Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Somewhere in the blurred evening Hong told the Ornclan of their adventure on High Carcereal, with the supple voice and timing of a skilled storyteller. They listened. He only left out the most important bits. In his telling, Viv had been a prisoner of the Empress, not—well, perhaps prisoner was not so wrong a word as all that. He did not make himself the hero. He rescued her, she rescued him. The battle was grand, the Bleed unknowable, the Empress’s deeds profound, Her motives mysterious. Only Zanj was missing.

  Zanj would have liked these people. Scorned them, yes, but liked them nonetheless—would have danced with them, would have wrestled ten of their best at once and let them think they might win. She would never have insulted them by throwing a bout. She would have drunk gallons, eaten the whole banquet, gone forth into the city to fight an Emperor Snake solo, then dragged the carcass back and butchered it so they could eat some more.

  But Zanj was gone, which was Viv’s fault. There were extenuating circumstances, sure, but if Viv had been the type to make excuses she would never have picked herself up off the ground after bankruptcy one. Zanj was gone. That was that. Carry on.

  Applause followed Hong’s story; the wrestler who’d failed against the Chief challenged Hong to a bout, and they threw one another three times before the next challenger arose. Dancing began, a long snakelike pattern of dancers holding hands, stamping, hollering; a spin moved down the snake of dancers and back up, as the snake ate more of the Ornclan and grew.

  Xiara pulled Viv toward the snake, and Viv, who had never danced, swam along through the wine, floated, joined the snake’s tail and tried to let the music fill her and scour away all trace of thought. Xiara spun—her injury healed, or at least the pain of it gone soft with drink. She spun Viv, too, grinning, slick. Viv saw things that were not there, faces in the blur, Zanj, yes, Wuchen, Shanda, Gautham, Susan, Magda, long gone, long gone. Xiara rolled her hips, curved and drew and grinned and teased and danced away, and Viv, wine-clouded, felt her body, far away, wanting.

  The dance twisted past her ability to follow. Xiara caught her eye, mouthed a question Viv could not hear, so she mimed drink with hand curved as if to hold a cup, and waved Xiara back into the dance. She joined the patterns that opened and closed while other dancers darted between, flower petals and bees at once. Stripy four-eyed dogs yawned on the dais by the Chief. Viv watched.

  Hong met her halfway to the wine. “Viv.” He had that knack of not saying things, so she could not really get mad at him.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Why aren’t you?”

  “I have vows.”

  “Do vows mean you can’t have fun?”

  “Certain kinds of fun,” he said, “yes. That is exactly what they mean.” She almost turned away, but he said quickly: “I’ve been thinking about our friend.”

  She felt steadier resting her hand on the table. “You can use her name.”

  “It would not be wise. They would recognize it.”

  “Really?”

  “The whole galaxy tells stories about her thefts, her battles with the Empress. I first heard them long before I joined the ’faith. And now she’s free.”

  “To fight the Empress. Like she wanted.” She tried to stand without the table, but decided against it as a long-term proposition. He stood between her and the wine. “It all works out. She gets to be all big ’n terrible.” Consonants betrayed her. “Everybody wins.”

  “To fight the Empress, she will need power. To get that power, she will break worlds, steal suns, lay claim to vast swaths of the Cloud. She’ll hurt people, just as she would have hurt Xiara if you had not stopped her. She cannot win, but she can break the galaxy in the process.”

  She remembered those burning eyes, the joy Zanj felt in unleashed rage. And she remembered, too, the hand extended in the dark room where she slept. “You think I should call her back.”

  “Yes.”

  She could stand, then, because she had to, and draw away. “What right do I have?”

  “We all are bound, in our own ways. Xiara to her Chief’s wishes, I to my faith.”

  “You broke with your faith to find me.”

  “I defied the Rector because of my loyalty to the ’faith, not in spite of it.”

  “Zanj’s suffered enough.” She wasn’t scared of that name, or of the consequences. “I hurt her. She’s right about that. She wants to come back, she can come. She wants to stay away, I won’t stop her.”

  “Even if—”

  But she would not let him finish that sentence. “Even if.” And she stalked off through the crowd, holding to the anger that was not sobriety, but a reasonable stand-in.

