Grail - Elizabeth Bear [97]
Still Perceval held the dead woman’s memory close, hugged it to her breast, and delved.
The record of a life ill-spent assaulted her. A great deal of what Ariane treasured was simply hellish to Perceval. The memory of her own maiming was in there, Ariane severing Perceval’s great wings with her weightless unblade. The memory of Tristen’s betrayal and incarceration was there as well. Perceval was tempted to tread lightly around the borders of that last. She knew Tristen would not care to be reminded of his decades in durance vile, nor would he care for her to share the details of his internment. But she was the Captain, and she was Caitlin’s daughter, and it was her responsibility to seek the truth under all the layers of sadism that Ariane could load up on it.
She gritted her teeth—literally as well as metaphorically—and plunged into the stinking depths.
Something that was not there, however, was the information she sought. Seamless, all of it, machine memory meshing up perfectly with the edges of fallible chemical memory, or as much of that latter as was recorded in Ariane’s ghost. Perceval waded through treasured, attention-polished images of her own gaunt flyer’s body, cobalt blood laddering down her protruding ribs and vertebrae as if it descended a staircase, dripping with viscous regularity from the thick, ragged stubs of her wings before it groped together like blind fingers and formed seeking tendrils, trying to seal the unhealing wounds. She walked tiptoe between Ariane’s gloating recollections of the netted dead in Rule, epidemic victims bundled and frozen in the bosom of the Enemy for when their bodies might be needed for raw materials or allowed to heal into the mute and servile resurrected. She watched Ariane kill Alasdair and consume his memories and experience with his colony.
She learned what snapped an unblade, as Ariane’s Mercy met Tristen’s black Charity, and both swords threw black sparks and shatterings along the walls of the world. She saw the battle, and she saw that Tristen was clearly the superior swordsman. But it availed him not when Ariane—that treacherous knight—sent her attendant Angel Asrafil into the matrix of Tristen’s sword, possessing the unblade, weakening its structure, and creating a plane of cleavage through the blade so that it broke across the forte. As Tristen reeled back, Ariane struck with the dagger in her left hand and ended the fight—for a time.
She learned, too, that Ariane had blinded Tristen before she locked him away, though she had used only her main gauche to do it and not her unblade, and so after some time the wound had repaired itself. A cruelty at the time—what good were eyes in eternal darkness?—but an unexpected and unintended mercy in the end, when Perceval, Gavin, and Rien had resurrected Tristen from the tomb.
Perceval learned all these things—things she had already known or suspected. She learned them in too much detail, and too well. At first, Ariane twisted against her, tried to hide, but she was proud of her crimes, fulfilled in her evils. She—her remnant—had been alone with them a long time.
There was a part of Ariane that delighted in showing off for Perceval all the wickedness she’d done. It was a new wickedness, and Perceval’s horror and disgust were most satisfying. Ariane gave her more, unable to resist. It is a human need, to see our accomplishments admired.
And Perceval, gritting her teeth, wading in foulness, quailed and encouraged those confidences.
Then, having encouraged Ariane to open up to her, she began picking Ariane apart. She did not care to assimilate her; she did not want this dragon in her head. But she knew now that she no longer dared leave her intact, encysted and virulent. She would have to consume her, truly, and make of Ariane’s twisted self-creation some useful materials out of which to build a richer and wiser self.
She learned a thousand unsuspected but hardly revelatory cruelties, too. The vivisection of a ship cat Chelsea had adopted