Grail

Cynric was unsurprised to learn that Dorcas meant to destroy her, and with her the Jacob’s Ladder and all that dwelled there, in order to preserve this alien colony from contamination.

Cynric had neither the resources of an Angel nor the armor of the Book. She had only her small colony and the meat she wore like a veil. All she had was argument.

“The world wants to live,” she said, as Dorcas took her by the virtual throat and began to pull her molecules asunder. “They all want to live. Who are you to decide otherwise?”

“They do not have the right to live at the expense of others,” Dorcas answered.

It was a fanatic perspective. But Cynric had never really understood the Go-Backs, with their ideas of genetic purity and limited lives. It was only fitting, she supposed, that never having understood them, she now must bargain with one for the life of the world.

“Everything is at the expense of others,” Cynric said. “The honest predator acknowledges the system what it owes.”

“No one in your family has ever been an honest predator,” Dorcas said, bearing down.

   Perceval was fighting, too, but her war was waged inside her own mind. It was not her first battle with Ariane, and she carried the memory that she had won the others. But somehow—sprawled incapacitated on an alien floor—that did not give her the strength she thought it should. And Ariane did not come alone this time, but wrapped in strange armor and wielding strange weapons.

Perceval saw her like a dragon, like an Angel in black armor, spanning wide the nine black iron wings of a seraphim. There was a tang around her, a cast Perceval recognized, and she only had to taste it once to identify it.

Dust.

MY NAME, Ariane said inside her. FOR I STAND IN MY PLACE OF POWER; I TAKE UP MY ASPECT. I AM THE NAME OF THE WORLD.

Inside Perceval’s mind, she extended a hand. Inside Perceval’s mind, Perceval refused to cringe from her.

She’s done what Rien did, and merged with an Angel. But unlike Rien, she stayed herself. Mostly herself. More than herself.

In the guise Ariane wore, in what had become of Rien, in Mallory full to brimming with the intellect of dead men—Perceval glimpsed a solution. Nova, she thought desperately. Nova, you have to hear me.

“Still here,” Nova whispered inside her. The momentary lag told Perceval that she answered from orbit. That lag was killing them.

It would have to be Tristen. And even as she knew he would do what she bid, she was sorry.

   Danilaw and Amanda rolled the Jacobeans onto their sides, checked their airways, and propped them as comfortably as was possible. There was nothing wrong with them—nothing visibly wrong. Elevated heart rates, the quick breathing of stress, but no reaction to pain or conversation or physical contact or cold towels.

Danilaw had left a q-set with Benedick, a direct link, if necessary. He tried it now.

No one answered.

Amanda glanced at him. Wordless, he shook his head.

Against the porthole glass, the scarred dodecapus writhed its silent hieroglyphs.

   “The Captain commands it,” Nova said into Tristen’s mind, and outlined Perceval’s plan.

Mad, risky, painful.

All right then, Tristen said, silently, because his body would not obey him.

Perhaps that was for the best in the long run, because it rendered him unable to run or scream when Nova took his body down to the component atoms. First, she pulled him from his body. He watched from her perspective as his corporeal form evaporated, felt the strength the stuff of which his body had been made loaned to Nova. She surrounded him, encapsulated him, and then he was discrete again, standing on his own two feet, there in the Heaven of Dorcas’s devising.

He felt crisp, razor-fine. Almost no time had elapsed; only long enough for Nova to transmit the data of his personality from one place to another.

That was all he was now.

Data.

Machine memories contained in a machine, all the meat and chemicals stripped away. Mirth was in his hand—a pattern conjured from available materials. His armor rippled about him, flowed and fell, replaced by a shirt and trousers that would serve him just as well against Ariane and her unblade.

He felt the earth spring under his feet as he stepped forward. There was a tent, a Go-Back pavilion. Around it, the Go-Backs arrayed themselves three-deep, their cobras twining their ankles.

Tristen did not have time to fight them. Midstep, he vanished; midstep, he reappeared, inside the pavilion now and still moving. In a glance, he took in the scene; Dorcas doubled over the table, Ariane bending her back, the unblade trapped between them with its blade through Ariane’s un-bleeding body.

Both women were wrapped in a shroud of black language, which clung to their skin and armored them. A broken-spined book lay under Dorcas. Blood dripped into it, filtering between the swirling words to stain the depths of the pages cerulean. Ariane was smiling.

So this, Tristen thought as he stepped to her, was what it felt like to be an Angel.

She lifted Dorcas up and hurled her at him. Dorcas clung to her wrists, trying to control the fight, but Ariane shook her loose. The web of black words stretched between them, separating only reluctantly.

Ariane pulled the unblade from its sheath in her own body. A spill of symbols followed it, blue with blood, but she stopped them effortlessly. Healing the damage done by an unblade. Quite impossible.

Tristen let himself come apart and reform when the body of his daughter had passed through where he was standing. He swung Mirth to and fro with a sound like silk sliced by a razor. When Ariane responded in kind, Charity made no sound at all.

“Remember last time?” Ariane said.

Tristen could have edited the memory as he moved forward, sealing it away. But whatever fear was in it was a friend, for he could use the information on how Ariane had fought before to fight her again.

And this time, he would not be defeated.

   Tristen fell apart into ashes, and it was nothing Perceval had not seen before.

She heard Amanda curse and Danilaw gasp, though, and felt their hands on her own limp body, as if by holding her close they could somehow protect her. It was futile and gallant and quintessentially Mean, and she wished for a moment that she could tell them of Rien, whom she had loved—and how desperately just then they reminded her of Rien.

Then, an instant later, she could. Ariane’s attack snapped and faded, whipped back like an electrocuted tentacle, and Perceval raised one hand and put it over Danilaw’s on her shoulder. “I’m all right now,” she said. Tell Tristen his distraction is working.

“Yes and no,” Nova said inside her. “I’m falling apart even faster now. It’s Dorcas, not Ariane, that’s doing it.”

   Ariane fought him, and she had strength he did not. But he was Tristen Tiger, and the weightless, soundless clash of Mirth and Charity filled him with the cold and ancient joy of battle. He was not afraid of Ariane Conn.

He would have his payment of her.

The black armor of the Book girding her might have been a defense, but behind him Dorcas rose up and took the pall in her own fists and twisted, hauling. So Ariane fought against her, too, and her arm was impeded.

Tristen found himself stalking her, toying with her. Walking her around the room. He batted Charity aside with the forte of Mirth’s blade and caught her by the throat, full of a cold and potent glee.

An Angel’s wrath, he thought. Or his father’s.

That blunted the edge of his joy. He paused, the blade edge to Ariane’s throat, her arms bound to her sides by Dorcas wrenching on the shroud of writhing symbols. He remembered blindness and pain, and a stinking hole where he had lost himself in the dark. Vengeance, he thought.

It satisfied him.

And then, like a small voice calling up from the bottom of a well, he remembered something else.