Chill (37 page)

   Perceval’s awareness flinched back, confused, withdrawing. If she were wearing her body, she would have windmilled her arms, but as it was she merely tumbled in confusion, out of control, disoriented, seeking something on which to focus her stumbling mind. She slammed up against something hollow and malevolent, circling the confines of her body, her own mind. Walling her out of her own senses and awareness.

She looked up in that unspace and saw the shadow of Ariane Conn smiling down on her again.

   Her features had changed, but Tristen knew her. He knew the way she moved, and even if the skin
and
bones were different, he knew the way the bones of her face lay under the skin.

Something else enfolded her as Tristen turned. She was naked to the Enemy, blue and ablaze, but there was more to it than just her energy, or her colony, or the Leviathan’s contamination. She was wrapped in white light, a cowl like a raptor’s beak, a cloak like the mantle of wings, old Charity a painful dark rip in all that brightness. It settled over her, pulled snug, soaked into her glowing skin.

She grew taller, as he watched, sparer, attenuated. Her storm-shadow hair grew fine and dark. He knew her. Not too far from where he stood, even in the thick of battle, he could feel Benedick knowing her, too, turning from his fight and coming in a rush.

Cynric Conn blinked. Her fingers opened, releasing his arm. “Let it be,” she said aloud, and the Enemy’s empty breath carried her voice. “Leave it be. Leviathan has served his purpose, brother mine. Leviathan has suffered enough.”

Tristen drew his blade back. “You’re still Arianrhod. And the beast has possessed you.”

She spread her hands, the empty one and the one with the unblade in it. “O Brother, you have it backward. I possessed the beast, long ago. And now that our father is gone, and the world is in motion again, I’m here to see us to salvation. Sheathe your sword, Tristen Tiger. Welcome your sister back from the dead, cold realms of the Enemy, and let this poor mutilated monster go.”

She was as he’d remembered her, no ghost of a Sorceress but the absolute item, chill and precise with her long hands motionless before her hips, the left one folded inside the right.

“I do not trust you, Arianrhod,” he said.

   Ariane reached out her hand, or the metaphor of her hand, and Perceval flinched back, flailing. The imaginary fingers could have closed around her, lifted her up—but she shouted for Nova with all her mind and suddenly someone was there beside her. Not Nova, but rather the necromancer, Mallory, who threw up arms like a barricade and shoved Ariane’s groping fingers wide.

Ariane grabbed again, and again Mallory was too strong for her—but not by much. Perceval saw the necromancer wince, twist, grimace with effort as once more Ariane’s hand came down.

Perceval just stood, awed, hands at her sides, watching.

The third time Ariane reached out, she pinioned Mallory’s arms and lifted the necromancer into the air, swinging the kicking figure from side to side.

“Dammit, Captain,” the necromancer yelled, each syllable rattled out between jerks. “We’re in your head! Get control of her!”

But she’s so big
, Perceval thought.
She’s so much bigger than me
.

Did that matter?

Maybe not. If they were in Perceval’s head, maybe Ariane only
looked
so large.

Perceval imagined herself very far away, back away in the dark confines of her mind, so Ariane looked tiny enough to pick up between her fingers. And then she imagined herself close, and Ariane really so small.

Perceval pinched her up, careful not to squeeze, careful not to squish the microscopic Mallory clutched in Ariane’s rattling fist.

“Ariane,” Perceval said. “I want you to put the necromancer down.”

   Arianrhod/Cynric smiled. “Nor should you. But who other than me could have arranged this? Who else would have brought a child of the line of Sparrow here, and filled her form with the memories of the one person who can best help you now? Who guided you, Tristen, and our brother and sister, and the angel and the implement who held my memories? Who brought you through the abattoir in safety? Who introduced you to Dorcas? Who sent the mammoth, man, and all from the very grave?

“Leviathan dreams true futures, Tristen, after the nature of his kind. And I infected him and his dreaming long ago, and used them to dream you to me and the world to possibilities other than destruction. Trust me when I tell you that, for the nonce, you will find no Arianrhod here.”

“Have you
eaten
her?” Carefully, neutrally, Tristen began disengaging his boots from the surface of Leviathan. Before him, the hole he and Gavin had gnawed in its side was sealing, seething at the bottom with the blue ropes of colonies.

“No,” she said. “She’s alive. I’m just borrowing her for now, because she’s here and Leviathan remade her
for me. And if she weren’t, would you kill your granddaughter’s body to be sure?”

“I’d kill her for her crimes,” he said, and winced at Cynric’s frown.

