Dust jl-1

by Elizabeth Bear

  Sometimes, even he found his program overly Gothic.

  "And so the Angel of Wires resides in the Past," Dust said. "If the Angel of Wires is Metatron."

  "Who else?"

  "You," Dust said. "Camael. Uriel, perhaps?"

  "Not Asrafil?"

  "Blades," Dust said, in a clipped tone. "Or nothing." He touched the edge of the topmost card of the pattern. It was a woman, serene before an air lock twisted all over with grapevines and sunflowers. A branch of pomegranates hung heavy over her shoulder, and a white raptor sat hooded on her fist. "The Nine of Stones, in the Sky. Under what influences the situation shall play out. It is the card of Apollonian mastery of the Dionysian. But not denial; the falcon is jessed and hooded, but he is not caged. He stands on her glove, ready in an instant to fly."

  Samael touched the Prince of Stars. A black-haired man, narrow-faced, with a tight goatee, stood with entwined burning suns over his shoulder. He leaned upon a harrow. Vines broke from the earth at his feet and twined him in fruit and flowers. "And what is this?"

  "Who."

  "Who is this?"

  Dust smiled. "Who do you think? Stars are the suit of fire, of course, of growth and nurturing. And also things that burn well-nigh eternally, that burn even iron in the end. He is the prince of the forge, that one. You know, on Earth, the cards had only four suits and each suit has only four face cards. But there are six important directions here in space."

  "Brother, you're stalling."

  "Brother," Dust said. "Choose another card."

  And when Samael had, and under Dust's guidance had laid it down to the right side of the cross and surround, they saw it was an image of a winged being, haloed and nude, who held a flaming orb between his opposed palms. The Angel of Stars. "Ah," Dust said. "The querent. That would be you."

  "So the Angel of Wires is Metatron?"

  "It looks more likely. Choose a card."

  Above the Angel of Suns was laid the Princess of Blades. "Perceval," Samael said, with satisfaction.

  Dust caught himself smirking again. How hard could it be, to let the smile just happen? "The House. That which surrounds and influences the querent. Blades are the suit of atmosphere and habitation, the suit of change when the change is willed. Choose a—"

  "—card." Samael's hand was already moving. He slipped a card free and turned it over. With a glance at Dust to confirm the action, he laid it above the previous card. Another winged figure, but this one's wings faded without visible border from inky-feathered indigo into a blackness that covered the background of the card. In their depths, stars shimmered.

  "The Angel of Voids," Samael said, without looking at Dust.

  "This is the card of what opposes the querent," Dust said, and made himself expressionless.

  Samael shifted in his chair. "We could be partners, Dust."

  "We're not?"

  Dust smiled, and Samael smiled back at him, shaking his head. "Don't make me bring Asrafil into this."

  Dust tilted the plaques in his hand. "Choose a card for the Outcome."

  "One more?"

  "Maybe."

  Samael chose, and turned it over in the appropriate place, at the top of the straight line. "The Princess of Voids," Dust said. "Voids are the suit of entropy, of memory, of shadows."

  "Nothing will come of nothing," Samael said. "Speak again."

  "You got that on my kiss," Dust said. "But I suppose now you think you always knew Shakespeare."

  "So Rien is the Outcome."

  "Part of it." Dust shuffled the remaining plaques, cut them, and turned one over. The ten of blades. "Ruin," he said, "but that doesn't concern us." He turned another, covering the first. The three of blades. "Heartbreak," he said. "But also not our problem. One more chance—"

  He turned a third, and did not lay it down upon the others. Instead, he weighed it in his hand a moment, and then placed it adjoining the last card, tilted at an angle, as if it sprouted from the feet of the Princess of Voids.

  Upon it was printed "a stylized image of a bulbous, streamlined silver starship, nothing like the bulky and tangled outline of the Jacob's Ladder. It was wreathed in improbable flames, and tiny people had been blown screaming from the hole in the side.

  "The Tower," Dust said. "It represents change, over-throw, destruction of the old order. The crumbling of all you have worked for. Wrack, and riot. Downfall and over-f turn."

