Chill (28 page)

“I brought you here—” He hesitated. “I brought you here because it is my program to bring you here, once the world again was under way …”

   Arianrhod blinked. “Your program? Me? Me in particular?”

“No.” He shook his head. “You in genetic particular. A descendant of Prince Tristen and Princess Aefre, through their daughter Sparrow. I chose you for that reason, but more particularly I chose you because you have long been my helpmeet, my sweet. My ally, my servant, and my friend.”

She had trusted him, loved him, this far. If all were lost now, well—all was lost. She had sacrificed all else on the altar of her angel. If he had deluded her, she might as well die of his love as live without it.

You did not love an angel to be safe, or in the interests of survival, or even because you thought the angel might ever love you back. You did not love an angel because you thought you could tame an angel, change it, make it safe. You loved an angel because to love an angel was to touch something larger than yourself, and because the process of that touch enlarged you as well.

“What’s on the other side?”

“I don’t know.” When he shook his head, at least it made more noise than the wings, though she knew it was because he thought it should. “But it’s writ in my bones that I must go there, beloved. Will you accompany me?”

“Across the very bosom of the Enemy.” She touched the scabbard across her back. Its plain exterior concealed a monomolecular skin and the magnetic bottle that contained Charity’s virulent, half-compiled revenant. The blade within the sheath was too much an absence for the touch to reassure.

He said, “It is far and cold, my darling.”

Far. Too far for an Exalt? What if there was no warmth nor oxygen at the other end of those lines? She could survive a plunge into the Enemy, yes, but she could not live there long. “If I die—”

“Kiss me and be saved,” he offered.

She lifted up her mouth to his, and let their breaths commingle. She raised her hands. Where they pressed the sculptured bones of his temples, his skin felt moist, warm. Fragile. Human. But that was only camouflage.

His mouth covered hers and he breathed in deep, breathed out, let their tongue tips touch. She felt the tingle as carrier was established, the momentary rush as her colony communed with the angel, passing along her memories and thoughts, the concentrated residue of her life.

—I keep you safe inside me.—

When he drew back, she kissed his cheek in gratitude. Then she turned, inside the circle of his arms, his coat, his wings, and faced the unadulterated Enemy. It was one thing to dip into the shallows, to skip from domaine to domaine within the sheltering embrace of the world.

But this was darkness in its person, the stronghold of the Enemy. There was nothing there to shelter her. She was about to leave the river for the sea, and she wondered if even a sea could seem so vast and strange. Surely there was a limit to how cowed the human soul could be.

Asrafil could infiltrate her, warm her, oxygenate her blood—within limits. Until his own resources were exhausted. Which would not take long. But then again, you did not love an angel if you were easy prey to fear.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Behind them, the lock door cycled. Ahead, the portal slid aside. Arianrhod fell forward into emptiness.

Reactive mass
, she thought, but with Asrafil’s wings around her there was no need of such primitive stopgap technology. He cast them out like a net, the colony using the world’s trailing cables to speed them along. They glided low and quick, so close to the light-delineated filament that Arianrhod imagined she could reach out a hand and touch it. It was cold in the depths of the Enemy, as she had imagined it would be, but the cold could not freeze her. Inside the envelope of her angel, she felt it as a caress. The lights racing beneath her, the world vanishing behind, a blur quickly disappearing into the glow of the nebula—in Asrafil’s presence, these things were exhilarating rather than terrifying.

He hesitated once, and whispered through the colonies,—
This is the point of safe return.—

—Go on.—

Unease filled her as the cables stretched further. Whoever had set them here had done so intentionally, to make this place inaccessible, even to the Exalt. Arianrhod wondered what danger weighed the chain: weapon? engine of war? Even the embrace of an angel could not remove the fear and awe she felt as they approached the end of the lines, and the thing that dragged them out straight and stiff in the wake of the world.

