"Wait," Tristen said, and for a moment Bened.i.c.k wanted to smash his hand away and remind him of all that caution and cowardice had cost them.

But he was Bened.i.c.k Conn. He did not perform his drama, and as he raised his gaze to meet Tristen's, it occurred to him that the sin he had been about to a.s.sign his brother was his own. Tristen had never been overmuch for prudence, and his ingrained recklessness had cost him as dearly as ever Bened.i.c.k's reserve. He settled his nerves and said, "Yes, Brother?"

To his shock, it was the calf that answered: "-"

He never could have named the words it spoke in, or recited the sentences. But whatever they were, they filled him with comprehension.

Chelsea, too, apparently. She pointed with her thumb to a sealed hatchway. "Through here? How do you know that?"

"-" the calf answered. It knew because it knew. Because, Bened.i.c.k surmised, it had been made to know. Because, it said, it was a Bible.

He swallowed a dizzying surge of resentment. "Cynric," he muttered, as if that explained everything.

Gavin-ensconced on Mallory's shoulder-arched his thick neck and fluffed his crest. "Do you ever stop to wonder if maybe she just couldn't have explained things?"

"Sure," Chelsea said. "Because we all listen so well."

She stepped between her brothers, skirting the mammoth and pushing to the forefront of the group.

"Through here?" she said, turning to glance over her shoulder. Even more than the healing burns on her cheek, Bened.i.c.k was struck by the line of her scapula, the way the bone projected through flesh and worn clothing.

"I haven't been taking care of you," he said, when she caught him staring. "You're thin."

"So are you," she answered. "We've been busy."

She palmed the door lock, but the door didn't open. "Wait," Mallory said. "Let me."

But as the necromancer addressed the door, the mammoth calf interrupted. Bened.i.c.k thought he might almost be growing accustomed to its manner of speech. Or unspeech. Or what-you-might-call-it.

"A different verse?" Mallory said, with a glance aside to the animal. "Why don't you just tell us?"

The mammoth stared at the necromancer, blinking. After a moment, with an exasperated wave of its trunk, it spoke a few unrepeatable words that provoked Mallory to irritated laughter.

"Because we're meant to look after ourselves, Princess Cynric, and so you didn't bother to tell your construct the answers? Oh, very well. I hope it's still Job? I could just run through the whole thing, you know-oh. One attempt? Well, I guess I'd better get it right the first time, then."

Bened.i.c.k was somewhat accustomed to the manners and means of sorcerers. He did not even have to pretend unsurprise as the necromancer laid both hands palm to palm as if praying, rested lips on fingertips, and stood for several minutes merely addressing the door. For some time, nothing happened except Gavin rustling boredly and the movement of Mallory's lips-not quite enough to count as mouthing the words, but certainly the tic of somebody recalling memorized phrases.

Tristen's armor creaked when he folded his arms.

Just as Bened.i.c.k was about to interrupt, Mallory flashed a grin. "Hah. I knew it was back there somewhere."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I'm a necromancer," Mallory said, tapping skull with forefinger. "What did you think that meant? I get information from dead people. Gavin, you can just whisper it in my ear."

The basilisk rustled, crest flat, head skulking low between hunched shoulders. "Don't you da-"

"You will tell me what you remember."

"And if I don't remember?"

"You mean if you don't want to remember?" Mallory shrugged. "Then we all die. Gavin-"

"Every time I look at her," the basilisk said, "I come back a little less myself."

Bened.i.c.k scrubbed the corners of his eyes. "s.p.a.ce this. Can't we just cut it open?"

Mallory's head shook back and forth. "For me, critter."

And Gavin sighed and tucked his head under his wing, but from the look of comprehension on Mallory's face, he gave the necromancer what they needed.

Mallory placed a palm flat against the panel beside the door and recited, "In his neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into joy before him."

There was a creak, a hesitation, a groan of tired metal and fatigued machinery. A fine whitish dust, more like lime scale than rust, showered from the top of the frame.

