Raven Stratagem

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Shuos Zehun’s words came back to Brezan with unhappy clarity: I wouldn’t have minded seeing you in the Shuos. Not that he could imagine why, given his inability to prevail in this conversation. Just because he was a failure as a Kel didn’t mean he’d make a good Shuos. He looked at Tseya, having given up on witty rejoinders, and waited for her next sally.

  Tseya lowered her hand.

  Brezan set his jaw and tried not to shudder with premature relief. He didn’t want to keep looking at Tseya. He made himself do so anyway.

  “General,” Tseya said quietly, with none of the mockery from earlier.

  He didn’t understand.

  “General,” she said again, “have you figured out what the point of this exercise is?”

  “I’m not a Shuos,” Brezan said, “and I’m not properly a Kel, either. Why don’t you explain it to me in one-syllable words and stick figures so I have a chance of following you.”

  Tseya ignored his tone, which was just as well. “We have to be ready to fight Jedao,” she said. “If we’re unlucky, the matter might not be settled by a well-aimed bullet, or by enthrallment. He’s not just a soldier, Brezan. Ex-soldier, if you prefer. He’s the oldest Shuos, and while he’s crazy, he’s not stupid. Just because you’re a crashhawk doesn’t mean he can’t get you to do exactly as he wants. The records say he’s very good at persuasion, at needling people until they capitulate—or join him. You have got to be prepared.”

  Brezan couldn’t contest any of this, but that didn’t make him feel any better. “You’ve made your point.”

  “In case you’re wondering,” Tseya said, “I’m going to have to be careful myself.”

  He didn’t trust himself to ask about her vulnerabilities.

  “It was a long time ago,” Tseya said. Her hands opened and closed. “My mother is also an Andan, but we’ve spent most of our lives arguing. This last argument—it wasn’t a good one.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brezan said then, because he ought to say something.

  “As I said, it was a long time ago. I mostly don’t miss her.” She smiled oddly at him. “It will be very satisfying to dispatch the Immolation Fox, regardless. Especially since my mother doesn’t believe I can do it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “SO WHAT KEPT you this time?” Zehun asked as Mikodez entered their office suite with its cheerful mix of cat toys and ink paintings by various grandchildren and other young relatives. “You’re fourteen minutes late.”

  Mikodez gave Zehun a pained look. On his way to the most comfortable couch, he knelt to pet the friendlier of Zehun’s two cats, Fenez. The other one was hiding, as usual. Fenez still bore a scary resemblance to a knitting project gone horribly awry. Mikodez had learned the hard way to beg off brushing her coat.

  After paying homage to the cat, Mikodez sat across from Zehun. On the table between the two of them rested a pot of tea painted with roses stabbed through their hearts, which he had given Zehun after an Andan assassin almost killed them. There was also a tray of cookies and candied flowers. Today Zehun wasn’t even trying to coax him out of his beloved sweets. They knew talking to his nephew always made him moody. Niath, who had trained as an Andan contact specialist, had been the only survivor of a border encounter. The incident had left him unstable. Mikodez had accepted him as a ward when Niath’s own parents, who had no faction affiliation, were too afraid to take him back in; an Andan without full control of enthrallment was liable to fry people’s brains. As hexarch, Mikodez had nothing to fear from Niath’s ability, and Istradez was good enough at fooling Niath that he was willing to take the risk. Their nephew’s loneliness was palpable, and family was family, after all.

  Mikodez helped himself to one of the flowers, more crunch than flavor, then said, “Sorry about the delay. Niath is doing as well as he ever does. On the way here I got tied up with a shadowmoth commander calling about an urgent matter of etiquette.”

  “Normal etiquette or Shuos etiquette?” Zehun asked as they poured him tea. It smelled of citron and rose hips. “By the way, I should warn you that everyone in the office thinks those almond cookies are unbearably sweet. If you don’t like them either, I’m going to dump them on Niath and see if he can enthrall anyone into eating them.”