At first, Arianrhod saw only a looming shape outlined in the sparkle of running lights, blue and green and gold photophores shimmering through occluding dust. As Asrafil brought her closer, though, she could make out the gleaming ceramic and metal of a massive framework or scaffolding.—
What a waste of energy all those lights are, out here in the dark.—

—What the Builders did, they did for a purpose.—

—Are you sure that was the Builders, Asrafil?
—How would the Builders have known that the world would be stranded? How would the Builders have known that
a descendent of the line of Sparrow would come forward through time to be here when it sailed again?

He did not answer, just glided closer, silent and dark. It was only when he banked to follow the line of the scaffolding that she realized the scaffolding caged something, illuminated it, pinioned it on long, ice-shiny spears.

The thing at the heart of the structure was a lumpish brown-black stone, space-pocked, rough and potato-shaped, kilometers across. As big as a Heaven.

—An asteroid?—

—It is
,—Asrafil said quietly,—
electrically active.—

Tentatively, Arianrhod reached out through his colony, feeling it for herself. Electrical activity—and more.
—Asrafil, the thing is swarming.—

—I do not take your meaning, my sweet.—

—I mean
,—she said
,—it’s infested with colonies. Can’t you feel them?—

He paused. She felt him check, like a balky transmission sticking.
—No.—

If she could sense something he couldn’t, then was it because whatever long-untriggered program directed them here also blinded him to the proliferation of the nanotech infesting the goal object—or was it because something more complex and sinister was involved?
—If it’s not an asteroid, Asrafil, what is it? When you say it’s showing signs of electrical activity, are you suggesting it might be alive?—

He made a sound in her head like a man humming in his throat, and quoted:—
He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.—

The cold gnawed in Arianrhod’s blood and bones now. She felt the light-headedness of dropping oxygen levels. The structure ahead gave no indication of life
support, no hope of sanctuary. There was only the rust-black stone, hulking in its cage, and the Enemy on every side.

Arianrhod raised her eyes across the gulf, and with her cold tongue shaped a word that had no air to carry it.
“Leviathan.”

  Gavin was ready, even expectant, when Tristen dropped away beneath him like a splash of falling water. He dared not close his talons hard—they might pierce the Prince’s armor—and so he could not ease Tristen’s fall. But he could spread his wings, cup air, and beat up out of the writhing mass of black-and-cream serpents that swallowed the fallen knight. The swarm of cobras heaved, shuddering, so Gavin knew that, under their weight, Tristen convulsed from the venom.

The basilisk hovered, churning air, and extended his neck to give vent to the hiss of a snake ten times his size. He would have done it alone, but Mallory stepped up beside him, an ally suddenly terrible with snapping eyes and a cloud of storm-black hair.

“Priestess,” Mallory said, “Lady of the Edenites. Call back your creatures, or this necromancer will see to it that nothing here leaves this Heaven alive.”

Dorcas remained before them, impassive as a queen, hands at her sides in the folds of her gown. Gavin reared
back, crest flaring. “I’d listen to the wizard if I were you, Lady.”

She cocked her head, seeming fearless. “By whose authority do you speak, familiar beast?”

“By my own,” Gavin said. “By the authority of light.”

A thin crack, only. The barest sliver of vision, enough that he caught a glimpse of her face, her form, as something other than a sensory shadow. Enough to let slip a sizzling fragment of light and smoke the dais between her feet.

He’d hoped to make her yelp and scuttle back. Instead, a serpent lunged for him. He felt it coming, the machined whisk of scales on scales, the nigh-invisible speed of fangs that could slice armor like butter. Gavin sideslipped, cranked his head around, and sizzled it in midstrike. He flapped up through air threaded with the rankness of burning mechanicals as the cobra thumped limply back among the bodies of its brethren draped over Tristen’s seizing form.

My Prince
, Gavin thought,
I seriously question your judgment
.

“The wizard meant it,” Gavin said to Dorcas. “Call them off.”

Her throat worked as she swallowed. He felt the way the atmosphere flexed around it, the accelerating beat of her heart. But neither her gestures nor her stance betrayed fear.

“Do you disregard your master’s command so easily?”

