Raven Stratagem

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

IMPRESSIVELY, ZEHUN GOT past the door to Mikodez’s primary office without getting themselves killed. Mikodez looked up, at first not recognizing the slim figure, the somber eyes, the long red coat. With their hair pulled back from their face, Zehun almost looked as they had when he had first met them, a quiet person with unquiet ideas about how the Shuos should be run. “Go away,” Mikodez said. His voice sounded as though someone had run over it with a rake.

Zehun’s eyes narrowed and they stepped in. The door closed behind them. “You should have said no to Istradez,” Zehun said.

“First,” Mikodez said, “it didn’t concern you.” Patently untrue: everything he did concerned his assistant. “Second, once Istradez offered to go, I had to accept. What was I going to do for the rest of my life, coddle him while I sent other agents to die? Imagine what that would do to morale. That’s bad management.”

“Your brother, Mikodez.” Zehun started to say something, changed their mind. “You’re allowed to have personal attachments. As a rule, the ones who don’t have any are the ones the rest of us have to assassinate for everybody’s good.”

“I gave up the right to sentimentality when I took the seat,” Mikodez said. “The Shuos are my family now. And please don’t tell me it was a poor trade, or a good trade, or anything. I can’t bear it right now.”

“That’s not why I’m here anyway,” Zehun said, although Mikodez knew better than to assume they wouldn’t bring it up later. “You haven’t been responding to my calls.”

“What could be so urgent?” Mikodez said sarcastically.

Zehun leaned over his terminal and ran a query. “This one you need to hear,” they said. A summary came up, explaining that a message had been transmitted in the clear and in all directions, from a thousand thousand sources, a storm of light. Cheris had sent her calendar and equations, plus a manifesto explaining their purpose. The Rahal were going berserk trying to suppress the information and handle calendrical fluctuations, but it was too late.

“Yes,” Mikodez said, admiring the uselessness of the map showing the scintillating profusion of transmission sources: too many for the human eye to pick out a pattern, and grid analysis wasn’t doing much better. “It was an obvious move. Sometimes the obvious one is the right one. I just hadn’t expected it to be so thoroughly implemented.”

“You made your choice, Mikodez,” Zehun said. “The world doesn’t stop moving forward. We have a crisis to deal with. Maybe after things settle down, we can hole up with some board games and get roaringly drunk, but in the meantime, you have a job to do.”

“Yes,” he said, “and you’ve done yours. Now get out, and fetch that Mwennin girl for me while you’re at it. I won’t be able to concentrate with you hovering over me.”

“What’s hilarious is that you think this is hovering,” Zehun said, with the superior knowledge of someone who has raised five children speaking to a non-parent, but they went.

Mikodez resisted the urge to procrastinate by watering his green onion some more. He’d only rot its roots that way. “Call request to Shuos Jedao on the Hierarchy of Feasts,” he said. Maybe this time he’d get through. He wondered what emblem that swarm was bannering these days. Deuce of Gears still? Swanknot? The boring temporary emblem for brand-new generals? Some crashhawk confection?

He had time for a quince candy while waiting. The stash in his desk was running low. He’d have to wheedle his staff into resupplying him. For some reason they thought he should restrict his sugar intake.

The Deuce of Gears flashed at him, and Mikodez’s mouth curled. So this was how she wanted it. The emblem was replaced by Cheris’s quizzical face when she accepted the call. “Shuos-zho,” she said, “is this the best time? Either you have a raging crisis or I do, I’m not sure which.”

“Hello, Cheris,” Mikodez said, impressed that her expression didn’t flicker. “I assure you that you want to be talking to me right now.”

“In that case, Shuos-zho,” she said, “we’re both dead people miraculously able to communicate with each other. I had it on good authority that you and the other hexarchs were all assassinated at some meeting. Must have been one hell of a party to get you all in the same place. Was there any good whiskey?”

Mikodez was pretty sure Cheris didn’t share Jedao’s fascination with liquor. “I ordered the strike,” he said, very calmly.

“Nirai-zho believed she spoke to you on the way in, before the ‘malfunction.’ How do you sabotage a shadowmoth, anyway?”

What the hell were Cheris’s sources? This was making his entire intelligence division look bad.

“Was it a double?” she said. Her smile turned knowing. “I remember you like using those, especially after you threw that Khiaz double in my direction. Because I needed more reasons to stay away from a Shuos hexarch.”