  "We fail?" Samael asked after a quiet moment.

  "Flowers grow from corpses," Dust said, and swept the cards together. "Are you sure you would not like a glass of wine?"

  "No," Samael said. He pushed his chair away, the moment broken. "I am not distracted, Jacob. You sent them to find Tristen Conn."

  Dust cased his cards, careful with the silk handkerchief that enfolded them inside the enamel box. "He's not in the reading," he said. "Neither is Ariane. And yet their brother and nieces are. I wonder what that means."

  "You don't know?"

  "I am," Dust said primly, standing to bid his brother farewell, "the Angel of Memory, Samael. Not the Angel of Foresight."

  The ugly lines of Samael's houndlike face rearranged themselves. He would never be handsome, but he was beautiful when he smiled. "And yet, you believe in prophecy?"

  "No," Dust said, tucking his cards into a weskit-pocket. "I believe in stacking the deck."

  14 evidence of war

  Six feet of dust under the morning stars.

  And a panorama of war performs itself

  — CARL SANDBURG, "Old Osawatomie"

  Once it became evident they meant him no harm, the naked and filthy man Perceval had rescued attached himself to her. He didn't speak at first, and Perceval wondered if he was capable. He would not give up his broken sword, but he held her hand peaceably and he also would not be shifted from her side.

  Perceval felt odd talking around him, but as he would not speak, she didn't see an option. "If he couldn't get out, what makes you think that we can?"

  The bats had finally quieted.

  Rien, appearing to notice this, said, "The bats get out somewhere."

  "You are bigger than a bat."

  Rien scratched the basilisk on her shoulder under the hackles. "I know where the door is," she said. "Also, we have lights. And a cutting torch."

  And with the assistance of those things, to Perceval's inexpressible wonderment, they escaped the realm of the bats without further incident.

  Abandoned crew quarters lay beyond, overgrown with kudzu. In daylight, the stranger cringed and covered his eyes until Perceval took pity and bound a blindfold over them. As they walked, she picked the tender leaves from the end of the kudzu shoots and shared them with the others. They were good, spinachy, and if they were to have a third, Perceval thought anything that might stretch the food budget should be investigated. The stranger—blindfolded—sniffed them, and then with his smeared and crusted hands stuffed them into his mouth, one-fisted.

  She looked at Rien while he ate, and Rien nodded. "You were right."

  Perceval smiled at her, and handed her another serving of kudzu leaves. Rien rolled them into tubes and gnawed, chewing as if the sharp green taste could drive the flavor of ammonia from her throat. "Space," she said, softly as if that meant that only Perceval would hear her, "how long do you think he was locked in there?"

  "Let's get clean," Perceval answered, and Rien began circumventing locks.

  It took them three hours to clear the overgrowth away from enough washrooms to find a working shower, but as soon as they found it, they looked at each other and at their new companion, and sighed. Perceval coaxed his blindfold off—he held onto it at first, emaciated fingers wrapped through the band—and Rien adjusted the sonics and the fine, warm fog in the stall.

  "It's even hot," she said, trying not to sound envious.

  "You'll get your turn," Perceval answered without rancor. "Let's see if we can find him something to wear."

  They were not the only things that rustled among the kud
zu, but whatever might have lived there was shy and wary of predators. They could hear little animals skip-hopping ("mice," Perceval said, but Rien said, "toads") and there were insects, which Perceval caught when she could, remembering that they were rich in protein.

  As they rummaged through abandoned, vacuum-sealed closets, they found many good things, including unfashionable but warm clothing that would fit a tall, thin man. "Perceval," Rien said after they had given up looking for shoes and sat side by side near the washroom door, "how many of the habitats in the world are deserted?"

  "Oh," Perceval said, "I would suppose most of them."

  "Where are all the people?"

  "Dead," Perceval said. Rien's fingers tightened on her wrist, driving nails into the skin, and Perceval flinched and tried to find an honest way to soften that news. As if she had meant to, she continued, "Or congregated in a holde, more rarely a domaine. There were a lot more of us, in the moving times."

