51. Gesto

gestō ~āre ~āuī ~ātum, tr.

1. to bear, to wear, to carry

The fourth circle was my grandmother.

Bellesera von Hauteclare was a woman of immaculate looks, her hair pure silver. She was a matriarch with the breeding and schooling of the finest of nobles. She turned seventy-eight this year—fighting a relapse of uterine cancer with the best doctors and medicines known to mankind. She was the first one Father told about me. Her pings to him scrawl long, written in early mornings at the hospital.

BELLESERA: I will not leave this Station until the House is secure, Farris. I will hang on with my last nail if I must, until the very moment everything is put right.

Dravik sends me pictures of her redwood room. She sleeps in a bed of gold satin, her hair a ghostly curtain on the embroidered pillows and her wrinkled hands splayed over the covers. One of them reaches limply for a pill bottle.

BELLESERA: I told you the first time that your taste for excess would ruin you. I told you over and over, and yet you never listened to me—not once—and now you’ve ruined yourself. You’ve ruined us ALL. To say your father would be disappointed in you is the understatement of a half dozen centuries.

Green pills spill like a river over her satin sheets.

BELLESERA: You’ll be rid of the both of them at once, as you should’ve done when the thing was first born. You will restore the honor of this House, or I will do it for you, and with far fewer reservations.

I watch the vis longer than I should: the picture of her dead face, her eyes blankly staring up at the bed’s canopy—two spears of blue ice looking for God. I’ve seen other people and their grandmothers; stews on stoves, kind embraces. If I was Mirelle, she would’ve smiled at me…held me close, maybe. My vis cursor blinks on the word “thing.” Luna licks at my frozen hand.

The fine line between love and hate is made of blood. And to blood it will return.

The nightmare wakes me again, hood and dagger, and I reach for my vis and type:

HELLRUNNER.

What information I can find is very sparse and mostly a paraphrase of what Dravik told me. Hellrunner is the king’s steed. It’s been ridden only by those in House Ressinimus and those chosen by House Ressinimus.

And then I see the picture.

The polished gold steed shines like a sun. The helmet has been altered to mimic a dragon’s maw, the hands and feet rife with scale-like imprints, and a tail drags behind it like a long, pure-gold banner. It’s different, shinier, but there is no doubt; that’s the gold A4 steed I keep seeing in Heavenbreaker’s memories. A search tells me there aren’t any A4 models left—the king’s steed is the only one.

Heavenbreaker is the A3 and Hellrunner the A4, and they were together in space somewhere, for a long time. Until someone found them and separated them.

Confused, I head for the kitchen with Luna on my heels, but I don’t make it far, feet freezing on the marble just before a puddle of bright red. Dravik stands in the middle of the hall, his beige sleeping tunic soaked in blood. A dark shape lies at his feet, human-size and unmoving. The prince looks over his shoulder and gives a blood-flecked smile.

“Ah, Synali. Couldn’t sleep?” He holds his cane-head projection sword, dark flakes crisping from the neon-orange blade. It hums faintly until the prince powers it off. “Shall I make us a cup of tea?”

Luna answers as I can’t, yipping excitedly. Slowly, I make my way to the kitchen counter and sit. Dravik reattaches his cane and busies himself with the kettle, and when he pivots with two steaming cups in his bloodstained hands, I take mine quickly.

Dravik smiles. “Don’t fret. The blood is the intruder’s—an assassin of the Spider’s Hand variety.”

My chair screeches as I jolt up and stride to the body—it can’t be him. He has the muscle, the same height, the same armor—flexible snake-scale armor that fought and failed against the projection sword—his insides spilling gray-pink in the cradle of his fetal position.

“It’s not the same one House Hauteclare sent to kill your mother,” Dravik assures me between sips. “But it is one of his associates.”

With shaking fingers, I rip off the blood-soaked cowl—a boy younger than even I. Eighteen at most, his red beard barely fuzz. A commoner, no doubt, pushed into this life as a way to make a living—a pawn not even playing his own game, and yet…I hold no illusions about my out-of-steed combat prowess; if Dravik hadn’t killed him, I would be dead in my bed.

“They prefer to recruit them young,” the prince murmurs. “Easier to burn the methods of control into their brains that way.”

I sit back down stiffly. “Is Hauteclare trying to kill me again?”

