Raven Stratagem

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

KHIRUEV HAD TROUBLE not drifting out of focus during High General Brezan’s meeting, partly because, like everyone but Brezan, she knew what the swarm had gone through, but partly because of the creeping exhaustion. Barely past the first quarter of Vrae Tala and it was already this bad. How did anyone survive to the hundredth day? She felt better when she interacted with people. On the other hand, sitting in the conference room made it all too easy to succumb to the illusion that she was gradually becoming no more animate than the walls, the air, the dust that wheeled in the light.

She roused when Brezan gave orders regarding Cheris, mostly to the effect of ‘if you see Jedao wandering around having broken his parole, shoot him.’ Interestingly, Brezan had not revealed Cheris’s identity, perhaps because the story was too incredible for anyone to believe. Then Brezan dismissed everyone else, and looked at Khiruev fretfully. Brezan had never been able to conceal what he was thinking.

“General,” Brezan said, “I’d like to tour the moth, unless you consider it inadvisable at the moment.”

A tactful way of allowing her to beg off, not that Khiruev intended to take it. All she’d do if she retired to quarters was dream herself into an assemblage of bones and coils and unthinking curves. “I don’t see why you should delay, sir,” Khiruev said. “Are you sure you don’t want a proper escort?”

Brezan flinched, as she had known he would, but the forms had to be observed. “Do you think I’m in danger?” he said.

“Not from any of the Kel,” Khiruev said. Of course, it was questionable whether Cheris fell in that category anymore.

Brezan didn’t reply to that, although the fate of his Andan comrade had to weigh on his mind. “The command center first, then,” he said. He took two steps toward the door, then stopped. Without turning around to face Khiruev, he said, “Why?”

Surely Brezan knew he wouldn’t get results with such a vague query? One of the first things they taught officers was that recalcitrant common soldiers could tangle you up with loopholes if they became sufficiently motivated. Khiruev said, mostly honestly, “I don’t understand the question, sir.”

Brezan swung around, eyes narrowed, nostrils flared. Looking for a target. Since this was Brezan, he hadn’t yet worked out that everyone in the swarm was a target if he wanted them to be. “You can’t guess?” he said. “I understand formation instinct. I can’t understand how you let yourself become Cheris’s pawn after you were freed.”

“Sir,” Khiruev said, “it sounds to me like you’re asking how you let her do the same to you. You already know my story. But here you are, and for all you know, the other crashhawk has already escaped to do as she pleases.”

“If you’d shot her in the head when Kel Command dumped Jedao,” Brezan said, voice rising, “we wouldn’t be—” His mouth snapped shut.

“What exactly did you think would become of me when you were gone?” Khiruev said, tired. “I’m human, sir. People break. Sometimes it doesn’t take much. If it disappoints you, I’m sorry. You can take whatever disciplinary measures you see fit. But I had decided what mattered most to me.” She paused, piecing together the reasons as they had once existed; it was already difficult to remember. “I don’t care if Cheris never had a chance against the hexarchs. I wanted to die having seen that someone believed in a better world enough to fight for it.”

Brezan stared at her, his face unreadable, then said, “Let’s go, General.”

Khiruev fell in to Brezan’s side. In silence they walked through the cindermoth’s halls. Either Brezan had discovered his inner art critic or something else about the ink paintings bothered him. Since Khiruev hadn’t been asked to have an opinion on the topic, it was none of her affair. Say what you like about formation instinct, it was soothing to know that figuring out what to do was someone else’s problem. She’d only fucked up by getting herself promoted too high.

Commander Muris saluted Brezan practically before the doors opened to admit them. The grid would have informed him of their approach. Muris avoided looking at Khiruev. This was entirely sensible: for all he knew, Brezan was parading Khiruev around before executing her for high treason. Khiruev had no plausible defense against the charge.

Although the swarm was at a standstill, Brezan was able to observe Muris poring over reports on post-battle repairs and casualties, and the occasional call from the moth commanders. Doctrine and Engineering were busy taking apart the salvage they’d recovered from the Hafn in an attempt to figure out what those auxiliaries had been. The officers carried out their duties in hushed voices. Brezan stuck around for thirty-eight minutes, his expression growing increasingly remote. Then he nodded politely at Muris, thanked him for his work, and headed out.

They went through the major departments. Brezan lingered longest at Medical, although there had been few casualties on the Hierarchy of Feasts this past battle and one of the people in sickbay was there for a banal bacterial infection. Then Brezan stopped by the dueling hall, and Khiruev wondered if Brezan meant to challenge her. Brezan would win, no question. Khiruev was as good at the sport as she had to be, and no better, even when she’d been healthy. Brezan had some genuine enthusiasm for it. But no, Brezan seemed content to take a seat in the back, away from the other spectators, after waving away the salutes. Khiruev looked at him curiously. Brezan made an impatient gesture for her to sit by him. A few people were warming up, and only one pair was sparring, with more grit than skill.

