He had been half expecting the charge and so was ready for it when it came. Three running footsteps warned them before a stout green-coated person barreled through the door, waving a sizzling, quarter-meter mono-knife like a child slashing at stick-swords. That tool would sever even Gavin's wings, and as he stretched them into filamentous nets and flipped them around the released attacker, he was careful to avoid the edge. Fortunately, the lunging individual had been a Mean until recently, and sie had not yet made sense of hir new body. The nets enmeshed hir, tangled hir wrists and forearms, bound hir hands tight against the hilt of the knife, and slowly dragged them down, however sie might strain.
Muscle and bone were no match for Gavin's strength. Before Mallory stepped forward, he had the prisoner pressed against the wall, bracing himself with stiff filaments to prevent hir from simply dragging or shoving him. Sie outmassed him exponentially, but when he could wedge himself, leverage won.
Deftly, Mallory moved forward and relieved the prisoner of hir weapon. As the necromancer stroked the control in the blade's hilt, the sizzle of air against the blade abated. Mallory tucked it through a clothing loop and sighed, pressing fingers to forehead as if in pain.
Mallory said, "Who are you?"
The servant, or former servant--by the cluster on hir collar, a chief of household--squared hir shoulders. Hir eventual words confirmed Gavin's deduction. "I am Head."
Hir jaw quivered when sie spoke, as if in naming hirself sie were struck by the weight of implications that the name no longer carried. "You might kill me now, if that's your intending. I won't serve Lady Ariane. But spare the others. They only did as I ordered. I am responsible. The treason is mine."
"Ariane is dead," Mallory said.
Gavin watched the emotions contort Head's expression: relief, disbelief, apprehension. Fingers shaking, sie reached to hir collar, touched the cluster there, moved as if to uncatch it, then hesitated. "Then who is Commodore?"
"There is no Commodore," Mallory said. "Perceval Conn is Captain."
Head's eyes closed. "She escaped." Then opened, intent and worried. "Rien?"
Gavin did not envy Mallory the moment of thought before the hesitant headshake that followed. Nor did he envy Head the moment of anticipation, the potential for hope.
"I'm sorry," Mallory said. "She saved the world. Not that that makes it better." Head's body jerked sharply, as if with an arrested shudder, but sie made no sound. Someone's eyes appeared briefly around the rim of the broken door, fingers enfolding the edge. Whoever they belonged to, they vanished back into the kitchen behind Head's slashing gesture. Yes. Whoever sie had saved, sie had saved because they had obeyed hir without question.
Head said, "A real Captain?"
"Sealed and confirmed."
"If Perceval is Captain, who leads the house of Conn?" A businessy question.
Mallory seemed uncertain of how to answer, glancing at Gavin with a questioning head-tilt.
"Tristen is eldest," Gavin said.
This time, Head put a hand flat against the bulkhead behind hir, as if hir knees felt too unsteady to take hir weight. "Tristen lives." So flatly that Gavin could not read pleasure or dismay in the tone. "In truth?"
"Tristen lives," Mallory confirmed. "As does Benedick Conn, and Caitlin, who is the Chief Engineer. Tristen is on his way here now, and will be in Rule within a few hours. We come in advance of him."
Head smiled, broad and certain, and shoved the cluster on hir collar hard against hir throat, as if to seat it there more firmly. "Then we have work to be getting on with."
7
back into rule
The darkest part of the kingdom of Satan is that which is without the Church of God.
There had been twelve who survived being sealed into the kitchen in addition to Head, and all of them were hale, if restless and dingily dressed. Head set them to work at once, readying the house for occupancy. Gavin felt it would be cruel to tell hir that the chances that Tristen was home to stay were slim, so he held his silence. He was surprised that Mallory did as well.
They would have insisted upon feeding Mallory, but the necromancer refused, more concerned with being shown to central biosystems at once. Head had keys and codes to all the house, and brought them hirself. When Gavin identified the most direct route, by the servant's stair, Mallory insisted on it, though Head fussed about inappropriateness.
While they walked, Mallory questioned an expansive but cautious Head about hir captivity.
"I had hoped for Prince Benedick," sie admitted. "He'd not let Ariane kill us all. Which is not to say, Honored, that your appearance was not welcomed, and timely!"
"Indeed," Mallory said. "It was resourceful of you to survive as you did. Ariane had an angel on a leash when she brought her bioweapon to Rule. Whose idea was the electrostasis? It's what truly protected you. And how did you manage to become Exalt, locked away like that? You wouldn't have survived as Means."
Head turned, astonished. "But Honored, it wasn't anybody's idea. It was the other angel."
Surmounting the stair back into Rule was one of the more surreal experiences in Tristen's long and storied existence. He kept a hand on the banister, not because he needed the assistance, but because he needed the stability of something cool and real pressed against his palm.
When last he'd left here, he had not expected it to be a journey of decades to see him back. He had not expected to be lost in darkness for the duration--but then, who ever did? And when he was trapped, sleeping in guano and roaches, gnawing raw meat, he had not expected ever to come home again. He had retreated into an animal self he barely remembered.
Barely chose to remember. Because should he want it, each moment of the endless wearing march of hours was crystalline and perfectly akin in his symbiont's memory. The same symbiont whose resources he used to manipulate his neurochemistry, calm the constant wash of anxiety and jagged edges that rolled like broken glass under the false floor he built himself. You're going to have to deal with that eventually.
Eventually, sure. Someday. When I have time.
Perhaps by then, the passage of days (or better, years) would have worn some of the sharp-shattered edges down. Like the pain of so many years spent without any expectation of ever returning to Rule again, and certainly not as its master.
And yet here was the stair, and here was the rail, and there were the white and golden and brown cascades of mushrooms swathing the walls like frozen waterfalls. The scent was strong and familiar. Heartening.
He reached out left-handed, broke off the rim of a shiitake, and tucked it into his mouth. He didn't bite down, just pressed it between teeth and lips and cheek, tasting the sweet musky moisture. It tasted of childhood and escape, of the places you could vanish to where your father would be too busy to come looking. The places where even a royal child could find a modicum of freedom.
He swallowed the mushroom unchewed, and went into Rule.
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.