“One of the tetrarchs owed me a favor.”
“That must have been some favor.”
“It was.”
“Do they really practice human sacrifice there? Or is this,” she gestured to the severed head the figure held, “just metaphorical?”
“It’s complicated.”
She made a breathy hmf. Seivarden knelt silent and motionless.
“The medic said you needed me.”
Five-year-old Anaander Mianaai laughed. “And so I do.”
“In that case,” I said, “go fuck yourself.” Which she could actually, literally do, in fact.
“Half your anger is for yourself.” She ate the last bite of pastry and brushed her small gloved hands together, showering fragments of sugar icing onto the grass. “But it’s such a monumentally enormous anger even half is quite devastating.”
“I could be ten times as angry,” I said, “and it would mean nothing if I was unarmed.”
Her mouth quirked in a half-smile. “I haven’t gotten to where I am by laying aside useful instruments.”
“You destroy the instruments of your enemy wherever you find them,” I said. “You told me so yourself. And I won’t be useful to you.”
“I’m the right one,” the child said. “I’ll sing for you if you like, though I don’t know if it will work with this voice. This is going to spread to other systems. It already has, I just haven’t seen the reply signal from the neighboring provincial palaces yet. I need you on my side.”
I tried sitting up straighter. It seemed to work. “It doesn’t matter whose side anyone is on. It doesn’t matter who wins, because either way it will be you and nothing will really change.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” said five-year-old Anaander Mianaai. “And maybe in some ways you’re right. A lot of things haven’t really changed, a lot of things might stay the same no matter which side of me is uppermost. But tell me, do you think it made no difference to Lieutenant Awn, which of me was on board that day?”
I had no answer for that.
“If you’ve got power and money and connections, some differences won’t change anything. Or if you’re resigned to dying in the near future, which I gather is your position at the moment. It’s the people without the money and the power, who desperately want to live, for those people small things aren’t small at all. What you call no difference is life and death to them.”
“And you care so much for the insignificant and the powerless,” I said. “I’m sure you stay awake nights worrying for them. Your heart must bleed.”
“Don’t come all self-righteous on me,” said Anaander Mianaai. “You served me without a qualm for two thousand years. You know what that means, better than almost anyone else here. And I do care. But in, perhaps, a more abstract way than you do, at least these days. Still, this is all my own doing. And you’re right, I can’t exactly rid myself of myself. I could use a reminder of that. It might be best if I had a conscience that was armed and independent.”
“Last time someone tried to be your conscience,” I said, thinking of Ime, and that Mercy of Sarrse soldier who had refused her orders, “she ended up dead.”
“You mean at Ime. You mean the soldier Mercy of Sarrse One Amaat One,” the child said, grinning as if at a particularly delightful memory. “I have never been dressed down like that in my long life. She cursed me at the end of it, and tossed her poison back like it was arrack.”
Poison. “You didn’t shoot her?”
“Gunshot wounds make such a mess,” the child said, still grinning. “Which reminds me.” She reached beside herself and brushed the air with one small gloved hand. Suddenly a box sat there, light-suckingly black. “Citizen Seivarden.”
Seivarden leaned forward, took the box.
“I’m well aware,” said Anaander Mianaai, “that you weren’t speaking metaphorically when you said your anger had to be armed to mean anything. I wasn’t either, when I said my conscience should be. Just so you know I mean what I’m saying. And just so you don’t do anything foolish out of ignorance, I need to explain just what it is you have.”
“You know how it works?” But she’d had the others for a thousand years. More than enough time to figure it out.
“To a point.” Anaander Mianaai smiled wryly. “A bullet, as I’m sure you already know, does what it does because the gun it’s fired from gives it a large amount of kinetic energy. The bullet hits something, and that energy has to go somewhere.” I didn’t answer, didn’t even raise an eyebrow. “The bullets in the Garseddai gun,” five-year-old Mianaai continued, “aren’t really bullets. They’re… devices. Dormant, until the gun arms them. At that point, it doesn’t matter how much kinetic energy they have leaving the gun. From the moment of impact, it makes however much energy it needs to cut through the target for precisely 1.11 meters. And then it stops.”
“Stops.” I was aghast.