Grail - Elizabeth Bear [53]
Cynric’s sanction left him with a sense of satisfaction he might even have characterized as “warm,” if he understood how humans used the term. (He was also given to understand that humans experienced emotions as physical sensations, which required a certain quality of imagination to comprehend.)
A pair of brilliantly colored birds swooped by overhead. Males, sparring—whether over a mate or territory it was impossible to say, and they were gone too fast for Samael to consider asking them. Cynric craned her head back to watch them swoop and dive over the breadth of the oval commuter shaft. She sighed.
“You never did tell me what the parrotlets were for,” Samael said, sensing an opportunity. “When I was Israfel, and after. They’re more than decorative, I think?”
She might have consumed a bit of his other self when she re-created herself. He wasn’t sure; there was so much inside her, and none of it was reliable. Where Nova had integrated and Perceval had subroutined, Cynric had … splintered.
For a moment, he considered whether he’d pushed too far. But he recollected the basilisk Gavin’s sense of humor and fair play. Some of that—all of that—was subsumed in Cynric. It might come with additional memories and ambitions now, but the core personality was derived from the same algorithms.
Cynric regarded the backs of her hands. When she drew them up, the draped sleeves of her robe fell over them. “They’re to change the future.” She shrugged. “They want to live. And they’re lucky. They have the stuff of Leviathan in them, and the stuff of Leviathan sometimes dreams true. It’s possibly them, their dreams of self-preservation, that have brought us here. Against all odds and the wishes of the Builders.”
“You are,” he said, “a sorceress.”
“So they tell me.” Her sigh, though, was any woman’s, and weary. “And if we don’t wish to disappoint them, we had best be about our work, Archangel Samael.”
If Sparrow Conn was not what she once was, then Dust would have to find someone who was—or, if not what she once was, one who had become something amenable to Dust. Someone he had been avoiding. Someone who had summoned him back from his oblivion, planted the tiny seed of himself in the shape of this toolkit, and let him grow.
Dust was an Angel. He was by nature a servant, even if his service often meant something more like mastery. It was no angel’s fault if flesh was weak, if memory was stronger than mere meat could bear.
This attempt at winning autonomy abandoned, Dust folded back his whiskers and went through tunnels and tightnesses, in search of the mortal remnant of Ariane Conn.
He found it curious that she had left the choice to him, that she had not commanded his attendance but only left in him the knowledge of where to seek her. Perhaps she preferred the possibility of a willing ally to the certainty of a treacherous slave. No fool, she had blocked his ability to reveal that information—but he could find her for his own self well enough.
She was disguised, which was only to be expected. But he knew where to look for her, although it took some time for him to travel by secret ways from the vale of the Edenites to the very heart of Engine.
When he found her, she was lost in the Conn personality she inhabited, bent forward and buried to the opposite shoulder in an access hatch. Leafy fronds surrounded her on every side—two curled tendrils supporting lights, another extended past her head and neck into the same awkward space her arm was jammed into. Three velvet-red snapdragon heads hung over her, their petals folded neatly back into comet shapes of concentration.
Dust paused at the door, observing. The body of the carnivorous orchid was comprised of tubers and sword-shaped leaves, pulled tight together now in deference to the cramped quarters. The body Ariane inhabited lay among those leaves with apparent trust, despite the orchid’s clawed thorns and toothed flower faces.
“Hand me the five-mil spanner,” the host said.