Somewhere in all Mallory"s stolen memories there must be some of this house and Heaven, because Gavin was surprised when they turned in the opposite direction from where his internal map indicated that their destination lay. In the Rule of Gavin"s uneasy knowledge, access to central biosystems had not been located in the Commodore"s chambers. But the Commodore"s chambers themselves were in the same place, so changes to layout were likely to have been cosmetic.

Gavin wasn"t privy to the transmission, but Mallory said, "Tristen"s at the stair" just as Head unlocked the door to the Commodore"s quarters.

Head twisted, one hand still on the handle, the oft-repaired panel held open a crack. Sie glanced back the way they had come, an artist"s study in conflict. The mastiff curve of hir heavy neck, the longing stare-that burned familiar yet elusive in Gavin"s memory also.

It troubled him. He was a machine intelligence. His was not an organic memory, lossy and p.r.o.ne to gaps and iterative errors. There should be nothing in his experience that he could not recall with the definition and precision of a holographic recording.

He"d been here before. He knew it. He knew Head.

And yet, he had never been here before. And he could tell from the caution with which sie approached their interactions that Head did not know him.

"Go on," Mallory urged, a hand lightly on Head"s wrist. "We can take it from here. See to the Prince on his Homecoming."

Head"s evident reluctance should have been comical, except that Gavin had witnessed the grim determination with which sie defended the lives in hir charge. "I should-"

"The Prince will forgive you leaving us unescorted," Mallory said gently, "in the face of exigencies, and the shortness of your staff. I believe he will be grateful to find that any survivors remain at all. You have given extraordinary service, Head."

Gavin resettled his wings, a triple-flip that left the feathertips crossed in the opposite direction from before, and leaned a shoulder against Mallory"s ear.

"Well," Head said, wavering on hir feet like an indecisive pendulum. "You are the Prince"s servants, on the Prince"s business-"

Mallory did not correct hir, and even laid an unnecessary warning hand over Gavin"s feet. "We can find our way."

Head twisted both hands in hir ap.r.o.n. "Mind you don"t move things around. There might be something in there of the old Commodore"s, or Lady Ariane"s, that the Prince will want."

"Indeed, good Head," Mallory said, and swept hir away with a bow that made the stout housekeeper giggle like a child.

Not until sie had vanished down the corridor and they were well inside the door did Gavin say, very quietly, "Angel?"

Mallory tickled the feathers alongside his neck. "I heard."

"You suppose something held on inside the static field? Something not the angel?"

The necromancer, moving rapidly through lushly comfortable surroundings, made a noncommittal noise. "Back here, do you suppose?"

"It would explain why parts of the world are going dark to communications," Gavin said, and added, "Nova will eat it if it finds it."

"Then maybe Nova shouldn"t find it. Oh, look, a concealed door. It can"t be ident.i.ty-coded; the new Commodore has to be able to win entrance after the death of the old one, so the world wouldn"t permit it. What do you suppose Alasdair would choose for a code?"

The entrance was not heavily concealed. It had been hidden behind a facade and a screen of greenery, but acceleration forces had smashed the plants and cracked the paneling, leaving the armored door obvious to casual inspection.

Gavin c.o.c.ked his head at the seal. No, this hadn"t been there before, according to his fragmented memories. But Alasdair Conn, in his own way, had been a predictable man.

"Cecelia," Gavin said, without hesitation. "Open the door."

If his hearing apparatus had been made of membrane and bone, he would have winced as hard as Mallory did at the grinding noise that followed. The structure was plainly warped, but the servos struggled valiantly against the damage. The door jerked along its track, finally sticking fast when it had opened a spare half meter. Beyond it, Gavin could see a second door, this one old-fashioned and constructed with a single lever handle, its finish tarnished by the rub of many hands.

Mallory had to crane to do it, but managed to offer Gavin a respectful stare nonetheless. "That wasn"t your memory, you jumped-up power tool."

"It"s mine now."

"Cecelia, as in Alasdair"s second wife?"

Gavin fanned pale wings for balance. "It didn"t end well."

Mallory pushed against the concealed door. It had been repaired many times and no longer operated automatically. But expert counterweighting ensured that, despite its ma.s.s, it swung open lightly to Mallory"s exertion.

The chamber within was small, a sanctum with a single "chair"-of sorts-sculpted of the living earth of the deck. The seat had humped arms, a high back that sloped like a pyramid, and a surface upholstered in deep, springy gra.s.s. One soft light shone down on it from above, filtered as if through leaves. A mirror hung before it, the surface lightly rippling in response to every vibration and change of air pressure as they moved into the room. It all could have been the throne room of some nature deity.

