Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  In the cell across from Viv’s, it turned out, chained to his bed like Viv had been to hers, and now Viv understood the need for the chains, and the voice patch: he thrashed against his bonds, and his jaw gaped as if to scream. Sweat slicked his body, stained the sheets beneath. Ropy veins stood out on his arms. She turned away when she saw him on the table, as if she’d touched a hot stove—that same sharp full-body clench, that same uncertain stillness after as she wondered how much she’d hurt herself, and waited for the blister to rise. She had not realized how composed Hong looked, how restrained, until she saw him like this.

  “I’m sorry,” Xiara said. “There is no lasting pain. However it looks. Just the dreams.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Xiara fumbled among her keys for the right one to undo Hong’s locks, but he thrashed into her and the keys tumbled from her shaking hands. She knelt to snatch them, but Viv shook her head. “I can do this.” She slipped the visor off him, peeled the small pads that were not quite electrodes from his forehead. His breath evened, and blink by blink his pupils swelled and the rictus of his face softened to something like normal.

  “Viv?”

  “I got you, big guy.” The chains fell from his arms and legs when she tugged at them—she ignored Xiara’s shock, time enough for questions later.

  “Viv. I saw—”

  “Come on. The Ornclan did us wrong. Let’s get out of here.”

  He rubbed his chafed wrists; he saw Xiara, and his wonder sharpened, serrated. Viv’s hand stopped him as he sat up, clubs materializing in his grip.

  “It wasn’t her idea.”

  “I am sorry,” Xiara said. “When we gave the nightmares ourselves, it was a duty. To chain another, a guest—the Chief was wrong. Come. Please. We haven’t much time.”

  Viv had to help Hong to his feet, steady him. He tested his own legs, which failed. “What did you see in there?” she asked.

  His jaw clenched and he looked away, and just when she thought she would never get an answer, he said, “Perfection.”

  Xiara led them back through the tunnel maze, and once more Viv wondered at this building’s original purpose in the time before the Fall. Bunker? Warehouse? Weird tree-themed hotel? Whatever it was, it had died, and the people who lived here died, their secrets gone with them into the Cloud, or else nowhere. The dark pressed around her, heavier by far than Hong, and cold. She clutched him close. She watched Xiara. After a long journey, the first glimmering of surface light relieved the black, and she felt a breath of air.

  “The change of guard comes soon,” Xiara whispered. “I was waiting for it myself, before Viv forced my hand. If we’re fast, we can make it out before anyone knows you’re gone.”

  The throne grove stretched around and up, ghostly dim without its candleflames and lanterns. Far, far above, framed by spreading leaves, stars burned against a bluing sky. They crept over cool grass toward the gap between the trees across the clearing, the exit, safety. The throne stood bare, and bare the clearing save for a few Ornclan sleeping fur-wrapped among the dogs by the warm ashes of the fire. Smoke lingered on the breeze, and the chill of night. A wrestler tossed, grumbled, settled back to sleep.

  When she stilled, Viv let herself exhale, and turned back to face the gap between the trees.

  Where the Ornchief stood, flanked by warriors.

  “Hello, Daughter,” the Ornchief said as her warriors rose from their feigned sleep and raised their spears.

  16

  HONG FELL FIRST, though not for lack of trying. Clubs out, he launched himself against the nearest guard, spun from him to the next, all his art and grace surrendered to violent efficiency: short, sharp blows with clubs, forehead, elbows, knees, leaving broken forms behind him. “Go!” He meant to sacrifice himself—why shrink from injury? Might as well take the blow to the ribs now. You’d feel it in the morning, but that assumed there would be more mornings in which to feel.

  Stupid honor. Viv tried to pull the warriors off him, but failed; two got her arms, and she kicked one in the groin, but another took his place, and the more she fought the more they wrenched her shoulders back and at last she settled for cursing them with all the invention in her arsenal. She hoped the translator gimmick made their ears bleed.

  Hong was fighting his way to her side, until the Chief joined the fray. The woman’s silver crown flared, and armor flowed out from it to shield her in a suit of coherent armor-light, a massive armature that moved flickerfast. She hit Hong like a truck. He fell, skidded, slipped as he tried to regain his footing, went down.

