Even through the cocooning colony, Rien could see Perceval's face shining with sweat, though, and the inflamed red streaks like spiderwebs surrounding the attachment points of her pinions. She tugged, but she had nothing to leverage against except Perceval's other wings—of which there were currently in total six, the four spanning the corridor and the two within which she slept—and it was useless.
"Oh, please," Rien said. "I have to get her someplace with water and food."
The pinion shifted, relaxing under Rien's hand. Abruptly, she realized how cold she was, the sweat of too-warm sleeping chilling on her skin, the ends of damp hair freezing. Perceval's pinions might have trapped the warmth when Rien was inside them, but they were themselves as cold as the corridor's frigid air. And Rien was wearing nothing but the sweeping knit trousers, cardigan, and strap-shoulder top.
"Please," she said again, fearful she had imagined the response. "Perceval, you have the map. I need you. Open your damned pinions."
When the shell cracked open, the warm air within escaped in a scroll of mist and flaking frost. Perceval floated limp as the third pair of pinions silently merged into the mass of the parasite wings. Rien stretched out from where she clung and touched Perceval's cheek.
Hot and moist, and Rien's fingers smelled of sickness when she pulled them back.
"Perceval." Her own pleading voice might have belonged to another. "That's good, sweetheart. Now open your eyes."
It was what Head might have said. What Head had said, when Rien was little and she was sick. And whether it was Rien's tone of abject fear, or some virtue in the words, when Rien touched Perceval's face again, she turned her cheek into it.
Slowly, the pinions relaxed further, and with unhurried motions unlike last night's frantic scuttling, began to bear Perceval and Rien forward. The feathertips—well, what would have been the feathertips, if the pinions had real feathers—bent against the corridor bulkheads, and they glided along as if borne by a giant, mechanical, four-legged spider.
Rien released her grip on the leading edge of the wing and instead caught Perceval's shoulder, floating beside her, huddled close to share warmth. It was easy in the microgravity.
The parasite wings paced along the corridor for some fifteen minutes, during which Rien's dark-adapted eyes saw nothing but Perceval and deck plates and the teal and lime bioluminescence of various kinds of fungus. And a school of ship-fish, a half-dozen of the oxygen-breathing scavengers floating midair, glass-transparent except for eyes and guts and teeth and streaks of blue and vermilion neon. They hung momentarily in a cloud, and then were gone in a flicker of winfings.
Rien, light-headed from cold and poor oxygen saturation, wondered if they had come through whatever j crevice the atmosphere and spores had entered through. She would not like to be the sparrow hawk whose dinner depended on catching one.
Eventually, the pinions paused before a hatchway like a dozen others they had passed. The burning pain in Rien's left arm had dulled to the sharp occasional twinges of a bone bruise, but without releasing Perceval's shoulders, Rien was able to grab and shake her face. "Here?"
Perceval's eyes were crusted yellow along the lashes. She shivered, and Rien's clothes were wet with Perceval's musty sweat. Whatever the infection, her symbiont was having a fight.
"Open it," she said, her voice cracked and sticky. "We might be safe in here."
Rien tried the palm panel, but the hatch—like the previous ones—was dead. Instead, she undogged it manually, made sure Perceval's pinions would hold her in place, and—with one hand holding her sister's—pulled the hatch open.
At least she knew it wasn't the Enemy on the other side. Overpressure pushed the door into her hand. Her ears popped painfully, and Rien made a small sharp noise.
The atmosphere that rushed out to surround them was warm and moist, scented pleasantly of chlorophyll and richly composted loam. Birds sang; the interior of the hatch cover trailed vines heavy with unripe slipskin grapes, and a drone of insects broke what Rien now realized was the humming, mechanical unsilence of the cold corridor. There was gravity beyond the door, and she swung forward half deftly to get her feet into it and feel the strength.
The ship-fish had not come from here.
Rien swung again, using Perceval's pinions like monkey bars. She generated enough momentum to carry her over the threshold and landed barefoot on mossy soil that squished water over her toes.
She pulled her injured arm against her chest, hugging it for comfort, and stepped forward. "Perceval," she said. "You found it."
There was no sound behind her. She turned; Perceval still floated amid the charcoal sketch of her parasite wings. Her eyes were only glassy slits behind her lashes.
"Pinion," Rien said, feeling foolish, "please follow."
They moved forward, smooth and graceful, with the speed and assurance of a giant spider. The trailing wing brushed the vine-hung hatch closed again, and Rien heard the thump of bolts as it sealed.
Then she also heard a flurry of wings, not Perceval's, but smaller and soft-feathered. Something white as star-shine and bigger than a rooster descended before her, fluttering hard.
The wings were so pale the blood tinted the light shining through them blue, the span a little more than the length of one of Rien's legs. The animal had fishhook talons like a hawk, a long neck leading to a cockatoo-crested head with a heavy, curved, lacquer-black beak. But the eyes were tight-shut, eyelids like the crumpled crepe of an old man's throat, and the tail that coiled around the branch it landed on lashed, scaled and patterned silver-on-blue-white.
"I am Gavin," said the basilisk. "Welcome to this Heaven, daughters of Benedick."
Rien did not know what Perceval would have done, but she could imagine it.
She stepped between the basilisk and her sister. The branch still swayed under its sudden weight, its wings fanning lightly for balance. Rien had seen a mountebank's parrot on a swing, and she thought of that now.
She didn't know what she'd do when it lunged. Its toes and talons measured together were as long as her pinky finger; its beak looked strong enough to snip that finger off. When it turned its head side to side, she was certain it was measuring the distance between them, and no matter that its eyes were closed. She crouched under its gaze, extended her right arm—the left still stung numb—and groped in wet earth and leaf litter for a stone, a branch ... anything.
"I greet you politely," the basilisk said. "And you fumble for a rock. Is this how you meet a stranger on the road in Rule? I would worry about your courtesy to guests."
The oddest thing was its beak, moving like a hand puppet's mouth. Exactly as if a beak and a thick black tongue could form the sounds of human speech—
Rien remembered the parrot, and shut her gaping jaw. She didn't straighten, though, or drop a knee. Fair words or not, after the past few hours she was not eager to trust a stranger. "I beg your pardon," she said. And pointed back, with her elbow like a bird's bent wing, at Perceval. "This is how we treat guests in Rule. I would not recommend you go there."
"Indeed. I am your guide to this Heaven, though, and if you come with me I will see what we can do to aid you."
"And if I don't come with you?"
The basilisk flipped its wings closed, flight feathers crossing over its back. The sequiny scales on the tail, she saw, made a reticulated pattern in unpigmented white and silver, the bluer, grayer scales showing the color of the blood beneath.
"Your sister is sick," it said. "If you do not come with me, what will you do?"
It waited a moment, as if it actually expected her to answer. And when she didn't, its tail uncoiled from the branch with all the sleekness of a heavy-bodied snake, the undersurface hollowing, pulling broad scales into an arch. It launched itself into the air, circled—over Rien's head, but not passing over Perceval—and reversed direction.