“Oh, yes,” his sister said. “Her crimes. So much worse than yours or mine. Look at the thing you’re standing on, My Brother, and tell me any Conn has the right to live.”

“Touché,” Tristen said, and shook Mirth free of blue blood before he put it away. “So assuming for the moment that you are my sister—and this would be very like her—what was the purpose of this charade?”

She smiled. She held out her fist, turned it over, and opened her hand. “Leviathan knows the universe,” she said, as he watched a glittering star map of impossible brilliance unfurl above her palm. “I have built us an astrogator, Brother Mine. I have made us a way home. Now draw out your blade again.”

“You told me to put it up,” Tristen said. “What would you have me butcher now?”

“Butcher nothing, but part a chain. Cut loose Leviathan. Let him return to his people, for we have abused him sore.”

“He wants to destroy us,” Tristen said. “And I cannot say I blame him.”

Cynric shook her narrow head. “He cannot have his vengeance, though I am without doubt the one most deserving of it. He will have to live with only freedom.”

And all around them, the lights of combat were dying away.

   Later, when Cynric had led them back inside, Tristen came up beside Benedick and rested one hand lightly on his shoulder. “I knew you were standing behind me.”

Benedick glanced sidelong at him and nodded. “I
thought you might not want to handle it. But then it turned out it didn’t need to be handled. Not that way.”

“Not yet,” Tristen said, watching Cynric’s slender, white-garbed spine retreat down the corridor before them. She moved fast. He stepped up his pace, aware of Benedick doing the same, of Chelsea and Mallory following. Aware of the way Mallory’s hand came up to one shoulder, as if to steady a passenger who was not there. “What about when she gives Arianrhod back?”

Benedick shook his head. “Cynric’s right. What has she done that’s worse than you or me?”

“It’s not about worse,” Tristen answered. “It’s about staying alive, not about what’s right or wrong.”

“Maybe it should be,” Benedick said, and to that Tristen had no response except a short nod, curt and painful.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s a fucking long walk home.”

   In the warmth of the bridge, Cynric Conn walked forward across violets to meet the Captain. The Captain stood and watched her. In her borrowed flesh, with her borrowed spirit, Cynric knelt, and Perceval felt a shiver of recognition, a cold wash of sweat as the hair parted over her nape and fell in brown streamers to either side. Perceval’s uncle, Tristen, stood behind her on the left side. Her father, Benedick, stood behind her on the right. Caitlin Conn, her mother, was in Engineering where she belonged, overseeing the removal of the last collars and clamps from the hide of Leviathan.

The Sorceress extended something in her two hands. A scabbarded sword with a rough, improvised hilt affixed.

Perceval did not reach out her hand. “I do not want that.”

“It is Charity,” Cynric said, raising her eyes in surprise. “The last of its kind.”

What, did she not foresee this also?
Perceval waved it away in irritation. She did not want a sword, and she did not want Cynric. What she wanted was Gavin back, but she would not say as much, for Captains did not weep. And if she said the basilisk’s name, there would be no end to her tears. So instead she said, “It was Tristen’s; give it to him.”

But Tristen demurred. “I prefer Mirth, as it happens.” He patted the hilt of the blade. “Give it to Benedick.”

Benedick shook his head. “Give it to Caitlin,” he said. “She probably actually misses hers.”

   When Benedick went to Caitlin, he knew she had been waiting for him because she was at such great pains to seem that she had not. She was alone in a booth at the center of a half-repaired Central Engineering, feet up on a console, studying schematics and frowning.

“Better?” he asked, having entered without knocking.

“Fair,” she said. “Now that nothing’s chewing the world apart from the edges, we’re getting some actual repairs done. Have you talked to Perceval?”

He nodded, tightly. In the long run, he thought the new, fey Perceval with so many ancient souls behind her eyes might even be a match for Cynric the Sorceress, in wisdom if not in craft. “Perceval sent you something,” he said, and held out the long nano-swagged parcel.

Caitlin looked from it to him, and did not reach out for it. “Tristen didn’t claim it?”

Benedick laid the unblade down across her console. She could unwrap it later. “You should go and talk to our daughter in person.”

Caitlin nodded, eyes bright. “I will.”

“I’m not sure how she’ll be,” he said honestly, stepping forward to stand beside her chair. “I don’t know where we go from here.”

He touched her naked hand with his own so his
colony could give her the map, the one he’d been saving to deliver personally since Cynric had imparted it to him.

“It’s okay,” Caitlin said. She tipped her head over her shoulder at Jsutien, who was visible through the glass. “Wherever the hell it is, we know how to get there, now.”