This was not the complex of labs and cloning tanks that haunted Gavin"s borrowed memories. He craned over his shoulder, wishing Head were still close enough to ask, but sie was long gone. Instead, Gavin hopped to the back of the chair and turned to face Mallory, slightly surprised when the necromancer did not sit. Instead, much circling ensued, Mallory circ.u.mnavigating the tiny chamber and trailing fingers along the walls. "Is this isolated as well?"

"If the door were shut," Gavin answered. "Is it safe to seal ourselves in?"

"Is anything?" Mallory crossed to the chamber door and tugged it until the latch clicked. Arms crossed, leaning against the now-seamless panel, Mallory said, "You can come out now. We won"t hurt you."

No answer but silence.

The necromancer sighed, stretched arms wide like a dramatized conjuror, and arched fingers back until Gavin heard the joints crack. "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

"There could be dozens of angel fragments lurking in shielded corners of the world," Gavin said. "They may not have any awareness to speak of. They may have had everything consumed but their purpose, or some sc.r.a.p of ident.i.ty, or-"

"The ghosts of angels," Mallory said. "Their revenants."

"Junk DNA," Gavin said. "Fragments of rea.s.sorted viruses." Gavin felt the earth of the throne separate beneath scoring talons. The colony within it moved to heal the damage at once, gra.s.s growing cleanly over the cuts. "What a stroke of good fortune we thought to bring along a necromancer," he said. Then he settled back smugly, neck drawn in a tight S-curve, and added, "He"s in the throne."

"Well then. It remains to lure him out." Mallory moved forward and stroked the gra.s.sy arm of the chair.

"The fragmentary angel? The same fragmentary angel, do you suppose?"

"A fragmentary angel. Once we get him out, we can ask if it"s the same one who is haunting the kitchen." Mallory crouched before the throne and dug the fingers of both hands into the earth with a grimace. "Come out, come out, wherever you are-"

When the necromancer drew back cupped, separated hands, something shimmered between them. A swirl of nanotech, a tiny fragment of a colony. Maybe-just maybe-the sc.r.a.p of an angel. Tautly, as if breath control were necessary to keep from blowing the fragile thing away, Mallory said, "Gavin? He would get lost in me."

Gavin shook out his wings in discontent, tail coiling against the backslope of the throne. Mallory was asking him to take in the broken colony, shelter it among his own symbiont, give it strength and a place to grow until they could recompile and reboot it. "You think you know who that is."

"I think if it fought off a plague, then it"s likely Samael. I think we need to get him safely away, and retrieve the rest of what"s left of him, before Tristen sits in this chair."

"You hope it"s Samael."

"Who else would think to use a kitchen in Rule and the shielded biosystem core as his refuge of last resort?"

Gavin hopped closer, down to the edge of the seat, but did not reach out to sweep the colony to his breast. "What if it"s Asrafil?"

Mallory held up the hands, the angel cradled between them. "Then, sweetheart, you eat him."

In the courtyard of Rule, Tristen Conn had to stop and lean against an olive tree. He could make a pretense that it was the ache of mending bones that led him to prop himself against a trunk just as cracked, but the truth was that being here hurt worse than any of the damage from the acceleration tank.

Some of what hurt was the quiet, the way the uncollected olives indented the healing earth beneath his soles. And some of what hurt was the Homecoming, after so much lost and so many years gone by. Neither one seemed likely to respond to anything so simple as medication and meditation, the symbiotic and mental discipline that had seen him through years in the dark. He felt his colony race to normalize his neurochemical load, support the limbic system and blood sugar levels, maintain blood pressure and heart rate. It was an electrochemical mask of serenity, a cloak over the fury and grief he would have chosen otherwise to feel.

He crouched, long, aching legs folding awkwardly, and raked his hands through ragged gra.s.s. Tangled strands encircled his finger joints, stretching and parting when he tugged. The gra.s.s remained perfectly manicured-the ghostly machine gardeners setting things right even when there were no overseers to direct them.

Rule"s maintenance colony-which should be possessed by Nova now, and inexplicably wasn"t-tickled the edges of Tristen"s own. He found the resilient ovals of two ripe, silver-black olives in the gra.s.s, rolled them between his fingers, and picked them up.

If he put them in his mouth in this state, just as they were off the tree, the alkalinity would pucker his mucous membranes and burn his tongue. Inedible unless processed-well, no: edible, perhaps, if you were Exalt, but Tristen was not that desperate now-and still the staff of life. Someone, sometime, had figured out how to render this tiny, loathsome fruit into delicious and essential oil and flesh. The olive, far from being vile, was transformed by technology and ingenuity into a resource so indispensable as to be regarded as sacred by every ancient culture that had encountered it.