“Unlikely. They have their own assassin within the Spider’s Hand assigned to do House work for them, but he’s currently MIA. It seems he mysteriously vanished after news of your survival spread. This”—he gestures to the body vaguely—“is more likely the result of an ally of Hauteclare’s who wished to curry favor with them by taking out an entirely new contract on you.”

“Can you stop them?”

“Not as thoroughly as I’d like. The Spiders have a reputation to uphold as the very best of the best—they do not rescind agreements. I believe they’ll keep sending assassins until you’re dead. Don’t worry—I have many security systems in place, and that little noisemaker might be useless, but it keeps eyes on the grounds well enough.”

“The noisemaker has a name,” I insist. “Luna.”

“Does it now?” Dravik chuckles. “Rather pointless, don’t you think?”

“So these assassins will keep coming, and you’ll keep killing them.”

“Yes.”

“Can you make it painless?”

“You wish to show them mercy when they’ve shown you none.”

“Assassins aren’t nobles,” I insist. “They’re used like us.”

“And the one who killed your mother? Should I show him mercy when he reappears, too?”

The chamomile tries to soothe my chapped lips. My fingers tremble around porcelain. There’s nothing to hold on to as reality splinters between the cracks, the assassin looming tall in black armor with that same scale pattern. He didn’t kill me—he could’ve, he was ordered to, but he didn’t, and I don’t know why. But then…how did I get the scar on my chest? He killed Mother, I know. She was on her knees in the end—

Luna rests its metal head against my ankle, the cold sensation halting my thoughts. My eyes roam Dravik’s face.

“I wish you’d been there,” I whisper. “The first time it happened.”

The prince’s smile tightens. “As do I.”

I stroke Mother’s pendant, redwood beneath bloodstained fingers. Dravik’s voice is a bare shadow against marble as he nods at the necklace. “I am sorry—about what I’ve done to it. It’s to keep you safe.”

“You don’t trust me,” I croak.

“It’s everyone else I don’t trust, brave one.”

There are only three circles left.

The grindstone of sleeping and training turns over and over. Everything I need to win is here in the bunker, and if it isn’t, it’s brought to me by Quilliam. Tea trays perch on Heavenbreaker’s innards, vitamin bottles tucked away in its metal seams, bloodstained towels and clothes hung on its ribs. I fill my head with Rax’s words, a litany; if he thinks I’m sloppy on the descent, I will become neat. I will dedicate inertia. I will hold the g-forces in my limbs until I hear my bones creak under the strain. I’ve learned now—sometimes what feels like breaking is just bending. On a too-sharp maneuver, my nose starts bleeding, and relief flashes through me when I see red, not silver.

Every rider’s brain is slowly filling with nerve fluid. Mine is filling faster than most. The nerve fluid connects different things—energy and matter, metal and mind. But that wouldn’t explain why I saw Astrix when I blacked out in Heavenbreaker. She saw me, talked to me. She overloaded in Heavenbreaker. Is she…somehow inside it? Is Sevrith somehow inside it, too? I’d be afraid, but there are so many other things to be afraid of: losing my next match (losing purpose); overloading during the match, all of House Hauteclare after me; the past—dark and inescapable—and the future—hard and unknowable; and a thought I can’t shake stuck between them: only Dravik and I can see the comatose queen. Dravik rode Hellrunner—I ride Heavenbreaker. Something is wrong with my steed, but something is wrong with Hellrunner, too. The two of them in space, holding hands.

I know I will regret this.

SYNALI: What do you know about Hellrunner?

I nervously shut the vis, try to ignore it. This works for all of thirty seconds. A strange pressure builds in my chest until I rip it back open…to what, you pathetic thing? To stare at the empty reply box? He’s busy. He’s with Mirelle. The thought sends me spiraling down, but the ping noise sends me spiraling right back up.

RAX: Good afternoon to you too.

SYNALI: This isn’t a social call. I need answers

RAX: And I’m gonna need some basic manners before you use me like your personal search engine.

SYNALI: Good afternoon. What do you know about Hellrunner?

RAX: Oof—that’s the best you got? One hello and then straight into the demands?

SYNALI: I already tried the vis search engines. Every dossier on Hellrunner is redacted

RAX: Well, yeah—it belongs to the king. The king’s shit is always redacted. Did you try the archive?

I freeze. At my feet, Luna cocks its head.

SYNALI: What archive

RAX: The SCC keeps an archive of every steed; who they’re made by, who rode them—it’s all in there. Only riders can access it. To, you know, research their opponents and stuff.