“He is not my master,” Gavin replied. He felt Samael behind him, closing up the gap between. Mallory stepped forward, graceful and martial as a cat, body surrendered for the moment to the control of some long-dead fighter. The warding ring of serpents had collapsed; nothing would hold Mallory back now.

“This is your third warning,” Mallory said, as if Gavin and the necromancer spoke from one mind.

Her chin lifted. “Very well,” she said, and raised her hand again.

The cobras rose with it, as if on marionette strings—an alien and unified motion. They swayed together, forward and back like stalks of wheat tossed in a circulation current, and flowed back to pool, hissing, around Dorcas’s feet.

Dorcas shrugged as if it were all the same to her. “We have done what was needful, in any case. I will have refreshments brought, and you may stay with him for the time being. Or, if you prefer to leave him and continue on your quest—which I understand to have been of some urgency—we will make arrangements to allow you to pass beyond our lands. If you remain, and if he emerges from his trial, we shall discuss this further.”

Dorcas had already turned and was taking the first step away when Mallory interrupted.
“If
he emerges from his trial?”

The priestess paused. “Many choose not to, having faced what awaits them.”

Gavin backwinged to settle on Mallory’s shoulder and felt Mallory bear up under it. He would have preferred to drop by Tristen’s side and give the stricken First Mate his closer attention, but he did not feel that this was the time to sacrifice the advantage of height.

“Choose?” Mallory said.

At Samael’s mismatched feet, Tristen convulsed again, a long, shocking extension of his legs and spine. Samael crouched, his immaterial hands passing through Tristen’s armor as if
it
were the hologram.

Dorcas smiled. “Of course,” she said. “We are the Woodsmen of the World, we Edenites. We are not executioners. We are only followers of the true path. We are not God. We cannot know a man’s heart: that is
between himself and what is divine. Whose judgment do you think he faces, if not his own?”

She stared down at them for a moment, but Gavin pointedly turned his head away. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t watching her with his eyes, but the message was unmistakable. A moment later, Dorcas raised her hood and stepped away, vanishing among the shapes of her followers.

“He’s alive,” Samael said from the earthen floor, his hands still buried in Tristen’s chest, flakes of unidentifiable substances swirling where the bones of his wrists should be. “But that’s one hell of an inducer virus. Psychotropic nanotoxin.”

“Inducer virus?” Mallory asked. “What’s it induce? Not a ghost personality?”

The Angel of Biosystems shook his head. “To a first approximation, I’d say it’s just about the opposite. It’s a tailored memory trigger, with an autoextinction function.”

Gavin flipped his wingtips one over the other, a tense scissoring that left him feeling no more comfortable. Around them, the Go-backs had withdrawn to the outside walls of the pavilion, but they were still present—and observing. “So you’re saying, what, it inhibits his colony’s life-extending functions? He’s about to crumble into the dust of a Mean five hundred years dead?”

“No,” Samael said. “I’m saying it makes it possible for him to
wish
himself dead.”

A pause for the sharing of worried glances followed. Samael drew back his hands, wiping them on immaterial trousers. “She wasn’t lying.”

“Yeah,” Mallory said. “We gathered that. What now?”

“Go on without me,” Gavin said. “The two of you. I’ll wait here with the First Mate. You keep tracking Arianrhod, and we’ll catch up when Tristen is recovered.”

“If he recovers,” Mallory said gently. “No. Too risky.

I can’t fight Arianrhod, birdy. And Samael certainly can’t, in his current condition.”

The necromancer glanced apologetically at the angel; the angel dismissed it with a hands-spread shrug of acceptance.

“It’s only the truth. We need you, Gavin. And we need Prince Tristen.”

“So what are we going to do?”

One-handed, Mallory gentled the basilisk’s wing, then scratched under his crest. Gavin lifted the feathers to allow better access, stretching into the caress. “We’re going to wait,” the necromancer said.

   Every breath Tristen drew was one less, Gavin told himself, that they had to worry about. One breath closer to survival. One breath closer to resuming their quest.