“You’ve watched videos of Jedao dueling, General?” Brezan asked.

Khiruev was touched at how often Brezan addressed her by her rank, as if that could restore their professional relationship to what it had been. “Once or twice, sir,” Khiruev said. “I remember that he was good, but that’s about it. Why, do you intend to duel Jedao?” She assumed she was to use the cover identity until Brezan indicated otherwise.

“Jedao’s colleague was supposed to be dead mediocre at it,” Brezan said, meaning Cheris, “not that that’s enough reason to keep someone from a hobby. But Jedao’s another story.”

Khiruev sensed that she wasn’t supposed to respond to that, so she didn’t. Whatever Kel Command had done to Cheris, they surely regretted it now.

“I should have killed you already,” Brezan said abruptly.

“After a thorough interrogation, yes,” Khiruev said. “It’s not too late.” It was Brezan’s most persistent fault, his impetuosity. That, and the fact that if you put a goal in front of him, he focused on it to the exclusion of everything else. No strategic vision. Khiruev would have put Brezan in the category of a ‘use with caution’ Kel if he’d been a line officer: great on special missions for his ability to think unconventionally, useful in charge of a tactical group if carefully supervised, and for mercy’s sake don’t promote him any higher than that. Kel Command wasn’t wrong: the promotion, in this case, was key to this particular special mission. As long as Brezan leaned hard on Strategy if the Hafn showed up again, he should be all right.

“I don’t care if they execute me too,” Brezan said after a while, although they both knew that mere execution would be the merciful option. “What I did—I wanted to do what was right. It looked simple. How the fuck do you mess up ‘kill swarm-stealing mass-murderer’?” He was gazing abstractedly at the sizzle-and-flash of the calendrical swords. “I don’t know enough about swarm tactics to read stylistic differences. Does Jedao fight as he always did?”

“That’s complicated,” Khiruev said, “since his black cradle engagements were classified and we’ll never know exactly how they were handled, but I’d point out that everyone seems rattled. Sir, if you want more information, you know who you have to ask. You’re going to have to hope Jedao wants to tell you the truth. It’s clear that he can be a very good liar when he wants to be.”

“Yes,” Brezan said, “you’re right.” Nevertheless, he lingered another nine minutes, until two more of the duelists started a practice round. “Let’s go.”

Brezan stopped at a terminal in one of the lounges to verify that Cheris was, indeed, still in her quarters. “Not that Jedao couldn’t have done something tricky to the grid,” he said, “but if I really believed that, I wouldn’t have accepted the parole.”

“Let me enter first anyway,” Khiruev said. “Just in case.”

Brezan made a pained sound. “You trusted him once.”

Khiruev couldn’t see the relevance of this. “Your safety, sir.”

“Look,” Brezan said, “if he wanted to hurt us, we should be more worried that he’d blow the whole place up instead of shooting us up piecemeal.”

“Did you leave high explosives in there with him?” Khiruev demanded.

“No, but—”

“There’s no need to ascribe supernatural powers to him, sir. Or to fail to take sensible precautions.”

Brezan grimaced. “The way my year’s been going, I’m not ruling anything out.” He strode briskly the rest of the way to Cheris’s door and requested to be let in. His hand wasn’t anywhere near his sidearm. Given how all this had started, fair enough.

After a few moments, the door slid open. Brezan walked in unhesitatingly. Cheris rose to greet him, although she didn’t salute. She had changed her clothes: an unexpectedly festive lavender dress and a raven pendant, the one Khiruev had seen once before when she played dangerously with her gun. The pendant must have some meaning to her, but this wasn’t the time to ask. Khiruev was so used to seeing her in Kel uniform that she felt the bones of Cheris’s face had changed, or her silhouette; that she was someone Khiruev had never met.

“Have you decided?” Cheris said to Brezan.

“There’s one thing more,” Brezan said. He was—not smiling, exactly, but his mouth had an ironic twist.

“Do tell,” she said.

Brezan nodded at Khiruev. “General,” he said, “I’m sure you have questions of your own for the interloper. I want you to ask them as though I weren’t here.”

Khiruev drew a shuddering breath, unable even to acknowledge the order.

“You’re learning cruelty, I see,” Cheris said to Brezan.

Khiruev looked at her. “Jedao?” she said.

Her smile was still Jedao’s smile, but this time sad. “If that’s who I am.”

“Was any of it real?” Khiruev asked.

“It was real enough,” Cheris said. “I’m what’s left of Shuos Jedao. Kel Command anchored his ghost to me. You can guess what some of the side-effects were. When he finally died, he passed on his memories to me. The hexarchs aren’t wrong to be concerned.”

