Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Doubts, too, were just thoughts.

  But—this mattered. What would she do, if she dethroned the Empress? Why should her friends trust her? What made Viv any different from the queen of galaxies she had spent eons fighting, striving, to become?

  Thoughts. Important, but still thoughts, thoughts in the grayness of the world, thoughts in the din of battle.

  What would save her from herself?

  She woke to breaking glass.

  To screams heard as if surfacing through deep water, to a pressure on her face, a sting—again, a slap. Lips pressed on hers, familiar, someone else’s breath in her lungs, sweet and warm: a halos of halos. She looked up and saw an angel with wheels in her eyes, with tears, endlessly repeating her name.

  Her hand trembled up, found Xiara’s cheek.

  Her “Hi” trailed off. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Xiara caught her in an embrace so tight Viv had trouble breathing, coughed; she let her go, laughed, choked, brushed a tear away. “Gods and monsters. Viv—you’re okay.”

  “I don’t think—” More coughing. “I don’t think I’d go that far.”

  “I got here as fast as I could.” Her hand ran through Viv’s hair, fingers gripping strands between them, curling around her skull, pressing her side, as if merely holding her could tear away the cold cotton wadding of death. And she wasn’t wrong. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You saved me.” Breathing hurt her throat—Jesus Christ, who built humans, anyway? She was a mess, a wreck. She was so, so happy. She hadn’t realized how stuck she felt in that bubble, with no human touch for days save chains or a blow. No, that was a lie. She knew. But she had drowned that feeling deep, buried it like a splinter in her skin. And now the splinter came out, coated in ugly and embarrassing gunk, and left her clean.

  Xiara was babbling. “I heard the Pride scream before the attack—I can always hear them, like they’re haunting us, but this was louder. The biggest assault yet, the Rector said. They needed fighters. I ran for a ship, helped—but then the Pride hit the Monastic Sphere and I thought…”

  “Xiara.” She dragged in deep breaths that tasted of the scent of her hair, and felt her body stop dying. What had she ever wanted more than this: to be alive, to be held, to be this close. It felt like peeling off her skin, to say what she had to say next. And like peeling off skin, you clenched your teeth and did it in a single rush, though you knew the pain would come. “Xiara, go. Can’t let them see you—”

  Xiara’s knuckles bled where she’d shattered the glass, and they left blood trails on her cheeks when she wiped tears away. “You don’t understand, Viv. I was in the fleetweb—I felt the Sphere’s shields fail. The Rector dropped them from the inside. She wanted you to get hit. She wanted you dead. I can’t leave you here.”

  She sat up, stood despite the spinning world, despite the ache. “You have to.”

  The wheels in Xiara’s eyes flashed white. “I’ll take her ship from her. I’ll crush her to a paste. I’ll turn this whole damn ’fleet against itself. They’re tense, so tense, all the time, faction against faction, all afraid of the Rector. A shot fired in the wrong direction would start the battle, and once it did, Zanj and I could kill and kill and never stop.”

  “And I’d die—and millions more. We need the ’faith, Xiara. We can’t do this alone. And they can’t find you here. Tell the Archivist what you told me, about the shields. She’ll do the right thing.” Viv hoped. “Okay?”

  Xiara’s bleeding hands tightened into fists.

  A door opened, and a robed shadow strode through: Brother Lailien, flanked by war monks. “Honored guest.” His voice was flat. “Why did you break the relic case?”

  Blood dripped from Xiara’s fingers as she relaxed her hands. “The Rector treats me well because she values my gift. I did not want to see her damaged.” She stepped over the broken glass, and out. Viv tried not to show relief. “But I’m better at breaking than mending, I’m afraid.”

  52

  THE ARCHIVIST CAME for her the following night.

  This time she lacked any escort save Brother Qollak. No war monks, none of the Grand Rector’s loyalists. Nor did she march in with full pomp and ceremony. An invisible door opened and she slipped through ghostly fast, bearing a familiar green flame in her palm. By the time the Archivist tore a glass patch from the dome, Viv was up and waiting in the dark. Eyes and teeth and metal glittered in green light that made the walls’ gold look sick.

