Chill. Part 20

One breath further behind Arianrhod.

Dozens of cobra fangs pierced armor, pierced skin, punctured flesh, and left their venom in Tristen's blood. There were colonies in the venom, and the colonies attacked his symbiont as the venom attacked his central nervous system.

Summoning the memory of the scent of lemon blossoms.

Lemon blossoms, and the brush of a cold wind across his neck. The smell-sugary, thick, not really like lemons at all-still made his stomach clench. Not nausea, but the salient memory of hunger.

There were some lean times then. As there would be lean times now.

Tristen knew, with the part of his brain that knew such things, that he had fallen to the carpets in the pavilion, that a hissing ring of cobras surrounded him. But all he felt was the chill breeze, the scent of the lemon tree, the hunger, the emotional pressure of Aefre at his left side and Sparrow beyond her, on her left-and the tension of a troop intent on battle, on the morn of revolution. It was not reliving, exactly. There was no surprise in what he experienced, just the event horizon of inevitability as he recognized where he was and what he recollected.

His horror was all at knowing in advance.

Aefre had been so golden, with her lion-tawny hair and her eagle-tawny gaze. Hazel, he supposed the color was called-but tawny was the right word, for everything about her should be defined in terms of predators. Her armor was golden, too, not the gold of metal but the gold of wheat, and so her skin would have been if not for the Exalt stain rendering it a pollen-dusted blue. The sword at her hip gleamed with care and use, and he had wanted to lean over and kiss the stern line between her eyebrows away. But one did not kiss a general before the a.s.sembled troops.

She was Alasdair Conn's eldest daughter, the Princess of the Jacob's Ladder. She was both fierce and beautiful, and why she'd chosen him, he'd never know.

Too much memory there. Memory was not, never had been, Tristen's friend. Most especially not when his great-granddaughter had tricked him into the imprisonment that Perceval and Rien (also his great-granddaughter, though he had not known it then) had so recently freed him from.

Tristen had survived by refusing to experience. By remembering those days through his symbiont, the machine memory where what had occurred was cool and distant and safely scrubbed.

Gavin was correct. Knowledge was not ident.i.ty.

What cannot be cured must be endured, and Tristen excelled at enduring. But as his perfect memory led him from Rule at the vanguard of an army, he was not certain he could endure this.

They had traveled in close quarters and swiftly-the lifts and commuter shafts still worked, in those days, and in wartime they burned consumables on transports. So they packed in like marines cramped in anch.o.r.es, waiting for the hatches to spring open and the killing to begin. He and Sparrow and Aefre had been separated in the transports-commanders do not travel together-but there was comm contact, and even though he heard nothing more over the comms than he should-that being terse, coded orders-some of those orders were in Aefre's voice, or Sparrow's.

The arguments were long over, pa.s.sed through the night before: "I'm going," Sparrow had said. "Those are the Commodore's orders. If we don't hold the world together, no one will."

Tristen had met Aefre's eyes over Sparrow's shoulder and frowned. But Aefre had tipped her head from side to side in a kind of nod that wasn't.

"I'm not fighting for Alasdair," Sparrow continued. "I'm fighting because the alternative is doing nothing, and that will not halt our destruction."

"And if the Go-backs are right?" Aefre said. "And if your General disagrees with your Commodore, what then?"

Tristen shook his head. "Even if they are right, we have no means by which to implement their plan. We have no time in which to bring them to see reason." He touched the hilt of his unblade, trusting his meaning was plain. "War," he said to his wife, "is uncomplicated."

Aefre had frowned at him, consideringly, then nodded. "All right," she said. "I hate complications. We'll fight."

So Tristen had marched with the others and failed with the others. They met the Go-back army on the banks of the River and beat them back as effortlessly as he had foreseen. In only hours, he watched Aefre's shoulders as she went to accept the surrender of their leaders. He watched them cut her down, too, in contravention of truce, one of the Go-backs triggering a suicide weapon that vaporized himself, Aefre, and two bystanders.

They must have thought they could fight him, that the heart and skill would go out of Rule's soldiers with the death of their General.

Tristen and Sparrow had seen to it that they learned the error of their thought. When he returned to Rule-Sparrow by his side, still carrying Mirth, the blade Aefre had left with her when she went to parley-blossoms rained down on their heads again.