“Cheris,” he said, “it’s over. You’ve won. And if you must know, the double that carried out the suicide strike was my younger brother.” Fuck, he didn’t know why he was confessing that to this woman of all people, when he hadn’t wanted to discuss it with his own assistant. But he knew after all, the way he always did, even when he didn’t want to. He needed Cheris to start trusting him. That would only become possible if she believed him capable of vulnerability. A terrible way to use Istradez’s sacrifice, not that that was stopping him.

Something shifted in her eyes: an intimation of shadow, a nuance of color. “I didn’t realize,” she said. “I’m very sorry.” She waited for him to make some acknowledgment, and when he didn’t, went on, “Why would you betray the other hexarchs?”

“Two reasons,” Mikodez said. “First, once I found out about your plan, I realized you had the winning hand. Second, I wish to offer you an alliance with the Shuos.” His smile was hard. “Consider the deaths of my colleagues a gift to you, as a gesture of my sincerity.”

“So you were the one yanking Kel Command’s defenses around. To get the timetables to match up.”

“Yes.”

“Then it wasn’t Hafn who took out those construction yards.” Cheris’s voice had a bite to it, and if he wondered if the outrage was hers or Jedao’s. For a traitor, Jedao had always been a judgmental prick.

“That’s correct,” Mikodez said. “My saboteurs did the job. Don’t think I wouldn’t do it again, despite the death toll. People are already dying in this revolution of yours. Most of our systems would be under martial law if we weren’t, you know, always under martial law. They’re under extra-special Vidona watch now. It’s always been a question of acceptable casualties.”

“The price of a Shuos’s assistance is a Shuos’s assistance, isn’t that what they say?” Cheris remarked.

Mikodez inclined his head.

“I expect the only thing I’d regret more than saying yes is saying no.”

“That was the idea,” Mikodez said modestly. “Running around as Jedao was an extremely well-chosen distraction, by the way. I congratulate you. But that trick only works once.”

“It only needed to work once,” she said.

Mikodez acknowledged the hit with a wave of his hand. “One moment. I have another gift to offer you, although it’s not a very good one.” Where was Zehun? He paged them but got no response. “If I can keep you on the line a few more moments, anyway. Who are you planning on blowing up next?”

“If I tried to shoot every monster in the hexarchate,” Cheris said, “I’d be a monster myself.”

Mikodez put his chin in his hands and smiled. “If you understand that,” he said, “then you’re far ahead of Jedao, and this alliance has a fighting chance.—Ah, here we go.”

Zehun had returned with a teenage girl in tow. The girl had ivory-sallow skin and hair done up with enamel clasps. Her clothes, despite the striking color coordination in greens and yellows, were notable for their concession to useless practicality. Mikodez wondered just where the girl thought she needed to run off to in those sensible slacks and even more sensible boots. The Citadel of Eyes was a space station. You couldn’t run far.

“Cheris,” Mikodez said, “this is Moroish Nija. I don’t believe you two are acquainted”—Cheris was already shaking her head—“but she is one of approximately 5,000 Mwennin we were able to evacuate. That’s a pitifully small number, and I am not optimistic that your community will recover from its dispersal, but it was the most I could do without exposing Shuos involvement to the other factions.”

“Wait,” Nija said. She wasn’t looking at Mikodez, but at Cheris’s face. “This is her? Ajewen Cheris?”

“Yes, I’m Cheris,” Cheris said.

Nija began speaking harshly and rapidly in a language that the grid identified as Mwen-dal. Mikodez eyed the machine translation it was providing on a subdisplay, which for all its awkwardness suggested that Nija had an impressive command of Mwen-dal obscenities.

When Nija wound down, Cheris said something haltingly in Mwen-dal, then, in the high language, “I have no excuse to offer.”

“As I told you,” Mikodez said, “it’s a very poor gift.”

“Were you planning all this even then?” Cheris said.

“No. I just like keeping my options open. And I happen to think genocide is a rotten policy anyway. Nothing personal.”

“Just what are you doing with one of my people in your keeping, anyway?”

Nija spoke to Cheris before Mikodez could, to his amusement. “He offered me a job,” she said. “Which I accepted because your shitty life choices left me so many options.”

Cheris looked uncomfortable. “You’re recruiting, Shuos-zho?”

“In a few cases, where warranted,” Mikodez said mildly. “I mean, the Mwennin produced you. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”

Nija was singularly unimpressed with this line of thinking. “You mean you don’t have enough former shoplifters working for you and you’re desperate.”

Behind the girl’s back, Zehun signed, We’ve located the only child in the hexarchate who isn’t afraid of you.

Mikodez signed back, Let me know if you find any more of her.

