Grail (38 page)

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.

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Nova had not merely withdrawn.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 there was an old-fashioned hardwired com link, useful—like a speaking tube—in emergencies.

It was Samael who answered. “We are under attack. Another Angel or djinn has infiltrated Nova and is attempting to rewrite and exploit her. In defense of the rest of us, she has shut down all contact-related functions.”

“Oh, suck it,” Jordan said, ripe with disgust. “It’s like the game with the worms and the mallets.”

Benedick, rising from his chair, could not prevent a flicker of smile. “Whack-an-Angel?”

“Yeah.” She turned in circles, scanning the edges of the room. “What do we do now?”

“I would suggest suiting up. Meanwhile, I shall forge a perimeter.”

Samael had always been prone to dramatic gestures. He
spread his arms and seemed to stretch, the spaces between his colorful flakes and gleanings expanding like the skin between the scales of a swallowing snake. Scraps of husk and petal that made him visible shivered from their invisible supports. Each pattered or drifted floorward according to their nature, leaving not even an outline in the air.

His voice now resonated all around them, as if the very air spoke from their own lungs and ears and the space between them. “Your armor will be awkward, but it will be airtight. And the suits have their own colony defenses, independent of Nova.”

Benedick, colony-naked, paused for a moment to consider. If his colony, his machine memories, failed with the absence of the integrated and distributed Angel, did that mean those parts of him were only a subroutine in her virtual universe? Had she really assimilated so much?

What was identity in the machine?

While he thought, he also moved. Jordan, for all her awkwardness when unsupported by her symbiont, reached the armor locker first. She heaved the grate open, struggling, and Benedick’s heart sank. They’d have to seal into the armor the old-fashioned way, by stepping inside its opened shell. And they’d packed their suits side by side, which meant dragging them out of the locker one by one.

“Sealing the room,” Samael said. No visible change followed the words. Benedick would have to take his word for it.

Benedick drew a deep breath while he assessed. First things first. “Chief Engineer,” he said crisply, “I recommend we pull your armor out first, as—given you are a flyer—it will take you the longest to suit up under these conditions.”

Jordan frowned at him, but nodded. “And I’ll be stronger in the armor. All right. Come on.”

She started forward into the cupboard, Benedick hot on her heels.

*   *   *   

Since she touched her dead self’s blade at Tristen’s insistence, Dorcas had been unable to ignore the whispering. She knew what she heard—the voice of Mirth, the voice of Sparrow. The echo through her bones of two things so allied they might as well be one.

She had heard it, and she had turned it away. Because she was not Sparrow; she was no Conn whelp, no woman who believed the world could be bettered by bullet and blade.

She heard it now, swelling in her. She might have turned it aside again, but this time was different than the others.

This time she stood before the worst Conn whelp of all, the words of an ancient spell crawling through her, transubstantiating her into a whirling tower of light and shadows, so Dorcas reached out a shaking hand and let Sparrow move it.

Her fingers pierced the luminescence. She had expected to feel something, some pressure, some resistance, but it was like reaching into a ray of sun. The heat was palpable, but not material.

Light broke in shafts through her fingers, blinding her with its moving dazzle. Her colony should have reacted to protect her eyes, but she realized at that moment that she felt nothing from that connection at all. Her irises contracted on their own, with merely biological alacrity.

Her merely human strength might have failed her had the revelation not surprised her so that she tripped against the table, her outstretched hand plunging into the swarm of words siphoned off the pages of the Book and into Ariane.

They caught her, too, in a spider-snare, a web of words, and noosed her wrist, and drew her in and in and in.

She half lay, half stretched across the table, and with the hand that was not sinking into the Book’s storm of words, she lunged for the hilt of the unblade that rested by Ariane’s hip.

   Danilaw knew his body must be convulsing, his back arching, the pale froth bubbling between his lips. But it was an intellectual knowledge, divorced from any sense of fear or urgency, because he felt no fear, no shame, no concern for the friends he knew knelt around him, bruising their knees, trying to protect his body from its own wildly firing electrical system.

He was somewhere else, somewhere warm and buoyant, and the ocean moved around him, swishing between his muscular limbs. The dodecapus bore him along, a serene passenger in a serene passage, and Danilaw felt himself sliding into release, into the embrace of a warm and just and loving universe. Sliding into acceptance, into universal light, into universal love.

He was numinous; the dodecapus was numinous; the whole damn sea and everything in it was numinous, too.

He felt the creature’s awareness, its concentration, the strength of its mental processes. He felt its intelligence and the curiosity with which it surveyed its environment. He felt the bind of the scars on its lower side, and remembered in bright concrete images and sensation how it had been injured, and what it had learned from that injury:
Do not play with your food
.

