Benedick was good, but she understood him. His political and martial acumen were unmatched, but Arianrhod knew how things were built. And also how to take them apart again. She was older than Benedick, as clever and-- because he thought like a Conn, not like an Engineer--she was also far more comfortable in her colony, its abilities, and their uses.
The Conns were corporeocentric as a culture, identified with their physical forms, unwilling to modify. Engineers were more comfortable with constant transition and evolution. They more perfectly expressed the will of the Builders, adaptation itself having become the end state. For was not the world a wheel, eternally in motion? So while Arianrhod had spent a great deal of time perfecting her shape--mature, attractive, carefully balanced to be enough like a Conn to be comforting while still evidently that of an Engineer--she now began to shed it.
A loss, but losses were also a mere challenge to adaptation. She could have shifted herself faster and more completely--and with less risk--in a medical tank, but pheromones and biochemistry and a few chromatic and cosmetic alterations would do for a beginning. She felt the tingle in the bones of her face, the burn and spark of lightning against her long bones as they awakened to growth long suspended.
The change would take time, and there were sacrifices she was not yet prepared to make that could reveal her. Her neural pattern must remain intact for the time being, as it was still necessary that she stay herself. Changes to her identity would eventually become inevitable, but those would have to wait until she no longer needed the cloak of who she was.
Another loss. A necessary one. She would be prepared to make sacrifices.
Despite the discomfort--not yet pain, though it would be, which was another reason to wish for a medical tank--she ran on, covering ground lightly, leaving as little trail as conveniently possible until she came to the parting of the ways. Five possible trails. This was where she would lose Benedick.
'Asrafil,' she murmured, and felt something larger and more alien tear inside her. Her enemies might think her ambitious, ruthless, but she comforted herself with the truth: that she was given in service, and sometimes that service demanded great sacrifice. She had given up so much already. So many lives. So much material. A little merely physical agony was nothing to spare herself.
Her symbiont pinched, pulled, separated, and Arianrhod gasped in pain as half her colony peeled free of her cells to flood from her mouth, her ears, the pores of her skin. Blue tendrils groped from every orifice, glossy with off-tints in the nebula's cankerous light. The symbiont seethed forth until it wreathed the air around her like smoke threading from a burned-out motor.
It wavered in coils. Then it dissipated, as if a breeze had spread it wide.
Arianrhod, hands on her knees, pressed her spinning head lower and gasped. Saliva flooded her mouth; she gulped and it stung her raw throat going down. Releasing a portion of her colony had cost her. The result was inflammation, ruptured cells, internal bleeding. Her remaining, weakened symbiont could replenish itself--and repair her body--but the process would take time.
Pride forced her to brace her palms against her kneecaps, push herself upright, and stand tall. She tossed loose strands of hair--storm-colored now, like the images of light-torn clouds from the old world, a gradient of silver through pewter to coal--behind her shoulder, shook it out, and breathed deeply enough to feel her ribs crack.
She repeated, 'Asrafil.'
Like a fan, the angel unfolded beside her. Familiar, in his black coat and boots, arms crossed, stern over the almost-feminine bones of his face. He raised his arms and stretched, as if settling new flesh over new bones-- although he had neither--and smiled at her.
'Well done,' he said. 'Well done, indeed. How may I reward your service, my brave one?'
Arianrhod stretched out her hands to him like a plaintive child. She said, 'Carry me.'
The angel lifted her into his arms. With a sweep of his hand, he smoothed the grass where she had stood, erasing the evidence of her distress. Then, they rose with the flaring of his coat and ascended into the air. 'I know where to go,' he said.
'That's as may be,' Arianrhod answered, letting her head relax against his shoulder. 'But first we must make a side trip. I have something to collect.'
'What is it?' She felt their bodies rising and falling between the wings he constructed from stolen threads ripped from passing colonies.
'Something my daughter Ariane concealed decades ago,' Arianrhod said.
Asrafil clucked his tongue. He knew she was teasing him.
She still waited a few moments before she relented. 'A weapon,' she said. 'It's a weapon.'
Because it was easier to lead than follow, Gavin preceded his necromancer up the spiral stair to Rule, bobbing between heavy wingbeats as he rose through a central shaft twined past bubbling algae tanks. He paused at the landing, tail twisted through the balustrade, and waited for Mallory to catch up.
The space at the top of the stair was vaulted and oddly proportioned, higher at one end than the other. Waste space, moist and dark, with walls composed of long bales of compost held in place by netting. Smelling of clean, sour earth, edible mushrooms festooned every bale in fans, spikes, and streamers. Some were broken, their thick stems weeping fluid, but enough remained intact to give Gavin hope for the survival of anyone left within Rule.
Engine lay at the outskirts of the world, isolated for the protection of everything that would have been threatened by its reactors. Rule lay cupped inside the arch of the wheel, protected by the world's many struts and habitats and active defenses, armored like a heart inside a rib cage. The only place more sheltered was the bridge, at its hub.
Safety lamps still burned dim behind translucent panels by the door, illuminating the landing. The hallway--or mushroom farm--tapered down to the far end. A great double portal loomed in the shadows, lit only by bioluminescence and the filtered light from outside. It was the external aperture of the air lock into Rule.
They had climbed a long tunnel of a spoke to end here, but despite the stairs Mallory's breath still came easy when at last they were side by side at the top. Gavin stretched his neck to slide his beak along the satiny skin of a lightly flushed cheek. Mallory responded by gliding fingers under Gavin's blue-tinged crest, rubbing until the basilisk twisted this way and that to maneuver the scratch to all the itchy spots. Gavin replied with grooming in kind, pulling mahogany ringlets taut and letting them slide through his beak like disordered feathers.
Mallory cast about, frowning. 'There should be a guard upon the stair. Why have we not been stopped? Or if they died at their posts'--as they should have, Mallory's tone implied--'where are the bodies? I'd like the answer.'
'Well, you know. I'd also like a shuttlecraft,' Gavin answered. 'A rasher of bacon, and a mined-stone brooch. But you don't hear me complaining.'
Mallory offered him a mocking head-tilt. 'What's a rasher of bacon?'
'A strip of cured animal flesh,' he said. 'Meant for eating.'
The necromancer made a face like a nauseated cat. 'What would you want that for?'
Gavin could not answer. Instead, he turned to groom the feathers on one wing into alignment. While so diverted, he asked, 'What shall we examine first?'
'Is there no one to greet us?' Mallory craned stagily from left to right. 'Can it be that the Chief Engineer is correct and all Rule has perished? Familiar spirit, what do you sense in this place?'
Gavin fanned his wings to stir the air, hoping there might be lingering scent in some still corner. But the breeze he generated brought only cold traces. 'Not a damned thing,' he said. 'Shall we travel into Rule?'
Flourishing, Mallory bowed and swept Gavin forward with a gesture. He arrowed past, tail and neck extended, and circled twice before the great doors into Rule, buying time until his patron should catch up.
Radio echoes told him the shape of the space, and that the portal before them was shielded. He could have cut his way in, but there was no benefit in destroying the air lock.
Mallory had ways of opening doors when it was needful.
The necromancer drew up and consulted the controls beside the gate. 'Thumb lock, code lock, DNA lock. Ancient tech.'
'From the Builders,' Gavin replied, circling again.
'Light,' Mallory said, without looking up from intent consideration of the lock. Gavin dropped to a forward-bent shoulder. 'Ooof,' Mallory said. 'That's not light.'
'This is.' A moment's intention, and a fine azure glow, crisp and bright, radiated from Gavin's breast and
