Grail - Elizabeth Bear [69]
Cynric might have been hard at work. She might have been napping on her feet. It was possible, Tristen admitted, pausing just inside the threshold of the door that had slipped open for him as automatically as if he were invited, that she had learned a way to manage both at once, sleeping with one side of her brain at a time like a cetacean. He did not think he’d ever seen her lie down to rest, or even claim a need for it.
But then, she was Cynric the Sorceress—or she was all that was left of what had been Cynric the Sorceress—and she was as much Engine as Engineer.
“Hello, Tristen,” she said without turning. Her head was tilted back on her long neck, the long almond-shaped eyes closed so her lashes smudged her cheeks, her hair—straight as Perceval’s, and browner—trailing across her loose robes to fall the length of her spine. “You have brought something of mine?”
“I think it’s ill or injured.” He came up beside her, extending the transparent clamshell in which he’d nested the parrotlet. It lay amid fleece like an icing decoration on meringue, green on white with its tiny head tucked close to the body, its papery eyelids closed over eyes round as beads.
“Hacked,” she said, accepting the package. It opened at her touch, and she gently insinuated her fingers under the bird’s still form. “How odd. This isn’t the first time anyone has brought me one of these.”
She lifted the tiny thing and put its head in her mouth, then removed it—damp—and frowned. “It’s been cut off from the rest, poor thing. Somebody who should be performing his own research is attempting to ride my labcoattails, Prince Tristen.”
The shake of her head made her eyes catch the light, and the stud through her nose glowed dimly—the same pale green as the parrotlet. Tristen watched as it shuddered, raised its head slowly, and shook itself as if awakening from a hard dream that had left it logy.
“Hmm,” she said, studying it, then shifted her attention to Tristen. “Thank you. I suppose it will be all right now. Where did you find this?”
“Among a few dozen murdered Deckers.” He handed her a crystal, the same recordings of what he and Mallory had seen that Mallory was delivering to the Captain. She accepted and pocketed it; he had no doubt she would download and integrate the information as soon as he departed. “What could you do with one of those birds? If you were unfriendly to the world, or to its Captain?”
Cynric opened the cage of her fingers and let the bird fly up, circling the irregular outline of her workshop. “They’re a prayer.”
Tristen folded his arms. “I realize,” he said, as jovially as he could manage, “that you have put a great deal of effort and practice into your gnomic utterances, Sister. But I for one would appreciate it if you spoke plainly, just this once.”
She straightened in surprise—not quite a recoil, but a definite reaction—and crunched the clamshell and swaddling between her palms. Her colony—or a colony, in any case; here in her workshop, there might be many—disassembled it promptly. She turned to watch the parrotlet spiraling overhead, her feet bearing her in a crooked circle. Tristen turned merely to watch her turn.
“I put something of the Leviathans’ ability to dream the future in them,” Cynric said. “The parrotlets want to live, you see. And so they help the world live with them. They are a prayer for safety. One that will be listened to.”
“If they were hacked—”
“That one was hacked,” she said. “Hacked and then abandoned.”
“So could someone use them to pray for something else?”
She nodded. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I rather imagine they could.”
13
this lord of grail
All red with blood the whirling river flows,
The wide plain rings, the dazed air throbs with blows.
Upon us are the chivalry of Rome—
Their spears are down, their steeds are bathed in foam.
—MATTHEW ARNOLD, “Tristram and Iseult”
The research scull Quercus