'round, but her internals assured her that it was only a little after sixteen hundred. Voices hummed on the air, one of them unmistakably Benedick's baritone, but the words were indistinguishable in echoes. They led her in the same direction as the smell of coffee.
Eventually she came through a door that looked decorative but was most likely an air seal waiting to fall, and she paused.
She had expected a dining room, dishes laid on the sideboards or brought by bustling servants. Instead, what she found was a sunny small room, the walls clear yellow and the trim cheerful orange. There was a circular table big enough for six, and Benedick and Tristen—his chin shaven and his hair trimmed halfway down his back—sat at the ten and two positions, their backs to the window, bowls and cups before them.
Perceval saw a different view from this side of the house: apple trees, their roots humped under the snow, and what must be an airy glade when this side of the world was not frozen. A red bird no bigger than Perceval's hand flitted from branch to branch, whistling. The flare must be over: the light seemed normal, and other senses told her the background radiation was falling off.
'Rien says the suns are dying,' Perceval said. She pulled out a chair and sat, a little forward to make room for Pinion behind her.
'Her father's daughter,' Tristen said. Benedick shook his head, faintly smiling, so Perceval wasn't certain if the dig was directed at her or at him—or even if it was meant to be a dig at all.
Perceval cleared her throat. 'What's for breakfast?' Tristen rose and fetched a cup from the cabinet. The coffee was on the table in a carafe, and Perceval poured her own and doctored it with soy milk and honey. Benedick said only, 'How does Rien know?' As she was drinking her coffee and explaining about Hero Ng (Benedick and Tristen shared a significant glance when Perceval told them about Mallory), a bowl of oatmeal appeared at her elbow. The necessities of honey and cinnamon and salt and more soy milk occupied her hands for a moment. She had barely even registered the presence of the resurrectee servant who left it there.
She finished the story and the oatmeal at close to the same time, and pushed the bowl away. 'It sounds as if Hero Ng has been expecting this for a long time. Since the end of the moving times. These suns have always been unstable.'
'Then why bring the world here?' Tristen asked. No doubt a rhetorical question, and none looked more shocked than he when it was answered.
'Because at the time there was no choice.' The voice was deep, gravelly, harsh as if with over- or underuse. Benedick was on his feet before the speaker finished, a pistol in one hand and a dagger in the other. Tristen remained seated, seemingly languid, the drape of his hand and wrist across the tablecloth unchanged. But Perceval could feel the electricity in him. That air of repose was no more reliable than a hunting cat's.
As for herself, she set her coffee down—it was laced with cardamom, and she harbored intentions of finishing every mouthful—and slowly pushed her chair out to stand. She furled Pinion tight when she turned, so as not to interfere with her father's or her uncle's line of sight or line of fire.
And when she turned, she saw—a man. A small man, all out of proportion with the voice. His blond hair hung lank on either side of a long, lined face, and his nose looked like it had been repeatedly broken. Perceval blinked. She wasn't sure she'd ever seen someone so fascinatingly ugly.
He wore a dove-gray morning coat and no shirt, and his feet were as bare as Perceval's and far hornier. 'I am Samael,' he said, 'the Angel of Biosystems. And I am afraid the ghost of Hero Ng is quite correct. It is
'Not to seem rude,' Benedick said, without lowering his weapon, 'but amicable relations would be easier established should you reveal how you came to enter my house.'
Samael paused, pale locks threaded through both gnarled hands as he pushed his hair behind his ears, earrings and finger-rings glinting. 'Like this,' he said, and vanished like a switched-off light.
Involuntarily, Benedick stepped forward. And Tristen stepped to the side, flanking him. Perceval craned her neck; surely there was meant to be some sort of a special effect when a person disappeared, a flash of light or a pop of air. Not a simple, crisp vanishment.
And then Samael reappeared, over by the cabinets this time and wearing a green damask greatcoat and a pair of sooty wings that—unlike Pinion—trailed off through the wall.
'You're a projection,' Perceval said.
Samael clicked his tongue. 'Close.' He opened a cabinet door and shut it again, ran ticking fingernails over the cherrywood finish, and then picked up a coffee cup and held it out, handle-first, toward Tristen. 'If I may presume?'
Tristen took it cautiously, a long lean and reach. He filled it with coffee and handed it back.
'Thank you,' Samael said, and sipped.
And Benedick looked sidelong at Tristen and holstered his weapons.
'Thank you,' Samael said. 'You only would have shot holes in your paneling, anyway. Technically, I am a distributed machine intelligence, in specific the entity charged with maintaining the habitability of the vessel you call the world. That habitability is in serious danger, and along with it, your lives. What you see before you'— with a flick of his hand, he forestalled Benedick, whatever might have been Benedick's question—'is in fact a sort of hologram, an avatar animated through the refraction of light. I, Samael, am all around you.'
A quick caress stroked Perceval's cheek, though she saw nothing. From Tristen's flinch, he felt the same, and though Benedick remained unmoved, his eyes narrowed.
'Samael—' Tristen said.
Samael forestalled him with an upraised hand. 'I am here for the princess. Sir Perceval, you must know that everything I say to you, Dust hears. Your neck is bent to his yoke for all to see.'
Pinion flapped once, so Perceval felt the air move between the feathers and feared a paroxysm of bating. Nevertheless, she said, 'Can you get it off of me? I care not for his harness, or his promises.'
'I cannot, princess,' he said. 'Not without consuming it, and I think by now it is too firmly integrated with your symbiont to do so without consuming you, as well.'
'It told me Dust loved me,' she said. 'It told me he meant to marry me.'
'I am sure he means to,' Samael said. 'We will see that he doesn't, won't we, gentlemen?'
It was gratifying, Perceval thought, that Benedict fell back and Tristen glided around the edge of the room to stand at her side. She felt warded, and it made her strong. It would have made her stronger to think that they would honor the authority the angel gave her, and place her in the lead. But when Benedick cleared his throat, the look Samael gave him was conspiratorial, the gesture placating.
It made Perceval want to bite them both.
She cast about for something to say, an attempt to reassert control, and came up with a question. 'Why would anybody name the Angel of Life Support for poison?'
Samael drained the last of his coffee and crunched an idle bite from the cup. Whatever, it seemed all the same to him, except the noise of the chewing. He tilted his head as if listening, which made Perceval hope she had asked well. 'Because there is no old Hebrew word for mutagen.'
'So you're not just charged with maintaining the world in a habitable state, are you? You're the Angel of Evolution, too. Or something like it.' Benedick shifted behind her, but he did not interrupt. And there was Tristen, crooked in the corner, were he could have the wall at his back and watch her and Samael and Pinion all at once.
'Something,' Samael said. However ugly his avatar might be, the smile it wore was absolutely dazzling. While she was considering her next question, he finished the last two bites of his coffee cup.
Somehow she managed not to look to her father for reassurance. 'Can an angel be imperfectly honest?'
'An angel can be whatever it is created to be,' Samael said, with perfect frankness. 'Humans are the only animals that intentionally, methodically change themselves. Well, unless you count a queen ant twisting off her wings, but I think you'll agree it's hardly the same thing.' He dusted his hands together. 'I am going to have to tell you a story.'
Perceval broke. She looked at Benedick; Benedick nodded and pointed to the table and the chairs. In another flicker of light, Samael was seated; the other three joined him a little less tidily, Benedick seating Perceval and Perceval choosing not to make a fuss about it. She sipped cold coffee while he reclaimed his chair, and waited for Samael to speak.
'The world has a name,' he said. 'Its name is
