Chill

She'd have killed him without hesitation, with her own hand, if she thought it necessary. She would as swiftly--even more swiftly--have offered her own death, if she deemed it necessary. As, in the end, she had.

If Gavin retained enough of Cynric's memories to be concerned by private knowledge of a potential trap, he'd also retain enough of her personality to walk blithely into one. On the other hand, if Cynric found it necessary to arrange a trap, it was possible that Tristen would agree with her reasons.

After all, he could not muster a particularly strong suite of arguments in favor of his own continued existence. And he thought now, with the clarity of hindsight, that if he had only had the courage or the moral convictions to join his half sisters in their uprising against Alasdair Conn, the world might have ended up a preferable place to live.

Tristen pressed his palm to the door and let it glide aside. And checked abruptly as a pair of battered shadows rounded a corner opposite.

Their forms were familiar. The taller folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head, heavy black hair falling straight to his hammer-edged jaw. The wavy-haired woman beside him came two steps past before she drew up short, bouncing lightly on her tiptoes when she stopped. She turned her head slightly to keep him in her peripheral vision. She might move to the forefront, but she would follow her older brother's lead.

'Hello, Tristen,' Benedick said.

Tristen could as much as feel Mallory's smirk, as if it heated the nape of his neck. 'Hello, Benedick,' the necromancer said.

Chelsea's forehead wrinkled with interest, but Benedick gave no sign of having noticed anything beyond common courtesy. 'Hello, Mallory. Hello Samael, Gavin. And, um.' He gestured to the mammoth.

Tristen shrugged. 'Your guess is as good as mine.'

'Mammoth,' Benedick said, as if that settled that. 'Isn't this convenient. I don't suppose you were guided here by some coincidental carnivorous plant people?'

'A coincidental mammoth,' Tristen said. 'If anything can be said to be coincidental when Cynric is involved.'

Tristen patted the mammoth on the shoulder, and it responded with a nearly subaudible rumble. Chelsea eyed it, frowning.

Benedick made a religion of stoicism. Tristen did not expect his brother to react to the name, nor were his expectations confounded. Benedick's mouth might have thinned, but that was all. He closed the few steps between himself and Tristen, one hand extended to clasp wrists.

'Nova,' Benedick said out loud, 'tell Perceval I found them.'

Tristen felt something very like a click in his chest and knew it for relief. The contact of Benedick's hand was firm and confident. Tristen strove to make his the same. Because he was not Benedick, he allowed himself a little smile of amusement at their performances. They were in truth their father's sons. 'Nova is with you?'

'We have contact,' Benedick said, his words confirmed a moment later when Tristen felt the angel's attention fall upon him. 'She's not manifesting an avatar'--he raised an eyebrow at Samael's speckled form--'so as not to draw hostile attention.'

'Does she know where to go next?'

'I do,' Benedick said. 'At least in general terms, though the question of how to get there is open.' He glanced at Chelsea, who shook out her hair.

'Leviathan,' she said.

Tristen had never seen it himself, but he understood that the blood draining from an amelanistic face could be a spectacular sight. Mallory actually grabbed his elbow, as if fearing he might topple over.

Mallory said, 'Cynric and coincidences, indeed.'

Gavin snorted. 'Don't look at me. Just because the puppeteer's hand is up your ass, it doesn't mean you know what they are thinking.'

Samael shot the basilisk a scathing glance, the snail-shell eye glinting dully. 'Tell me about it.'

Mallory unwound those fingers from Tristen's arm and turned slowly to face Samael's avatar. Quietly, breathing through a taut throat, the necromancer intoned, 'He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.'

'The key,' Samael said.

Tristen looked from one to the other. 'Did it unlock anything this time?'

The angel stared back, at first seemingly nonplussed by Tristen's sarcasm. But glacially, as if with deliberation, the long vertical lines of his hound-creased face rearranged themselves into a grin.

'Hell, yes,' the angel said, waving his immaterial hand. 'Follow me.'

Samael--looking much the worse for experience and worn thin--led Benedick, his siblings, Mallory, and Gavin at a quick trot, down through still more barren corridors.

'This is the way to the Broken Holdes,' Benedick said, as his colony reminded him with images and maps of when he had been here before.

'To and through,' Samael said. 'Mallory's code and the location have opened the way. We're going outside.'

'Into the belly of the Enemy,' Benedick said.

Mallory hid a laugh inside a sneeze. 'Where the Leviathans dwell.'

'Great,' Chelsea said. 'I hope there's some undamaged armor down here somewhere, because Benedick's and mine ended up at the bottom of a compost heap. And it seems Mallory doesn't have any either. I don't know about you two, but I don't fancy skinny-dipping in space.'

The mammoth calf touched her wrist and Chelsea startled. Benedick--who a moment before had been fraternally pleased that she had the mature awareness to notice other people's needs in tandem with her own-- lurched forward to intervene and found Tristen's hand on his chest.

'Wait,' Tristen said, and for a moment Benedick wanted to smash his hand away and remind him of all that caution and cowardice had cost them.

But he was Benedick Conn. He did not perform his drama, and as he raised his gaze to meet Tristen's, it occurred to him that the sin he had been about to assign his brother was his own. Tristen had never been overmuch for prudence, and his ingrained recklessness had cost him as dearly as ever Benedick's reserve. He settled his nerves and said, 'Yes, Brother?'

To his shock, it was the calf that answered: '--'

He never could have named the words it spoke in, or recited the sentences. But whatever they were, they filled him with comprehension.

Chelsea, too, apparently. She pointed with her thumb to a sealed hatchway. 'Through here? How do you know that?'

'--' the calf answered. It knew because it knew. Because, Benedick surmised, it had been made to know. Because, it said, it was a Bible.

He swallowed a dizzying surge of resentment. 'Cynric,' he muttered, as if that explained everything.

Gavin--ensconced on Mallory's shoulder--arched his thick neck and fluffed his crest. 'Do you ever stop to wonder if maybe she just couldn't have explained things?'

'Sure,' Chelsea said. 'Because we all listen so well.'

She stepped between her brothers, skirting the mammoth and pushing to the forefront of the group.

'Through here?' she said, turning to glance over her shoulder. Even more than the healing burns on her cheek, Benedick was struck by the line of her scapula, the way the bone projected through flesh and worn clothing.

'I haven't been taking care of you,' he said, when she caught him staring. 'You're thin.'

'So are you,' she answered. 'We've been busy.'

She palmed the door lock, but the door didn't open. 'Wait,' Mallory said. 'Let me.'

But as the necromancer addressed the door, the mammoth calf interrupted. Benedick thought he might almost be growing accustomed to its manner of speech. Or unspeech. Or what-you-might-call-it.

'A different verse?' Mallory said, with a glance aside to the animal. 'Why don't you just tell us?'

The mammoth stared at the necromancer, blinking. After a moment, with an exasperated wave of its trunk, it spoke a few unrepeatable words that provoked Mallory to irritated laughter.

'Because we're meant to look after ourselves, Princess Cynric, and so you didn't bother to tell your construct