Raven Stratagem

CHAPTER SEVEN

ACCORDING TO HIS augment, Mikodez had two minutes before the conference started. He had watered his green onion in the morning, just when his schedule said to, and was resisting the temptation to do so again because he didn’t want to kill it. He was also resisting the temptation, in advance, to suggest container gardening as a hobby for the Kel hexarch, even if it would be a good idea for Tsoro to learn to relax. Even—especially—given the latest news.

Forty-two years ago, Mikodez had become the youngest Shuos hexarch in almost three centuries. No one had taken him seriously then. Shuos hexarchs regularly backstabbed their way to the top. As a result, few of them lasted longer than a decade, if that. Two decades if they were particularly good. People took Mikodez more seriously now, but they still disregarded his advice on the salutary effects of a few well-chosen hobbies. Their loss, really.

“Incoming call on Line 6, top priority,” the grid informed him.

Mikodez leaned back and smiled. “Put it through.”

The other five hexarchs’ faces appeared in the subdisplays with their emblems below them, as if he hadn’t learned those as a toddler. Rahal with its scrywolf above Nirai’s voidmoth, Andan’s kniferose above Vidona’s stingray, Shuos’s ninefox with its staring tails above Kel’s ashhawk.

Rahal Iruja spoke first, her right by tradition. She was a dark woman with coiled gray hair cropped short, and would have been beautiful if not for the severity of her eyes, the absolute lack of humor. He liked that about her. “We all know what this is about,” she said. “General Shuos Jedao survived an assassination attempt that Andan, Vidona, and I were assured he couldn’t escape.”

“I can’t believe you let him run off with a swarm,” Vidona Psa, a large, pale man with incongruous hunched shoulders, said to Kel Tsoro. Psa wasn’t bothering to conceal his scorn. “Jedao walked right in and your general let him pull rank.”

Tsoro’s scarred face was impassive. The scars were an affectation, but no more so than the face: Tsoro spoke for the entire hivemind that formed Kel Command. “We don’t make a practice of stripping the dead of rank, Vidona,” she said. “He served after his own fashion. We had no reason to believe that he could survive the carrion bomb.”

Psa harrumphed. “Well, he clearly did.”

“Jedao has been discharged, but it’s anyone’s guess as to whether any of the Kel in that swarm will be allowed to receive the bulletin we’ve been transmitting. We tend to doubt it.”

“What I don’t understand is how he got off the Unspoken Law,” Nirai Faian said. She had been promoted from false hexarch to actual hexarch in an emergency meeting after convincing everyone that Nirai Kujen had, in fact, vanished, but she had trouble getting the others to give her the respect due her rank. She was a quiet woman with wavy shoulder-length hair framing a face like fine ivory, usually mild. There was no mildness in it now. “It’s unfortunate that he convinced Cheris to let him possess her. We should have had the cindermoth destroyed with invariant explosives as well to get rid of her.”

“Yes,” Andan Shandal Yeng said sourly. She was fidgeting with her sapphire rings, all of which were the exact sultry blue of her satin dress with its embroidered seed pearls and smoke-colored diamonds. “Except we only have so many cindermoths, and the Kel keep complaining they can’t afford to build another six.” Not least because of certain Andan monopolies; Tsoro’s face remained impassive. “I’m honestly surprised that Kujen was lying about wanting to retrieve that anchor for dissection or mathematical foreplay or whatever it is that he does.”

Faian wasn’t interested in discussing Kujen’s extracurricular activities. “All the hoppers and transports on the Unspoken Law were accounted for, so how—?”

“I checked the analysis,” Mikodez said. “Wasn’t there that suggestion that one might have gone astray? Looked like it was hard to piece everything together, given all the damage.”

“That’s a dissent among my analysts,” Faian said. “And even so, either Cheris or Jedao would have had to repair the hopper and fly it all the way to the Swanknot swarm, or rendezvous with a conspirator. Neither is known for being an engineer. Too much doesn’t add up.”

“We can figure that out later,” Shandal Yeng said. “We have to deal with the reality that we have a vengeful madman loose with a Kel swarm at his disposal.”

“Jedao won’t have taken the assassination attempt personally,” Mikodez said. “Appeals to his extravagant death wish and all that. He’ll be pissed that we blew up his soldiers. Delicious, really.”