  “Very funny.” Mikodez didn’t like discussing his nephew’s condition with anyone but Istradez and Medical. The cookies must be extraordinarily bad for Zehun to bring Niath up like this. That, or Zehun was in a mood. The current situation had everyone in a mood. To be polite, he tried one of the cookies and grimaced. “Just toss these. They’re no good.”

  Zehun scowled at the cookies. “Oh well, it was worth a try.”

  “Anyway, the issue was Shuos etiquette.” This meant things like whether circumstances made it proper to unstealth and blow an unsuspecting target to smithereens. Rahal Iruja hated it when he did that without submitting paperwork in advance, which killed the point. “I handled it.” He sipped the tea, smiled a little at the taste of honey, and tapped the edge of the cookie tray. “I presume you have your scenario all figured out, so you might as well go ahead.”

  In order to keep from locking into interpretations of events prematurely, Mikodez and Zehun ran through counterfactual scenarios periodically. With both Jedao and Kujen at large, he felt it particularly important to continue the exercise, although the subject of today’s was the former and not the latter. He would have liked to run through the scenario with some other members of his senior staff, but scheduling was proving more difficult than usual.

  “All right,” Zehun said. They called up two jeng-zai images. Mikodez suppressed a groan. He could hold his own at the game, but he had gotten sick of it as a cadet and had never recovered.

  The first image was a gruesome portrayal of the Drowned General. Most artists didn’t go in for curved ice spikes or dissevered silver-green light or pale, frenetic eyes peering out of cracked flesh. Mikodez bet the artist had taken inspiration from some remembrance.

  The second image was the Deuce of Gears, but done up in the traditional colors, silver on black. Like every other card in the suit, it had been associated with the Nirai before Jedao happened to it. Spirel had explained to him that most jeng-zai artists drove themselves crazy trying to do something to the card to compensate for the connotations that Jedao had stapled to it. It had originally meant ‘cog in the machine,’ a show of submission to Kel Command, although Mikodez doubted Kel Command had been fooled even before Hellspin. This particular interpretation had etched the character for one million into the gears’ degenerating surfaces.

  “Are we too old to bother with subtlety anymore?” Mikodez inquired.

  “Forget old. I’m too cranky to sit around thinking of creative ways to present a fictional scenario when the real situation is so bad,” Zehun said. “All right, here it is. Shuos Jedao has persuaded key Shuos officials in the Crescendo March to declare for him.” The Crescendo March overlapped both the Severed March and the Stabglass March, putting it uncomfortably close to the Fortress of Spinshot Coins on the one hand and the Citadel of Eyes on the other. “He hasn’t made an attempt on your seat, precisely—”

  If Zehun meant to get his attention, they already had it. He knew where this was going anyway.

  “—but he’s seceded from the hexarchate,” Zehun said. Fenez mewed and hopped up into Zehun’s lap, then began purring loudly. Mikodez had always known that cats were more treacherous than his own people. For their part, Zehun buried their hands in that mess of calico coat, expression content. “The other hexarchs are pushing for you to resolve this rapidly. The Kel have offered their compliance, mainly as a way of rubbing it in, but you will lose considerable prestige by taking them up on it. What went wrong, and how did the Shuos get to this point?”

  Fenez yawned hugely. Light from the two jeng-zai images sheened yellow-green in her eyes. “Just one question about the scenario,” Mikodez said. “Has Jedao set himself up as some kind of dictator?” The thought was almost funny enough that he wante
d to see it happen, except for the implications.

  Zehun laughed at him. “In the interests of watching you struggle, I’m going to say no. He’s put someone else in charge and is running around as their pet general and all-around enforcer.”

  “Well,” Mikodez said, “I suppose that even my favorite suicidal revenant might have enough of a sense of self-preservation to know that it’s better not to be the primary target. Plus, this way he can deny that he wants power for its own sake.”

  “Quit stalling and get started, Mikodez.”

