Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

Jedao wasn’t looking directly at Khiruev when he said, “General, how do you feel about children?”

Any question of Jedao’s was bound to have teeth hidden in it, but this one baffled Khiruev. “I haven’t got any, if that’s what you mean,” she said, setting the cards down and squaring them neatly. Surely Jedao could have looked that up?

“Let me rephrase that,” Jedao said. “You don’t have any children in the Tieneved—excuse me, in the legal, high-language sense. But did you ever become a mother?”

It took Khiruev a while to work out what Jedao was getting at. Jedao was Shparoi, from a culture that no longer existed in the hexarchate. Khiruev was accustomed to people entering marriage contracts for mutually agreeable periods of time to form a shared household or, if children would be involved, a lineage. Said contracts laid out whether those children would be natural-born or crèche-born. (Outdated terminology: most people were crèche-born, and had been for some time. The language had not caught up to contemporary practice.)

Jedao was asking about being a non-custodial parent, a paradox in the high language. Children might be adopted, or might be formed from some combination of genetic material from the household’s parents, or from a donor or donors if that was desirable. But the marriage contract would spell out clearly who had birth-custody of the children, and only that person or persons were the parents. Apparently, Jedao was conflating being a genetic contributor and being a parent, even if the donor was not part of the contracted household.

“Sir,” Khiruev said, wishing she hadn’t been put in the position of deciphering Jedao’s real question, “did you have genetic spawn?” Horrible circumlocution. The high language term she’d used referred to animals. It was offensive to use it to refer to humans. But in the absence of an adequate word, she had to get the idea across somehow. Khiruev did speak two low languages, but both came from the same language family as the high language and suffered the same deficiency of lexicon.

To her relief, Jedao snorted. “No, that wouldn’t have happened,” he said. “I saw to that medically and I didn’t sleep with many womanforms to begin with. But I’ve always wondered if other”—he used a word Khiruev didn’t recognize, sibilants and an oddly pinched vowel. Shparoi, presumably. “If I had other siblings. Ones that survived.”

Jedao’s hand dangled over the arm of the chair. He gazed at a world folded up into myth and mystery and footnotes no one read anymore but historians with high security clearances. “Once in a while, when Kel Command took me out of my pickle jar, I’d ask one of my anchors and they’d know about my mother, my sister, my brother and his family.” Assassinated; vanished; murder-suicide on Hellspin’s anniversary. “But no one had heard anything about any other siblings.

“I had a father, in the Shparoi sense,” Jedao resumed after a long pause, “but not in the hexarchate one. He died before Hellspin, flitter accident. We’d met only twice years before that. He was a violist, very handsome. My mother was forever complaining that she’d gone to the trouble of picking a particularly nice one and I didn’t have the decency to inherit either his musicality or his looks.” The note of affection when Jedao mentioned his mother sounded disquietingly genuine. “Anyway, I never asked him if he’d sired others, in arrangements like the one he’d had with my mother. I didn’t investigate, either. It would have been extremely improper. Now he’s over four centuries dead and I’ll never know if anyone in my lineage survived.”

“Would you feel better if you did?” Khiruev asked.

“I doubt it, but I wonder all the same.”

“I was never tempted to contract for children,” Khiruev said. “I don’t feel strongly about them one way or another. They’re loud and messy”—she’d never forget the expression on Mother Ekesra’s face that time she’d shorted out one of her pastry machines—”but if they weren’t like that there’d be something wrong with them.”

She also remembered Mother Allu complaining once to Mother Ekesra, She’s so quiet, and Ekesra’s reply that at least she wasn’t getting into trouble.

“The hardest thing Kel Command ever made me do was shoot children.” Jedao’s voice was soft.

Khiruev hadn’t known about this, but then, her interest in historical generals had been confined to their strategies and tactics rather than biographies. “Secondary casualties are always difficult,” she said neutrally.

“I’m not a linguist, but do you ever think there’s something wrong with the things we do and don’t have words for?”

So this was what Jedao had been leading up to. “Sir,” Khiruev said, with a hint of a bite, “they didn’t have formation instinct in your day.” Jedao’s mouth twisted as though that had brought something to mind, but if so, he kept it to himself. “And you’re a Shuos, anyway. Why didn’t you do something?”

“You know what?” Jedao said. “The Kel called me the fox general, although there was a Shuos brigadier general who overlapped my service, a staffer posted somewhere obscure. But the Shuos called me a hawk.”

Khiruev waited for an answer, or some moral, some further revelation. Instead, Jedao called up a digest of news reports and a regional map hazed with annotations. “Sometimes it amazes me how big we’ve gotten,” Jedao said, and smiled with predatory benevolence. “Tell me, what do you know about that system?” He struggled with the map before getting it to focus on Weraio 5.

“It’s one of a thousand conflagrations,” Khiruev said wryly. She had paid it more attention than most not because it was noteworthy in itself—sporadic outbursts of calendrical warfare and student demonstrations on the subtropical archipelago, yes, but many planets suffered similar incidents—but because she’d visited it twice. If you avoided the hotspot archipelago, it could be a perfectly reasonable vacation. She hated warm weather, which reminded her of home, and had instead gone for a tour of the city of Miifau, famed, if you followed that sort of thing, for its orchestra. Every time the Weraio system came up in the digests, she’d scanned them for any mention that Miifau’s orchestra had gotten bombed. It was a stupid thing to care about, especially when so many people died everywhere, in every passing moment. Yet the fractal nature of the hexarchate’s fight against heresy made it impossible to care about those blotted numbers.

Khiruev doubted Jedao cared particularly about Weraio 5, other than having zeroed in on Khiruev’s own interest in it, even if it was theoretically possible that he had caught word of a nasty development from that direction. But Weraio wasn’t located anywhere strategic and was yet some distance from the Hafn incursions. Instead, Khiruev said, “Sir, we”—I—“will be of more use to you if we have some indication of the next objective.”

So far Jedao had maneuvered them past the Fortress of Spinshot Coins and toward the Hafn while keeping them from engaging any Kel, either by luck, an intelligence system he had yet to reveal to Khiruev, or intimidating Kel Command from a distance. Khiruev didn’t expect Jedao to level with her about his grand strategy. At the same time, Jedao couldn’t expect anyone to take his motives at face value, either.

“What, thrashing the Hafn isn’t good enough for you?” Jedao said.

Khiruev suppressed a shiver. She had long practice hiding her reactions, dubious benefit of growing up in a household with a mother who terrified her. Still, taken literally, a question was a question.

“If all you cared about was the defeat of the Hafn,” Khiruev said, “you could have left that to the Kel after whatever happened at Scattered Needles. Flitting around the hexarchate with a renegade swarm merely advertises our weakness to the enemy, especially since they’ve already engaged us.”

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