Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Zanj rolled her eyes.

  “We offer welcome to guests and friends,” the voice said. “And death to foes of Orn. Declare yourself.”

  “Declare yourself.” Zanj mouthed along with the voice, mocking. “I’ll give you one chance. Toss those toys away, take your helmet off, and apologize. Then we’ll talk. If not, I’ll break your metal friends, then you. Slowly. Your people tell stories about me around your campfires, and those stories made you wet yourself with fear. Do not—”

  One of the rifles spoke. Even as the sound reached Viv’s ears, Zanj was turning, so fast a whirlwind rose at her feet. Her hand spun out—the gun’s fire was a dart of blinding green, too fast for the eye to follow, but Zanj’s backfist met it and slapped it away, into the dirt. The whirlwind settled. Zanj’s fist smoked. Through the burned-off skin, Viv saw more of that whitish not-bone, and other things, too, metal and light, unfamiliar substances that did not belong in bodies as Viv understood them. Wiggling things. The rumble in Zanj’s chest swelled to a roar.

  “No,” Viv said, but she put no force behind it.

  She heard the wishbone pop of Zanj’s battery. Back on High Carcereal Zanj had said she was running low on power, and would need weeks to recharge. But they had been traveling for a while.

  Zanj glanced back to Viv, slow as a taunt, and her eyes were white.

  The guns spoke all at once, and most of the blasts passed through space where Zanj had stood a half second before. They struck asphalt, stone, the ship, without effect; Hong’s clubs blocked two blasts. One struck Viv straight in the chest—and when her senses returned moments later she found herself sprawled on the pavement, alive, singed, breathless. Her robe-shirt’s weave crackled and gleamed with lightning for an instant, and her skin hurt where the seams had seared her. Oh. So that was why Hong wore his robes loose.

  Hood, she told the robe, and threw the one it made over her head, and ran after Hong toward a mound of asphalt that would serve for cover. The stone hurt her feet. But just because these clothes had blocked one shot didn’t mean they could stand up under a barrage. Hong, certainly, didn’t seem to trust them.

  She dove into cover, chased by more bolts—a rock sliver clipped her ankle, a wound she felt only as a tug and hoped wasn’t serious. The broken landing strip stank of hot rock and plasma. Blood made noise in her ears. Apparently her adrenal system understood rifles better than it understood Pride drones. She gathered herself behind cover, checked her ankle—bleeding, but not as bad as she’d feared. Beside her, Hong didn’t seem worried about their predicament. Though that might have had less to do with their odds than with the fact that, after the second volley, none of the fire had been directed at them.

  She risked a glance out of hiding, and saw Zanj as a blur between broken bodies. Zanj kicked out the center of one of the armored figures’ chests—it sparked and flew back and lay smoking, bleeding oil. She tore off a metal limb and batted off a second figure’s head—another bot—then grabbed its rifle, snapped it in half, and tossed the pieces spearlike into two more helmets. In a minute, the twenty were ten.

  Viv’s stomach churned. The armored figures were made of metal, circuits, recognizably robotic, but they looked like people. Hell, in this future, they might well be people. And once she made that leap, she thought of the Pride—the Pride, the hate fractals, who cared for their dead. That hadn’t occurred to her back on Rosary Station. She’d focused on staying alive, on her fear, on their monstrosity, but of course the Pride were alive.

  Fewer of them, though, now they’d met Zanj.

  Zanj pulled off one guard’s head, jumped on a second’s shoulders, and beat in the second’s skull with the head of the first. Eight left.

  Easier to count down than to describe. As far as Viv could tell, Zanj found the fight as easy as counting anyway. Seven. She was showing off. Six. She was angry. Five. And these things just happened to be. Four. In her way. Three. She shrugged off a volley. Two.

  One.

  Viv realized she was standing in the open. She’d left shelter as the battle turned to a slaughter.

  The last guard scrambled back from Zanj, not so smooth anymore, and tried to raise his rifle—Zanj closed the distance between them in a blur, grabbed the rifle, broke it. The guard slipped, turned to run. Zanj stood in front of him, eyes white fire, smile wicked. Caught him by the neck, and lifted. Zanj glowed with fury and waste heat. She caught the guard’s helm beneath the chin and lifted, and the helm popped off, rattled to the ground.

