Chill (17 page)

An uneasy sensation. Mirth in his hand generated no such discomfort; rather it felt alert and responsive.
Command me
. He resheathed it, breaking the circuit, but was left with a sense of its eager pleasure in having been handled.

There were other treasures: rings and geegaws, suits of armor, ancient and mysterious electronics. Tristen walked past it all, back to where the others waited, and with a gesture sealed the vault behind. His companions in misadventure stared at him, one question plain in three regards.

Tristen clipped the sword onto his hip. They parted before him, stepped aside and let him pass through as if he held some authority over them. As if they were following where he led.

What a kingdom
, thought Tristen Conn.
The shadow of an angel, a necromancer, and a reinvented power tool. What an army I bring against you, Granddaughter
.

“I’m ready,” he said, and steeled himself for plain statement. “Let’s go kill Arianrhod.”

   In the arms of her angel, Arianrhod rested. Asrafil lifted her on vasty wingbeats, her newly variegated hair trailing like a banner over his adamantine forearm, her weight borne up like a doll’s. She curled against his chest, face pressed into the black warm nap of his coat, and felt the waxy leaves of the trailing vines he bore her through brush her body. He moved like a tramcar, stately, unstoppable, with rhythmic surges and hesitations carried on each stroke of the wings. When he turned she could feel him bank and slide and glide, the way the forces wanted to tug them along their initial vector, the long smooth arc as he veered and swung.

She had never felt so safe.

It was a disappointment when broad pinions flared and slapped atmosphere—a halt as abrupt as if some unseen hand had snapped their leash. Arianrhod’s body jerked against Asrafil’s grip. As she had never feared that he would drop her, she felt only a kind of thrill-ride exultation. She burst out laughing, her hair tousled in every direction by the wind of their passage, her arms uplifted and back arched as she surrendered entirely to the angel’s strength. In perfect love and perfect trust.

She thought they flew and then descended for a long time—nearly a day, by her colony’s clock. During some of that time she dozed in Asrafil’s arms, less than aware of her surroundings. He would wake her if a threat required her attention, or he would deal with it if it did not. When she opened her eyes again they had entered a chill place, cavernous by the echoes of Asrafil’s wing-beats, and she had lost what sense of orientation she’d had. The light here was banded, gray and grayer, and when she turned her head she could just make out a glimpse of tombstone ranks of machinery. She felt them
buffeted by twisted gravity, gasped as he swept her through a passageway so narrow she felt the brush of metal on her skin.

At last, soft as milkweed down, he settled to the deck, his wings a curtain enfolding them. As his boots brushed soil, the shadow of the wings faded into nonexistence. He set her on her feet at arm’s length, and stepped back.

Arianrhod felt irrationally as she had when she was small, and her father had kissed her forehead. “Thank you, Asrafil,” she said.

The angel bowed from the waist. “You are loyal and deserving,” he said as he straightened. “If I can make your burdens light, my dear, well—broad are an angel’s shoulders.”

Arianrhod turned away to hide the flush of pleasure warming her cheeks. She wrapped her arms across her chest to ward off the chill. Noticing, the angel wrapped her in his coat, and kept his arm around her shoulders. Though he was only warm because he chose to be, still his heat soothed. An animal response, primitive. Perhaps something she should have grown beyond—something all Exalt should have grown beyond, to earn their rank as half-mortals placed just below the angels.

But who could disregard the love of God when they saw it shining from the eyes of a holy messenger? Here was the devotion that she had looked for all her life. The filial duty, the sacred trust, which she had received in such scant measure from her family. And oh, she basked in it.

She wanted to say that all her burdens were made more bearable simply by his regard, that he himself was the remuneration of her faith. But there was too much vulnerability in such a statement, and anyway—he was the Angel of War. He knew whatever she might have said to him.

So instead she looked around the chamber she found herself in—too small for a holde or a Heaven or even a domaine; a mere anchore, just one tiny bead swelling along the myriad stems of the world—and drew a breath of its dank, unwholesome air. There was only a little light here, dim and filtered, slanting through a clouded panel on the curve of the ceiling above. But as her colony and her eyes adapted, Arianrhod saw a floor lined with leaf litter and bones. Along one wall lay a filthy nest of shredded, matted tufts of hair and salvaged scraps from many levels. No plants grew within this chamber, not even leggy, yellowed, light-starved ones. But somewhere in the darkness, trickling water ran.