The door glided open and Chelsea, straight-spined, brushed past Mallory with murmured thanks and stepped through. Bened.i.c.k stood aside so Tristen could follow, but Tristen gestured him on. "I have armor."

"Right."

Bened.i.c.k pa.s.sed through the entry, Mallory-with attendant basilisk-only joining the procession when he and Chelsea were well inside. Beyond, he found himself in an armory like any other, the suits lined up at rest from wall to wall. They were all alike, uncustomized, suitable for anyone to take and make his own.

"Nova," Bened.i.c.k said, "how is it that these suits were not measured among our resources?"

"I didn't know they were here," the angel said. "I'm afraid this is all very much outside my program, Prince Bened.i.c.k."

"Right."

"Cynric," Gavin said, the name stressing his voice strangely. From the corridor outside, Bened.i.c.k heard Samael's hoa.r.s.e chuckle. "And from the number of suits here, she may have expected more than a few of us."

"Well, it's nice to know she can be wrong about something."

Chelsea touched the closest suit of armor, laying her palm against the access plate. Bened.i.c.k was rea.s.sured when the armor reacted just as it should, first absorbing the plate, then peeling open to allow her admittance.

Bened.i.c.k snaked one long arm over her shoulder and touched a suit in the second row. It came forward, picking its way around both Chelsea and the first rank of suits, and paused before Bened.i.c.k. He tapped the shoulder, and it unfolded like a flower. As he stepped inside, he saw Mallory choosing a suit, too. Gavin fluttered up, onto the suit's head, and Mallory stepped inside.

After a moment of concern, which Bened.i.c.k endured with the best stoicism he could muster, the armor sealed around him, stretching and snuggling until it settled against his body like a second skin. The cool colloidal layer of the interior adjusted, molding close while he grimaced at the familiar, unpleasant sensation. Then it was done, the armor chiming to indicate a successful fit.

He scrolled his helm open. Mallory came up on his right side, Chelsea on the left. There was no hesitation as they returned to Tristen, who had sealed his own armor. Tristen took the fore. Bened.i.c.k, Chelsea, and Mallory fell in behind him. There could be one leader of an expedition such as this, and Tristen was oldest and highest-ranked in the family and the crew. Etiquette and tradition brooked no argument.

"Samael," Tristen said. "We are ready."

But Samael paused for a moment, immaterial arms folded, head tipped insolently, and grinned at them.

"Yes?" Tristen said.

With every evidence of satisfaction, Samael shook his head. "If I saw us coming, I'd bes.h.i.t myself."

Tristen's helm was up, but Bened.i.c.k did not need to see his face to hear the satisfaction in his voice. He touched the hilt of the sword at his hip; Bened.i.c.k recognized Mirth, and also its provenance.

"Good," Tristen said, and gestured the angel on ahead with a white-gauntleted hand. "Then let us essay the Broken Holdes."

Arianrhod would have liked to have moved proudly from the embrace of her angel to the belly of Leviathan, but her strength was spent. She found herself delivered like a baby, like a package, something handed off as an inconvenience. She could not even stir herself to protest, though her numb hand itched for the hilt of her unblade.

-Here is your safe place-said Asrafil, his coat furling about him like wings.-Here is your bower.- Arianrhod fell through s.p.a.ce, drifting into the cage that surrounded the pitted dullness of the living asteroid. Its ma.s.s drew her in, gently, lightly, a.s.sisted by a little thrust and guidance from Asrafil's colony. If she had the strength she would have reached out to him, spread wide her arms in supplication and pleaded like a child, but her Exalt body was freezing from the edges, already stiff with the Enemy's chill, and soon even her mental processes would fail her.

Panic stabbed her, sharp as a fistful of shards.-Do not make of me your sacrifice!-she begged.-Have I not served you faithfully, O Asrafil?- Asrafil only receded. He still moved with comfort, his pale hands shining with reflected light as he gestured before his coat. Before, also, the face of the Enemy, wreathed though it was in the dust of dead stars.

