Chill

levels, and Tristen held his breath against the scent of their flowers. Some of the structures rose ten yards or more into the air, and the largest of them was topped by that enormous glistening blue-green globe--lit faintly from within--but the walls rippled softly with air currents, and in places flaps billowed open, showing men and women and others at work over looms or cookstoves within. They looked up as the procession passed, and any that could left their toil and came to walk beside the slithering carpet of serpents.

The sound of wingbeats warned Tristen an instant before Gavin's weight struck his shoulder, so he was braced. The basilisk tossed a coil lightly around his neck for balance, and settled with a ruffle of feathers and a flash of the pale blue underside of his crest.

'Cloud forest,' Gavin said. 'Do you think they have coffee plantations?'

'Do you think they have outside trade?'

The basilisk's shrug brushed hard, warm feathers against Tristen's ear. When Gavin spoke again, it was colony to colony, through the seemingly innocuous contact.

'Do you think they could survive without it?' A hard squeeze of talons compressed Tristen's armored shoulder, sharply enough to give him concern for the integrity of his armor. The touch was followed by the quick flick of a beak through a lock of hair straggling free of his braid. 'You walk like you're still carrying her coffin, Tris.'

Tristen stumbled, staying on his feet without any particular grace. His head swiveled, so if Gavin's lids had not been sealed he would have been staring into the basilisk's eyes. 'Excuse me? Whose coffin would that be?'

Gavin stretched out his neck and shook his head as if he meant to whip water from the feathers. 'I just ... I knew that.'

Of course you did.

There was no use nursing anger at the dead, and it wasn't Gavin's fault, whatever Tristen was coming to understand had been seeded in him. Tristen tugged the basilisk's tail tip with his other hand. He forced his voice light, unconcerned. The way he would have spoken to his father, without revealing vulnerability. 'Considering the purpose of this mission is to bring back my granddaughter's corpse--'

Arianrhod. He should say the name, but that would be too personal. Too much of an admission.

But still. Arianrhod. Tristen rather thought Alasdair had made a special effort in her case, when it came to building his servitor monsters. Petty vengeance had been well within his father's capabilities, and using children to control their parents was an established family technique.

Knowing didn't lessen the ache.

Tristen bit the inside of his cheek, because he did not wish the locals to see him shake his head like a restive dog. They still did not speak, even when the others joined them, so the only sound was their footsteps--his and Mallory's and those of the escort--on the graveled path.

'So here we are in a funeral cortege again,' he said, because they were coming up now on the cloth-walled chapel with its lofty minaret.

Gavin snorted. 'Again?'

'You have some memories waking in you, don't you? Machine memories?'

'Machine memories are all I have,' the basilisk answered. 'Whoever you think you recognize, that wasn't exactly me.'

'It wasn't exactly not,' Tristen said. He didn't fill in the name--Cynric--that floated in his awareness, though. Only two sisters had called him Tris, and only one of them would have thought to preserve her ghost in a machine.

'Knowledge is not identity,' Gavin said. 'Especially when the knowledge is shattered like a host of angels, and no person remains to give it context. That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.'

'Excuse me?'

'Never mind,' the basilisk said, as they were brought inside the pavilion. 'Just something I read once, when we had a library.'

The interior of the pavilion was lit in cool colors by the light that fell from above and lay shadowless across the carpets and cushions arranged over the earth in a semblance of a floor. 'They're nomadic,' Mallory said, at Tristen's back.

Tristen permitted himself a nod to show he'd heard. 'Take what you need, sow what you will later want, and move on. It makes them harder to find.'

'Do not speak,' Dorcas said. She walked away from them, steps springy across the carpet, and climbed a set of risers to a dais. The cobras, which had accompanied them inside, did not follow her. Instead, they closed the ring before Tristen and reared on long bodies, looking inquisitive with their threatening hoods folded tight. Beyond the ring of snakes, a larger ring of farmers waited.

At the top of the dais, under a canopy of green and blue tasseled in ropes of gold, Dorcas turned to face him, looking down.

'Tristen Conn,' she said. 'Come forth.'

Tristen stepped forward, away from the others, but not too close to Dorcas--or her serpents. His armor might be a match for the Enemy's chill, but he was not sure he cared to test it against engineered cobra fangs. He paused some meters short of the dais.

On his shoulder, he felt Gavin spread white wings for balance, the brush of pinions across Tristen's scalp as they bowered him. He rested his hand on Mirth's hilt. The sword's longing to go to Dorcas could almost have pulled him forward. He tightened his gauntlet over the pommel, wondering if, in some atavistic part of her brain, Dorcas remembered it as the one that she had carried once when she had been Sparrow.

Neural pathways became worn in with use. If she folded her hand around it, would the part of her that had been his daughter--the physical part, the part where the unconscious lived and struggled--remember the feel of the blade? Would her body recollect its use, she who had been a swordswoman without equal, trained by her mother's hand until she had exceeded even her mother?

He wondered if he wished more that the answer was yes, or no. He wondered also if Dorcas expected him to speak. But if she did, he had no idea what he should say.

Scales scraped across carpet behind him. The armor told him what he already knew: the cobras were cutting him off from the others. They could not harm Samael, and Mallory was not without defenses, but that was carrion comfort.

Dorcas still regarded him, letting the silence stretch, her face a mask as serene as a priestess's. Tristen tilted his face up to her as if to the light of the shipwreck stars.

She wore only a loose smock and mud-daubed work pants, the cuffs rolled up to show her bare, bony ankles.

The sight of her pained him as deeply as if he looked upon the Queen of Heaven. Still he waited, holding to a taken breath and the soothing mental construct of a pale green light as if they could defend him. But nothing could make this right.

The breath Dorcas drew seemed to enlarge her. Silence spread from her like a ripple across a pool, even the serpents seeming to rustle more quietly. Just when that quiet had reached oppressive proportions, when everyone else was holding their breaths with her, her voice rolled forth in a preacher's or stateswoman's ringing tones.

'Tristen Conn,' she repeated. 'How do you plead?'

It was no other than he had expected, but he could play out the game. 'What is the charge?'

'Treachery,' she said. 'Collusion. And blackest kinslaughter.'

He would not grant her the victory of a nod or wince. This is not Sparrow. Easy enough to change that perception, to edit his symbiont so he saw her--really saw her--as someone new and foreign. But to do so would mean giving up on ever seeing Sparrow again.

Mallory started forward; Tristen would have known even if his armor had not told him, because he heard the answering choir of hisses. Tristen extended his left hand, leaving the right on Mirth's hilt, and gestured the necromancer back.

'Tristen,' Mallory said.

He shot a quelling glance over his shoulder. 'Not guilty. By what right do you level charges?'

'By right of survivorship,' she said. 'Lay down your weapon, Sir Tristen, and leave behind your familiar beast. If he acts on your behalf, know we will destroy him and your traveling companions, too.'