  Only Xiara did not fight. Spears ringed her; she glared past their points at Djenn, but Djenn would not meet her gaze. Rigid with fury, Xiara wheeled on the others, the warriors who dared oppose her, memorizing each face for vengeance, knife out, growling. But she could not break the ring of spears.

  Then it was over, Hong down in a pile of limbs, Viv herself held by people trained to hunt game far more dangerous than temporally displaced entrepreneurs, Xiara’s neck ringed by a spearpoint collar.

  “You are guest-traitors,” she said. “Betrayers of trust. We welcome strangers. We honor pilgrimage. Is this welcome? Is this honor? When we wander distant lands, will they chain us, and feed us to monsters?”

  Metal shifted on leather and plastic. Wind whistled, high up. No one spoke. The Chief’s crystal armor faded back into her torques, into her crown, and she moved between shadows, now torchlit, now a darkness against pale-barked trees. Viv tugged against her captors’ grip, but gained nothing save more pain in her shoulder. Future people, it turned out, were harder to escape than future chains.

  How was Hong? Conscious at least, glaring up through the layers of hands that held him. Hot with anger, not yet calm enough to think of a plan, let alone communicate one through gaze and gesture. Viv knew how that felt. She wanted meat between her teeth. She wanted to stomp down and break these booted feet behind her. But she wasn’t strong enough. You can’t fight their way, Viv, not without broken bones you can’t afford. These fast-healing, grossly fit specimens of Orn might not even know how to do first aid for Earth-humans. Okay. No big deal. Xiara was trying an emotional appeal, the whole better-angels-of-your-nature tack. It wouldn’t work, but at least it gave Viv time to come up with something better.

  The Chief, massive, silent, reached her throne, and laid one broad hand upon its arm, but she did not settle. There was something in that, maybe: when she assumed the throne, her word was law, and bound her to its consequences. She had looked so light and strong in the ring, mighty and free until she donned the crown again. “Daughter,” she said. “Xiara. We should not discuss this here.”

  “If our people aid in guest-fraud, they should know the why and how of it. They should know why they have been asked to do things that will shame our ancestors when we meet them in the Cloud.”

  “She is not our guest,” the Chief replied. “Nor is she a pilgrim. She does not belong to us. Brother Hong, I am sorry you became a part of this. But she came to trade. She is outside our fire.”

  Oh. Shit. A trader was not a guest. A trader was an outsider, a threat.

  “I welcomed her,” Xiara said. “I owe her my life and offered her my friendship.”

  The Chief’s fingers traced the grain of the carved wood throne. “We owe our people more.”

  “You owe them the truth,” Viv said. Xiara and the Chief both turned to her, surprised she’d spoken. She tried to continue, but the guard behind her wrenched her arm and she stumbled, cursing, breathing shallow. Stupid physical body. If she could touch the Cloud, she’d leave the flesh behind in a heartbeat. She’d miss sex and cinnamon rolls, but she had to imagine there were compensations. She breathed slow until the pain stopped. “I just want to talk. There are, like, a hundred of you. I’m no threat. Tell your boys to chill.”

  The Chief nodded once, and Viv was free—well, free was pushing it, considering Hong, and the ten hunters between her and even a sprinter’s slim chance of escape. Free enough to st
and, at least. She’d take it for now.

  “I saved your daughter’s life. You want to discount that, fine. But we agreed to a trade while you sat on that throne.” She pointed with her chin. Pointing with your hand didn’t seem to be a thing these people did. “We gave you the news, and you were supposed to give us fuel and let us go. You’re breaking your people’s word, for what? A monster’s squatting on your fuel depot—what do you even use fuel for? And, hell, if you’d asked me I might have given you my nightmares.”

