Grail

Jesse shook his head. “Oftentimes, the patent medicines contained harmful substances. Mercury, arsenic, lead, radium. But by the time people started to get sick, the medicine man had moved on, and he’d taken the money with him.”

Gain sat back in her chair. “That’s barbaric. And these were just normal people, not Kleptocrats?”

“That’s the point,” Jesse said. “They were all Kleptocrats—some more successful than others. That’s what unrightminded people are like. They will trade future suffering for gratification now. They’re hierarchical, and they don’t care how badly they hurt somebody if they get something out of it.”

“And that’s what we’re up against?” Gain said.

Captain Amanda nodded. “There’s a whole shipload of them, headed right at us.”

8 where they ought stand

A woman will have her will.

—ANONYMOUS, The Marriage of Sir Gawaine (medieval manuscript)

Perceval, still pacing the Bridge in her armor, the cowl stripped back but the seals intact otherwise, knew there was news because Tristen came in person. It being Tristen, she didn’t know if the news was good or bad until he spoke. And, it being Tristen, he did not draw out the suspense.

“I do not believe Dorcas is behind the raid,” he said. “But she knows or suspects who the culprit is, though she is withholding that information for now. Did you have any luck with the bodies?”

“Mercenaries, most likely.” Because it was Tristen, Perceval allowed him to see her twisting her hands in frustration. “Mallory performed the autopsies while you were with Dorcas. Their colonies wiped on their deaths. They were AE-deckers born, both of them.”

Tristen’s expression drifted from neutral to disapproving—or perhaps disappointed. It was not precisely a dead end, but after the Breaking of the world, the AE decks had been wild and isolated places. Cut off from the rest of the vessel, their Mean inhabitants had developed a tightly controlled martial society, defending their limited resources from all comers and forbidding overpopulation to the point of exposing both unplanned and malformed infants, and the unproductive old, to the Enemy—on tethers, because the quick-frozen bodies were a resource too rich in proteins and amino acids to be easily discarded.

They were clannish and xenophobic and fought among themselves as frequently and ferociously as they fought against outsiders. Along with the Go-Backs, they had been the chief of Tristen’s problems since the waystars went supernova.

Perceval didn’t need the roll of Tristen’s eyes to tell her the process of interviewing the Deckers would be complicated and likely unproductive—she and Rien had had an encounter with them when escaping Rule, shortly after they first met—but that didn’t stop her from being grateful when he said, “I’ll go after we eat.”

“Eat?”

Nova’s voice chimed from everywhere and nowhere. “Samael is en route with a picnic, compliments of Head. He should arrive in thirty seconds.”

“Thank you,” Perceval said, reflexively. “Picnic?”

“You can linger here fretting,” Tristen said, with all the soothing ice of his imperturbable calm. As if to create an ironic contrast, he threw himself backward on the grass like a boy, spreading his arms until she heard his spine crackle with release. “Or you can come with me, clear your head, and have some time to think while we wait for the Fisher King to answer.”

Of course the leader of the people of Grail would be the Fisher King. Perceval’s mouth bowed, despite herself, into her first real smile since the hideous events of the morning. As soon as she remembered why that was, it fell off her lips again—but for a moment there was a drift of relief.

Whether he’d learned it supporting his father or his wife, Tristen was very good at taking care of people. And she couldn’t fault the wisdom of experience when it came to dealing with grief. “So how did Head get involved?”

Head was the chatelaine of Rule—Cook, Butler, Housekeeper, and petty household god. Cynric had built hir to the task more than five hundred years previous, and sie was still at it. Sie had no equals.

“I petitioned hir for some snacks,” Tristen admitted. “Head’s idea of what constitutes a snack—”

Perceval snorted. “I can imagine.” She wondered if there was any kind of message in it that Head sent the food to the Bridge care of Samael, a small but independent and self-aware remnant of the Angel of Biosystems, also called the Angel of Poisons for his association with mutagens.

Samael knocked on the thick Bridge door, polite as a golem, the acorns and beetle shells of his knuckles rattle-rasping. Nova amplified the sound and transmitted it inside, leaving Perceval to wonder at the ancient mores imbedded in Angel code.

Once upon a time, it had made sense to knock on almost any door, because the people inside could simply hear it. Now, though, it was a kind of elaborate politeness, a formality with no social purpose. She knew who it was and what he carried—oat cakes, cashew butter, noodles in a salty savory sauce with garlic and ginger, sliced treecarrots and peaches, olives and oysters in brine, mushrooms and eggplants sliced thick and fried, and all tucked into a cleverly folded paper basket. Nova would not conceal such information from her, even if Tristen had asked, especially when the arrival was an angel.

Perceval summoned him with a gesture. When Samael stepped over the threshold to the Bridge, Tristen went to meet him, rising from that sprawled, languid pose to a standing position with a fluid strength that Perceval found heartening.

He was better. It had taken years of recovery and reconstruction, but in recent years he had begun to move as if he were comfortable in his body. Perceval wanted to say again, but the truth was she didn’t know. He’d been crippled when she rescued him; she hadn’t known him unwounded. And from everything she had heard, she might not have wanted to know him unwounded.

The most he’d confessed on the subject was “It was beneficial to me, in the long run, to spend some time alone with my sins,” pronounced with a wry sideways twist of his lips that could have been mistaken for a smile.

Time was the great closer of wounds, so even a maiming of the soul could heal over and quit seeping if you lived long enough. Although (thinking of Rien) Perceval wasn’t sure if the amputated bits ever grew back again, or even truly stopped aching. Perhaps they just became more impervious to careless blows.

She wasn’t sure she wanted them to harden off. Letting go of that loss meant letting go of Rien, and Perceval found the prospect more painful than recollecting the amputation of her wings. Better to lose a piece of your body than a piece of your soul, she thought.

And now there was Caitlin—a loss still too raw to do more than whisper past. If she looked at it too long, too directly, her eyes stung and her throat closed, and then she was no use to anyone.

She watched from her chair while Samael and Tristen conferred, heads bent, speaking via vibration in low tones she could easily have analyzed, if she chose. But it was impolite to eavesdrop, and if anyone had earned her trust, Tristen had. He wanted to surprise her? Well and good.

When he came back, the folded paper basket rested in his hand. Samael waited inside the door—a homunculus whose outline was dictated by the eddies of organic detritus caught up in his energy field. There was something doll-like about him, although the mosaic detail of the shape described by bits of straw and petal and translucent insect wing was quite fine. He had managed to survive Nova’s assimilation of the angels in this diminished form. Nova and Perceval allowed his unique existence to persist so long as he claimed no additional resources—beyond waste and scrap, if waste and scrap could be said to exist in the closed ecosystem of the Jacob’s Ladder—and so long as he comported himself as an ally.

Perceval watched Nova’s avatar rez in beside Samael’s—politeness when dealing with non-Engineer humans,