And that was not the worst of his failures of his daughter.

No, he thought, and wondered if it would be his last thought. He could not claim he did not deserve her justice.

"What can his crime have been, to deserve such punishment?" Mallory mused-a voice out of the silence and cool darkness that enveloped Tristen.

"Blackest kinslaughter," Tristen said, and opened his eyes to find the ghost of an angel leaning over him. "Guilty, of course. Don't be an idiot."

Samael jerked back, which was just as well, as Tristen would have sat up through him. Instead, he found himself nose to nose with the angel, specks and bits of things filling up his vision, until the angel retreated-and Tristen arose. He glanced down the white length of his armor, seeing where the paired holes smeared about with dark blue pierced it. They would heal, given time. The colony in the armor would see to it. The armor would be good as new.

Unlike Tristen.

"Where's Dorcas?" Tristen heaved himself to a crouch, rocking his feet under him, and stood. Not wobbly at all, which surprised him. He felt clean and strong and a little attenuated, as if with hunger. Sharpset and ready to hunt.

Purged. That was the word he was groping after.

Samael stood up beside him, rising like a train of smoke. "She's over there. Somewhere."

The bitter curve of the angel's lips said it all. Samael knew which one of the coa.r.s.e-clothed figures she was, knew exactly. But it was polite to pretend otherwise, unless Tristen ordered him specifically to abrogate that politeness.

When he gestured, the curve of his arm led Tristen's eye to Mallory and Gavin, huddled beside an upright post, their attention obviously turned inward. "They didn't go on?"

"They thought they needed you," Samael said with a shrug.

"They may not get me," Tristen said. "I think I've been convicted of crimes against humanity."

"You had a tough judge," Samael said. "It's a hard sort of existence. Come on; I'll walk to the gallows with you."

Tristen had been only half kidding. Samael's expression hinted that the angel had the other half. Tristen guessed that added up to one complete sense of humor between them. Serious or not, they walked together toward the cl.u.s.ter of three or four farmers by the pavilion wall.

The sense of lightness, of being constructed of something dry and strong, did not leave him. If anything, it increased, as if the soil under his boot were pus.h.i.+ng him forward with each step.

"Dorcas," Tristen said. He waited while she turned to him, watched the dark amber strands escape around her face as she pushed back her hood. "I have fulfilled my part of the bargain."

Her mouth did a funny thing, very unlike any expression of his daughter's. He couldn't read it as either relief or approbation, and he didn't know anything else it might be. It didn't last long before her expression settled back to impa.s.sivity. "I see that you have. And what was the verdict, Prince Tristen?"

"Guilty," he offered. "As you knew it would be. Guilty of kinslaughter-by negligence and recklessness. Guilty of moral cowardice and the failure to protect all I should have held sacred. And certainly I am culpable in the deaths of my wife and daughter."

For all it was the answer he would have expected her to want, it did not seem to satisfy her. "And yet you stand before me. How then has justice been served?"

He thought of darkness, humid warmth, the blinding, incessant reek of ammonia. He folded his fingers closed against wet palms. "Death is not the only justice. I paid for my sins before you met me, Lady of the Edenites. I am well acquainted with my monstrosities. And I have long since learned to live with them, which is harder."

From the manner in which she stared down the bridge of her nose at him, he thought she might disagree. He braced for her word to break their bargain, and the wasteful carnage that must follow.

But at last she drew in a breath and let it out again on a sigh, and folded her arms before her. "Good enough," she said, "if unsatisfying."

Tristen felt Mallory and Gavin at his shoulder. He didn't feel Samael, but he could not imagine that the angel was not there. It gave him a little strength to press forward. "You know that Sparrow Conn, whose form you wear, was my daughter."

Dorcas nodded. "So you gave me to understand."

He let his fingers cup Mirth's pommel, but did not grip the hilt, nor move to draw the blade. The cool, resilient polymer of the blade's handle conformed to his touch. He could imagine how his fingers would sink into the grips, how the sword would become an extension of his hand.

Once upon a time, he would have found comfort in that. He would have been eager to draw the blade. He would have looked forward to the carnage and displays of prowess that followed, the song of battle along his nerves.

