Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  * * *

  HONG LAY CAUGHT in a trap built for him.

  But who was he, exactly? To what measure was that trap made?

  Call him Brother Hong of the Mirrorfaith, and he would answer, but that was a name and names were masks. He had worn another before he took up the ’faith, and many more since. He had been called a heretic, a warrior, a prisoner, a champion. A man could change names as easily as hats. But his name was not the thing that was bound. He could not free himself by dancing from name to name, could not twist words to liberty.

  What was bound? Himself, his self. The trap addressed the being behind his eyes, tailored its designs to his desire.

  But who was that being, after all? Of what substance was it made?

  Long ago, a young boy ran through a wasteland, through burning days and frozen nights, skin torn by sun and claw. That boy had never left his homeworld. He did not know the sky, or the tenets of the ’faith. He knew only that if he reached his journey’s end, his brother might be saved. So he ran.

  Years later, a man less young but no less foolish flew, with his Archivist’s blessing and with fellows willing to risk heresy for a miracle, toward High Carcereal. This man, who called himself Brother Hong, had never betrayed a friend, never wrestled a pirate queen, had never fought the Empress’s servants hand to hand. He had never heard the name Vivian Liao.

  And then there was another man, still foolish, who traveled the universe with strange companions: with one woman from a vanished past, another from a land of myth, a man who argued and joked with a monster whose name he’d first heard around a campfire as his cousins vied to scare one another into nightmares—a man who counted a member of the sacred Grayframe as a friend. A man who faced the Grand Rector in single combat. Was this the same person?

  In a sense, perhaps, but how limited a sense! What remained the same? The mind? But what was the mind without and before the world in which it moved? What was Hong of the Mirrorfaith, beyond the world that shaped him? He was Vivian Liao; she was Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter, Xiara of the Groundswell; she in turn was Gray of Grayframe. They were themselves in and through and with each other.

  This fragment writhing in a trap built to its shape, this mewling fear of failure, this desperation to work harder, faster, to gather the whole world to itself while there was time, what was that thing but the product of circumstance? Call it a wound, call it a scar, call it a habit, but wounds and scars and habits were not Hong of the Mirrorfaith. They were contingent, unfixed, empty of form. There was no Hong of the Mirrorfaith. There was no fixed entity who was acted upon. There was no truth but transformation. He was as much Gray of Grayframe as he was this tiny shred running in fear from the monster behind.

  And if he was Gray of Grayframe, he would not run. He would laugh, and swell in his hunger and his joy, and turn and find this thing that tried to eat him—and before it could flee or change its shape, he could open his jaws glittering wide, and lick his lips, and bite down hard, and chew, and swallow.

  Eyes opened in the screaming dark. And someone, call him Hong, for names are masks and masks are sometimes useful, rose from his chains and set about his work.

  * * *

  ZANJ DREW BACK, her nose wrinkled, her eyes dangerously sharp. “What are you saying?”

  “Did you really think you were in charge here?” Viv would have shaken her head, if she wouldn’t have cut herself in the process. She settled for a steady expression, challenge and certainty and all the power she could project. “You’re just as managed as they are, just as compromised. You didn’t suspect that, after all this time? Man, she really did a number on you.”

  “The Empress has never touched us. My sister fell before her—I never did. If you want to find a victim, you’re looking in the wrong place.”

  “She wouldn’t need to touch you,” Viv said. “She built you.”

  “No one built me.”

  “The Empress caught Zanj. She wouldn’t just have hurt her. She would have studied her, scoured her, learned the secrets of her soul. She used all that to build you—or, if Zanj really did make a copy of herself before the battle, she used it to break you. But I think the odds are on build. She likes to have things both ways. You’re too perfect. She could hold Zanj in High Carcereal, eternally suffering, too delicious to give up. Defiance has a flavor, challenge a spice. But she likes obedience, too. If there wasn’t a second Zanj she could warp to her specifications, she would have made one.”

