Grail - Elizabeth Bear [131]
And the worm kept gnawing her edges, consuming her and making her its own.
Dorcas found the hilt smooth and neutral, the unblade weightless, inertialess, and all but nonexistent in her hand. She might have recoiled, but Sparrow burned in her with berserk ferocity. No words, just will. Just craving.
Sparrow had held a blade such as this one before. And Sparrow had been Aefre and Tristen’s daughter, raised to the sword from a babe in arms.
Let me, Sparrow said in her heart, a plea for release. Let me. Just now. Let me. I will save you.
Dorcas knew it would not be so easy. The Conn bitch, the Tiger’s daughter, would not go tamely back to her cage once the latch was raised.
But the unblade was familiar in her hand. She knew enough of them to know you didn’t wield one without the training—not if you wanted to bring back a hand still attached to your frame.
But here in this word-wrapped space she and Ariane—this strange Ariane-Dust hybrid, this dragon with eyes of light—inhabited, she also knew that nothing else was going to suffice to kill Ariane. Especially as Ariane had died once already.
Some things only an unblade could sever. The only fear—and she could not tell if it was her concern or Sparrow’s—was that Charity was damaged. Virulent. And Dorcas did not know how to limit its wrath.
She thought of that, and thought of the code running through her blood and bones, sucking the luminescence from her skin. She thought, How ridiculous to worry that the sword might not stop with unraveling Ariane, and was careful not to let the dead Conn in her head overhear her.
All right, Sparrow.
Dorcas’s arm pulled back sharply, then even more sharply extended. There was no sensation of resistance as the ghost of Charity went through the ghost of Ariane.
With the strength of the Book in her blood, and Charity’s voracious virulence trembling in the orbit of every electron, Dorcas reached into space with endless arms and began to take the world apart.
Dust, thought Nova. Her chance was Dust. He was in her as well as without, and if she summoned him out of her integrated core she would have that much more knowledge of how to fight him. She burrowed down and bored through, opening archives she would have preferred stay immured forever, cracking the seals on Dust’s ancient and demented library. He was in there—all his ghosts and legends, all the twisted Gothic nonsense out of which he’d built a realm in the long dreaming time when the broken world orbited the shipwreck stars.
All his stories. All his words. And his words were all he was.
It was a failure of human brain chemistry, and what was an Angel modeled on except a human mind? An Angel was a model of an identity, and so was a human being. In a world where a human’s—even a Mean’s—mental construct of an identity could so trump physical reality that that human would ignore significant health threats in order not to challenge his or her worldview, what was an intelligence except for what it thought it was?
She sucked in what Dust said he was, and what he truly believed. It was old information—no doubt he had evolved from backup, and this iteration would be different than the last because it had been differently affected by the stresses of environment. But it had grown from the same seed.
Still defending her boundaries—no longer parrying, but now withdrawing, flicking the edge of her core out of Dust’s reach like a lady flicking her skirt from a puddle—Nova processed. He ate her away; he wore her down.
It’s now or never, Captain, she said, although Perceval could not hear her.
She needed, desperately, to speak with Perceval.
Then, as if her prayer had been answered, Dust trembled. He shrieked in a voice Nova knew as that of Ariane Conn, and Nova felt her Captain reaching—yearning—toward her through the emptiness.
Tristen was there, and Cynric, and she greeted them. And Perceval, her sweet Perceval. Right there,