As he and Chelsea ran, the panels revealed the seemingly tremulous spire of the shaft they moved through lifting to connect to the next level. Before them, small animals scattered from the regrown gra.s.s-quail, rabbits, a long weasel-bodied predator after which the toolkit sent angry chittering. As they crested a hill-actually a bend in the tunnel and, as such, a rise that left them with no sense of ascending, because the orientation of the gravity simulators followed that of the corridor-pillars hove up, stretching from deck to ceiling, their ivory, fluted lengths discolored by foamy, grayish ma.s.ses where they rose above the fronds of some thorned, twining plant.

Behind the feathery leaves, a shadow lay across the deck, and a darkness penetrated the ceiling forty meters overhead. As they drew closer, both gained depth of field, so Bened.i.c.k could see it was a great oval shaft, thirty meters across the large diameter, leading into untrammeled darkness above and below. He felt each footstep falling more heavily on the deck despite the a.s.sistance of his armor. At least the increase of gravity was incremental, rather than stair-step. Or worse, one abrupt transition.

Once upon a time, the shaft before them had been a major thoroughfare connecting the most populous regions of the world. Now it was a one-directional pit, a death fall for anything that might stumble into it.

Bened.i.c.k wondered how many strata it plummeted, and how many times you would strike the wall, should you tumble down. And what the odds were of a falling body bursting through the bottom of the shaft and punching into the bosom of the Enemy? Unlikely, that last. If it had been going to happen, it would have by now. Many things must have tumbled to their deaths over the centuries.

Chelsea slowed to a trot as they arrived, and Bened.i.c.k also allowed his pace to slack. He strained his sensory resources as well as those of his armor, alert to any potential ambush or unforeseen threat. More gray-cheeked parrotlets-an entire flock of twelve-centimeter birds darting through the branches of the feathery warden trees-cried shrill alarm at their approach. Wings as green as radioactive gla.s.s flashed as they mocked each other from perch to perch, yelling their nearly comprehensible imprecations. They had powder blue caps and silvery cheeks, the leading edges of their wings blurring his vision with the sharpness of lime-and-cobalt biomechanical luminescence. When they tumbled in flocks, it was impossible to track one cleanly; he thought the glow of their wings must be designed to confuse predators when they schooled, like the dazzle of shipfish and neon tetras.

Above the range of the parrotlets and the tops of the fluffy green cloud of trees, long-winged swifts swooped from nests on the pillars. They might have been darting after tiny insects-even with the armor's telescopic vision, at this range Bened.i.c.k could not be sure.

"I don't antic.i.p.ate getting past that thornbrake without harming the trees," Bened.i.c.k said doubtfully.

In answer, Chelsea stepped forward and lifted her hand. Her armor stayed dormant, but as it brushed downy fronds they first lunged, tapping her fingers. Then as if in surprise or discouragement the leaves folded tight and drew aside like a potentate lifting the skirts of hir robe. When the bough folded, a scatter of fragile bones-tiny rodents or marsupials-were revealed around the base of the trunk.

"Mimosa," she said. "We're too big for it."

Bened.i.c.k glanced from the folded-up leaves lying flat between two-inch thorns and allowed himself a tiny smile. "How come it doesn't eat the parrotlets?"

"Symbiosis?" she guessed. She pulled back her gauntlet and tucked hair behind her ears on both sides. "Maybe they were engineered to live together. The mimosa keeps the rodents from eating the birds' eggs, and the existence of birds' nests in the mimosa lures the rodents into giving it a try?"

Something slender and green whipped from under his foot as he came forward to stand beside her. Because he did not care to touch the trees, much less trust his weight to them, he balanced with one hand against one of the four pillars that delineated the transit shaft and leaned over the abyss. It was not quite the bottomless pit he had antic.i.p.ated-or rather, it was, but the walls were tapestried with enormous mushrooms, their caps forming a deceptive broad patchwork that began only a few meters below. The native color of the fungus was impossible to discern; the top layer was encrusted with a ragged gray-white camouflage of guano. "Bened.i.c.k!" Chelsea yelped.

He stepped back, into the embrace of a feathery carnivorous tree that withdrew to frame his body rather than suffering his touch. "Are there these on every level?" he asked, gesturing to a branch that swept aside from his hand.

She shrugged. "I've only been two up and one down. They were on all three strata I checked." She swept an arm across the open s.p.a.ce before them. "Aren't they beautiful? And the swifts' nests are edible. When we reach the next stratum down, we should collect some."

"Saliva nests," he said. "Those are the ones you make soup from?"

"The same." She beamed, obviously pleased to have known something useful and lovely that her older brother didn't for the second time in a single day. "We should tether to each other for the climb."

"And take turns anchoring," he agreed.

