Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  “At night,” he whispered back. “At the same time as Yannis.”

  “Hey, if she’s doing it, it must be a good idea. Right?” Speaking of which. “Ah. Where did she go?”

  Hong sighed. His irises flicked red, and he reviewed the slope for heat sources.

  She wished she could have done this alone. It would have been quieter, for one, and for two, she’d grown unsure of herself around Hong. But the last two nights she’d followed Yannis up, only for the old woman to lose her among the cliffs. She’d climbed the rest of the mountain by shipmoonlight, and found nothing but a cold hill’s side.

  “There.” Pointing: she saw a flash of motion behind a bush, which might have been a nightbird taking off, or a startled fox. But she trusted Hong’s eyes, and followed him upslope.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have been quieter to do this alone, as a matter of fact. She could climb, more or less, but back home she’d never had to stalk anything wilier than a pizza—unless you counted investors, and the stalking there was mostly metaphorical. Hong moved like a wave over water, as sure and smooth, and left as little trace. She wallowed after him. But even now, painfully aware of her every overcommitment to a step, each brush of hers against a bush he’d skirted, she knew she was climbing faster, more surely and quietly, than she could manage alone.

  She caught herself loving this: the two of them climbing together, silent when they could bear not talking, on this cool evening, on this rippled slope beneath the shipmoons. Of all their party, even Xiara, Hong was closest to Viv-model human, but that didn’t explain how comfortable she felt with him around. So: what?

  She understood then, as she traced him hold for hold up a cliff, as he turned back and watched her, one hand half out, ready to spring if she should slip.

  She’d once seen a huge ice shelf calve from a glacier, then turn over in the water, at first a slight slope in the glacier’s plane, then steeper, steeper, then with a rush of frozen spray that made rainbows in the knife-dry air, with a surge of mighty shoulders, the complications underwater revealed themselves, and what had been visible faded below the waves. This felt like that.

  Hong was a friend. Viv didn’t have many. Lovers, yes, collaborators, coworkers, and fellow strivers by the legion, but all those relationships were bound by common needs. Shared goals gave clarity. Coworkers wanted to fulfill their mission statement and get rich along the way. Lovers wanted happiness, and good sex—selfish and mutual satisfaction. But what was the goal of a friendship? What did it get you? How did it run up the score?

  She knew so many people. Classmates, coworkers, gaming buddies, gym mates, they were her friends—people she’d describe unreservedly as friends, people whose weddings she’d flown twelve time zones to attend, people she’d protested for, people whose hospital beds she’d waited beside, people she’d bailed out of prison. But again and again when there wasn’t a crisis she turned from them into uncharted waters, to run up her various scores alone.

  She’d ached with their absence. And she’d been afraid. But still, she hadn’t seen Magda in years before Boston. She couldn’t blame all that on politics, or on the world. Some of it was her own damage.

  Hong could have left her. He wanted answers, but that wasn’t why he was here. And that wasn’t why she turned to him.

  She could have said all this when she realized it, and that might have changed things. Nothing physical stopped her, no promise bound her. Just the girders of her self, the tower she’d built to become Vivian Liao. So instead she ignored his offered hand up, heaved herself onto the ledge, and when she spoke next, it was to focus on the problem. Shared goals. Shared objectives. “Yannis does this every night,” she said as she recovered her breath. “I think the other elders go up, too. I haven’t seen Nioh in a couple days, and the rest have disappeared for days at a time before. I just didn’t wonder where they were going.”

  He nodded. “Perhaps the ritual is the source of their longevity.”

  “What longevity?”

  He judged brush-strewn ground, then tiptoed through it without a rustle or crack. “Nobody in the village knows how old Yannis is. Or Nioh.”

  “You didn’t think this was worth mentioning before now?” Tiptoe, tiptoe, tiptoe—snap. She’d stepped on a twig. Nearby almost-crickets ceased chirping.

  “Why would I?”

  “You thought it was suspicious that they have very good plows, but not that some of them don’t age.”

  “Does everyone age where you come from?”

  “Yes!”

  He shuddered, and kept climbing.