Cheris’s mouth tightened, then: “I saw the broadcast of my parents’ executions.”

Amazingly, Nija kept quiet.

“I considered intervening,” Mikodez said. He could offer little comfort, although the evidence suggested that she wouldn’t hold it against him. Right now, he almost wished she would. “Because of who they were, Vidona security was too high. I chose not to risk it.”

“I appreciate your forthrightness,” Cheris said. “But what do I have to offer you? All I have is the tenuous control of one swarm, and you undoubtedly have your own mathematicians.”

None of her caliber, but she didn’t need to know that if she hadn’t guessed it already. “Zehun,” Mikodez said, “please escort Nija to lunch or gardening or handgun lessons, whatever you two find agreeable. Nija, thank you for indulging me. I’ll talk to you later.”

Zehun led the girl out. Nija appeared to think she should be back in school, and did the Citadel of Eyes offer a normal curriculum alongside all the Shuos refresher courses with ‘deception’ and ‘murder’ in their titles? Zehun had that ‘I thought I was done raising teenagers’ expression.

“I want in on your social experiment,” Mikodez said to Cheris. “But there’s one thing I believe only you can offer me. I’m hoping you’ll indulge me, as I’m certain it will benefit you as much as it will benefit me.”

“Now you’re making me worry,” Cheris said.

“You know more about Jedao than anyone alive,” Mikodez said. “What the hell was it that drove him over the edge?”

“Ah,” she said, very softly. “That.”

“His academy evaluations said he was a perfect Shuos. If that’s perfection, I don’t want any more of it. We’ve been trying to keep from producing more Jedaos ever since. I was almost purged myself as a cadet for manifesting Ninefox Crowned with Eyes. But the endeavor is doomed if we don’t know what the fucking trigger was.”

For a moment, Mikodez saw Jedao looking at him out of Cheris’s eyes, locked forever in the darkness. Then Cheris said, with Jedao’s accent, “The hexarchate was the trigger, Shuos-zho. All of it. The whole rotted system. He was never mad, or anyway, not mad the way people thought he was. I’ll put together a more detailed account for you. I don’t think it will do anyone any harm, and perhaps it may even, as you suggest, do some good.”

“Thank you,” Mikodez said. He bowed to her from the waist, in the old style that Jedao would remember as a formal greeting between heptarchs. She winced, which was good. He needed her to understand what she had gotten herself into. “I am in your debt. Now, I believe we have emergencies to attend to.”

“Understatement,” Cheris said. “Goodbye, Shuos-zho.”

It did not escape Mikodez’s notice that she signed off with the Deuce of Gears.

BREZAN HAD BEEN putting off the conversation for too long, but he could no longer tell himself that he had direly important matters to attend to, even if he did. Face it, the chief of staff was better at administrative matters than he was, and Cheris seemed to have some idea of what to do about generalized crises, perhaps because she was a trouble magnet.

In an ideal world, the damned uniform would burst into flames and save him from dealing with this, but he needed to deal with the consequences of his treachery like an adult. He was almost starting to wish he could consult Jedao on how you went on with your life after turning traitor. While he could ask Cheris, it seemed gauche.

After drawing a deep breath, Brezan headed down to the brig. His shoulder blades tickled every time he passed a Kel. He could no longer take formation instinct for granted. Now he knew how other Kel felt around him. Fitting punishment, really.

On the other hand, Cheris’s calendar reset meant, for the moment, that Brezan was safe from enthrallment. Terrible excuse for avoiding Tseya: he could have communicated with her remotely at any time, since the ability relied on proximity.

Tseya was being held in a standard cell, although it looked decidedly nonstandard with her in it. He wanted to offer her creeks and birds with ribbony necks and luminous tanks full of fish. Unfortunately, they were beyond the point where apologies would do any good.

Tseya herself sat calmly on the provided bench. The dull brown clothes didn’t flatter her. A servitor must have cut her hair. He ached, remembering the long ripples falling through his fingers, remembering combing out the tangles.

He had expected her to try to enthrall him the moment he stepped into line of sight. Instead, she raised her head and regarded him with silent dignity. Maybe she had decided it would be better to crush his windpipe straightaway, except he had no intention of getting that close.

After an uncomfortable pause, Brezan bowed to her, very formally. She might take it as mockery, although he didn’t intend it as such. “Tseya,” he said. “I owed you better than this. You figured out long ago that I decided to betray you, I’m sure, and I’m probably the last person you want to talk to, but there are some things you should know.”

