Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  “You recognize her?”

  “Dear. I’ve known her since the Empress first burned stars against the Bleed. We fought together, loved together. We stole wonders to slake our greed and lust, and reveled in our triumph to break the vaults of heaven. Of course I recognized her. But I have changed since I was the woman she knew. I barely remember that form anymore.”

  The kettle spoke, and as Yannis poured, she flickered. Her scales glistened gold, her head proud, unbowed, feather-crested, her teeth long and fierce, her skin threaded with fire: immutable, unbendingly vicious, a violence that once stalked prey through some prehistoric alien swamp, still, still, each heartbeat closer to a pounce. The preconscious mammal buried somewhere in Viv’s body saw that shape and reacted with hot-stove speed; before she realized what was happening, she’d half risen to a crouch and dropped her teacup.

  Then Yannis was Yannis again. She’d caught Viv’s cup before it hit the floor. Viv’s heart took longer to stop insisting she was about to die.

  Yannis poured tea again. This cup was a darker green.

  Viv sat stiffly. The first time she tried to lift the cup, it shook, spilled onto her fingers. She closed her eyes and breathed, centered herself. The next time, the tea made it to her lips.

  “Well done.” Yannis’s laugh was a clicking of teeth. “I’m sorry to shock you. Some truths are better shown than told.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Zanj? You must have seen her in the temple. She misses you. The Empress spent three thousand years torturing her. She thinks she’s alone.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Maybe not.” She shrugged. “But here’s my guess. You didn’t tell her, even though you miss her and she misses you, even though you were old galaxy-smashing buddies, because you know what she’d think about what you’ve done here.”

  Nictating membranes closed across Yannis’s eyes, but the pupils dilated wide, and reflected in their blackness Viv saw the ship behind her, saw the spear that pierced it through. “And what,” Yannis said conversationally, “do you think we have done?”

  “This is Groundswell, isn’t it? Your great weapon, built from corpses of stitched-together Bleed, made to kill an Empress. And it came close—it hurt her. It fought off the first waves of her Diamond Fleet. But she called the Bleed themselves, in her desperation, and they wormed into Groundswell, tore it from you, and began to murder your ships. Zanj used the Fallen Star to kill it—and as Zanj struck, the Empress locked the Star away. She chased Zanj, and caught her. But you escaped—or once the Cloud was broken you crashed into Groundswell, like we did. You decided to stay. You had children, or cloned them, or used your crew and followers. Generations passed. You used the ship’s systems to build soil, an ecosystem, a fake sun. In here, you’re safe. You guide your subjects, you tend their village like a garden, and live in peace. In fear. Zanj would hate you for it.”

  “Don’t tell me about Zanj.” Yannis’s voice went vicious and low. It hit Viv in the lungs. She couldn’t breathe, for a heartbeat that lasted a thousand years. “Always rushing to battle, always bouncing back as if nothing hurt. She pushed for this … for this disaster. One big play for the galaxy. She failed. And now she’s back, the same as ever.”

  Viv remembered Zanj’s face in the shadows, in Viv’s cabin, in the Question. “I don’t think so.”

  Yannis lowered her teacup. “You don’t know her like I do, dear. She wouldn’t understand our plan: waiting this long, and this patiently, for victory.”

  “Hiding.”

  “Hardly. We draw on the minds of our children, and their children, and their ancestors sunk within the ship, devoting all their dreams, all their creative capacity, to a single problem: cracking the Empress’s chains on the Fallen Star, and on the local Cloud.”

  Viv should have kept silent, should have let her speak, but she felt the conclusion well up in her, slip out her mouth before she could think through the implications of speaking the words out loud. “You want to rebuild your fleet. You want revenge.”

  Again, the grating laughter. “Revenge? We live well here. We are safe, and we have control. But we have lived these three thousand years at the mercy of the Empress’s ignorance. If she knew we were here, she could kill us all in seconds. Once we solve her lock on the Cloud, we can change it, and banish her forever. She hides inside her Citadel; we would rule a citadel of our own, immortal and perfect, safe from the Bleed, forever.”

