Dust

awake.'

Fortunately, the bowl was durable. Because when the prisoner lifted up her head, blinked eyes the same color and transparency as the peppermint tea, and said, 'Hello, Rien,' Rien dropped it.

Dust closed his eyes and leaned back in a chair beside the conjured fire. Of course real fire was an impossibility here, a terror that would devour irreplaceable oxygen and fill airtight spaces with killing smoke, but the flicker and warmth and light of the programmed counterfeit would serve him, who was a counterfeit himself.

He put his feet up and listened to the downpour flooding the battlements. It rushed over polycarbonate-paned windows and poured out the rough-beaked snouts of precision-molded rain gutters, beaded on mossy outcrops, and thundered down the ragged shoulders of his house.

The sky creaked overhead. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the world, a conduit had broken. The unseasonable rain would continue until the world's blood healed the wound; Dust's anchore would be washed with water needed, no doubt, in far holdes and domaines. There was no sunlight in the core, except whatever reflected through the long-lensed and mirrored channels from the skin of the world, but there was water aplenty. Half the rivers in the world twisted across his sky.

He breathed the chill air, and smiled. The rain washing his house tickled his skin, the memory of a caress on skin that had not felt such a thing in centuries.

He had lost much of the world when he lost the rest of himself, but all that occurred here, he knew. He retained that, though he was not what he had been.

His ring caught on the placket as he tucked one hand into a white-and-silver brocaded waistcoat and felt for his watch. The chain fell cold and silver between his fingers, as if the rain ran through them, too.

When he raised it to his eye, he neither lifted his eyelid nor exposed the crystal. He did not need the watch, the glance, or the gesture. He knew the time; it ticked out within him with atomic regularity. But the ceremony pleased him nonetheless.

'Nearing midnight,' he said to an empty chamber, voice ringing on stone walls and hushed by hand-knotted carpets. Dust sat upright, opening his eyes, tucking his watch away. White sleeves billowed as he stood and walked to the window, where a watery light struggled: the reflected suns' doomed but valiant attempt to shine through the sheeting water.

'All but midnight already,' he said, and streaked the condensation on the plastic with a casual finger. The house rubbed into his caress. 'And so much to be done.'

With a magician's gesture, he plucked a glass of brandy from the air, swirling the liquor under his nose. It smelled sharply of real rain—as the rain could not—and chocolate, atomized molecules tickling his receptors, and he smiled when he tasted it.

He spoke to the rain as if through it the world could hear him, though he knew the world had gone deaf long before. But memory was what he had, memory and ritual, and a flair for the melodramatic honed through centuries of study.

'By the elements, by the ten directions. I have not forgotten. My name is Jacob Dust, and I have not forgotten.'

Dust could see through the rain if he chose to, stretch out his senses to the skin of the world. He could attenuate himself, reach broad, grow into mist and brush as if with invisible fingertips the transparent skin of the world, reach out beyond it, into the cold empty darkness beyond, where the light of the stars and the temporary suns burned. He could stroke the vast cratered hide, its twisted sun-shades and solar panels, the old wounds and injuries that there simply were not resources to repair. He could reach out into many the holdes and anchores and do-maines, into the chambers and vaults of the world. If he were not prevented, in places, he could have extended that reach into its long-cold engines and rent reactor cores, through the homes of Mean and noble alike, into the courts of Engine and Rule. But not all paths were open; some of them his brothers watched over jealously.

He could, however, stroke the cheek of an exiled prince, and of a princess who would be Captain, and of Perceval in her dungeon chains.

And only the angels would know.

But world was vast, and vastly broken, limping in its desolate orbit around these shipwreck stars. And Jacob Dust was not what he had been, when he and the world were whole. He could do these things, if he chose to. But the effort would exhaust him. And there were those to whom he could not risk being made vulnerable. Not yet.

2 they know all, that dwell in the silent kitchens

In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

—JOHN 14:2, -King lames Bible

Some of the milk and porridge splashed out when Rien dropped the bowl. It spattered Perceval's ankle, and her chains writhed toward it, defensively. But once they tasted the spill, they withdrew again—Perceval could not help but think—nonplussed.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I did not mean to startle you. Was that for me, Rien?'

The girl stammered, staring. She was small, fine-boned, with delicate features and a wild froth of frizzy black hair chopped off shoulder-long and clipped back with jeweled plastic spiders that spun a transparent hairnet between them—something cheap and pretty.

She looked nothing like her mother, but then, who did?

'It is for you,' she managed, bending down to pick up the bowl. It hadn't overturned.

She picked the spoon off the floor as well, and scrubbed it on the hem of her tan blouse. As if a little dirt from the dungeon floor could discomfit Perceval now.

When Rien looked up again, Perceval spread her hands, a gesture of helplessness. She could not feed herself bound up in chains, the strain like dripped fire down her neck and shoulders, a hurt even sharper than the missing wings. Ariane Conn, Perceval promised herself, feeling a little ridiculous. She could say the name a thousand times. It would not free her, nor put her in a place where she could fight Lady Ariane.

And in any case, Ariane was the eldest living and acknowledged daughter of Alasdair Conn, who had been Commodore since the death of the last Captain. Nearly five hundred years, nearly since the moving times. She was out of Perceval's league.

Except here unlooked-for was the child Rien, sent to serve Perceval in her captivity, apparently in all innocence. An Engineer's miracle. It might mean that even somewhere here in Rule there was a friend.

Perceval arched up on the balls of her feet to ease her arms and shoulders as Rien fussed with the spoon.

'I will feed you,' Rien said, as if noticing Perceval's gesture. She dug the spoon through porridge and held it up so Perceval had only to push her chin forward to take it.

Of course the stuff might be drugged, but they had her in nanochains. If they wanted to poison her, or kill her, or interrogate her, there were easier means.

And Perceval had no doubt those means would be used.

Even such a small motion made her want to gasp in pain, though she schooled herself to let only a little air hiss from her nose. Rien noticed, however, and after Perceval had her mouthful, Rien walked around her to ex- j amine her back.