Dust

deliver Perceval from Dust's thrall.'

'But if he is the Angel of Libraries, shouldn't he know—'

'Yes,' Samael answered. 'But all things come to an end. And I am the Angel of Death.' And then he smiled sidelong through his hair and said, 'But it was I who came to see you awaken. I do not see your father or your mother here.'

And why should he? They had abandoned her to Alasdair, without a backward glance, and Alasdair had done everything possible to hide her history from her.

Not that being raised Mean seemed like being cheated, exactly, now that she'd met a few Exalt.

She realized that Samael was still looking at her, waiting for her to respond. To defend Benedick, and Arianrhod— whom she had barely met—or to condemn them?

Rien smoothed her hands along her thighs, and let it go. She had never had anyone's protection in her life. She didn't need it now, and especially she did not need Samael's.

And then he said, 'You know they only want to use you. The way they used Perceval.'

And his tone—hopeful, light, disingenuous—was the clue that triggered Rien to angry speculation. She came up to him with quick small steps, the decking stinging her bare, moisture-softened feet. 'And are you the angel who poisoned us?'

'Poisoned you?'

'Poisoned Perceval,' she said. 'With an influenza virus. And then arranged for her to be captured by Ariane.'

This smile made his lined face shine. 'If I had,' he said, 'why in the world would you think I'd admit it so easily?'

They interpermeated.

Perceval had just time to realize that Dust was enfolding her, drawing her out of her body and into the shadow-light fretwork of the parasite wings, and then she was as free of her body as any devil coughed loose in an exorcism. She imagined her consciousness floating up her own throat, exhaled on a cloud of sunlit particles, swirling into the presence of the angel.

And then they were together. Meshed, reinforcing and canceling in an interference pattern, bars of brilliance and darkness. Perceval was clear of thought, simultaneously purged of the chemical cocktail with which Pinion had tried seducing her and lifted from the framework of her own flesh. She diffused into him, wondering how long it had taken Pinion to duplicate the patterns of her thought and personality, and how she would know if they had been subtly—or not so subtly—changed.

'Come with me,' Dust said, and now he was a gossamer presence, a breath of air upon a neck she didn't have. He guided her, and she went with him, feeling small in the shadow of his wings. They reached out, a lightspeed flicker, closer than flying feathertip to feathertip.

And found themselves in Rule.

Or what remained of it.

'Your doing,' Dust said, and Perceval might have quailed, had she not been a perfect and unemotional machine.

He showed her death; he showed her the toll of war; he showed her what it was to be an angel, and adrift.

They moved like ghosts among the dead, distributed consciousnesses floating in a fall of dust. Perceval understood that it was dangerous to be so far attenuated, that there were angels that hunted angels, but Dust had left this portion of his substance in place for a long time, and he felt his was as safe as leaving one's stronghold could ever be.

'I ward your body,' he said, and if she reached back far enough she could feel it, a mortal tether floating among the lattices of the world.

She did not have his knack of distributing consciousness over the entire network. She could switch back and forth between images, conscious of a lightspeed lag measured in fractions of fractions, and even overlay one perspective with the other, but the effortlessness with which Dust managed his gestalt focus was beyond her.

She could, however, feel the dark patches, the vast swaths of the Jacob's Ladder that were outside of Dust's control, or simply dead, gangrenous flesh still grafted to the moribund world as it rotted in pieces.

'Still only human,' he told her. 'This is what it means to be my captain, beloved.'

She explored the limits of this new capability, wondering if there was a tool here that could be used as a weapon against him, trying to hide the thought. She might have been successful; in any case, if he saw it, he did not respond.

Instead, Dust brought Perceval through Rule, and showed her the bodies of the Mean. They were netted and roped outside the air locks, frozen far more crudely than the ones in the holde. Like fish in nets, she thought. There must be dozens of dead. Hundreds.

It should have chilled her, if she were in her own flesh, but she was beyond chill. She could count them, exactly, if she wished. She could brush her fringes over each of the dead and know that person, and bear witness to their illness and agony.

Cowardly, she turned away, and went within the halls of Rule, accompanied by Dust.

Here, a few still walked. Some Mean, still wasted and shuffling with exhaustion in their slow unaugmented recovery from the illness Perceval had brought them. Some Exalt, with the flat eyes of the resurrected. And some Exalt, who must have lived.

Among them, Ariane, who stood in a luxuriously appointed chamber, two gray-faced servants by her side, arraying her for battle.

Perceval braced for a flush of rage and terror, but felt no such thing. Chemical, all chemical. And if it did rise, back in the belly of her cold body, it barely brushed her here.

'Take me,' Dust said, 'and I will help you defeat Ariane. Be my captain, and help me stand against the angel who is her ally.'

'And what angel is that?' It was a strange sensation, to float at her Enemy's shoulder unnoticed. Witchcraft.

'Astafil, the Angel of Blades.'

'While we are here beside her,' Perceval asked, 'why not just block her throat, kill her now?'

'Asrafil,' Dust repeated. 'We move subtly, now, and go unnoticed. The world swarms, and not even an angel can inspect every nanobot that crawls within its sphere. But if we moved against her, he would know.'

Perceval watched as Ariane drew her unblade and cut passes in the air with it. If she followed her thread back to her own body, she could imagine fear at the sight. 'Who is she going to war with? Surely not Engine. Not with her forces so depleted.'

'No,' Dust whispered in her ear. Perceval slid back into her body with a sense of impact, awash in sick meat and chemical deception. Her fingers curled in distaste. 'She's coming here, Perceval. To devour you, and conquer me.'

24 Vessel

We are like searchers in a house

of darkness,

A house of dust; we creep with

little lanterns,

Throwing our tremulous arcs of light

at random.

— CONRAD AIKEN, The House of Dust