Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

Right now Tseya was sitting at the edge of her bed combing out her hair. She had an astonishing variety of outfits. Today’s involved a blue-gray chemise beneath a vest that seemed to be more lace than substance, and darker pants. Her bare feet looked weirdly incongruous. She had a grudge against socks when she wasn’t wearing shoes.

“I should make you help me with this,” Tseya said, amused, when she caught Brezan admiring her hair. He appreciated the aesthetics when it was someone else’s problem. “There are days the stuff tangles if I so much as breathe.”

Brezan located a spare comb on her dresser, half-hidden under some pearl necklaces, and weighed it dubiously in his hand. He couldn’t tell what it was made of, possibly wood. Would it snap if he tried to use it? What if it was an heirloom?

Tseya chuckled. “I bought that cheap in some souvenir shop in a city whose name I can’t remember,” she said. “My mother did always say I had abysmal taste. Anyway, it won’t bite you, and I won’t cry if it breaks.”

He eased himself down behind her and began combing, careful to work through the tangles without yanking, a skill he’d learned from his sisters as a child. Tseya’s perfume wafted back to him: citrus-sweet, no roses at all. He resisted the urge to inhale more deeply.

She hummed contentedly. “You must think Andan are terribly indolent.”

“No, just you,” he said. It had taken him a while to adjust to life on a silkmoth. It felt as though he ought to spend longer shifts in the command center, or else that he should be constantly embroiled in paperwork. But Tseya had pointed out that a moth ordinarily intended for a single pilot couldn’t have that single pilot on duty continually. The Orchid relied on a lot more automation than Brezan was accustomed to.

Tseya reached over to stroke the inside of his thigh. Brezan made a noncommittal noise, although his hand trembled. He kept combing. “Have you ever considered that wigs would be easier to manage?” he asked. “You could swap them out at whim, or program one to change colors to harmonize with your outfit.”

She snorted.

“Just a suggestion.”

After a little while, she said, “I’m clearly not distracting enough.”

Brezan paused. “You’re not even facing me. How can you tell?”

“People talk with their hands as much as they do with their tongues, Brezan.” She never used endearments, even when they fucked, which he liked about her. “Shall I try harder?”

“I’d have to start over with your hair,” he said in dismay, as much as he liked running his hands through the glossy-dark mass.

Tseya twisted around and kissed the side of his face, then his chin. “I could let it hang in tangles and go around as a ghost.”

“Why do ghosts in the stories always have long, tangled hair?”

She pushed him down with one hand, which he didn’t resist, and regarded him with a slow smile. “Do all Kel get sidetracked that easily, or are crashhawks special?”

It almost didn’t hurt when she said that, especially considering what she was doing with her other hand. He slitted his eyes at her and said, “Are you ordering me to answer?”

“What, you won’t volunteer the information?”

“Kel never volunteer if we can help it. I thought you’d heard.”

Her hair brushed over his face. It tickled, but if he laughed it’d get in his mouth, which Tseya found hilarious. He craned his head up, and she dipped her head so they could kiss.

He woke alone some time afterward. Tseya never stuck around, although hot tea always awaited him on a side table. The other thing Tseya liked to do was leave his clothes folded over a chair. Brezan couldn’t help wondering if this was something they taught in Introduction to Seduction at Andan Academy, or if this was some personal quirk. Kel speculation was divided on just what was in that course’s curriculum. He was almost tempted to ask. Brezan got dressed and drank the tea quickly, since Tseya wasn’t there to watch.

Then he went to the silkmoth’s command center. By now he had almost developed the knack of ignoring the aquarium in the command center, which took the shape of a fluted column. It was filled with seahorses and striped colorful fish with comical eyes and snails and green-dark kelp. Once he would have thought the Andan were frivolous. Now he suspected advanced psychological warfare. Tseya refused to say which.

Tseya was already there. It had been evident from early on that she had a lot of specialized training, especially with the moth’s scan suite, some of whose functions were more advanced than what they’d had on the Hierarchy of Feasts. Tseya had grimaced when he remarked on it, and confirmed what he’d heard about silkmoths: “There are trade-offs. We can sneak, run, or see things far away, but we’re only good at two of the three at any given time. Right now we’re running and sneaking so we can catch up to Jedao without getting caught, so the scan suffers a lot.”

“Anything interesting?” Brezan said as he took his seat.

Tseya nodded at him, all business. “Take a look at the chatter,” she said.

Brezan picked through the backlog of communications, which the mothgrid had sorted according to their criteria. An alert flashed red just as he got through the second of the digests. He groaned. “Jedao again?”

“More propaganda, I expect,” Tseya said, leaning forward. “I want to see what he has for us this time.” She played the message.

The piece opened with the Deuce of Gears, which Brezan wouldn’t have minded burning up or melting down, then went into a two-dimensional animation, brushstrokes applied to elegant spline curves, unrelieved black and white. Swarms of moths as stylized as paper airplanes flew and wheeled and fought against a backdrop of—

Those weren’t stars, although it only became evident when the camera zoomed in on one moth colliding with another. Those were lanterns. The battle dissolved into ashes. The ashes became ink; the brushstrokes condensed into a single column of calligraphy: penance. And that was just the introduction, in a few seconds.

“Fuck you,” Brezan said as the propaganda continued to play, as though Jedao stood in the command center with them smiling his tilted smile.

“I admit this wasn’t the angle I expected him to take,” Tseya said after the rest of the piece had finished. The earlier propaganda pieces had included maddeningly irrefutable documentation of how the commandant of the Fortress of Spinshot Coins had prevented Jedao from mauling the Hafn. Said commandant had been removed, but no one knew the full story. You would expect the Shuos to have broadcast a rebuttal; no such luck. Jedao had also made straightforward requests for specific systems not to interfere with swarm operations, which they tended to honor, mainly because his requests were sensible.

“It’s infuriating that people are retransmitting his broadcasts,” Brezan said, “but I suppose people will be people. What I want to know is, why would he want to remind his nervous but gossipy listeners about Hellspin Fortress? How does that help him?”

Tseya’s smile had a curious sour quality. “Brezan, he’s rewriting the story. It’s one thing to have it out of the archives, or some drama no one expects to be historically accurate, and another to hear it told by someone who was there.”

Brezan bit off what he’d been about to say and busied himself with a map depicting Jedao’s movements over the last two weeks in red. Hafn movements appeared in a ghost-cloud of gray. The latter had speared past the Fortress of Scattered Needles in the Entangled March and into the adjacent Severed March. Ever since the battle at Spinshot Coins, Jedao and the Hafn had been feinting at each other without engaging. The two swarms were now approaching Minang System, home to a wolf tower. The tower acted as a calendrical beacon, facilitating navigation, and contained one of the great clocks by which the hexarchate reckoned time.

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