  The guard was human-ish—webs of blue lines flanked the corners of eyes wide with terror, but that could have been makeup or aftermarket modification. She—Viv revised her original judgment, barring future clarification with regard to the pronoun, and observed that in real life, comic books to the contrary, you couldn’t tell much about sex when people were wearing armor—kicked Zanj in the crotch without producing any visible reaction. The guard clawed for Zanj’s eyes, but Zanj held her at arm’s length, off the ground, without apparent effort. The guard bared her teeth. She pried at Zanj’s grip on her throat, and Zanj did not seem to care. “Where’s your respect, Daughter of Orn?” She sounded almost mournful. “Your grandmothers welcomed me with song.”

  The guard’s next kick found only air; a third might as well have struck cement.

  “Where are your topless towers, Daughter of Orn? How did your mother’s mother’s mothers fall? Do you even remember them? Do you remember what you were?”

  The guard’s breath rattled in her throat. There were tears in the corners of her wide round eyes. Her lips bared white teeth, a panic rictus. Her nails slipped over Zanj’s skin as if it were marble.

  Viv remembered the Empress’s hands in her chest. Remembered how it felt to fight her, futile, desperate, and saw that same look in the guard’s eyes.

  Zanj spread her jaws, and leaned in.

  “Stop!”

  Viv saw the pain hit Zanj—saw her jaws snap shut, saw her buckle as the crown went black. The guard found a breath, though not freedom, as Zanj’s grip weakened. She looked so scared.

  Zanj roared. Her eyes were bright white and blinding, and her breath steamed even in this warm air. “She was trying to kill us.”

  “You threatened her first. She’s from here. She’s the people we came here to find.”

  “She’s an echo. A by-blow. Less than a child. And she tried to shoot me. For that alone—”

  Viv didn’t wait for Zanj’s grip to tighten, didn’t wait for her to use those brilliant teeth. “Let her go.” With all the authority she could muster.

  The circlet burned night black. Zanj stood firm, as if she would never fall—for a second. Then her eyes dulled to red, her hand trembled, and she collapsed to the broken earth, clutched her temples, screamed. The guard, too, fell; her leg twisted under her. She lay still, but breathing. Alive.

  The circlet faded to its normal gray. Some time later, Zanj stopped shivering and fought back to her feet. She swayed, but stood, and spat her own rainbow blood onto the ground. Behind them, shards drifted down from a broken tower. “How did that feel, Lady? Good?”

  Many answers leapt to mind, many justifications. All she let herself say was “No.”

  “Fine,” Zanj said. “I’m going. Command me to stay, if you want. Make me dance. Order me to feed you, bathe you, I don’t give a shit. I know how the Empress builds—this thing will bring me running from anywhere in the universe. You say you don’t want to control me? Bullshit. Jailer. Call me back when you’re done lying to yourself. But as far as I’m concerned, you and I are done.”

  And then she turned on an axis Viv had not noticed before, and in a flash of Cloud blue and static, she was gone.

  12

  WIND BLEW SPLINTERED metal through the spot where Zanj had stood. Viv watched the dust settle, heard the sizzle of broken circuits, and realized Zanj was gone.

  And why shouldn’t she go? Viv had caught her, tortured her, held her. She said she’d never wanted to make Zanj her prisoner, t
hat she only left the crown on Zanj’s brow to protect herself, but seconds later she’d given her an order, and watched her collapse. Worse: it felt good. Beneath the hook that dug into her gut as she watched Zanj fall, beneath the ache of sympathy and shame, she had felt a drunken swell of strength, like a kid with a magnifying glass on a sunny day, the whole world full of things to burn. She knew where that joy came from, that relief. Weakness had snuck up on her since she woke on High Carcereal in space, in the future, a weakness that built on the weakness she’d felt in the months before her flight from Saint Kitts. And when you were weak, strength was a powerful drug.

  Even now, she wanted to call Zanj back.

  She told herself it was to apologize. Maybe that was true. But she didn’t know, and didn’t trust herself.

  Instead, she ran to the fallen guard. To the woman whose life she’d saved.

  She was still breathing, shallowly, her eyes rolled back. Viv reached for her, tried to sort out scraps of half-remembered Girl Scout first aid classes in her head. She’d paid attention, thinking, I might need this someday, but she never had until now.

