Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  They had existed. She was certain. Even in her confinement, in her madness, Zanj had not lost quite so much as to let herself be fooled so effectively. Her secret names remained secret. Her memory was hers.

  But Pasquarai was gone.

  It made a bleak and miserable sense.

  Zanj, in her strength, stole suns, freed planets, so naturally the Empress would steal her home.

  Anger’s hotter than a star, and endures where stars do not.

  Fuck exploration. Fuck mourning. Zanj wanted answers.

  She smelled a small god not so far away, some ancient fucked-up elephant brand whispering about the joys of free enterprise to a handful of near-sentient fishes on a backwater moon. She snuck up on the god through the Cloud, and tapped it on the shoulder. The little brand might have jumped half a planet in its shock, and that was before it saw Zanj, before the slow synapses of its Cloud-mind performed a shoddy lookup operation, and recognized her.

  Have you ever seen an elephant fly?

  You might be tempted to feel bad for this fucker as you read the next bit. Don’t. Gods have a lot to answer for. And this one sure has it coming.

  It fled, anyway, or tried to. Hid in a drift of stardust, which Zanj blew apart with a backhand; encrypted itself into Big Bang after-static wash, and she peeled its encryption away; doubled back through an asteroid belt and crouched trembling in a cave. Where Zanj, behind it once again, cleared her throat.

  She caught it by the trunk and slammed it into the cave wall hard enough to split the asteroid in two. It spat noopoison, caustic whispers to sneak into her mind and shut her down, get all her parts talking against one another; would have been a clever attack a few millennia ago, but now it dripped harmless off her cheek. She caught the elephant god by the jaw, and peeled it in half. Inside, nested in the meat, a small pale misshapen wormlike man-shadow mewled against the world; she tugged it out of the wet elephant carcass it had occupied like a tongue louse, slapped it hard enough to spin its head around, then flipped it over, snatched its chin between thumb and foreclaw, and forced it to stare into her eyes, no matter how it tried to roll its own away. “You know who I am.”

  “Zanj,” it said, “I swear, I didn’t know those were your fishes, I just wanted—”

  “I’ve been gone awhile.”

  “That’s it,” the god whined, “we were just taking—ow—taking care of them for you, you know, gotta rope them in, gotta ow.”

  She dragged it from the broken asteroid through the Cloud, slamming it into code blocks and cosmic strings on the way, until she could dangle it above the abyss where her home used to be. “What happened to the world that used to be here?”

  “Empress took it,” the god replied. “Long ago. Into the Citadel. Pretty lights. We ate for weeks on the code she used to move it.”

  “And the Fallen Star? The Suicide Queens?” She had seen the battlefields; she had seen some of the Queens fall herself. But she had to ask the question, had to hear it even from this pathetic liar’s mouth.

  “Haven’t seen. Haven’t heard. Ancient history stuff. Like—” The god thought better of saying like you. “You got any other questions? I almost had those fishes ready for a market economy…”

  “No,” said Zanj. “I’m done.” And she broke his strange loop. Easy as crushing a bug, and more fun. A mind is a twist of thought curling back upon itself. She snapped that twist, and the thoughts no longer spun to frame an identity; they darted out forever into the Cloud, into the sea of souls. The mind was gone. A dripping, gross pile of data, of habit, memory, remained, a stain on her hands. She would have eaten the god’s body, but it was old, corrupt, and held nothing she might need. She was a better class of monster.

  She hovered alone in the universe.

  Like Viv.

  Viv, who had tasked her. Tortured her. Viv, lost in the world, not knowing where she fit, what use the Empress had for her. Viv who refused to let her kill—someone, to be quite honest, who did not deserve to die. Viv, that tiny soulless infuriating meatsack who bore the Empress’s scars. Who wanted to get back to a home the Empress stole from her. Who did not have the luxury of breaking gods when she was mad. Who needed help.

  And, hell, they had that in common. Zanj wanted to make the Empress suffer—and like this, unarmed, without allies, wearing this shitty crown, she’d be swept aside with as little effort as Zanj herself had needed to break the whining vampire elephant.

