Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Perhaps there was some bond linking Viv to the crown, invisible to human eyes. Perhaps Yannis merely proceeded by elimination: she had not caused Zanj’s collapse, and neither had the Star, which left … Viv. And maybe Viv had spoken her command out loud.

  Viv scrambled back, but Yannis’s massive hand swept out, caught her, lifted her up, squeezed. Bones ground bones. Viv’s own scream surprised her. “I don’t know what you have done to my sister,” Yannis said. Pressure built, and with it pain, all through Viv’s body, bones taxed to the verge of breaking, joints crammed against themselves, the burning black-dot panic of asphyxiation as she tried to breathe but could not, and the tingling throughout her limbs as her heart struggled to force blood against the pressure of that gigantic hand. “But be you ever so useful, I will crush you for it.” And as the black bloomed, she knew she was about to die.

  “No.” Zanj rose, ragged, panting, free, from the ship—silvery-gray blood on her face, her nails. “Sister. Let me.”

  Yannis, respectful, bowing, of course, dear Sister, opened her fist and let Viv slide into Zanj’s palm. Half-blind with agony, Viv used that moment’s freedom to draw a long, shuddering breath, filling her lungs, ignoring the razor blades someone had sewn between her ribs. She was about to die. Zanj would kill her. But Zanj’s crown remained stubbornly, furiously gray as she shrank, as she knelt and dropped Viv in a panting sprawl on the ship’s hull. Perhaps Viv was already dying, and the crown believed there was no more harm Zanj could do.

  Zanj touched the Fallen Star.

  Its lightning cascade burned gold all through. Fractal facets smoothed. The Star whirled inward, its light-devouring blackness gaining depth as the weapon concentrated itself into a staff of no color save at either end, where its facet edges broke light to rainbows. Zanj gripped the Star, hefted it, spun it experimentally in space, tossed it up and caught it once again, contemplating. The space around her seemed to sing. An earthquake twitch ran through the ship’s many limbs, as if the world itself would flee her.

  Viv did not move.

  Yannis knelt beside them, her teeth man-sized, her whisper deafening. “Kill her, Sister. She is yours.”

  Zanj raised the Star. Viv watched the rainbows at its tip, and wondered if this, too, would hurt.

  The Star swept down. It tore through Viv’s skinsuit—and left a trail of burnt air in its wake as it swung past, and around, and, growing through that arc, struck Yannis in the side of the head.

  The thud of Yannis’s collapse was heavy and hard enough to send Viv flying, and land her in a different, no less painful, configuration.

  When Zanj looked down at Viv, her face held a familiar rage. “What the fuck,” Zanj said, “was that for?”

  “What?” Viv, still desperate for breath, still afraid to breathe because it hurt too much, felt as if she’d missed a page.

  “What what? That nonsense with the crown! Telling me to stop!”

  “You were on her side. You said you didn’t care about me. You were talking about how you’d torture me!”

  “I said nothing like that. She did.”

  “You blinked at me, and just walked past!”

  “That was a wink! A just go with me here wink.”

  “You wink with two eyes?”

  “‘You wink with two eyes?’” she repeated, mocking, exasperated, and rolled hers. “I had to convince her I was on her side! She could have killed you—she almost did just now. That hurt, Los Angeles. We had a deal. Do they not have deals where you come from?”

  “She was your friend.”

  Yannis groaned and shifted, still unconscious. Zanj frowned. “Oh, she is. And she’s always been too smart for her own good, and she deserved that ten times over for trying to pull this mess. She’ll forgive me when she wakes up. Probably. Whether I’ll forgive you is another matter entirely. But we’ll settle that later.” She reached down, grabbed Viv’s hand, pulled her to her feet—in spite of Viv’s yelp of pain. “We have the Star. The Cloud started rolling in when you pulled off that chain. We need to get out of here before—”

  And then the hull behind her burst open.

  36

  A SILVER BLUR pierced the ship’s hull and struck Zanj from behind. She tumbled into the hollow space within Groundswell as the blur bulged and transformed, shifting form to match her every strike, gnawing at her skin, at the Star.

  Viv staggered, almost fell, reached for something to steady herself—and felt familiar arms embrace her, too fiercely for her broken ribs’ comfort. “Ow.” But she couldn’t stop from smiling.