But that man was dead, and he realized with a shock that he did not miss the b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

The sword's awareness stirred, pus.h.i.+ng against the palm of his hand like a questing cat. The blade was hungry, after the manner of blades. But that did not mean that he had to feed it.

Tristen said, "If you are not she, why do you crave her vengeance so badly?"

"Your misguidance led to her death," Dorcas said. She lowered her voice. "And her death led to my life in this sh.e.l.l far from the embrace of Mother Gaia, and that is a burden with which I would rather not be troubled. How do you answer to that, Tristen Conn?"

"I failed you," he said, amazed that the deep sting in his chest was not shame or humiliation, but simple grief. Five hundred years to the death of the ego, he thought, and shook his head in bemus.e.m.e.nt. "I failed you as a father, as a fellow soldier, and as the eldest member of the house of Rule."

"That was not me-"

"Whatever." And maybe there was a little of the man he had been in the interruption. But even a shed skin left its pattern behind. "If you are not her, then I am not him. And as you have already determined that I am accountable for his crimes against her, then by G.o.d you will listen to my accounting."

It drew her up, and brought the lingering three or four Go-backs hurrying forward to flank her with their support. Tristen imagined the high priestess of the Edenites was unused to being placed off her balance. Somewhere behind Tristen were Mallory, Samael, and Gavin. For the time being, he would pretend they could not see him.

He unclipped Mirth's sheath from his belt and balanced the sword across his palms. "There's half a bargain to be sealed."

He knew he hadn't imagined the quirk of her lips. "So there is." She reached out, but he held the blade back for a moment.

"There was more in your venom than hallucinogens, wasn't there?"

"An inducer virus," she agreed. "Are you feeling it?"

Light, strong, like something woven out of carbon fiber and high-end ceramics. As if his mind rode the cha.s.sis of a synbiote, and not his own body at all. It made him feel as ungrounded as it did capable.

Mallory brushed his elbow. Tristen ignored it.

"Behavioral controls?"

"Not as such. But if you had really believed you deserved death, it would have carried out the sentence."

"Of course," he said. "Why leave such things to chance?"

The smile they shared was not what he would have expected, but it was satisfying. When she lifted her palms, he laid the blade across them, flat as a tray.

"Draw it," he said, stepping backward to give her room.

Whatever knowledge and elements of personality were earthed in the brain, the body had an intelligence of its own. And the body of Sparrow Conn had not forgotten how to handle a weapon.

With one smooth extension, she skinned the blade.

Tristen held his breath, feeling his companions behind him, the way Mallory edged still closer. The necromancer's shoulder brushed Tristen's armor, and the armor transmitted that sensation to his arm.

Dorcas weighed Mirth in her hand as effortlessly as if it were an unblade. She tilted her head to squint its length and frowned. "After all that, you deliver me your weapon?"

"If I'm not a harsh enough judge of myself, who better to make up the deficit?"

When she looked up at him over the blade, he found himself hard-pressed not to see her mother in her hazel eyes. Smeared reflections of her features blurred along the length of the sword. She turned it in her hand, let it glide back along her forearm and beyond. "I am not an executioner."

"I was," he said. "My father's dog, at first because I believed in him, as he had raised me to. Then, after Aefre died and Alasdair turned his attentions on Arianrhod, your antecedent had the sense to remove herself from the family, out of grief and because it was easier than opposing him. If I had kept my granddaughter away from my father, Sparrow might never have left Rule at all."

He sighed. Arianrhod was a question all her own. It was not as if anyone had ever been able to control her. "And then when your antecedent died in Engine"-in the Go-back riots, during Caitlin and her sisters' attempt to wrest control of the world from Alasdair, but now did not seem the most exemplary time to mention that-"if I had been with her, if I had stood up with her, she might be living still."

Dorcas's eyebrow raised, but he did not feel guilt in saying it. She might inhabit Sparrow's body now, but the scarce resource had historically been allocations for memory, not resurrected flesh. People were easy to make. There were always more dead than remnants to fill them with.

Dorcas said, "You were not the brother who went to war for him against Cecelia's daughters. You are not the brother whose blade cut Cynric's head from her shoulders."

"Nor did I join them in rebellion," Tristen said. "Think of all the evil I might have averted had I cast down my father then. Apathy is no excuse. Nor is a taste for combat."