Khiruev had difficulty thinking clearly. Cheris waited calmly while Khiruev formulated her next question. Not long ago Khiruev had answered to Cheris, although the memory of that loyalty was threadbare already, and would soon be gone except as a puzzling shadow. “Was there ever a chance to bring the hexarchs down?” she said. She wasn’t sure what she wanted the answer to be, given that Brezan himself seemed ambivalent on that count.

“Brezan,” Cheris said, “why don’t you ask me straight out yourself, instead of doing this to her? I have the same incentive to give you the answers you need, either way.”

“Because she’s the one you hurt,” Brezan said. “Because she’s the one who’s dying for a cause you never bothered to explain.”

“Brezan—”

“You did this to her, don’t you think you owe her something?”

“I didn’t ask her to—”

“But she did. Don’t you think you should at least give her a fucking reason before she falls dead?” Brezan was shouting now.

“Brezan,” Cheris said, all ice, “look at her. You’re a Kel. You should know better than to lose it around one of your subordinates.”

Khiruev’s breath was coming hard. She couldn’t explain why. She had trouble looking at the high general, as though he was surrounded by fire, by death painted into the crevices between molecules.

Brezan choked back whatever he had originally meant to say. “Fine. I concede you didn’t turn the swarm into a pyre. That you fought the invaders. But that’s not enough justification for using people as game pieces. Tell me what the hell this plan is, what the hell made this whole crazy outing worth it, or I will feed you to a very pissed-off Andan. She’ll have my head too, but at that point it’ll be worth it to be rid of you. So tell me, and make it good.”

“Just think,” Cheris said, “all this passion for a system you’re not even committed to. Imagine who you’d become in service of something you truly believed in.”

Brezan visibly checked himself from hitting her.

“We need a new calendar,” Cheris said.

Brezan and Khiruev exchanged glances involuntarily. Then Brezan said, “The hexarchate has spent almost a millennium crushing heresies, some of which drummed up a significant amount of local support. Hell, weren’t the Lanterners heretics?”

“Technically a client state and not part of the heptarchate proper,” Cheris said. “The histories tend to get that part wrong.”

“It’s besides the point anyway,” Brezan said. “You can’t possibly enforce a new calendar over enough of the hexarchate to make a difference. Not to mention—” He stopped, paling.

“Sir?” Khiruev said. Cheris had started to smile, very faintly. That couldn’t bode well.

“That was the whole fucking point, wasn’t it?” Brezan said to Cheris. And to Khiruev: “It’s in her fucking profile. It was there all along. She’s a mathematician. I mean phenomenally good, as in the Nirai tried to recruit her and it was her specialty in academy.”

“Yes,” Cheris said. “I won’t deny it was often helpful being Jedao, but I meant it as a distraction. Jedao could do calendrical warfare only so long as he used a computer, or someone else juggled the congruences for him. Anytime he was in play, all people ever thought about was where the next massacre would be, not about mathematical skullduggery. Frankly, Brezan, the calendar reset is going to go off in fifteen days no matter what you do to me.”

If anything, Brezan looked even less reassured. “Splendid,” he said. “You’ve admitted that you’re running around with pieces of a spectacularly bloodthirsty mass murderer inside your head. Now you’re trying to convince me that this new calendar of yours will be an improvement? Because—because as bad as the hexarchate is, as bad as the remembrances are, and the suicide formations, and Kel Command getting crazier with each successive generation—as bad as this all is, I’m not under any illusion that things can’t get worse. Do you have any idea how much chaos there will be if you destroy our technology base?”

“I designed the new calendar to be compatible with most existing exotic technologies,” Cheris said. “Especially communications and the mothdrive.”

Brezan scowled at her. “I’m not a Rahal, and I’m not a Nirai-class mathematician either, but that means the associated social structures have to remain similar. That’s not an improvement.”

“You haven’t seen the theorem I dragged out of the postulates,” Cheris said wearily. “Yes, you’re right. The calendar won’t make all the Vidona disappear. It won’t make people forget about remembrances, or change the minds of people who think ritual torture is entertaining. It won’t make the hexarchs people that I ever want to meet. What it will do is let people choose which exotic effects apply to them. That’s all.”

Khiruev worked through the implications. “Sir,” she said to Brezan, “you have to stop her. If she can do this, she’ll destroy the Kel. Without formation instinct—”

“The Kel existed as an elite before formation instinct was ever conceived,” Cheris said. “I remember it, even. It could be done again, if the Kel decided it was worth doing.”

To Khiruev’s dismay, Brezan was studying Cheris intently. “If you’re lying to me about this, any of this,” he said, “I will never forgive you.”

