"Nothing will come of nothing," Samael said. "Speak again."
"You got that on my kiss," Dust said. "But I suppose now you think you always knew Shakespeare."
"So Rien is the Outcome."
"Part of it." Dust shuffled the remaining plaques, cut them, and turned one over. The ten of blades. "Ruin," he said, "but that doesn't concern us." He turned another, covering the first. The three of blades. "Heartbreak," he said. "But also not our problem. One more chance—"
He turned a third, and did not lay it down upon the others. Instead, he weighed it in his hand a moment, and then placed it adjoining the last card, tilted at an angle, as if it sprouted from the feet of the Princess of Voids.
Upon it was printed "a stylized image of a bulbous, streamlined silver starship, nothing like the bulky and tangled outline of the Jacob's Ladder. It was wreathed in improbable flames, and tiny people had been blown screaming from the hole in the side.
"The Tower," Dust said. "It represents change, over-throw, destruction of the old order. The crumbling of all you have worked for. Wrack, and riot. Downfall and over-f turn."
"We fail?" Samael asked after a quiet moment.
"Flowers grow from corpses," Dust said, and swept the cards together. "Are you sure you would not like a glass of wine?"
"No," Samael said. He pushed his chair away, the moment broken. "I am not distracted, Jacob. You sent them to find Tristen Conn."
Dust cased his cards, careful with the silk handkerchief that enfolded them inside the enamel box. "He's not in the reading," he said. "Neither is Ariane. And yet their brother and nieces are. I wonder what that means."
"You don't know?"
"I am," Dust said primly, standing to bid his brother farewell, "the Angel of Memory, Samael. Not the Angel of Foresight."
The ugly lines of Samael's houndlike face rearranged themselves. He would never be handsome, but he was beautiful when he smiled. "And yet, you believe in prophecy?"
"No," Dust said, tucking his cards into a weskit-pocket. "I believe in stacking the deck."
14 evidence of war
Six feet of dust under the morning stars.
And a panorama of war performs itself
Once it became evident they meant him no harm, the naked and filthy man Perceval had rescued attached himself to her. He didn't speak at first, and Perceval wondered if he was capable. He would not give up his broken sword, but he held her hand peaceably and he also would not be shifted from her side.
Perceval felt odd talking around him, but as he would not speak, she didn't see an option. "If he couldn't get out, what makes you think that we can?"
The bats had finally quieted.
Rien, appearing to notice this, said, "The bats get out somewhere."
"You are bigger than a bat."
Rien scratched the basilisk on her shoulder under the hackles. "I know where the door is," she said. "Also, we have lights. And a cutting torch."
And with the assistance of those things, to Perceval's inexpressible wonderment, they escaped the realm of the bats without further incident.
Abandoned crew quarters lay beyond, overgrown with kudzu. In daylight, the stranger cringed and covered his eyes until Perceval took pity and bound a blindfold over them. As they walked, she picked the tender leaves from the end of the kudzu shoots and shared them with the others. They were good, spinachy, and if they were to have a third, Perceval thought anything that might stretch the food budget should be investigated. The stranger—blindfolded—sniffed them, and then with his smeared and crusted hands stuffed them into his mouth, one-fisted.
She looked at Rien while he ate, and Rien nodded. "You were right."
Perceval smiled at her, and handed her another serving of kudzu leaves. Rien rolled them into tubes and gnawed, chewing as if the sharp green taste could drive the flavor of ammonia from her throat. "Space," she said, softly as if that meant that only Perceval would hear her, "how long do you think he was locked in there?"
"Let's get clean," Perceval answered, and Rien began circumventing locks.
It took them three hours to clear the overgrowth away from enough washrooms to find a working shower, but as soon as they found it, they looked at each other and at their new companion, and sighed. Perceval coaxed his blindfold off—he held onto it at first, emaciated fingers wrapped through the band—and Rien adjusted the sonics and the fine, warm fog in the stall.
"It's even hot," she said, trying not to sound envious.
"You'll get your turn," Perceval answered without rancor. "Let's see if we can find him something to wear."
They were not the only things that rustled among the kudzu, but whatever might have lived there was shy and wary of predators. They could hear little animals skip-hopping ("mice," Perceval said, but Rien said, "toads") and there were insects, which Perceval caught when she could, remembering that they were rich in protein.
As they rummaged through abandoned, vacuum-sealed closets, they found many good things, including unfashionable but warm clothing that would fit a tall, thin man. "Perceval," Rien said after they had given up looking for shoes and sat side by side near the washroom door, "how many of the habitats in the world are deserted?"
"Oh," Perceval said, "I would suppose most of them."
"Where are all the people?"
"Dead," Perceval said. Rien's fingers tightened on her wrist, driving nails into the skin, and Perceval flinched and tried to find an honest way to soften that news. As if she had meant to, she continued, "Or congregated in a holde, more rarely a domaine. There were a lot more of us, in the moving times."
Behind the door, the sound of sonics stopped.
"Are we dying?"
"Yes," Perceval said. She stood, as the door opened, and extended an armload of soft shirts, underthings, and coveralls to the man—
She stopped short, her arms bent under the flat-palmed offering.
She'd thought his skin chalky with layered guano and lack of sun, his hair white and caked with the same limy excrement.
But no.
Clean, he was whiter. Blue-skinned in the filtered light through the overhead, his hair sculptured from ice-white curls, his beard still long but washed now. Perhaps he had not found a depilatory, but he had found a comb, and an elastic. He wore a towel wrapped at his waist, and the stub of his sword protruded from it.
His hair, braided, still hung most of the way down his back now that it was clean. Looking at it, thinking of what it must have taken to clean it, Perceval was grateful for the loss of her own. The stubble would be easier to scrub out.
He smelled not at all of ammonia.
And the eyes that met Perceval's were ice-blue, faintly luminescent with the same blueness that stained her own veins, in his case unalloyed by pigment.
"Thank you," he said, his voice creaky and cracking but perfectly intelligible. He reached out to take the heap of clothing. His warm, moist fingertips brushed Perceval's.
"Lord Tristen," Rien said. Stammered, really. "You're meant to be dead."
And while Perceval looked at Rien in disbelief, Tristen Conn said, "Do I... know you?" and Rien reached out to steady herself against the wall.
That night, they camped in a kitchen with a stove, and they had hot soup for dinner. The cooking surface didn't work at first, but thanks to her spontaneous mechanical knowledge, Rien repaired it. Gavin curled up in the corner, the tip of his tail in an electrical socket, though Perceval thought he was only pretending to doze.