  “Nonsense.” But she was fraying, her eyes bloodshot, her laugh nervous.

  “Look back on what you’ve done to Pasquarai. To your people. Look back on how you’ve ruled. Do you remember leading them to the stars? Do you remember freeing them from death? Would the woman you used to be do what you’ve done?”

  Nothing in the throne room moved. Viv wondered if anything moved in the whole wide world.

  “You’re not who you think you are,” Viv said. “You’re a dream. That’s all. But don’t take it too hard. So are the rest of us.”

  * * *

  —HER NAME, SHE had lost her name, and her name was all the machine needed, her name beneath and beyond all the meat of her already torn away, her name the keystone that, removed, would let her give up more than she had given already, that would let the great ship scour and remake her, that would let her lose herself—

  A cool touch graced the forehead she had thought she lost when the machine pried her skull away. A voice whispered in her ear.

  And she was not herself anymore.

  She never had been. There was the part that gave, yes, the small scared girl trying to fill the gap in the world. But that was not all there was. She was not alone in her own head, as she had never been alone in life. The part that gave depended on others who filled her. Her mother had given her strength and the joy of battle, and Djenn had given her a foe to run against, a rival to best. Viv smoothed her back into her human shell when she stumbled unmade after union with the ship, and Viv needed her, which created a her to need. Gray teased her, Gray saved her life, Gray carried her through the war zone. She was all of them, too—and she was Hong, who studied the world, who drew it into himself, who moved slowly and with care, who tried to be gentle.

  The part that gave did not exist without the others who replenished. She was Hong of the Mirrorfaith as much as she was Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter. Yes, there it was: her name. Yet now, as she reached out to offer it to the machine, she felt it given back to her, unending. Here she was as much Hong as she was Xiara, and Hong, seated in the heart of the machine, drew its truth, and commanded it, and it bent to his will. To hers.

  The machine choked and caught. It had been built to digest her. But she was much larger than even she could bear to think. The machine sparked and cracked and ground itself to pieces on her fullness.

  She opened her eyes in the dark, and heard screams, and saw Hong.

  * * *

  ZANJ SNARLED. “YOU’RE wrong. You don’t know how hard I worked to keep these people safe. You don’t know what I’ve had to give up, whom I’ve had to throw aside. I’ve broken friends. I have cast them into the darkness to suffer as I tried to save my world. And no piece of meat from beyond the wall can challenge that. I will take you apart. I will make you see the glory we have built here, if I have to carve you to pieces first.” Her teeth were sharp, and so were her claws, and her breath was hot.

  So Viv ordered her: “Let me go.”

  The Queen dropped to her knees. The crown pulsed on her brow. She clutched her temples, growled, spat, and let out a high-pitched winding yowl. She looked so like Zanj in that moment that Viv felt a stab of guilt, a twist of sympathetic pain. This was not Zanj, she told herself. This Queen had been made to tear apart what she had built, and to mock her with its ruins.

  The Queen stretched out one shaking hand toward the wires that bound Viv to the throne. So close to hooking her claws beneath the wire, and tearing Viv free.

  The hand blushed gold in the sun. It curled into a fi
st.

  When the Queen looked up, gold tears ran from her eyes, and blood stained her teeth where she had bitten her lip. But still, she was not Zanj.

  “I thought I recognized your voice,” she said, and before Viv could answer, she moved.

  * * *

  GRAY ATE GRAY, and ate, and ate, and despite the pain there always was a greater hunger, and so he looped through himself, he ate and grew and ate what grew in turn. The pain was enormous, gut-churning and terrible, and worse than the pain, if there were worse things than pain, was his certainty that this would go on forever, that the hunger and pain would grow entwined, that there was no death in all the universe, only hunger, and pain, and himself eating and being eaten.

  And yet there came a touch upon his temple, a cool assuring pressure to calm the whirl of him. Relief spread like a virus from that touch.

