Yes.
“I’ll come with you,” Cheris said. Companionably, they made their way to the medical center, which was marked by paintings of ashhawks entwined with snakes.
The Kel medics deferred to Cheris only as much as they had to. One of them warned her not to tire Khiruev. She promised to be careful. How bad had Khiruev’s condition become? Brezan had said that he had tried a few times to get Khiruev to understand that she didn’t need Vrae Tala anymore, but Khiruev had not responded. Of course, Brezan was the exact worst person to be making that argument.
Cheris wasn’t prepared for the tables with their screwdrivers and different sizes of hammers and strange metal coils and small bottles of shellac. And she wasn’t prepared for Khiruev sitting up, her face drawn but her eyes clear as morning. “General—?” Cheris said.
“I don’t know what you want me to call you,” Khiruev said. Her voice was scratchy.
“I’m Ajewen Cheris, and I’m what’s left of Jedao,” she said, “and from the beginning I lied to you.”
Khiruev laughed a little. “Then it wasn’t entirely a lie, was it?” She turned something around in her hand. Cheris couldn’t tell what it was when Khiruev still had her fingers around it.
“Not entirely,” Cheris said. “I remember being Jedao. That’s four hundred years of him. It was hard not to drown in him sometimes. But unlike you, I had a choice. Do you regret ending up here?”
“It’s still hard to think sometimes,” Khiruev said. “But I’d do it again. All of it.” She opened her hand, showing Cheris the watch, an antique, severe in its design. “For you,” she said. “I’m not done yet. I have some more restoration to do.”
“That thing must be a couple of centuries old,” Cheris said. “Don’t you want to save it for yourself?”
“You’re a couple of centuries old yourself,” Khiruev said. She was smiling. It made her eyes young. She set the watch down on the nearest table. “Three gameboards all along, isn’t that right? Jedao fighting the Hafn. But that wasn’t the real fight. The hexarchs thought Jedao was using the Hafn to start a revolt against them, a war of public opinion. And that wasn’t the real fight either. The real fight was the calendrical spike that must have been your intention from the beginning. So that’s it. It worked. The hexarchs are dead—well, except Shuos—and you’ve won the war.”
Cheris thought of the name she would have been given if the Mwennin religious calendar hadn’t been suppressed by the hexarchate. Khiruev’s father crumpled into swans. Her parents’ execution and her people’s genocide, the riots, numbers written in pale ash. Servitors silenced for hundreds of years. Being ordered to fire on the Lanterners’ children. Her swarm massacred with a carrion bomb at the Fortress of Scattered Needles.
That was only a fraction of the atrocities the hexarchate had perpetrated in her lives. And people didn’t stop being people because they had choices.
She had found a gun with which to fight. It remained to be seen whether anyone had the will to use it well.
“No,” Cheris said. “The war never ends.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THANK YOU TO the following people: my editor, Jonathan Oliver, and the wonderful folks at Solaris Books; my agent, Jennifer Jackson; and my agent’s assistant, Michael Curry.
I am grateful to my beta readers: Joseph Charles Betzwieser, Cyphomandra, Daedala, Isis, Yune Kyung Lee, Nancy Sauer, Sonya Taaffe, and Storme Winfield. Additional thanks to the following people from Fountain Pen Network for fielding my firearms questions: ac12, injesticate, openionated, ragpaper1817, and TheRealScubaSteve. All errors and narrative license taken are, of course, my own.
This one is for Nancy Sauer: yours in calendrical heresy, always.