About 8,000 soldiers, in point of fact. Nirai Kujen had wanted to be sure of catching Jedao with one of the few weapons that could kill him, and had insisted on blowing up the swarm, too, for good measure. Mikodez hadn’t pushed back too hard because by then he had acknowledged that Jedao’s victory at the Fortress of Scattered Needles had dangerous repercussions. You had to admire Jedao for coming out ahead. Upgrading to a bigger swarm, even.

Psa scowled. Like many drawn to the Vidona, he was obsessed with rules and as flexible as a pane of glass. Most people in the hexarchate feared the Vidona, who served as a police force against low-level heresy, but Mikodez found it boringly easy to finesse his way around Psa. “I’m sorry, Mikodez,” Psa said, “but you do remember Hellspin Fortress?”

Mikodez suppressed a sigh. At least Kujen, who did remember, wasn’t around to make snide remarks. Actually, Mikodez wouldn’t have minded the snide remarks. It was just bad form to show it.

“Let’s not retread ancient history,” Shandal Yeng said. “We still have to decide what to do about Jedao and his submissive army of Kel.” She must be rattled. No matter how much she disliked Tsoro, she was generally better at tact than this. Unless—hmm. Maybe that wasn’t Shandal Yeng after all. Mikodez paid closer attention to her face.

“We have to concede that he put a good scare into the main Hafn force,” Tsoro said dryly.

“If your agent hadn’t intervened, Mikodez,” Iruja said, “we’d have one less threat operating in hexarchate space.”

“I stand by Mazeret’s decision,” Mikodez said. “She had her choice of targets and she knows as well as everyone how dangerous Jedao is. For love of fox and hound, he had threshold winnowers in orbit around the Fortress with who knows what modifications. We’re lucky we didn’t have a replay of Hellspin.”

“We need to discuss why you felt the need to plant a spy in our fortress,” Tsoro said, her tone wintry. “As the commandant. What were you trying to prove, Shuos?”

Mikodez gave her an equally chilly smile. “Yes, about that,” he said. “Let’s talk extradition.”

“Need I remind you that we’re facing a madman who has the unsavory habit of winning all his battles?” Shandal Yeng said. “This is hardly the time—”

“This is exactly the time,” Mikodez said. “I’m not in the habit of letting loyal agents rot in detention. Talk to me, Tsoro.”

“We can deal with this later,” Tsoro said.

“We’re hashing this out now. You’re going to have a fun time chasing Jedao and the Hafn when your listening posts start going deaf.”

“Shuos—”

“Look, I get that individual Kel are as expendable as tinder and you can use formation instinct to yank them in whatever direction your strategy requires, but I don’t have that option. If I operated that way, no one would want to work for me anymore. Mazeret belongs to me, Tsoro. Your quarrel’s with me, not the agent. Give.”

Iruja looked faintly irritated by the exchange. “Is it worth throwing a tantrum over one agent, Mikodez? Unless you’re planning on mass-assassinating the Hafn all by yourself.”

“Oh, I don’t intend to try anything of the sort,” Mikodez said respectfully. “But I can take down a scary number of Kel listening posts in an amount of time you’re happier not knowing, and the agent is important to me.”

“Tsoro,” Iruja said after a considering moment, “I realize that, like everyone here at some point, you’re fantasizing about running Mikodez through with a bamboo pole for his latest caprice. But let him have the agent as a favor to me. The Rahal will reckon with him later.”

“As you desire, Rahal,” Tsoro said, inclining her head.

Mikodez decided it would be better not to smirk at Tsoro. Why couldn’t one of the Kel with a sense of humor be hexarch? “Tsoro’s earlier remark brings up an interesting possibility,” he said. “If Jedao’s so hell-bent on exchanging bullets with the Hafn, why not let him wear himself out that way?”

“What an intriguing proposal from someone who recently agreed to have the man offed,” Psa said.

“I’m adaptable?” Mikodez suggested.

“We could get lucky,” Shandal Yeng said. “Maybe the Hafn will kill him for us.”

Tsoro coughed. When Shandal Yeng raised her eyebrows, Tsoro said, “We’d be left trying to defeat the general who defeated Jedao. This is unlikely to be a strategic improvement.”

“If there’s no way of retrieving the swarm,” Iruja said, “we may be stuck with that.”

“This is the curious part,” Faian said. “If General Khiruev’s stray staff officer is to be believed, the Kel on the command moth authenticated off the wrong thing, to the extent authentication’s even possible with a revenant. All of Jedao’s anchors inherited his movement patterns and, eventually, his accent, thanks to bleed-through. Of course, the Kel are used to reading each other that way.” As part of formation instinct, a certain baseline body language was imprinted on cadets. “Neither of those proves anything, however. A sufficiently good actor or infiltrator could fake them. It’s the apparent inheritance of Jedao’s skills, too, that’s more worrisome.”