  Mikodez considered what he’d been given. “I posit this: we’re too lackadaisical about responding to Jedao’s propaganda campaign. Ordinarily it’s a mistake to draw attention to whatever chatter is being distributed, but that’s when you have a better chance of monitoring the sources. We apparently never manage to track down the distribution channels. Even now there’s circumstantial evidence that he’s doing something unusual there. Istradez tells me it’s driving Intelligence wild, as if I couldn’t tell.” He eyed Fenez, who was clearly unimpressed. “Scenario aside, it’s infuriating that traffic analysis hasn’t yielded anything illuminating. If our agent on the Hierarchy of Feasts had run across anything, she’d have passed on word, but that’s assuming she hasn’t been killed or subverted or turned into a paperweight.”

  “That’s just distribution, though,” Zehun said. “You haven’t accounted for the effectiveness of the propaganda. Yes, we’ve seen a few system-level successes on Jedao’s part, but they can be attributed to locals reacting to the Hafn breathing down their necks. So go back to the scenario. Jedao can’t have kept on broadcasting bulletins that suggest that he’s as nicely leashed as someone’s dog. What changes?”

  “Jedao buys a brainwashing ray off the black market?” Mikodez said, remembering some of Kujen’s caustic remarks. You couldn’t find more of an expert on brainwashing than Kujen. Too bad they still had no idea where he’d gotten off to.

  Zehun gave him the flat stare that had earned them a reputation for eating slow-witted cadets back when they’d been an instructor.

  “All right,” Mikodez said, sobering, “I’ll stop being a pest.”

  Zehun muttered something that might have been “No danger of that.”

  “Jedao isn’t a propagandist,” Mikodez said, “although he picked up the basics and absorbed some stylistic quirks from Khiaz. He’s very good at talking people into things, but with his anchors he had the advantage that no one else could monitor what he was saying once they left Kujen’s presence, and with the Kel he could use formation instinct as a crutch. Anchoring no longer applies, and the Shuos are not conformist enough to be manipulated in the same ways that modern Kel can be.

  “Given all that, I’m proposing a few things. First, he recruits a propagandist or six. I doubt anyone with the necessary imagination was lurking in General Khiruev’s swarm. It simply wasn’t what they were assembled for. Still, Jedao can always recruit someone on some station. Face it, the man has raging ego problems the way most Shuos do, myself not excepted, but he didn’t become a general without learning to delegate.”

  “What about Jedao’s motivations?” Zehun said.

  “The other hexarchs default to thinking that he’s out for old-fashioned vengeance and let it go at that,” Mikodez said. “I don’t buy it. He’s at war because it’s the world he knows, but he tells himself he’s putting something right in the process because he needs a reason for the butchery.

  “If he successfully creates a splinter state, it’s either because that was his goal all along, it’s a stepping stone to some other goal, or it’s a feint and he’s after something else entirely. I assume we fuck up our assessment for him to get as far as he does. He doesn’t issue some kind of manifesto, does he?”

  “Nice try,” Zehun said, “but no.”

  “What, you don’t think it’d be fun to draw up a mock document in Jedao’s style?” Mikodez started making a fort of the cookies. Zehun, used to such behavior, sighed. “The other logical possibility is that Jedao wants something else but was stuck with secession as a consolation prize. Since the point of the exercise is a disaster scenario, I have to assume that’s not the case and he’s out to stick it to us.”

  “It would be one hell of a consolation prize, yes.” Zehun lowered their cat to the floor. Instead of darting off, Fenez rolled over on her back and began writhing comically.

  “As of right now in the real world,” Mikodez said, “Jedao has intimated that he’d like to ingratiate himself back into the hexarchs’ favor. Granted, everyone remembers that he looked sane from his childhood until Hellspin Fortress, so a couple months of ostentatious good behavior isn’t much of an indication, but he always did like playing long odds. In the scenario, we misread the threat that he represents. Say he takes a left turn and obtains more threshold winnowers, which puts everyone on high alert. We’re occupied making sure he doesn’t sprint somewhere to blow up another million people because with a mass murderer you can’t afford to ignore the threat. In the meantime, he’s busy negotiating with a number of senior Shuos.” He fell silent.

  Zehun said, “Ah,” very softly, and waited, hands resting on their knees.