  There was an undeniable appeal to throwing yourself into a monster’s gears, in hope you could jam them with your corpse. But better to think. To plan. To use your hatred like a whetstone of the will. To develop tools and paths of vengeance, recruit allies, and above all else to study the machine until you found a chance to strike, and die, or not, but at least to win.

  And still, after all this ticking time, Viv, who held her leash, had not called her to heel. She had let Zanj run. Had, perhaps, even trusted she would come back of her own accord.

  Would Zanj have done the same, their places reversed? Of course not. She would have seized every advantage—until the person she controlled found a chance to kill her.

  Interesting.

  Zanj should not be considering this. She had a whole galaxy in which to run, hide, gather tools, and fight. Alone.

  The abyss revolved around her, and far away the Citadel walls glittered: a million-light-year expanse of black ice.

  Her people were gone. Her galaxy was broken. The Empress must pay.

  She washed her hands of the small god’s blood and brooded on the how.

  15

  VIV KNEW BAD dreams, and these were worse. She hadn’t thought that was possible after the Cloud. Phantoms huddled round her in her sleep and flicked forked tongues into the hollows of her ears. Fever tossed her. Knives slid beneath her fingernails.

  In dreamtime she was split between parallel worlds of fear. She hung, wrapped in a tight leather sack, from the ceiling of a dark warehouse room, while men in suits circled, discussing how they’d end her, how they’d make her suffer first. Elsewhere, in another body, in a smaller room of dripping pipes, she was covered in cement, which set, hardened, toasting her with waste heat, and her friends were in another room and could come save her if she called to them, but a touch of fire had welded her lips together. She stood onstage, clad in metal that would not let her move save as the strings that led to the ceiling pulled; she was a doll, a puppet. She sang because she was not allowed to scream.

  These were the easy nightmares, the dreams she could bear. They grew worse, in widening spiral.

  She dreamed of disappointment, of Angelique or of Magda in pain, dreamed of disgrace in newspaper headlines, dreamed flipbook-swift of setting all that to rights, dreamed vengeance, dreamed finding those who hurt her and breaking them, dreamed the faces of friends on her victims. She would master all. But as she fought the phantoms, the suits, the robots, the great mouths in space, behind each a larger monster loomed. She won. She won. But the larger she became the greater her certainty and fear that someday she would lose, someday the collar would click home around her throat. She fought and burned and built and suffered, and as she did she tired, and soon she would fall, and all she’d done would come to nothing, and the screams would remain her fault.

  Unless she won. Unless she beat them all. Chained boundless space to her will, hollow queen upon a hollow throne, trapped within a perfect crystal form that sealed her mouth and locked her limbs and would not let her live, just rule. Concrete hardening around her, baking her as it set.

  She screamed, mouthless, immobile, locked in crystal gleam. Her self was a shell, unbroken smooth.

  But as her nails scraped that shell, as horror overwhelmed her, she realized there was a door behind her, out of sight, a door from dreams back to the waking world. If she let go. If she stopped straining against her shell.

  She tumbled back into the dark.

  She realized, first, that her eyes were closed.

  She opened them to darkness and rea
lized, second, that she was awake. When she moved her head, she felt extra weight against her temples. She wore some kind of bulky headset. She raised her hand to her face, but she moved only a few inches before her chains stopped her with a clink.

  Wait. Chains?

  That was when the headache hit.

  It felt like a pickax to her temple, but after the initial shock she realized the pain had come without attendant scattered bone chips and brain guck. If she’d been free, she would have curled around herself, clutched her head, groaned, but the chains bound her arms and legs, her waist, her shoulders. They’d clad her hands in steel mitts. She tried to cry out but made no sound, not even a muffled groan, as if her voice had gone. Scream, she told herself, but when she opened her mouth no sound came. Her jaw creaked, strained; silence. Something tugged the skin of her throat, adhesive, a patch of some kind, numbing her voice. Temporary, she hoped.

