Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Disposal of bodies was going to be a problem. Cheris had authorized Ragath to conscript civilians in the secured wards. This caused chaos, recriminations, and more riots, but she had to try something.

  A Shuos reported in: fighting among the heretics in the Dragonfly Ward. Cheris felt as though she were watching the gears in a machine settle into place, or dissolve. She couldn’t tell which.

  10.6 hours later, Doctrine reported that calendrical values were shifting toward approved norms.

  Cheris slept long and deeply after that. When she woke, she dressed and paused while pulling her gloves back on. “The propaganda drops,” she said. “They weren’t for the heretics, were they.”

  “I wanted you to know what we were annihilating,” Jedao said.

  “Why is it important?”

  “Are you saying it’s not?”

  “No,” Cheris said. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. But we have our orders.”

  “I never forgot that,” Jedao said.

  When the time came, Cheris went to high table. She paused for a moment at the threshold, looking not at the people but at the banners with their ashhawks Brightly Burning, the calligraphy scrolls, the tapestries. For a dizzying second she thought she was back in the boxmoth Burning Leaf, with her old unit, with Verab and Ankat and soldiers younger than she was by a count of battles that, however small, felt like forever drum-tides. Then she blinked and she was back on the cindermoth again, immeasurably older.

  Commander Hazan was overseeing the command center, but Cheris saw Rahal Gara and Shuos Ko and other familiar faces. Shuos Liis smiled at her, a slow, sweet curve. Cheris caught herself admiring Liis’s velvet-dark eyes and lush mouth, then flinched, suddenly worried.

  Cheris took her sip from the communal cup, barely tasting the wine, and passed it down. The ritual brought her comfort. She would have given much to have Kel Nerevor by her side, bright as fire, but no one had any word of her.

  She left high table as early as she could get away with, returning to her quarters so she could sit on the bed. There were no servitors: the last two she had talked to had suggested that she should sleep instead of staying up with her paperwork. If she hadn’t known better, she would have suspected them of conspiring with Jedao.

  “Tell me something about yourself,” Jedao said out of nowhere. “What it was like in the City of Ravens Feasting. That luckstone means something to you, but you haven’t looked at it since I – since I ruined it for you.” He didn’t say what they both knew: she would be free of him soon.

  “I was determined to leave,” Cheris said, wishing he had picked another topic. But she was starting to question her motivations for fleeing toward the Kel. “My mother’s people are old-fashioned, barely within approved norms. I was natural-born, not crèche-born –”

  “That’s something we have in common,” Jedao said wryly. “Crèches were still coming into use when my mother had me. I really can say I was born on a farm. I remember the day I first woke up and realized that I was bigger than the geese.”

  Cheris tried to picture this. How big were geese anyway? “If my instructors had ever mentioned things like this, I would have paid more attention to history.”

  Jedao laughed. “But you were saying about your people –?”

  “Most of them are concentrated in a ghetto in the city, although we lived by a park. I didn’t speak the high language until I entered school, and then I couldn’t get rid of the accent until Kel Academy.”

  “I’ve never heard you speak your native language.”

  She felt a rush of embarrassment. “I don’t speak it well anymore.” Was she embarrassed because of her ineptitude, or because she spoke it at all?

  “I barely speak Shparoi anymore myself,” Jedao said, “although I have a Shparoi name.”

  “Does it mean something?”

  “Does yours?”

  An exchange. Fair enough. “In the traditions of my mother’s people,” Cheris said, “I would have been named after – after a saint’s day in the old calendar. A heretical calendar. So instead my parents named me after the high calendar day I was born on. ‘Cheris’ is the word for ‘twenty-three.’ It’s a vigesimal system. That’s all it is.”

  “My mother, who was eccentric by our culture’s standards, had three children by three different fathers,” Jedao said. “You’re not supposed to name children after living relatives, it’s disrespectful, but Koiresh Shkan was my father’s name. He was a musician, and I only met him a few times. My other name is derived from a root that means something like ‘honesty.’ You can bet that made my life hell when it got out at Shuos Academy.”

