A grave, deeply made bow, the sort she only got out of Kefanin when he disapproved mightily of a decision she’d made. She grunted, set off along the hall to the east wing, got there in a couple of minutes, a little out of breath. She worked the bolts. A faint, musty chill puffed out at her as she hauled the door open. It had been a while since anyone was in here.
Shadows capered on the walls while she moved about, lighting lamps from the wick of the lantern with a paper spill. A warm yellow glow spread over the untidy piles of books and less easily defined junk that owned the floor. The study emerged by increments from the gloom. Her desk in the center, stacked with papers and more books. The curtained window. Paintings of An-Monal on the walls, a map etched on Kiriath glass.
The Helmsman.
“Hello there, Archeth Indamaninarmal.”
“Hello Angfal.” She cleared off one side of the desk so she could put her feet up, pulled out the chair and sat down. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”
“You should not concern yourself on my part.” The Helmsman’s voice was deep and melodious, warmly avuncular and at the same time very slightly unnerving at the edges, as if at any moment it might suddenly scale upward into an inhuman scream. “You know time doesn’t have the significance for me that it does for . . . humans.”
Archeth grinned at the calculated insult. It wasn’t the first time. She cocked one ankle over the other on the corner of the desk and stared through the angle between her feet at the thing she shared the study with.
“Good to see you again, anyway.”
It took up most of the space near the wall, a span of nearly twenty feet and a height of at least ten. Mostly it looked like guts, riotous loops and coils of dark iron intestine all across the pale plasterwork and trailing down onto the floor, seemingly at random. But there were other parts, too, segments that hung fatly off the wall like lungs or tumors, and the whole thing was speckled with a series of weak green or yellowish lights behind what appeared to be thick glass optics each no larger than a thumbprint. Near the center and high up, two symmetrical sets of angled ribbing gripped the wall and ceiling, braced outward from a swollen oval the width of a man’s arms at full stretch. Not for the first time, Archeth thought that the arrangement was uncomfortably arachnoid—it gave the impression that some giant spider out of a child’s nightmare was somehow oozing through the wall prior to springing down on whoever happened to occupy the study at the time. Or, perhaps, that the same monstrous creature had simply been embedded there in the plaster like some grotesque hunting trophy.
It didn’t help that there were clusters of the little green and yellow lights gathered at the lower end of the oval like eyes.
She knew—because the Kiriath engineers who ripped Angfal out of a derelict fireship’s hull and installed it here had told her—that the Helmsman’s consciousness existed within the whole organic-looking mess at once, but that didn’t help much. Like it or not, she found herself habitually, instinctively, addressing herself to this hanging half-spider central structure, focusing on it whenever—
She was doing it now.
“So what do you want?” it asked her.
“Why should I want anything from you?” She unfixed her gaze from the clustered lights, made a point of gazing off toward the window instead. “Maybe I just stopped by for some light conversation.”
“Really?” Angfal’s voice didn’t change all that much, but Archeth thought there was now an accent of cruelty in the inquiring tone. “Come to reminisce, then, have we? Talk about all those good old times when your father and Grashgal were still alive, and the world was a finer, nobler place?”
She held down the hurt, the old familiar ache.
“Far as I know,” she said tonelessly, “Grashgal’s still alive. Far as
A tiny beat of silence.
“Archeth, daughter of Flaradnam, you come to me with elevated pulse, dilated pupils, swelling of blood in breasts and labia—though that’s ebbing now—and a fractionally unsteady vocal range, all clear symptoms of mingled sexual arousal and krinzanz abuse, a combination that is, incidentally, not ideally suited to your physiology, or indeed any physiology beyond the very youthful. And you’re staring out of a window that has a curtain drawn across it. So you see, as we both already know, my sense organs were not all left in the wreckage, and you did not come here for light conversation.”
The quiet seeped in again. She thought maybe one or two of the lights in Angfal’s coils had shifted color or maybe just brightened.
“I’m two hundred and seven years old,” she said. “That is youthful in Kiriath terms.”
“Yes, but not for a half-breed.”
Her temper snapped across, shiny steel rage at the break. “Hey,
