soft, round-sounding clicks, Mallory stooped to hand him the pack and the water. Tristen slung them through carabiners at his shoulders. His armor protested good-naturedly as the sacks thumped it, but Tristen ignored the complaint.
Then thought again:
He unsealed the helm and looked from Mallory to the artificial intelligences. 'Follow me.'
Ariane had carried Caithness's unblade Mercy, a gift from their father to his most trusted child, and that sword had been consumed in Nova's creation. Tristen, as eldest, had borne an unblade, too, though his had shattered against Mercy when he could not bring himself to strike down Ariane. Caitlin had taken the third and final with her into exile, and that blade had died when Mercy did.
But there were other family weapons, treasured heirlooms, whose bearers would be chosen and controlled by whoever held the house of Rule.
He knew where Alasdair kept his captured riches, and as the acknowledged head of house, all locks in Rule would open to him. Still, when he paused before the vault door, stripped back his gauntlet, and laid his left hand against the contact pad, apprehension chilled his neck. 'Open sesame,' he said, for luck.
The door gaped wide.
Tristen gestured his escorts back with one hand and stepped within. He moved into dimness and light followed, floor and walls and ceiling panels catching a rippling circle of illumination that matched his pace. The light was clear, sun-spectrum, bright enough to reveal the details on Alasdair's assembled treasures without washing them away.
Tristen walked between urns and scepters, ancient books and electronics, a jeweled crucifix sparkling with mined diamonds. A crystal vial full of brown earth caught his eye. He turned to it with reverence: dust from the homeworld, to be sown wherever they should make planetfall. Beside it hung a second flask, containing a few scant ounces of the Earth's enormous world-encircling sea. For a moment, Tristen tried to imagine such a thing, a body of water as big as a planet.
The mere consideration made him spin with vertigo.
He turned to the wall that held the weapons. Empty space awaited the dead unblades--Mercy, Charity, and Innocence. Another niche awaited the someday return of a blade called Humility--leading Tristen to wonder which of his siblings might be its bearer now--and a fifth and sixth were respectively bereft of Benevolence and Grace.
But beside the gaps others still hung: Purity, Compassion, and Sympathy. And the one his hand gravitated to, without thought. A weapon Aefre had carried, and Sparrow after her, curved of blade, with a hilt swept like the neck of a black swan and filigreed guards like golden wings.
'Mirth,' he said, and drew it from the sheath as he took it into his hand.
A blue spark raced from his palm to the tip of the blade; a golden spark ran back. His palm tingled as his colony and Mirth's made their handshake, proof that the weapon had acknowledged and accepted him. It felt light, peculiar, though it had been fifty years since he'd touched Charity in its intact state. The unblade had been inertialess, weightless, a null space in his hand--but it had expressed also a weight beyond the physical--the presence of its own chill alien will and intellect. In bearing it, Tristen had always been able to feel it at his side, like a wary demon: considering, assessing, making its own judgments.
An uneasy sensation. Mirth in his hand generated no such discomfort; rather it felt alert and responsive.
There were other treasures: rings and geegaws, suits of armor, ancient and mysterious electronics. Tristen walked past it all, back to where the others waited, and with a gesture sealed the vault behind. His companions in misadventure stared at him, one question plain in three regards.
Tristen clipped the sword onto his hip. They parted before him, stepped aside and let him pass through as if he held some authority over them. As if they were following where he led.
'I'm ready,' he said, and steeled himself for plain statement. 'Let's go kill Arianrhod.'
In the arms of her angel, Arianrhod rested. Asrafil lifted her on vasty wingbeats, her newly variegated hair trailing like a banner over his adamantine forearm, her weight borne up like a doll's. She curled against his chest, face pressed into the black warm nap of his coat, and felt the waxy leaves of the trailing vines he bore her through brush her body. He moved like a tramcar, stately, unstoppable, with rhythmic surges and hesitations carried on each stroke of the wings. When he turned she could feel him bank and slide and glide, the way the forces wanted to tug them along their initial vector, the long smooth arc as he veered and swung.
She had never felt so safe.
It was a disappointment when broad pinions flared and slapped atmosphere--a halt as abrupt as if some unseen hand had snapped their leash. Arianrhod's body jerked against Asrafil's grip. As she had never feared that he would drop her, she felt only a kind of thrill-ride exultation. She burst out laughing, her hair tousled in every direction by the wind of their passage, her arms uplifted and back arched as she surrendered entirely to the angel's strength. In perfect love and perfect trust.
She thought they flew and then descended for a long time--nearly a day, by her colony's clock. During some of that time she dozed in Asrafil's arms, less than aware of her surroundings. He would wake her if a threat required her attention, or he would deal with it if it did not. When she opened her eyes again they had entered a chill place, cavernous by the echoes of Asrafil's wing-beats, and she had lost what sense of orientation she'd had. The light here was banded, gray and grayer, and when she turned her head she could just make out a glimpse of tombstone ranks of machinery. She felt them buffeted by twisted gravity, gasped as he swept her through a passageway so narrow she felt the brush of metal on her skin.
At last, soft as milkweed down, he settled to the deck, his wings a curtain enfolding them. As his boots brushed soil, the shadow of the wings faded into nonexistence. He set her on her feet at arm's length, and stepped back.
Arianrhod felt irrationally as she had when she was small, and her father had kissed her forehead. 'Thank you, Asrafil,' she said.
The angel bowed from the waist. 'You are loyal and deserving,' he said as he straightened. 'If I can make your burdens light, my dear, well--broad are an angel's shoulders.'
Arianrhod turned away to hide the flush of pleasure warming her cheeks. She wrapped her arms across her chest to ward off the chill. Noticing, the angel wrapped her in his coat, and kept his arm around her shoulders. Though he was only warm because he chose to be, still his heat soothed. An animal response, primitive. Perhaps something she should have grown beyond--something all Exalt should have grown beyond, to earn their rank as half-mortals placed just below the angels.
But who could disregard the love of God when they saw it shining from the eyes of a holy messenger? Here was the devotion that she had looked for all her life. The filial duty, the sacred trust, which she had received in such scant measure from her family. And oh, she basked in it.
She wanted to say that all her burdens were made more bearable simply by his regard, that he himself was the remuneration of her faith. But there was too much vulnerability in such a statement, and anyway--he was the Angel of War. He knew whatever she might have said to him.
So instead she looked around the chamber she found herself in--too small for a holde or a Heaven or even a domaine; a mere anchore, just one tiny bead swelling along the myriad stems of the world--and drew a breath of its dank, unwholesome air. There was only a little light here, dim and filtered, slanting through a clouded panel on the curve of the ceiling above. But as her colony and her eyes adapted, Arianrhod saw a floor lined with leaf litter and bones. Along one wall lay a filthy nest of shredded, matted tufts of hair and salvaged scraps from many levels. No plants grew within this chamber, not even leggy, yellowed, light-starved ones. But somewhere in the darkness, trickling water ran.
'Where are we?' she asked, and half answered her own question. 'I see that it's a lair.'
'Don't worry,' the angel said. 'The swine are hunting at this time of the local day, and anyway they are quite harmless so long as you are alert and on your feet. But their waste can help conceal us.'
'This is not where I asked to be brought, Asrafil.'
'It is in service to your cause.' He crouched and dug long fingers in the floor, unearthing fistfuls of compost