  “So your mother was really a farmer?”

  “Agricultural researcher. I have no complaints about my childhood, and anyway the Nirai scraped it over for clues already.”

  She had forgotten that he was a madman. It was going to be a relief when Kel Command unstapled her from Jedao so she knew what things to believe again. At this rate he was going to ruin her for the Kel.

  It occurred to her that Kel Command had done that already.

  CHERIS COMPOSED A report to Kel Command. Just the notes made her wince. Vidona Diaiya’s fungal canister. The pervasive use of heretical formations. The threshold winnowers. She made Jedao look over it four times before she sent it along with her request for Andan or Vidona backup, both for preference. The Kel weren’t suited to conversions, and there weren’t enough Shuos to go around.

  “Oh, that reminds me – you should go into detail on all the computations you did for the heretical formations and the calendrical spike,” Jedao said just as she was about to send it. “Kel Command might not care about the derivations, but the Rahal like that sort of thing. Put them in a good mood for whatever renormalization they need to do on the Fortress. Plus, you can impress them with your mathematical skills.”

  “Is this some new trick?” Cheris said. All she wanted was for the mission to be over.

  “What, by throwing math I don’t understand at people I’ve never met?”

  It was true that the Rahal might find some of that information helpful, at that. Besides, she didn’t want to get into an argument about something so trivial.

  The day after that conversation, Znev Stoghan’s body turned up in neat pieces in the middle of the amputation guns’ original kill zone. A gene scanner confirmed his identity. No one claimed responsibility. Cheris declined to inquire into the matter.

  No one ever found Commander Kel Nerevor. But Cheris kept hoping.

  Over the next several days, while Cheris struggled to keep up with the administration of the Fortress, calendrical values continued to normalize at a maddeningly slow rate. Rahal Gara and the other Doctrine officers spent a lot of time muttering to each other.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” Cheris said to Jedao.

  “I don’t get tired, so there’s no need to relax,” he said. “But I wonder what it is they’re so worried about.”

  She didn’t think anything of it until two days later, when Communications and Scan spoke at once.

  “Relief swarm, four bannermoths escorting twelve boxmoths –”

  “We’re being hailed –”

  Cheris’s heart leapt. Kel Command hadn’t forgotten them after all. She was going to be done with the whole wretched situation. “Accept communications,” she said.

  “Cheris.” Jedao was trying to get her attention. “Rahal Gara sent a signal you didn’t authorize. I don’t know what she said, and I’ve never seen that override before.”

  But she was too giddy with relief to hear him. She didn’t recognize the man whose face appeared on her display, with his dark, steady eyes, but given the number of bannermoth commanders in the hexarchate, there was no reason she should. “This is Commander Kel Huan of the Coiled Stone,” the man said. “I assume I’m addressing Brevet General Kel Cheris and General Shuos Jedao.”

  “Fuck,” Jedao said, which wasn’t the response Cheris had expected from him. “Look at the pulse
in his neck, Cheris. Something’s wrong.”

  “This is Brevet General Kel Cheris,” Cheris said over Jedao’s voice. But she was starting to worry. “I assume you’re here to assist with the conversion of the Fortress.”

  “We’ll take care of you, sir,” Huan said. “Just hang tight. – One moment, I’ve got a ridiculous emergency in Engineering to attend to. I need to yell at my Nirai again. My apologies.” He signed off.

  “He’s lying,” Jedao said. “Short-term you’ll save more people firing on Huan –”

  Cheris remembered what she had learned from Jedao’s sacrifice of Nerevor. No shouting. “I’m not firing on other Kel,” she said coldly. Let alone the relief swarm, of all people. “How are four bannermoths going to take down two cindermoths, to say nothing of the rest of our swarm?”

  Scan again. “Formation break! Sincere Greeting has left the secondary pivot.”

  Her heart froze. “Get me Commander Paizan. I need an explanation.”