SCC—the Steedcraft Control Center. Their archive would be much more official than the fan databases I’ve been scraping from.

SYNALI: Look up Hellrunner for me

RAX: Anybody ever tell you you’re super good at the word ‘please’?

SYNALI: You’re the first

RAX: I can’t get you into the archive, but I know someone who spends their whole life on it. Gimme a sec.

His address and mine in the upper right corner are joined by another. My stomach sinks, fingers hesitant over the holograph keys. What do I say to her?

MIRELLE: I didn’t agree to provide information to a murderer, Rax.

She’s obviously furious—more so than when we were in the club. She must’ve liked Bellesera.

RAX: C’mon, Mir. Just this once.

MIRELLE: No.

RAX: She wants to know about Hellrunner. You know, your fave?

Another long pause.

MIRELLE: Hellrunner is a Destroyer-class A4. It’s the king’s legacy steed—its riders are chosen only by him.

SYNALI: I know that

MIRELLE: What you don’t know, murderer, is that the king deploys it only when he feels the riders are of a caliber high enough to challenge it.

RAX: Kinda like a test. Or a reminder to stay in line when we get too wild. Either way, it always wins. If you ever see it deployed, it’s pretty much game over.

SYNALI: Who rides it now? They must be good

MIRELLE: Hellrunner changes riders frequently.

SYNALI: Why?

MIRELLE: Many of them overload. It’s a powerful steed that can only be ridden by the strongest.

Dravik rode Hellrunner. Astrix rode it, too, but she overloaded herself in Heavenbreaker. The only connecting thread between Hellrunner and Heavenbreaker is Astrix…and the memory I keep seeing of the steeds holding hands.

RAX: Hellrunner’s famous for burning out its riders real quick. Mirelle’s kinda obsessed with it.

MIRELLE: As every rider worth their lance should be. ’Twould be the ultimate honor to fight it.

SYNALI: Do either of you know why Astrix was dethroned?

The cursor blinks blankly. The manse creaks eerily around me.

MIRELLE: No. No one speaks of it. Whatever the case, she chose overload. She was a true and honorable rider to the very end.

Astrix made Luna’s true AI transmit into Heavenbreaker, to keep something inside, but why? Did she try to put a true AI inside of Hellrunner, too? Heavenbreaker learns new words and concepts every day from me—like a baby growing. If the true AI had access to fifty times more riders, it would learn much faster. It would learn to speak, think. Like people. No—like an autonomous fighting force.

“do you know what it means to ride?”

Queen Astrix was trying to make a true AI to turn the steeds into her soldiers—soldiers that didn’t need riders. Soldiers that would help her take the throne, maybe. But she failed and was killed for treason.

And her son is trying to finish what she started.

The blue flicker of my vis suddenly catches silver cloth. I look up, but it passes too quickly and leaves behind a feeling of being watched. Luna’s nose points to a patch of sunlight, and it wags its tail as if it’s greeting someone. I jump as the sudden ping alert blares around the empty room.

MIRELLE: The archive says the murderer’s been in Heavenbreaker’s saddle for 103 hours over the last five days.

RAX: Jesus—is that true?

MIRELLE: So you’re concerned with how long she’s saddlebound but not how many noble lives she’s taken? Wonderful priorities, Rax.

SYNALI: I’m training to beat you. Both of you

RAX: 103 hours is ridiculous, Hauteclare—you can’t DO that. Nobody does that. Is that Lithroi shithead making you stay in there?

SYNALI: You told me my weaknesses. I’m fixing them

RAX: Do you wanna overload? Is that it? Do you wanna end up like Sevrith? Do you wanna DIE? Because that’s what overload is—death, just with whiter-ass sheets.

Every finger shakes strangely as I type.

SYNALI: I want to win

RAX: You’re not gonna win anything if you don’t start giving a shit about yourself.

RAX ISTRA-VELRAYD HAS LEFT THE CONVERSATION.

His anger thrums in the blue-light quiet. For the barest moment, I forget who Mirelle is, what I’ve done to our House, and my typing comes like water.

SYNALI: I don’t understand—why is he angry with me?

MIRELLE: It’s quite simple; I hate you because you’re a murderer. But he hates you because you continue to choose as he could not.

MIRELLE ASHADI-HAUTECLARE HAS LEFT THE CONVERSATION.