Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Damn the sting in her cheek. Heretic probably meant Hong. What did that past tense mean? Was he dead? Tortured? Imprisoned? Viv didn’t let herself hope, and she most certainly did not ask about him. She’d met enough high-level players to tell that the Rector was the type that thrived on weakness. She’d never dealt against someone like that from quite so compromised a position. “I need your help.”

  “You fled High Carcereal with a heretic and a demon, and you have scourged the galaxy in the months since, committing great blasphemy. You are a soulless puppet, your strings cut, in chains. Why should we help you?”

  “To save yourselves.”

  The Rector laughed, seized the chains across Viv’s chest in her fist, and rose from her crouch, dragging Viv and chains alike one-handed up. Viv’s feet left the floor and she dangled from the Rector’s grip. “You are in no position to make threats.” Her breath smelled of metal. Viv wondered what she ate, if anything.

  “I’m not threatening you. The Empress is.”

  “Blasphemy,” the Rector sneered. “If you were not a sacred relic, I would break you now. If you had a soul, I would enlighten you.”

  Viv wasn’t certain what enlighten meant in this context, but the tone of voice didn’t suggest anything pleasant. “Your Empress made me on High Carcereal, and ran away. Did you ever wonder why?”

  Those golden eyes might be curious—or hungry.

  “She made me in her image,” Viv said. “She’s modeling her past. She’s stuck—she’s taken her current technologies as far as they’ll go, and she can’t think outside them. So she’s been searching for a version of the universe where she has the power to beat the Bleed. She thinks she’s found it.”

  “Then the final triumph is at hand.”

  “For her.”

  “Her victory is ours.”

  It was hard to breathe, suspended like this. “You don’t get it. She doesn’t care about you. She cares about winning. The Bleed have stopped her from rolling over the cosmos so far, because if she grows too large, they’ll come for her. If she breaks them, that’s it. She’ll eat the whole Cloud. She’ll turn this galaxy into her citadel. She’ll archive you all, if you’re lucky, and reach out for another galaxy, and another after that. She won’t be safe until she’s sure the Bleed are truly gone, until she’s sure there’s no bigger threat hiding behind them—and she can’t be sure of that until she owns the universe. You’ve studied her for centuries. You know her better than anyone. How she strikes, and why. I’ve seen worlds she’s ruined, and the archives she carries with her, pieces of civilizations she found interesting. Frozen whales in a frozen sea. That’s your future, if you don’t help me.”

  The Rector dropped her; Viv’s knees buckled when her feet hit the ground, but she’d been waiting for the weight. It bowed her. She almost collapsed, but she forced her legs to push her up, to take the weight, to let her stand. Her shoulders trembled, and her back, and the chains bit into her skin, but she held firm before the Grand Rector.

  “She offers victory. Immortality. The ’faith has followed Her for centuries. And yet you claim She would destroy us. Why should we listen to your lies?”

  “They’re not lies. You have followed her from battlefield to battlefield. You pick up the pieces she leaves behind. You keep civilization alive. But if she wins, she’ll leave nothing here or anywhere. Just her.” Viv couldn’t turn much, but she scanned the monastic court, all those robed and hooded strangers in their many forms, letting her desperation show and seeing signs of sympathy, or at least shame. One of the monks, a woman with white hair and large owly eyes, seemed receptive, though it was hard to say how much of her concern was for Viv and how much for the wounded, man-sized bunch of seaweed she was holding. “I can break the Empress’s locks. Ask Xiara. That’s why she had to bring me herself—I could slip free if she wasn’t there to watch me. You’ve been collecting her tools, her traces, for longer than I can imagine. I can help you use them, and together we can save—”

  The Rector’s face did not change to warn Viv of her impending motion. Her hand closed over Viv’s mouth, and her long fingers wrapped around Viv’s jaw, around the back of her skull, talons dimpling skin just on the verge of drawing blood. Her last word was lost in a moan, and her jaw creaked as the Rector squeezed. “We have heard enough from this soulless creature. She has borne out the Heretic’s account of her delusion. So small, so weak: hard to believe the Empress would build such a thing.”

