Grail

27

the feeble starlight itself



For I remember, as the wind sets low,

How all that peril ended quietly

In a green place where heavy sunflowers blow.

—ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, “Joyeuse Garde”





Tristen turned in space, aligning himself to the tug of gravity, and let the Enemy fill with empty space the empty spaces in the net of himself. The Enemy that wasn’t such an enemy any longer.

Dorcas was there beside him, a drifting presence, jeweled in the reflected light of two worlds. She brushed his fringe. He gave her the warmth of his full attention.

“Tristen Tiger,” she said.

“Retired,” he told her, though he didn’t believe it. “What is there to fight against anymore?”

“He’s not a villain,” Dorcas said. “He’s a hero who happens to be on the other side of the war.”

“You were fighting for a passionate belief,” he said.

She made a mood of affirmation. “I can be magnanimous in victory.”

Perhaps she could. Perhaps he’d test it.

“You remember a little of Sparrow now, don’t you?”

“I am not Sparrow, sir.”

“No,” he said. “I know that. But you felt her in the blade, and it was her personality that etched the neural pathways yours lives in. Lived in. When you lived in anything.”

She modeled a mood for him. It seemed like a reluctant but tolerant one.

“Who killed my daughter, then?”

He had a sense she regarded him. He had a sense she brushed her fringe on his again.

She said what he’d known she would say. “Talk to Benedick, Sir Tristen. Speak to your brother, if you would truly know.”

He paused halfway through leaving. “Thank you.”

Now they were all Angels, and Nova did not wish to be an Angel at all.


Not that she had ever, exactly, been merely an Angel. With the assistance of Rien and the complicity of Mallory, she had wrought herself from the pieces of Dust and Pinion and Asrafil, and all the angels they had eaten. And most of all, Rien, the Mean girl, freshly Exalted, upon whose conscience Nova had been forged. Rien had been the beloved of Perceval, and so Nova, too, had loved the Captain beyond the love that Angels had been built to suffer.

She did not want to suffer that lovesickness and that pain and that hunger anymore. The world was gone, the Builders’ plans fulfilled beyond anything they could have hoped. Nova drifted over the streaked clouds of a living world, over the swarms of her former inhabitants transformed and trying out their wings of light upon the solar winds—and realized her duty was fulfilled.

Almost.

There was someone to whom the Angel must speak.

She folded herself into a pure datastream, releasing her components to whoever might need them, and plunged through the waiting world’s atmosphere.

There were dust and sand along the beach where Perceval walked, scraps of leaf and salt in the air. More than enough to sweep together a temporary form, using techniques borrowed from Samael.

“Love,” she said, as Perceval’s head turned. “I have come to say farewell.”

“Farewell? Nova, you can’t—” Perceval stopped herself. “Of course you can. No one will ever command you again, I promise. I’ll see to it myself. You’re leaving, then?”

Nova smiled. “Thou needest no Angels whither thou goest.”

But she must have miscalculated something, because Perceval blinked and crossed her arms and said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

“But I thought—”

Perceval rubbed the sandy sole of one bare foot against the sandy top of the other, and said, “Maybe we should assume that neither one of us already knows what the other one is going to say, and start from there? I thought you had come to tell me you were going to join them.” She rolled her eyes upward. “Are they finding their wings?”

“They’re in the shoals yet,” Nova said. “They will find their way deeper. They’re still thinking like monkeys. Eventually they’ll realize they don’t actually need a planet for anything. And then there will be no stopping them.”

“You keep saying ‘them’?”

Nova shrugged. She coalesced. She pulled organic material into her and built a body from it—not too challenging when you worked at the molecular level. The body did not, in particular, look like the one she had been wearing for fifty years now.

She let her identity fade, too, allowing the new/old one to burgeon and fill her before Perceval could think to argue.

“Nova did her job, and was getting tired of existing,” she said, the last words she would speak. “And Rien wants to stay.”

It was a relief to let go.

* * *

The young woman who held out her hand to Perceval—blinking, befuddled as a cat—was neither tall nor broad. She had slight, sloped shoulders and hair that stood out wildly in dark coils that snaked off in every direction.

“Rien,” Perceval said, and felt the name catch in her throat. “Rien,” she said again, to hear it. “Rien, Rien—”

“I am not a ghost,” Rien said. “Come here and hug me.”