He leaned against the trunk of the olive tree once more and dented the flesh of its fruit with his nail. When he was young, he and Aefre had dared each other to chew unprocessed olives from these selfsame trees, to hold them in their mouths as long as they could stand the bitterness. The first time she"d kissed him had not been beneath this tree-it had been in the hallway near the kitchens, and afterward she"d claimed a lock of his hair as her prize. But this was where they had married, under their father"s gaze, and this was where the procession that had carried her body down into the graveyard of the holdes had departed Rule. And it was here, on this very spot, that Bened.i.c.k had executed Cynric, and her blood had soaked the gra.s.s under his feet.

A ghost of her colony might still inhabit the colony in the earth here, in the flesh of the fruit in his hand.

In a moment, Tristen would collect his thoughts, collect himself, and walk forward into Rule. He would pa.s.s down the hall, and the portraits of his brothers and his sisters, living and dead, including the three that his father had ordered turned and nailed to the wall. And he would come face-to-face with what he feared most-the black-draped one of Aefre, leaning on a scabbarded sword almost as tall as she, her hair falling across her forehead in springy coils like yellow ribbon stripped against a blade.

He wasn"t sure yet how he would look at her, when he pa.s.sed. He would deal with that in a moment. Just as soon as his legs stopped aching quite so much.

He was still leaning against the olive tree-gathering himself, surely that was all-when Head came to greet him. As with so many things, he could have predicted exactly how it played out. Sie was still Head-virtually unchanged from the images stored in his symbiotic memory, except for having grown slightly stouter and slightly more lined, and Tristen thought the ap.r.o.n was new. That was to be expected, though. A Mean who was so valued by hir masters as Head was-and always had been-could expect a life as indeterminate as an Exalt"s. And Head had never quite been a Mean like others, being as perfect for hir job as Cynric had made hir-back when Cynric made so many things.

Head still bustled as Head always had. Short steps bobbed hir briskly over the pavement and then the lawn. Sie plowed up to him like a cargo tug, stopped abruptly enough that hir toes furrowed the earth underneath, and-fists on hips-glared up at him until Tristen expected hir to reach right up, stand on tiptoe, and twist his earlobe between chastising fingers.

"h.e.l.lo, Head," he said, holding out his right hand.

There was a long pause. Then sie muttered "s.p.a.ce you!" and threw hirself into his arms.

It might have been ridiculous-Tristen was half a meter taller-but the tears that wet the breastplate of his armor between hir clutching fists were anything but humorous. So he wrapped his arms around Head"s head and hir stout shoulders, took a deep breath, and said, "There, there."

Having lost something, lost it, he thought, forever, lost everything good it ever brought into his life, he knew that sometimes it could be easier to simply let it go. To choose to remember only what was dreary, or terrible, so he did not feel the loss so acutely. For a long time, all he had permitted himself to remember of Rule was the storms of his father"s house, the rages, the broken bones and savage politics, the funerals. The feel of family blood across his knuckles.

But that was not all there had ever been, and standing here under this broken tree, he found he remembered some of that now, as well.

He was taking a breath to tell Head so when sie tilted hir head back, stared up past his chin, and said-as clearly as if hir eyes were not still inflamed with weeping-"I thought the b.i.t.c.h had killed you."

Tristen stroked hir hair. "She tried. She didn"t know her own limits, that was all." Then he put hir back at arm"s length. "I"m First Mate now, Head."

"I know. Your necromancer told me," sie said, provoking a slow blink while Tristen wondered exactly when it was that he"d grown a personal necromancer. "Come on. You must be famished. Come inside."

The walk through the doors was as weird as he"d antic.i.p.ated. A Homecoming. If Rule had ever been home, precisely.

Well, it was not as if he-unlike Bened.i.c.k-had found another.

Head had recovered hirself, and though Tristen could read hir micromovements well enough to tell that sie was resisting the urge, sie did not take his elbow to steer him. "The house is in disarray. Please do not believe that what you will see is the normal state of affairs, sir. Things have not fallen so far from that to which you were accustomed." Sie hesitated, as if considering how to broach a delicate subject.

"Head," Tristen said. "You need never temporize with me."

"We are twelve," sie said, after an additional weighty pause. "There were twenty who escaped with me to the kitchens, but-"

"Acceleration trauma?"

Sie nodded. "I had no warning, sir. And even if I had, there were no tanks accessible."

Tristen would have touched hir shoulder, but the moment for that was past. It would be an affront to hir dignity now, and intimation that Tristen did not believe in hir strength and professionalism. Now he was lord, and sie was servant.

Still, he could not quite believe that sie was apologizing to him for saving twelve lives out of twenty-one, under impossible circ.u.mstances.

"Head."

Sie turned to him, eyes big, and he wondered-not for the first time-how he could be both things to hir: Tristen, whose wedding sie had catered; and Prince Tristen, lord of the House of Rule. "Lord?"

