Only the ship answered, with that same unbroken hum of digesting star.
“Okay,” she said. “I guess I’ll go.”
She tried to turn, to leave. But a hand held her shoulder, strong as glaciers though less cold. Those inhuman features flowed into something almost familiar, and vicious enough to seem kind.
And those remembered lips shaped words: “Not yet.”
47
SEATED CROSS-LEGGED UPON her dais in the Monastic Sphere, in the ever-changing heart of the glorious Mirrorfleet, Grand Rector Celestine was vexed.
Grand Rectors did not tend to vex easily—the position called for probity and wisdom, for the political clout to meld the half a hundred sects of the Mirrorfaith, each with its own hierarchy and Hierarchs, its own schools of contemplation and research and discovery, contingents of spies and scholars spread throughout the galaxy and beyond, and of course its own orders militant, to a single whole. Many Rectors had been selected for patience alone. But even a Rector chosen for wisdom and kindheartedness might change—when faced with the awesome responsibilities of preserving the detritus of thousands of years of civilization—into an order-minded stickler, or worse, a tyrant. Sentient beings given power beyond reason, and responsibility beyond measure, sometimes clutch the power to themselves like a blanket, and ignore the responsibility for as long as they can, until one day the capital city’s fires reach their palace, too.
And if this could be said even of those who inherited the office under ideal circumstances, well, Grand Rector Celestine achieved her place under circumstances not even she would term ideal. She seized command in pitched battle against the Pride, when the Blessed Archaetryx fell, and upon return to the Monastic Sphere she had been confirmed in her role by a number of well-timed retirements, enlightenments, suicide missions, and good old-fashioned murders.
No one would admit her ascension to the throne was a surprise. Celestine took large steps. She slept little. She had been loved in her childhood—loved beyond all reason by her predecessor, and loved to the brink of madness by a podmate with whom she’d joined the ’faith. But love was complicated. To love another being, in specific, and remain unbound to passing and insubstantial forms, required deep liberating practice and the sort of firm free generosity only saints could manage—and while Celestine accepted few limits to her own capacity, she knew she was no saint. Love bound her fast to lovers.
So, to move forward, she had carved individual affection from her soul. Sentient beings changed too much, too fast. All form was transitory. Yes, there were tears. But when she was done, she found herself free—to love the ’faith. Saints had warned her the love of ’faith was but another attachment, all the more insidious for its illusory permanence, but again, Celestine was no saint. The ’faith needed those who were not. She sacrificed the purity of her practice to support the saints’ grand, slow work.
And when that work jeopardized both ’faith and ’fleet, she grew vexed indeed.
This monk before her, twitching in his suspender field, bound for judgment before the assembled Hierarchs—she found him especially infuriating. One of Archivist Lan’s protégés, by the name of Qollak—another chip off the old recalcitrant block. Celestine did not hate the Archivist: Lan had been a miscalculation, a never-quite rival overlooked upon Celestine’s ascension because she spent her life pondering ancient broken file systems in the Archive Tree, lacked arms and armor, and was utterly insignificant to ’fleet operations. But many throughout the ’fleet loved her, trained beside her or beneath her, respected her—and she, Celestine suspected, had been the Brother Heretic’s most subtle ally. But no more of that. The poor young man-alogue before her stood proud as he could manage, his suspender field flushing blue-based rainbows, his tendril forest face swishing in what he no doubt hoped was well-concealed concern.
“And,” Celestine continued, “after the most recent Pride attack, not only did you violate our quarantine order, you personally boarded a Pride drone and attempted to commune with it.”
His voice burbled panic. “Rector. You know as well as anyone—we have so many questions. The Pride’s behavior has undergone an extreme change since Brother—since the Heretic’s assault on High Carcereal. They have become relentless, eager, almost desperate in their pursuit of the ’fleet. I found a single crippled drone isolated from the swarm, Cloudblind. If there was any chance of recovering its data, gleaning its motivation—I had to seize the opportunity. We have all lost friends in this ceaseless battle.” His dorsal eyes sought help from the gathered Hierarchs, all silent in their robes—and from Archivist Lan herself. “Studying the Pride is permitted by the precepts of ’faith. After all, the Pride were of the Empress once.”