He produced a cable from the beltline of his armor and clipped it into her matching utility. A sharp tug proved the connection secure.

"I'll climb first," he said, but she was already swinging a leg over the edge.

"I've done it before. And I'm lighter," she said. "And in my armor, just as strong. I'll break trail."

He stopped the cable paying out. She leaned her weight on it, shifting her hips back to tug, but he had grounded himself and was immovable.

"Bened.i.c.k."

"Until the halfway point," he said. "Then I climb first."

She stared for a moment, until with a wink she tapped her faceplate closed. "That's only fair," her speaker agreed. As he released the lock on the cable she was over the edge and gone, her suit lights gleaming brighter and brighter in the gathering gloom.

Downclimbing was harder, not easier, than climbing up-cautious and unpredictable work on a slick, finicky surface, with overset gravity increasing the risk. It might have been easier to rappel by turns, but while Bened.i.c.k was willing to trust the topmost sibling to belay the other, and thus bear some of the weight (with the armor a.s.sisting the rest), neither he nor Chelsea were willing to rest their entire faith on one spider-strand. And so the second climber must follow under native power and skill, augmented by capable armor.

It wasn't the strength of the monofilament cable that Bened.i.c.k distrusted. It was the anchor points, which involved either the decaying gardens behind the frozen waterfall of fungus, or the fungi themselves. They were strong enough to bear their own weight-strong enough even to bear his and the armor's, in addition, though sometimes the slenderer stalks squished or swayed unnervingly. But he thought the cable might slice through the trunks. Nowhere would the descent be a straight rappel, because six-meter mushrooms curved out from the walls like dancers' upraised arms, their caps great round mattresses clogging the center of the shaft.

Bened.i.c.k and Chelsea could not see below themselves except in glimpses, and after five minutes of climbing they also could not see above. What light fell was cut in shafts, progressively vanishing, and it wasn't long before only the sweep of their armor lamps revealed surroundings grown eerie and strange.

The walls had never been smooth. Designed as hanging gardens, in the darkness their honeycomb terraces were home to amazing things, such as woody, pale fungi tall as trees, which bled faint, contagious, greenish light where his gauntlets broke their surfaces. His handprints glowed for seconds afterward, until the sap wore away. Other mushrooms flourished in crevices-some pinhead-tiny, brilliant futile purples and golds on thread-fine stems revealed in Bened.i.c.k's helmet light; others broad and shelf-level, hard as tabletops, ledges you could sleep on. Chelsea and he used those to belay each other, anchoring around slippery-skinned, porous, but unyielding trunks.

The ghostly forest teemed with tiny, eyeless, pale animals, insensible to the glare of Bened.i.c.k's lights. Spiders translucent as window polymer, the joints of their articulated exoskeletons wraithlike around the shadowy organs within. Sticky-footed salamanders that flicked away from the air pressure of a descending gauntlet. Crickets spun of crystal.

Endless water dripped behind it all. The irrigation system must have broken centuries ago, along with the illumination, and in the humid darkness this was what had grown. Bened.i.c.k was conscious of the wet, the ice that rimed the back corners of the terraces where even the heat of decomposition could not entirely stave off the chill of the Enemy behind. Still rotting, five hundred years later, and some of that ice must be nearly as old.

The smell tempted him to order his armor to filter-but odors could transmit vital information, and with the helmet sealed the toolkit huddled against his neck like a warm fur collar, whiskers tickling his cheek with every hesitant sniff.

He swung himself around a delicate-seeming fungus that he trusted with his weight only because his armor's scanners told him it was reinforced with biomechanicals-internal carbon monofilament cables leveraging its grip on the nearest terrace-and caught sight of Chelsea's lights and her sap-daubed armor below. She was paying out cable attentively, one hand on the winch, providing sufficient slack but ready to stop his descent at any sign he was in trouble. He touched down to the main trunk of the fleshy, branching mushroom she'd chosen to ground herself on and squatted deeply to make a little extra slack. When he stood again, he unlocked the cable release and began cautiously to reclaim his side of the line. Chelsea moved away to perform the same maneuver.

"Break," she said, and lowered herself to the trunk. Bened.i.c.k, after a glance around, stretched out beside her. They could not afford to pause for long, but they would lose more time to a fall and recovery than to a few minutes spent letting their heartbeats slow and their colonies repair damage to their muscle tissue.

They rested on their backs, lights illuminating the delicate moth gray gills that formed their temporary sky. Bened.i.c.k thought of feathers, of filters, of narrow leaves of ceramic seen edge-on. A haze of spores drifted over them, graying their faceplates. If they were to lie here long enough, the spores would blanket them over like snowdrifts until the filaments of rooting fungus enveloped their armored sh.e.l.ls. They would lie entombed, encapsulated, beneath the lofty white pillars and the parasol caps. People-cysts, like frogs in mud turned to stone, like parasites burrowed into muscle tissue.