He felt his own words, pushing to get out, to get into his new friend, and he felt the blankness with which this smooth, intricate intelligence greeted them. Sounds, concepts, ideograms. They were nothing to it. There was the being and the sharing, and the things he knew, viscerally, because the dodecapus knew them.

The scarred old thing sculled along the muddy bottom of Crater Lake, puffs of mud rising behind it with each
squash-blossom contraction of its webbed tentacles. Now, through its eyes, Danilaw saw a bubble of light, the shadows moving against it.
The observation port. The sickroom
.

The dodecapus plastered itself against the glass and, with one giant jelly eye, it looked within.

Danilaw saw the man on the floor, the figures surrounding and supporting him, and another pair withdrawn to one side with their heads bent together. He saw it all through a haze of atmospheric distortion and sense of wonder, the brightness of awe that filled him up like a pressure bubble until joy buzzed from every pore.

An immanence filled him—a thing that went beyond words and math and music and into some other space—a gestural, nonverbal, sharp-edged reality of light and hope and companionship. You could never be alone again. There was something divine inside you, and all you had to do was give it a home.

It’s just the seizure talking
. In there, electrical signals were looping and cascading, ricocheting wildly, triggering the same parts of his brain that gave rise to religious visions and ecstasies. It didn’t matter what he understood intellectually. He felt the presence, the benevolence, the awareness within him, and he
knew
.

He would never be alone again.

The warmth of the dodecapus’s approval washed through him until he felt himself falling and it was gone.

   Samael bought them the time to armor themselves. By the time Benedick was sealing his helm and gloves, a fox fire of Cherenkov radiation crawled the walls and ceiling in moth-eaten loops and frontiers like the outlines of magnetic storms seen from space. It was the visible result of the battle lines drawn between Samael and Ariane’s colonies, as were the bright flashes that more and more regularly sparked in every corner of Benedick’s vision.

The battling colonies threw off charged particles; the flashes were caused by them passing through the vitreous humor of his eye. All around the room, furniture and other things were disassembling themselves, raw material for Samael to throw into the fray. Benedick suspected that he, Jordan, and Mallory might be more useful to the Angel as raw materials than as self-willed firepower, in the long run, but it wasn’t an option he was ready to put on the table.

Yet.

“Samael,” Benedick said into his armor pickup.

“She’s not alone,” Samael said. There was no strain in Angel voices; they sounded serene until they chose not to, but Benedick could impute his own panic to the tone. “A revenant of Dust is with her. They have some kind of decompiler weapon—”

Fuck
. “Make a hole. We’re coming. If we can win through to Central Engineering, we can make a stand there.”

It wasn’t a hole, exactly, but Samael was an old Angel and canny. What he did instead was collapse, shrinking around his allies until his protective field just covered them. He did not recoalesce; he made no avatar. That concession to the prejudices of meat intelligence was energy he could not afford to waste.

But he guided them, and he girded them. And as Benedick bounced on his toes, hearing his armor creak with his breathing, he reached out wild spans and lashings of colony like bowering wings and broke the walls of Engine wide.

   In the black, razor-edged heart of the storm of words that surrounded Dorcas and Ariane, Ariane opened her dark, mad eyes and threw back her head and laughed. I NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D HAVE THE GUTS TO COME IN AFTER ME, LITTLE MOUSE.

Dorcas smiled. “I promised to do this beside you.”

Words whirled close—so sharp, so near, so swift they drew blood without Dorcas ever feeling the cut until seconds later, when each one beaded in thready lines of blue and began to throb and burn. Ariane, scaled all over in words black and slick, breathing like live things between the translucent layers of her skin, went unharmed. Dorcas was caressed by deadly poetry.

Dorcas firmed her grip on the hilt of the unblade. “And I will.”

   In her hole in the center of the world, Nova fought for her existence, and for the continuity of consciousnesses of her senior crew. Though, in that first salvo, Dust and Ariane had managed to numb her outliers and launch a devastating attack, Nova responded by severing the infiltrated extremities, closing off communications with any scrap of herself she was not sure of, and releasing her limbs to fight on their own. She lost communication, but she retained integrity, and that let her maintain the cohesion to fight on.

And though armed with mighty compilers and code weapons such as Nova had never before experienced, Dust was still small. He chipped some bits of the world away from her; he swayed some borderline fragments to his side, and he came back at her as a spearhead and then a sweeping wall, like a Roman legion—a crash of barrier that was also battering ram.