  Okay, Viv thought. So we’re following an immortal up a mountain. Best not focus on how that might go poorly. Still, she felt relieved to be doing something, to be out here with Hong, alone as they had been in those first panicked minutes in High Carcereal, running from Pride and local security and the ’faith.

  The others were variously consumed. Zanj had spent the days since their failure and her ensuing brief sulk in ceaseless work, gutting and rebuilding the antenna along a new design, her own this time; when villagers approached, even to offer food, she cursed them and threw things until they left, and when they’d gone she muttered about spies and saboteurs and stealers of parts. Gray had returned to the fields, to his songs and his heavy lifting, and Viv didn’t want to disturb him.

  And then there was Xiara. She worked long hours with Zanj, and when she had to sleep she wandered back to Viv’s hut and collapsed. In the minutes of shared wakefulness, they talked. They tried. Jumping into sex, they’d skipped the whole getting-to-know-you bit, so now it went slower and more painfully. Viv tried to explain what she’d done back home, with little success, since most of the concepts involved in software capitalism were either too advanced or too primitive for the Ornclan. Xiara knew trade, and hated it: for her it meant long treks through wasteland bearing cargoes of knives, to sit across a low sacred fire from another daughter of another Ornclan, breathing acrid smoke from herbs tossed in the fire that made the edges of the clearing pulse and spin, while each clan’s priests and oracles invited the propitiation of the ancestors, and warriors watched wary, and haggle with her opposite number over how many of her clan’s knives were worth how much of the other clan’s embroidered cloth. And after that, the drinking started, and, depending on the deal, the sex.

  “Is it the same where you come from?”

  “Actually,” Viv said, trailing fingers down her belly, “more or less. Minus the sex, most of the time. There are rules.”

  She yawned, and curled beside her. “Missing the best part.”

  “Is this a trade, then? You and me?”

  “Mmm. What are you offering?”

  She waved her hand over her own body atop the sheets, indicating: this.

  “Oh.” Xiara slid one arm down, down her belly, below, held her and leaned in, and caught the skin at the side of her neck between her teeth. “But I have one of those already.”

  Xiara slept after, so deep she didn’t notice Viv creep from bed to follow Yannis up the mountain.

  They were talking again, at least. Xiara had found … not peace, but a space less grim than her postcrash depression. Viv didn’t know how stable that place might be, and did not risk shaking its foundations. She’d made that mistake before with other women—and the opposite mistake, too, the one she was making now.

  Hell. Better to trust, and leave the second-guessing for later.

  Hong held out one arm, and she stopped, waited, followed him to a patch of ground that looked no different from the rest. “Where did you learn to track, anyway?” she asked as he led her once more uphill.

  “X!hanghaim,” he whispered back.

  “Is that a ’faith world?”

  “The ’faith have no worlds. Only the ’fleet. We wander through the galaxy, small and mobile, so neither Bleed nor Empress can find us. But some supplies are easier to grow on worlds—and we need recruits. So the ’faith visits settlements that need the services we offer. Sometimes we repa
ir a decayed stormshield, sometimes we chase off bloodthirsty gods. Often it’s simpler: Medicine. Operations. Basic mathematics. From those who ask of us, we take. Goods, sometimes—but also children young enough to bring into the ’faith.”

  “That’s…” horrible was the way she expected to finish her sentence, but what she actually thought was depressingly consistent with my expectations. “Interesting,” was what she said.

  “My older brother was sick. He had teased me one day, and I ran from him, and I fell into a nest of cats. He rescued me, and chased them off, but he was bitten on the leg, and the venom spread. We were lucky: this was the month the ’fleet were visiting X!hanghaim. They were far from us, in the capital city, so I ran a week to reach them, across the Thorn Plain. The Archivist found me passed out a mile from the city gates, when she wandered collecting local herbs for her garden. She fixed my brother, and I went with them. Here. Use this handhold, then that.”

  When the climb was over, she said, “They didn’t have to take you. They could have just helped.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But this is how it is done. My brother has four children now. And I seek the liberation of all sentient beings. If I never left X!hanghaim, I would never have met you, or Zanj, or Xiara, or Gray, and posterity would be the poorer for it.”

