Raven Stratagem
Page 36
The birdform flashed the word at her once, twice. In the conversation that followed, it coaxed out of her that the high general had told her to rest, but she didn’t care how much her bones felt cobwebbed around with ice, her heart with frost, she wanted a diversion. Maybe some of the gadgets she had been fixing up. The way her hands shook, she’d probably mangle them. But at this point, did it matter?
I could bring you your tools and components, the birdform said.
I am to rest, Khiruev said mechanically. She looked down at her hands. They were shaking again. Some hidden reserve of obstinacy stirred up in her. Would it be too much trouble?
The high general wanted her to rest.
The high general didn’t have to know.
The birdform whistled its assent, and left.
Not long afterward, a small procession of servitors arrived bearing Khiruev’s tools, a judicious selection of broken mechanisms, and modular furniture to put everything on. She had no idea how they’d gotten all that past the medics and decided she wasn’t going to ask. Thank you, she said, although she was certain she was using the wrong form; the grid only knew about a stripped-down, blunt dialect of the language.
They blinked amiable acknowledgments and filed out, except the birdform. It seemed to find her entertaining. Well, if nothing else, she could ask it for pointers.
Khiruev’s eyes fell on the rose gold watch that Jedao—Cheris—had admired once upon a time. It took her several tries to pick it up. “This one,” she said softly. She knew what she wanted to do, frivolous though it was.
She needed the servitor’s help. At least the problem was the mainspring, which she knew what to do about. There must have been some reason she’d left it undone for so long, if only she could remember what it had been. No matter. She could fix it now.
By the time they had finished with the mainspring, her hands still had a tremor, but Khiruev realized with a start that the pervasive cold had slid away, and she could think more clearly.
CHERIS HAD A dreadful headache after she and Brezan went over the latest reports of riots, rebellions, scorched cities and cindered swarms. Devenay Ragath had raised an army on some planet. She hoped he wrote her a letter on how to do it because she had the feeling this was going to become vitally important information. For all Jedao’s military virtues, he had always been handed his armies; he’d never had to create one from scratch.
She planned to crawl into bed and stare into the darkness, but one of the servitors, a birdform, intercepted her on the way to her quarters. It offered her painkillers, adding that she ought to have taken them earlier.
“You’re right,” Cheris said, sighing. “I get these moments—revenants can’t get headaches. I forget sometimes I’m alive.”
You should see the general, it said, meaning Khiruev. She knew it had taken a liking to Khiruev.
Cheris had visited Khiruev once after she was moved to the medical center. Khiruev had been dozing. Cheris hadn’t wanted to wake her, not when she looked like she was disintegrating into shadows. Now—“Is she awake?”
Yes.
“I’ll come with you,” Cheris said. Companionably, they made their way to the medical center, which was marked by paintings of ashhawks entwined with snakes.
The Kel medics deferred to Cheris only as much as they had to. One of them warned her not to tire Khiruev. She promised to be careful. How bad had Khiruev’s condition become? Brezan had said that he had tried a few times to get Khiruev to understand that she didn’t need Vrae Tala anymore, but Khiruev had not responded. Of course, Brezan was the exact worst person to be making that argument.
Cheris wasn’t prepared for the tables with their screwdrivers and different sizes of hammers and strange metal coils and small bottles of shellac. And she wasn’t prepared for Khiruev sitting up, her face drawn but her eyes clear as morning. “General—?” Cheris said.
“I don’t know what you want me to call you,” Khiruev said. Her voice was scratchy.
“I’m Ajewen Cheris, and I’m what’s left of Jedao,” she said, “and from the beginning I lied to you.”
Khiruev laughed a little. “Then it wasn’t entirely a lie, was it?” She turned something around in her hand. Cheris couldn’t tell what it was when Khiruev still had her fingers around it.
“Not entirely,” Cheris said. “I remember being Jedao. That’s four hundred years of him. It was hard not to drown in him sometimes. But unlike you, I had a choice. Do you regret ending up here?”
“It’s still hard to think sometimes,” Khiruev said. “But I’d do it again. All of it.” She opened her hand, showing Cheris the watch, an antique, severe in its design. “For you,” she said. “I’m not done yet. I have some more restoration to do.”
“That thing must be a couple of centuries old,” Cheris said. “Don’t you want to save it for yourself?”
“You’re a couple of centuries old yourself,” Khiruev said. She was smiling. It made her eyes young. She set the watch down on the nearest table. “Three gameboards all along, isn’t that right? Jedao fighting the Hafn. But that wasn’t the real fight. The hexarchs thought Jedao was using the Hafn to start a revolt against them, a war of public opinion. And that wasn’t the real fight either. The real fight was the calendrical spike that must have been your intention from the beginning. So that’s it. It worked. The hexarchs are dead—well, except Shuos—and you’ve won the war.”
Cheris thought of the name she would have been given if the Mwennin religious calendar hadn’t been suppressed by the hexarchate. Khiruev’s father crumpled into swans. Her parents’ execution and her people’s genocide, the riots, numbers written in pale ash. Servitors silenced for hundreds of years. Being ordered to fire on the Lanterners’ children. Her swarm massacred with a carrion bomb at the Fortress of Scattered Needles.
That was only a fraction of the atrocities the hexarchate had perpetrated in her lives. And people didn’t stop being people because they had choices.
She had found a gun with which to fight. It remained to be seen whether anyone had the will to use it well.
“No,” Cheris said. “The war never ends.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THANK YOU TO the following people: my editor, Jonathan Oliver, and the wonderful folks at Solaris Books; my agent, Jennifer Jackson; and my agent’s assistant, Michael Curry.
I am grateful to my beta readers: Joseph Charles Betzwieser, Cyphomandra, Daedala, Isis, Yune Kyung Lee, Nancy Sauer, Sonya Taaffe, and Storme Winfield. Additional thanks to the following people from Fountain Pen Network for fielding my firearms questions: ac12, injesticate, openionated, ragpaper1817, and TheRealScubaSteve. All errors and narrative license taken are, of course, my own.
This one is for Nancy Sauer: yours in calendrical heresy, always.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
YOON HA LEE is a writer and mathematician from Houston, Texas, whose work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed and The Magazine Of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He has published over forty short stories, and his critically acclaimed collection Conservation of Shadows was released in 2013. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat.
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