Celestine unfurled herself from the dais, rising to her full seven feet. Hierarchs fell back, sensing the rage she broadcast through the Cloud. “The Pride turned against the Empress. They are the first and fiercest heretics, Brother Qollak. Their secret knowledge drove them mad—as it has driven so many among our order. Distraction, ignorance, and ambition cloud the mirror of the mind.” Heavy robes and wings rustled around her as she stepped down; her talons ticked against the cold floor. “And these weaknesses are catching.”
“We pledge to seek,” he stammered, “without bias and without fear. My mind held only this intent.”
“Your mind held only this intent,” she repeated, projecting sympathy, kindness, understanding, all these foreign emotions she so often had to feign these days. On patrol, in battle, she had not needed to seem amiable before administrators. She required no compassion on a dawnblade’s bridge, when she ordered the legion’s torches to advance. This, too, vexed. Nearing, she considered him for a time that did not seem long to her. She had chosen the hawk’s discipline, and time felt different for a raptor. He twitched, purpled, pinked, rippled beneath his robe. His eyes kept sliding from her gaze. “Naturally. You did not consider the risk that the drone might feign damage, that it might have made a trap of its own mind. You did not ask yourself what might lurk within that hateful consciousness. Some virus, some heresy to poison the ’fleet? Some insidious slow doctrine to feed our ships, so the Pride might turn them against us—or command even our own bodies? Or even a simple lie to corrupt us against ourselves, and waste thousands of hours’ meditation in pursuit of a false promise?” The hall kept its silence. The Hierarchs understood the way of things, the need for discipline.
All save one.
“He made a mistake.” Archivist Lan’s voice was smooth from infrequent use, like a blade drawn only to shed blood, and well cleaned after. She strode forth from the other Hierarchs: a small woman of the owl discipline, eyes large, hands clasped, willowy beneath her robes. If Celestine made her nervous, she did not show it. She lived too far from war to fear those who waged it, and the discipline of the owl held a patience of its own. “A mistake to try at all, and certainly to try alone. But Qollak is not the only one in this room who seeks answers. Why have the Pride pursued us, these last months? What changed? Qollak asked the right question, at the right time, for the right reason. That is our calling.”
And this was why Celestine never truly feared Lan, though she could not kill her, either. The Archivist understood propositions and philosophies, principles and compromises. Data theory, archaeonetworking, the many mysteries of the deep, the forgotten languages of the far Cloud, she mastered them and made them hers. But she knew little of power. She did not, could not, understand that by challenging Celestine, by all but ordering her to free and forgive this little monk, as she had begged her to free and forgive the Heretic, she created an opposing will Celestine must be seen to overcome. By arguing for mercy, she made mercy impossible.
“Your student,” the Grand Rector said, “did ask the right question, at the right time, for the right reason. But without the proper perspective.”
She reached through his skinfield, touched his drifting fronds, and took his soul into her hand.
In the Cloud of which this world was but a flic
kering shadow cast by madmen on a cavern wall, she found him. His soul, the integral of his experiences and consciousness over time, a tracking model of too, too earnest Brother Qollak, danced and pulsed with a liquid firefly radiance. Celestine remembered fireflies from her childhood. She had caught them just as easily: in her talons, like that, without crushing. How he fluttered against her grip: a mottled, eager being, full of flashing delights, of questions embraced for themselves, of answers discovered. He dreamed in many colors.
How sweet.
She began, with little passion and less joy, to pry him open.
He screamed as his soul cracked. Being was an inbound spiral, spinning always back on itself, an orbit enforced by the gravity of attachment. War, true war, on the scale of milliseconds and eons, required more clarity and flexibility, more openness, than the self could bear. Selves were predictable; selves built patterns, sought meaning where there was none. Celestine had forsaken all attachments, and embraced instead the warmaster’s lonely, open contemplation: a ruthless transience of form. She shared that with him now. One by one, she found the points of gravity that bound Qollak’s soul, and unbound them. That sunset was no different from all other sunsets. His mother, teaching him to hunt with bubble nets in their home oceans: there were other mothers, other teachings. She pulled him into her lonely orbit, and his scream grew fine indeed.