  Xiara let her go at her protest, and she almost fell—caught herself with a hand on the other woman’s shoulder, steadied, and stared, relieved, into her turning pilot’s eyes as the battle bloomed above them with apocalyptic fire and bursts of ultraviolet light.

  “You’re safe,” Xiara said, and kissed her, which she liked, though that hurt, too. “Oh my god, your face.”

  “And my hand, and ribs, and—” But she kissed her again. “What’s going on here? You…”

  “We’re here to rescue you.”

  “We?”

  “Gray and I. I saw Zanj and Yannis working together, Zanj was drawing the Star, you were hurt. I thought we wouldn’t get here in time. I thought—when I thought the elders kidnapped you, I ran to Zanj for help. When I freed Gray, I realized what she was doing. So I pushed as much of the ship’s power into him as he would hold, so he could fight her. It’s all my fault, I didn’t see—”

  “No! Xiara, Zanj was trying to trick them. To keep me safe.”

  “Oh,” she said. She looked up into the mess of light and fire. “Well. She’s doing all right, all things considered.”

  She blinked, finally thinking through the pain. “Wait a second. Are you inside the ship? This ship?”

  From above, a roar: “I’m on your side, you gluttonous waste of silicon!” The sound that followed was a crash of cars dropped from an airplane onto a granite flat. “I am sick—of—people—tackling me—for—no—reason!”

  When Xiara smiled, arcs of lightning darted between her teeth. “Groundswell. It’s broken, but Zanj gave me its keys, its true name. Viv, the size of this ship—I can feel gravity waves, I can see your mind inside your skull—” She pulled her closer, tighter, kissed her with darts of static—and as she did, the ship rippled around them. “It’s beautiful.”

  Even with the broken ribs, even with the fucked-up hand, it felt … good. Excellent. Ideal. She kissed Xiara, and this time there was no collapse, no withdraw. When she pressed into her, she pressed back.

  Gray crashed to the hull behind them, and a cloud of debris rose into the night, only to patter and ting off a forcefield Xiara popped into place around them.

  “You know,” Viv said, “I’ve never hugged a battleship before.”

  Xiara grinned. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Behind, Gray: “—traitor all along, just waiting for a chance to turn—” Something, probably Zanj, hit him very hard.

  “Gray,” Viv said without turning. “It’s fine.”

  “What?”

  “It’s fine. Zanj is on our side.”

  “That,” Zanj growled, “is just what I’ve been trying to tell you!”

  “Of course you would say that! Even if you weren’t. Especially if you weren’t.”

  “Just shut up and listen,” Zanj said. “We have a very brief window here. Yannis is out, and Nioh, but they’ll wake up soon. The Cloud’s rolling back in, because Viv broke the Empress’s lock, and that will make them stronger. I want to get us the hell out before any of our other friends decide to show—”

  Up was the last word, but lost beneath a crackle, snap, and hiss of static. A gleaming golden cloud filled Groundswell’s hollow core in an instant, spun, and resolved. Its billows sharpened to features, sculpting form.

  Viv did not recognize the Grand Rector of the Mirrorfaith at first: bald and ageless, beautiful as a bomb. Viv had only glimpsed her on Hong’s wrist screen as
they escaped High Carcereal. Now she saw her mountain-sized and fearsome, draped in robes of the ’faith.

  But she recognized the ships visible behind her, diamond cathedrals burning among the wrecked ships in Groundswell’s orbit. And she recognized, too, with one final iceberg turn in her gut, Hong, kneeling by the Rector’s side, under heavy guard, in chains.

  “Vivian Liao,” said that voice of instinctive, sneering command, “and friends. We have placed your ship under interdict. Thanks to a timely prayer from Brother Heretic Hong, we have come to save you from the greatest blasphemy. Surrender yourself to our care and study. Be welcomed to the ’faith as a treasure beyond price. Or we will burn your world, and kill your friends, and sift your corpse and its ashes for the sacred truths we seek.”

