Chill

--THOMAS HOBBES, Leviathan

There had been twelve who survived being sealed into the kitchen in addition to Head, and all of them were hale, if restless and dingily dressed. Head set them to work at once, readying the house for occupancy. Gavin felt it would be cruel to tell hir that the chances that Tristen was home to stay were slim, so he held his silence. He was surprised that Mallory did as well.

They would have insisted upon feeding Mallory, but the necromancer refused, more concerned with being shown to central biosystems at once. Head had keys and codes to all the house, and brought them hirself. When Gavin identified the most direct route, by the servant's stair, Mallory insisted on it, though Head fussed about inappropriateness.

While they walked, Mallory questioned an expansive but cautious Head about hir captivity.

'I had hoped for Prince Benedick,' sie admitted. 'He'd not let Ariane kill us all. Which is not to say, Honored, that your appearance was not welcomed, and timely!'

'Indeed,' Mallory said. 'It was resourceful of you to survive as you did. Ariane had an angel on a leash when she brought her bioweapon to Rule. Whose idea was the electrostasis? It's what truly protected you. And how did you manage to become Exalt, locked away like that? You wouldn't have survived as Means.'

Head turned, astonished. 'But Honored, it wasn't anybody's idea. It was the other angel.'

Surmounting the stair back into Rule was one of the more surreal experiences in Tristen's long and storied existence. He kept a hand on the banister, not because he needed the assistance, but because he needed the stability of something cool and real pressed against his palm.

When last he'd left here, he had not expected it to be a journey of decades to see him back. He had not expected to be lost in darkness for the duration--but then, who ever did? And when he was trapped, sleeping in guano and roaches, gnawing raw meat, he had not expected ever to come home again. He had retreated into an animal self he barely remembered.

Barely chose to remember. Because should he want it, each moment of the endless wearing march of hours was crystalline and perfectly akin in his symbiont's memory. The same symbiont whose resources he used to manipulate his neurochemistry, calm the constant wash of anxiety and jagged edges that rolled like broken glass under the false floor he built himself. You're going to have to deal with that eventually.

Eventually, sure. Someday. When I have time.

Perhaps by then, the passage of days (or better, years) would have worn some of the sharp-shattered edges down. Like the pain of so many years spent without any expectation of ever returning to Rule again, and certainly not as its master.

And yet here was the stair, and here was the rail, and there were the white and golden and brown cascades of mushrooms swathing the walls like frozen waterfalls. The scent was strong and familiar. Heartening.

He reached out left-handed, broke off the rim of a shiitake, and tucked it into his mouth. He didn't bite down, just pressed it between teeth and lips and cheek, tasting the sweet musky moisture. It tasted of childhood and escape, of the places you could vanish to where your father would be too busy to come looking. The places where even a royal child could find a modicum of freedom.

He swallowed the mushroom unchewed, and went into Rule.

Somewhere in all Mallory's stolen memories there must be some of this house and Heaven, because Gavin was surprised when they turned in the opposite direction from where his internal map indicated that their destination lay. In the Rule of Gavin's uneasy knowledge, access to central biosystems had not been located in the Commodore's chambers. But the Commodore's chambers themselves were in the same place, so changes to layout were likely to have been cosmetic.

Gavin wasn't privy to the transmission, but Mallory said, 'Tristen's at the stair' just as Head unlocked the door to the Commodore's quarters.

Head twisted, one hand still on the handle, the oft-repaired panel held open a crack. Sie glanced back the way they had come, an artist's study in conflict. The mastiff curve of hir heavy neck, the longing stare--that burned familiar yet elusive in Gavin's memory also.

It troubled him. He was a machine intelligence. His was not an organic memory, lossy and prone to gaps and iterative errors. There should be nothing in his experience that he could not recall with the definition and precision of a holographic recording.

He'd been here before. He knew it. He knew Head.

And yet, he had never been here before. And he could tell from the caution with which sie approached their interactions that Head did not know him.

'Go on,' Mallory urged, a hand lightly on Head's wrist. 'We can take it from here. See to the Prince on his Homecoming.'

Head's evident reluctance should have been comical, except that Gavin had witnessed the grim determination with which sie defended the lives in hir charge. 'I should--'

'The Prince will forgive you leaving us unescorted,' Mallory said gently, 'in the face of exigencies, and the shortness of your staff. I believe he will be grateful to find that any survivors remain at all. You have given extraordinary service, Head.'

Gavin resettled his wings, a triple-flip that left the feathertips crossed in the opposite direction from before, and leaned a shoulder against Mallory's ear.

'Well,' Head said, wavering on hir feet like an indecisive pendulum. 'You are the Prince's servants, on the Prince's business--'

Mallory did not correct hir, and even laid an unnecessary warning hand over Gavin's feet. 'We can find our way.'

Head twisted both hands in hir apron. 'Mind you don't move things around. There might be something in there of the old Commodore's, or Lady Ariane's, that the Prince will want.'

'Indeed, good Head,' Mallory said, and swept hir away with a bow that made the stout housekeeper giggle like a child.

Not until sie had vanished down the corridor and they were well inside the door did Gavin say, very quietly, 'Angel?'

Mallory tickled the feathers alongside his neck. 'I heard.'

'You suppose something held on inside the static field? Something not the angel?'

The necromancer, moving rapidly through lushly comfortable surroundings, made a noncommittal noise. 'Back here, do you suppose?'

'It would explain why parts of the world are going dark to communications,' Gavin said, and added, 'Nova will eat it if it finds it.'

'Then maybe Nova shouldn't find it. Oh, look, a concealed door. It can't be identity-coded; the new Commodore has to be able to win entrance after the death of the old one, so the world wouldn't permit it. What do you suppose Alasdair would choose for a code?'

The entrance was not heavily concealed. It had been hidden behind a facade and a screen of greenery, but acceleration forces had smashed the plants and cracked the paneling, leaving the armored door obvious to casual inspection.

Gavin cocked his head at the seal. No, this hadn't been there before, according to his fragmented memories. But Alasdair Conn, in his own way, had been a predictable man.

'Cecelia,' Gavin said, without hesitation. 'Open the door.'

If his hearing apparatus had been made of membrane and bone, he would have winced as hard as Mallory did at the grinding noise that followed. The structure was plainly warped, but the servos struggled valiantly against the damage. The door jerked along its track, finally sticking fast when it had opened a spare half meter. Beyond it, Gavin could see a second door, this one old-fashioned and constructed with a single lever handle, its finish tarnished by the rub of many hands.

Mallory had to crane to do it, but managed to offer Gavin a respectful stare nonetheless. 'That wasn't your memory, you jumped-up power tool.'

'It's mine now.'