wings. He focused the light on the lock, so Mallory could lean back a little. Exalt eyes were fine in dimness, but detail work in the dark could challenge even a Conn. 'How will you win past?'
'Dead men's memories,' Mallory answered, and pressed a thumb to the lock. What would happen now, Gavin knew, was that thumb skin would shape itself into the patterns of some long-dead Conn's print. Mallory's symbiont would manufacture a synthetic approximation of the relevant sections of the dead man's DNA. And finally, the necromancer would reach into the racked archives of untold partial memories and draw up the appropriate response to the blinking challenge lights.
A moment, no more, and the massive, well-maintained doors glided whispering into their housings. Gavin fanned his wings for balance as Mallory stepped forward, saying absently, 'Watch the claws.'
'I never crush anything I don't mean to.'
A pass of the necromancer's hand, and the outer air lock closed behind them. There was no second lock inside. All Mallory needed to do was cycle the lock--a manual command again, crude and robust--wait for the hiss of exchanged air as the inner doors slid wide, and step forward into Rule.
Here, the air was full of information. Without the light of the waystars, the cavernous lobby blazed with full- spectrum lamps that illuminated the repair of ravaged fruit trees. As they paused inside the air lock to orient themselves, a shattered olive humped itself and heaved, straightening a trunk that had twisted when it fell. With a vast creaking and splintering, the rustling of unfolding branches, its colony drew it upright. Gavin thought perhaps the world itself colluded in the righting, because the limbs sprung and swayed as if gravity luffed for a moment in the vicinity, and when they sagged again a patter of unripe olives struck the earthen deck.
'The lights are wasteful,' Mallory said. 'We'll need to check the resource load and what our intake is. And perhaps advise the Captain to dial them back.'
'The trees need them,' Gavin said.
'The trees need not to freeze on the Enemy's breath,' Mallory rebutted. 'We haven't a waystar to mine for energy now. Consumables are
'A pity,' Gavin said, 'when we invested so much in arranging a reception.'
Mallory's shoulder moved under his talons, rise and fall of a shrug. 'At least we heard before we fetched the party favors.'
'And the snacks.'
Somewhere a bird sang, and Gavin detected the heavy aroma of blossoming jasmine. He could smell people, too, and death, but those scents were cold. Arianrhod and Ariane's engineered disease had done its work; there was no sign of living habitation--or even the bodies of the dead.
Mallory walked forward through air scented with the musky green sap of olive trees. 'What good is an apocalypse without snacks?'
Gavin resettled his wings. 'Does that mean Tristen won't be meeting us here after all?'
'No. Caitlin says his ETA is only a few hours now. It will be easier to connect here.'
Gavin bobbed his head at the end of his neck like the ball at the end of a flexible rod. 'We'll have to work fast, then.'
The necromancer only kicked a clod of earth, gesturing at the empty orchards. 'I could have saved these people.'
'As you did Perceval and Rien. If you had been here, the flu might not have killed so many.'
An angry nod moved curls against Gavin's wing. He cupped it wide, as if to shelter Mallory's head, angry in his own turn that all he had to offer was a useless protective gesture. 'They were Conns. Would they have accepted your help?'
'It's not the Conns. It's the servants.' A declaration Gavin met with silence, until Mallory added, 'We should examine the house before deciding everyone is dead.' That last was said desultorily, as if Mallory assumed already what they would find.
Still, they found the direction and went, coming at last through orchards and gardens--all busy with the task of healing themselves for a harvest that might never happen--to the great house of Rule. It was not an imposing edifice, being built simply into the bulkheads of the Heaven, so the effect was rather of a castle around a courtyard. Once they emerged from the passageway that led them in, walls pocked with openings rose on every side toward a sky full of windows.
'If you were central biosystems, where would you be?' Gavin asked. A richly oleaginous scent drew his attention. In addition, he could just make out a faint, mechanical whine.
'Some expert system you turned out to be.'
'I'm a power tool. You're the one with a head full of dead Conn. You tell me.'
Mallory snorted. 'If you were the last small band of desperate survivors, where would
'In the kitchens,' Gavin answered. With one wing, he pointed to the turning exhaust fan set low in the wall before them. 'In the kitchens.'
Mallory could move fast, given the right provocation. Gavin allowed the wind of the necromancer's passage to lift him from his perch, beating heavily in pursuit. Mallory ducked into the main entrance of the house, an arched tunnel whose curved walls echoed back the thumping of Gavin's wings. They ran through hallways, pelted down a flight of stairs, charged unwavering past a long gallery of portraits. Together they descended, Mallory choosing stairwells over corridors and left turns over right, until they leveled out in a corridor flanked by open chambers. The unsealed doors revealed coffin sleepers four to a room, racked in vertical sets of two against each wall. Servants' quarters.
Gavin--who had never been here before--remembered. Remembered the shape of the space, the doors, the cubicles. The irising spiral leading to food services, beyond. He backwinged, but there was no place to land and consider. He knew this place, knew it in every shred of metal and polymer that made up his form.
On the right, there would be a passageway, concealed by doors that might seem--to the casual eye--merely a part of the corridor wall. Beyond that, Gavin remembered, were the elevators that led to the laboratories and workstations of central biosystems.
The memory unsettled him. It itched, so he wished he could claw at it.
'The bio labs are that way,' he said, with a lash of his tail.
'I thought you didn't know the layout.'
'I don't. But that doesn't change the fact that the bio labs are that way.'
'Correct,' said Mallory, still trotting. 'We'll check that after we're done in the kitchen. Which should be right about--'
The door was unmistakable, a heavy affair sealed tight, with its air lock lights burning green for a good seal. Mallory leaned a shoulder against it and cupped a hand between one ear and the portal.
Gavin looped to pass Mallory's other ear. 'If everybody in Rule died of an engineered influenza, there could be contaminated bodies inside. Is it safe to open that?'
'Is anything?'
'I'm immune,' the basilisk said. 'I was only concerned for you.'
'I promise not to die on you.'
A child's answer--but that was Mallory. Sulking, Gavin settled to a rail against the wall and watched while the necromancer examined the door and the space before it.
Gavin's beak was not made for frowning. He converted the urge to a head bob instead. 'How do you mean to get the door open?'
With a sidelong glance, Mallory said, 'Technology.'
Magic, rather. Which was to say, the layers and layers of abstract knowledge that came as the arcane cost of being a necromancer. Whatever the necromancer did to subvert the locks, in only seconds the portal irised wide.
Gavin flapped up to perch beside it. 'Charming,' he said.
A complicated rearrangement of forehead muscles indicated that perhaps Mallory