  At small and weak, Viv managed a muffled protest, even through the pain.

  “We will not be drawn into heresy. We will not let your lies distort the true science. But you are, yourself, a miracle, and you shall receive no less study than your nature demands. Archivist Lan, perhaps this will serve as a more fitting challenge for your students than the seductions of Pride hardware.” The Grand Rector gestured to the war monks, massive and armored and waiting with their pikes. Two marched forward, seized Viv’s chains from behind, and dragged her back. “Seal her in a relic case.”

  49

  THEY LEFT HER in a glass bubble on a clawfoot pedestal in a cornerless room decorated with golden filigree, with nothing to do but pace.

  She had hoped they would use Imperial technology to bind her, some forcefield she could slip through or cage she might unlock. Instead the war monks dragged her to this room, and dropped her on this pedestal. One cut off her chains with shears; Viv tried to jump her and take the shears away, but was thrown back with casual ease, while another war monk drew a circle around her in the air with a gray metal rod. The circle remained where it was drawn, glimmering fuzzily in a way she recognized, with a heartsick pang, from Gray’s transformations. It revolved around her, knitting a glass shell from thin air, anchored to the dais.

  Then they left through a door that vanished behind them, leaving her stuck inside a Fabergé egg.

  When she punched the glass it rang so loud it hurt her ears, but did not break. She threw her body against it and bounced off. She worried about air at first, but there was a circle of tiny holes in the floor just inside the glass, spaced ten to a fingerpad, and a cool breeze passed through them. She would not suffocate by accident. Of course, they could stop giving her air at any time. Or mix other gases with her air supply. Or evacuate the air altogether. Raise the temperature to boil her, lower it to freeze her.

  March in a circle ten feet across, and that was her world. For all she knew, they’d already moved her—with the right technology, she’d never notice. She imagined the gold filigree egg lowered onto a shelf lined with other eggs that held other bodies, other versions of her, the Mirrorfaith’s collection. They wanted to study her. Take her apart. Just like she’d told Hong, way back when. Just like Zanj had said.

  She had to use the bathroom. The floor of the dais bubbled, and the bubble popped, revealing a chamber pot and a small box of tissues and a tube of something that smelled (when she sniffed it, with some reluctance) like sanitizer. No curtain, though. Of course, the fact that they knew she had to use the bathroom without her saying anything suggested she was under the kind of surveillance that would have made the presence or absence of a curtain immaterial.

  Okay. Imprisoned, yes. Forgotten, no. She did her business as defiantly as possible under the circumstances. She’d never had cause to piss vehemently before, but there was a first time for everything.

  When she was done, the floor burbled up to cover the basin and tissues, and settled flat again. She’d considered holding on to the sanitizer, but what would that accomplish? Unlikely that glass was alcohol soluble in the future. At any rate, now she knew the floor could strangle her on its own, without any help from gas, which was nice.

  She paced. She did a few push-ups, and that rising-up-on-your-fingertips-while-in-lotus-position thing, which looked cool when Nicolas Cage did it in Con Air. She entertained fantasies of jumping the next guards who came for her, then considered the likely outcome of jumping guards who spent most of their lives training to fight evil cybor
gs. She decided against it.

  Eventually she was hungry, and soon after that the floor bubbled again to produce a bamboo box containing two of Hong’s nutrient paste packets and a glass of water. She ate, drank; the packaging melted when she was done. After a span of time she could not precisely judge, the light from the walls dimmed and died without warning or pretense of sunset. Keep deducing, Ms. Liao: they want you alive, contained, and fed, but they don’t care about boredom, or exercise. They’re more interested in your body than your mind.

  “I’ve been on dates like this before,” Viv said, then realized she had spoken out loud, and felt for the first time—save, maybe, when the Pride had been about to kill her, or the Empress—nervous. People lived for years in solitary confinement. Years and years. Some of them didn’t go irretrievably mad as such.

  Everything was still, more or less, going according to plan.