  “You couldn’t sleep either, huh?” Viv asked the Archivist, because several days’ imprisonment had left her punchy. Her smile hurt; her cheek had bruised where Lailien had hit her. At least the cut had healed. At least she could breathe. At least the Rector hadn’t killed her yet.

  The Archivist cocked her head to the side. Most people Viv knew would have raised an eyebrow or made some other sign to acknowledge the poor attempt at humor. Lan closed her eyes, and opened them again, slowly. There was something oddly complex about that movement—oh. An extra layer of eyelid. “Follow me.”

  Her voice, never louder than a whisper, echoed—as did their footsteps when they left the cell, as did the nervous rustle of Brother Qollak’s fronds, and the previously inaudible noise of the dim-lit Monastic Sphere, the buzz of machinery in the walls, the hydraulic hiss as doors opened and the snap as they swung shut. Their footsteps on a winding stair, down, down, down, hours down. Viv had toured a salt mine in Poland once, the kind of place where workers stayed underground for months at a stretch, stayed so long that they carved every wall with Jesus and Madonna, with dragons and with rolling hills, with saints and sun, in salt. The stairs down to the mine had not taken this long to descend. And these walls, like the mine’s, were etched with symbols, though these had meanings she could not read.

  The Archivist led her to a door, tall and round and pulsing with crystal pattern circuits in a familiar shade of green. “Can you see it?”

  “The door?”

  The other woman nodded once, pleased. “The Rector has used secret arts to hide it from sight. This is the sepulcher, once our most revered of archives. When the Rector rose to power, she ordained it a place for those tools and relics too holy, too fraught with risk, to study in the open. Over time, more and more relics have come to fit this description. That you can see the door at all is promising.”

  But promising was not the same thing as enough. As Viv neared the door, Qollak shuddered again; his dorsal eyelets tracked in all directions without apparent pattern. The Archivist had taken a huge risk breaking Viv out, only to bring her to a place of even greater danger. Viv had only met the Grand Rector once, twice if you could count a one-way conversation through mile-tall hologram, but in neither meeting had the Grand Rector seemed the kind of woman who would take kindly to others rifling through her medicine cabinet. Had the Archivist laid the groundwork for a strong, swift play, forcing the Grand Rector into a confrontation she would lose? Or was this a desperate overreach, a ball tossed across court overhand as the buzzer sounded, time up, hoping luck would save her when strategy failed?

  Viv hated this—trusting other people, building alliances and coalitions. Easier, always, to do everything herself. But she knew where that path led.

  And either way, the bodies of the Grayframe would lie beyond this door.

  So she opened it.

  The green lights dimmed, great bolts unbolted, and a mass of counterbalanced wall slid back at her touch. A gust of cold, stale air escaped into the dark stairwell. Viv stepped through into an immense space, dimly lit by pulsing dots on the walls, no brighter than city stars. The Archivist followed her, and Qollak, and the door swung shut behind them with a thud. Viv’s night vision chiseled shapes out of the darkness: catwalks, shelves flanked by those stardots, and on the shelves all manner of boxes, baubles, weapons, machines, guns and crowns and shields and armor and, for some reason, a simple, heavy, blocky hammer. The weapons whispered to her, silent, promising secrets, but she paid them no mind, because in the sepulcher
’s center, suspended from chains of impossible strength, hung an immense jagged shape whose outlines she could not yet trace.

  But the Archivist’s night vision was better, and she gasped, and named it: “Pridemother.”

  The hate fractal hung from a web of chains, its thorns shrunken on themselves, its fires damped to coals, its gunmouths silent. Not dead. Ripples moved across its not-quite-skin, shook its spearlike antennae. Black fluid dripped from gaping wounds to pool on the floor.

  “She almost killed Brother Qollak for merely touching a drone,” the Archivist said. “How long has this been here?”

