Chill

'Oxygen content?' he asked, and with a great show of how beset she was by his laziness, Chelsea waved a hand bedecked with a sample net through the air.

'Thirty-nine percent,' she said. 'Bet that's not the only giant bug around. Think it eats apes?'

'It definitely eats mushrooms,' he said. Pieces of nipped-off cap were visible in its digestive tract, the pale meat and powdery gills compressed into a single variegated knobby line. He stood up and triggered his own lights. The motion did what Chelsea's floods hadn't; the centipede darted into the overstory in a dazzle of fluidity.

'Come on,' Benedick said, when it had been gone a long moment. 'We still have a fugitive to catch.'

The centipede was the only giant arthropod they saw, but now that he knew they were there, the evidence of their existence was obvious--nibbled mushroom caps, a burrow bored in a stem, as wide as the circle he could make with both arms. And once, when he was leading the downclimb, he saw something that led him to call back up on the armor radio and tell Chelsea to stop the descent. He let himself dangle for a moment, watching the rays of his floodlamps shimmer off the intricate strands of a moisture-dotted funnel-web large enough for him to have walked down upright. His line of descent was a good thirteen meters from the mouth of the thing, for which he was grateful.

Something twitched at the bottom of the funnel, an inquisitive motion, and he said, 'Lower away' with unconscious softness.

The winch started up. As he descended away from the spiderweb, Chelsea asked, 'Problem?'

'I found your carnivores.'

'Everything okay?'

'Fine. Spiderweb. Pretty. When you come through--'

'Yes?'

'Be careful.'

He heard her laughter down the line. 'Oh, boy,' she said. 'Giant spiders. I wonder which bastard angel thought that up.'

10 the door gaped wide

But now, from between the black & white spiders, a cloud and fire burst and rolled thro' the deep black'ning all beneath, so that the nether deep grew black as a sea, & rolled with a terrible noise; beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking east between the clouds & the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones' throw from us appear'd and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent.

--WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Tristen bound back his hair.

Still wet from his shower, it felt like damp wire between his fingers. He stood before the mirror in his chambers and worked it into a braid, bringing the end over his shoulder to finish. The strands appeared crystalline white, but he could see the shadows of his fingers through the locks. In truth his hair was colorless, its apparent whiteness a function of the air trapped in the center of the shaft where normally pigment would be.

Alone among his surviving siblings, Tristen had been born during the Moving Times and had come to adulthood when the biogenetic engineering technology of the symbiont colonies was still undeveloped. His sister Cynric the Sorcerer was younger than he: even she could hardly have built the symbiont before she was born.

Tristen's childhood in these halls had been a sickly one. But he had adapted, and he had still been a young man in the aftermath of the disaster that had crippled the world--when his grandfather Gerald had adopted Cynric's science and directed the creation of the first Exalt.

The rest of the Conn family followed, as did the essential crew of Engineering. With mortal life span and illnesses left behind, Tristen's colony could have amended the lack of pigment as surely as it had amended the worst of the nystagmus that had once so badly affected his vision. But with the early technology, the change would have been obvious and artificial ... and once it became a choice rather than a defect, and he could leave his father's house at will, Tristen found that his self-image had solidified. He liked the drama of his coloring. A little uniqueness could be a valuable thing, especially in a society that valued a man's legend as a marker of his merit.

Now, he looked into the mirrored cobalt glow of the colony shining through his own unpigmented irises, and smiled mirthlessly.

Tristen Conn had weathered the storms of two vast transformations of his world, and the worse storms of growing to manhood in the house that was his grandfather's and then his father's. He had seen failure and betrayal, and more than once his sympathies had been with the betrayers.

Tristen had seen his wife and sister Aefre cut down as a representative of a family and a government she scorned, lost his daughter Sparrow in a war of his grandfather's making. There had been four daughters between him and Benedick, and three were dead. Two--Caithness and Cynric--either at their own father's hands or by his command, having learned patricide from Alasdair's example and died in the attempt. The last sister, Caitlin, survived in exile, where--Tristen must admit--she had done well for herself.

He knew where Ariane had come from, how she had grown so edged, so poisoned, and so bent. She had been Alasdair's favorite, and so he had made her as much in his own image as possible. Or perhaps it had just pleased the old man to focus his loathsome parenting upon her because it griped Tristen so.

Whatever Alasdair's motivation, Tristen had watched his father cripple his younger siblings--the ones born after Benedick--so they would never grow strong enough to challenge him. At first, Tristen had intervened where he could, until Alasdair made it evident that the end result of his interference would be an exile not unlike Caitlin's. If he suffered Tristen to live.

Tristen had learned to stay silent, even in the face of the indignities his father had heaped upon his own line, because to openly cross Alasdair Conn was to lose everything. And he had tried to befriend those who had suffered most--particular among them Ariane.

His filial loyalty to Ariane had only led him to another betrayal--in all the long line of betrayals that marked his history with his family, perhaps the most bitter. Even after her death and consumption, Tristen could not forgive that she had guided him astray. It wasn't exactly that he had trusted her--Conns did not trust one another--but he had cared for her. That caring was what had enabled her to trap him, break his blade, and imprison him in a horrible dungeon.

But as he wrapped the tail of his braid with a blue ribbon that crimped itself tight to bind the locks into a blunt club, he thought: If I had been a dutiful brother, father, husband, grandson--I would have saved the family so much grief, and killed the old man long ago.

It hadn't mattered in the end, because Alasdair had created his own destroyer. And no one could say if the collateral damage had been greater or less because Tristen had not found the resolve to consume his father when he should have.

Tristen knew himself to be as crippled as the rest of his family. Living under his father's will, watching Benedick spill Cynric's blood at their father's command, had made him quiet. It had made him cowardly. It had made him cold.

He let his braid fall behind his shoulder and turned from the mirror.

Things change, he thought. And then, feeling as if he dared greatly: It is time things changed in the house of Rule.

When Tristen emerged into the relaxation chamber, his heap of pack and water bottle lay ready, his armor standing nearby. Mallory, Gavin, and the ghost of Samael--outlined like a dust devil in the scraps of things swept up inside him--awaited by the door. The necromancer was also festooned with travel gear.

Mallory shrugged to settle a pack strap. 'Is everything ready?'

'I want a weapon.' Tristen came before them and turned his back to step into his armor. It folded him into its embrace, the cool resilience of shock gel lining molding to his skin. As it sealed, fasteners sliding into housings with