  “Waste of time,” Jedao said. Now he sounded calm. “He’ll have been warned. You’re fucked. If you want to preserve your swarm, you have to open fire. But then you’ll be outcast forever, to say nothing of the odds. If you let them bomb you, your swarm will die, but you might live.”

  Cheris glanced at the display: the relief swarm was closing rapidly, and was well within erasure cannon range. Her hand had reached the chrysalis gun at her hip when Jedao spoke again. “I don’t advise that,” he said. “I’m your only hope of survival if they hit you with exotics. One survivor is better than none.” His voice cracked suddenly. “I fucked up. Four hundred years trying to put it right and it all goes up in smoke because they decide massive overkill is the best way to execute me. Six to one it’s not Mikodez after all, it’s Kujen. He miscalculated anchoring me to you.”

  Mikodez was the Shuos hexarch, but who on earth was Kujen? And why was she a mistake?

  Slight pause. “I wasn’t crazy when I killed everyone at Hellspin Fortress,” Jedao said rapidly. “Nirai-zho has the answers, Nirai Kujen, the black cradle’s master, but don’t ever, ever trust him.”

  Panic frothed up in her. How was a random faraway Nirai technician germane to the situation? Jedao had picked one hell of a time to make himself a distraction. This was it, he had gone mad, he was going to betray her –

  “Sir!” Scan sounded frantic. “Something’s wrong with the Coiled Stone’s engine harmonics. That’s – I think that’s a bomb.”

  The only thing worse than Jedao being crazy was Jedao not being crazy. “All units into formation Rising Tiger,” Cheris said, but she knew it was too late. “Open fire on Coiled Stone.”

  “One last throw of the dice,” Jedao was saying. “I taught you what I could. Don’t make my mistakes. Goodbye, General. And – and thank you for the light.”

  Moments later, the world came apart in a roar of needles and bright, hard angles, and there was no more room in her head for questions, or words, or any scrap of feeling.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHERIS WOKE TRANSFIXED by splinters of a ghost’s carrion glass: invisible and insubstantial, but they hurt as though they pierced each nerve. Carrion bomb, she thought, dredging the memory out of the long-ago briefing. As an exotic weapon, it would have killed Jedao, leaving her free of him.

  She remembered the protocol she had read so long ago through a haze of pain: In an emergency, if the general withholds necessary information, the carrion glass remnants can be ingested by a volunteer. Although this procedure is experimental, this will give the general a body so he can be tortured.

  The cindermoth was a chrysalis of hard light and heavy fractures and empty spaces where people had been. Every time she moved – to breathe, to blink, to scrabble for purchase on the bruising floor – she felt splinters go into her brain and pin her to Jedao’s memories.

  She had a choice. She could take the splinters out and leave them behind. Refuse to look at them.

  Or she could scavenge what she could from them. Try to understand Jedao.

  The New Anchor Orientation Packet seemed to be from a time long ago and far away, but she remembered Jedao’s warning, when she had first read it, that eating the splinters would drive her mad. Having him around to talk to her all the time had been bad enough. Having him inside her head would undoubtedly be worse.

  On the other hand, her world had already gone mad. Kel Command had just turned on her. Her situation was dire. Jedao had clearly known more about what was going on. She needed the information he hadn’t had the time, or the inclination, to give her. What game had he been playing with Kel Command, all those centuries? And what had he known about this Nirai Kujen, whom he had been so desperate to warn her about even as he was about to die?

  She had always liked ravens. She would peck what answers she could out of the carrion glass and hope that she could find a workable course of action in them. Her turn to gamble, with her life as the stake.

  Gravity was reasserting itself. She had to be careful how she moved. For a while she concentrated on breathing. She had good lungs, but her breaths felt too shallow no matter what she did. It was hard not to panic. If she stood up too suddenly, all her bones would dissolve and she would spill onto the floor like ink out of a jar, a Cheris-shaped blot.

  She caught sight of her shadow, and the absence of Jedao’s nine eyes hurt her, but there was no time to grieve.

  She swallowed a splinter. It punctured her heart on the way down.