  “Since High Carcereal.” Viv paced on the walkway around the imprisoned ship. “I think. They’ve attacked every three days since then. Xiara said she could always hear the Pride screaming. She heard this. That’s how they tracked you. But what’s she been doing with it?”

  As her eyes adjusted she saw shapes that did not belong, wrapped around and through the Pridemother’s thorns: conduits and electrodes, leads and cables, roundness disturbing that perfect fury. The conduits converged, tangled, braided—and as she followed the catwalk she saw where they led.

  She did not cry out. The sound she made was small, strangled.

  Before the Archivist could stop her, she hooked her legs over the metal railing and dropped to one of the chains, thick around as her own body. Hand over hand she climbed, trusting her grip and ignoring as best she could the vertigo of shadows plummeting to a toxic black pool beneath. Hand over hand, she worked her way toward the Pridemother. Toward the bulging growth of cables and metal and green plastic on its side, and the man hanging there.

  Toward Hong.

  Qollak and the Archivist called after her and she ignored them. The chain barely moved beneath her weight. The metal chilled her fingers; by the time she reached the Pridemother they were so cold they could barely close. She breathed on them until feeling returned, first as agony, then as strength, before she tried to climb the thorns.

  She hadn’t thought this part through. The Pridemother’s thorns were so sharp that one slid through her coverall sleeve without a trace of resistance. No doubt it would pierce her skin as easily. She might find a handhold if she reached past the outer thorns. Tentatively, and for once thankful she’d found so little coffee in the future, she guided her hand into a gap between the spikes, and tried not to think about what might wait inside the Pridemother—or about the tremors that crossed its body, snapping tiny gaps like this one shut.

  First handhold, fine. Second, more or less. She leaned back, held her breath, and trusted the thorns.

  She did not die. They took her weight. One foothold, and another, and now she dangled from the ship. Hair-thin Pridemother spikes feathered her skin.

  Dangling from the ship, she had to force herself to breathe. She wanted her body as far from those points as possible—but if she didn’t stay close, she’d slip and fall. If she didn’t breathe, she’d lose strength and, yes, fall. The gap she was climbing ran up, and over, toward the cancer of cables that held her friend. She worked along that gap hand by hand, foot by foot, breath by breath. Blood roared in her ears. She couldn’t hear anything else.

  She had three feet left to go when she felt the tremor.

  It started from a wound in the ship’s south pole, where the chains anchored. She saw it coming. From this angle, looked less like a ripple than a revolution, old thorns turning inward while new ones took their place, a beautiful interlocking motion like an alien meat grinder, rolling across the ship’s hull toward her.

  She gathered herself and, as the thorns closed around her, leapt.

  A moment wheeling through blackness, hands out, silent because she would need her breath to scream if this failed—and then came the lurch, the torn foil crinkle of her weight settling into one arm, one shoulder. It hurt. She swore. But she was alive, and she hung from the cancer, and when she found a stable three-point hold on its surface, she saw the deep gash in her forearm and counted herself lucky.

  She hung beside Hong.

  Cables and conduits wrapped him, feeding fluid through his skin, evacuating waste, gurgling around his temples. His eyes were half open and that half showed whites only, bloodshot, wet. When he betrayed her she’d wanted to hurt him, but she had no rage left now. She hooked her wounded hand through the cables and pulled. They came away easily. He started to slump, and she swung a leg across him, and an arm, pressing him back into the niche so he did not fall. Dots of blood crossed his brow where needles had dug inside.

  Waking, he tensed, screamed, struggled, and almost killed them both. The long fall gaped beneath them. He was stronger than Viv, but that strength required focus he did not have right now; Viv forced him back inch by inch, held him there. His eyes opened. Pupils narrowed. Fear melted to confusion. “Viv? Viv, I dreamed…”

  Her throat caught. “Hey, buddy.” And, “We have to stop meeting like this.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I … I messed it up. I thought you were going away. I thought she’d…”

  She shushed him. “You were an idiot. Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

  “They wrapped me around the Pridemother. She wanted me to break her, or go mad. It’s all fire and wheels in there, and stars and stars and stars—”

  “Hold still.” Over her shoulder, she called to the Archivist, to Qollak, to whoever was watching: “Hey! Can you guys help us out? Throw us a rope, or something?”