“Nobody’s ever scrounged up any evidence that Captain Cheris had the least scrap of acting ability,” Tsoro said. “We made some inquiries with former instructors and classmates. She couldn’t even shed her low language accent until she was a second-year cadet.”

“I wish I knew why anyone would capitulate to Jedao to the point of giving up her own existence,” Faian said.

Tsoro shrugged. “No one else could hear what he said to her, so we’ll never know for sure. The fact that she responded to being nudged toward Jedao in the first place is suggestive, but for all that, she was determined to be a good Kel. She joined up despite family resistance.”

“No ties there, then,” Psa said, thoughtful.

“Not entirely true,” Tsoro said. “She wrote to her parents regularly, and exchanged the occasional letter with some of her old classmates.”

“Well, then,” Psa said. “We could apply pressure from that direction. We already have Cheris’s parents under surveillance, as a precautionary measure. We could detain them and let Jedao know, see if we get a reaction.”

“That isn’t a good idea,” Faian said, her brow creasing. “If any part of Cheris is alive in there, she’s not remotely psychologically stable.”

“Faian,” Iruja said, “that may give us the opening we need.”

“It may drive her even crazier.”

Tsoro was thinking about something else. “If we’re applying pressure anyway,” she said, “we might as well turn it up all the way. Cheris used to write to her parents in Mwen-dal, which is only spoken by her mother’s people, the Mwennin. There are scattered communities of them on the second-largest continent of Bonepyre, and there are so few of them that they’re extinct by any reasonable standard. We could round them up and threaten to wipe them out if the swarm isn’t restored to Kel control. Vidona, you’ll find a use for them sooner or later, won’t you? It’s too bad they’re so obscure that a massacre of them would be no use as a calendrical attack. In any case, if Cheris is indeed alive in there, it might give her the incentive she needs to resist Jedao’s influence.”

“I don’t see that anything’s lost by trying it,” Shandal Yeng said. “I for one would feel better if we didn’t have a rogue swarm rampaging through the hexarchate.” How many times had she said that already? Or, more accurately, had her protocol program said that to cover for the side conversation she was having, and which Mikodez was recording for review after the meeting now that he’d picked it up? “If this works, then fine.”

Iruja turned a hand palm-up. “I have no objections either.”

“I’ll make it a priority,” Psa said.

Nirai Faian looked intensely frustrated, but said nothing. She knew when she’d lost, and she was the least powerful hexarch.

“No,” Mikodez said. “That’s as in absolutely not, we’re not doing this.”

Shandal Yeng pulled off one of her rings and slammed it down out of sight. “I wasn’t expecting you to be the one with the sudden attack of humanitarianism.”

“This is me, remember?” Mikodez said. “I could care less about that. I don’t object to atrocities because of ethics, which we’ve never taught at Shuos Academy anyway.” She rolled her eyes at the old joke. “I object to atrocities because they’re terrible policy. It may be the case that no one cares about the Mwennin or whatever they call themselves, but if we had so tight a hold over the populace as we like to advertise, we wouldn’t perennially be dealing with heretic brushfires. Make threats against Cheris’s own parents, fine. But it’s unwise to be indiscriminate about these things. We’ll just be creating a new group of heretics, however small.”

Iruja steepled her hands and sighed. For a moment Mikodez was reminded of her age: 126 years, old enough to feel every clock’s ticking heart. “Are you going to throw a fit over this, too?”

As if that would work. Iruja had intervened earlier because she wanted to get the meeting moving and the agent had already been exposed. (Mikodez bet that there would be a lot of extra personnel screening in the next months, though.) On this issue, however, only Faian agreed with Mikodez, and she wasn’t a credible ally. “It’s not worth it to me,” he said.

She laughed without humor. “Good to know. Not that I’m interested in putting this to some kind of vote, but this endeavor will go better if we coordinate.”

“I do appreciate that, Iruja.”

“Well.” Iruja exhaled slowly. “We’re going to send Jedao an ultimatum. The important thing is recovering the swarm. The precedent can’t be allowed to stand. What do you suppose the odds are that General Khiruev is still alive?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tsoro said. “Khiruev’s already been compromised even if she survived. We don’t want her in charge of that swarm after Jedao’s had a chance to mess with her mind.”

“I assume you have an alternate.”

