Grail (36 page)

Across the table, the Go-Back Engineer who possessed Tristen’s daughter sat, too, pressed her own hands open on the tabletop, and also waited.

Dust heard her heart and breathing quicken as that black, black text began to flow from the page across the backs of Ariane’s hands, sliding over graceful bones and tendons in as fine relief as sculptured porcelain. The book bled text up the outlined muscles of her forearms, the sharp elbow bones. Words glided like projected light and shadow over skin, then vanished beneath the sleeves of her blouse. Dust felt them moving, immaterial but important, under the dry, scratchy pads of his feet, curling up his patron’s throat and swimming across her face. She ran full of words; she glowed with them. They buoyed her blood and burned in the depths of her irises.

“Loading,” she whispered, in a voice full of strange resonances. Words continued to flow into her—words now that were unrecognizable, strings of digits and letters, curious and arcane symbols. There was seemingly no bottom.

“Loading,” she said, again. And again. And, “Dust, I need you.”

The fallen Angel nerved himself, looked into his patron’s eyes, and followed the words within.

   Cynric recognized the young Mean who waited in the shuttle—the
lighter
—for her. Jesse, one of the Administrators of Fortune. He seemed drawn and harried as she took her place, but more than a little overawed by her, and made an awkward, undiplomatic effort to make her feel at ease.

And his mere presence was a pleasant assurance that her chances of making it to the surface in one piece were fairly good. She folded herself into the tight space defined by the acceleration couches and rigged the straps for security. When Administrator Jesse double-checked them, he seemed satisfied.

With a small bump, they came free of the world, and she saw it from a perspective farther away than even when she had captured the Leviathan.

As they accelerated into the gravity well, Cynric made idle conversation with the Administrator. As their path took them between Fortune and its secondary, she found her eye drawn to the smaller world’s cloud-swirls, its dark seas and ragged continents.

“If you won’t share your world,” Cynric said, “what about that one?”

Jesse’s gaze followed her own. “Everything on that one is poison.”

“Too poison for us?”

“It’s a hydrogen sulfide based biosphere,” he said. He glanced at her sideways, eye corners crinkling. “And yet perhaps you are too poison for it.”

Cynric laughed. “You lot make so much of your mental stability. But you’re xenophobes, neophobes, the lot of you. You’ve wired a lack of diversity into your souls.”

He rubbed his chin and frowned, but he did not seem offended. “And you do better?”

She shrugged. “We get along with carnivorous plants and talking screwdrivers. I don’t know what should be so hard about getting along with you.”

   Perceval awakened in a room of wonders, unable to really appreciate any of them. On her left side, vast bubbled portals showed a watery undersea view—a glimpse into the River, perhaps?—and on her right, animate banks of lights winked in oscillating patterns.

She lay, she thought, exposed on a sort of cot or raised pallet, not enclosed in a proper bunk. She didn’t have much pain—a little lingering soreness and stiffness—and she didn’t feel crushed by the weight of her own body, which at first made her think she was back aboard the
Jacob’s Ladder
.

She didn’t immediately recognize the room she was in, but even now there were probably thousands of places in the world she hadn’t seen with her own eyes. Life was finite—and very busy—and the world was large.

But this room was not lit in any of the ways Perceval recognized, instead illuminated by full-spectrum fixtures that nevertheless didn’t shine in quite the color her eyes expected. And when she said “Nova?” Nova did not answer.

Instead, the face of her Aunt Cynric hove into view, creased with a frown of concern. “How do you feel?”

Perceval self-assessed. “Not bad,” she said. “All things considered.”

“Not bad for somebody who left most of her liver on the pavement?” Cynric spoke in the dialect of Fortune. It was strange to hear her switch languages with such facility and obvious relish.

This idea of languages—of
different
languages—was something of a novel concept to Perceval. Of course there were dialects aboard the world, and isolated communities had drifted away from one another. But so long as you excepted the anatomically unique creatures, such as the carnivorous plants and the Leviathan, all speech descended from one mother tongue.

