Юн Ли - Raven Stratagem

Brezan started to figure out that Tseya wasn’t getting mad at him, she was getting mad at Shuos Mikodez. In all fairness, Mikodez was the one who’d offed Andan Shandal Yeng, but Brezan didn’t feel good about himself for escaping blame. He muttered an oath, then entered the cell and started to undo her restraints. “Before you get ideas,” he said, “I want your parole. We’ll let you off somewhere safe, but even if enthrallment doesn’t work anymore—”

“Was that what the calendar reset did?”

“Not exactly.” He explained it as succinctly as he could.

“You know,” Tseya said afterward, rubbing her wrists, “you should have asked for my parole before you came in here.”

Brezan shrugged. “Everyone’s a critic. Do I have it?”

“Why are you doing this?”

He didn’t touch her, didn’t catch her hands in his, only looked at her soberly. “Because you shouldn’t have to grieve for your mother in here.”

Tseya’s mouth curved downward. “You have my parole. You’ve fucked up really badly, you know, and there’s going to be an accounting, but I won’t be the one to take it out of your hide.”

“Come with me,” he said, because he didn’t know what to say to any of that. “I’ll find you a place to have some privacy.”

“Thank you,” she said. It didn’t make things right between them, but he hadn’t hoped for that anyway.

NEITHER PRINCIPLE NOR loyalty nor memory prompted Khiruev to cast off formation instinct. Rather, it was the fact that she was mewed up in her own room in Medical and they seemed to think she should do nothing more strenuous than watch dramas or, alternately, stare at the walls. Khiruev had come to the opinion that at least the walls had better dialogue.

The birdform servitor who had taken a liking to her—she was developing a rudimentary ability to tell servitors apart—came to visit her. Khiruev greeted it with stumbling taps in Simplified Machine Universal. She didn’t have much vocabulary yet, as the grid’s tutorials were atrocious, but the only way forward was practice.

The birdform lit up in a dazzlement of pink and gold lights. Then it said, very slowly, Are you well? Just to be sure, it repeated itself in the Kel drum code.

“How do you say ‘bored’?” Khiruev asked. The tutorials mostly assumed you wanted to know terms like ‘toxic fungus’ and ‘casualty.’

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.”