Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

“What?”

“You’re going to believe what you’re going to believe,” Brezan said, a safe, bland statement to launch from. “Will you at least let me tell you why I thought this was a good idea?”

“Yes,” Miuzan said, diverted. “Make it good.”

Nothing he said would be good enough to persuade her. But that wasn’t why he was going to try. All across the hexarchate were people like his older sister: loyal citizens, decent people in their day to day lives, many of whom had benefited even from a system that ran on regular ritualized torture. He’d been one of them once, or liked to think he was. Those were the people he had to reach. He might as well start with the hardest audience of all.

“Do you remember the first time you told me about the Day of Shallow Knives?” Brezan said. It had come around two days ago, high calendar. Naturally, it wasn’t observed anymore among his people.

Brezan remembered that first time distinctly, although it was also accompanied by irrelevancies like his dislike of the feather-patterned wallpaper and the whining of a mosquito that the ecoscrubbers hadn’t been able to get rid of. His youngest father had stopped working on a commissioned painting and hurriedly rinsed his hands in a basin of water, although it didn’t do much for the ink stains further up his arms or daubed on his shirt. Brezan had been playing with a toy voidmoth and pretending it didn’t bother him that one of the wingtips had broken off. He’d had an awareness that the calendar was full of special days, but not why it mattered; had never thought to question it. As a child, why would he have?

Miuzan was frowning at him as though she could already see where he was going to go with this line of thought. “Not really.”

Oh.

She added, “There are a lot of remembrances, Brezan. They all sort of blur together after a while. I show up and I do what the bulletins tell me to.”

Brezan blinked, regrouped. He’d always thought of his sister as taking the remembrances very seriously. Certainly she and his oldest sister, Keryezan, had led him through the required meditations until he was old enough to manage for himself. He’d never questioned her sense of devotion.

“There was a lot of blood,” Brezan said, thinking back to the video broadcast.

The Vidona who’d led their local observance had worn the traditional robes of green lined with bronze, and bronze jewelry in the shape of stingray spines. Her knife, too, had had a bronze hilt, with an edge that winked brightly. Brezan had been fascinated by the deftness with which she used it to slice up her victim. The heretic hadn’t screamed only because his mouth had been sutured shut. This wasn’t the case for all remembrances, something that Brezan had learned rapidly.

Miuzan’s face had that stony expression he knew so well. “They’re heretics , Brezan. Are you trying to argue for some kind of clemency? You know how much trouble they cause. Even if they weren’t all bad in themselves”—she said this as though the thought had just occurred to her—“we can’t allow calendrical rot.”

“Yes,” Brezan said bleakly, “I used to think the same thing.” Or anyway, he’d thought it just enough to reconcile himself to it, which he imagined was the same thing from the luckless heretic’s viewpoint. Then he’d signed on to be a Kel like his oldest father, like Miuzan after that. He’d been both relieved and disappointed when he’d ended up in Personnel rather than as a field officer.

“Well,” Miuzan said, with less condescension than usual, “I suppose you were only trying to do as you saw best in a chaotic situation.” She had never thought well of his ability, a fact she didn’t make any effort to hide. “But that’s not why I called.”

“Really,” Brezan said. “Why, then?” His stomach knotted up. Stop that , he told himself. Given the impressive number of fires he was trying to put out all across the hexarchate, he didn’t need to borrow trouble.

Miuzan leaned forward, eyes brightening, and he knew he was in for it. “General Inesser asked that I contact you.”

That didn’t help the state of his stomach. General Inesser, the Kel’s senior field general. The only general who had been honored by having a cindermoth, one of the hexarchate’s six greatest warmoths, named after her personal emblem. Inesser, known for her courage and cleverness, to say nothing of a lineage that went back into some of the great Andan families. Normally that last fact wouldn’t have been an advantage . Unlike the Andan (because of them, even), the Kel had strong feelings about nepotism, largely negative, although that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. But by the time she reached her current rank, Inesser had developed a reputation for unswerving honor.

Miuzan had landed a position on Inesser’s staff several years ago, quite a feat. It had also made her more insufferable than ever. He didn’t want her to take him seriously because he’d gone revolutionary, but since that was the world they lived in...

“The general has my attention any time she wants it,” Brezan said, quite truthfully. Among other things, he doubted Inesser was contacting him because she wanted to throw her support to the regime he proposed. While he’d never met her, she also had a reputation for old-fashioned Kel conservatism of the kind he’d once aspired to even as it made his teeth ache. If Inesser was speaking to him through his sister, it meant that she was feeling him out for a proposal of her own.

“That’s good to hear,” Miuzan said, although she eyed him as if she suspected sarcasm. For which he couldn’t blame her; their relationship had not been sarcasm-free, these past years. “She may have an offer for you.”

“Do tell.”

“The hexarchate needs a strong hand to hold it together after the broadcast of that heretical calendar,” Miuzan said. Brezan wondered if she realized that she was speaking just a little more loudly, a little more quickly, than usual. He wasn’t used to thinking of his sister as someone who could be swept up by fervor, even fervor in her general’s service. “General Inesser intends to be that person.”

He’d thought as much. Inesser was going to be a formidable rival.

“Don’t answer yet,” Miuzan said rapidly, responding to whatever she saw in his face. “The foreigners, not least the Hafn, don’t care about our internal divisions except as weaknesses they can exploit. The hexarchate needs a united Kel to hold them off and to enforce the calendar so that the stardrives can keep working. General Inesser is the best candidate for the job.”

“You said calendar,” Brezan said, going directly for the part he cared most about. “By which you mean the high calendar, I presume.” The one that he and Cheris had blown up Kel Command to overthrow.

“Of course,” Miuzan said, puzzled. “How could the Kel function otherwise?”

How indeed. Brezan searched for a response. The Kel military depended on formation instinct to yank around its soldiers. As a crashhawk, Brezan’s own formation instinct was defective, something he’d been in denial of for the longest time. After all, you didn’t need formation instinct to obey orders. It just made doing so easier, if by “easier” you meant “unavoidable.”

Cheris’s new calendar, which she’d broadcast throughout the hexarchate for the use of anyone who could make it stick, changed exotic effects so that they only affected those who wanted to be affected. It wasn’t hard to see how this would jeopardize Kel hierarchy. The Kel hadn’t always used formation instinct, but once instituted, they’d grown dependent on it.

“There’s something else you should be aware of,” Miuzan said.