Grail - Elizabeth Bear [94]
Head surprised him more. He would have thought hir beyond overwrought emotional demonstrations, possibly beyond fear. But the mention of Ariane’s name and the suggestion that she might be returned brought blanched cheeks and denials. Head had known Ariane better than any of them, and dealt with her more personally and in more detail, which could account for a good deal of hir refusal to believe that the most sociopathic of Conns had returned to wreak havoc again.
When sie had done wringing hir hands, however, sie folded them together and said grimly, “Well, the unlamented Princess Ariane aside—begging your pardon, Prince Tristen—it’s clear that, whatever else is going on, we’ve a bad enemy at large and no mistake.”
“No mistake at all,” Tristen responded. Head might not be overly good at anticipating, identifying, and accepting threats, but sie was more than competent to handle the actual disaster in progress with aplomb. “I trust you will be alert to any evidence.”
“Alert and more than alert,” Head said. “Prince Tristen—”
“Yes, Head?”
“Take care of my Captain.”
The first decision Perceval faced was the need to choose a place in which to work. There would have been a certain poetry in using the Captain’s chair, when Ariane had fought with such monomania to claim it, but that chair had too much other and bloody symbolism, even if Perceval only meant to use it as an icon of authority. And Perceval—who had fought her cousin twice to claim it—found she wished to face Ariane this time not as Captain, not even as hopeful claimant to the chair, but as her mother’s daughter.
Vengeance repaired nothing. It replaced nothing. It wrought nothing anew—except the vengeance itself. It was only vengeance, and the splinter of Ariane that Perceval carried within herself was not even the splinter that had planned the attack, carried it out, and killed Caitlin Conn—all assuming Tristen was correct in his deductions, which was by no means a given.
But both fragments were related; both were remainders of the same woman who had destroyed Rule, who had crippled Perceval and shamed her, who had set in motion so many of the schemes and treacheries that Perceval and her family and allies were still paying for. They must share continuity of experience to a certain point, and at that point—where they had divided—lay the key to uncovering where the wicked Conn’s wicked twin was hid.
Perceval left her Bridge and walked instead down the lengthy access corridor. Measured footsteps rang on the deck, carrying her past the niche where the paper Bible sat no longer—good riddance, she should not think—past the seamed, rough-patched section where the Deckers’ breach had been repaired, and past the antechambers sown with sunflowers and all manner of bright things. She stopped by the lift, contemplated the moment, and stepped inside.
It carried her down. Well, not down, precisely, but in, further toward the world’s center of mass and rotation—which the Bridge lingered close beside already. Bridge, Perceval thought, unaccountably cheered by the wordplay, is only one letter from Bride.
And there, at the world’s center of gravity, Perceval walked across the naked breast of the Enemy, herself naked and unarmored. She did not need to travel far. Just a revolution or two, until she found a small, dead-chilled anchore, its deep seams and cracks still full of traces of ice that had not yet sublimated. It had no hatches, no air locks, no visible means of entrance. It had nothing but the chains and cables that connected it to the world—links thick as Perceval’s waist; cables braided of carbon monofilament and titanium—and the weight of ice within.
Trivial enough matters to the Captain of the world.
Perceval laid her hand flat on the surface of the capsule. Moist skin would have frozen there, but Perceval’s skin was dry. “Nova,” she said. “Open this and