  He contained everything. But then, he always had, even before he ate the world. He was Gray of Grayframe, which meant he was uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers without number. He was Gray of Grayframe, and Vivian Liao had rescued him from a prison of his own hunger, had brought him back to life after he defied his own Empress to save her, defied the Empress as no Gray of Grayframe ever would have dared. He learned from the children of Refuge how to lift and carry. He studied Hong’s practice, and Xiara’s gift for giving, for offering herself, when all he could do was take.

  And they would not have been caught this way, any more than they would have let him be caught. Xiara would have fallen to another trap, and Hong to another, and Viv, well, her whole life had been a sort of trap, but if Xiara somehow woke to find herself racked with hunger and her teeth embedded in her arm, she would have gone out to find who else she could feed.

  The hunger eased, and with it pain.

  Xiara flowed into him. The part of him that was her flowered, the part of him that had shaped itself around her. And, finding herself in possession of all the world, finding her belly full of cosmos, what could she do but take herself as the dark material from which to frame new worlds?

  And there was light.

  And his eyes opened in the dark that echoed with fading screams.

  He felt whole, wrung out, and dizzy. He realized, then, that he was seeing himself: a vague-featured gray body upon a slab with an iron crown on his head, painted with diamond sweat that cracked as he pushed himself upright. And in the dark, he saw Xiara watching him, and knew he was seeing himself through her, even as she saw herself through him—as they both saw themselves, and in turn saw Hong.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, but with Xiara’s lips. More disorienting still: he spoke those words in her savage fallen Ornclan tongue, and remembered learning how to write those words in Ornglyph at a traveling tutor-skald’s knee, remembered how understand sprang from a word that meant, in Orntongue, to digest, to make a thing a part of yourself. He spoke through her. He spoke inside her mind.

  “We were crowned,” Hong said with Gray’s voice, and Gray saw they still were: a band of iron burned at each one’s temple, blacker than black. “The crowns trap our selves. They carve us off from the world. But what is the self? There are pieces of me in all of you, and pieces of you in me. We are all empty of inherent form. Trace the threads of each of us, and you find not just the others, but the entire universe. And what crown could bind the whole universe?”

  “You tied us together through the Cloud,” Xiara said through Hong—or was that Gray, speaking with Xiara’s wonder? Gray remembered staring gleeful at her mother in the ring, as she gathered and threw an enemy. Or else Xiara, in him, remembered the glory of first construction, of eating a moon and shaping it to a glistening arch.

  “I let go,” they said. “The Cloud is a tool, that’s all—like the body, and the mind.”

  And then, the both of them at once: “You’re bleeding.”

  Blood tears leaked from his eyes, but his voice was steady. “The crowns cannot hold us with their illusions. But they tear at what pieces they can. We must act fast.”

  * * *

  VIV’S JAWS STRAINED against the scratchy metal the Queen had shoved into her mouth and buckled there. She breathed fast and sharp through her nose, and tried to speak. But the Queen circled back in front of her, breathing heavy, shaking, but still on her feet.

  “I’ve never met the Empress,” the Queen said, “but Her voice echoes behind the wall and ripples through the Cloud, all clarity and truth, a will that must be obeyed. She built this, you know. She took the world beyond our world and made the Cloud from it, to Her specifications and under Her control.” The Queen seemed to hear herself then, to hear the words she spoke that Zanj would never frame, and she shivered all through, curled her claws into her cheek, drew blood. When she looked up the nail tracks wept red. “And here you are, with a voice like Hers. A voice that can command my sister’s crown. I feel it inside, crushing the part of me that’s her. But you are not Her. Just an echo, a copy, a husk.” Her laugh tuned Viv’s fear to a higher pitch. She’d pushed the Queen almost to breaking, and a broken thing had sharp edges to tear and carve. “But what if I were to master you? I could make you mine, bend you, hurt you, twist you round, and end up with Her voice at my call. That’s why I’m here. Isn’t it?” Her eyes fixed on Viv, desperate, and in their desperation Viv knew she was right: the Queen was hungry, at a depth that scared her, for Viv’s approval, for assurance she’d worked as her master willed—no, not Viv’s approval, but approval with Viv’s voice. She needed the Empress to say she had done well. She ached for it.