  “So, what happens now?” What a stupid question to ask. Her palms were moist; she drank more tea, bitter now that it had cooled. She was getting carried away with the dramatics of the moment: the secrets told, the plans. Always had been a nut for conspiracies.

  “Now,” Yannis said, “you forget.”

  She made another gesture like the one that summoned water. A hand closed around Viv’s brain, the world tensed—and then it passed, and color returned. Granted, if she had forgotten something, she by definition would not remember what was gone, but she seemed to remember their whole conversation: the tea, Yannis, Zanj, the Fallen Star, plans, forgetting. She tried to say, forget what, thinking, no reason to let Yannis know her trick didn’t work, but instead she said, “No.”

  Yannis’s head tilted, then craned forward, curious. “Interesting. The ship does not touch your soul.”

  “Because I don’t have one. That’s what Hong said. I wasn’t born here, so I don’t have the kind of exomemory interfaces you people seem to have from birth. It’s annoying. But it does protect me from the kind of nonsense you just tried.” The words slipped out at first, then poured, gushed; she had as little control over them as she would have over bleeding, if Yannis stabbed her. She clapped her hand over her mouth, clenched her jaw. With deep breaths, the urge to speak, to babble, faded. She stood. Backed away. Yannis did not move. “What did you do to me?”

  “A test. Fortunately, though the ship cannot touch your mind, the tea’s effects are purely biochemical. It is good, and virtuous, to tell the truth.”

  Viv ran—and stopped, halfway to the hall, as if her left arm were cased in concrete. Yannis stood behind her, her hand closed around Viv’s wrist. Viv tugged, but Yannis did not so much as twitch.

  “Which brings me to my main question,” she said. “Child, tell me: How did Zanj get free?”

  Viv opened her mouth to curse, to spit, but the truth rose inside her like a bubble in a clear pool—she tried to catch it, stop it, but it slipped shimmering between her fingers, reached the surface, burst. “I let her out.”

  “Excellent.” Yannis savored the word as she had savored her tea. She drew very close. “Come with me, dear. I would like to conduct an experiment.”

  31

  XIARA CROUCHED IN boulder shadows and wished she had her spear, or her rifle, or her robots, or her ship, or Viv. But here, a million million miles from home, she had only herself—body, formidable; mind, adequate; soul, currently inaccessible—and the monster by her side. Viv was gone.

  “They came this way,” Gray said. “I can smell them.” Chiefs and maidens but Xiara missed being able to do that—she would never have called it smell, but on the ship she could have traced Viv and Hong by their heat, the cells they shed, the whine of their nerves. Viv had called the experience “managed synesthesia” when Xiara described it, the Question collapsing telemetry data to her native senses—but no less true. The chants, the exercises, the blood of Orn had crafted in Xiara reflexes for mastering space and Cloud, but those great geometries did not play on her soulstrings like the little changes, the grace notes in the soug. On the Question, Viv smelled of elderflower and warm bread, and here, Xiara could not smell her anymore. So she followed the monster, even if she did not trust him. “The trail ends here.” He pointed at a patch of bare ground, a slope of grassless rock without seam or joint.

  “I’m going to look.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Before he reached the end of the sentence she was already moving, Ornchiefsdaughter striding from cover sha
rp and wary as a spring hare at the whiff of baying hounds. She was unarmed only in the vulgar sense. When you stand unarmed, the world must be your weapon, as the Chief her mother said. And though Xiara never had her mother’s strength, her breadth, her canniness, she had seen more worlds in weeks than the Chief her mother had dreamed in all her years.

  She kicked the ground. It did not give. But it did not give strangely—more like metal than rock. “Monster! Help me.”

  Gray shook his head, from cover. “I’m not a—look, just get back over here!”

  She kicked the rock again, and still it refused to move.

  “If something’s wrong,” the monster said, “we can ask about it in the morning.”

  “Viv may be dead by morning.”

  “She’s snuck off up the mountain before. You said so yourself.”

