Part 20 (2/2)

The sword's awareness stirred, pus.h.i.+ng against the palm of his hand like a questing cat. The blade was hungry, after the manner of blades. But that did not mean that he had to feed it.

Tristen said, ”If you are not she, why do you crave her vengeance so badly?”

”Your misguidance led to her death,” Dorcas said. She lowered her voice. ”And her death led to my life in this sh.e.l.l far from the embrace of Mother Gaia, and that is a burden with which I would rather not be troubled. How do you answer to that, Tristen Conn?”

”I failed you,” he said, amazed that the deep sting in his chest was not shame or humiliation, but simple grief. Five hundred years to the death of the ego, he thought, and shook his head in bemus.e.m.e.nt. ”I failed you as a father, as a fellow soldier, and as the eldest member of the house of Rule.”

”That was not me-”

”Whatever.” And maybe there was a little of the man he had been in the interruption. But even a shed skin left its pattern behind. ”If you are not her, then I am not him. And as you have already determined that I am accountable for his crimes against her, then by G.o.d you will listen to my accounting.”

It drew her up, and brought the lingering three or four Go-backs hurrying forward to flank her with their support. Tristen imagined the high priestess of the Edenites was unused to being placed off her balance. Somewhere behind Tristen were Mallory, Samael, and Gavin. For the time being, he would pretend they could not see him.

He unclipped Mirth's sheath from his belt and balanced the sword across his palms. ”There's half a bargain to be sealed.”

He knew he hadn't imagined the quirk of her lips. ”So there is.” She reached out, but he held the blade back for a moment.

”There was more in your venom than hallucinogens, wasn't there?”

”An inducer virus,” she agreed. ”Are you feeling it?”

Light, strong, like something woven out of carbon fiber and high-end ceramics. As if his mind rode the cha.s.sis of a synbiote, and not his own body at all. It made him feel as ungrounded as it did capable.

Mallory brushed his elbow. Tristen ignored it.

”Behavioral controls?”

”Not as such. But if you had really believed you deserved death, it would have carried out the sentence.”

”Of course,” he said. ”Why leave such things to chance?”

The smile they shared was not what he would have expected, but it was satisfying. When she lifted her palms, he laid the blade across them, flat as a tray.

”Draw it,” he said, stepping backward to give her room.

Whatever knowledge and elements of personality were earthed in the brain, the body had an intelligence of its own. And the body of Sparrow Conn had not forgotten how to handle a weapon.

With one smooth extension, she skinned the blade.

Tristen held his breath, feeling his companions behind him, the way Mallory edged still closer. The necromancer's shoulder brushed Tristen's armor, and the armor transmitted that sensation to his arm.

Dorcas weighed Mirth in her hand as effortlessly as if it were an unblade. She tilted her head to squint its length and frowned. ”After all that, you deliver me your weapon?”

”If I'm not a harsh enough judge of myself, who better to make up the deficit?”

When she looked up at him over the blade, he found himself hard-pressed not to see her mother in her hazel eyes. Smeared reflections of her features blurred along the length of the sword. She turned it in her hand, let it glide back along her forearm and beyond. ”I am not an executioner.”

”I was,” he said. ”My father's dog, at first because I believed in him, as he had raised me to. Then, after Aefre died and Alasdair turned his attentions on Arianrhod, your antecedent had the sense to remove herself from the family, out of grief and because it was easier than opposing him. If I had kept my granddaughter away from my father, Sparrow might never have left Rule at all.”

He sighed. Arianrhod was a question all her own. It was not as if anyone had ever been able to control her. ”And then when your antecedent died in Engine”-in the Go-back riots, during Caitlin and her sisters' attempt to wrest control of the world from Alasdair, but now did not seem the most exemplary time to mention that-”if I had been with her, if I had stood up with her, she might be living still.”

Dorcas's eyebrow raised, but he did not feel guilt in saying it. She might inhabit Sparrow's body now, but the scarce resource had historically been allocations for memory, not resurrected flesh. People were easy to make. There were always more dead than remnants to fill them with.

Dorcas said, ”You were not the brother who went to war for him against Cecelia's daughters. You are not the brother whose blade cut Cynric's head from her shoulders.”

”Nor did I join them in rebellion,” Tristen said. ”Think of all the evil I might have averted had I cast down my father then. Apathy is no excuse. Nor is a taste for combat.”

