Grail - Elizabeth Bear [117]
He also heard Dorcas’s controlled intake of breath. “May I?”
The fall of Ariane’s hair moved against Dust’s fur as she nodded. “I had expected you would want to. The key to the world is in there. And the Captain is gone; we will never have a better opportunity.”
“Think of all the hands that have touched this.” Gently, Dorcas added her own to the litany. She turned the book to face her and ran the tip of a fingernail down the page. The words were so black, the ink set deep in creamy fibers. “You’ll use this to claim control of the Angel?”
“And the world,” Ariane said. “You and yours must stand ready to fight, once it is done. There are some in Rule and Engine who will oppose us, even when Dust is restored to his rightful place. I brought him back for a reason, and his knowledge of how to use the Bible was one part of it.”
“And you to yours.” Dorcas set the open book back from herself with a fingertip push, releasing its custody to Ariane.
Because Dust nuzzled his patron’s ear, delighted to be remembered, he felt the muscles in her jaw tense with her smile. “This may take a little while.”
“I have nothing but time,” Dorcas answered. She lifted her chin, her eyes unfocusing as if a distant sound had drawn her attention. “Let me find you a chair.”
The sound of the firearm was lost to the sound of the thunder, but Tristen Conn would not have been Tristen Conn if he had not seen the flesh of his niece’s torso leap back around the point of impact—the shock wave ripple through her—and automatically turned away from her collapsing form to track the trajectory of the bullet to its firing point.
“There’s a gun!” he shouted, while Perceval accordioned into a puddle. Tristen lunged forward, to and through the assembled dignitaries, desperately missing his armor and half aware with his peripheral senses that Captain Amanda—with a weapon in her hand—lagged only a few steps behind.
Danilaw never saw where the shot was fired from. One moment he was moving forward to facilitate the meeting of ship’s Captain and City Administrator, the next he was watching in horror as Perceval slumped to the tarmac, blood leaking from her body front and back to stain the rainwater and the asphalt a ropy, luminous blue.
He did see the warriors move. Barely, for Tristen and Amanda were there, and then they were gone. The echo of their footsteps lingered only a moment longer as they pushed through the group and stretched out, running hard through the rain.
With the curious detachment of crisis, Danilaw found himself wondering how the hell anybody had managed to sight through the wind and the rain, never mind hitting what they were aiming for. But curiosity didn’t stop him from doing what was needful.
He dropped to his knees in two centimeters of water and started pushing Perceval’s clothes aside, looking for the entrance and the—presumed—exit wounds.
A moment, and Gain was beside him, tearing cloth in her haste. Danilaw found the deceptively tiny puncture at the bottom of the alien architecture of Perceval’s rib cage, the slow meandering ooze of cobalt telling him the worst was elsewhere. He raised her shoulder—she made a noise of pained protest, his first clue that she was conscious and alive—and with groping fingers he outlined the exit wound high on her back, and felt the hiss of air against his fingers as she struggled to breathe.
“Shit,” he said.
He doubled his fist—unclean, unsterile, but there was time to worry about that later—and pushed it hard into the injury. The wound—wet and sucking—swallowed his fist.
When Danilaw was still in secondary education, he’d satisfied his economic Obligation on a fishing trawler. It was safer and more sustainable than it had been in millennia past, but it would never be the sort of work