But he did not scream so loud, nor did the work so consume her awareness, that she missed the alarm.
Sirens rang through the assembly hall. Data rushed into her soul.
Pride ships. Nearing fast.
Prayer wheel chandeliers flashed red, and holographic threat assessments and multidimensional projections filled the chamber; stained-glass walls opened like flower petals to leave the Hierarchs, and Celestine, standing within a transparent dome amid the vastness of the Mirrorfleet. Threat estimates and Cloudforms slid into her soul, and battle systems and semiautonomous subroutines digested them—thunder gods of flourishing colors and horrid, hungry grins. She had forged them down decades of meditation and hypnosis and battlefield experiment, and now they moved for her, ordering the ’fleet. Pickets torched up, Clericies unfolded into battle form, and vulnerable meditants, chanting cross-legged in hard vacuum, made hand signs of mystic import and slipped back to the Monasteries for their war garb. The ’fleet was battle-ready in moments—but Celestine could not guide it and break this boy’s soul at once.
With a sigh, and a loosening of her hand, she let Brother Qollak fall. The Archivist bent to retrieve him, pull him to safety—defiance, but forgivable. The others would remember Lan kneeling to draw the wreck of her apprentice back. They would see their Grand Rector victorious.
Which she needed—because, in his shortsighted scholar’s way, Qollak was right. The Pride had changed. After years of silence, they had launched an attack every three days since High Carcereal, an unending wave of pursuit, tides of their vicious ugly ships breaking against the beauty of the ’faith. Even Celestine’s most loyal and broken Hierarchs asked: Why?
Only two days had passed since their last assault. Had they changed pattern once again? What would that signify?
Celestine let her thunder gods pass the routine orders to the lesser shipminds her abbots and admirals maintained. That done, she directed the small self-aware fragment fools called consciousness, which was in truth but a sort of focus of the totality of the mind, as the center of the field of vision was the point of greatest focus for the human eye, to the problem that needed her most precise attention: the enemies approaching through the Cloud.
Her wings flicked in surprise. Pride ships approached, yes, but only a cruiser and twenty drones, optimized for speed—barely enough of a fleet to destroy a battle moon. Guns live, sensors hot, the Pride were looking for something—no, she saw now, chasing something, an ancient crude fast picket, deeply wounded, its pilot crying through the Cloud for help, and offering … not cargo as Celestine had first thought. Treasure.
Ah. That answered the question of timing. They had not been found after all. They simply lay upon the line of pursuit. The ’fleet rested in a space of Cloudbound emptiness, invisible to outsiders; they did not have to answer the picket’s cry for aid. They could wait here, and watch it burn.
She reached out her hand instead, and offered safe passage.
The ensuing battle barely merited the name. The Pride sensed the picket’s calculations for reentry and attempted to block them, but the ’fleet used its deep roots in the local Cloud to block the Pride in turn—creating an impression that local turbulence and corruption complicated transit into realspace. The Pridemind calculated an innovative solution for this interference, and dropped into realspace right before the mouths of the guns of the ’faith.
Then it was all over but the glory.
Some monks ascended; one died with mind unclean, and the soulcatchers caught him for purification in the crypts. They burned the Pride from the sky, and dragged the limping picket in. Celestine marked three brilliant monks for further enlightenment, and turned her attention to the fast picket’s pilot, who’d refused to leave her self-described treasure, and demanded (demanded!) an audience.
War monks brought them from the hold, pilot and treasure both, up the vast winding stair to the platform where the Hierarchs waited. To Celestine.
The pilot was a jumpsuited barbarian, staring about herself flush with the chemical wonder Celestine recognized as ship withdrawal. The pilot’s veins glowed with endorphins; her system shouted joy through the Cloud, and far deeper need than a mere fast picket could prompt. She was a naked nerve. The right touch on her cheek would have left her rapt in ecstasy. She had been bound to a larger vessel recently.