  37

  THE GRAND RECTOR disappeared, leaving her threat behind, and a dissipating cloud of golden light. But Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter saw her still, not just the ebbing projector fog the Rector used to cast her image across space, but also out in the black past Groundswell’s skin, approaching through the wrecked fleet of the Suicide Queens: the Mirrorfaith, cathedrals with gunports open, fighters darting brilliant as dragonflies above a lake, as minnows in a stream. (Dragonflies and minnows that breathed flame hot enough to melt suns.) With yet another sort of eyes she peered into the minds of those ships, into the Cloud beneath their physical shadow. Drives wove potential to momentum; Groundswell’s deep reflexes, now hers, calculated their probable future paths, built firing solutions for long-silent guns. She peered deeper, tried to pierce the ’fleet’s shipmind cores, but her attention slid off the chanting circles of monks clustered around each mind, shielding systems from attack.

  At fireside in the Orncamp, age eight, Xiara had leaned forward, eager to hear grandmothers’ tales of the ’faith and its great fleet, relic and weapon and temple all at once. And now they faced her, these holy warriors and their vicious queen come a-questing.

  Back in the world of matter she held Viv with weak arms clad in skin so fragile compared with her hull that she felt as if she had been grated raw; with imperfect, muffled ears, with eyes of variable resolution and strange depth of focus, she heard, saw, Viv pale, her pulse rise, felt her breath quick but measured, parsed pain of her wounds from the chemical cascade of her sweat. Even without the advantage of her systems, Viv would not have been so hard for Xiara to read: she thought herself complex, but she was pure, too, as a nocked arrow, her only mystery the mystery of the archer’s will.

  Once, Viv had seemed so strange. Viv, who saved her life, who held herself close and distant, queen of a faraway star. Now, Xiara knew her, and felt strange to herself.

  To be a daughter of Orn, the Chief her mother once said, was to see many worlds at once, and walk many paths.

  She did not think this all in order, but at once, overlapping, a flowering of thought in the second’s gap after the Grand Rector’s speech and before Zanj threw Gray aside. The pirate queen stamped her foot on Groundswell hard enough to dent the ablative alloy surrounding its monomolecule hull, and screamed: “Fuck!”

  Viv tried to pull away from Xiara, toward Zanj, but staggered when she leaned too far into her bad leg. Xiara did not let her fall. “We have to save him.”

  Zanj’s raised eyebrows made ripples across her forehead. “Save him? He did this to us. I knew someone messed with the antenna. My work was perfect. The boy must have set up some subsystem. When I spent my battery trying to hop out, he harvested the power—used it to drive his distress call. Your friend screwed us. I should have killed him when I had the chance.”

  “He thought you would leave us,” Viv said with the slow dawning tone of a woman unraveling a riddle. “He thought this was the only way off Refuge. To get me to his fleet.”

  Gray groaned, recovering his form, thinner after his wrestling match with Zanj. “That must be why Xiara couldn’t sense him in the ship. He went straight for his beacon, and left.”

  “He tried to warn me.” Viv again, with that still-unraveling tone. “I wonder how early he pieced everything together about Yannis, about Nioh. He was drawing maps to the village, to the mountain. Everything a strike team might need. And I didn’t see it.”

  Zanj spat. “Those monks warped his soul half to hell.”

  “Are you telling me you would have come back, if you’d escaped?”

  Zanj’s answer was a moment of silent, pacing, tail-lashing fury. Her eyes, when she returned Viv’s gaze, were great and golden. “I want to get you to the Empress. Which we can’t very well do now.”

  “We have the Fallen Star. The fastest ship in the galaxy.”

  Xiara had to squint her shipsenses to look at Zanj—the woman seemed little different physically, but with that immense sucking wound of the Star in her grip, she hurt the mind, a wash of data overloading all Xiara’s systems. She tasted blue. She smelled acid heavy as a mother’s slap. “If we leave now, those ships will follow us. We’ll outpace them, but even an idiot would feel their bow wave through the Cloud. The Empress will know someone’s coming. Good-bye, element of surprise. Good-bye, Gray’s chances of getting home. And yours.”

  Xiara saw Viv hesitate. Saw the conclusions fire in her brain. “We have to get Hong back.”

  “Are you paying attention? He betrayed us.”

  “Because he thought you would betray us first.”

  “Whatever I would have done—he did it. We can’t rescue him. That’s not just a small battle group out there—it’s a whole fleet.”

