Raven Stratagem

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

MOROISH NIJA WAS hot beneath her coat and knitted dress. The coat was slightly tight at the shoulders. Ordinarily she preferred more vivid shades of rose, but she hadn’t had time to be picky. Right now she was stuck inside a store full of shawls she couldn’t have afforded if she wanted to, although that pale green one with the tassels would complement the coat nicely.

Nija had spent her entire life on the world of Bonepyre, and even then she had never before left the City of Hollow Processions, where she had been born, except on a couple of school trips. Terrible irony: she was supposed to have caught a shuttle off-planet, an adventure she’d longed for all her life, and instead she’d fled back home. If anyone recognized her, they wouldn’t send her to school, where her classmates were sitting that exam in discrete mathematics she hadn’t pretended to study for, or to her parents, who were probably dead. They’d send her straight to the Vidona, as they’d done with all the other Mwennin.

She had ducked into the store when the remembrance was about to begin, the Meditation of Needle Tongues. She didn’t know how she had forgotten it, when all her life her elders had emphasized the importance of adhering to the high calendar’s external forms. Even better, a Vidona stood in the store, a man with a disconcerting resemblance to her kindly history teacher. He wasn’t wearing full faction uniform, but the green-and-bronze sash said all that needed saying.

Mostly Nija could hear people’s breathing and the rapid thudding of her own heart. It seemed impossible that the Vidona couldn’t hear it, too, despite being on the other side of the room looking bored with the proceedings. It seemed equally impossible to concentrate on the official litany being read in the unquiet silence. Nija settled instead on composing mental critiques of the shawls. The one right in front of her was a dead loss, she’d never cared for that style of lace, but the one beside it had promise. She wouldn’t mind wearing something with that touch of sparkle on a date. Not that she’d ever owned anything nice enough to go with it.

Finally the remembrance ended. Nija lingered in the store a little longer, then headed out into the street with its mingled smell of spice and damp earth and expensive perfumes. Trees were planted at precise intervals. Servitors were busy clearing away leaves and twigs from the walkways. The air was humid, the sky overcast, but she didn’t think it would rain again so soon. Still, maybe she should pick up an umbrella. She clenched her jaw thinking of her grandfather’s absurd oversized umbrella, the blue one with the stripes. The Vidona had probably tossed it in the recycler with everything else.

Nija’s attention was brought unpleasantly back to the present when she realized a brown woman in cream robes and an unflattering profusion of pearls was following her. She was wondering what to do about it when the woman lengthened her stride, then stooped and cleared her throat. “Excuse me,” the woman called out to Nija. The woman straightened, holding out a handkerchief. “Did you drop this?”

Nija’s demurral died in her throat when she looked at the handkerchief, an elegant affair in matching cream silk. For a second, words appeared in red light upon the handkerchief. Words in Mwen-dal, her native tongue: Come with me. Beneath the words was the Shuos eye in yellow.

She almost bolted, but it was too late already. Although the street was by no means crowded, there were enough shoppers and people sipping tea outdoors or taking strolls that someone would notice and alert the authorities, assuming the authorities weren’t already paying attention. Besides, if the woman was a genuine Shuos, she could drop Nija unconscious with a flick of her fingers.

“Thank you,” Nija said, accepting the handkerchief with a forced smile.

“I’m Trenthe Unara,” the woman said. She fell in beside Nija. “Do you know where’s a good place to get flowers around here?”

Why couldn’t she look it up the way normal people did? Still, Nija had passed an extravagant florist earlier today. She tried not to wonder what a Shuos needed with flowers. “I’ll show you the nearest one I know,” she said, feeling hopelessly stilted.

Unara smiled. “I’d like that.”

Nija wanted to demand an explanation. Why the charade? Why not arrest her? A Shuos agent didn’t need a pretext to detain her. Nija had no faction affiliation or friends in high places to protect her.

She lost the ability to notice anyone but Unara, as though they walked about hedged by walls. Even the sight of the extravagant florist only increased her anxiety. Maybe some of the flower arrangements were used for assassinating people, or drugging them.

