Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  “I will go for her,” she said. “Fight well.” She did not add monster. Did not even think it.

  She ran.

  Behind her, Nioh bellowed in a tongue Xiara did not know. She did not care about the words, or about the webs flitting after her. It was not her duty to care. Gray stood behind her. He would hold, while he could manage. Her duty was to run.

  She leapt from the cave into the night, skidded down the slope. Flashes of uncanny light and the noise of tearing metal chased her into darkness—darkness that was dark no longer as her eyes opened, adjusted, as she kenned the ground beneath. Shipmoons lit the mountainside: noontime bright to her, as the Ornblood woke. A hypersensitive metacornea, Viv had suggested when Xiara described how she could see in perfect dark, form blooming from nothing as needed. Viv and her magic nonsense words. Xiara’s eyes worked, that was all, as her feet adjusted to stable and unstable ground, skipped rabbits’ holes and cracks in stone without conscious intervention. Xiara was a firm runner, steadiest, strongest in the clan.

  Wherever Viv came from, her grandmothers had wrapped her in different enchantments, handed down different teachings through their blood. With the lights off in a windowless room, Viv saw nothing, stumbled blindfolded groping for walls, shuffling over carpet, growing peevish as Xiara laughed, as she slipped from her touch, circling in what to Viv was dark and to Xiara daylight clear, touching her now on the small of the back, now on the side, now brushing her bare arm with a kiss. And when Viv lunged for her and caught nothing, and stumbled into the space only for Xiara to slide behind her, catch her, draw her close, kiss her and press her against the wall and feel Viv’s enchantments, her scruples, the tensions that distant nightmare world had fixed beneath her flesh begin to melt, as Xiara pressed her leg between her legs, and held Viv’s wrists against the wall above her head with one hand … And in the morning after Viv was the same as ever, as distant and assured, precise and complete, pretending herself unchanged, this beautiful, strange, hard, soft woman who never stopped fighting, yet would never kill.

  Xiara would save her. Whatever it cost.

  She heard a flutter above, as of birds’ wings or a thrown bolo cutting air, and ducked behind a tree—so the web, brilliant blue in the shipmoons’ light, fell on the tree instead of her, and crushed its trunk to splinters. Another web arced overhead—Xiara sprang from her shelter to a cliff, from the cliff to a tree, caught a branch, fell, caught another and dropped and heard, behind her, the wet slap of web on rock. How many more could she dodge? How many were there?

  She had made good time. Ten more minutes’ hard run would bring her to the village. She risked a glance back. White webs gathered on the cliff’s edge. Twenty. Thirty. More.

  They sprang.

  And here she was skidding down an open slope, without cover.

  The webs arrowed into the sky, spread winglike at the apex of their arc, adjusted to aim, then curled themselves back into spears and flew.

  If she had a shield, she could have blocked them. If she had a spear, she could have parried them. If a rifle, shot them from the sky. If she had cover, she could have hidden behind it. But she was running alone and unarmed on a mountain slope.

  When you stand unarmed, the world must be your weapon.

  She was not running down a mountain. She was running down a ship: a single vessel of vast confounding mind, dormant and thousands of years mad. She did not know the true name that would master it; without the Cloud to steel and support her, she would crumble in moments before its will. But she did not need to master it. Just to nudge it a little.

  She woke her blood, and told the ship: move.

  The pain took her at once, the vastness of the ship and its many wounds. Death looped forever in its mind as angels fell and Bleed-mouths opened and the Empress, glorious green, fled. Xiara slipped, fell, struck her forehead on a rock, rolled scraped and torn down the mountainside, thinking, this is it.

  She woke a timeless instant later to the ringing of bells.

  Xiara opened her eyes. Pressed arms against rock to force herself up to her knees, commanded legs and back and belly to raise her to her feet. Around her, trees swayed. Boulders rocked upslope; gravel and ground sifted, settling after the convulsion she had caused.

  All around her lay the mounded webs, spreading, seeking, clutching rock to powder. But Xiara herself was free.

  She picked through the webs, limping, toward the village. She could breathe and walk, though her side hurt, though her foot twisted. She wanted to stop, to rest. She had time for neither.

