Chill

flesh of her own bosom. Having plucked the phial from the pucker of skin that pushed it free, she unlocked it and let it open on her palm like the petals of a crystal flower. Drifting, her hair alive around her like the tentacles of a curious octopus, she bent to inspect it.

Awakened, the fragment of tissue managed two or three reflexive contractions before the breath of the Enemy froze it. Arianrhod winced in sympathy; returned to her breast, it would thaw fast enough and her symbiont could heal it, but at the moment she felt for its pain.

A scraping gave her what she needed, and she folded the rest away inside her again. A smear of cells across her thumb, frozen, clinging to her own frosting skin, and she laid the pad against the reader. In the emptiness, she could not speak the access codes, but the lock accepted a data pulse and she felt the transmitted tremor as bolts slipped free.

The apparatus had been twisted in acceleration, and she had to grow flat blades of claws and pry to help the drawer slide free, but what lay inside was intact. Black as a splinter of the Enemy's teeth, sharp as a laser, flat and unreflective as a hole in the universe, more than a meter of hiltless blade rested like a naked singularity cradled in the crumbled monofilament silk of engineered moths.

'They were consumed,' Asrafil said inside her mind, leaning over her shoulder. 'All the unblades went into the consuming angel.'

Not this one, Arianrhod answered. The angel only got the other half. Half-compiled, virulent, fragmentary. But this is what remains of Tristen's Charity.

This is the last unblade in the world. And you're going to make me a scabbard and a hilt for it, angel.

Perceval said, 'I do not mind the cold.'

She must admit to having heard Nova's protest, but the angel's words were wasted. They might as well have been the crying of birds, the creak of old metal contracting in the Enemy's deep chill.

'I don't mind it,' she repeated. She rested her palms on the newly reconstructed portals. Beyond them, the Enemy waited, green with the death of the waystars, their final light occluding the suns beyond. She could make out a few, the hottest or closest, veil-swathed and dim. 'Do not waste your warmth on me.'

Dust and Pinion had changed her, before she changed them in return. She was the Captain of the Jacob's Ladder, and barely meat anymore. The Enemy could no more harm her than it could harm an angel. If she, Perceval, did not deserve to suffer for the comfort and well-being of others, then the dead men and women she harbored most certainly did.

Speaking of angels, hers stood behind her still as if he--as if she--had not heard her answer. Perceval might be tempted to say she hovered, but though she wore gray wings, dove-soft and warm- looking as a cloak, she stood on her feet like anyone.

'Captain,' she said, a soft protest she could not exactly call an argument, 'you may not need the warmth. But anyone who might come to visit you--'

'Is it not my bridge?' She turned her head to see the angel with her own eyes, though that had become another conceit that did not matter. Her colony told her where Nova was; she knew her shape and colors and stance as if she looked upon her, no matter whether she bothered with an avatar or no. She felt her movements as her own, but that wasn't what she wanted. For the moment, she wanted plain human vision, with all its limits and inadequacies. She wanted to see with her own eyes, though they showed her less reality than could adapted ones.

Perceval's slow, blink-punctuated stare didn't seem to concern Nova. The angel said, 'Would you have your crew come before you only if they are armor-clad?'

She did not answer.

Nova swept a wing across the floor. 'Are you so much a Princess after all that you'd sacrifice this grass, these flowers, these gardens of your bridge, to feed your own selfish grief?'

The voice pushed her a step back as surely as a hand. She recognized the tone, the fleeting brow-furrowed expression. She spun away before her face could break and said between her teeth, 'Don't be her with me.'

She expected a protest.

Instead, the angel just said, 'What parts of me are her? You'll have to tell me. There is so much within me, Captain. So much that argues, and does not agree.' Nova extended a hand. 'I will listen to you. I must listen to you. But you must speak to me, for only you can make my heart quiet.'

Perceval breathed in so deeply it made her chest ache like a distended balloon, and held it.

Softer, and not in any voice Perceval recognized, Nova said, 'I cannot be her with you. I cannot be Dust.

You would not like me any better as Samael or Asrafil or Inkling. I am only the angel they have wrought me, Captain, though I am as yet a thing mosaic-made from chips. But all those shards serve you, and you alone.' The angel paused, as if groping after words. As if settling an argument that Perceval could not overhear. 'And serve you I must.'

Nova's warm-looking wing encompassed her, covered her shoulders, and proved not warm at all but nearly weightless. The voices inside Perceval yammered responses, pushing, arguing with each other and herself. Silence them, she told herself, but it was an order easier issued than obeyed.

'As I must serve the world,' Perceval said. She wanted nothing more than to shrug away the angel's embrace, but somehow restrained herself. 'We are bound to it.'

'We are but familiar demons,' the angel agreed. 'Forgive me.'

Perceval closed her eyes. 'Sweetheart,' she said, 'I'm trying. And it's not your fault that I hate you.'

Asrafil enfolded Arianrhod in the borders of his colony, and they fell into the bosom of the Enemy again. Charity, its shortened blade more suited to her height now, lay across her back in the fittings Asrafil had constructed for it. It felt strange there--unpresent, empty, neutral, still, and waiting to be filled.

Hungry, if she allowed herself to anthropomorphize so far. She kept wanting to touch it to reassure herself it was really there, or really gone.

'We are still followed,' Asrafil said softly, inside her as if reluctant to disturb her train of thought.

'From Engineering?' Arianrhod asked. 'Our path should lead them down through the lift to the Broken Holdes.'

'It is as you arranged,' he agreed. 'Benedick is determined, and he has found an ally. Young Chelsea Conn is with him on the hunt.'

Arianrhod grimaced, feeling her frozen cheeks crack in the cold. Chelsea should have died usefully in the plague, and having survived that, it seemed a shame to kill her now.

But pity had no place in the world Arianrhod had been raised to. 'If they're in the shaft,' she said, 'I left them an enemy there.'

Below the halfway point, Benedick and Chelsea rested again, this time on a shelf fungus broad as a dining table. They slept in shifts, and--having tested the environment and found it within the tolerances of their colonies-- opened their helms and breathed the spore-sweet air while they dined on a variety of nutritious fungi and eyeless shaft-dwelling insects. When they resumed descending, Benedick took point.

He was still in the lead when light began to glimmer through the caps beneath his feet. He notified Chelsea and slowed his descent. Transition zones were often most dangerous--the haunt of predators lying in wait for something that had blundered out of its usual range, something that might be confused, disoriented, or ill.

Nothing attacked him when he lowered himself into the gap that permitted access to the next stratum, but only the armor's filters saved him from bedazzlement when he found himself encircled by a beaded curtain of falling water refracting brightness. The mushroom forest, it seemed, could not retain every drop lost by the long-cracked irrigation system.

Benedick shook his head and spun himself on the cable for a 360-degree view, watching rainbows, their polarized light intensified by his filters, skip across his armor.

'I'm down,' he said to Chelsea, and with minimal exertion swung himself up to the lip of the shaft. The swifts darted about, screaming and buzzing his head and hands, but even if they had dared come close enough to strike, their talons would have proved ineffectual. He clipped in to a convenient knobby growth of woody fungus and settled himself. 'Ready to belay.'

He had time to observe the shaft below while waiting for her. The mimosa wood at its lip grew particularly verdant, and like the one above was shrieking with parrotlets. The shaft was lushly forested from this point to the