Grail - Elizabeth Bear [93]
Ariane, her beloved’s half sister. Ariane, the worst of the Conns. Ariane, whose preserved and flattened ghost inhabited Perceval’s own mind, controlled and caged away, yet who seemed to have left another ghost, another revenant, loose in the world to wreak havoc and spread despair. If she had done so, she had wiped her own memory of the backup, or Perceval would have inherited that also.
Although Perceval had to admit, she had failed somewhat, out of distaste. She had not interrogated Ariane as completely as she should have, and even if overwritten with something innocuous to cover the hole, an erased memory could potentially leave a discontinuity.
That might tell them when she had made the backup. Which would in turn tell them where to start looking.
“She’s in my head,” Perceval said. “I suppose I shall have to find out what she knows about it. But I want you and Benedick here when I do it.”
Tristen nodded again. “Benedick will want a piece of her—for Caitlin’s sake and for Rien’s. And for you as well. But he’ll also know he’s emotionally compromised, and he won’t ask to be sent after her.”
“You think I should send him after her anyway.”
“No one is more dogged than Benedick. Or more dangerous when roused.”
“Tristen Tiger is,” she said, reaching across her own chest and left arm to brush her fingertips across his shoulder.
He leaned into the contact. “Tristen Conn is old and tired, My Lady. His claws are blunted and his teeth show yellow in receding gums. But in so long as you need one, I shall be thy tiger. I will find where Ariane has gone to ground, and I will reclaim your mother’s blade, and I will find what she plans for the Bible.”
He paused and took a breath, another. Knowing Tristen, knowing how he nerved himself to speak, Perceval gave him time. Finally, he began, “The Fisher King and his folk …”
“I know,” she said. “Every day they spend with us, the welcome will grow a little cooler, the willingness to share their world a little more remote. If we wish their permission, we will have to change to suit them.”
“It would disappoint the Builders,” Nova said, not so much startling Perceval as reminding her of her presence.
It had become easy to forget the Angel was there—something that never would have happened fifty years before. But now she was as neutral as blood-warm distilled water—a part of the environment. Unremarkable.
“The Builders believed in evolution over all,” Perceval said, “except where they were hypocrites about it. We’ll adapt. If they can be convinced to accept us, we’ll find a niche and exploit it.”
On his indrawn breath, Tristen seemed to swell. She felt him hold it and release before he spoke with resigned formality. “Well, if it comes right down to it, how do they propose to stop us from coming down? We are a war they cannot win.”
“I do not want to kill them,” Perceval said. “I want to prove to them that we, too, have grown from what we were.”
Tristen nodded. “Good luck,” he said.
It was not sarcasm.
While Perceval prepared herself for the task she so patently dreaded, Tristen took it upon himself to contact the most trusted members of the command crew and alert them to the possibility of a rogue revenant at large. He called Benedick in advance of any other, as per his Captain’s wishes. But then he contacted Mallory and Head, amused that his confidence did not extend first to any member of the Conn family but rather to creatures created by them, or evolved in response to the extremes of their creations. Head was a living tool, wrought by Cynric and blessed with free will to a specific task, and Mallory was an immortal with a head stuffed to creaking with the dead—memories recorded and transferred with Conn-derived alien technology: the colonies Cynric had stolen and reengineered.
Mallory took his suggestion calmly, and—surprising Tristen—suggested that the Angel Samael not yet be informed. Given Samael’s history with Ariane, it was probably wisest—and it would prevent Perceval having