The curl to Unara’s mouth suggested that she had divined Nija’s worries, but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she forced Nija to stand there with a burgeoning headache as she picked out a bouquet of fantastic proportions. If not for the headache, Nija would have enjoyed watching the florist put it together. Some of those flowers, with their wildly disparate shapes and colors, shouldn’t have harmonized, yet the florist made it work. Nija’s favorite touch was the lace-spray of drooping cloud-bells.

A hoverer awaited them when Unara declared herself satisfied with the bouquet. The driver, in front, was hidden behind a shaded partition. Meekly, Nija climbed in the back. She had given up trying to understand the situation. Unara sat across from her. The bouquet, held up by stabilizers, took up an impressive chunk of the back. The mingled fragrances, stronger in the enclosed space, aggravated Nija’s headache.

As the hoverer took off, Unara said, no longer bland, “I’m Agent Shuos Feiyed. You know, if it were up to me, I’d fucking recruit you. I put three of my people on report because you slipped out from under their noses earlier.”

“I’m sorry,” Nija lied, although she did remember to use an appropriate humble verb form now that they weren’t pretending to be chance-met strangers.

“I’m not saying the Shuos are infallible,” Feiyed said, “because we’re clearly not, but as one of them, I have to ask. Where’d you pick up that trick for vanishing into crowds? Your school records looked completely unremarkable. Perfect attendance, glowing conduct reports, all of that.”

Nija flushed and stared out the hoverer’s window. Below, the city with its streets appeared to be calm and orderly, with flashes of silver or gold as other hoverers swooped by. No sign that an entire people had been scrubbed out of it. The parks were patches of cloudy green. Sunlight glinted faintly off the snaking river. “Iusedtoshoplift,” Nija mumbled.

“What?”

“I said, I used to shoplift,” Nija repeated, blushing. The shopkeepers hadn’t caught her, mainly because she had been too smart to go after the pricier items and, like any number of her classmates, she knew the tricks by which you could fool the more common security systems. She had only stopped when her grandmother took sick and she felt irrationally guilty, as though purloined baubles attracted germs.

Nija’s mortification grew when Feiyed started making alarming wheezing sounds. “Oh, that’s priceless,” Feiyed said when she was done. “Like my aunt’s always telling me, never underestimate teenagers.”

Nija glowered at Feiyed in spite of herself.

“You’re very stupid for being so clever,” Feiyed said without any trace of kindness. “Headed straight back to your hometown, of all places, instead of some quiet city where they don’t know your face. Do you want to end up in a detention camp? The only reason your people aren’t already extinct is that the Vidona get slowed up by petty paperwork almost as much as the Rahal do.”

“I’ve been watching the news reports,” Nija said, trying to hide her renewed terror. Mostly she’d had useless fantasies of sneaking onto Shuos Jedao’s command moth and kicking him naked into vacuum for what he’d done to her people. “I—I watched some of the executions.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I caught up to you,” Feiyed said. “As I said, it’s a pity I can’t recruit you. Knock some of the dumb ideas out of your head and you might be good for something, but it’d be a pain to arrange on such short notice. We’re headed to a nice, boring, remote campground where we’ll get you to the shuttle that will take you to a nice, boring moth to get you out of the system.”

Nija crossed her arms and glowered some more. This had no effect on Feiyed. Finally, Nija burst out, “You’re a fox, what could any of this matter to you? What are you getting out of this?” Especially since the measure was supposed to punish Jedao, or pressure him, for all its blatant ineffectiveness. There was a Shuos game going on, but she couldn’t imagine what it was.

She had the dangerous tickling thought that the Shuos weren’t supposed to be rescuing randomly selected Mwennin. Unfortunately, she couldn’t leverage this knowledge. What was she going to do, turn Feiyed in to the Vidona? That was supposing Feiyed hadn’t selected her for some extra-gruesome form of execution.