She smiled and allowed Mirth to glide back into its sheath. "You were terrifying then."

"You remember?"

"I wasn't an Edenite during the Moving Times, Tristen Conn," she said. "Go-backs don't store their data, or accept colonies." She paused, ironically. "Until now, anyway. I served under your wife. I was a soldier. Do you know what we called you?"

Her hand extended, the sword laid across it. Offering. Slowly, he reached out and lifted it from her palm. Her face remained impa.s.sive, but a long chill ran up her spine when the sword left her grasp, so he knew it troubled her. He wondered what the sword had said to her, if indeed it had spoken at all.

Of course he remembered. There had been political cartoons, the white ruff, fangs, stripes, talons. The devil eyes. He'd nursed a little secret pride about it, then.

"Tristen Tiger," he said.

"The man-eater. The tame killer. You do remember." He touched his temple. The colony remembered for him.

"Tristen Tiger would not have survived the venom, you know. I think perhaps you have changed more than I have." She shrugged and spread her hands. "Half a millennium is a long time to live within a monster."

It hadn't been that long. Or rather, he had indeed lived that long, but it was only in the years he'd pa.s.sed pent up in a dungeon of Ariane's devising, living in filth, that he had come to realize he had been a monster, after all.

A thousand things crowded his mouth, none of them willing to be refined into sensibility. So, instead, he clipped Mirth to his belt and said, "I am glad you've found peace. Even if you are not the woman you were."

"And I am glad you are not the man you were. And I hope you find peace as well, before too much longer." She pursed her lips, craning her neck to see over his shoulder to Samael and Mallory-and Gavin as well. She paused, seeming puzzled, and glanced down at her fingers, which flexed and stretched as if she were absently working out a cramp.

Recollecting herself, she continued. "You've pa.s.sed the test. We will guide you across our Heaven, and show you the fastest path to your destination."

"You know it?"

"We built it," she said. His eyes must have widened with the surprise and disbelief he felt, because she smirked-turning her head to include Mallory and Samael in its arc-and said, "What did you think the Go-backs were, exactly, Tristen Tiger?"

Tristen glanced at Mallory; the necromancer nodded. Not that it mattered-he suspected Dorcas was interested in his opinion, not that of his companions.

He could have given her the snap answer, the dismissal. And maybe he would have, not too long gone by. To alienate the enemy was a useful defense. But he thought now of ancient history, the thin, perfect memories of his colony predominating over the richer, chemical, organic ones. They had been Engineers, convinced that the best means of survival was to cannibalize what could be saved of the world and return to Earth in a smaller, stripped-down vessel, leaving behind everything designed for colonization and terraforming as useless ballast. Many of them had also been heretics of another stripe: they had believed in the perfection of the human form as a reflection of G.o.d's will, and had refused inoculation with Cynric's then newly invented colonies, or any physical augmentation whatsoever.

Alasdair Conn, the Commodore, had opposed them.

Alasdair had believed pa.s.sionately in the goals and edicts of the Builders: that the purpose of G.o.d's creation in Man was to confront harsh environments, to master them, to evolve to meet any challenge. That the ultimate expression of faith was to subject one's self and one's offspring to ever harsher challenges, ensuring survival of the fittest through mortification of the flesh. Of all the species of G.o.d's creation, only man had the power to reshape himself in G.o.d's image, and Alasdair-whatever his other failings-had not been a hypocrite. A deeply religious man, as moral and spiritual leader of his people he had believed in that obligation with all his heart.

And, as Bened.i.c.k had pointed out at the time, given conditions when the Builders left, there was no guarantee that Earth was any more able to support life than would be a smoking cinder.

Tristen-a dutiful son, and a dutiful soldier-had gone to war to drive the Go-backs from Engine. He had been doing what he was bid, and in every way that mattered to his father, he had succeeded. If Sparrow died in the war, well, that was the cost of selection. In any case, she'd already pa.s.sed along her genes to Arianrhod, so it would be easy for Alasdair to fix the line. That the result had been Ariane, Alasdair's eventual murderer, gave Tristen a bitter little frisson of complicated pleasure-his own history with his great-granddaughter notwithstanding.