  But Viv could not speak.

  The tower shook. The fake sun dimmed overhead. Or else that was only Viv’s own terror redoubling, rising, blotting out all light.

  The Queen drew the Fallen Star from behind her ear and made it a sharp-tipped needle, pressing down, down against Viv’s skin, into her palm and through, so fast Viv had time to think, That wasn’t as bad as I expected, before the pain hit.

  Then it was worse.

  * * *

  THEY ROSE TOGETHER.

  Xiara’s eyes turned and Hong understood what that meant from the inside now, the whirling of systems into place, the alignment of vision with different realms of being, knew it without being told even as he knew the fields that bound Gray’s million mites together, the Cloud within all things. One arm waved—what did it matter whose—and the ceiling burst open, and light burned down into the cells, onto the slabs, where others now, not all, not millions, but the hundred thousands give or take of Pasquarai who in three millennia had never been convinced to yield, who from mutation or determination could not be turned, opened their eyes together. Hong’s virus spread and spread, Cloud-code tangled up in a whisper.

  You are empty.

  If you are empty, there is nothing for those crowns to hold.

  Wake up.

  And so they did.

  The Queen’s soldiers tried to stop them. Pasquarai Station sent forth its fields and drones, its piercing light, its graviton inversions, and they slid past. There is no form to strike, no being to wound.

  Still the station fought. Still its soldiers gathered.

  And the imprisoned hundred thousands boiled up from far beneath to pull them down.

  * * *

  VIV TENSED EVERY muscle she could bear to keep still, but even so the pain thrust her against her wire bonds. Skin parted at her neck, at her ear. Vomit rose in the back of her throat, and she forced it down. You thought pain inured you to pain and maybe that was true, but the Empress’s claws in her chest, the sickening pull of the skin melting on her wrist and cheek, the give of her thumb in Yannis’s grip, those didn’t make the Fallen Star hurt less when it pierced her hand. They were signposts, pointing out how bad things could get, and suggesting they could be even worse.

  The Star ground against the bones at the root of her first and second fingers.

  She expected worse to come, and when it did not, she worried. She realized her eyes were closed and opened them, which helped her vis
ion clear.

  The Queen knelt beside her, yowling and screaming, carving trenches in her scalp with her claws. She slumped onto her side and her cries stopped, but not because she no longer suffered. Her breath pulsed in her chest, and cords stood out on her neck where she was strangling herself to keep her voice contained.

  The tower shook. She thought the tower shook. Maybe Viv’s friends were coming for her, maybe they’d broken free, maybe she had a chance. Or maybe that was her heart shaking her, from pads of feet up to throat, maybe that was the gut-tremor of knowing she would not be saved, and that whenever the Queen came around, what happened next would be worse.

  She pulled against the wire, but it would not give. And even if she freed herself, what would she do? She couldn’t run fast enough, and the Queen had shrugged off her commands. If she did slip free, she’d fail just like she had before. She stopped herself from thinking that far ahead. She could worry about failure once she made it far enough to try again.

  The Queen recovered.

  She lurched to her feet, driven by will and shaking from the effort. “I see,” she said. “If I hurt you, she hurts me triple. Vicious, even from that scratch.” Scratch? Viv’s hand was a coal of pain. “I don’t think I can hurt you enough to break,” she said. “Not without killing myself. All that power so close to hand, and yet so far away. But there may be hope. You have no soul, and yet you command and the crown obeys. It hears your blood, not your soul. And what’s blood but a code I can crack? I wanted to bend your will to mine, but there are many ways to make you part of me.”

  She caught the fingers of Viv’s wounded hand, and pulled the pinkie straight, and knelt before the throne, and as she smiled her teeth grew sharp.

  * * *

  THEY BURST INTO the throne room as the battle waged beneath them.