Grail

“It’s not pain,” he said. “It’s aura. Seizure aura. I will be fine. Just back up a little and let me breathe, please.”

She stepped back. Danilaw raised his eyes to follow her. “Saint Cynric,” he said. “Haloed in tentacles. It’s really quite numinous on you.”

“Temporal lobe epilepsy,” Cynric said, her eyebrows rising. “I’d never seen it. We can cure that—”

“It’s usually well controlled,” Danilaw said. “It’s just lately, and at work, that it’s been getting awkward.”

Apparently, Perceval noted, that hand-flip dismissal of personal stress reactions was a human constant.

He seemed to be steadying, calming. His hands rested on his thighs, and when a hesitant knock came on the door he did not startle.

“Come!” Perceval said, because everybody was looking at her. Technically, she supposed, it was her sickroom—

A woman dressed as a member of Danilaw’s security poked her head into the room. “Administrator Gain is under arrest—Danilaw!”

“He’s fine,” Amanda said, just as Danilaw lifted up his head and said, “I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s just an aura. Karen, you have Gain in custody? That’s a relief.”

The security agent nodded. “She doesn’t seem too upset about it. She wanted a message passed.”

“Oh, ruin,” Danilaw said. “Hit me.”

“ ‘I did not do these things for myself,’ ” and it looked as if the agent refrained from eye rolling only through a titanic struggle, “ ‘but for the future.’ ”

Danilaw heaved himself to his feet, straightening faster that Perceval suspected was wise. He seemed none the worse for it, however, though he steadied himself with a hand on Amanda’s arm. “Sounds like religion to me. Have somebody check her rightminding, would you? And Karen—thank you.”

Karen smiled and vanished back whence she had come, her torso retracting through the half-open door like a snail’s head.

Danilaw turned to Amanda. “Well, then. Maybe we can make some decisions in a climate of calm reason now. What do you say?”

But the latch had barely clicked behind the agent when a familiar chime sounded.

“Crap,” Danilaw said. “Did we bring Central Transit down here?”

“That’s for me,” Perceval said. “Nova, we’re here.”

There was lightspeed lag, and Nova was resolving herself from appropriated particles of Perceval’s own colony, so her avatar was watery and faint—a ghostly outline rather than the semblance of solidity.

“Captain,” she said, a staticky flicker snaking across her projection. “We’re under attack. It’s Aria—”

She snapped out of existence, leaving Perceval a half step from lunging after her. She came up short, caught herself, and staggered a step before regaining her balance.

“Should have seen that coming,” Cynric said.

Perceval opened the fists of her hands, aware—as she turned away from Nova—that Tristen was standing right behind her.

And that he had come up behind her on footsteps silent as a cat’s.

“All right, First Mate. What do we do now?”

“Oh, not now,” Danilaw burst out, and folded like a snapped fan to the floor.

   The words swirled over Ariane and over Dust. Black as the Enemy, black as time, words webbed them together, words linked them and pulled them in and pulled them down. Dust felt the margins of himself dissolving, the borders of skin, of Chelsea Conn’s body, melting away under his feet.

He fell. Into her, through her, pulling the veil of words behind him like silk into an arrow wound. He pierced Ariane and dissolved into her, and she into him.

She threw her head back and shouted. Majesty crackled around her, her hair flung out and rising in the static charge, a swarm, a storm of words spiraling her body, falling in. Maelstrom. Whirlwind. Event horizon.

And Dust at her core. She shrieked, she swelled. She opened out her hands and embraced the world—all subtlety, all camouflage, all subterfuge discarded. She—they—rose up from her place at the table and stood like a tower. Dust felt Ariane, felt them conjoined—Angel and animus, as it was always meant to be. Felt Chelsea fall aside like a shed skin and the world come into them.

All the words. All the world. And the world was in these words.

And all the words were in him, in her. All together now.

Power in her hands, knowledge in her fingertips. Informing her grasp. Data. Code. Cipher. Source, and sorcery.

There was the book—the Book. And there was the blade—the unblade, a stroke of neutrality through the bright heart of the world. Hyper-real, furious, pronounced light—cut by a thing of infinite absence, of infinite edge. Charity, the unblade. The thing that brushed the world and left an emptiness behind.

All the same. Write it down. Memory, electricity, chemistry. So subjective. So malleable. So ephemeral. Objective reality is in a library. Nothing but echoes lives in a human mind.

The world is what is written down.

I AM THE WORD, said Ariane Dust.

And all the world shook with the sound.

25 silence is an answer

Let her pass; it is her place.

Death hath given her this grace.

—ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS, “Elaine and Elaine”

In the heart of Engine, Benedick felt the world fall away.

A moment before, he had been pushing through calculations, sharing a workspace with Jordan, Mallory, and the Angel-shard Samael as they worked out four competing sets of equations. What would be the best way to break down the world, if they were staying? Or reconstruct it, if they were moving on? If they were to harvest the solar system for available materials, how would that change the equations?

Perceval would need solid data upon which to base her decision, and Benedick knew Jordan was as devoted to providing it as was he. The silence of the room hung heavy with concentration and coffee fumes. Only the occasional request for additional data or a second set of eyes broke it.

And then, without warning, Benedick was alone in his head.

Everything fell away. His sense of the other Exalt in the room, the subconscious connection to Nova, and the matrix of interface and colony through which he moved—through which he had moved for centuries. Machine memory vanished, leaving muddled and conflated organic patternings behind, half atrophied with lack of attention and care.

Nova had not merely withdrawn. She’d shut down all the cognitive and communications responses of the Exalts’ colonies. Benedick understood that she might have done this to protect them—either from an external virus, or some contaminant in her own system—but it was a desperation measure, and one that left all Nova’s allies more vulnerable than they had been within the range of whatever memory he had left.

Across the table, Jordan abruptly dropped her feet to the floor and sat forward, fingertips pressed to her forehead as if it hurt. “I feel as if my brain is shrinking away from the inside of my skull,” she said, frowning. Her face seemed naked, old, through the fur without the bioluminescence of her colony informing it. Her wings drooped from her shoulders as if she abruptly found them dragged down by gravity.

“Nova.” Mallory rose, scooting a chair back with a scrape, and moved toward the front of the room, where