Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

Brezan made a pained sound. “You trusted him once.”

Khiruev couldn’t see the relevance of this. “Your safety, sir.”

“Look,” Brezan said, “if he wanted to hurt us, we should be more worried that he’d blow the whole place up instead of shooting us up piecemeal.”

“Did you leave high explosives in there with him?” Khiruev demanded.

“No, but—”

“There’s no need to ascribe supernatural powers to him, sir. Or to fail to take sensible precautions.”

Brezan grimaced. “The way my year’s been going, I’m not ruling anything out.” He strode briskly the rest of the way to Cheris’s door and requested to be let in. His hand wasn’t anywhere near his sidearm. Given how all this had started, fair enough.

After a few moments, the door slid open. Brezan walked in unhesitatingly. Cheris rose to greet him, although she didn’t salute. She had changed her clothes: an unexpectedly festive lavender dress and a raven pendant, the one Khiruev had seen once before when she played dangerously with her gun. The pendant must have some meaning to her, but this wasn’t the time to ask. Khiruev was so used to seeing her in Kel uniform that she felt the bones of Cheris’s face had changed, or her silhouette; that she was someone Khiruev had never met.

“Have you decided?” Cheris said to Brezan.

“There’s one thing more,” Brezan said. He was—not smiling, exactly, but his mouth had an ironic twist.

“Do tell,” she said.

Brezan nodded at Khiruev. “General,” he said, “I’m sure you have questions of your own for the interloper. I want you to ask them as though I weren’t here.”

Khiruev drew a shuddering breath, unable even to acknowledge the order.

“You’re learning cruelty, I see,” Cheris said to Brezan.

Khiruev looked at her. “Jedao?” she said.

Her smile was still Jedao’s smile, but this time sad. “If that’s who I am.”

“Was any of it real?” Khiruev asked.

“It was real enough,” Cheris said. “I’m what’s left of Shuos Jedao. Kel Command anchored his ghost to me. You can guess what some of the side-effects were. When he finally died, he passed on his memories to me. The hexarchs aren’t wrong to be concerned.”

Khiruev had difficulty thinking clearly. Cheris waited calmly while Khiruev formulated her next question. Not long ago Khiruev had answered to Cheris, although the memory of that loyalty was threadbare already, and would soon be gone except as a puzzling shadow. “Was there ever a chance to bring the hexarchs down?” she said. She wasn’t sure what she wanted the answer to be, given that Brezan himself seemed ambivalent on that count.

“Brezan,” Cheris said, “why don’t you ask me straight out yourself, instead of doing this to her? I have the same incentive to give you the answers you need, either way.”

“Because she’s the one you hurt,” Brezan said. “Because she’s the one who’s dying for a cause you never bothered to explain.”

“Brezan—”

“You did this to her, don’t you think you owe her something?”

“I didn’t ask her to—”

“But she did. Don’t you think you should at least give her a fucking reason before she falls dead?” Brezan was shouting now.

“Brezan,” Cheris said, all ice, “look at her. You’re a Kel. You should know better than to lose it around one of your subordinates.”

Khiruev’s breath was coming hard. She couldn’t explain why. She had trouble looking at the high general, as though he was surrounded by fire, by death painted into the crevices between molecules.

Brezan choked back whatever he had originally meant to say. “Fine. I concede you didn’t turn the swarm into a pyre. That you fought the invaders. But that’s not enough justification for using people as game pieces. Tell me what the hell this plan is, what the hell made this whole crazy outing worth it, or I will feed you to a very pissed-off Andan. She’ll have my head too, but at that point it’ll be worth it to be rid of you. So tell me, and make it good.”

“Just think,” Cheris said, “all this passion for a system you’re not even committed to. Imagine who you’d become in service of something you truly believed in.”

Brezan visibly checked himself from hitting her.

“We need a new calendar,” Cheris said.

Brezan and Khiruev exchanged glances involuntarily. Then Brezan said, “The hexarchate has spent almost a millennium crushing heresies, some of which drummed up a significant amount of local support. Hell, weren’t the Lanterners heretics?”

“Technically a client state and not part of the heptarchate proper,” Cheris said. “The histories tend to get that part wrong.”

“It’s besides the point anyway,” Brezan said. “You can’t possibly enforce a new calendar over enough of the hexarchate to make a difference. Not to mention—” He stopped, paling.

“Sir?” Khiruev said. Cheris had started to smile, very faintly. That couldn’t bode well.

“That was the whole fucking point, wasn’t it?” Brezan said to Cheris. And to Khiruev: “It’s in her fucking profile. It was there all along. She’s a mathematician. I mean phenomenally good, as in the Nirai tried to recruit her and it was her specialty in academy.”

“Yes,” Cheris said. “I won’t deny it was often helpful being Jedao, but I meant it as a distraction. Jedao could do calendrical warfare only so long as he used a computer, or someone else juggled the congruences for him. Anytime he was in play, all people ever thought about was where the next massacre would be, not about mathematical skullduggery. Frankly, Brezan, the calendar reset is going to go off in fifteen days no matter what you do to me.”

If anything, Brezan looked even less reassured. “Splendid,” he said. “You’ve admitted that you’re running around with pieces of a spectacularly bloodthirsty mass murderer inside your head. Now you’re trying to convince me that this new calendar of yours will be an improvement? Because—because as bad as the hexarchate is, as bad as the remembrances are, and the suicide formations, and Kel Command getting crazier with each successive generation—as bad as this all is, I’m not under any illusion that things can’t get worse. Do you have any idea how much chaos there will be if you destroy our technology base?”

“I designed the new calendar to be compatible with most existing exotic technologies,” Cheris said. “Especially communications and the mothdrive.”

Brezan scowled at her. “I’m not a Rahal, and I’m not a Nirai-class mathematician either, but that means the associated social structures have to remain similar. That’s not an improvement.”

“You haven’t seen the theorem I dragged out of the postulates,” Cheris said wearily. “Yes, you’re right. The calendar won’t make all the Vidona disappear. It won’t make people forget about remembrances, or change the minds of people who think ritual torture is entertaining. It won’t make the hexarchs people that I ever want to meet. What it will do is let people choose which exotic effects apply to them. That’s all.”

Khiruev worked through the implications. “Sir,” she said to Brezan, “you have to stop her. If she can do this, she’ll destroy the Kel. Without formation instinct—”

“The Kel existed as an elite before formation instinct was ever conceived,” Cheris said. “I remember it, even. It could be done again, if the Kel decided it was worth doing.”

To Khiruev’s dismay, Brezan was studying Cheris intently. “If you’re lying to me about this, any of this,” he said, “I will never forgive you.”

“Sir—” Khiruev protested.

The muscles along Brezan’s jaw convulsed. “Khiruev,” he said, “when she no longer outranked you, when you first had a choice between Kel Command and her, you chose her. You chose Vrae Tala. You saw something in her, in what she was doing. Do you remember what it was?”

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