  The fear hit her then. She flailed on the bed, not so much to break the chains as to feel her body obey her. What had happened? Where was she? A prisoner again? A prisoner still, everything since Boston a drug dream? No—her feet still ached from their hike through broken Orn.

  That headache, those vivid, terrifying dreams: the Ornclan must have drugged her. But they had been welcomed guests. Hadn’t they? The Ornclan didn’t seem the type to skimp on hospitality.

  Xiara had been so eager to take Viv under her wing before the Chief. Tried to drag Viv into her bed, even. Had she meant to protect Viv? Or was she just playing along?

  Either way, here Viv was, chained to a bed, with some damn headset covering her eyes, showing black-on-black static, unable to speak, her hands cased in steel, just like in her nightmares. At least now she could think. What did they want with her? What would they do to her? Her imagination was too vivid to ask that question lightly.

  She felt the fear, let it hammer her, remembered how it felt to almost drown, remembered the Empress in the basement, remembered the faceless men, remembered the nights in high school when she’d turned on the news and thought the world was ending. She was tied up here, could not see, could not fight. Some fucker could just walk in with a potato peeler and go to town. She did not ignore the fear. She felt through it, crawling for an exit across a floor covered with broken glass.

  And then she was done. Enough terror for now. She was going to fight, win or lose. Though, when she fought, she tended to win.

  Call Zanj, a voice she did not like tempted her. She could not speak, could not even scream, but then, her commands were not carried by sound. It might work. An angry immortal space pirate would be an asset. Even one who wanted to kill her.

  Still, she refused.

  That helped, oddly. Rejecting one option suggested she might find others. She explored the chains, the mitten-shells over her hands, and fought to keep her breath deep and even in spite of surging panic. Was she imagining … no. It was real. The seam of her right mitten had a small gap, just wide enough for her fingernails to catch. When she curled her fingers, it hinged apart, fell off, clattered to the stone floor. Once that came off, she found the manacle at her wrist was loose. She shifted her thumb to the center of her palm and pulled, and pulled harder, ignoring the joint’s protest. Just before the joint gave, her hand slipped free.

  She wasn’t a praying type, but she thanked god anyway, or the dumb jailers of the far future. No time to linger in thankfulness. She grabbed the patch at her throat, tore it off, hissed away the pain, and almost wept when she heard her own voice behind the hiss.

  “Fuck” was all the comment called for by her current situation.

  She tore off the headset next, ripping more adhesive patches from her forehead. This room looked like the one where she’d gone to sleep: underground, windowless, one door, what light there was shed by a ghoulish blue phosphorescent lamp on a table by the wall. Aside from the lamp, the table held an array of what looked disturbingly like surgical equipment.

  She heard footsteps outside the door, voices. Two pairs of boots tromped toward her down the hall, and she held her breath, tried to wish away the clatter her headset had made when it struck the floor.

  The boots passed by. They must not have heard. She breathed out, turned to her other bonds.

  Her left mitten and manacle appeared seamless at a glance, but they came apart when she pried at them. Odd. Incompetence, she thought at first. But then she remembered the manacles the Pride had used on her back at High Carcereal, and Hong’s claim that he could not even think about escaping.

  If everyone and everything in this place, in this time, had some sort of connection to the Cloud, some sort of informational component, call it a soul if you like, perhaps chains interfaced with the Cloud as well as with normal matter? But Viv had no bond with the Cloud—no soul. Maybe their chains didn’t work on her.

  It was a theory. She’d test it when she got the heck out of here. For now, bonds on her left hand came away, and the manacle at her waist, and the leg irons. And she was free.

  Free, in a cell, with two guards between her and, hey, why not be optimistic and call it freedom. They must have snagged Hong, too. Or killed him. That thought lit a fire in her brain. She’d rescue him, or take revenge.

  Not against two guards at once, though. Not Ornclan guards.

  She pressed her ear against her cell door, and listened. The guards marched back up the hall, and down again. By their third circuit, she hadn’t come up with a better plan. She hefted the headset, tested its weight; the thing felt sturdy. The voice patch she slid into her pocket. Might come in handy.

