Grail (29 page)

Each time they happened, Perceval considered editing out the emotional/mnemonic function that reminded her of lost loves. And each time, she put the decision off for another day. The pain faded naturally with the years, but she was loathe to lose it all. It might prickle, but it prickled because it was the relic of something dear.

She met Nova’s level look with one of her own. The Angel was the first to glance down.

—As you wish.—

Perceval forced a smile. “I’ll knock to be let out.”

No passes, no incantations, no prestidigitator’s gesturing. Just the veil of titanium drawn transparent across the gap, then thickening, opaquing, and the Angel’s face vanishing behind it. Her interior voice went silent at the same time, and Perceval was left with the bottomless, unsettling emptiness of being alone in her own head for the first time in a half century.

It was cold in the library, and there was no oxygen. It didn’t matter; she was the Captain of the
Jacob’s Ladder
, and adapted to life in a fragile world that rested like a jewel in the black velvet bosom of the Enemy. She would have liked to have drawn a breath for the simple kinetic consolation of it, but comforted herself with folded arms instead. This was a closed space, small and dark. She was alone here, alone with the voices in her head. And there was a warden outside, to keep her safe from the world and the world safe away from her.

She was Perceval. She was strong. She could do this thing.

She placed the palm of one hand against the cold, cold wall of ice, hard as stone and unmelting before the mere
warm heat of any mortal flesh. She grounded herself in that reality and went within.

There were shapes in her head—enemies and strangers. There were people in her program she never would have invited there. The program informed the meat, and the meat informed the person who identified as Perceval, and the person who called herself Perceval controlled the program. An endless loop, an oceanic cycle.

One of those people was the pallid remnant of Ariane Conn—a thing Perceval did not touch willingly or often. Now, though, she girded her loins, rolled up her sleeves, and waded into the fray. For Rien, for Caitlin, for Oliver—for everything Ariane had broken, and everything she had destroyed.

It was not easy.

It was rather like catching an oil slick, to begin with. Ariane might be in her head—might clamor for attention, attempt to force her twisted wisdom on Perceval, might be only a reflection and a memory of the madwoman who had been Ariane Conn in truth—but that did not mean she cared to let Perceval lay hands on her, even metaphorically. Her surface was greasy and insubstantial, and below that the personality of the dead Commodore was thick and sludgy, putrid, repellent. It was probably Perceval’s loathing for Ariane that was corrupting the program (she was reasonably certain that Ariane the narcissist had never seen herself as revolting), but acknowledging the source of the revulsion did not serve to make it any less real.

Still Perceval held the dead woman’s memory close, hugged it to her breast, and delved.

The record of a life ill-spent assaulted her. A great deal of what Ariane treasured was simply hellish to Perceval. The memory of her own maiming was in there, Ariane severing Perceval’s great wings with her weightless unblade. The memory of Tristen’s betrayal and incarceration was there as well. Perceval was tempted to tread lightly around the
borders of that last. She knew Tristen would not care to be reminded of his decades in durance vile, nor would he care for her to share the details of his internment. But she was the Captain, and she was Caitlin’s daughter, and it was her responsibility to seek the truth under all the layers of sadism that Ariane could load up on it.

She gritted her teeth—literally as well as metaphorically—and plunged into the stinking depths.

Something that was not there, however, was the information she sought. Seamless, all of it, machine memory meshing up perfectly with the edges of fallible chemical memory, or as much of that latter as was recorded in Ariane’s ghost. Perceval waded through treasured, attention-polished images of her own gaunt flyer’s body, cobalt blood laddering down her protruding ribs and vertebrae as if it descended a staircase, dripping with viscous regularity from the thick, ragged stubs of her wings before it groped together like blind fingers and formed seeking tendrils, trying to seal the unhealing wounds. She walked tiptoe between Ariane’s gloating recollections of the netted dead in Rule, epidemic victims bundled and frozen in the bosom of the Enemy for when their bodies might be needed for raw materials or allowed to heal into the mute and servile resurrected. She watched Ariane kill Alasdair and consume his memories and experience with his colony.