  All but two of the cookies had joined the fort. “You know,” Mikodez said, “Jedao’s record as an assassin has always puzzled me, as though I should be able to diagnose whatever the hell went wrong twenty years down the line. He wasn’t enthusiastic about torture or seduction, but he’d follow his handlers’ orders. And then his service with the Kel. Superficially gregarious, but no close friends or lovers. For the longest time, people just figured he lived for his job, like any number of soldiers, and then. It’s vexing that I can’t solve the puzzle when there’s so much on file.”

  Zehun shook their head. “I know you like to think that there was some cunning pattern back then we ought to have picked up on, but face it, we make a point of recruiting people who are comfortable getting friendly with others only to stab them in the kidneys. Some of them are even decent, helpful human beings who just want to rescue kittens in distress and the occasional hostage. With Jedao we got unlucky. It’s not like he’s the only Shuos to prove unstable, given the personality traits we select for, even if he happens to be one of the more destructive of the bunch.”

  “Short of dragging Jedao in here and scaring up some ace interrogators,” Mikodez said, “we can’t resolve that question. But the point is that we assess Jedao as a military threat rather than a political one. It’s the curse of being a Shuos, or a Kel, for that matter. All we see is a general in a box, when the general might have other ideas now that he’s free.” He picked up a candied violet and crushed it over the cookie fort. “What I hate about my own logic is that this is exactly what we’re doing right now, whether or not it’s wrong.”

  “How does he know which Shuos to target?” Zehun said. “I don’t trust a number of things Kujen claimed, but I do believe him when he says revenants are blind and deaf when locked up in the black cradle. On the occasions it came up, he seemed far too pleased about it for it not to be true. Anyway, that’s something you have to explain. I’ll accept that a few entrepreneurs might have contacted Jedao on their own, but that wouldn’t account for a full-scale secession.”

  Too bad Mikodez couldn’t use the terrible cookies to bribe some possibilities out of someone else. He liked making use of other people’s brains, to say nothing of other people’s cookies. And why did Zehun think that this many cookies was remotely appropriate for two people anyway? Did they think the cats would develop a taste for them?

  “Mikodez,” Zehun said, “you’re getting distracted.”

  He smiled brightly at Zehun, but he knew they weren’t taken in. “Freedom of choice,” he said. “Jedao never had any choice about his anchors. But recruiting Shuos? The hexarchate is a large place. He just needs to keep trying until he hits on enough people who find his offer attractive, and he’d target people who have reasons not to report the contact to higher authorities. W
hatever we do, corruption never dies. He’s hampered by not starting out with a network of agents, but whenever he talks to a station or a system of any size, he can pump the locals for information. Since he had basic analyst training, he’d know what to look for, and—”

  “And?” Zehun said when he broke off.

  “The succession problem crops up everywhere, doesn’t it?” Mikodez said. “I could come up with alternate paths to the end scenario. Irritatingly, it always winds back to the fact that this entire faction is held together by spit and fraying thread. The moment someone offs me, it’s back to the usual chaos, as you like to remind me. So the issue is that I can’t foster enough faction cohesion to stop people high up the food chain from finding Jedao’s offer attractive. Since you mention that he’s going around as an enforcer, I’m guessing he’d install someone with both ambition and the arrogance to think that they could control him. There’s a lot of that going on—yes, Zehun, I can see what you think of my efforts in that direction.”

  “I didn’t say anything.” Zehun shrugged. “I don’t even disagree with your attempts to give Jedao long-distance therapy. It’s doomed, but it’s not more doomed than everything everyone else has tried already.”

  “He hasn’t been answering my calls anyway,” Mikodez said. “You know, let me amend what I said. Now that I think about it, Jedao doesn’t target people who are keen on power. That’d be too obvious, and they’d end up quarreling down the line. Not that he’d be reluctant to shoot obstacles in the head.”

  Mikodez met Zehun’s pitiless eyes and drew a long breath. “He goes after the idealists. The ones who dream about fixing our government. A few always slip through academy, although the dangerous ones are those who develop the notion during their careers. As a bonus, he finds one who not only thinks that a sufficiently big gun will get rid of all the impediments, but that they can reform him. At that point, all Jedao has to do is play into the fantasy.”