With a stretch of his hand against the sensors in his gauntlet, Bened.i.c.k shut down his helmet floods, imaging, sonar. Incautious, but he wanted to feel the s.p.a.ce they had entered for itself, and if anything attacked, he trusted his armor. His lights died abruptly, with none of the flare and fade of cooling incandescents. After a moment, without being told, Chelsea did the same. Now she was a ghost in the darkness, like the spiders, luminescent in pale smeared patches that seemed to grow brighter as his eyes adapted. Blackness settled around them, as bottomless as the Enemy. There were even stars: tiny sparks of life scurried along the walls, moved through the miniature forests around the bases of the tree-fungi.

Through the armor, Bened.i.c.k could not hear Chelsea breathing, though other things moved in the dark.

Did you help to kill them? He wondered. What is it you plan to do with me?

He was giving her the opportunity. It only remained to be seen if she tried to take it. If she didn't, it would prove something. If she did, he would be antic.i.p.ating the attack. He'd have to place his trust in that, and in the hopeful truth of all those old expressions about the superiority of age and treachery.

"When you did this by yourself," he asked, "how did you manage?"

"I free climbed."

He imagined her here in the darkness, the flash of her lights, nothing between her and the fall but her skill and strength and balance-and the technology on her back. Age and treachery, all right. In that she made him feel old.

"I'm impressed."

She stirred, just a little, but he heard her armor sc.r.a.pe. He waited for her to find what she was groping after, to see if she would fill the silence with it. He breathed as he waited, and as he listened to the slow hiss in and out, it struck him that he was old. And that it was no use to pretend he could somehow redeem the void he'd left in the lives of two daughters by praising a sister.

But then she said, "Thank you," in a voice so small he only recognized the phrase because it was familiar.

Bened.i.c.k gave her a few moments longer, and when she spoke again her tone had the smooth, ironic featurelessness so common to conversations around dinner table in Rule. What she admitted, however, would have been blood among piranha in that house. "Father never would have said that to me."

No, Bened.i.c.k couldn't make up paternal neglect of his daughters by throwing a bone to another young woman, but that didn't mean that Chelsea had no needs of her own.

Such vulnerability deserved an answer. He cleared his throat and closed his eyes. "He said it to me once."

Bened.i.c.k could still hear the words, dripping sarcasm thick as the blue blood that had drenched his hands and arms. Amazing how one's organic memory could cling so tightly to the worst moments of a life, and lose everything that surrounded them.

Chelsea said, "Wow. That must have been some accomplishment."

In the darkness, Bened.i.c.k sat up sharply. He reached to key his lights, and stayed his hand. Be fair, he admonished himself.

He said in plain tones, "He didn't mean it."

She didn't answer, but he heard her sigh, felt her reach for him across the s.p.a.ce between and stop her hand before it connected. For a moment, they sat together, the understanding silence between them almost big enough to fill that s.p.a.ce.

Whatever had been moving in the dark moved again, and this time Bened.i.c.k caught a glimpse of rippling bioluminescence, impossibly pure azure and crimson, trembling like the gills of a fish. "Sister," he said.

Chelsea's armor clicked as her head turned. "Big," she said, as the train of light flowed across the underside of the trunk not four meters overhead. It left two parallel tracks of glowing green dots behind it, matching the smears on the Conns' armor. It must be taking pinp.r.i.c.k holds on the surface of the fungus. The entire organism looked three meters long or longer, estimated with his own eyes. His colony suggested a tip-to-tip measure of 3.2, and a width of half a meter.

Against his throat, the toolkit compacted itself, shivering. Under all that fluff, its tiny body might have been twisted of wire.

"What do you think it is?" Bened.i.c.k asked, using the suit mike directly to Chelsea's earpiece, so external noise would not distract the creature.

"Arthropod," she said.

He would have been content to sit in the dark and play guessing games a little while longer, but Chelsea triggered her floods and bathed the cozy vertical dell in light. Brilliance washed reds and blues from the countless legs of a three-meter centipede, which froze when revealed as if the glare had pinned it to the trunk to which it clung. Like the spiders, it was transparent in places, translucent in others, only a few of the internal organs pigmented and solid-seeming. Bened.i.c.k had the uncomfortable misapprehension that if he stood up and reached out to it, his hand would go through-though whether it should feel like gelatin or mist, he couldn't quite decide.

"Oxygen content?" he asked, and with a great show of how beset she was by his laziness, Chelsea waved a hand bedecked with a sample net through the air.

"Thirty-nine percent," she said. "Bet that's not the only giant bug around. Think it eats apes?"