She learned what snapped an unblade, as Ariane’s Mercy met Tristen’s black Charity, and both swords threw black sparks and shatterings along the walls of the world. She saw the battle, and she saw that Tristen was clearly the superior swordsman. But it availed him not when Ariane—that treacherous knight—sent her attendant Angel Asrafil into the matrix of Tristen’s sword, possessing the unblade, weakening its structure, and creating a plane of cleavage through the blade so that it broke across the forte. As Tristen reeled back, Ariane struck with the dagger in her left hand and ended the fight—for a time.

She learned, too, that Ariane had blinded Tristen before she locked him away, though she had used only her main gauche to do it and not her unblade, and so after some time the wound had repaired itself. A cruelty at the time—what good were eyes in eternal darkness?—but an unexpected and unintended mercy in the end, when Perceval, Gavin, and Rien had resurrected Tristen from the tomb.

Perceval learned all these things—things she had already known or suspected. She learned them in too much detail, and too well. At first, Ariane twisted against her, tried to hide, but she was proud of her crimes, fulfilled in her evils. She—her remnant—had been alone with them a long time.

There was a part of Ariane that delighted in showing off for Perceval all the wickedness she’d done. It was a new wickedness, and Perceval’s horror and disgust were most satisfying. Ariane gave her more, unable to resist. It is a human need, to see our accomplishments admired.

And Perceval, gritting her teeth, wading in foulness, quailed and encouraged those confidences.

Then, having encouraged Ariane to open up to her, she began picking Ariane apart. She did not care to assimilate her; she did not want this dragon in her head. But she knew now that she no longer dared leave her intact, encysted and virulent. She would have to consume her, truly, and make of Ariane’s twisted self-creation some useful materials out of which to build a richer and wiser self.

She learned a thousand unsuspected but hardly revelatory cruelties, too. The vivisection of a ship cat Chelsea had adopted as a pet; the theft and destruction of Oliver’s lover; the endless torments heaped upon long-suffering Head, who existed—who had been
created
—only to please the folk of Rule. Status as a valued servant was not sufficient to protect anyone from Ariane—Doctor and Vintner and others had suffered as well. Alasdair would not have permitted Ariane to interfere with their duties, but given an adequacy of spite and invention, it was not hard for Ariane to make
herself a figure of dread and loathing to all and sundry, from highest to most low. Rien, it seemed, had been beneath Ariane’s notice until she was called to serve Perceval, and for that Perceval was grateful. But no one who caught Ariane’s attention escaped unscathed.

But the information she needed was in here somewhere, and she would find it if she must pull each atom of her enemy’s memory from the next and disassemble them all for the component parts.

She’d expected Ariane to fight the integration more vigorously, and indeed her remnant tried. But Perceval had grown stronger and more skilled than when last they fought, and it turned out to be a trivial matter to defeat her ancient enemy again. But the ease of the victory, she thought bitterly, was more than made up for by the distastefulness of the task.

Perceval was examining the record of a monster, and felt lessened for wading through it—and the more so for each bit she plucked, disassembled, and consumed. How was she different from Ariane if she took such pleasure in destroying Ariane?

Examining each bit for the discontinuity was like running her fingers over a polished surface, feeling for the bit of roughness, the seam, the snag. Ariane would have hidden it well, if she were hiding it even from herself. As one would; one did not hide one’s soul away to ensure one’s immortality and then blithely advertise the location.

She found it, at long last, in Rule. There, among the netted bodies, the victims of the engineered influenza that Ariane had used Perceval herself as a vector for, there was a flutter. Not even a skip, but a—a discontinuity. A repetition in the pattern of breaths, in the images of contorted bodies and dead faces.

Time excised and filled up with other time.

“Gotcha,” Perceval whispered. Wild exultation filled her, but she fought it back and adjusted her chemical balance.
She didn’t want to feel this joy now, surrounded by the stench and the memory of the dead.