  CHERIS FELL INTO a memory of blurred voices and laughter and the mingled smells of wine, perfume, flowers, a door half-open: a party. A woman dark-haired and fragrant and sweet of face, a long red coat draped over her shoulders, was pressing herself against Cheris. The woman’s mouth was beautiful, but never kind. She was wearing gloves so dark a red they were almost black, in terrible taste, but no one could tell her no. It was Heptarch Shuos Khiaz, and she had backed Cheris into a shadowed room.

  Khiaz’s hands were in her hair, drawing her head down for a kiss. One hand drifted across Cheris’s chest, unerringly finding all the scars beneath the black-and-gold uniform, then lingering over the brigadier general insignia. She was telling Cheris to take off her gloves. The gloves were black and fingerless. Cheris knew she couldn’t afford to sleep with a heptarch, but she couldn’t afford to say no, either.

  “Congratulations on the promotion,” Khiaz said. “I always knew you’d go far.”

  “Shuos-zho,” Cheris said, very formally. She was remembering her origins as Shuos infantry, a decade ago, and why she had transferred out of Khiaz’s office and into the Kel army at the earliest opportunity. “Pardon me, can I get you anything to –”

  Khiaz shrugged off her coat in a single languorous motion. Underneath it she was wearing a Kel uniform. It was perfectly tailored to her.

  For that matter, the gloves weren’t dark, dark red. They were black. Kel gloves, taboo for a Shuos to wear.

  Cheris was aware of the suddenness of her erection, and of the fact that in one moment she had been comprehensively outflanked.

  She almost said no, even if the heptarch could pull her from Kel service for defying an order. Destroy the career she had worked so hard for, the plan she had nurtured for so long. But as a Shuos, she was the heptarch’s property. There was no one she could appeal to.

  The Shuos didn’t believe in sex without games and obligations. Khiaz’s hands moved down. For one red-black moment Cheris considered killing her just to get away. Khiaz had very clever hands. Cheris’s heartbeat sped up despite her best efforts not to react. Khiaz liked to ask embarrassing questions to punctuate her caresses.

  Then Khiaz reached up to unbutton her uniform’s jacket. Before she could stop herself, Cheris caught her wrist. Begged her to leave it on.

  And I call myself a tactician, Cheris thought savagely. Of all the subterranean desires to be caught out in. Her breath hitched. She could wring an advantage out of this if she retained some shred of control. She started answering Khiaz’s questions, maneuv
ering the conversation in a better direction. As long as Khiaz thought Cheris was overcome by desire rather than nurturing a plot against the heptarchate, she was safe.

  Khiaz murmured something about fear and courage and the zigzag paths people take between the two. “What are you so afraid of?” she asked, mocking. “Do you think I’ll hurt you?” She knelt, still in the uniform, and took Cheris in her mouth, velvet-warm.

  Voice breaking like a boy’s, Cheris gasped out a terror of death. Banal, but believable. Khiaz’s eyes were momentarily bright with triumph beneath the long lashes.

  Years later, Khiaz would remember, as Cheris had intended her to; and in the aftermath of Hellspin Fortress, she would consign Cheris to the black cradle’s terrible undeath.

  Khiaz wasn’t done. Cheris hadn’t expected her to be satisfied that easily, so this came as no surprise. Over and over as it happened, Cheris thought, I’m not here. I’m not here. But of course she was. After a certain point she gave up trying to mislead Khiaz with clever ripostes. She had no words anymore, only the miserable awareness that she couldn’t make her heart beat more slowly.

  Afterward, Cheris closed the door, which Khiaz had left partway open. Dressed and put her gloves back on. Opened the door and walked to the nearest bathroom, looking neither left nor right, past the people who knew what she had just done. She locked herself in and turned on the water. Listened to the water running.

  She peeled back one glove and stared at the veins, and the scar across the base of her palm.

  For a long moment she hesitated. Then she took out her Patterner 52 and laid it next to the sink. Rested her hand on it. She was under no illusions that it would be painless. She had experienced too much of battle for that, and anyway, a little pain was a small enough price to pay. At least it would be quick.