Startlingly, her eyes glinted with humor. “You’re safe, you know,” she said. “I’m sure the mission’s completely blown, we both know it was Cheris all along, and I can only hold onto righteous fury for so long. Not that you can afford to believe me. So what happened? What was your breaking point?”

He forced himself to meet her eyes. “Cheris offered me a better world. A better calendar. This meant a calendrical spike. All the hexarchs are dead except Shuos, who sold the others out, or something, the details aren’t entirely clear to me. I have no idea what the fuck we’re doing next, but we’re going to let you off at—Tseya?”

Tseya was staring at him, face white. “All the hexarchs except Shuos?”

“If you want to say something cutting about my lack of character, or about how I did this because I let my promotion get to my head, go right ahead. I can’t say you’re not entitled.”

The strength went out of her. “I think,” she said, “that you really think this is for the better, although what it sounds like to me is an unbelievable amount of chaos. But that wasn’t the part that—that got my attention. I’m surprised you didn’t figure this out earlier. You were too polite to dig, I guess. The Andan hexarch is—was—my mother.”

“Say what?” Brezan sputtered. Then, remembering simple decency: “I’m sorry. I—I had no idea.”

“Well,” Tseya said, regaining a little of her spirit, “she was a terrible mother. But she never stopped being my mother, if you see what I mean.” Her breathing was still shaky. “Do you know, when I was little I thought Mikodez was my uncle. He always had the best candy in his pockets. Then I grew up and learned what the red-and-gold coat meant.”

Brezan started to figure out that Tseya wasn’t getting mad at him, she was getting mad at Shuos Mikodez. In all fairness, Mikodez was the one who’d offed Andan Shandal Yeng, but Brezan didn’t feel good about himself for escaping blame. He muttered an oath, then entered the cell and started to undo her restraints. “Before you get ideas,” he said, “I want your parole. We’ll let you off somewhere safe, but even if enthrallment doesn’t work anymore—”

“Was that what the calendar reset did?”

“Not exactly.” He explained it as succinctly as he could.

“You know,” Tseya said afterward, rubbing her wrists, “you should have asked for my parole before you came in here.”

Brezan shrugged. “Everyone’s a critic. Do I have it?”

“Why are you doing this?”

He didn’t touch her, didn’t catch her hands in his, only looked at her soberly. “Because you shouldn’t have to grieve for your mother in here.”

Tseya’s mouth curved downward. “You have my parole. You’ve fucked up really badly, you know, and there’s going to be an accounting, but I won’t be the one to take it out of your hide.”

“Come with me,” he said, because he didn’t know what to say to any of that. “I’ll find you a place to have some privacy.”

“Thank you,” she said. It didn’t make things right between them, but he hadn’t hoped for that anyway.

NEITHER PRINCIPLE NOR loyalty nor memory prompted Khiruev to cast off formation instinct. Rather, it was the fact that she was mewed up in her own room in Medical and they seemed to think she should do nothing more strenuous than watch dramas or, alternately, stare at the walls. Khiruev had come to the opinion that at least the walls had better dialogue.

The birdform servitor who had taken a liking to her—she was developing a rudimentary ability to tell servitors apart—came to visit her. Khiruev greeted it with stumbling taps in Simplified Machine Universal. She didn’t have much vocabulary yet, as the grid’s tutorials were atrocious, but the only way forward was practice.

The birdform lit up in a dazzlement of pink and gold lights. Then it said, very slowly, Are you well? Just to be sure, it repeated itself in the Kel drum code.

“How do you say ‘bored’?” Khiruev asked. The tutorials mostly assumed you wanted to know terms like ‘toxic fungus’ and ‘casualty.’

The birdform flashed the word at her once, twice. In the conversation that followed, it coaxed out of her that the high general had told her to rest, but she didn’t care how much her bones felt cobwebbed around with ice, her heart with frost, she wanted a diversion. Maybe some of the gadgets she had been fixing up. The way her hands shook, she’d probably mangle them. But at this point, did it matter?

I could bring you your tools and components, the birdform said.

I am to rest, Khiruev said mechanically. She looked down at her hands. They were shaking again. Some hidden reserve of obstinacy stirred up in her. Would it be too much trouble?

The high general wanted her to rest.

The high general didn’t have to know.

The birdform whistled its assent, and left.

Not long afterward, a small procession of servitors arrived bearing Khiruev’s tools, a judicious selection of broken mechanisms, and modular furniture to put everything on. She had no idea how they’d gotten all that past the medics and decided she wasn’t going to ask. Thank you, she said, although she was certain she was using the wrong form; the grid only knew about a stripped-down, blunt dialect of the language.