  The Chief crossed her arms, and still refused to look at Viv. She walked behind the throne and gripped its back in her hands, as if she could squeeze it until blood flowed. “The manufactory is not merely a fuel source.” Oh, good. The translation gimmick was fine. She’d just been wrong. “It makes … anything. Everything that we cannot make ourselves. Drones and glass and weapons to pierce thick plate, filters and drugs to fend off the poison the fathers left in our water, our soil. It was our joy, our wealth, our obligation, until Grayteeth came.” Shudders around the clearing. “He is a beast. A virus of metal—endlessly hungry, transforming all he touches to himself, a self-optimizer”—which seemed to be a single word in the Orn language—“seeking always and only his own pleasure. He chased us from the manufactory, defends it viciously, suckles on its matter siphon. He does not wish to eat us—he merely hungers, lusts. He tires of his own perversity; we gain what we need to live by trading our dreams, our shames, to him.”

  “That’s gross,” Viv said, because someone had to. Note to self, if you ever get back home: if you must design some sort of gray goo nanovirus, don’t make it kinky. Though, on the flip side, a usual sort of gray goo nanovirus, the make-the-whole-universe-into-copies-of-me type, would have devoured all Orn by now, so maybe there was something to be said for the kinky sort. “But it doesn’t answer my question.”

  “We did not chain you for the Grayteeth,” she said. “We chained you for the Pride.”

  Hong, eyes wide, fought his way to his feet before his captors forced him down again.

  “No!” Xiara started forward; the spears resisted her this time, scraped her breastplate, found the skin of her throat. She stopped. “Mother!”

  The Ornchief sighed. “The Pride believe you are important. That much was clear from your friend’s story. And the Pride have sent ghost-messages throughout the galaxy seeking you. My seer threw the oracle stalks and called them across countless spans of darkness.” She put out her hand without looking, and found the shoulder of the jeweled man who’d waited on the throne while she wrestled. He looked ashen now, less joyful in his jowls, as if he had traveled light-years while Viv slept. A diadem flickered on his forehead, and his eyes—yes, his eyes were black from lid to lid. “They want you, especially, Viv. They hunger for you with a need I cannot fathom. They have skills and tools and powers far beyond our own. In trade for you, they will rid us of Grayteeth forever.”

  “Mother, we do not deal with gods!”

  “These are not gods.” The Ornchief sounded tired. “Fallen angels, at best. Hungry, and useful.”

  “We have never bent knee—to the Empress, to the ghosts of the Cloud. And you would have us—”

  “We have bent knee already, child, to the beast that squats on our sacred trust, pleasuring itself with our fears. One trade, and we’ll be ourselves again. No more nightmares.” But the spears drew back from Xiara’s throat; the hunters traded uncertain murmurs, flicks of eye, shifts of stance, the usual subtle boardroom gestures of resistance amplified by the fact that the discomfited rank and file were actual soldiers, actually armed. “No more stolen dreams.”

  “Tell me you haven’t done this already,” Xiara said. “Tell me there’s still time.”

  The Chief’s shoulders softened. Viv did not breathe. She was so tired. One more push from Xiara might save them. One well-chosen word.

  “No.” The seer’s voice was high and clear, a tenor beautiful from lack of use. “There is no time. A power draws close through the Cloud, my Chief: massive and aflame with purpose.”

  The Chief looked up, still tired, but with the exhaustion of a hard job done at last, if not well. “That will be the Pride. Bind the woman, gag her; her tongue will not poison our guests against us.”

  Hands caught Viv from behind; she buried an elbow in a leather-armored stomach, bowled one of her assailants over, and so missed it when Xiara made her move: snatched Djenn’s spear from his hands, swept its haft around to parry the spears to her right and lock them down in the dirt, ran up one spear-haft to knee a hunter in the face, then tumbled to earth and came up sprinting toward Viv. Viv heard Xiara cry, and the thud of colliding spears, and felt a twist of panic until she spun and saw the Ornchief’s daughter bodycheck a warrior to the ground. But Xiara was reeling, breathing hard. Her spear shook in her hands as she raised it against the twenty warriors surrounding them. Her tip darted from target to target. Viv grabbed a spear herself, but she couldn’t even fake knowing how to use it. Hong, somehow, had fought his way through the crowd to Viv’s side—but he could barely raise his arms into a proper guard, and held only a single club.

  The Chief stepped down from the dais, armored once more, shining amber, grim. Wind whistled in the trees. Above, a shooting star approached.

  Grew larger.

  “O Chief,” the seer said. “A correction. My eyes have been clouded. What approaches is not massive. It is small, but moving fast.”

