Chill (16 page)

But then she said, “Thank you,” in a voice so small he only recognized the phrase because it was familiar.

Benedick gave her a few moments longer, and when she spoke again her tone had the smooth, ironic featurelessness so common to conversations around dinner table in Rule. What she admitted, however, would have been blood among piranha in that house. “Father never would have said that to me.”

No, Benedick couldn’t make up paternal neglect of his daughters by throwing a bone to another young woman, but that didn’t mean that Chelsea had no needs of her own.

Such vulnerability deserved an answer. He cleared his throat and closed his eyes. “He said it to me once.”

Benedick could still hear the words, dripping sarcasm thick as the blue blood that had drenched his hands and arms. Amazing how one’s organic memory could cling so tightly to the worst moments of a life, and lose everything that surrounded them.

Chelsea said, “Wow. That must have been some accomplishment.”

In the darkness, Benedick sat up sharply. He reached to key his lights, and stayed his hand.
Be fair
, he admonished himself.

He said in plain tones, “He didn’t mean it.”

She didn’t answer, but he heard her sigh, felt her reach for him across the space between and stop her hand before it connected. For a moment, they sat together, the understanding silence between them almost big enough to fill that space.

Whatever had been moving in the dark moved again, and this time Benedick caught a glimpse of rippling bioluminescence, impossibly pure azure and crimson, trembling like the gills of a fish. “Sister,” he said.

Chelsea’s armor clicked as her head turned. “Big,” she said, as the train of light flowed across the underside of the trunk not four meters overhead. It left two parallel tracks of glowing green dots behind it, matching the smears on the Conns’ armor. It must be taking pinprick holds on the surface of the fungus. The entire organism looked three meters long or longer, estimated with his own eyes. His colony suggested a tip-to-tip measure of 3.2, and a width of half a meter.

Against his throat, the toolkit compacted itself, shivering.
Under all that fluff, its tiny body might have been twisted of wire.

“What do you think it is?” Benedick asked, using the suit mike directly to Chelsea’s earpiece, so external noise would not distract the creature.

“Arthropod,” she said.

He would have been content to sit in the dark and play guessing games a little while longer, but Chelsea triggered her floods and bathed the cozy vertical dell in light. Brilliance washed reds and blues from the countless legs of a three-meter centipede, which froze when revealed as if the glare had pinned it to the trunk to which it clung. Like the spiders, it was transparent in places, translucent in others, only a few of the internal organs pigmented and solid-seeming. Benedick had the uncomfortable misapprehension that if he stood up and reached out to it, his hand would go through—though whether it should feel like gelatin or mist, he couldn’t quite decide.

“Oxygen content?” he asked, and with a great show of how beset she was by his laziness, Chelsea waved a hand bedecked with a sample net through the air.

“Thirty-nine percent,” she said. “Bet that’s not the only giant bug around. Think it eats apes?”

“It definitely eats mushrooms,” he said. Pieces of nipped-off cap were visible in its digestive tract, the pale meat and powdery gills compressed into a single variegated knobby line. He stood up and triggered his own lights. The motion did what Chelsea’s floods hadn’t; the centipede darted into the overstory in a dazzle of fluidity.

“Come on,” Benedick said, when it had been gone a long moment. “We still have a fugitive to catch.”

   The centipede was the only giant arthropod they saw, but now that he knew they were there, the evidence of their existence was obvious—nibbled mushroom caps, a
burrow bored in a stem, as wide as the circle he could make with both arms. And once, when he was leading the downclimb, he saw something that led him to call back up on the armor radio and tell Chelsea to stop the descent. He let himself dangle for a moment, watching the rays of his floodlamps shimmer off the intricate strands of a moisture-dotted funnel-web large enough for him to have walked down upright. His line of descent was a good thirteen meters from the mouth of the thing, for which he was grateful.

Something twitched at the bottom of the funnel, an inquisitive motion, and he said, “Lower away” with unconscious softness.