They blinked amiable acknowledgments and filed out, except the birdform. It seemed to find her entertaining. Well, if nothing else, she could ask it for pointers.

Khiruev’s eyes fell on the rose gold watch that Jedao—Cheris—had admired once upon a time. It took her several tries to pick it up. “This one,” she said softly. She knew what she wanted to do, frivolous though it was.

She needed the servitor’s help. At least the problem was the mainspring, which she knew what to do about. There must have been some reason she’d left it undone for so long, if only she could remember what it had been. No matter. She could fix it now.

By the time they had finished with the mainspring, her hands still had a tremor, but Khiruev realized with a start that the pervasive cold had slid away, and she could think more clearly.

CHERIS HAD A dreadful headache after she and Brezan went over the latest reports of riots, rebellions, scorched cities and cindered swarms. Devenay Ragath had raised an army on some planet. She hoped he wrote her a letter on how to do it because she had the feeling this was going to become vitally important information. For all Jedao’s military virtues, he had always been handed his armies; he’d never had to create one from scratch.

She planned to crawl into bed and stare into the darkness, but one of the servitors, a birdform, intercepted her on the way to her quarters. It offered her painkillers, adding that she ought to have taken them earlier.

“You’re right,” Cheris said, sighing. “I get these moments—revenants can’t get headaches. I forget sometimes I’m alive.”

You should see the general, it said, meaning Khiruev. She knew it had taken a liking to Khiruev.

Cheris had visited Khiruev once after she was moved to the medical center. Khiruev had been dozing. Cheris hadn’t wanted to wake her, not when she looked like she was disintegrating into shadows. Now—“Is she awake?”

Yes.

“I’ll come with you,” Cheris said. Companionably, they made their way to the medical center, which was marked by paintings of ashhawks entwined with snakes.

The Kel medics deferred to Cheris only as much as they had to. One of them warned her not to tire Khiruev. She promised to be careful. How bad had Khiruev’s condition become? Brezan had said that he had tried a few times to get Khiruev to understand that she didn’t need Vrae Tala anymore, but Khiruev had not responded. Of course, Brezan was the exact worst person to be making that argument.

Cheris wasn’t prepared for the tables with their screwdrivers and different sizes of hammers and strange metal coils and small bottles of shellac. And she wasn’t prepared for Khiruev sitting up, her face drawn but her eyes clear as morning. “General—?” Cheris said.

“I don’t know what you want me to call you,” Khiruev said. Her voice was scratchy.

“I’m Ajewen Cheris, and I’m what’s left of Jedao,” she said, “and from the beginning I lied to you.”

Khiruev laughed a little. “Then it wasn’t entirely a lie, was it?” She turned something around in her hand. Cheris couldn’t tell what it was when Khiruev still had her fingers around it.

“Not entirely,” Cheris said. “I remember being Jedao. That’s four hundred years of him. It was hard not to drown in him sometimes. But unlike you, I had a choice. Do you regret ending up here?”

“It’s still hard to think sometimes,” Khiruev said. “But I’d do it again. All of it.” She opened her hand, showing Cheris the watch, an antique, severe in its design. “For you,” she said. “I’m not done yet. I have some more restoration to do.”

“That thing must be a couple of centuries old,” Cheris said. “Don’t you want to save it for yourself?”

“You’re a couple of centuries old yourself,” Khiruev said. She was smiling. It made her eyes young. She set the watch down on the nearest table. “Three gameboards all along, isn’t that right? Jedao fighting the Hafn. But that wasn’t the real fight. The hexarchs thought Jedao was using the Hafn to start a revolt against them, a war of public opinion. And that wasn’t the real fight either. The real fight was the calendrical spike that must have been your intention from the beginning. So that’s it. It worked. The hexarchs are dead—well, except Shuos—and you’ve won the war.”

Cheris thought of the name she would have been given if the Mwennin religious calendar hadn’t been suppressed by the hexarchate. Khiruev’s father crumpled into swans. Her parents’ execution and her people’s genocide, the riots, numbers written in pale ash. Servitors silenced for hundreds of years. Being ordered to fire on the Lanterners’ children. Her swarm massacred with a carrion bomb at the Fortress of Scattered Needles.

That was only a fraction of the atrocities the hexarchate had perpetrated in her lives. And people didn’t stop being people because they had choices.

She had found a gun with which to fight. It remained to be seen whether anyone had the will to use it well.

“No,” Cheris said. “The war never ends.”