  When the guards marched past the door, she turned the handle, quick. Locks disengaged. She moved.

  She slipped out into a long, straight hall, lined by doors to either side; the guards, Ornclan in armor, marched ahead, talking in low voices. They didn’t seem to have noticed her.

  Don’t waste it, Viv. She grabbed the smaller guard by the shoulders, pulled back, and swung her hips; the man staggered off-balance into Viv’s cell, and she slammed the door shut behind him, heard the lock engage. So far, so good. Now there was only one guard in the hall, so what if he had about six inches of height and an extra foot across the shoulders on Viv, not to mention a club? He lunged for her; she turned, ran, heart in her throat. Boots clattered on stone behind her; if she could make the turn at the end of the hall, maybe she could—

  He tackled her, toppled her. She spread her arms and turned to break her fall, hit the floor hard with her shoulder and ribs and kept her head well clear of the stone. A good fall, but this wasn’t a dojo floor: the impact stunned her, and by the time she gathered her senses he was on top of her, teeth bare, his club at her throat. She could see up his nose, smell his sweat. Viv thrust her hip up into his groin, struck some damn piece of armor there; he grunted, pressed the club into her neck. She couldn’t breathe.

  A hand touched him on the side of the neck.

  His eyes rolled up, and he slumped over. Xiara caught him as he fell, and set him down slow.

  Xiara bent over Viv in the empty hall, in armor. Her eyes glittered in the phosphorescent dark. She held one hand out to Viv, and Viv scuttled back on her palms—but then they both stilled, in shadow, each watching the other.

  “I tried to stop them,” Xiara said. She looked raw, sad, scared. Not nearly scared enough.

  “You could have tried harder,” Viv replied when she could find her words.

  “You’re my guests. You saved my life. But I can’t go against the Chief.”

  Viv tried to push herself up, still unsteady. Xiara’s hand was out—no longer cautioning now, just offering. Viv glowered at her and she winced, colored with shame—then, hell, Viv grabbed her hand anyway and let herself be pulled upright. “This isn’t going against the Chief?”

  “I wanted to break you out. I was waiting for her to stop posting guards. They do, generally, sometime on the second night.”

  “Second?”

  Xiara bit her lower lip, looked away, nodded once.

&nbs
p; “Christ.” She didn’t bother to answer Xiara’s questioning look. “What did you do to me?”

  “Nightmare harvest.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I told you we control Orn’s manufactory?” Viv remembered, nodded. “We don’t anymore. A god took it from us.”

  “I thought gods traded. They don’t take.”

  “Most aren’t strong enough to take if we don’t let them. This one is. It fell from heaven two years ago. Grayteeth, it calls itself. It attacked the manufactory, cut us off, and cast us out. It gives us the things we need—so long as we feed it nightmares. Desires. Dreams. It sent us the tools: machines to pry through minds, root out fears and desires, and feed them back to its maw. We fed it on ourselves for years, but it tired of our taste. For months now it has demanded we send more … delicacies, and for months the Chief has appeased it. We’ve never met travelers from so far away as you. I’m so sorry. When I set you under my protection, I hoped she would respect that, and respect Hong’s faith. But none of that’s important now.” She flinched from Viv’s gaze at first, drawing back into her body as if warding off a blow—but she closed her eyes and forced herself out again, to face the accusation and pain. “I am sorry. I owe you my life. The Chief dishonored us by seizing you. I want to help you escape.” She took the helmet from Viv’s hands. “We can trade your desires to Grayteeth ourselves, in exchange for the fuel you need. And then I will face my Chief’s justice.”

  “You could come with us.” Perhaps Viv said that as a sincere offer. Perhaps she said it because she felt vicious, deep down, and wanted to see Xiara suffer when she wished she could say yes.

  “The Chief is wrong,” Xiara said, “but she is my Chief. If I wish to stand against her, I must stand. It is wrong to run.”

  “A hell of a lot safer, though.” But the choice was made, and Viv felt too guilty for taunting Xiara to force her through it again. “Come on. Do you know where Hong is?”