And then he said, "You know they only want to use you. The way they used Perceval."
And his tone—hopeful, light, disingenuous—was the clue that triggered Rien to angry speculation. She came up to him with quick small steps, the decking stinging her bare, moisture-softened feet. "And are you the angel who poisoned us?"
"Poisoned you?"
"Poisoned Perceval," she said. "With an influenza virus. And then arranged for her to be captured by Ariane."
This smile made his lined face shine. "If I had," he said, "why in the world would you think I'd admit it so easily?"
They interpermeated.
Perceval had just time to realize that Dust was enfolding her, drawing her out of her body and into the shadow-light fretwork of the parasite wings, and then she was as free of her body as any devil coughed loose in an exorcism. She imagined her consciousness floating up her own throat, exhaled on a cloud of sunlit particles, swirling into the presence of the angel.
And then they were together. Meshed, reinforcing and canceling in an interference pattern, bars of brilliance and darkness. Perceval was clear of thought, simultaneously purged of the chemical cocktail with which Pinion had tried seducing her and lifted from the framework of her own flesh. She diffused into him, wondering how long it had taken Pinion to duplicate the patterns of her thought and personality, and how she would know if they had been subtly—or not so subtly—changed.
"Come with me," Dust said, and now he was a gossamer presence, a breath of air upon a neck she didn't have. He guided her, and she went with him, feeling small in the shadow of his wings. They reached out, a lightspeed flicker, closer than flying feathertip to feathertip.
And found themselves in Rule.
Or what remained of it.
"Your doing," Dust said, and Perceval might have quailed, had she not been a perfect and unemotional machine.
He showed her death; he showed her the toll of war; he showed her what it was to be an angel, and adrift.
They moved like ghosts among the dead, distributed consciousnesses floating in a fall of dust. Perceval understood that it was dangerous to be so far attenuated, that there were angels that hunted angels, but Dust had left this portion of his substance in place for a long time, and he felt his was as safe as leaving one's stronghold could ever be.
"I ward your body," he said, and if she reached back far enough she could feel it, a mortal tether floating among the lattices of the world.
She did not have his knack of distributing consciousness over the entire network. She could switch back and forth between images, conscious of a lightspeed lag measured in fractions of fractions, and even overlay one perspective with the other, but the effortlessness with which Dust managed his gestalt focus was beyond her.
She could, however, feel the dark patches, the vast swaths of the Jacob's Ladder that were outside of Dust's control, or simply dead, gangrenous flesh still grafted to the moribund world as it rotted in pieces.
"Still only human," he told her. "This is what it means to be my captain, beloved."
She explored the limits of this new capability, wondering if there was a tool here that could be used as a weapon against him, trying to hide the thought. She might have been successful; in any case, if he saw it, he did not respond.
Instead, Dust brought Perceval through Rule, and showed her the bodies of the Mean. They were netted and roped outside the air locks, frozen far more crudely than the ones in the holde. Like fish in nets, she thought. There must be dozens of dead. Hundreds.
It should have chilled her, if she were in her own flesh, but she was beyond chill. She could count them, exactly, if she wished. She could brush her fringes over each of the dead and know that person, and bear witness to their illness and agony.
Cowardly, she turned away, and went within the halls of Rule, accompanied by Dust.
Here, a few still walked. Some Mean, still wasted and shuffling with exhaustion in their slow unaugmented recovery from the illness Perceval had brought them. Some Exalt, with the flat eyes of the resurrected. And some Exalt, who must have lived.
Among them, Ariane, who stood in a luxuriously appointed chamber, two gray-faced servants by her side, arraying her for battle.
Perceval braced for a flush of rage and terror, but felt no such thing. Chemical, all chemical. And if it did rise, back in the belly of her cold body, it barely brushed her here.
"Take me," Dust said, "and I will help you defeat Ariane. Be my captain, and help me stand against the angel who is her ally."
"And what angel is that?" It was a strange sensation, to float at her Enemy's shoulder unnoticed. Witchcraft.
"Astafil, the Angel of Blades."
"While we are here beside her," Perceval asked, "why not just block her throat, kill her now?"
"Asrafil," Dust repeated. "We move subtly, now, and go unnoticed. The world swarms, and not even an angel can inspect every nanobot that crawls within its sphere. But if we moved against her, he would know."
Perceval watched as Ariane drew her unblade and cut passes in the air with it. If she followed her thread back to her own body, she could imagine fear at the sight. "Who is she going to war with? Surely not Engine. Not with her forces so depleted."
"No," Dust whispered in her ear. Perceval slid back into her body with a sense of impact, awash in sick meat and chemical deception. Her fingers curled in distaste. "She's coming here, Perceval. To devour you, and conquer me."
24 Vessel
We are like searchers in a house
of darkness,
A house of dust; we creep with
little lanterns,
Throwing our tremulous arcs of light
at random.
Samael waited while the resurrectee brought Rien clothing, in which she dressed as quickly as she could, even to the paper shoes. Then the resurrectee took her wrist again and led her to a door. From the silence of the medical bay, Rien emerged into soft-spoken chaos.
She had known Engine was a city, but a glimpse of its vast spaces while being borne in on a stretcher was profoundly different from stepping out the hatchway, flanked by a resurrectee on one side and the Angel of Death on the other, and being confronted by the sweep of unfettered space. Her earlier head-spinning glimpses could not prepare her for this.
The holde might have rivaled a small city on Earth, she thought, though neither she nor Ng had personal experience to compare. Still, she felt she stood at the bottom of a bowl—but she would have felt that no matter where she stood. The space was a bubble, and the gravity must be directional, because she could see the structures rising from the walls as if from solid deck, all of them shining in pearlescent pastels, each tapered and prickling toward the center, so the whole bore a resemblance to a pin cushion turned inside-out.
And the streets, and the space between the walls, were filled with traffic. For the first time, the existence of Perceval's wings made logical sense to Rien; she watched Engineer after Engineer flit from one side of the void to the other, and thought how long it would take to walk around.
There were spanning cables as well, and cars moving along them, but why walk (or drive) if you could fly?
She would have expected noise, echoes filling the cavernous space, but the structures must have been designed to absorb sound. If anything, the street was hushed, voices falling off within a few steps, footsteps inaudible. It made the bustle eerie, like watching vids with the sound turned down to a whisper.