  When she reached the village square, the first door opened.

  A girlchild stood inside in silhouette, dark against dark save her glassy open eyes and the orange light that circled her forehead like a crown. Arms at her side, mouth open, her body rigid as a carving’s, she ran toward Xiara.

  Xiara ran faster.

  A second door opened, and a third. An old woman vaulted through a window. Bare feet slapped bare earth; hands reached for her out of an alley and she caught them, shifted weight, tossed the lunger—a little lizard-man she remembered serving wine that first night—to the ground, saw him skid, heard him moan. She spared him a stab of sympathy, but she had to duck away from another lunge and run farther, faster, commanding her joints to ignore their pain, her muscles to ignore their damage, blinking through blood from the cut on her forehead, numbing the ache of her broken rib, scrubbing oxygen, suspending thought.

  The world simplified to rhythm. Feet. Night. Wind. Slower. (Stride imbalance. Stabilizers of the ankle strained. Steady. Compensate. Like skirting a black hole: easy, if you know how. The Ornblood knows.) She ran through Refuge, villagers after her jumping from rooftop to rooftop, eerie silent, their footfalls like rain, minds suspended, bodies ridden by their elders’ will.

  Open distance. Keep pace.

  After a mile, her knee seized, on schedule—which was to say, at the least convenient moment. There stood the antenna, just out of reach. A bedroll spread before it, and on that bedroll, sound asleep: Zanj.

  The rainstorm neared, the rushing feet, the open mouths. She couldn’t keep it up. She could. A few more steps. Black spots in vision—bad sign.

  She stumbled. Fell to her knees.

  The bedroll lay before her. Zanj snoring. Teeth bare through lips. Xiara heard a whisper in the night behind her, a sense of approaching mass—a hammer struck the earth, and she turned, and saw Nioh recover from her landing and rise, smoking, furious, scarred, one horn broken off, one eye swollen, injured from her battle with Gray, but still vast and strong. And advancing. The orange light that bound the villagers burned around her hands. She worked them like marionettes.

  Nioh spoke, but Xiara’s heart beat too loud for her to hear the words. She thought of Gray, the boy who was a monster, who fought to give her this chance. She thought of Viv. She wondered if they were still alive. She could not hear herself when she shouted, “Zanj!”

  No answer. Nioh advanced a step, light-spear dripping in her hand, and the villagers closed in, breathing heavy, sweating, hungry, silent save for animal sounds.

  Xiara shook Zanj’s arm. Pounded on her chest, on her stomach. This woman could shatter gods, if she would just wake up.

  Xiara collapsed, weeping, on her chest.

  Claws stroked her hair.

  She looked up into a pair of red-gold eyes, and a vicious smile on a scarred face.

  32

  VIV FOUGHT WHILE she had strength. Sirens wailed; the hallway lights burned red. Hong must be at large, uncaught. She dug her heels in; she planted her feet against Yannis’s body and strained with every fiber of her muscle, and still could not break the woman’s hold on her wrist. She punched her, and hurt her hand; she gouged for her eyes, but Yannis swatted her thumbs away, annoyed. Yannis never slowed. She had seemed bent by years, but then, three thousand years weighed more than Viv.

  Viv could have made Yannis drag her all the way to whatever doom she had in mind, but she could not choose to be dragge
d. While she had strength, she fought. When strength gave out, if she was going to her death, she preferred to go under her own power.

  “I’m glad you’ve seen reason, dear,” Yannis said when she tired and began to walk. “No sense making this less pleasant than it has to be.”

  She wasn’t wrong, though Viv’s plan ran more toward saving her strength for when it might help. If Yannis and Zanj were even close to the same sort of being, she would never win an arm wrestling match. “Where are you taking me?”

  Yannis stopped at a patch of wall that seemed identical to the rest and made another sign in air. The wall bloomed open, and they fell out into the abyss within the world.

  Viv turned and spun in space—the rush of free fall coupled with knowledge that she was about to die, inside this monstrosity of chitin or metal or monomolecule hull, or, fuck, sub-ether nonsense for all she understood, surrounded by lights and battle damage and the impossible mass of that black spear through the ship’s heart—and found, when the panic passed, that she could breathe. Then she noticed the inch-thick skinsuit field that covered her, and the slight burnt tang of the air. Just a bit of nothing between her and vacuum. She hadn’t minded that on her earlier spacewalks, but then, her earlier spacewalks had been under her own power, in a suit she controlled.