The pilot stared at Celestine with the wonder due the Grand Rector of the ’faith, then realized she was staring and dropped to one knee, eyes lowered. “Grand Rector. I thank you for your courtesy, and your rescue.”
“Your rescue was a chance to cleanse the world of its mistakes,” she answered, and held out her hand. “No thanks are needed. It is customary, however, to offer one’s name to one’s benefactor.”
“I am Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter,” she said, and dared raise her eyes at this, as if these were not words to be said with eyes lowered.
“Orn, we have heard, is a myth.”
She blushed like a novice. How charming. “Orn is no myth, Grand Rector. Though it has been many years since we last flew.”
“Yet you kneel before me now. Having, of late, detached yourself from a ship of some majesty.”
The color deepened, changed. Were all women of Orn so easily read? She was a crystal glass held up to the sun. Delightful. “It is a long story, Grand Rector. I bring a treasure that is, I think, of great value to you.”
“How did you find us?”
“I was, of late, in another ship. A larger ship, with the power to see much that lies hidden. There was a battle; I fled, but realized I could not keep this treasure for myself for long. So I come to you.”
“Surely you could have sent an automated shuttle. I feel the rawness of your ship-need. You are cruel to yourself, Daughter of Orn.”
She smiled at that, oddly. “When you see this treasure, Grand Rector, you will know why I had to deliver it myself.”
“Show us, then.”
They had brought the box, eight feet tall, four wide and deep, and made of iron, on a hoversled. The sled settled; Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter unlocked the door, and the door behind that, and stood back.
From within came curses in ancient tongues, and a cry—and from the box tumbled a woman clothed in heavy chains, a woman the Grand Rector had very much desired to look upon with her own eyes. She fell before her now, too burdened by her bonds to stand.
But despite that weight, Vivian Liao could still roll over, and look up, and say, through the blood of the lip she’d split falling, “So you’re the Grand Rector. I have a proposition for you.”
48
VIV LAY ON the floor at the Grand Rector’s feet
, in chains, and consoled herself with the thought that so far almost everything was going according to plan. She never would have reached the Grand Rector walking free, and if the choice was chained or not at all, at least she wore chains she chose. Xiara had sold the humble-outsider-bringing-tribute schtick; the Pride made things interesting for a few hours there, in a we’re all going to die sort of way, but she’d reached the heart of the Mirrorfleet. The rest was up to her.
She hadn’t expected the Grand Rector to be quite so imposing in person. The last time Viv had seen her, the woman seemed colossal, true, but that was a projection, and projections lied. She was easily seven feet tall in person, taller if you counted the wings that rose from her back, thin-boned and severe and massive with the interlocking muscles both wings and arms required. Her feet and hands were talons, her eyes a deep raptor gold. On Hong, the robes of the ’faith looked comforting, relaxed; the Rector wore hers taut and ceremonial as a dress uniform. And she was smiling, an expression as natural and reassuring on her face as it would have seemed on a hawk’s.
“Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter,” she said as if Viv had not spoken, though her gaze never left Viv’s form, “tell us of this treasure you have brought.”
“You have sought her.” Xiara sounded dutiful, proud, earnest—every bit the loyal Orn warrior she’d been when she first brought Viv to her mother’s court. Viv almost bought the lie. “We traveled together. She betrayed me. She crawled back, and I wanted nothing of her. So I bring her to you.”
Viv forced herself to her knees. She hadn’t expected the chains to be so damn heavy, and she burned to think of all these high-class monks and nuns and such seeing her trussed up like this. It wasn’t the most decorous position from which to make a pitch. “I didn’t crawl.”
The Rector knelt with an ease Viv had not expected from a woman that tall; she cocked her head to one side, and before Viv could flinch back, her left talon darted out and drew a thin line of blood from her cheek. The Grand Rector smelled the blood, tasted it with her thin tongue. “How strange. As the Heretic claimed: it speaks, yet lacks a soul.”
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