And then she winced, because she realized what it indicated. If the skip was in Rule, at that particular time and place, that meant that Ariane’s Trojan Horse personality was embedded in somebody who had been present in Rule at that time. Which meant one of two places, because if Ariane had copied herself into the surviving splinter of Samael, Nova would have found it when she vetted the contents of his program. That left Head, or one of the members of her staff that she had managed to rescue—

—or the body of Oliver Conn, resurrected now and repurposed to hold the personality of the long-dead Astrogator, Damian Jsutien.

“Shit,” Perceval said—or mouthed, rather, there being no atmosphere to carry the vibrations. Reaching out, she tapped on the library’s external hull.

“Nova?” she said, when the Angel reestablished contact. “I think I’m ready to come out.”

   Through the host Conn’s night, while the host slept and Ariane used the body to study, Dust washed his paws and watched the door. His patron rarely said anything, rarely rose from her chair. Instead, she sat before the massive swell of the ancient book, a papery rasp revealing each turned page.

She was not reading. Or rather, she was reading, but she was not reading the words written in ink. There was other information there, leaved through the pages on circuit boards mere molecules thick, wired into the spine on data-jewels that had endured for generations.

Night after night, Ariane—in her borrowed body—figured out the access, learned the technology, unlocked the coding, and bored into the guts of the antediluvian computer. And night after night, Dust sat on the perch by the door and watched her.

Benedick was often intentionally infuriating. Tristen thought he cultivated the air as a sort of privacy shield, a means of keeping the world at arm’s length and maintaining the distance, and thus the authority of command.

But it had never worked particularly well on Tristen, being older, and Tristen thought that quite possibly infuriated Benedick. Also, for now, Tristen made allowances, remembering his wife Aefre and how well he himself had dealt with that; Benedick was deep in the throes of grieving his lost love. Tristen harbored no illusions that the fact that Benedick and Caitlin were separated had meant that either of them cared less for the other.

In any case, his priority call was met with a skeptical eyebrow and a reserved expression until he began to talk. “The Captain has a task for us, O Brother. One perhaps best carried out by you, in Engine, although you will want support. And also to inform Jordan, before you act.”

It was typical of Benedick that he neither asked foolish questions nor assumed answers were implied in what went unsaid. “Support?”

“It’s likely that Caitlin’s killer was a martial revenant of Ariane Conn. We believe she planted the daemon-seed for her resurrection in Oliver’s body when she toured Rule. After her bioweapon had taken its toll of the servants and family.”

Benedick’s jaw firmed. It was the only outward symptom of distress—or determination—that Tristen was likely to get. “Evidence?”

“The Captain—” Important, that, for if Tristen had put them on equal terms when he called Benedick
brother
, now he reestablished the chain of authority. “She went through Ariane’s memories.”

Again, Benedick showed that firming of the jaw that could not exactly be termed a flinch. “I would have expected her to wipe something like that at the hippocampus. Or at the very least, have it on a dead-man’s switch so that, when Perceval ate her, she wouldn’t get access to Ariane’s failsafe plan. But then, Ariane always was an overwhelming egotist.”

“She did wipe it.” Tristen enjoyed watching the surprised mothflutter of a smile at the corners of Benedick’s mouth, gone as quickly as a flicker. No matter what else came between, paternal pride was beautiful. “Perceval found the repeated segment.”

“So it’s conjecture that the daemon-seed went into Oliver.”

“Conjecture supported by circumstantial evidence. A newly installed personality—Jsutien—would grow around the daemon-seed and disguise it.”

“And Jsutien was the person present when Arianrhod escaped,” Benedick finished.

“Also, Nova cannot confirm his whereabouts for the duration of the attack on Engine.”

Benedick was also too disciplined to curse. And although Tristen knew he had a startling, mercurial sense of humor,
it was not on display now. “You’re assuming he’s not aware of the daemon he carries.”

“If you were Ariane, would you place that much trust in a mule?”

Benedick wrapped a long hand around the squareness of his jaw. “I’ll bring him into custody. Cynric can take his head apart and see what’s hiding in there. She’s more likely to put something functional back together when she’s done rooting around than anyone else would be.”