  She did not contest his point. But Viv—Viv of the cunning smile and the sharp eye and the jokes no one understood—had left her bed on the first night, and in the morning Xiara had asked why, and accepted an answer that was no answer. Then Viv left her bed a second night, and in the morning Xiara asked, and accepted an answer that was no answer.

  No Ornchiefsdaughter would be denied the truth three times.

  On the second night, Xiara crept from bed and saw Viv climb the mountain alone, and come back down; on the third, she’d seen her take Hong, and so she herself went back for Gray, whose monster nose could follow trails her own could not. Even if he was at heart a lazy child. “Hey,” he said. “I need rest. We have work tomorrow. Yannis wants us to close the last of the fissure and start plowing. If I’m exhausted—”

  “Come help me, monster.”

  “Okay! Fine.” He slouched from the shadows, chastened, lit pale silver by the shipmoons above. She remembered those ships—how they felt from the inside, their voices, their power and their rage. Remembered what she had almost become, drawn into them. She did not shudder with this feeling that was almost joy and almost fear—she was hunting, and hunts were no place for a hunter’s ghosts. “Would you at least stop calling me monster?”

  “You held my people hostage for years.”

  “I made them happy! I gave them what they wanted, and all I did in return was record what they wanted.”

  “You robbed their freedom.”

  “Oh, sure, their freedom to fight and die in a broken wasteland. Some freedom.”

  “You took them from their homes.”

  He looked over to her, and for once his too-large features, his too-big eyes, were truly unreadable. “I didn’t know then.”

  She almost believed him, but this, too, would be best discussed after the hunt. “Touch the ground here. It is wrong.”

  He knelt, spread his hands out like lily pads, and leaned into the bare rock. “Look. I—when I first fell to Orn, I didn’t understand it. It looked so … boring. Everything stayed itself all the time. And everyone wanted so many things you couldn’t have—basic stuff. I thought I could help. I made mistakes.”

  Clearly they did not teach monsters the silence of the hunt. “Do you feel it? It’s—”

  “Hollow,” he said. “Yes.” His lily-pad hands sprouted small tendrils at their edges, and those dug into the ground. “Weird. There’s a seam.” Something cracked within the rock, not at all like stone cracked—more like when lightning struck one of Old Orn’s crystal towers.

  A perfectly straight line split the slope in two and it rolled apart soundlessly, both doors vanishing into the rock, to reveal a shallow cave which ended in a wall of shadow.

  “Um,” Gray said. “Look, we don’t know what this is. We should go back, get help maybe, ask if anyone back in Refuge has seen anything like—”

  Xiara marched into the cave, through the wall, and Gray, too late to stop her, ran after.

  Shadow parted around her like a thicket, and she found herself in a ship.

  This was not a conclusion drawn from evidence, as Viv always sought the why of things. Xiara knew this was a ship, because it spoke like ships spoke to her blood. She answered at once from her soul’s depths, as her secret muscles woke and moved, as fire burned beneath her skin.

  A ship, yes, not hers—so vast and alien Zanj’s vessel seemed a raft at best. This one ship, itself, was the equal of all that ruined fleet in orbit. Xiara’s blood sought purchase on it, but her blood was too thin a rope to rein such majesty. For a moment it even sought to rule her, flooding back along the link, a great hand to climb her spine and wield her as its instrument.

  But she was a daughter of Orn, and her mothers’ mothers bound her. Fly the ship, do not be flown.

  She had lost control, in that great wrecked fleet overhead. It called to her and she failed and crashed them here. She would not let it happen again.

  She stilled her secret muscles, made her blood, what Viv called her implants, what Zanj had called her nanome, sleep. She came back to herself, slumped against the white wall of the Aft Anterior Hull Access Corridor 2773-A, Western Cloud Antenna Interproximal, and realized she’d been screaming. There was a siren, too—and red lights.

  Intruder alert.

  Gray knelt over her, holding her up, eyes wide, an expression that, if he were not a monster, she would have described as scared. “Xiara. What’s wrong?”

  “Ship,” she said, which she thought should serve.

  “It’s broken.”