  Before she could sort out how to answer that, he crouched and pointed uphill to a black, rounded smudge that ducked behind a boulder. Yannis. That was her fringe of gray scales, that her pitchfork. Then she ducked her head, and was gone.

  No words now, as they crept forward together. Only wind, and sifting sand, and branches brushing branches.

  “There,” he said when they rounded the boulder behind which she’d disappeared. “Just a cave. Their ritual chamber must be inside. We should go back.”

  The cave looked suspiciously cavelike, its walls patterned limestone and lichen, woven with roots like veins, narrowing to a shadowy crevasse. Heat exchange between cooler air and warmer stone created a subtle breeze, out and in, as if the cave were a mouth. It couldn’t have been more realistic if she’d paid Imagineers to build it. Because Viv was human, she felt a stab of primal fear. And, because she was herself, she crushed it.

  “I remember that boulder,” Viv said. “But the cave wasn’t here last night.” She ducked, and descended. Hong, reluctant, followed her.

  Ten feet into the cave, the shipmoonglow that had lit their path failed. It didn’t surrender to normal shadows. Instead, it stopped altogether, in a gray-black wall that rippled at Viv’s touch.

  “Viv,” Hong said, “we really should—”

  She stepped through the shadow curtain into false fluorescent day.

  White walls, white floor—no, white deck. Doors here and there. Ahead, a whisper of robe turning down a side passage. No darkness anywhere.

  Hong passed through the gray curtainfield after her, caught himself on her arm, and gaped.

  God, Viv loved being right. Even—hell, especially—when being right meant learning you were in a great deal of trouble. “Some ritual chamber, huh?”

  He shook his head.

  “Let’s follow her.” She grabbed his robe and tugged him after her, but he didn’t budge. “Come on. We have to see what’s going on here.”

  “We might have set off an alarm already.”

  “Even more reason to learn what we can before they catch us. This might not be so easy next time.”

  “What if they do worse than catch us? Viv, we have to go back and tell the others.”

  Christ. He was right. “Okay. Go down. You can climb faster than I can in the dark. Tell them where I’ve gone.”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “Then come with me,” she said, “and we’re caught, or we’re not.”

  He refused to budge. And she felt so grateful for that hesitation, for his urge to protect her.

  “Go on, goofball. I’ll be fine.”

  He opened his mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it and stepped back through the curtainfield, leaving her alone.

  If he hadn’t left, she would have pushed him away, but when he did, she felt a second lurch inside, as if the white walls and deck had disappeared and left her in free fall. But, hell, if she paid attention to her every post-decision doubt, she would never have become herself.

  So she descended.

  The hallway zigged, zagged, without branching. She heard footsteps always around the next corner and padded after them in silence, thankful for her Ornclan boots’ soft tread. After the third turn, the hallway began curving down, smooth as ever, a slope like a playground slide, but “down” changed direction as she walked, always perpendicular to the floor.

  With every step in this strange place she felt smaller, more alone, a girl in a white hall in a haunted universe, following the footprints of a ghost. The air chilled her, artificial, perfect, and finished. The halls smelled of filters and cleaning products. This was not the Refuge where she’d worked, the place she thought she knew. Ancient, polished mechanism lurked beneath.

  Looking back, she could not see the hallway’s last corner. It had vanished beyond the horizon of the sloping floor. She was, if she judged the curve correctly, now walking straight down into the heart of the place she’d taken for a planet.

  She passed doors, closed mostly, with red lights over each. The first one she found open led to a room as featureless as the hall, its bulkheads the whiteness of a blind eye. The second held a skull, or a helmet shaped to look like a skull, rotating in a column of blue light. The footsteps had long since faded, but Viv kept moving, tugged down and in, though her heart hammered in her chest. She felt pressure on her wrist, and realized she was rubbing the scar there, the burn in the shape of the Empress’s hand. She remembered the agony of her ribs snapped, her chest peeled open, her heart gripped by burning fingers—remembered it not with her mind but with her blood and lungs and with the pit a fist’s distance below her heart.