“Where are we?” she asked, and half answered her own question. “I see that it’s a lair.”

“Don’t worry,” the angel said. “The swine are hunting at this time of the local day, and anyway they are quite harmless so long as you are alert and on your feet. But their waste can help conceal us.”

“This is not where I asked to be brought, Asrafil.”

“It is in service to your cause.” He crouched and dug long fingers in the floor, unearthing fistfuls of compost writhing with shiny black beetles. “Here,” he said, rapidly sifting them through a nanotronic net until the rot fell free and only the insects remained. When he had finished, he cupped a double handful of insects no bigger than pinheads at her, his expectant impression prompting her to hold out her hands.

When she had dropped to her knees and done so, steadying herself by watching his face intently, he poured the beetles across her palms.

They did not stay neatly contained in the cupped hollow, as they had for him. Instead, they scrambled up her arms, scattering, finding refuge in the dark recesses of her borrowed coat and the warm creases of her body. The prickle of their tiny barbed feet made her want to
squirm and slap at them, but she set her jaw and waited it out. It was only a little while before they seemed to have chosen their places—in her hair, behind the cuffs of the coat, moving lightly across the outside of her arm in search of some eventual destination. Settled, they prickled no more than hairpins or jewelry.

Arianrhod shuddered, and tried not to scratch her scalp. “What are those?”

“Symbiotes,” he said. “They’ll eat what you shed, and keep you from leaving a trail of DNA. If you are comfortable, come along; we should be gone before the swine return from foraging. They do not take kindly to interlopers.”

She followed on. A few steps brought them to a narrow passage, the sort that must be navigated in a half crouch. Their footsteps echoed—or at least, hers did. The Angel of Weapons walked silently.

Eventually, they emerged into another anchore, slightly larger than the last. Here, Arianrhod could see the game trail threading the earthen deck, the packed dry dirt that spoke of something—yes—hoofed, or running on sharp trotters. She stood up straight between the long veiling falls of glossy-leaved foliage that marked either side of the trail and said, “Asrafil, tell me your plan.”

He glanced at her, but did not stop his steady, effortless progress. His coat swung against her ankles. She hurried to catch up. “You have been loyal,” he said.

“I am loyal,” she insisted. “And again, I asked you for something—”

“We will go there now,” he said, so smoothly she could not tell if she imagined his air of humoring her.

“But I can’t help you if I don’t know what you plan. Surely not just to beard the new angel in his lair?”

“I am too small for that,” Asrafil admitted, ducking his bald head as if it cost him. He looked so frail—
bird-boned, delicate, his simulated collarbones projecting over the collar of his white T-shirt now that the long coat did not cover them.

For a moment, Arianrhod felt sympathy for him, protectiveness. She reached out and brushed his sleeve with her hand. “I support you, Asrafil.”

He drew up short, shoulders lifted, eyes on the egress hatch a few more yards across the width of the anchore.

“It is terrible work I’m on,” he said, when she had given up hope of him speaking at all. He turned pale eyes on her and made a gesture as if to wet his mouth, though he had neither salivary glands nor the need for comfort. “I go in search of an ally, Lady Arianrhod.”

She folded her arms. “That was but half an answer.”

He nodded. And holding her gaze as if to hold, also, her understanding, he said, “I seek the beast. To make of him a weapon, Arianrhod.”

“The beast?”

“Cynric’s beast,” he said. “Her darkest sorcery.”

Arianrhod stretched her shoulders. “That’s all well and good,” she said. “But first you have to bring me to Ariane’s strongholde.”

   As Tristen led his band through the corridors and domaines near Rule, what they found at first was simple farmland—serried hydroponics tanks in racks twice Tristen’s height, crushed strawberries and melons moldering unpicked on bruised and twisted stems, plastics cracked and nanopatched to hold water the world must have mopped from every corner and returned to containment. The plants were healing, slowly, but there was no hope for the fruit.

