Grail - Elizabeth Bear [135]
He felt crisp, razor-fine. Almost no time had elapsed; only long enough for Nova to transmit the data of his personality from one place to another.
That was all he was now.
Data.
Machine memories contained in a machine, all the meat and chemicals stripped away. Mirth was in his hand—a pattern conjured from available materials. His armor rippled about him, flowed and fell, replaced by a shirt and trousers that would serve him just as well against Ariane and her unblade.
He felt the earth spring under his feet as he stepped forward. There was a tent, a Go-Back pavilion. Around it, the Go-Backs arrayed themselves three-deep, their cobras twining their ankles.
Tristen did not have time to fight them. Midstep, he vanished; midstep, he reappeared, inside the pavilion now and still moving. In a glance, he took in the scene; Dorcas doubled over the table, Ariane bending her back, the unblade trapped between them with its blade through Ariane’s un-bleeding body.
Both women were wrapped in a shroud of black language, which clung to their skin and armored them. A broken-spined book lay under Dorcas. Blood dripped into it, filtering between the swirling words to stain the depths of the pages cerulean. Ariane was smiling.
So this, Tristen thought as he stepped to her, was what it felt like to be an Angel.
She lifted Dorcas up and hurled her at him. Dorcas clung to her wrists, trying to control the fight, but Ariane shook her loose. The web of black words stretched between them, separating only reluctantly.
Ariane pulled the unblade from its sheath in her own body. A spill of symbols followed it, blue with blood, but she stopped them effortlessly. Healing the damage done by an unblade. Quite impossible.
Tristen let himself come apart and reform when the body of his daughter had passed through where he was standing. He swung Mirth to and fro with a sound like silk sliced by a razor. When Ariane responded in kind, Charity made no sound at all.
“Remember last time?” Ariane said.
Tristen could have edited the memory as he moved forward, sealing it away. But whatever fear was in it was a friend, for he could use the information on how Ariane had fought before to fight her again.
And this time, he would not be defeated.
Tristen fell apart into ashes, and it was nothing Perceval had not seen before.
She heard Amanda curse and Danilaw gasp, though, and felt their hands on her own limp body, as if by holding her close they could somehow protect her. It was futile and gallant and quintessentially Mean, and she wished for a moment that she could tell them of Rien, whom she had loved—and how desperately just then they reminded her of Rien.
Then, an instant later, she could. Ariane’s attack snapped and faded, whipped back like an electrocuted tentacle, and Perceval raised one hand and put it over Danilaw’s on her shoulder. “I’m all right now,” she said. Tell Tristen his distraction is working.
“Yes and no,” Nova said inside her. “I’m falling apart even faster now. It’s Dorcas, not Ariane, that’s doing it.”
Ariane fought him, and she had strength he did not. But he was Tristen Tiger, and the weightless, soundless clash of Mirth and Charity filled him with the cold and ancient joy of battle. He was not afraid of Ariane Conn.
He would have his payment of her.
The black armor of the Book girding her might have been a defense, but behind him Dorcas rose up and took the pall in her own fists and twisted, hauling. So Ariane fought against her, too, and her arm was impeded.
Tristen found himself stalking her, toying with her. Walking her around the room. He batted Charity aside with the forte of Mirth’s blade and caught her by the throat, full of a cold and potent glee.
An Angel’s wrath, he thought. Or his father’s.
That blunted the edge of his joy. He paused, the blade edge to Ariane’s throat, her arms bound to her sides by Dorcas wrenching on the shroud of writhing symbols. He remembered blindness and pain, and a stinking hole where he had lost himself in the dark. Vengeance,