  She felt a lurch in her stomach, followed by weightlessness. Invisible hands lifted them from the niche, Hong now child-light in Viv’s arms.

  “That works, too,” she said as they floated from the Pridemother over the gulf to settle to the catwalk. Hong collapsed first, which, Viv supposed, as she fell to her knees beside him, was only fair. She cradled his head. “It’s okay. Rest. We have time.”

  “Do not be so sure.”

  Hong’s eyes snapped open, flicked left, his whole body rigid. Viv, too, looked up, though she didn’t need to look to name that cold, superior voice.

  The Grand Rector stood on the catwalk before them, flanked by war monks. Lailien held a staff to the Archivist’s throat. Two others held Qollak at gunpoint.

  Consequence accumulates in situations like minerals in solution, until some impurity or asymmetry appears. Add a seed, a sudden shift in temperature, and the solution snaps to crystal order. Time stops. How could anything change, after this moment? This, surely, is all the change the world can tolerate. Motion becomes impossible.

  But if Viv cared about impossibilities, she would have been long dead by now. She lowered Hong’s head, and stood, shaky, brushing dirt and blood off her coverall. She only succeeded in smearing the blood, since more of it was still dripping from her hand. “So you’ve come to cover up your mess.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Come on. This isn’t exactly world’s-greatest-kid-detective shit right here. You snagged the Pridemother back over High Carcereal. Such a prisoner—a core node of the Pride’s network. If you could break her, maybe you could get another, turn it, too, and node by node subvert their fleet. But you couldn’t, without taking the risk that you, or whoever you used to turn her, would be turned yourself. So you kept her, as the ’fleet burned and broke around you—until Hong came back. He was the perfect solution. You were going to send him to the crypts anyway. Why not use his soul for a higher purpose? Heck, you’re probably using more than just him—he’s a preprocessor, feeding abstracted data to your penance crypts. But the Pride just keep coming. How many have died to keep your secret?”

  “Too many,” the Grand Rector said, full of scorn. “But I have done my duty to the ’fleet. My success here would be the ’fleet’s success, my glory the ’faith’s glory. All for the soul of a single heretic, and a few ships lost, a few mortal forms discarded.”

  The Archivist sounded grave and formal even with a staff at her throat. “The Hierarchs will never accept that cost. They will not accept this path
—seeking forbidden knowledge through slavery and torture.”

  “My job,” she snapped back, “is to preserve the ’fleet. This decision is mine. The Hierarchs have no grounds for protest.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “you should ask them.”

  The Archivist looked up, and so did the Rector, and Viv, as overhead, one by one, the robed Hierarchs appeared in space: those grim, silent figures from Viv’s first audience in the Rector’s throne room, the leaders of the ’faith’s many factions, watching. Arms folded in judgment. Their images wavered, ghostlike holograms, the high holy council of the ’fleet present and watching. But still, for now, silent.

  The Grand Rector sneered. “So the Archivist convinced you to follow her. Tempted you to violate my sepulcher with the promise of forbidden wonders. Are you happy now? You see what we have done. Kidnapping, torture, battle after battle provoked. But each battle, we have won. We grind the Pride to dust. Yes, we have suffered—but we will win beneath my banner. I see your stares, your disapproval. But will any of you challenge me? After what I have done, will any of you claim you can stand for the ’fleet better than I?”

  Silence. Viv held her breath. She waited. She counted heartbeats.

  Please. Somebody. Speak up. End this.

  Here was a second problem with trusting others: How could you be sure you’d chosen right?

  “I challenge you,” the Archivist said softly, into the silence.

  “You?” She scoffed. “Weak, and disjoint. A scholar bound in your studies. You have no right to lead the ’fleet. Withdraw your challenge and I will forget you ever spoke. I will forget you came here. You cannot face me and live. And you have no champion to fight in your stead.” Her gaze raked the Hierarchs. None spoke.