Grail

against the sheltering trunk of a bent palm. Fur-tips wet with the irrigation falling in the Heaven, he crept to the edge of the pallet where she slept, arms folded mantislike to her chest and mouth open, breath rasping in and out with rough regularity. A black-backed synbiotic snake curled against the backs of her knees, basking in whatever heat radiated through her blankets. A sheen like oily rainbows covered its back. Its tongue flicked out when Dust approached; he made well sure to keep the sleeping woman between the rodentlike form he inhabited and the curious snake.

He touched the damp tip of his nose to the woman’s eyelid, prepared to jump back if, on awakening, she swiped at him. But not prepared enough, apparently. She might be Sparrow Conn no longer, but the body she inhabited had all of Sparrow’s hard-won reflexes.

Dust found himself on his back, spine twisted and pinned to the ground, the Go-Back’s hand pressing into his belly. He squeaked surrender, going limp, and bared his minuscule throat to her.

A too-long silence followed. When he opened his eyes again, he found her still shoving him against the ground, the heavy head of the cybernetic cobra swaying at her left shoulder as it regarded him with baleful, candy- colored eyes.

“So,” Dorcas said. “Are you volunteering to feed my snake?”

“However this small one may serve,” Dust said. “But if this small one may suggest, it may be more advantageous to you to listen to the message I bring.”

“Still looking for alliances?” Her voice was not friendly, but she lifted her hand and let him right himself. If he’d chosen to fight, he could have made her regret laying hands on him—but that was hardly in keeping with his current mission of diplomacy.

“I bring more this time.” Because he could not bite, he groomed, busily washing his face and paws. His fur was gritty with soil. Also, the washing made him look inoffensive. “My patron would like to speak with you in person.”

The Go-Back reached out and let the back of her hand brush the cheek of the cobra. It did not withdraw, but its flared hood smoothed back into the taut black-and-buttercream column of its neck. Dust was a construct, and could not feel fear exactly. But he could feel the toolkit’s arousal levels lowering, its tiny, trembling heartbeat slowing to a mere whirr.

Well, if Dust was going to be eaten by a synbiotic snake, it was probably within his powers to possess that snake’s colony from the inside. He’d fight that war when he came to it.

“Patron,” she said. She pushed herself more fully into a sitting position, adjusting her weight on her seat bones by pushing down on the ground. The snake flicked its tongue once more and seemed to resign in favor of the woman, whipping its long body into a fold of the blankets. It was too bulky to vanish completely, but the bulge could have been a pillow if Dust had not known otherwise. “All right, Dust,” she said. “What is it that you want from me? Other than allegiance, because you must know now that my goals are not yours—”

“Parley with my sponsor,” he said. “I am under the command of another, Go-Back. That is all. She seeks an alliance, and your goodwill. Or at least your sworn word not to oppose her.”

She tapped her fingers on her thigh, twice. She looked down at him, where he huddled by her knee. “What are the politics of Conns to an Edenite? I’ll parley. But she must come to me.”

12 carried bright scars

Christ, what a night! how the sleet whips the pane!

What lights will those out to the northward be?

—MATTHEW ARNOLD, “Tristram and Iseult”

Tristen Conn was a tiger, and no hound. Mysteries were not his metier. His strength lay in the subtlety of war. But for his Captain’s sake, he would attempt what he did not well understand, and solve the murder of Perceval’s mother.

Before the world was made anew and a Captain sat upon the Bridge, a knight-errant had often been called upon to resolve crimes, to serve as investigator and judge as well. But the crimes of simple folk were often simple as well, unsophisticated, the culprits apparent when the knight-errant applied logic and interview skills to the case. Here, there was no one to interview. The only witnesses were Nova and Perceval, and what Nova had seen was spotty and suspect.

He was fortunate to have assistance in his inquiry. The necromancer Mallory might be a better detective than Tristen, as necromancers were without a doubt temperamentally suited to the investigation of death. He was fortunate as well that he could frame Caitlin’s death as an act of war. That—the shadowy realm of sabotage, spycraft, assassination, espionage—was a paradigm with which Tristen felt comfortable.

In the privacy of Tristen’s insulated bedchamber in Rule, he and Mallory commenced with the facts they knew. Those facts were comfortingly simple—if frustratingly few. Five persons in armor had entered the corridor outside the Bridge, somehow undetected. They had made off with an antique paper book which had held great religious and symbolic significance to the Builders, and was still sacred to some—perhaps many—of the folk of the Jacob’s Ladder. Two of them—the ones Perceval had killed—had been Deckers, and possibly so had the remainder.

But one of those former two had been skilled enough to put Perceval to the test, and at least one of the latter three had been the equal—or the better—of Caitlin Conn, hard as that was for Tristen (who had ranked Caitlin along with Benedick as one of the few warriors nearing to his own skill) to accept.

It was possible that Caitlin’s killer had gotten the drop on her somehow, a possibility that Tristen was cautious in regarding as more plausible because it was more comforting.

It would be nice to think Caitlin had made a mistake. But that was the sort of logic that got a man killed through underestimating the threat posed by his adversaries.

It was more likely, Tristen knew, that the person who killed Caitlin had been, like her, a Conn, Exalt and well seasoned to the arts of war.

The three remaining trespassers had made good their escape, successfully using Caitlin’s death to distract Perceval and once again blocking the attention of the ship’s Angel. They had taken with them the paper New Evolutionist Bible, still sealed in its protective case, and Caitlin’s unblade Charity—the last unblade in the world, as far as anyone knew—which had once been Tristen’s before it was shattered and then remade.

Tristen’s chamber lay high up along the curve of Rule’s architecture. He could have had one larger and lower, nearer the courtyard and generally considered more desirable, and in being honest with himself, Tristen admitted that he would have preferred the basement. Dark, tight spaces still felt safe to him. One might anticipate claustrophobia as a consequence in someone who had spent decades immured in a living crypt, but the result for Tristen had been the opposite. Expanses seemed too open now, space without walls something you could fall into forever and never escape.

Agoraphobia was a common ailment among those who grew up among the coiled passages and close anchores of the world. The Enemy lay always close enough to fall into—breath-suckingly close, and personally malevolent. Wide-open spaces could kill, and it was only sensible to fear them.

But Tristen had long ago learned that when confronted with fear, he dug in his heels and became stubborn. And so he had chosen quarters far up along the arch of Rule’s bulkhead, arm’s length from the great transparent panels of the sky. He had chosen quarters that floated a hundred meters above the olive trees and grass of the courtyard. A long panel opened out on that side, revealing the gardens and the other wall beyond. On the other side he had a bottomless vista of the skeleton of the world, flattened and distinct against the coffin velvet of the Enemy’s bosom.

Mallory stood now in the narrow point of the room, where interior and exterior panels came together. One hand was pressed palm-flat to each window, as if the necromancer established a current between positive and negative, between warm living atmosphere and the coldest dark of all. Tristen schooled a spontaneous smile, but