sin x2 had said, They’re our Kel. Someone should be with them at the end, even if they never know or understand. Then the others, realizing it would not be dissuaded, left it alone.
sin x2 wasn’t under any illusions that the hive Kel cared about it except as an instrument for necessary chores, and sometimes unnecessary ones. It knew that the hivemind became less and less sane with each passing year. Nevertheless, it considered itself Kel. Someone from its enclave should honor Kel Command’s passing.
At present, sin x2 was polishing a collection of musical instruments, one of the oddball duties it had taken up because no one else wanted it. High General Aurel had brought some of the instruments with her. In the early years she had come here to practice from time to time. The last time she had come in here had been thirty-one years ago. She had played snatches of a concerto. sin x2 paid special attention to the viols, because they had been her favorites.
Servitor tanh x sent the six-minute warning over the maintenance channel.
sin x2 knew High General Aurel was part of Subcommand Composite Eight right now. It whisked quickly through the corridors so it could reach her. The doors were open, as always. It floated in to where Aurel sat on a minimalist metalglass chair. Her posture was beautiful, and her hands still had some of their strength, but the pale brown eyes saw nothing in the room except, perhaps, the limitations of light and shadow.
One minute and eight seconds later, the Aerie roared into an effusion of fire, of heady vapors, of numbers rolling backwards to the new calendar’s pitiless zero hour.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
IMPRESSIVELY, ZEHUN GOT past the door to Mikodez’s primary office without getting themselves killed. Mikodez looked up, at first not recognizing the slim figure, the somber eyes, the long red coat. With their hair pulled back from their face, Zehun almost looked as they had when he had first met them, a quiet person with unquiet ideas about how the Shuos should be run. “Go away,” Mikodez said. His voice sounded as though someone had run over it with a rake.
Zehun’s eyes narrowed and they stepped in. The door closed behind them. “You should have said no to Istradez,” Zehun said.
“First,” Mikodez said, “it didn’t concern you.” Patently untrue: everything he did concerned his assistant. “Second, once Istradez offered to go, I had to accept. What was I going to do for the rest of my life, coddle him while I sent other agents to die? Imagine what that would do to morale. That’s bad management.”
“Your brother, Mikodez.” Zehun started to say something, changed their mind. “You’re allowed to have personal attachments. As a rule, the ones who don’t have any are the ones the rest of us have to assassinate for everybody’s good.”
“I gave up the right to sentimentality when I took the seat,” Mikodez said. “The Shuos are my family now. And please don’t tell me it was a poor trade, or a good trade, or anything. I can’t bear it right now.”
“That’s not why I’m here anyway,” Zehun said, although Mikodez knew better than to assume they wouldn’t bring it up later. “You haven’t been responding to my calls.”
“What could be so urgent?” Mikodez said sarcastically.
Zehun leaned over his terminal and ran a query. “This one you need to hear,” they said. A summary came up, explaining that a message had been transmitted in the clear and in all directions, from a thousand thousand sources, a storm of light. Cheris had sent her calendar and equations, plus a manifesto explaining their purpose. The Rahal were going berserk trying to suppress the information and handle calendrical fluctuations, but it was too late.
“Yes,” Mikodez said, admiring the uselessness of the map showing the scintillating profusion of transmission sources: too many for the human eye to pick out a pattern, and grid analysis wasn’t doing much better. “It was an obvious move. Sometimes the obvious one is the right one. I just hadn’t expected it to be so thoroughly implemented.”
“You made your choice, Mikodez,” Zehun said. “The world doesn’t stop moving forward. We have a crisis to deal with. Maybe after things settle down, we can hole up with some board games and get roaringly drunk, but in the meantime, you have a job to do.”
“Yes,” he said, “and you’ve done yours. Now get out, and fetch that Mwennin girl for me while you’re at it. I won’t be able to concentrate with you hovering over me.”
“What’s hilarious is that you think this is hovering,” Zehun said, with the superior knowledge of someone who has raised five children speaking to a non-parent, but they went.
Mikodez resisted the urge to procrastinate by watering his green onion some more. He’d only rot its roots that way. “Call request to Shuos Jedao on the Hierarchy of Feasts,” he said. Maybe this time he’d get through. He wondered what emblem that swarm was bannering these days. Deuce of Gears still? Swanknot? The boring temporary emblem for brand-new generals? Some crashhawk confection?
He had time for a quince candy while waiting. The stash in his desk was running low. He’d have to wheedle his staff into resupplying him. For some reason they thought he should restrict his sugar intake.
The Deuce of Gears flashed at him, and Mikodez’s mouth curled. So this was how she wanted it. The emblem was replaced by Cheris’s quizzical face when she accepted the call. “Shuos-zho,” she said, “is this the best time? Either you have a raging crisis or I do, I’m not sure which.”
“Hello, Cheris,” Mikodez said, impressed that her expression didn’t flicker. “I assure you that you want to be talking to me right now.”
“In that case, Shuos-zho,” she said, “we’re both dead people miraculously able to communicate with each other. I had it on good authority that you and the other hexarchs were all assassinated at some meeting. Must have been one hell of a party to get you all in the same place. Was there any good whiskey?”
Mikodez was pretty sure Cheris didn’t share Jedao’s fascination with liquor. “I ordered the strike,” he said, very calmly.
“Nirai-zho believed she spoke to you on the way in, before the ‘malfunction.’ How do you sabotage a shadowmoth, anyway?”
What the hell were Cheris’s sources? This was making his entire intelligence division look bad.
“Was it a double?” she said. Her smile turned knowing. “I remember you like using those, especially after you threw that Khiaz double in my direction. Because I needed more reasons to stay away from a Shuos hexarch.”
“Cheris,” he said, “it’s over. You’ve won. And if you must know, the double that carried out the suicide strike was my younger brother.” Fuck, he didn’t know why he was confessing that to this woman of all people, when he hadn’t wanted to discuss it with his own assistant. But he knew after all, the way he always did, even when he didn’t want to. He needed Cheris to start trusting him. That would only become possible if she believed him capable of vulnerability. A terrible way to use Istradez’s sacrifice, not that that was stopping him.
Something shifted in her eyes: an intimation of shadow, a nuance of color. “I didn’t realize,” she said. “I’m very sorry.” She waited for him to make some acknowledgment, and when he didn’t, went on, “Why would you betray the other hexarchs?”
“Two reasons,” Mikodez said. “First, once I found out about your plan, I realized you had the winning hand. Second, I wish to offer you an alliance with the Shuos.” His smile was hard. “Consider the deaths of my colleagues a gift to you, as a gesture of my sincerity.”
“So you were the one yanking Kel Command’s defenses around. To get the timetables to match up.”
“Yes.”