“We’ve recalled General Kel Inesser from the High Glass border. If Jedao can be persuaded to turn himself in, she’s more than capable of handling the Hafn.”

Inesser, the Kel’s senior general, and one of their most respected. Mikodez snorted. “Isn’t that the woman you’ve been holding at arm’s length for the last two decades?” He’d met her a few times at official functions: a woman vainglorious about her hair, with a disarming fondness for talking about her cross-stitch projects. It hadn’t escaped him how adroit she was at manipulating conversations while pretending to be a typical blunt Kel. “I peeked at some of the evaluations. I’m surprised you wouldn’t rather assimilate her already.”

Tsoro gave him a look. “Inesser may be one of the best strategists we’ve seen in two hundred years, and she’s an excellent logistician, but we’d prefer that she not end as another Jedao.” She didn’t elaborate on the evaluation, which she’d discussed with Mikodez, reluctantly, in the past. The textbook Kel opinion of Jedao was that Jedao’s battlefield successes added up to him never thinking far into the future, since he always assumed he could fight his way out of whatever fix he landed in, instead of asking whether the battle was worth fighting in the first place. Mikodez had preferred the much more succinct words of a Kel instructor who had spoken off the record: “Brilliant tactician, shit strategist.” Presumably Kel Command was supposed to think about the big picture for him.

“I realize that you’re saddled with almost four centuries of condensed prejudices,” Mikodez said, “but don’t you think it’s time to stop letting Jedao dictate everything you do? You’ll turn Inesser into an entirely different kind of enemy at this rate.”

“Shuos,” Tsoro said, “when you feel the need to pull stunts like assassinating your own cadets, we don’t send you memos telling you how to run your faction.”

Mikodez fiddled with one of the leaves of his green onion. “Fine,” he said, “but never say I didn’t give you good advice.”

“If you two are quite finished,” Iruja said without raising her voice. “Mikodez, I’ll need you to monitor the situation. Don’t intervene as long as Jedao makes no play against us, and especially leave him alone if he’s fighting the Hafn.”

“I have a useful number of shadowmoths moving into position,” Mikodez said. “Trust me, their commanders have as little interest in getting into a firefight with Jedao as I do.”

Psa grunted. “I’ve seen you at the firing range, Mikodez. I’d give you even odds.”

“Very flattering,” Mikodez said demurely, “but while Jedao has demonstrated that his solution to a man with a gun is shoot it out of his hand—the kind of idiot stunt I tell my operatives to avoid attempting—my solution is not to be in the same damn room to begin with.”

Andan Shandal Yeng was smiling. “I’m glad we have a course of action, regardless.”

Mikodez kept his expression noncommittal. He’d caught Kel Tsoro’s eyes flickering several times. She and Shandal Yeng had definitely been holding that side conversation. Both used kinesics and protocol programs to smooth things like that, but Mikodez had bypassed them ages ago. Both hexarchs would have been better served lying the old-fashioned way, not that he was about to inform them.

“One last thing,” Iruja said. “Faian, how’s progress on the immortality process?”

“Kujen’s notes are a mess,” Faian said. She meant the ones she had stolen from him, on the grounds that she would rather not accidentally recreate something as unappetizing as the black cradle that had once caged Jedao. It wasn’t so much that Kujen was disorganized—quite the contrary. The man was meticulous about everything. The reports that he sent to the other hexarchs, before he’d vanished, were flawlessly organized and proofread, models of clarity. But his private notes, on projects that he didn’t mean to share with anyone else, took a great deal of decoding because he recorded them in a personal shorthand and his genius made it difficult (so Faian had explained once) to follow the odd jagged leaps of intuition.

Faian went over some of the recent technical difficulties, addressing herself mostly to Iruja, who had the background necessary to follow her. Mikodez simply recorded the details to run by his staff later. Watching everyone else tie themselves up in knots about the prospect of living forever had its entertainment value, not that he meant to let on.

The conference wrapped up after that. Soon Mikodez was left alone with his green onion. It was clear that the other hexarchs were going to make hash of their attempts to control Jedao. Mikodez supposed that no one had been thinking clearly after Hellspin Fortress, but the long-dead Kel and Shuos heptarchs had a lot to answer for. In what universe was keeping an insane undead general as an attack dog a good idea?

On the other hand, wrangling hexarchs had grown tedious. The fact that Jedao had slipped his leash gave Mikodez a new challenge. While he went over the transcript of Tsoro and Shandal Yeng’s conversation, he called up a set of files he had poached from Nirai Kujen, back when. He’d be reviewing those next.