  Back through the grove she marched, back through the dance, seeing nothing, feeling alone. There were stairs worked into a tree near the dais, winding up and around its vast white trunk. She climbed them with heavy feet, on wood worn smooth by generations that have trod, have trod, have trod. Nor can foot feel. Christ, she needed boots. Night wind chilled her after the sweat and smoke of the grove. She stumbled free at last onto a balcony beneath the stars.

  The sky burned in no pattern she knew. Massive trees closed out the firelight behind her, and the city of Orn was dead save for a faintly glowing marbled purple-pink dome a mile or so off, mostly hidden by the ruins, its light too soft to taint the sky.

  So, matchless, the stars took fire: a galaxy more like a disc than a hoarfrost road. Those brilliant golden and rainbow rings gave depth and dimension to the warm, full black. She thought of a velvet dress Danika had once worn, how it glittered when crushed against the grain and struck by light. Her eyes were hot, her cheeks wet, and she was alone.

  She heard a footstep on the stair.

  Another. Soft, catlike. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re sad.” Not Hong’s voice. She turned.

  Xiara had removed her armor; the clothes beneath seemed gray silk, but glittered, and draped a body not so muscled as the Chief her mother’s, but curved with strength and flesh. She shivered in the cold, still flushed from dancing. When she touched Viv’s arm, Viv felt that warmth: Xiara was a skin-clad coal. “Remembering. That’s all.”

  “You are my guest,” she said, and drew closer. “You are in my grove. You are strange to me, but I would not see you sad.” Her hand cupped Viv’s ribs, her fingertips pressing skin through cloth that had protected Viv from claws and lasers and did nothing against this woman’s touch. A touch, that’s all, simple and frank, an offer followed by a silence to give her time to think. Someone had replaced her brain with rubber. A touch: Why had she never tried that before? She’d played coy, she’d teased, she’d been blunt and she’d been flush with romantic gesture, she’d been kind and mean. But she had never been this simple.

  Xiara’s bottom lip was very full and close. She smelled like a person smells after dancing, after armor, and Viv liked it. Compatible, she thought, as she drew closer, by instinct. Compatible immune systems.

  She stopped.

  Maybe it was the thought that did it: the vertigo of memory, of reading that scrap about immune systems on some idle airplane afternoon, flying from somewhere she had friends to somewhere she had work. Remembering that, and being here.

  She could take shelter in a body tonight. She’d done it before.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am sad. You’re right. And you’re great. And any other day, I would, but—it’s been a long, long time. I don’t even know how long. I’m so far from home, and I don’t know what this would be. I don’t know who you are. I’d like to learn—I really would. But I can’t do this now.”

  Teeth trapped Xiara’s lip, and she looked away, and for a heartbeat even the back of her neck seemed disappointed. But it passed, and she turned back, eyes level. “Can I sit with you awhile, at least?”

  “Yes,” Viv said. “Please.” She sat down harder than she meant, and sprawled back as if to carve out snow for angels. Xiara settled beside her, and—“May I?” “Yes.”—rested
her neck on Viv’s arm. “I can’t imagine growing up with a sky like this,” Viv said. “All these stars. Where I used to live, there was so much light it smeared the sky after dark. The first time my parents took me camping, I thought there was something wrong with the sky.”

  “Camping?”

  “In tents, you know. Away from the city.” So far as she had seen, there was no away from Orn, city of starships. “In the woods, I mean.”

  “You grew up in a city,” Xiara said, “one so vast you had no sky. And yet you do not know how to fly your own ship.”

  “It was…” She did not know how to say what it was. “Where I come from, we don’t know about much of this.” Because maybe it hasn’t happened yet. “The Empress took me from there. When Hong found me I didn’t know about the ’faith, the Pride, the Bleed, or Orn. What about you? How do you know about all that stuff?”

  “Travelers come. Pilgrims mostly, seeking Orn of old. Gods bargain for sips from the manufactory, to grant them power. The Chief prays to a magic mirror, and hears voices from beyond. We tell stories from the old days. We learn what we need.”

  “Can you really fly?”