Feiyed’s answer didn’t reassure Nija. “We’ve been holding a betting pool asking that very question ourselves,” she said. “Not like your lot have much to offer us. But our hexarch, well, he’s whimsical. He gets these notions in his head, so we carry them out.”

Nija could have done without the reminder of the assassinated Shuos cadets.

“Anyway,” Feiyed said, her eyes canny, “are you registering a complaint?”

Nija was aware that she’d slipped up on the formality level of her speech. She resolved to speak more carefully. “The Vidona took away Boherem Roni’s family,” she said. “I went to school with the son.” The Boherem boy had had the annoying tendency to drone on and on about his collection of inkstones, but that wasn’t a good enough reason to wish him dead. “Why me and not one of them?”

There had to be others, lots of others, but the initial evacuation, the one she had slipped free of, had been hushed and hurried and full of rumors. When she thought of it, it came back in snatches: the brusque Shuos agents, the carefully regulated lines, the transports. It had been pure chance that she had heard about the Boherem family from two adults whispering to each other before they were separated. Most of the Mwennin had been convinced that the Shuos were taking them to face firing squads. The general sentiment had been that Shuos bullets beat Vidona torture any day.

“You want to know the truth, Nija?” Feiyed smiled. “I can’t speak for my hexarch, but I don’t care about your people one way or the other. It’s just orders, as arbitrary as”—her smile turned cutting—“fashion. If I wanted to be in the business of rescuing people, I’d be a firefighter.”

The Shuos’s frank callousness reassured Nija. She didn’t have to pretend to like her.

“Logistically speaking, my superiors picked people based first on ease of extraction, then ran a lottery because we couldn’t get more of you out without attracting attention.”

“You shouldn’t have bothered,” Nija said, too upset to be careful about formality levels all over again. “The Mwen-denerra”—she stopped, rephrased. “There won’t be enough of us left. Our traditions will die. Considering that we’re supposed to be tidy piles of ash, it’s not as if we can teach them to anyone else.”

Nija considered herself to be an indifferent Mwennin, as Mwennin went. She had memorized the list of Mwennin calendar-saints not out of any great faith but because her family had always looked so happy whenever she faked interest in the old ways, the forbidden ways. She only mouthed the prayers with their invocations of raven prophets and heron oracles, the queen of birds in the wood-with-no-boundaries. Admittedly she liked traditional food, especially lamb with yogurt sauce, but that was a low bar.

She was certain that the Shuos would profess indifference to this matter as well. But Feiyed said, “You would have to be careful, it’s true. However, I don’t think it’s impossible. The question is, how much are you willing to compromise? I mean, it’s not like anyone in the hexarchate knows or cares about your customs. They wouldn’t recognize them, and that works in your favor. You could lie low for a dozen years—forever at your age, I realize—and start introducing your customs to the receptive. You do accept adoptive Mwennin, don’t you?”

Nija stared at her. She hadn’t expected Feiyed to know about that point of Mwennin practice. It was the only reason the Mwennin hadn’t died out entirely, according to—she clamped down on the thought. Her grandfather was dead.

Feiyed chuckled softly. “I was adopted myself, so I keep track of these things. Besides, I have an ulterior motive. You’d make an entertaining Shuos if you put your mind to it. Fight from within and all that.”

Nija’s first instinct was to say something her father would have chided her for. After all, the destruction of the Mwennin was that bitch Cheris’s fault for being stupid enough to enter faction service in the first place. But Cheris had already paid for her mistake, and Feiyed was making a disturbing amount of sense. “I’ll think about it,” Nija said.

Feiyed leaned back and smiled.

AJEWEN DZERA WISHED she could lose track of how long she had been sitting in the cell, under spider restraints that tightened painfully whenever she moved too suddenly. The walls were a white just gray enough to look oppressive. The door, only four paces away, might have been on another planet. Whenever she approached it, she was wracked by a burning sensation that started at her skin and needled inward. Incongruously, the cell smelled of a persistent, pleasant fragrance, with notes of lilac and starbloom. One of her Vidona handlers liked perfume.