  Behind the door, the sound of sonics stopped.

  "Are we dying?"

  "Yes," Perceval said. She stood, as the door opened, and extended an armload of soft shirts, underthings, and coveralls to the man—

  She stopped short, her arms bent under the flat-palmed offering.

  She'd thought his skin chalky with layered guano and lack of sun, his hair white and caked with the same limy excrement.

  But no.

  Clean, he was whiter. Blue-skinned in the filtered light through the overhead, his hair sculptured from ice-white curls, his beard still long but washed now. Perhaps he had not found a depilatory, but he had found a comb, and an elastic. He wore a towel wrapped at his waist, and the stub of his sword protruded from it.

  His hair, braided, still hung most of the way down his back now that it was clean. Looking at it, thinking of what it must have taken to clean it, Perceval was grateful for the loss of her own. The stubble would be easier to scrub out.

  He smelled not at all of ammonia.

  And the eyes that met Perceval's were ice-blue, faintly luminescent with the same blueness that stained her own veins, in his case unalloyed by pigment.

  "Thank you," he said, his voice creaky and cracking but perfectly intelligible. He reached out to take the heap of clothing. His warm, moist fingertips brushed Perceval's.

  "Lord Tristen," Rien said. Stammered, really. "You're meant to be dead."

  And while Perceval looked at Rien in disbelief, Tristen Conn said, "Do I... know you?" and Rien reached out to steady herself against the wall.

  That night, they camped in a kitchen with a stove, and they had hot soup for dinner. The cooking surface didn't work at first, but thanks to her spontaneous mechanical knowledge, Rien repaired it. Gavin curled up in the corner, the tip of his tail in an electrical socket, though Perceval thought he was only pretending to doze.

  As for Tristen, once he'd determined who they were, where they were going, and why, he remained quiet— painfully so—but it turned out he could cook, so Rien and Perceval sat shoulder to shoulder, wrapped in Pinion's warm but worrying embrace, and watched. There was something tremendously comforting in having an adult appear and take care of things, Perceval admitted, watching the tall white man stir dinner with curious focus.

  She was fascinated by that. And by how very white his hair was, and the soft translucence of his skin. She could see the blue veins where his salvaged clothes did not cover, and she was surprised that not only was his symbiont apparently healthy, but that it had managed to keep him so. She was also amazed by his resilience; she had only been captive a few days, and she thought she would lie staring at ceilings the rest of her life. She could not feel safe.

  But there was Tristen Conn, singing to himself as he tasted broth and stacked and rolled tender kudzu leaves into long tubes for chiffonade. And he made her feel safer, his broken sword tucked into his belt and a knife from a magnetic rack inside one of the mouse-rummaged cabinets rocking in his left hand. Perceval hadn't seen a wild mouse, but she knew that all the mice in the world were as white as Tristen, albinos. They would have red eyes, though—natural mammal blood color—not stained blue by the symbiont blood-marker.

  She and Rien sat and watched Tristen cooking, and she tried not to let herself feel too safe. But that was hard, when he brought them plastic mugs of salty broth full of shredded rehydrated mushrooms and soy protein, the delicate rags of sliced kudzu floating on top, a soft and saturated green.

  She cupped the mug in both hands, first undraping her arm from around Rien, and sipped. It tasted fantastic. The tightness across Perceval's shoulders—where the weight of her wings wasn't—eased at the warmth. They sat in an uneven triangle, eating in silence.

  When Perceval had finished, she flicked Pinion shut— even the brief breeze was warm and welcome—and got up to get more, collecting Rien's cup as well. Tristen placed his hand over his mug when she reached for it. He'd only gotten through a little more than half, and was taking it slowly.

  Too much food in a hurry might not be good for him.

  As she ladled more soup into the cup, she spoke. It was easier, somehow, when you were not looking. "Rien, do you think we're being maneuvered into finding things?"

  Rien made a noise. Startled, rather than affirmative. "I hadn't thought of it." In the stainless-steel trim around the backsplash, Perceval saw Rien press three fingers to the side of her head.