So Perceval did, and Rien was not nothing, but solid, warm, and real. So that was the best thing of all.


When Tristen approached the cluster of entities that enfolded his brother, Benedick emerged alone to meet him. Samael was there, recognizable by his entirely insouciant aura. Jordan, too, still fresh-faced, even as a being of energy states stored temporarily in appropriated atoms.

“Brother,” Tristen said, when they were close enough to brush fringes and speak without being overheard. “You killed my daughter.”

Benedick settled back, but did not release him. That took courage. Or fatalism. The two were not so easily distinguished.

“I don’t remember,” Benedick said. “But I have come to understand that my memories are not … pristine.”

“How do you mean?”

Benedick gave him a shrug-mood: irritation, discomfort. “What blade killed Cynric?”

“Mirth,” Tristen said. It was a part of him now, and it remembered. As it remembered being Sparrow’s—so he remembered it, too, with a particular fierce poignancy now.

She had not been prone to let her blade hang useless.

“But I remember an unblade,” Benedick said. “And yet I have it from the victim, and from history itself, that she was murdered with a different sword entirely.”

Misery rolled from him quite palpably; Tristen felt it against his foils like the solar wind. Misery, but no fear.

“I cannot swear my own innocence. I am an eidetic, and I cannot remember clearly. Someone has been in my mind, and the organic memories have conflated to match the broad outlines of the edited mechanical ones. Nor can I swear that I would never do such a thing, for we all know that kinslaughter is not beyond me—”

“If you did it,” Tristen said, “it was because Father ordered it. Because Sparrow was a rebel.”

“If I did it, it was because I was young and ignorant and weak. But I do remember Sparrow, Brother. She was more than a rebel. She was the true daughter of Tristen Conn.”

“Will you do a thing for me?”

“I will,” Benedick answered at lightspeed, unhesitating. “Will you mourn her as if you killed her? Even remembering it not?”

“I will.”

Tristen paused, to give weight to what he would say. “Then you are already forgiven.”


Danilaw should not have allowed Perceval to go out alone, with only a security tail or two to keep an eye on her, but the Captain could handle herself, and he wasn’t about to tell her she had to miss her first sunrise.

He stayed behind with Cynric and Amanda. It was supposedly a planning meeting on how to release information regarding the abrupt transubstantiation of the Jacob’s Ladder and her crew. In reality, it was a huddled moment of respite over cookies and coffee.

“I want to come away with you,” Amanda said, while they were passing cream from hand to hand. “I want to see the solar system.”

Cynric’s head came up, her eyebrows rising, but if the feeling of his face were anything to go on, it was nothing to Danilaw’s expression. “Oh,” he said, and settled back.

“This is a chance that will never occur again,” she said. “A chance to live without rightminding, to travel—” Her breath caught. “I can’t say no.”

“No,” he said. He smoothed his right hand over the back of his left. “All this time the dodecapodes have been using the structural quirks of my neurology to try to reach us. It seems ungrateful to go running off—”

“The ones who are leaving are not bound even to the gravity well,” Cynric said. “The feeble starlight itself will suffice to feed them, if they spread far enough apart.” Cynric cleared her throat. “It’s not the solar system they’ll claim, but eventually the universe. It might be lonely. It will be strange. Do you really want to be one of them?”

Danilaw’s heart leapt up his throat. “I—”

“Do you want to?”

“I have Obligations,” he said. “Family. Work.”

“We always do.” Cynric steepled insectile fingers. “You people are all bodhisattvas. You’re all such adults, with your culture of self-sacrifice and your perfectly myelinated frontal lobes, your beautifully refined senses of consequence. I used to make people like you as servants.”

“Head,” Amanda said, with a glance at Danilaw as if checking what he thought.

“Angels are servants,” said Danilaw, reminding himself that his anger was most likely just ego-defense, and useless. “And so are we.”

“Go on. Serve your own self for a while. What I did—it was a lousy thing to do,” Cynric admitted. “But once they’re made they want to live as much as anything. What are you going to do, unmake them? And if your people are adults, my people are all such children—reckless, selfish, egocentric. Waiting for a divine plan to direct us. Maybe it would be good for you and me to trade places for a while. We both might be stretched by it.”

