Юн Ли - Raven Stratagem

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.”

“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?”