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By Root 854 0

as a pet; the theft and destruction of Oliver’s lover; the endless torments heaped upon long-suffering Head, who existed—who had been created—only to please the folk of Rule. Status as a valued servant was not sufficient to protect anyone from Ariane—Doctor and Vintner and others had suffered as well. Alasdair would not have permitted Ariane to interfere with their duties, but given an adequacy of spite and invention, it was not hard for Ariane to make herself a figure of dread and loathing to all and sundry, from highest to most low. Rien, it seemed, had been beneath Ariane’s notice until she was called to serve Perceval, and for that Perceval was grateful. But no one who caught Ariane’s attention escaped unscathed.

But the information she needed was in here somewhere, and she would find it if she must pull each atom of her enemy’s memory from the next and disassemble them all for the component parts.

She’d expected Ariane to fight the integration more vigorously, and indeed her remnant tried. But Perceval had grown stronger and more skilled than when last they fought, and it turned out to be a trivial matter to defeat her ancient enemy again. But the ease of the victory, she thought bitterly, was more than made up for by the distastefulness of the task.

Perceval was examining the record of a monster, and felt lessened for wading through it—and the more so for each bit she plucked, disassembled, and consumed. How was she different from Ariane if she took such pleasure in destroying Ariane?

Examining each bit for the discontinuity was like running her fingers over a polished surface, feeling for the bit of roughness, the seam, the snag. Ariane would have hidden it well, if she were hiding it even from herself. As one would; one did not hide one’s soul away to ensure one’s immortality and then blithely advertise the location.

She found it, at long last, in Rule. There, among the netted bodies, the victims of the engineered influenza that Ariane had used Perceval herself as a vector for, there was a flutter. Not even a skip, but a—a discontinuity. A repetition in the pattern of breaths, in the images of contorted bodies and dead faces.

Time excised and filled up with other time.

“Gotcha,” Perceval whispered. Wild exultation filled her, but she fought it back and adjusted her chemical balance. She didn’t want to feel this joy now, surrounded by the stench and the memory of the dead.

And then she winced, because she realized what it indicated. If the skip was in Rule, at that particular time and place, that meant that Ariane’s Trojan Horse personality was embedded in somebody who had been present in Rule at that time. Which meant one of two places, because if Ariane had copied herself into the surviving splinter of Samael, Nova would have found it when she vetted the contents of his program. That left Head, or one of the members of her staff that she had managed to rescue—

—or the body of Oliver Conn, resurrected now and repurposed to hold the personality of the long-dead Astrogator, Damian Jsutien.

“Shit,” Perceval said—or mouthed, rather, there being no atmosphere to carry the vibrations. Reaching out, she tapped on the library’s external hull.

“Nova?” she said, when the Angel reestablished contact. “I think I’m ready to come out.”

Through the host Conn’s night, while the host slept and Ariane used the body to study, Dust washed his paws and watched the door. His patron rarely said anything, rarely rose from her chair. Instead, she sat before the massive swell of the ancient book, a papery rasp revealing each turned page.

She was not reading. Or rather, she was reading, but she was not reading the words written in ink. There was other information there, leaved through the pages on circuit boards mere molecules thick, wired into the spine on data-jewels that had endured for generations.

Night after night, Ariane—in her borrowed body—figured out the access, learned the technology, unlocked the coding, and bored into the guts of the antediluvian computer. And night after night, Dust sat on the perch by the door