There was a clock display on the wall. Dzera hated looking at it, but it was impossible not to let her eyes rest on it periodically. In two days there would be another remembrance. She imagined the Vidona would execute her before then. In the meantime, the illicit prayers that had comforted her all her life stuck in her throat like hot stones.

They had taken away her partner of twenty-nine years almost from the start, rousing them in the middle of the night. Harsh bright lights everywhere, enforcers in Vidona green-and-bronze tramping through the small garden where their daughter Cheris had liked to watch the birds as a child. Derow hadn’t been born Mwennin, he had married in and learned their traditions, but this distinction hadn’t mattered to the Vidona.

Another minute ticked past. Dzera caught herself watching the clock, and slowly and carefully averted her face. Her bangs fell in her eyes. Slowly and carefully, she reached up to brush them away. If she had known this would happen, she would have picked a different hairstyle. A haircutter had come in once to trim her hair. She had prayed to fall dead then, but they hadn’t killed her afterward.

Dzera often thought of Cheris, who had left the City of Ravens Feasting for the Kel. Cheris had left them long before then, if the truth were told. Dzera hadn’t been able to admit it to herself, however, until the day Cheris came to them, pale, shoulders squared, to inform them that she had been admitted to Kel Academy Prime.

There were so many of the old stories she had not told her daughter, although she had made a scrabbling effort to pass on the language, the prayers, the poetry. The story of the one-eyed saint who kept a casket with no lock, and what became of her lovers who found a way to open it. The story of the half-tailed cat who lived in the world’s oldest library. The story of the raven general who sacrificed a thousand thousand of his soldiers to build a spirit-bridge of birds to assault the heavens.

Sometimes Dzera thought that if she had found the right stories to tell Cheris, Cheris wouldn’t have needed to run away from her own people. But as much as Dzera agonized over it, she’d never figured out which stories those would have been.

Without warning, a video came to life right where she had been looking, an unremarkable patch of wall. She jumped, although she knew better, then choked back a sob at the restraints tightening around her. No matter how often this happened, she never got used to the experience.

It took her a few seconds to understand what the video was showing her, partly because of the bite of pain, partly because she didn’t want to. A man in dust-colored clothes like the ones they had put her in held still in a chair very like her own. Next to the chair was a table with a bronze tray. The chair explained everything. It was of a dark green material, glossy, with bronze striations.

Next the video showed a Vidona officer entering. Her uniform was a slightly lighter green, the bronze piping and buttons brighter. In her hand she held an instrument that resembled a spoon, if a spoon had incandescently sharp edges.

Dzera guessed what was coming, but not in time to look away. The image tracked the movements of her eyes. It was suddenly impossible to squeeze her eyes shut. The spoon flashed. The man screamed. His eye was a lump with red flesh clinging to it. Blood and fluid dripped from it, and tracked viscous lines down the man’s face. The Vidona tossed the eye onto the tray. The tray was much larger than the eye was. Dzera could guess what that meant, too.

The Vidona were unlikely to go through this with every single Mwennin in custody. Too inefficient. But Dzera couldn’t look forward to an efficient death because she was Cheris’s mother.

I can’t do this, she thought.

She looked sideways, seeking to escape the video even though she knew it was hopeless. The next one had already begun playing where her gaze had fallen. This one showed a young woman who might have been Cheris’s age, although Cheris had never worn her hair that long. Dzera liked to think that Cheris would never have cringed like that.

When the spoon flashed again, Dzera felt a sudden sting in her right ear. She tensed up, breath scraping against her throat.

“Don’t react,” a tiny crystalline voice said right in her ear at the young woman’s next scream. The voice spoke flawless Mwen-dal. The timing was just as well, because Dzera flinched anyway. “It will be painless. We tried to find a way to free you, but this is all we can do.”

The stinging sensation intensified, and then there came a subtle flash of heat. A hundred questions crowded in her mind, then ebbed away. The last thought she had before her benefactor’s drugs scoured everything to static was that there would be no one to restore the garden.