  They were taught, Xiara told her, lying still across her arm, watching stars: taught by songs and old books, by whispers from the Cloud, by their mothers’ memories and their fathers’, by the blood which spoke to some of them in time. (Viv almost argued with that, there was no such thing as blood memory—but why not, here? If you could upload consciousness to the Cloud, why not pass memories? Bodily fluids were not so bad a vector. But she was distracting herself—from so much, including the warmth by her side.) Xiara had dreamt of flight every night she could remember.

  “So you’re asking me to trust a pilot who learned to fly from ghosts.”

  “Better that, than not to fly at all.”

  “Do you really want to go with us? Leave your clan? Your family?”

  “I have had clan and family all my life,” Xiara said. “They will not vanish if I leave. I will take them with me to the sky, and they will grow with me as I travel.” She hesitated, looked toward her—Viv mirrored the motion, saw a glint in her eyes just as she looked away. “Hong’s story did not mention your friend. The pilot.” She did not say: the one who almost killed me. “She was not a monk.”

  “She was … a prisoner, too.”

  “From your world?”

  “No. But we were similar.” Viv remembered Zanj’s touch on the scar. The world wheeled beneath her, back, always back, her body strapped to spokes and spinning. She should keep her secrets. She should not trust. That was how she’d lived back home, and look where it had gotten her. “Have you ever heard the name Zanj?”

  Xiara laughed, and in that laugh Viv thought, well, good, Hong was making it up, I haven’t done anything I’ll regret, I can just lie here and be happy and Xiara can laugh forever by my side. But no, she had to slow, and stop, and speak. “You must be from a strange and backward world indeed, to ask that question.”

  Oh. “Someone important?”

  “A fairy-tale monster. A star-stealer. Zanj fought the Empress; Zanj led an army of gods. Zanj outwarred the Diamond Fleet, and stole the Saint’s Cascade and the Cup of the Sun. Zanj gathered the Suicide Queens. She swiped the Fallen Star from a dragon’s forge—watch or she’ll come for you, too! Zanj Girlthief.” She poked Viv hard in the ribs. Viv yelped, sat up straight, rubbing her side; Xiara’s head slipped off her arm and thunked against the wood, and she was still laughing. Viv’s head swam from the vertigo of sudden movement. “Not to know Zanj! They must know nothing where you’re from.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Come on.” She patted the platform beside her. “Lie back.”

  “I’m drunk,” Viv said. “And it’s been a long, hard day. I really should sleep.” It would have been a bad cover if it weren’t true. Xiara lay still; the world revolved.

  She rose, smooth, and slid herself under Viv’s arm. “You helped me all this way,” she said. “Let me help you a little further.”

  It all blurred after that—the downward path, the throne grove where Hong and the wrestlers tossed one another about, drunken, giddy, down into the tunnels of an ancient bunker, concrete riven and arched with roots, to a small room with a bed and a lamp. Xiara helped stretch Viv on the bed, and touched her cheek. “I could stay.”

  “Later,” she said. “I need sleep now.”

  She was not imagining reluctance on Xiara’s face as she left. Felt good about that. Nice. Better than she felt about the dreams that followed: dreams of green, of burnt skin, of a voice too close, too loud. She was used, by now, to screaming. But these dreams were not her usual nightmares, because in these dreams her torture built and built until she could bear no more and still it grew, until all at once it stopped, and the Empress drew back, and there Viv saw above her, battling, bloody, fierce and deadly and doomed but oh so free: Zanj.

  14

  ZANJ. ZANJ, DARTING free and lonely through the Cloud, Zanj swift and strong and unrestrained for the first time in three thousand years—she dropped to realspace to drink heat from an exploding star, she surfed a wave in a planetary ring, she stretched, strained, compassed the gap between galactic arms in a single jump.

  At first she ran to outpace command, to flee Viv’s inevitable order—come back, help me. Kneel. But that order did not come.

  She was, impossibly, free.