-This service you may do me also-he said, allowing her to imagine that she felt the brush of a hand against her cheek, stroking back the strands of her hair. It was a projection, a manipulation. Nothing real. -Don't leave me!- He was too far away now for her to have seen it, and anyway her eyes had frozen, but she knew the look of his smile. Even imagining it pierced her heart.-Silly human. I cannot leave you. Don't you know I am with you always?- A maw-a fissure-opened across the surface of the asteroid beneath her. Light shifted within, aurora veils fingering forth in chilly, gelid blue reminiscent of a colony's genetic marker.

And Arianrhod fell into the welcoming embrace of Leviathan.

The mammoth bid them adieu at the air lock, which Gavin found disappointing. He'd rather been antic.i.p.ating the spectacle of a quarter-ton quadruped in armor.

Gavin was not only sad to see it go due to the potential for entertainment. Whether he and it had grown from splinters of the same personality like so many soldiers grown from dragon teeth was an open question. But if they had, they were something like siblings.

Gavin had never had a sibling before. He was curious to discover what it was like.

He hoped he'd get the chance.

The Broken Holdes were exactly as Gavin had expected: barren, twisted, full of warped metal and fluctuating gravity. The Holdes were disintegrating, as the name would indicate, but you could never tell until you pa.s.sed into a s.p.a.ce if it was holed and evacuated, or if the atmosphere held-and, if it held, what its density might be. And that density wasn't necessarily consistent from one section of a s.p.a.ce to the others. The random gusts of gravity and vectors of the world's rotation and acceleration affected that, as did the simple matter of how the ventilation in any given unit was working.

As they moved deeper into the wasteland, Gavin released his grip on Mallory's armor and flew up to join Samael at the head of the group. Gavin was more material than the angel's makeshift avatar, so if there were traps, he would be more likely to trigger them. Moreover, Gavin wasn't so trusting as to leave the angel unsupervised to choose their path through such treacherous terrain.

Gavin flew close-winged, using atmosphere where it was available, surfing the edges of dangerous gravity surges and slick-sloped ma.s.s tunnels. This was a sport played by the winged youth of Engine, a chance to demonstrate prowess and an adolescent status game. But now, for him, with four wingless Exalt in tow, it proved nothing but an annoyance. The humans slowed him. Armor and symbionts or not, it was too easy to imagine them ruptured and twisted, oozing precious bodily fluids into the cold vacancy that surrounded them.

But his urge to caution was mitigated by the need for haste, the sense that, after days of pursuit, Arianrhod was almost within reach. Gavin was flogged onward not only by Tristen and Bened.i.c.k's palpable desire for vengeance, but by the undeviating conviction that, if they did not catch Arianrhod now, everything would be lost. This was a woman to whom the murder of hundreds, Exalt and Mean, was an acceptable loss.

Surely, Gavin thought, in that choice she was very like the Builders.

This entire portion of the structure was acrawl with radiation-another legacy of the Breaking and the wreck of the world's mighty engines. It was why the material of the Broken Holdes had never been salvaged for use elsewhere, and why they remained here, a shattered memorial to the dead, isolated at the bottom of the world.

As Gavin and his companions moved into the outskirts of the holdes, they came to the fringes of the world, where the atmosphere had frozen in fabulous hexagonal spires and feathers along the bulkheads. No matter how many times Gavin witnessed the phenomenon, he never failed to be awed. Now, as the lamps of his companions lit the rimed warrens stretching before them, he extended his colony and looked. Not with his eyes, which were only weapons, but with the other senses, more delicate and more elaborate.

What they faced was an ice cave, a h.o.a.rfrost mansion. Crystals of oxygen and water vapor and nitrogen feathered from every surface until the whole holde stretched before them, refracting and reflecting the visible spectrum like the interior of a vast and labyrinthine geode.

A temple that had been cracked and shattered, rattled by unimaginable stresses. Broken loose, some of the shimmering spears and needles of nitrogen rock had settled against the trailing bulkheads; elsewhere their truncated stumps glittered gla.s.sily in the armorlight.