  She hadn’t been afraid of things before. Back home, she’d considered her risks, capture, a black bag over her head, her fingers broken and her fingernails pulled out one by one in some government cell, all the fun people could have with genital electrodes, in abstraction: she could bear them, or not, and if not, she wouldn’t be around to worry. But then the Empress hurt her, and now she was afraid, because she knew what pain was. Was this what they called growing up? She’d thought that meant maturity, weathering, endurance. But instead you gathered one terror after another to yourself, until you were a skin-clad skeleton cradling a self made up of wounds.

  Behind the third open door knelt Yannis.

  She had made herself tea in a small iron kettle that hovered over a sourceless flame. Past her, beyond a window so clear Viv first thought it was but a hole, lay the ship.

  It could be nothing else. At this size Viv thought station first, but this structure was clearly built to move: those were engines, enormous if dormant, hidden between the miles-long tentacles, nestled in mouths in metal skin. The ship curled aphidlike and broken around itself, and in a gut-twisting inversion Viv realized the ship was not outside the window, not separate from the wall. That distant dark expanse, those great silent engines, the weapons and manipulator veins, curled back hundreds of miles around to meet the wall through which Viv now stared.

  The planet Refuge was the outer skin of an enormous dead ship, curled around its mortal wound. A massive glittering column of fractal black impaled the hull, an affront to the eye, a curse to the mind.

  Viv’s eyes settled on that column, that spear. She knew its name. This, at last, was the Fallen Star.

  And Yannis knelt there, and watched out the window, and sipped her tea.

  Viv drew back, her steps soft, soundless.

  She ran into a wall of cloth: a scratchy robe, unyielding flesh and bone beneath. Turned, and found herself staring into glistening green slitted eyes.

  Impossible. Yannis could not have moved that fast.

  But the room behind was em
pty save for the fire and the kettle and the cups.

  “Dear,” Yannis said. Her tone was kind, and her teeth long and sharp and curved. “I didn’t hear you come in. Please. Would you join me for some tea?”

  30

  YANNIS MADE TEA like Viv’s grandmother, hot water first poured over the whole set of unfinished purple teaware to wake and fill its clay, then new water boiled, poured once again over tea leaves in a small pot, let steep a bare minute, poured from there into a second pot to prevent over-steeping, then, finally, into cups too small to use for rolling dice. It rested green and fragrant in Viv’s cup. Yannis raised hers first, breathed deep, drank, set it down. A show of good faith.

  “I doubt we’re poisoned by the same things,” Viv said.

  “If we wanted to kill you, dear, we would have done it already.”

  Viv pondered the tea, and the pure white room, and the old woman across from her with the snake scales, and told herself this was just another negotiation. “Where did the water come from? I don’t see a faucet around here.”

  Yannis made a precise gesture over the empty kettle. A stream of water poured into it from thin air, then stopped.

  “Shame you didn’t teach the villagers that trick. It would save them trips to the well.”

  “Work improves character. Now, drink before it cools. You’ll lose the aroma.”

  This tea was a feeling more than taste, a half-remembered dream: warmth and shade, and somewhere, flowers. As she lowered the cup, she met Yannis’s eyes.

  “You must have questions.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Viv said.

  Yannis opened one three-fingered hand, inclined her head: please.

  “How many of the other Suicide Queens are left?”

  Yannis did not smile like a human, but her eyes narrowed, sparkling, mirthful.

  “All of them, I bet. I don’t know the other two—maybe they’re somewhere else within this complex. But Nioh is the Bull. And I bet you’re the one who sees from shadows. Heyshir.”

  Viv had not expected a reaction, so she was not disappointed. This was a long, long con, and Yannis, or whoever she was, had spent centuries growing into her role. “The Suicide Queens,” Yannis said, “left their old names behind when Tiger died of her wounds. I never lied to you, dear. Or to any of them. This is who we are now. But I have to say, I’m impressed. I thought Zanj would be the one to put this all together. I’m hurt, really, that she did not.”