“I have a useful number of shadowmoths moving into position,” Mikodez said. “Trust me, their commanders have as little interest in getting into a firefight with Jedao as I do.”
Psa grunted. “I’ve seen you at the firing range, Mikodez. I’d give you even odds.”
“Very flattering,” Mikodez said demurely, “but while Jedao has demonstrated that his solution to a man with a gun is shoot it out of his hand—the kind of idiot stunt I tell my operatives to avoid attempting—my solution is not to be in the same damn room to begin with.”
Andan Shandal Yeng was smiling. “I’m glad we have a course of action, regardless.”
Mikodez kept his expression noncommittal. He’d caught Kel Tsoro’s eyes flickering several times. She and Shandal Yeng had definitely been holding that side conversation. Both used kinesics and protocol programs to smooth things like that, but Mikodez had bypassed them ages ago. Both hexarchs would have been better served lying the old-fashioned way, not that he was about to inform them.
“One last thing,” Iruja said. “Faian, how’s progress on the immortality process?”
“Kujen’s notes are a mess,” Faian said. She meant the ones she had stolen from him, on the grounds that she would rather not accidentally recreate something as unappetizing as the black cradle that had once caged Jedao. It wasn’t so much that Kujen was disorganized—quite the contrary. The man was meticulous about everything. The reports that he sent to the other hexarchs, before he’d vanished, were flawlessly organized and proofread, models of clarity. But his private notes, on projects that he didn’t mean to share with anyone else, took a great deal of decoding because he recorded them in a personal shorthand and his genius made it difficult (so Faian had explained once) to follow the odd jagged leaps of intuition.
Faian went over some of the recent technical difficulties, addressing herself mostly to Iruja, who had the background necessary to follow her. Mikodez simply recorded the details to run by his staff later. Watching everyone else tie themselves up in knots about the prospect of living forever had its entertainment value, not that he meant to let on.
The conference wrapped up after that. Soon Mikodez was left alone with his green onion. It was clear that the other hexarchs were going to make hash of their attempts to control Jedao. Mikodez supposed that no one had been thinking clearly after Hellspin Fortress, but the long-dead Kel and Shuos heptarchs had a lot to answer for. In what universe was keeping an insane undead general as an attack dog a good idea?
On the other hand, wrangling hexarchs had grown tedious. The fact that Jedao had slipped his leash gave Mikodez a new challenge. While he went over the transcript of Tsoro and Shandal Yeng’s conversation, he called up a set of files he had poached from Nirai Kujen, back when. He’d be reviewing those next.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BREZAN CAME AWAKE in snatches, like a puzzle assembling itself out of a junk heap. “What?” he said, then grimaced at the furry, sour, metallic taste of his mouth. Gradually, he took in his surroundings. Walls of warm gray, with a single abstract painting where he could see it without lifting his head. After that, it occurred to him that he was lying on a pallet, hooked up to a standard medical unit. Spider restraints held him fast.
All right, this was an improvement over the fucking sleeper unit that Jedao had had him stuffed in. “Hello?” Brezan called out. It emerged as a croak. He tried again, without much better results.
Around this time he discovered that someone had shut down his augment, which either implied a very good technician or someone with the overrides or both. Bad news, either way. He assumed there was a local grid, but even if it wouldn’t talk to him, it would have been nice to be able to access his internal chronometer and basic diagnostics. How long had he been out of it? And where the hell was he, anyway?
Brezan waited some more. Infuriatingly, despite the lingering pain when he breathed, he developed an itch behind his left knee. Which he couldn’t reach to scratch.
Just when he decided to have a go at the spider restraints anyway, a very pale, smiling woman with an elaborate shimmering tattoo over her right cheek came in. She wore a purple half-jacket over lavender clothes liberally decorated with aquamarine tassels, and silver jewelry chimed from her throat and wrists. The fluttering slits at her neck suggested that she had gills. The only useful hint as to her identity was the clashing gold pin over her left breast: the Shuos eye.
“Hello there,” she said. “Give me a moment and I’ll get you out of those.”
“I need to talk to Kel Command, please,” Brezan said, remembering his mission.
“We need to process you first.”
There it was: the hint of Shuos obdurateness despite the flowery getup. Still, as a staff officer, Brezan had his share of experience bowing to bureaucratic prerequisites. Shuos procedures tended to be well enforced. Best to go along.
After she’d unhooked him from the medical unit, a process that hurt more than he wanted to admit, the woman said, “Glass of water?”
“Water closet is more like it.”
“One moment. I still have to unspider you.” She didn’t do anything visible, but he bet she had a working augment. “You can move now.” She pointed to a door. “Don’t take too long if you can help it?” Her smile again, winsome. “Someone wants to talk to you.”
Both her friendly demeanor and her vagueness about ‘someone’ made Brezan suspicious. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much he could do but comply. He braced himself and sat up. Pain, yes, but not the slicing pain associated with spider restraints, which he’d experienced years ago as a cadet, in a demonstration.
“Thank you,” Brezan said, and managed not to stumble on the way.
After he emerged, appalled anew at the shakiness of his legs, the woman held out a glass of water. Wordlessly, he accepted it and drained it in several desperate gulps. It didn’t taste of anything in particular, but if they’d wanted to drug or poison him, they could have done so at any point before he regained consciousness.
“All right,” the woman said when he had finished. “Just set that down, a servitor will clear it later. Ready?”
Brezan nodded.
“Even if you are a hawk,” she said, so amiably that he couldn’t take offense, “you’re awfully incurious.”
He smiled unconvincingly back at her.
This didn’t seem to bother her. “Oh well,” she said with a cheer that he was certain was unaffected, “none of my business. Shall we?”
If she didn’t mind his reticence, all the better. They took a lift to another level. Brezan still couldn’t tell whether they were on a moth or a moon or a station, or something else entirely. They didn’t pass any obvious viewports, and the doors were singularly inexpressive. Nine levels down, a walk through corridors barren of other human presence, and finally, an office with its door standing open to receive them.
“Brought the hawk,” the woman said loudly. Brezan almost jumped. “You busy in there, Sfenni, or shall I send him up, or what?”
“Please tell me he’s cleaned up,” a man’s rumbling voice said from within.
“Medical took care of that. I don’t think he’ll expire messily during the interview.”
“Excellent,” Sfenni said in a tone implying the opposite.
“In you go,” the woman said, and pivoted on her heel without waiting for Brezan to walk into Sfenni’s office. Granted, there had to be a hidden security team scrutinizing his every move, but Brezan couldn’t help feeling offended at being counted so small a threat, even if the Kel and Shuos were nominally allies.