The party scavenged as they walked—cucumbers broken open but not yet rotten here, sprays of round green eggplant the size of eyeballs there—and ate on the move. Or rather, Tristen and Mallory scavenged, Gavin
complained, and Samael looked on from his half-realized transparency, arch or amused.

All my life is running
, Tristen thought, entertained by the irony when all his life had been waiting but a few days since.

Already the chamber of the bats seemed another lifetime, a story recounted but not experienced. He was growing scars over it, he knew, sealing up the raw place with proud tissue. Soon all that remained of a weeping wound would be a rough, unsightly patch, and the raised seam where the flesh had grown together.

Comfortable and relatively safe surroundings brought them half a day’s travel from Rule. Things grew wilder there, but incrementally. At first, one could fail to notice that the hydroponics tanks had been full of sediment since before the nova. But before long they came to places where knobbed tree roots, blindly seeking moisture, had heaved open wall and floor panels, popped welds, rent sheet metal wide.

There was nothing in all the world so implacable as a tree. Out of the world, the only rival was the Enemy.

The braided web of passageways and chambers that comprised the agricultural domaine wore on Tristen, though he would not show his discomfort to the others. Quiet words, soft eye, straight spine. Push through, carry on. You can walk on a broken leg if you set your jaw against it. It’s not good for you, or for the limb, but there’s time to be fragile when the war is won. That, too, he had learned from his father.

Just as he had learned that the war is
never
won.

The angel’s oversight reassured him not at all. He only remembered the breaking of Israfel with his native memory, as he had not yet been Exalt when it happened, but he remembered it well enough. Tristen Conn did not trust angels.

When they passed into one of the null spots, he found
comfort in their isolation, despite knowing he was leading them into the heart of whatever opposed Perceval and her loyal followers—among whom he must number himself.

Still, he breathed a sigh when they came not to another in the seemingly endless series of pressure doors, but instead a proper air lock, big enough to move large equipment. The massive doors had sealed against some ancient pressure drop. Tristen’s band drew up before the first. While they paused, he looked from one companion to the next.

“Samael,” he said, having considered. The angel was not to be trusted—no angel was to be trusted, and the Angel of Poison least of all—but Tristen held the Captain’s authority by proxy, and if anything could force a recalcitrant angel to duty, it was the word of Perceval Conn.

Without a glance, the angel passed forward, ghosting through the door, flakes of things swept from his field and pressed flat against it. Fifteen seconds—timed by Tristen’s colony, during which he heard mostly the drip of condensation and Mallory breathing lightly, quickly, in anticipation—passed before Samael returned, dusting translucent hands one against the other and making the motes inside them sparkle and tumble.

“Heaven,” he said. “Quite pretty. Within tolerances, I believe. I don’t know why the lock tripped.”

Tristen sealed his helm up anyway. Mallory, unarmored, watched with amusement, but though Tristen thought of an apologetic glance, he didn’t share it.

He palmed the air lock controls, entered his command security override, identified himself as First Mate—and found that the air lock would not open.

“Huh,” he said. “Isn’t this thing supposed to listen?”

Mallory chortled. “Sure it is. But only if you know the right commands. The whole world does not yet know you’re in charge of it. Let me try.”

Tristen stepped back, folding his arms so the armor clattered, and tried not to frown as Mallory laid hands on the panel, concentrated, and a moment later the lights began to cycle blue and green.

“There’s no colony in the lock,” Mallory explained, straightening. “It has no connection to Nova. No way to update.”

When it ground wide, protesting every centimeter, the atmosphere within stank of mold and must but was not toxic. Even through his suit filters, Tristen wrinkled his nose. He strode into the small space, ignoring the filth stirring around his ankles, and gestured the others in behind. When all the corporeal ones were clear of the outer door, he cycled the lock.

The inner door was stuck, but whatever jammed the tracks was not solid enough to stand against the whining motors that forced it back. The cincture rasped apart, bringing in a rush of sweet, oxygenated atmosphere even before Tristen could see what lay beyond.