Gavin's wings did not rely on atmosphere. He could surf the electromagnetic spectrum just as easily. Samael strode through broken crystals and nitrogen snow without disturbing them at all except for what he twisted up, sparkling, into his whirlwind outline, and without any sign of being discommoded by the lack of gravity-or the moments when it rea.s.serted itself. The brush of Gavin's wingtips, by contrast, stirred the crystals from where they had settled. He moved among frozen sprays, blue as blood, that skipped along his feathers soundlessly, for the atmosphere that could have carried the sounds was frozen.

But now, something else was shivering and scaling the nitrogen crystals. A vibration ran through the hulk of the world-a silent grinding whose source Gavin did not know.

Apparently, neither did any of the others, because when Tristen laid a hand on the wall and asked via radio, "What's that?" the only answers to return were hesitant suggestions.

"I don't like it," Chelsea said, with just the fingertips of her gloves resting on the ice. She knew how to handle herself in the absence of gravity; that slight contact stabilized her rather than sending her into a spin. "I have a bad feeling, you know?"

Gavin knew.

It was a seemingly bottomless trek, but before too much longer he was sure the angel was leading them in the right direction. The s.p.a.ces opened out and the rents gaped wide, some showing glimpses of superstructure or swatches of sky beyond. Here, any atmosphere not frozen directly to the bulkheads had long since been lost into unsounded deeps. They were crossing into the bosom of the Enemy now, even as the world still offered what frail shelter it was able.

When they came at last to the edge of the Broken Holdes, he spread his wings into a spiderweb net, to keep the humans at least temporarily safe within the hull of the world. There was no fanfare, no sense of demarcation. Rather, the corridor they traveled simply ended, abruptly, sheared off in ragged petals that curved out like a trumpet flower's bloom. Beyond, Gavin was aware of an elegant line of long cables, running whip-straight into the darkness, shuddering with each turn of the enormous winches that were taking them up. Lights burned out at their terminus, blurred and clouded by the nebula.

Samael stepped through Gavin's elaborated body, but the humans paused just within, drifting an easy arm's length from one another. One of them-Bened.i.c.k-reached out and laced the fingers of his glove through Gavin's mesh.

"s.h.i.t," Bened.i.c.k said, in a flat and agonized voice such as Gavin had never imagined from him. Mallory grunted unhappy agreement.

"We can get there from here," Tristen said. "It's in a cage. Or we can wait. Judging by the action, it'll come to us."

"Look at the damage," Mallory said.

Tristen must have looked, though it was hard to tell through the armor what he might be observing at any given time. But he stilled like a corpse, and whispered, "Oh."

"I don't understand," Chelsea said.

Gavin did not observe the signal that must have flown between the brothers, but he knew it had occurred, because it was Tristen who answered her as smoothly as if it had been prearranged. "See the way that edge is blown outward?"

"Of course."

"That's not an asteroid strike," he said. "It's conceivable, I guess, that an explosion in the engines could rip the metal back that way. But if it were, how in the world could an asteroid simultaneously destroy the engines and the main reactor, all the way down here, and critically damage the secondary reactor back in Engineering? That's some pretty good bowling, even on the part of G.o.d."

"Freak accident," Samael said, without looking back over his shoulder. "The will of G.o.d."

Gavin was beginning to get a feel for when Samael meant what he said, and when he was mouthing lines fed him by his program. Judging by the tone in Tristen's voice, he was, also.

Mallory countered, "This blast came from within the world."

Chelsea jerked hard enough to send her drifting. It didn't take her long to correct att.i.tude, though, and when she did, she came back with a question. "Sabotage?"

When it returned, Bened.i.c.k's voice was dry again, so soft and a.s.sured that if Gavin hadn't been able to play back the recording, he could have believed he'd imagined the earlier stress and dismay.

"We were marooned out here on purpose, friends."

"Great," Mallory said. "Who's going to tell Caitlin?"

19.

take the world apart