The winch started up. As he descended away from the spiderweb, Chelsea asked, “Problem?”

“I found your carnivores.”

“Everything okay?”

“Fine. Spiderweb. Pretty. When you come through—”

“Yes?”

“Be careful.”

He heard her laughter down the line. “Oh, boy,” she said. “Giant spiders. I wonder which bastard angel thought that up.”

  Tristen bound back his hair.

Still wet from his shower, it felt like damp wire between his fingers. He stood before the mirror in his chambers and worked it into a braid, bringing the end over his shoulder to finish. The strands appeared crystalline white, but he could see the shadows of his fingers through the locks. In truth his hair was colorless, its apparent whiteness a function of the air trapped in the center of the shaft where normally pigment would be.

Alone among his surviving siblings, Tristen had been born during the Moving Times and had come to adulthood when the biogenetic engineering technology of the symbiont colonies was still undeveloped. His sister Cynric the Sorcerer was younger than he: even
she
could hardly have built the symbiont before she was born.

Tristen’s childhood in these halls had been a sickly one. But he had adapted, and he had still been a young man in the aftermath of the disaster that had crippled the world—when his grandfather Gerald had adopted Cynric’s science and directed the creation of the first Exalt.

The rest of the Conn family followed, as did the essential crew of Engineering. With mortal life span and illnesses left behind, Tristen’s colony could have amended the lack of pigment as surely as it had amended the worst of the nystagmus that had once so badly affected his vision. But with the early technology, the change would have been obvious and artificial … and once it became a choice rather than a defect, and he could leave his father’s house at will, Tristen found that his self-image had solidified. He liked the drama of his coloring. A little uniqueness could be a valuable thing, especially in a society that valued a man’s legend as a marker of his merit.

Now, he looked into the mirrored cobalt glow of the colony shining through his own unpigmented irises, and smiled mirthlessly.

Tristen Conn had weathered the storms of two vast transformations of his world, and the worse storms of growing to manhood in the house that was his grandfather’s and then his father’s. He had seen failure and betrayal, and more than once his sympathies had been with the betrayers.

Tristen had seen his wife and sister Aefre cut down as a representative of a family and a government she scorned, lost his daughter Sparrow in a war of his grandfather’s making. There had been four daughters between him and Benedick, and three were dead. Two—Caithness and Cynric—either at their own father’s hands or by his command, having learned patricide from Alasdair’s example and died in the attempt. The last sister, Caitlin, survived in exile, where—Tristen must admit—she had done well for herself.

He knew where Ariane had come from, how she had grown so edged, so poisoned, and so bent. She had been Alasdair’s favorite, and so he had made her as much in his own image as possible. Or perhaps it had just
pleased the old man to focus his loathsome parenting upon her because it griped Tristen so.

Whatever Alasdair’s motivation, Tristen had watched his father cripple his younger siblings—the ones born after Benedick—so they would never grow strong enough to challenge him. At first, Tristen had intervened where he could, until Alasdair made it evident that the end result of his interference would be an exile not unlike Caitlin’s.
If
he suffered Tristen to live.

Tristen had learned to stay silent, even in the face of the indignities his father had heaped upon his own line, because to openly cross Alasdair Conn was to lose everything. And he had tried to befriend those who had suffered most—particular among them Ariane.

His filial loyalty to Ariane had only led him to another betrayal—in all the long line of betrayals that marked his history with his family, perhaps the most bitter. Even after her death and consumption, Tristen could not forgive that she had guided him astray. It wasn’t exactly that he had trusted her—Conns did not trust one another—but he had cared for her. That caring was what had enabled her to trap him, break his blade, and imprison him in a horrible dungeon.

But as he wrapped the tail of his braid with a blue ribbon that crimped itself tight to bind the locks into a blunt club, he thought:
If I had been a dutiful brother, father, husband, grandson—I would have saved the family so much grief, and killed the old man long ago
.

