Ninefox Gambit

COLONEL RAGATH HAD reported that the Radiant Ward was a wasteland no one wanted to enter except some corpse calligraphers bent on memorializing the event. Resistance had collapsed in the Umbrella Ward when Znev Stoghan pulled out his troops to deal with some internal crisis. The Drummers’ Ward was wracked by riots. Cheris had asked what the riots were about. Ragath had given her a jaundiced look, then said, “The generalized unfairness of life.”

Disposal of bodies was going to be a problem. Cheris had authorized Ragath to conscript civilians in the secured wards. This caused chaos, recriminations, and more riots, but she had to try something.

A Shuos reported in: fighting among the heretics in the Dragonfly Ward. Cheris felt as though she were watching the gears in a machine settle into place, or dissolve. She couldn’t tell which.

10.6 hours later, Doctrine reported that calendrical values were shifting toward approved norms.

Cheris slept long and deeply after that. When she woke, she dressed and paused while pulling her gloves back on. “The propaganda drops,” she said. “They weren’t for the heretics, were they.”

“I wanted you to know what we were annihilating,” Jedao said.

“Why is it important?”

“Are you saying it’s not?”

“No,” Cheris said. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. But we have our orders.”

“I never forgot that,” Jedao said.

When the time came, Cheris went to high table. She paused for a moment at the threshold, looking not at the people but at the banners with their ashhawks Brightly Burning, the calligraphy scrolls, the tapestries. For a dizzying second she thought she was back in the boxmoth Burning Leaf, with her old unit, with Verab and Ankat and soldiers younger than she was by a count of battles that, however small, felt like forever drum-tides. Then she blinked and she was back on the cindermoth again, immeasurably older.

Commander Hazan was overseeing the command center, but Cheris saw Rahal Gara and Shuos Ko and other familiar faces. Shuos Liis smiled at her, a slow, sweet curve. Cheris caught herself admiring Liis’s velvet-dark eyes and lush mouth, then flinched, suddenly worried.

Cheris took her sip from the communal cup, barely tasting the wine, and passed it down. The ritual brought her comfort. She would have given much to have Kel Nerevor by her side, bright as fire, but no one had any word of her.

She left high table as early as she could get away with, returning to her quarters so she could sit on the bed. There were no servitors: the last two she had talked to had suggested that she should sleep instead of staying up with her paperwork. If she hadn’t known better, she would have suspected them of conspiring with Jedao.

“Tell me something about yourself,” Jedao said out of nowhere. “What it was like in the City of Ravens Feasting. That luckstone means something to you, but you haven’t looked at it since I – since I ruined it for you.” He didn’t say what they both knew: she would be free of him soon.

“I was determined to leave,” Cheris said, wishing he had picked another topic. But she was starting to question her motivations for fleeing toward the Kel. “My mother’s people are old-fashioned, barely within approved norms. I was natural-born, not crèche-born—”

“That’s something we have in common,” Jedao said wryly. “Crèches were still coming into use when my mother had me. I really can say I was born on a farm. I remember the day I first woke up and realized that I was bigger than the geese.”

Cheris tried to picture this. How big were geese anyway? “If my instructors had ever mentioned things like this, I would have paid more attention to history.”

Jedao laughed. “But you were saying about your people –?”

“Most of them are concentrated in a ghetto in the city, although we lived by a park. I didn’t speak the high language until I entered school, and then I couldn’t get rid of the accent until Kel Academy.”

“I’ve never heard you speak your native language.”

She felt a rush of embarrassment. “I don’t speak it well anymore.” Was she embarrassed because of her ineptitude, or because she spoke it at all?

“I barely speak Shparoi anymore myself,” Jedao said, “although I have a Shparoi name.”

“Does it mean something?”

“Does yours?”

An exchange. Fair enough. “In the traditions of my mother’s people,” Cheris said, “I would have been named after – after a saint’s day in the old calendar. A heretical calendar. So instead my parents named me after the high calendar day I was born on. ‘Cheris’ is the word for ‘twenty-three.’ It’s a vigesimal system. That’s all it is.”

“My mother, who was eccentric by our culture’s standards, had three children by three different fathers,” Jedao said. “You’re not supposed to name children after living relatives, it’s disrespectful, but Koiresh Shkan was my father’s name. He was a musician, and I only met him a few times. My other name is derived from a root that means something like ‘honesty.’ You can bet that made my life hell when it got out at Shuos Academy.”

“So your mother was really a farmer?”

“Agricultural researcher. I have no complaints about my childhood, and anyway the Nirai scraped it over for clues already.”

She had forgotten that he was a madman. It was going to be a relief when Kel Command unstapled her from Jedao so she knew what things to believe again. At this rate he was going to ruin her for the Kel.

It occurred to her that Kel Command had done that already.