  "Lord Tristen," Perceval hastened to add, "no offense. I did not mean to insinuate that you were a thing."

  "Considering how you met me, I could hardly be offended if you did," he said. His voice was returning, but it was still soft and weary; she wondered how it felt for him to be clean and clothed and full of salty soup after the builders knew how long crawling through bat muck and gnawing raw bones. She hoped she could remain glad to never know. "But I don't believe anyone knew where I was."

  "Then how did you come to be there?" Perceval asked, just as Rien volunteered, "We got help and directions from a necromancer." Perceval turned back in time to see Rien's guilty glance at Gavin, but Gavin never shifted.

  Tristen, however, craned over his shoulder to look at Perceval, then watched her walk back, balancing mugs, to sit again beside Rien. "You're trusting of a stranger." His tone ruined it, though—he might be trying for menace, but he only sounded avuncular.

  Which, Perceval supposed, was exactly what he was. Their father's brother.

  "Only strangers who can cook," she replied. "And anyone who would bury himself under a metric ton of bat shit to fool us deserves to. We mean to try to stop a war, Lord Tristen—"

  "Don't Lord me," he interrupted, the electric blue eyes narrowing in colorless sockets, "and I shan't Lady you."

  "And so are all the forms of courtesy defeated," Perceval said, but she smiled. "So are you for war?"

  "When I was free, I was for any war I could get," he said. He touched the hilt of his broken unblade. "Now that I am free again ..." He shrugged. "Durance vile can alter your expectations. You think someone is machining this war, Perceval?"

  "Ariane Conn," she said, without hesitation. "And somebody on the Engine side, too. Who is willing to risk biological warfare. And to arrange things so that I might be captured by Rule, so as to bring the contagion among them."

  That was dangerously close to topics Perceval was not yet ready to discuss—not without first gathering some intelligence—so she drank soup and then changed the subject before someone could pursue it. "In any case, I'm feeling schooled. And I do not think your sister is the Commodore who is needed in Rule."

  "Commodore?"

  "I'm sorry," Rien said. "La—I mean, Ariane killed your father."

  "Good riddance," Tristen said, his woolly white braid sliding forward over his shoulder. Despite two elastics, the end was fraying. "But how can she have declared herself Commodore, when I am legitimate, and so much older?"

  For the time being, even Tristen seemed content to avoid conflict. They skulked and hid, Gavin their ears and Rien's unsettling, newly intrinsi
c sense of geography their guide. They saw no one else alive, and Rien was both grateful for and worried by it.

  They might have been not too far from Benedick's residence on a straight line, but many of the corridors were blocked or ruined. Two days' careful and unobtrusive journey followed. Tristen acted impervious, Rien thought— but she also noticed that he slept propped in corners, and that she'd wake and find him staring into space or reading on a hand-screen he'd scavenged in one of the rooms they bunked in, his nose pressed almost to the display as if his sight were failing.

  As they came closer to the border between Rule and Engine, the travelers saw at last evidence of Ariane's war. Foliage scorched and trampled by battle, a blasted bulkhead. A body, which Perceval knelt beside and brushed with her fingertips.

  "His name was Alex," she said, and rasped her hands over her stubble in the thinking gesture of someone accustomed to long hair. The prickles looked as if they must itch, but perhaps knights, like ladies, did not scratch.

  Gavin seemed to have the knack of riding shoulders; when Rien hunkered to wait, he aided her balance.

  Tristen, in his blue fleece and salvaged sandals, knelt, too. He placed one hand on the dead man's forehead, as if in benediction. And then he began to go through his pockets.

  "Sir!" Perceval protested. And Tristen paused, and only looked at her.

  They stared, back and forth a moment; Rien noticed the sameness in the shapes of their features. Though Perceval's face was squarer, and Tristen's was long, they were both thin and tall, with deep-set eyes. His nose wandered; hers was incongrously pert. Nevertheless, Rien thought the resemblance would have been striking if Perceval still had her hair, and if Tristen's was pigmented rather than wooly and white and if the line of his jaw was not concealed by the beard.