  Yannis spun them in space, pointed her pitchfork, and they flew, with a speed that almost dislocated Viv’s shoulder; at her scream Yannis eased off the accelerator, but still their speed built, and built. Viv gained a new sense of Groundswell’s scope by the long minutes it took them to reach the point where the spear transfixed the ship.

  Spear was too small a word. It might be wrong on even the most basic topological level: Viv could see no tip or blade or barb, only an immense column so black it burned her eyes, facets growing and melding as she watched, its darkness broken by darting blue weblike lines that branched, cascaded, then vanished without trace.

  “Like a brain,” she said without thinking. The tea still at work inside her, maybe.

  “Yes,” Yannis replied. “In most ways that matter. The Fallen Star is Zanj’s weapon, her ship, the greatest part of her soul. We don’t even have words for what it’s made from. Computationally dense acausal neutronium was Old Tiger’s guess, but that doesn’t explain all of its properties. Zanj took it from beings you would not understand, and it fit her as if they had crafted it for her grip. And still, it is chained.”

  Yes—chained. At first, the Fallen Star’s sheer mass had drawn Viv’s eye, but now she saw the bonds that held it fast. Jade vines climbed the Star, and sank thin, burning roots into its blackness. Where the blue cascades met green, they stopped. The chains seemed too flimsy to hold something like this—an engine Zanj would have mocked her for describing with so worthless a word as god. But Viv recognized that green. She saw it in nightmares. “The Empress.”

  “She chained it,” Yannis said. “Now you will break those chains, and I will use it to keep Refuge safe, forever.” Her form slipped as they drew close, returning to that fearsome burning predatory shape she’d shown Viv over tea. She stood without a stoop now, her scales glistened and feathered. Two more arms swelled beneath her cloak. She opened like a flower bud to some radiation from the Star. Or perhaps that was only memory bridging the eons between Yannis, village elder, and the woman who once fought an Empress.

  “No,” Viv said.

  “You will do it,” Yannis replied. “For me. For Refuge.”

  Viv backed away from her slowly, hands out. “I get it. You’re afraid. But you don’t have to do this.”

  “Afraid?” Yannis’s tongue flicked out; her eyes were dangerous slits. “Child, you are speaking nonsense.”

  “I know fear when I see it. You lost a big fight, and to cover for yourself you let your people slide back to the Bronze Age, and kept them there, and made as if hiding would keep you safe.”

  “You don’t understand,” Yannis said. “You’ve never met Her.” And there was no doubt which her she meant.

  “I have. She pulled me into this fucked-up world. She gave me this scar.”

  “A scar?” The laugh was fierce and torn. “I have seen Her scatter ships like a thresher scatters husks of rice. She broke my friends and laughed at the ease with which She slew them. She called the Bleed upon us. She shouldered off our might, and carved Zanj down to that ruin you rescued from the star. But we survived here, free. We built ourselves this place. If this is what it takes to live, then we will live. Break the chain.”

  “No.”

  “You do not understand.”

  “I do. The answer’s still no.”

  Yannis hissed, and drew in breath, and let it out. She looked almost sorry before she moved.

  She grabbed Viv’s wrist again and dragged her toward the Star. Viv kicked her, and bit her; she caught Groundswell’s ribs and antennae, the many protrusions from its hull, and still Yannis pulled her forward. Viv’s nails bent back; her fingers slipped, scraped. Their pads tore. She wedged her foot in a crack in the ship, and Yannis stopped, growled, then knelt, picked her up by her ankle and tossed her toward the Star, which, when she struck it, felt like any other wall.

  Her head rang; she tasted blood, and hoped that wasn’t her tongue. Fallen but free, she scrambled to her feet, and tried to get away, but Yannis was already over her, four-armed now—one hand caught each of Viv’s wrists as she rose, and the fingertips of her third hand squeezed into Viv’s clenched left fist and peeled it open, forced her fingers back, back—her thumb dislocated with a pop, and she screamed, and in that instant of pain, Yannis hooked Viv’s fingers over the Empress’s vines and pulled.