It hadn’t mattered in the end, because Alasdair had created his own destroyer. And no one could say if the collateral damage had been greater or less because Tristen had not found the resolve to consume his father when he should have.

Tristen knew himself to be as crippled as the rest of his family. Living under his father’s will, watching Benedick spill Cynric’s blood at their father’s command,
had made him quiet. It had made him cowardly. It had made him cold.

He let his braid fall behind his shoulder and turned from the mirror.

Things change
, he thought. And then, feeling as if he dared greatly:
It is time things changed in the house of Rule
.

   When Tristen emerged into the relaxation chamber, his heap of pack and water bottle lay ready, his armor standing nearby. Mallory, Gavin, and the ghost of Samael—outlined like a dust devil in the scraps of things swept up inside him—awaited by the door. The necromancer was also festooned with travel gear.

Mallory shrugged to settle a pack strap. “Is everything ready?”

“I want a weapon.” Tristen came before them and turned his back to step into his armor. It folded him into its embrace, the cool resilience of shock gel lining molding to his skin. As it sealed, fasteners sliding into housings with soft, round-sounding clicks, Mallory stooped to hand him the pack and the water. Tristen slung them through carabiners at his shoulders. His armor protested good-naturedly as the sacks thumped it, but Tristen ignored the complaint.

Then thought again:
That is what your father would have insisted upon
.

He unsealed the helm and looked from Mallory to the artificial intelligences. “Follow me.”

Ariane had carried Caithness’s unblade Mercy, a gift from their father to his most trusted child, and that sword had been consumed in Nova’s creation. Tristen, as eldest, had borne an unblade, too, though his had shattered against Mercy when he could not bring himself to strike down Ariane. Caitlin had taken the third and final with her into exile, and that blade had died when Mercy did.

But there were other family weapons, treasured heirlooms, whose bearers would be chosen and controlled by whoever held the house of Rule.

He knew where Alasdair kept his captured riches, and as the acknowledged head of house, all locks in Rule would open to him. Still, when he paused before the vault door, stripped back his gauntlet, and laid his left hand against the contact pad, apprehension chilled his neck. “Open sesame,” he said, for luck.

The door gaped wide.

Tristen gestured his escorts back with one hand and stepped within. He moved into dimness and light followed, floor and walls and ceiling panels catching a rippling circle of illumination that matched his pace. The light was clear, sun-spectrum, bright enough to reveal the details on Alasdair’s assembled treasures without washing them away.

Tristen walked between urns and scepters, ancient books and electronics, a jeweled crucifix sparkling with mined diamonds. A crystal vial full of brown earth caught his eye. He turned to it with reverence: dust from the homeworld, to be sown wherever they should make planetfall. Beside it hung a second flask, containing a few scant ounces of the Earth’s enormous world-encircling sea. For a moment, Tristen tried to imagine such a thing, a body of water as big as a planet.

The mere consideration made him spin with vertigo.

He turned to the wall that held the weapons. Empty space awaited the dead unblades—Mercy, Charity, and Innocence. Another niche awaited the someday return of a blade called Humility—leading Tristen to wonder which of his siblings might be its bearer now—and a fifth and sixth were respectively bereft of Benevolence and Grace.

But beside the gaps others still hung: Purity, Compassion, and Sympathy. And the one his hand gravitated to,
without thought. A weapon Aefre had carried, and Sparrow after her, curved of blade, with a hilt swept like the neck of a black swan and filigreed guards like golden wings.

“Mirth,” he said, and drew it from the sheath as he took it into his hand.

A blue spark raced from his palm to the tip of the blade; a golden spark ran back. His palm tingled as his colony and Mirth’s made their handshake, proof that the weapon had acknowledged and accepted him. It felt light, peculiar, though it had been fifty years since he’d touched Charity in its intact state. The unblade had been inertialess, weightless, a null space in his hand—but it had expressed also a weight beyond the physical—the presence of its own chill alien will and intellect. In bearing it, Tristen had always been able to feel it at his side, like a wary demon: considering, assessing, making its own judgments.