keeping with his current mission of diplomacy.
“I bring more this time.” Because he could not bite, he groomed, busily washing his face and paws. His fur was gritty with soil. Also, the washing made him look inoffensive. “My patron would like to speak with you in person.”
The Go-Back reached out and let the back of her hand brush the cheek of the cobra. It did not withdraw, but its flared hood smoothed back into the taut black-and-buttercream column of its neck. Dust was a construct, and could not feel fear exactly. But he could feel the toolkit’s arousal levels lowering, its tiny, trembling heartbeat slowing to a mere whirr.
Well, if Dust was going to be eaten by a synbiotic snake, it was probably within his powers to possess that snake’s colony from the inside. He’d fight that war when he came to it.
“Patron,” she said. She pushed herself more fully into a sitting position, adjusting her weight on her seat bones by pushing down on the ground. The snake flicked its tongue once more and seemed to resign in favor of the woman, whipping its long body into a fold of the blankets. It was too bulky to vanish completely, but the bulge could have been a pillow if Dust had not known otherwise. “All right, Dust,” she said. “What is it that you want from me? Other than allegiance, because you must know now that my goals are not yours—”
“Parley with my sponsor,” he said. “I am under the command of another, Go-Back. That is all. She seeks an alliance, and your goodwill. Or at least your sworn word not to oppose her.”
She tapped her fingers on her thigh, twice. She looked down at him, where he huddled by her knee. “What are the politics of Conns to an Edenite? I’ll parley. But she must come to me.”
12
carried bright scars
Christ, what a night! how the sleet whips the pane!
What lights will those out to the northward be?
—MATTHEW ARNOLD, “Tristram and Iseult”
Tristen Conn was a tiger, and no hound. Mysteries were not his métier. His strength lay in the subtlety of war. But for his Captain’s sake, he would attempt what he did not well understand, and solve the murder of Perceval’s mother.
Before the world was made anew and a Captain sat upon the Bridge, a knight-errant had often been called upon to resolve crimes, to serve as investigator and judge as well. But the crimes of simple folk were often simple as well, unsophisticated, the culprits apparent when the knight-errant applied logic and interview skills to the case. Here, there was no one to interview. The only witnesses were Nova and Perceval, and what Nova had seen was spotty and suspect.
He was fortunate to have assistance in his inquiry. The necromancer Mallory might be a better detective than Tristen, as necromancers were without a doubt temperamentally suited to the investigation of death. He was fortunate as well that he could frame Caitlin’s death as an act of war. That—the shadowy realm of sabotage, spycraft, assassination, espionage—was a paradigm with which Tristen felt comfortable.
In the privacy of Tristen’s insulated bedchamber in Rule, he and Mallory commenced with the facts they knew. Those facts were comfortingly simple—if frustratingly few. Five persons in armor had entered the corridor outside the Bridge, somehow undetected. They had made off with an antique paper book which had held great religious and symbolic significance to the Builders, and was still sacred to some—perhaps many—of the folk of the Jacob’s Ladder. Two of them—the ones Perceval had killed—had been Deckers, and possibly so had the remainder.
But one of those former two had been skilled enough to put Perceval to the test, and at least one of the latter three had been the equal—or the better—of Caitlin Conn, hard as that was for Tristen (who had ranked Caitlin along with Benedick as one of the few warriors nearing to his own skill) to accept.
It was possible that Caitlin’s killer had gotten the drop on her somehow, a possibility that Tristen was cautious in regarding as more plausible because it was more comforting.
It would be nice to think Caitlin had made a mistake. But that was the sort of logic that got a man killed through underestimating the threat posed by his adversaries.
It was more likely, Tristen knew, that the person who killed Caitlin had been, like her, a Conn, Exalt and well seasoned to the arts of war.
The three remaining trespassers had made good their escape, successfully using