  The vines made a sound like violin strings when they snapped.

  Yannis let her fall.

  Viv lay, teeth gritted, curled around her thumb, heartbeat fast, cursing, weeping. She did not let herself breathe, because if she breathed she would scream, and she would not let herself scream before this woman.

  This woman—

  —who stood before the Fallen Star, its immensity wreathed now by cascades of unrestrained blue light, vibrating with its full power.

  —who reached for it, this phantom of her dark dreams.

  Pulled.

  Strained.

  And yet the Star did not move.

  Viv breathed through the tears. She had to, because she could not stop laughing.

  Yannis clawed at the Star, cursed it, kicked it, and it did not budge. Yannis grew to mountainous size and wrapped her arms around the Star, and strained, her feet dimpling the hull. She roared curses in radio bands—and Groundswell trembled.

  But that tremor had nothing to do with her.

  Viv was still laughing when the ship’s skin burst open and Zanj flared out into the hollow night, trailed by the fires of her wrath.

  33

  ZANJ BURNED IN the air, massive, slick, and deadly, radiating war. Her fur sparked and glistened, and her tail lashed, whiplike. The scar that twisted her face burned, too, a rot-bog green that pulled the corners of her eye and mouth. Her fingers dripped ichor and light.

  Viv, still collapsed around her dislocated thumb, stopped laughing. Zanj had almost killed her before, had promised to kill her often. She wreaked gleeful destruction through waves of Pride. But after those first few attempts at murder, she’d bent her power to their journey: to escape, to survival, to helping Viv. This Zanj was different.

  This was Zanj as she had been before three thousand years of torture inside a star: Zanj, pirate queen, ruthless and unruled, Zanj whose mention scared kings and gods to silence, Zanj the stealer of suns, Zanj who would drive a fleet of her friends to destruction to burn the sky free of Empresses. Zanj, whom the years had marked only by her scar and her crown.

  And Viv had thought she knew her.

  “Let it go,” Zanj said.

  “Of course, Sister.” Yannis, grown immense, hissed like sand down a dune face and released the Star. She bowed low. If Zanj’s arrival worried her, the only sign she gave was an
exaggerated formality. “Zanj.”

  “Sister Heyshir.”

  “Yannis,” she said. “Please. We did not lie about that: we left our old names on the battlefield. Not even our children know them. And is Nioh…?”

  “Alive,” she said. “She will heal in time. Yannis.” Zanj tasted the name as she advanced. “A galaxy of names to choose from, and that’s what you went with?”

  “It’s a good, simple name. We need no more in Refuge.” This politeness from a giant snake woman made Viv laugh, but her laugh did not draw a glance from Zanj. Zanj, she realized then, had not looked at her since breaking into Groundswell’s core. “I am glad to see you awake, Sister. I had thought you lost.”

  “Not glad enough,” Zanj said, “to introduce yourself to me when I arrived in Refuge, or to explain your con. You did not respect me enough to respect my traveling companions.”

  “Those mayflies? Do you truly care about them?”

  “Of course not.”

  Some people—including Viv, especially if drunk—joke about not caring for people, about screwing over friends. Some people—including Viv, drunk or not—joke about these things because jokes hide truths, invert them, preening gilt and flash to protect a vulnerable underbelly. We joke about what we cannot allow ourselves to be.

  Zanj was not joking now. Her voice bore no hint of comradeship or concern. It was light, and mocking-friendly, the same tone with which she’d shrugged off any of Viv’s questions she deemed foolish: What do you need? Are you hurt? How can I help?

  “Do your children matter?” Zanj asked in the same light, scornful tone. “Do you care about them?”

  “Of course,” Yannis said. “In a so-many-greats-grandmotherly kind of way. They keep me occupied, and their brains are useful platforms for our decryption apparatus. Not necessary now, of course! Thanks to this one here. A master key for the Empress’s chains—a valuable tool.” She reached for Zanj, but Zanj slipped away on the air. “I’ve freed your weapon, dear Sister.”

  “Out of the goodness of your heart, I am sure.”