Well, there was Language, but that was different—a neurological exploit rather than patterns of sound and movement. And only Cynric had ever been any good at it.

“Pavement,” Perceval said, lingering over the foreign language in her turn. “The liver’s growing back, I hope.”

“Everything seems to be repairing itself nicely.” Cynric patted her shoulder. “You should rest a while longer. We
have the gravity turned down to make you more comfortable, but the field only extends over the hospital bed.”

“I have to pee,” Perceval said. “Can I risk a trip to the head, or am I to be subjected to indignities?”

“Better not risk it,” Cynric said. “Tristen is in the hall, guarding the door, and I’m pretty sure he’d glare at us. I’ll get you a pan.”

Perceval sighed and turned her head to watch the ports. Were they still windows when they showed an underwater world outside, sunlight streaming through green translucence thick as glass? Something moved behind them, writhing and alive. The storms, it seemed, had passed.

“We’re underwater,” Perceval said, stating the obvious because it came with a revelation. “That’s why we couldn’t find the settlement.”

“Dug into earth and covered by water,” Cynric agreed. She slid the bedpan under the sheets, and stepped aside while Perceval made the necessary accommodations. “Low-impact.”

“Which
we
are not.” Perceval relieved herself, thinking of chamber pots and squatting by roadsides and how much of human history was about finding ways to pretend biology didn’t exist. “Cynric …”

There was a silence, as if Perceval’s hesitation had cued her that what came next would be a prickly topic. “I’m listening.”

Perceval nerved herself, and tried to speak not as Captain to Bioengineer but rather as younger relative to elder. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t be Captain much longer now. She probed the bullet wound in her abdomen with her fingertips and tried to imagine what it would be like to regret that.

“I know it’s been a long time, and a lot of changes. I know you might not remember. But—I have wondered for a long time. What was Caithness like?”

Whatever Cynric had expected, whatever she had been
braced for, it was not that. She started—the first time Perceval had ever seen that cultivated mask of serenity slip. And then she said, softly, one word.

“Fair.”

“Beautiful? She is not remembered so—”

“No.” Cynric’s hand slid down, a gesture that cut. “They called her Caithness the Just, and she was. To a fineness, to a fault. It must have been a reaction to our father, who was arbitrary and capricious, but in many ways Cate was the one of us most like him. Though she would have scowled to hear me say so.”

“Scowled and not raged?” Perceval handed the bedpan back with care.

Cynric took it with no evidence of distaste. Of course, she’d seen worse. And of course, if you were cutting yourself for tight storage, squeamishness would be one of the first things to go. “She had a temper. But she did not give it rein.”

“That doesn’t sound much like Alasdair.”

She’d met him only once, and she’d been his daughter’s prisoner at the time—a daughter he was furious with, and who was about to kill him—which might not be the best way to get a sense of someone’s personality. But she’d known enough of his sons and daughters now to learn secondhand what they thought of him, and she’d seen the results of his child-rearing. If you could dignify it with that term.

Cynric, sliding the bedpan into what must be a sterilizer, shrugged. It made the long drapes of the robe that concealed her narrow body sway, ripples moving down them as if someone had shaken out a sheet. “The thing in her that was most like our father was her ruthlessness. I call her just. I do not mean to suggest that she was compassionate.”

“Oh.” Perceval settled back against the pillow. Her breath lifted and settled her chest; her heart beat even and
sure. She took a moment to contemplate just what a luxury that was, as the stitch of pain across her back eased, forgiving her movement for the immobility that followed.

Perceval had made choices since becoming Captain of which she was not proud. Some—many—of them, she would make again, though she did not claim that justified them. And she blanched at what Cynric had considered a reasonable price—to herself and others—for the survival of the world.