  Don’t move someone who might have a neck injury. Had Zanj broken the guard’s neck? How would Viv tell? You were supposed to check airways. But what if moving her jaw made the neck injury, if there was a neck injury, worse?

  Viv touched the woman’s cheek; awake, she had been too afraid for Viv to get much sense of her features, but she resolved in repose: large round eyes, closed now; a flat dark face with high cheekbones; full mouth, fierce and breathtaking. She looked young, early twenties, though who knew how fast people aged in this world, or how slowly, or whether early twenties still counted as young. Someone’s daughter, anyway, someone’s lover, someone’s soldier—like Viv, though separated by who knew how many years.

  Zanj might have known, but Zanj was gone.

  Hong knelt beside them, hand to chin. “Is she well?” Too polite to ask if Viv needed help.

  “I don’t know,” she snapped. “My CPR certification’s a few thousand years out of date. Did the ’faith teach you first aid?”

  He flowed past her, hands to the woman’s throat, then mouth, then forehead, checking limbs, joints, muttering under his breath; the translation gimmick threw up its hands at the half-voiced words. When she could no longer understand him she lost her sense of him as a person, his professorial comment, his priestly remove, his eagerness and his fear. He seemed more alien to her than he ever had before.

  As he touched the guard, she groaned. Her eyelids fluttered. The blue lines on her skin pulsed. “She should be fine,” Hong said, and when he spoke she made sense of him again. “She tore a muscle in her leg when she fell, but it’s healing. Slowly. She won’t walk until tomorrow at least.”

  “If you think that’s slow healing, wait until you see me get hurt.”

  Hong hadn’t mentioned Zanj’s disappearance, or their argument; Viv felt too numb to find the right words to thank him for that. She’d said so many of the wrong ones to Zanj just now to trust her own choices.

  Good job, Viv. Stress takes over, and at the first opportunity you alienate one of the only two people you’ve met since waking up who have done anything but try to kill you. Zanj had been doing her arrogant, lethal best to help. But should Viv have let her kill this woman, who was breathing deeper now, who had done little enough to hurt them—who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, on the wrong patrol? If Viv hadn’t pissed Zanj off, she wouldn’t have been so murderous. And Viv had been angry, because Zanj was angry, because Viv was angry, because … Because of everything.

  This woman was hurt, because of her. And alive, for the same reason.

  Her eyes snapped open. They were an alien blue-gray that swirled like mercury, and they locked on Viv, wide with fear for a heartbeat before she could make herself brave. Viv liked her at once—for that moment’s terror, and for how fast it turned to fight. “Get away from me!” Her language was tonal and throaty, her voice rich, deep.

  Viv did—backed up on her knees, hands up. Hong had rolled away and risen in the same motion to his feet. Dork. “It’s okay,” Viv said. “You’re fine. You’re safe. We just wanted to be sure you were still alive. Our—” She stopped herself from saying friend. “—our traveling companion, she’s gone. We chased her off.”

  She was clear as glass. This girl—this woman, not a girl at all, not here—she knew how to fight, she’d probably lived harder and more violently than Viv could imagine, but she had the fluid, open look of a person who never had to lie.

  Viv had not seen a face like that in a long time. She always thought of it as Shanda’s face, Shanda whom she’d met at a charity tennis thing back when Shanda was only number eight in the world, so direct, as open on the dance floor, at the bar, on the court, as she’d been in bed that night. A handful of actors Viv breezed through the summer after they broke it off could almost fake that breathtaking translucence. (Viv had sworn off actors when she realized that was why she’d gone for them. Never trust a rebound.) Seeing that same earnest expression here, so far from home, made her feel dizzy.

  The guard’s suspicion parted like water before a whale’s back, replaced by wonder and gratitude. She accepted Viv’s hand and pulled herself to her feet, favoring her hurt leg. “You saved my life.”

  “Viv saved you,” Hong said.

  “Lady Viv,” the guard breathed. “Are you from—are you from beyond the sky?”

  Viv squirmed, and looked away—embarrassed by the guard’s openness, and a little afraid of her beauty. When she realized she was afraid she made herself turn back, and meet that gaze that wasn’t exactly Shanda’s but wasn’t not, because the right thing to do now, she felt certain, was to accept her thanks like a grown woman, respectfully, and ignore the size of those eyes, the way the husk on her voice made medically interesting things happen to Viv’s heart and lungs.