“Sir—” Khiruev protested.

The muscles along Brezan’s jaw convulsed. “Khiruev,” he said, “when she no longer outranked you, when you first had a choice between Kel Command and her, you chose her. You chose Vrae Tala. You saw something in her, in what she was doing. Do you remember what it was?”

It was like trying to look through a lens made of mist. “I am Kel,” Khiruev said. “You are here now, sir. My service is owed to you. I understand that I was in error. I accept whatever consequence you impose.”

Brezan jerked his gaze away. “I could order you to do practically anything,” he said savagely, “and you wouldn’t even see anything wrong with the arrangement.”

“Then I await your orders,” Khiruev said, because it was the most correct response she could think of.

Brezan scrubbed angrily at his eyes, but didn’t say anything to that. “Cheris,” he said, “just how do you propose setting off a calendrical spike? I assume it’s a calendrical spike you have in mind. It’d have to be something big.”

“The Rahal, like everyone else, rely on servitors for maintenance tasks,” Cheris said, “including those for the master clocks.” She let the statement hang there.

“You can’t possibly be talking about having sway over a legion of treacherous disaffected Rahal—” Brezan paled again. His glance swept around the room, at servitor-height. “Servitors? But they’re not—” He swallowed. “Can they be trusted?”

Cheris crossed her arms. “Brezan,” she said, “has a servitor ever offered you harm? Or anyone you know, for that matter?”

After a drawn-out pause, he said, “All right. I’ll concede that. But why? What do they want?”

“They’re individuals,” Cheris said tartly. “I don’t presume to speak for each and every one of them.”

Khiruev thought back to the servitors who had hung around Cheris’s quarters back when she was being Jedao. Khiruev had never thought twice about their presence. Most people gave servitors less thought than the wallpaper. If they had wanted to slaughter humans in their sleep, they could have managed it forever ago. It spoke better of them than the humans.

Brezan hadn’t finished questioning Cheris, however. “That takes care of calendar values,” he said, “but you’re going to have to do something pretty fucking dramatic to mark a full-on calendar reset. What are you going to do, aim some torture beams at all the hexarchs?”

Cheris gave him a look. “No torture,” she said. “But Kel Command has to go.”

Khiruev drew her gun.

“Stand down,” Brezan hissed.

Khiruev holstered her gun, although she didn’t want to. “It’s high treason.”

“This whole thing is high treason,” Brezan said, which didn’t help. “I’m not done talking to her.”

“So you want to see if I can pull it off,” Cheris said to Brezan.

“I am sick of serving something I don’t even believe in,” Brezan said. “What the hell. Fifteen days, you say? I want to know down to the fucking hour, and I want to see the math so someone who is not me can check it over. If nothing happens, if nothing changes, I’ll scorch you dead and drag you back to Kel Command. And then, if they don’t hang up my corpse next to yours, I will spend the rest of this rotted career helping them smash whatever uprising they point me at.”

“And the Andan agent?” Cheris said. “What’s her place?”

“I left her in confinement,” Brezan said. His voice had gone distant. “She claimed to be disgraced, but it’s always possible she was lying to get my guard down.” Brezan colored. Khiruev knew then what their relationship had been. “It may not be safe for anyone, er, human to enter the room with her. We’ll have to find somewhere to let her off at some point.”

“Were you expected to report in?”

“They’d expect to hear from her, not me,” he said. “I’m positive there’s no way to secure her cooperation. As far as I know, she’s loyal. And I—I don’t have any leverage.” His eyes darkened. “Her silkmoth is mated to the Hierarchy of Feasts. I’d better do something about that before we set off for wherever the hell we’re going.”

“I’m certain we’ve driven off the Hafn,” Cheris said. “It’s not impossible they have yet another reserve swarm, but I was looking in on the analysis that Doctrine was doing. The Hafn had a staggering number of those caskets, but they run through them fast. I looked at what we could deduce of their calendar and figured it out. Those people sewn up with birds and flowers—they’re a power source. That’s why the Hafn were able to use their native exotics in high calendar terrain. Fortunately for us, they were running low, and they weren’t able to link up with their logistics swarm.” The one with the mysterious auxiliaries.

“They use people as a power source?” Brezan said in revulsion. He had been shown videos of the caskets during the meeting he had called.

“So do we,” Cheris said, “only we call them suicide formations.”

“It’s not the same.”

Cheris held her silence just long enough for Brezan to get the point.

“Anyway,” Brezan said, unable to meet her eyes, “since this border is otherwise wide-open, it won’t kill us to be on patrol. At least until non-crashhawk Kel show up spoiling for a fight.”

Khiruev listened while the two crashhawks discussed logistics, and wondered if it was possible for her world to tumble any more upside-down. In fifteen days she would find out.