"It definitely eats mushrooms," he said. Pieces of nipped-off cap were visible in its digestive tract, the pale meat and powdery gills compressed into a single variegated k.n.o.bby line. He stood up and triggered his own lights. The motion did what Chelsea's floods hadn't; the centipede darted into the overstory in a dazzle of fluidity.

"Come on," Bened.i.c.k said, when it had been gone a long moment. "We still have a fugitive to catch."

The centipede was the only giant arthropod they saw, but now that he knew they were there, the evidence of their existence was obvious-nibbled mushroom caps, a burrow bored in a stem, as wide as the circle he could make with both arms. And once, when he was leading the downclimb, he saw something that led him to call back up on the armor radio and tell Chelsea to stop the descent. He let himself dangle for a moment, watching the rays of his floodlamps shimmer off the intricate strands of a moisture-dotted funnel-web large enough for him to have walked down upright. His line of descent was a good thirteen meters from the mouth of the thing, for which he was grateful.

Something twitched at the bottom of the funnel, an inquisitive motion, and he said, "Lower away" with unconscious softness.

The winch started up. As he descended away from the spiderweb, Chelsea asked, "Problem?"

"I found your carnivores."

"Everything okay?"

"Fine. Spiderweb. Pretty. When you come through-"

"Yes?"

"Be careful."

He heard her laughter down the line. "Oh, boy," she said. "Giant spiders. I wonder which b.a.s.t.a.r.d angel thought that up."

10.

the door gaped wide

But now, from between the black & white spiders, a cloud and fire burst and rolled thro' the deep black'ning all beneath, so that the nether deep grew black as a sea, & rolled with a terrible noise; beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest, till looking east between the clouds & the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones' throw from us appear'd and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent.

-WILLIAM BLAKE,

The Marriage of Heaven and h.e.l.l

Tristen bound back his hair.

Still wet from his shower, it felt like damp wire between his fingers. He stood before the mirror in his chambers and worked it into a braid, bringing the end over his shoulder to finish. The strands appeared crystalline white, but he could see the shadows of his fingers through the locks. In truth his hair was colorless, its apparent whiteness a function of the air trapped in the center of the shaft where normally pigment would be.

Alone among his surviving siblings, Tristen had been born during the Moving Times and had come to adulthood when the biogenetic engineering technology of the symbiont colonies was still undeveloped. His sister Cynric the Sorcerer was younger than he: even she could hardly have built the symbiont before she was born.

Tristen's childhood in these halls had been a sickly one. But he had adapted, and he had still been a young man in the aftermath of the disaster that had crippled the world-when his grandfather Gerald had adopted Cynric's science and directed the creation of the first Exalt.

The rest of the Conn family followed, as did the essential crew of Engineering. With mortal life span and illnesses left behind, Tristen's colony could have amended the lack of pigment as surely as it had amended the worst of the nystagmus that had once so badly affected his vision. But with the early technology, the change would have been obvious and artificial ... and once it became a choice rather than a defect, and he could leave his father's house at will, Tristen found that his self-image had solidified. He liked the drama of his coloring. A little uniqueness could be a valuable thing, especially in a society that valued a man's legend as a marker of his merit.

Now, he looked into the mirrored cobalt glow of the colony shining through his own unpigmented irises, and smiled mirthlessly.

Tristen Conn had weathered the storms of two vast transformations of his world, and the worse storms of growing to manhood in the house that was his grandfather's and then his father's. He had seen failure and betrayal, and more than once his sympathies had been with the betrayers.

Tristen had seen his wife and sister Aefre cut down as a representative of a family and a government she scorned, lost his daughter Sparrow in a war of his grandfather's making. There had been four daughters between him and Bened.i.c.k, and three were dead. Two-Caithness and Cynric-either at their own father's hands or by his command, having learned patricide from Alasdair's example and died in the attempt. The last sister, Caitlin, survived in exile, where-Tristen must admit-she had done well for herself.

He knew where Ariane had come from, how she had grown so edged, so poisoned, and so bent. She had been Alasdair's favorite, and so he had made her as much in his own image as possible. Or perhaps it had just pleased the old man to focus his loathsome parenting upon her because it griped Tristen so.

Whatever Alasdair's motivation, Tristen had watched his father cripple his younger siblings-the ones born after Bened.i.c.k-so they would never grow strong enough to challenge him. At first, Tristen had intervened where he could, until Alasdair made it evident that the end result of his interference would be an exile not unlike Caitlin's. If he suffered Tristen to live.

Tristen had learned to stay silent, even in the face of the indignities his father had heaped upon his own line, because to openly cross Alasdair Conn was to lose everything. And he had tried to befriend those who had suffered most-particular among them Ariane.