  Christ, Viv. At least try to pretend you’re not a goon. “Just Viv. Don’t mention it. It—you—we were, ah, just passing through. From, um.” She couldn’t bring herself to say from space. “From up there.”

  The guard’s eyes went wide with wonder. Her grip was strong; Viv felt a thrill at her strength that she did her best to ignore. Stay cool, dammit. “I’ve met gods before, but never a woman from the stars.”

  Gods? But what she said was: “What’s your name?” Yes. So very cool.

  “Xiara,” was how Viv would spell it, because even though Mom and Dad came from Taiwan, the Chinese school where they’d sent her used Pinyin. Hsyara, maybe, almost Sierra but not quite. “Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter. The Chief sent me to patrol these ruins, and I heard—” She gasped. “Is that your ship?”

  She was past Viv in an instant, all injury forgotten in wonder.

  “I’ve never seen one so—” Xiara put too much weight into her bad leg, and a yelp of pain interrupted her exuberance. Viv caught her as she folded and tried not to think, much, about the body beneath the armor in her arms. Xiara barely seemed to notice. She had eyes only for the Question. She lurched away from Viv and limped slack-jawed toward the ship. She tugged her glove off with her teeth and stroked the hull with one hand, as if she’d been trusted with a relic. “So old—and intact! We have pieces, but I’ve never seen anything so old in working shape. Are you pilgrims?”

  Viv opened her mouth to give some kind of clever lie, and realized she had no idea what a convincing lie would sound like. She turned to Hong, help please, and to her surprise he answered with the ease of rote practice. “I am a simple monk of the ’faith, and Viv is a sojourner. We were passing through your system in quest of miracles, but our ship has run out of fuel, and our temperamental companion’s departure has left us without a pilot. As poor seekers who have left the family, we beg your aid.”

  Viv had almost been impressed. She stopped when he revealed the weakness of their position. “We do need fuel,” she said, “but I’m sure we can figure out how to fly the ship.”

  But Xiara had turned alre
ady, and this time only the Question’s hull at her back kept her from falling. But she didn’t seem to notice the pain—it was quashed beneath her awe. “You have no pilot?” As if Viv had just said, We have this old Holy Grail lying around, don’t know what to do with it, any ideas? “Viv, you came from beyond the stars, and angered a powerful being to save me, though you did not know my name.” As if Viv weren’t the reason Zanj had been about to kill her in the first place. But Xiara didn’t know that, and her voice was heavy with awe and purpose, and Viv was too weak to correct her. “I owe you my life and service, but your accepting the service I now offer would be the greatest boon I have received of any woman. Will you take me as your pilot?”

  Viv hesitated, not just because of take me. “You can fly?”

  “Flight,” she said, “is the blood of Orn. We sing our children songs of the sky.” But whatever she saw in Viv’s face, it was not the answer she was looking for. Viv did not know if there was enough sincerity inside her to answer Xiara need for need. Xiara blushed. “I am sorry. I have been too forward. I should not have dared to ask.”

  “No,” Viv said, feeling like a jerk. “That’s not it at all. It’s … Hong and I are going on a long journey, to find the Em—”

  “To find relics of saints of ages past,” Hong said politely but with enough force to shut Viv up. She notched her estimation of Hong’s competence back up a few points. At least Xiara didn’t seem to have noticed the slip.

  “Relics,” Viv said. “Right. It would be a long trip. Journey. Quest. Very dangerous.” But she could tell from the eager light in Xiara’s eyes that danger would not discourage her.

  Xiara could not be serious. This city had been ruined for centuries, and she’d never seen the Question. How could she fly it? After weeks watching Zanj and taking notes, Viv barely knew what half the controls meant in realspace, let alone how to plot a course through the Cloud. She looked to Hong for help—but Hong seemed ready to defer to her on this one, and self-satisfied in his deference. He must have noticed the glare she shot him when he’d let on about the weakness of their bargaining position. But Xiara was still standing in front of Viv, expectant, and Viv felt a rare stab of empathy. How would it feel to grow up here, knowing you had lost the sky?