  “Not ours.” Idiot. “This one. A ship.” Mothers, why wouldn’t he understand. “Everywhere.” Footsteps. She smelled them coming—burnt oranges, copper wire, the fresh grassy snap of a live cricket in the mouth. Tried to warn him, but the words weren’t there.

  “Gray.”

  A voice—whose? Turn your head, focus the eyes. Ornchiefsdaughter, pilot yourself, if you can. There, at the corner of the hall, stood a hulking shape, aged and bent, with stubby broken horns: Nioh, flanked by two glassy-eyed villagers of Refuge. Behind those three, two white webs—intruder containment point defense, words bubbling out of her contact with the ship, a knowledge that slid snakelike inside her, nested—webs that peeled off the walls, leaving no hollows to mark where they had been. Nano-thickness immobilizing restraints, probabilistically nonlethal, used in case of primary modifier impairment. She didn’t know what most of those words meant—they sounded like the way Viv talked sometimes—but she knew they were dangerous.

  “Nioh?” Gray asked. “Gatyen?” Of course Gray recognized them. They had worked side by side. The villagers’ faces were blank, and an orange light played around their temples—but the thickset elder moved with purpose. Gray was talking fast, eager: “We didn’t mean to break anything. We’re just looking for our friends. We think Viv came down this way. Honest, we don’t want to cause anybody any trouble.” Hands splayed, face open. These were his friends. They couldn’t want to hurt him.

  Nioh signaled with one hand, and the webs darted forward.

  One caught Gray’s arm, and wormed up the limb toward his mouth; Gray snatched the other out of the air before it could hit Xiara, and stared down in panic as it wove around his fingers, up his arm, clinging, constricting. He tried to shake the webs free, and failed. Tried to claw them off, but they stuck together. Xiara took one step back toward the door—she should have run, but fear froze her, and loyalty. She could not leave him.

  Gray frowned at the webs that covered his body. He darkened, like the Chief did when solving a problem. Then his skin bubbled silver between the strands of web, and burst, snaring the web inside him; the webs wriggled, scrambled, beneath his skin, but they could not escape. He chewed, somehow, with his whole body, and swallowed, and stood once more unhindered against Nioh. “That wasn’t nice,” he said. “I’m sure this is all a mistake. But I think you should tell me where our friends are now.”

  “Surrender.” Nioh’s voice was deep. She gestured again, and more webs detached smoothly from the hall, all up and down its length. And Nioh herself grew: armorfields closed her skin, and her staff sprouted a spearhead dripping light. “It will be easier
for you.”

  Gray swelled. In seconds, he grew a foot in height, and across the shoulders. He did not have muscles, and his skin wasn’t skin at all—but he grew tissue, strong and tight-wound as cables, to move him through space. His hands thickened, and his fingers sprouted long yellow claws. Red eyes blazed from his child’s face. “If you have our friends,” he said, “please don’t do this. Just send them out. Whatever you’ve done to Gatyen, whatever you’ve done to Viv, I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Xiara marched forward then, and joined him. She felt a rush as she did so, the vertigo of standing beside Gray as if he were a clansman. But he had fought for them, again and again. He saved her on Orn, devouring Pride drones. He had sheltered Viv. She would not abandon him now.

  Nioh glanced at her, and her broad mouth parted to reveal blunt, heavy teeth.

  “Xiara,” Gray said calmly. “Run.”

  “I can fight.”

  “Not against these guys.” He sounded cautious, tense, calculating. Was this how a monster sounded when he was afraid? “Find Zanj. Tell her what happened. She’ll know what to do.”

  Xiara felt the first trickle of her own fear, like the first raindrops before a gouging storm. It made her want to stay and fight. But Gray had withstood Ornclan attack for almost a year without weakening, and he sounded scared. And though Xiara knew, as all Ornclan children knew, the ways of battle, her mothers and teachers had not trained her and raised her simply to fight.

  They trained her and raised her to win.

  Sometimes, to win, you had to lose. Sometimes, to win, you had to run for reinforcements, and trust your fellows to guard your back.