She smiled and allowed Mirth to glide back into its sheath. ”You were terrifying then.”

”You remember?”

”I wasn't an Edenite during the Moving Times, Tristen Conn,” she said. ”Go-backs don't store their data, or accept colonies.” She paused, ironically. ”Until now, anyway. I served under your wife. I was a soldier. Do you know what we called you?”

Her hand extended, the sword laid across it. Offering. Slowly, he reached out and lifted it from her palm. Her face remained impa.s.sive, but a long chill ran up her spine when the sword left her grasp, so he knew it troubled her. He wondered what the sword had said to her, if indeed it had spoken at all.

Of course he remembered. There had been political cartoons, the white ruff, fangs, stripes, talons. The devil eyes. He'd nursed a little secret pride about it, then.

”Tristen Tiger,” he said.

”The man-eater. The tame killer. You do remember.” He touched his temple. The colony remembered for him.

”Tristen Tiger would not have survived the venom, you know. I think perhaps you have changed more than I have.” She shrugged and spread her hands. ”Half a millennium is a long time to live within a monster.”

It hadn't been that long. Or rather, he had indeed lived that long, but it was only in the years he'd pa.s.sed pent up in a dungeon of Ariane's devising, living in filth, that he had come to realize he had been a monster, after all.

A thousand things crowded his mouth, none of them willing to be refined into sensibility. So, instead, he clipped Mirth to his belt and said, ”I am glad you've found peace. Even if you are not the woman you were.”

”And I am glad you are not the man you were. And I hope you find peace as well, before too much longer.” She pursed her lips, craning her neck to see over his shoulder to Samael and Mallory-and Gavin as well. She paused, seeming puzzled, and glanced down at her fingers, which flexed and stretched as if she were absently working out a cramp.

Recollecting herself, she continued. ”You've pa.s.sed the test. We will guide you across our Heaven, and show you the fastest path to your destination.”

”You know it?”

”We built it,” she said. His eyes must have widened with the surprise and disbelief he felt, because she smirked-turning her head to include Mallory and Samael in its arc-and said, ”What did you think the Go-backs were, exactly, Tristen Tiger?”

Tristen glanced at Mallory; the necromancer nodded. Not that it mattered-he suspected Dorcas was interested in his opinion, not that of his companions.

He could have given her the snap answer, the dismissal. And maybe he would have, not too long gone by. To alienate the enemy was a useful defense. But he thought now of ancient history, the thin, perfect memories of his colony predominating over the richer, chemical, organic ones. They had been Engineers, convinced that the best means of survival was to cannibalize what could be saved of the world and return to Earth in a smaller, stripped-down vessel, leaving behind everything designed for colonization and terraforming as useless ballast. Many of them had also been heretics of another stripe: they had believed in the perfection of the human form as a reflection of G.o.d's will, and had refused inoculation with Cynric's then newly invented colonies, or any physical augmentation whatsoever.

Alasdair Conn, the Commodore, had opposed them.

Alasdair had believed pa.s.sionately in the goals and edicts of the Builders: that the purpose of G.o.d's creation in Man was to confront harsh environments, to master them, to evolve to meet any challenge. That the ultimate expression of faith was to subject one's self and one's offspring to ever harsher challenges, ensuring survival of the fittest through mortification of the flesh. Of all the species of G.o.d's creation, only man had the power to reshape himself in G.o.d's image, and Alasdair-whatever his other failings-had not been a hypocrite. A deeply religious man, as moral and spiritual leader of his people he had believed in that obligation with all his heart.

And, as Bened.i.c.k had pointed out at the time, given conditions when the Builders left, there was no guarantee that Earth was any more able to support life than would be a smoking cinder.

Tristen-a dutiful son, and a dutiful soldier-had gone to war to drive the Go-backs from Engine. He had been doing what he was bid, and in every way that mattered to his father, he had succeeded. If Sparrow died in the war, well, that was the cost of selection. In any case, she'd already pa.s.sed along her genes to Arianrhod, so it would be easy for Alasdair to fix the line. That the result had been Ariane, Alasdair's eventual murderer, gave Tristen a bitter little frisson of complicated pleasure-his own history with his great-granddaughter notwithstanding.

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