  After nervous, she felt sleepy. She tried to remember when she’d last had a good night’s rest. Back at the fleet, with Xiara, barely counted. Certainly not as they chased the Empress, or fled from her. On Refuge, maybe? Worn out after a hard day’s work? But then, she’d known each night’s sleep was one night farther behind the Empress, one night farther from home. She felt farther away than ever now, curled on the floor in this glass cage, trusting her captors’ goodwill to keep her alive. If only the board of directors could see her now.

  This was such a bad idea. But none of them had come up with a better one.

  She dreamed of an ocean seen from overhead, of tumblers in a lock, of needles of light that pierced her skin, of green hands and flame and melted flesh, and sat up wide awake and panting in darkness, in her glass cage.

  “This was such a bad idea,” someone said. This time, it wasn’t her.

  By the time she stopped screaming, she realized it was Zanj, wearing ’faith robes and her own face, leaning on the Star. Her palm glowed a ghoulish green, which didn’t help the whole night terror schtick. Viv steadied herself against her bubble’s wall. “What the hell was that for?”

  “Fun, mostly.” She raised her open hand. “The flame will foil their sensors while it lasts. Thought I’d check in and see if you wanted to give up yet.”

  “I had to try the easy way. We need them.”

  “Sure, sure. We need their spare parts, is what you mean. Come on. I’ll bust you out of here, we’ll crash down into their library, find what we need to fix Gray, then pick up Xiara before they can wine and dine her into pledging allegiance, and get out and on with our next bad idea.”

  “We need more than tools. We need allies.”

  “These allies? Trust me, Viv. I’ve seen all sorts of monsters in my time, and the Grand Rector is a piece of work. She’s not coming over to your side.”

  “The Archivist might. Hong’s teacher. I think that was her, with the white hair and the big eyes, back in the audience chamber.”

  “Oh yeah. She looked super important, kneeling over that seaweed guy.”

  “Hong thought she was.”

  “Hong turned you in!”

  “We all messed up on Refuge. Hong was right about some things.”

  “Oh yes, from what I’ve seen it really looks like Hong could have started a revolution, won the ’fleet over. That’s why he was in chains the last time we saw him. Because he’s such an excellent judge of political reality.”

  “We have to stop the Empress. The ’faith is better positioned than anyone to do that.”

  “They’re children playing with guns.”

  “So we take the safeties off and teach them to shoot.”

  Zanj laughed at that. “I didn’t know what to expect, when you decided to go to war. It’s a good look.” The flame dimmed. “Time’s wasting. Okay. We’ll stick with your way for the moment.”

  “Have you found Hong?”

  “Not a trace. Everyone knows he was taken. They had this big trial; he confessed to heresy, and accepted the sentence of some kind of meditation retreat. It’s pretty common around here. But I sweet-talked the penance ships—the inmates spend most of their time hard-dreaming their way through difficult decrypts, it’s pretty gross—and they don’t have him either.”

  “Look harder.”

  Zanj rolled her eyes. “Fine. Well, at least Xiara’s enjoying herself. Lots of glad-handing, tours, the whole hospitality game. The Grand Rector can smell Groundswell on her, and she’s got her teeth out for that ship.”

  Viv tried not to think about the strength of that woman, about the piercing consideration of those eyes, and about Xiara, earnest as a morning breeze. But then, Xiara was native to this world. She’d be fine. She would probably, certainly, almost definitely be fine. “We’ll be fine,” she said out loud, hoping that would convince her. This had been the hardest part of the plan: thinking of Xiara alone, exposed, in the ’fleet. Her hand rose to the cut the Grand Rector’s claw had drawn in her cheek. “For now, we wait. We need these people on our side.”

  “Okay.” Zanj tossed the flame in the air. It guttered, flashing. “But if you get yourself killed, I’ll kill you.”

  Viv stopped pacing. The gravel sincerity in that threat, and Zanj’s immediate glance away thereafter, as if she’d said nothing notable, the nervous twitch of her hand up to scratch the back of her neck—it all clicked, and Viv felt warm all through. Nothing sexual about it. She was more than sufficiently in tune with her various lusts to track that sort of thing. No, this was the far simpler, and stranger realization that Zanj, for all her bluff and bluster, would care if Viv were gone. She wanted her safe. She wanted to hurt people who hurt her. Viv remembered how she had felt in the Empress’s throne room, Zanj hanging from green light in agony, the Star fallen from her hand—that overwhelming rage, so intense it verged on nausea, how dare this nonsense Empress of however many stars set one damn glowstick finger on her friend.