There were so many things he could say and only one of them would be the best one. Too much consideration before continuing would only feed hir worry. "When you have done something requiring an apology, I shall demand it. Are we clear?"

Hir hands knotted in the new ap.r.o.n-violet, and very flattering. Hir lips began to shape something. An apology, or he missed his guess. Then sie swallowed hard and said, "Yes, Commodore. Perfectly."

He nudged hir, because he couldn"t resist, and because in the long term he was certain he couldn"t live with this fawning obsequiousness. He thought he"d rather employ revenant servants, like Bened.i.c.k did. And that would be a horror. "There"s a Captain on the bridge now, Head," he reminded, "Call me First Mate."

Sie blanched, as he had known sie would. So he offered a compromise.

"Or just Lord."

"Yes, Lord Tristen," sie said. "I thought I"d show you to your chambers first, and where you could also meet with your servants."

Mine, are they? But he held his peace. If Mallory had practiced deception, Tristen would bring his displeasure to the necromancer"s notice at some convenient time, and it did not need to become Head"s problem. Head had suffered enough of late that Tristen thought it fitting to shield hir a little.

The main hall of Rule was as much of a challenge as he had antic.i.p.ated. Long and dark, echoing with footsteps and paneled in the dark wood of storied Earth, it offered no shelter, either physical or emotional. His chambers, sie said, so glibly.

But what sie meant was his father"s rooms.

And he wondered now-pa.s.sing the portraits of his murdered brothers and sisters, pa.s.sing Aefre"s portrait and the three turned to the wall without a sideways glance, though the muscles in his neck trembled with the effort of ignoring them-how was it possible that the old man still terrified him so? Head did him the politeness of pretending ignorance, for which he was grateful, but they both knew it for kindness instead of truth.

His symbiont would have remembered perfectly what the three effaced portraits had looked like, but Alasdair had ordered all his children to forget, as well, so all Tristen had was the blurred and transitory memories of flesh. Worse, he had seen Caitlin recently and so her adult face-more worn with responsibility, no longer the mask of an impudent, auburn-haired pixie-had overlaid what he remembered of her portrait.

Alasdair was dead and eaten. At the end of the corridor, Tristen hesitated. After a moment, he turned and stalked back.

He paused before the first of the reversed frames and tried to remember what lay behind it. A woman, tall and broad, her body concealed by charcoal, lavender, and violet armor blazoned silver and purple over the heart with a stylized iris. Caithness had held an unblade in one relaxed hand and rested the other on her hip, and her eyebrows had been the same rich brown as her hair. The second frame had also outlined a picture of a woman, but one more different from her sister than Cynric had been from Caithness was hard to imagine. Cynric had been fallow-s.e.xless by choice, like Perceval-tall and spare and bony-chinned, her dark hair falling along either side of her face as if to accentuate the angles. She had been p.r.o.ne to flowing outfits remarkably unsuited for micro-G.

Tristen arrested his hand before it could touch the back of her portrait, aware that Head was staring. He turned away instead and continued with hir down the hall, past all the staring faces of his siblings, dead and living.

By the time they came to the end of the gauntlet, Tristen"s hands were clammy and tendrils of hair stuck unpleasantly to his nape. As Head keyed the lock at the far end, Tristen looked down at the bones of his wrists. "I"m not glad of much that happened in this house," he said. "But I"m glad he"s dead."

Head let hir shoulder brush his sleeve. "So am I. And you know what, Prince Tristen?"

He didn"t correct hir to the less formal t.i.tle. He"d registered his protest. He knew better than to make more of it. "What, Head?"

Sie opened the door and stepped through. "I"m glad that she"s dead, too."

Tristen nodded. They had found something else to agree on. Neither one of them missed Ariane.

He had thought the hall, with its ghosts and memories, would be the hard part. When he thought of Rule, it was the hall he"d recollected-Alasdair"s ringing footsteps, Cynric the Sorceress in her white and gold, a data-etched green sapphire glinting against her nostril as she paced in the midst of guards, dragging the sweep of nanochains. He thought of his father returning from the battle in which he had destroyed his oldest daughter, with Caithness"s black unblade Innocence slung across his shoulder. That blade had eventually been handed down to Ariane, and, with a kind of horrible poetry, come back in her hand to claim Alasdair"s life, as if with Caithness"s death-curse behind it. Yes. The hall, he had a.s.sumed, would be the hard part.

But he"d been wrong. And as soon as Head unlocked the door to the family quarters, he knew it. Because in his memory, these had been the walls and corridors that held every rare happiness of the house. They had burst with family: his father, his father"s women, his brothers and sisters and himself and all their lovers and children.

And now there was him and Head. And every door along the corridor was sealed.