Danilaw chuckled. “They’re not going to let you run Bad Landing.”

“They don’t have to,” Cynric said. “They just have to let me talk to the dodecapodes. Do you think they know the divine plan that leads to all this mess?”

“I don’t think there’s a divine plan,” Danilaw said haltingly.

“Then what does any of this matter?”

“It matters to us,” Danilaw said. “Isn’t that enough?”

“Then go,” Cynric said. “Go and explore. Become a thing of light. If you find out you hate it, maybe you can even find a way to come home someday. Not all gates open in only one direction.”


Mallory found Tristen and Benedick coiled close, and hurried in on taut-stretched sails, praying to be there in time. But they were not fighting. In fact, as Mallory drew up, it became evident that the conversation was one of mutual comfort, not a prelude to war.

The necromancer drew up and waited. Not too long—Tristen must have noticed, because after a few moments he ended the talk with his brother and came over.

“You lived,” he said, brushing fringes.

“After a fashion,” Mallory answered. “And as well as anyone. I am still collecting my trees—or whatever it is my trees have been transubstantiated into. I suppose I shall have to herd them now, like a shepherdess with an idle flock. Or let them wither—”

Tristen’s mood colored dismissal. He did not believe that Mallory would do any such thing to the orchard of memories so long guarded. And now that they had assumed a more animate form—along with all the other life aboard the Jacob’s Ladder—the necromancer’s task would only grow more interesting.

“You’ve found your purpose in life,” he said. “It’s keeping the past alive for the future. A necromancer, maybe—or a guardian of memories? That is not such a small thing.”

If Mallory had anything now that could be called eyes, exactly, they would have been cast down, cold arms folded. “I thought you would kill Benedick.”

The color of dismissal deepened. “What good is another death now? It wouldn’t bring Sparrow back.”

“No,” Mallory said. “But I could.”

That was a long pause for an energy being. “Excuse me?”

“She’s in the library. You have Mirth’s pattern. That’s enough for a seed that could grow in her old body—or the pattern that was her old body. The pathways are there. I can bring her back.”

“Oh,” Tristen said. After a time, he said, “It wouldn’t be her, exactly.”

Mallory said, “Ask Perceval. It would be as much Sparrow, I suspect, as you are Tristen Tiger. Continuity of experience is an illusion, old man.”

Mallory felt it when Tristen glanced at Benedick, though there was no visual input to indicate it. The attention shifted, and it was obvious to anyone else so transformed.

A glitter of life-motes flocked past, sparking green and turquoise, chasing each other tumbling through the void. Cynric’s parrotlets, transformed. Transformed into something otherwise, as was all the world.

A broad world now, and scattered. Mallory felt confident in its diversity.

Tristen said, “Cynric is not exactly Cynric anymore. And you’re probably right. I am not me. I remember what I left behind when I changed, but I can—I cannot feel it. No. To summon Sparrow back from the dead would mean sacrificing Dorcas.”

“The terrorist?”

“The freedom fighter. Should I condemn her to death to give birth to a shadow? Let her live, Mallory. Sparrow is dead. It is time I let her die.”

Mallory leaned forward, to let their margins overlap. Whatever they had become, there was a sense of comfort in the touch.

“Some tiger you turned out to be.”

“I’m a tiger who does not care to hunt any longer.” He turned his back to the world below, his attention to the cold bright stars beyond. Mallory floated beside him, imagining all the forms of farewell.

“Come away with me,” Tristen said.

Mallory wished for a painful moment of sense-memory that there were a calming breath to be taken. A thousand ghost voices rang in the necromancer’s heart, each one bereft and abandoned, a pattern of loneliness and memories. Everyone loved and lost, and perhaps it took a necromancer to appreciate how truly universal that experience could be.

“Will you pretend you love me?”

“I don’t really need to pretend.”

Tristen hesitated, then seemed to firm his resolve and spoke on. “It is not the thing I had with Aefre. But it is what I have to offer, and if you want it, it is yours.”

Mallory would have smiled, if smiling were an option. “How can I refuse an offer like that? We are all we have. And we are so small, and the night is so large.”

—and ye,

What are ye? Galahads?—no, nor Percivales.

—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “The Holy Grail”