  Faster than sound or thought. No sooner had the seer finished his sentence than a brilliant red light hammered into the glade. Oven heat washed over them, and the stench of fire and ozone and hot glass. Sound, there was none: what struck them was greater than sound, a fist made of air, a backhand of pure pressure.

  Viv thought, first: I’m dead.

  Then she thought, dead people probably can’t think. At least, not dead people who don’t have souls.

  Form bloomed from the red as her eyes recovered. She caught her breath. She was not sure whether she was happy.

  There, in the glassed ashes of the bonfire, burning with transit, hands crooked to claws, eyes white, stood Zanj.

  “You don’t know me,” she told the Ornclan, in a voice pitched thunder-low. “Yet. But trust me: you should run.”

  17

  ORNCHIEF, VIV LEARNED, is not a position one attains without a certain resistance to the notion of running away.

  In other circumstances—circumstances in which Viv herself had not been chained to a bed, stuffed into a VR sim, and traded to monster robots—Viv would have admired the Chief’s chutzpah. Zanj, fresh-fallen from space, burning with reentry, claws dripping plasma, her head oblong, her teeth jagged, her eyes white, her face a mask of fire, did not look like a person with whom one should fuck. Viv would have run. Hell, she was tempted to run anyway.

  The Chief leapt forward. The torques at her arms and neck flared, and that amber armor shaped itself around her; a spear thick as a sapling flew through the air to her grip, and she struck at Zanj, a blow so fast Viv’s eyes refused to track it, so fierce as to leave no question of quarter.

  Zanj stepped aside, lazy slow. Her smile—even at this speed, Viv could see her smile—bore no trace of cruelty. For her, this was a joke.

  Then she tugged the spear from the Orchief’s grip, swept it around over her head, and struck the Chief so hard that her chestplate shattered. The Chief tumbled back, landed on her feet, skidded, hands up to defend herself, a brilliant display of physical control that would have been more impressive had Zanj not been standing, suddenly, behind her.

  Zanj took her time, and still it was over fast.

  She toyed with the Chief: opened herself for a strike only to dodge with a yawn and a stretch and a leap that landed her on the Chief’s outstretched arm, reclining—then spun away, peeling off another pane of armor in the process. “No respect anymore,” she said as she appeared behind the Chief to tear off the plate that covered her back. “No welcome, these days.” Off came the pauldrons, left and right. �
�No guest right, no red carpet. Not even an offer of tea. Not that I mind skipping straight to the fun.” She ripped away the Chief’s face mask, hooked the Chief’s greave with her foot-claw and shattered it.

  And that was the end.

  The Chief stood, disarmed and human, before Zanj. Still, she would not give up. She ran at her, caught her by the shoulders—but Zanj slipped away and the Chief tumbled to the earth. Still alive. Zanj turned her, seized her by the neck, lifted. “But you might at least have asked my name.”

  The Chief’s eyes were wide; Viv’s would have been wide with terror, but this looked more like religion. “Who are you?”

  The hunters and guards had abandoned Viv entirely; spears ringed Zanj, Djenn commanding, “Release her!”

  Zanj looked at him, raised one eyebrow— Are you fucking with me?—looked back at the Chief. “I’m Zanj. I’ve been away a long time. But now I’m back.”

  She might have done something in the Cloud to prove it, unfurled a banner Viv could not see, offered a cryptographic signature—or else her word had weight enough. The name was a boulder thrown into a still lake: waves rippled outward. Warriors dropped spears, drew back. Gaped. Xiara, beside Viv, looked like she was staring into the end of the world.

  “It’s okay,” Viv whispered to Xiara. “She’s not that bad once you get to know her.”

  “It’s not possible.” The Chief could barely draw breath. “The Empress—”

  “Reports of my impossibility, as the prophet says, have been greatly exaggerated. Now. Here’s what happens next. You will release my friend.” She turned and waved to Viv with her fingers, grinning. Viv waved back. Lacking claws, her wave was a bit less impressive. “You will give us fuel. We will get out of your hair, and you will forget you ever saw us.”

  “And Hong,” Viv added. “Let Hong go, too.”

  “Thank you,” Hong said.