She thought for a moment on what Cynric Conn might experience as an excess of ruthlessness, and folded her arms across her abdomen, mindful of the tubes that fed, medicated, and watered her. “I think I’m glad she’s gone.”

“She would have made a good Captain,” Cynric said. “But so do you. And now you should try to sleep again.”

The man Captain Amanda had shot
was
dead, and it was not Amanda’s doing. The sedative rounds hadn’t killed him; the poison capsule in his mouth had done the work instead.

Danilaw couldn’t blame Amanda for the fatality, especially when she so patently blamed herself. But he did find himself confused by it, distressed and befuddled.

“It’s like something from the bad old days,” he said, drawing his legs up into the window embrasure of the conference room. Dodecapodes and small darting fish moved in his peripheral vision. “It doesn’t make sense to sacrifice your life for a political point.”

Across a narrow gap, Amanda perched on the violet glass conference table, her feet kicked up and her ankles crossed. “It does if you think not in terms of politics but revolution. The would-be assassin was named Pan Kagan. A review of his posts and conversations for the past month suggests he was heavily involved in the isolationist movement, and he supported Administrator Gain’s attempt at a bloodless coup.”

“We know she’s behind it,” Danilaw said. “So he killed himself because he believed strongly enough in her cause to die for it. To die to protect her. He had to be viewing himself as a hero.”

“He needed to avoid interrogation. To withhold proof of her complicity.” Amanda slid off the edge of the table and began to pace restlessly.

Danilaw’s mouth filled up with bitterness. He had to give it voice to get it off his tongue. “You know, our system of government is predicated on the idea that nobody in their right mind would ever actually
want
my job.”

Amanda gave him a look under her eyebrows. “We can prove Gain was behind it.”

She seemed very bright, very certain, almost outlined in light.
Oh, not now
, he thought, and wondered if he should warn her—but the seizure aura didn’t worsen, and he breathed slowly to calm his racing heart.

“What’s your evidence?”

She folded her hands open before her. “Free Legate,” she said. “I was looking at her when the shot went off, and I have her reaction on record. I’m also trained in semiotics and microexpressions. She was the only person in the group not surprised when the shot was fired.”

“She was expecting it.”

Amanda touched the tabletop, summoning up a three-dimensional image of the rain-soaked party as they had looked at the time—from Amanda’s point of view. Danilaw was amused by the way her attention rarely wandered to him, and when it did, brushed quickly away again.

She was conscientious. And from that, he determined that she was consciously deciding not to let his presence dominate her attention.

He hid his smile—then had it quickly wiped away as Gain’s shoulders stiffened, as Perceval jerked with reaction to the bullet, as Tristen and Amanda turned to run after the shooter.

Amanda froze the playback. She circled the frozen, miniaturized tableau, examining it from all directions. “Did you see it?”

“She didn’t just know in advance,” Danilaw said. “She triggered it. She sent a signal.”

   When Tristen entered the sickroom, he found a scene substantially unchanged from what he’d seen the last time. Perceval had turned on her side, which he took as a positive sign, and curled around a pillow like a snuggling child. Cynric stood beyond the sickcot, centimeters from the observation bubble, peering into the water beyond as if the shifting shafts of sunlight that pierced it had divinatory uses.

She turned as he entered. Because her hands stayed lost in the folds of her robe, he knew she had already identified him. He squeezed his mouth together until the words filled the space, then let them out, still not quite knowing what they would say.

“They won’t let us stay. Not unless we become like them.”

She smiled before she turned back to the water. The echoes from the curved port carried her voice back to him, full of strange resonances. “I’m staying. I’ve had enough of Cynric the Sorceress.”

“What do you see out there?”

“Friends, perhaps? There’s life in the waters,” the Sorceress said, with a lift of her pointed chin that reminded him suddenly, painfully, of every proud woman their family had ever spawned.

“Generally speaking,” Tristen said, “that’s where one finds it, if one is going to find it anywhere.”