  When the flight-fear passed she settled into a steady pace, fueled by anger, burning layers of it as she pushed herself further, faster. The first layer, the hottest and most fearsome, was her anger against Viv—how dare she order Zanj. Viv, that fleshy mistake, that soulless blank, who remembered nothing of where she was, who she was, just visions, illusions of self, her grasping, surging need for control in a world that made no sense to her. Viv, who dared accuse Zanj, Zanj, of cowardice, dared order her not to kill whomever she damn well pleased.

  (Not to kill a girl, admittedly, who could never in a thousand years have hurt her. It had been a fair fight—but was it, really? Could a match between such unequal powers ever be fair, or a fight? She ignored the question. Foolish back-of-mind yammering logic. Rage felt cleaner without thought.)

  Once Zanj burned through her anger at Viv, she found a deeper, sweeter vein of fury toward the Empress. Tyrant. Traitor. That smug, entitled monster, who killed friends and wrecked world after world in quest of her perfect future, who ate civilizations that would not bow to her endless war.

  But even that resentment, that rage over wasted eons, gave way in the end, and she found the deeper, slower, dirty-burning but eternal fuel of anger at herself.

  What was the common thread in all her failures? Who oversaw Zanj’s every suffering, who forced her to endure, who promised vengeance but had not yet brought vengeance to pass?

  She sat upon a comet turning inward through the Oort cloud of a red and dying sun. She had hoped Orn at least would last. Its people were clever. They built small, and hid from the Empress’s eye. They avoided truck with the flashy, wasteful Cloudbound meme-monsters small folk called gods. They hid when they could and fought only when they had to.

  She had hoped. And that hope failed.

  But for once, forever, she was free. She would never be chained again. Viv had taken her dare, refused to call her back. So why not enjoy this freedom? She could compass the galaxy, visit old haunts, find everything she’d missed in three thousand years trapped within a star.

  She rolled to her feet, and left that place.

  Her form slipped. Traveling so fast, she did not need it, found its weight a hindrance. Her edges grew complex; she sped down strange dimensions.

  Wherever she walked, she found ruins.

  The purple jungles of Celephaïs were now towers of ossified ash, overgrown mushrooms rising from the skulls of the few ungulate bodies she could find amid the wreckage. The floating pleasure barges of gas giant Kedayil had sunk beneath the methane layer, and she dove to swim among their pressure-crumpled husks�
��no bodies here, or at least no organic ones. The acid layers had eaten all her friends away.

  Up. And out.

  She flew, and did not find what she sought. She met wonders, in a way: broken battlefields overshadowed by immense crumbling monster-robots, with cinder-suns burning their last in a scorched sky. Listing space hulks, shattered fleets where once her armies spread. The Cloud near the core zones of the ancient war still burned with spent weaponry—she walked the stars here carefully, danced around the edges of holes in space. Near the Citadel, the Cloud thickened and bubbled to opaque glass, impenetrable as the walls of fish tanks to a fish. She probed it with all the powers and sensors and systems she possessed in this reduced and scar-warped form, but no chink or crack appeared, no flaw made itself known. The Imperial palace approached, the world-station with its Rosary bead, an immense drain on the Cloud, circled by black lightning traces of Bleedsign; Zanj dared not close without weapons, so she left.

  When she lost all other options, she sought Pasquarai, her home. She’d dared not run there first—who could say what horrors the Empress might have unleashed on her people while Zanj remained imprisoned? To jump straight from the shock of ruined Orn to the certainty of ruined Pasquarai would have pushed her beyond the limits of herself—but all those barren, fallow worlds, those cracked orbitals and wrecked enclosure spheres, these worldminds cored and silent, had padded her with sorrow and rage.

  Even now she had hope: the Empress was cruel. Would she not have taunted Zanj with her people’s agony? And there had been no taunt. Could they have remained safe and hidden for so long?

  She turned her eyes to Pasquarai, and found it gone.

  No scar marked its passing upon space. No wrecks of worlds. No shredded starstuff, no Cloudburn or radioactive scar of antimatter disintegration, none of the weird-physics inversion a contained color bomb would leave. No. Pasquarai of flowers and fruit, her pirate cove, the world and the nondescript but lovely star from which Zanj first took her life, its moons, even the statue they built in her honor when she saved them all from death, all gone, as if they never were.