  “Are you saying you can’t take a fleet?”

  Zanj laughed, teeth bared, haughty and invincible—but checked the answer she almost gave by reflex. “Oh no. You’re not getting me that easy again.”

  “He’s saved my life a dozen times. I can’t just let him go.”

  “Viv.” Zanj stopped in front of her, and stared into her eyes. “You would have let him go anyway. You’re letting all this go. This is your shot at getting home. Hong always would have gone back to the ’faith to tell his story, and he always would have ended up in chains. You can’t save people from themselves.”

  ’Faith ships slid through space, surrounding Groundswell. Viv grew taut and still. Xiara had seen archers freeze this way, too, eyes darting from target to target, sorting priorities, measuring the depths of fear. You would have let him go. Not just him, of course. To find her way home, Viv would have to let Gray go, and Zanj. And Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter.

  She had known, of course. Two nights after they first lay together, Xiara, breathing herself back into her body, into the euphoric afterglow of an instrument beautifully played, looked down at Viv, asleep, mouth soft-parted, naked. She wondered at the curve of her neck, the swell of her cheek, at the tiny oval scar below her collarbone that was the only wound Viv bore which had not come from an Empress, no battle-wound but a child’s scar, a soft flawless flaw—and felt something shift in her that was not desire.

  Neither was it song-love, then. They had moved too fast for that, had clutched each other too hard, had been altogether too clear in what they’d asked, each from each, and what they’d offered, taken. Xiara needed a body to remind her what bodies were; Viv was alone in a world far different from the strange, cruel place to which she was so eager to return, and needed a spar to clutch. They were warriors. They had asked, given, received. But that night Xiara lay beside her, drank her in, and felt a rush not of a leg curled across her leg, but of Viv’s leg, in specific, curled across hers, in specific. She had left Orn to sail the stars—but she had left Orn, too, to see this strange wanderer home.

  She left everything behind, to lose her.

  She had not thought it would be so soon.

  “I will go.” Her voice was so soft it was lost in the fight between Viv and Zanj. “I will go.” Repeating the words was harder than saying them the first time—and when she heard the deafening silence after, she realized she had shouted at them, with her voice, and through the Cloud. They were looking at her. Viv was looking at her—for what fe
lt like the first time. Each time their eyes met felt like the first. “I will lead them away.”

  Was there a word that meant trapped, sure as a gator-cat in a thorncage, unable to escape no matter how she pulled at the teeth that bound her—trapped like that, but in a good way? She would like to learn that word, or find it, or make it up.

  “Xiara,” Viv said, and many other things besides within that name.

  “This is your chance. You need Gray to get you through the Citadel. You need Zanj to fly. And I can hold them off. Distract them.”

  “One ship won’t do it,” Zanj said into Viv’s silence. “Even Groundswell. There are too many of them.”

  “I won’t use one ship,” she said. “I’ll use them all.” She whispered with a voice that was not of her body—and across space, throughout the stretching wreckage of the Suicide Queens’ fleet, other chattering whispers came in answer.

  Viv hugged her, her eyes black and wet and wide, her pulse up, endorphins rushing, a mess of adrenaline and pain and love. “No. You said they’d take you apart if you tried again.”

  The whispers merged as dead systems woke, as engines touched the Cloud for the first time in three thousand years. She had felt Zanj’s small Question as a second body around her own, warm and welcoming, like sliding into a bath. Groundswell, its colossal ruined hulk, the shattered mirrormaze of its mind, was a lake to that. And the fleet webbing itself together under Groundswell’s guidance was an ocean. “I was scared when I touched the fleet. I wanted so badly to stay … a person. To stay the person I thought I was. To stay with you. But I was born to swim.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “Of course you are,” Xiara said. “You’re going home. It’s what you want. Isn’t it?”

  Viv nodded, against her cheek. She was crying. Yes. And those were tears, burning in Xiara’s eyes.

  “Go conquer your world. Thank you for bringing me to mine.”

  The whispers built: the ocean deeper than all measure, waiting for her to break the dam that held it back. Alerts, warnings, damage reports, status indicators, spoke to her from across the star system. She was huge now, and growing. Yet somehow Viv kissed her, gathered her, and encompassed her completely in her arms.