  She stammered, but managed, “Thank you,” and, “I care about you, too.”

  “Look at that,” Zanj said, “flame’s out, got to go, see you later, take care.” And she left Viv in the dark.

  But not alone.

  50

  TWO DAYS LATER the Archivist came for Viv. Flanked by mod-bristling war monks, some four-armed, some two, some scaled, one a shadow in space identifiable only by his robes, the Archivist seemed a fragile hook from which Viv could hang her hopes: willowy slim, owl-eyed, careful with her steps, her white hair braided back, light brown skin gently worn with age that Viv, back home, would not have been surprised to learn fell anywhere from midthirties to early sixties. Who knew what it meant here.

  She moved like a ghost, now still, now slow, now so fast Viv’s eyes could not track her. The changes of speed were not, Viv thought, affected, meant to startle or distract. The mind within that body worked down its own paths, and some of those took it far from the world of flesh and ordinary time. When her attention wandered back to physical reality, she accelerated to catch up.

  In a breath and a blur, she crossed the room to Viv’s bubble and pressed her hand against it, watched her unblinking for seconds that turned to minutes. Viv did not return her stare: she did not know what the Archivist could read from her through those eyes. She watched the woman’s hand instead, its thin fingers crisscrossed with tiny lines, shiny with calluses and scars of thin deep healed cuts. Still hands, untrembling.

  “I mean you no harm,” the Archivist said. “The Grand Rector has asked me to study you. Do not fight, and you will not be hurt. Answer questions, and we will treat you with courtesy. Nod if you agree.”

  The Grand Rector asked—interesting. That explained the war monks. But Viv had come to find the Archivist, and through her, to find Hong. She nodded once.

  The Archivist pressed her fingernails into the glass. It glowed where she touched, bubbled, began to flow. Her nails passed through, and the heat spread in straight lines from her hand, to frame a door of fire. When the Archivist pulled, the glass peeled away. It clanged against the floor when she let it fall. The Archivist b
lurred back, her hands crossed over the front of her robe, seemingly cool. “Chain her if you must,” she told the shadow monk. “But do not damage her. She is a relic, beyond price.”

  She didn’t fight the manacles, or the belt they locked around her waist to chain the manacles through, or the leg irons. She’d accomplish nothing at this stage by clawing eyes or kicking groins—if these monks even had the sort of genitalia she was used to.

  She wondered if one of these monks was Zanj, disguised, but if so, Zanj kept such deep cover she didn’t even wink to tip her hand. Probably not, then. Zanj had her tricks and transformations, but Viv would never accuse her of subtlety. If she needed to hide in shadows, she’d just snuff out the sun.

  The Archivist led them out a door that hadn’t existed moments ago, down a high, dim hall lit by green and yellow and red stained-glass slits, to a round room with a fountain in the middle, the hub of many intersecting halls. The Archivist stirred the fountain’s clear water with her fingertips, then cupped her palm to draw a handful that now had a rich ruby tint, and, though Viv tried by reflex to pull away, she dripped that red water onto Viv’s forehead, and spoke a complex phrase Viv’s translation gimmick rendered as activate. The liquid felt cool and warm at once; it crawled over her skin and sank through. She felt a weight enter her bloodstream, as if she’d just received an injection.

  Then the floor disappeared, and they flew into space.

  The war monks held her by her chains, and didn’t seem worried, which was all well and good for them. Viv cursed, for her part, and in the process of cursing discovered that she could breathe, and that her eyes were not freezing or boiling or popping from her head or any of the other things television had warned her eyes did in space. All the skinfields and spacesuits she’d tried had swaddled her in cloth, or electromagnetic barriers, offering only a shadow of this experience: her skin prickling in vacuum, her own eyes wondering at the deep, and the ’fleet.