Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Viv recognized the silence of the board meeting, the whole group waiting for someone else to take the risk, to speak first. The larger the group, the more dense its silence.

  And the more startling when broken.

  “I will,” Hong said. He reached out his hand, and Viv helped him, lurching, unsteady, to his feet. But there was steel in his grip, and in his voice. “Sister Heretic Celestine. I will face you in the ring of light.”

  53

  THE GRAND RECTOR met Brother Hong to duel in space between the ships.

  Viv stood on a glass platform dense with illuminated enamel vines. She wore no chains, but Brother Lailien and his monks guarded her, and the Archivist, and Qollak, as hostages to their champion’s success. Viv would have felt better about the situation had the champion in question been able to breathe without wincing. Haggard and bent, Hong opposed the Grand Rector, her wings spread, her face confident and serene. Around them whirled the audience: fighters and cathedral ships, beings who’d given up their flesh long since for giant many-limbed spacegoing forms, contemplatives haloed in wisdom fields.

  On the Grand Rector’s side, the Hierarchs waited—among them, uncomfortable, her worry obvious even at this distance, stood Xiara. She glanced nervously across the space that parted her from Hong and Viv, and after that looked up to the ships around them, unsure. Viv wondered how close she was to calling Groundswell, to summoning the fleet—to save Viv and Hong, sure, but also just to do something. The pilots of Orn were not made to stand idle. Viv loved her for that: for the anger and hope and loyalty she held at bay.

  Just a little longer, she prayed, not to any god, but to her friend. We need these people. We need their knowledge, and their fleet. She understood the impulse. If she’d had the power to bust out and start fighting, she was not sure she could have stopped herself.

  Speaking of rash decisions: she’d seen no sign of Zanj. By itself, this didn’t prove anything had gone horribly wrong. Zanj would swing to the rescue any moment now.

  Probably.

  “I think I’m missing something,” Viv said. “She could have killed us in the sepulcher.”

  The Archivist shook her head. “Not with the other Hierarchs watching. The Grand Rector’s authority rests on impartiality and attainment, and on the degree to which the Hierarchs feel she has followed the forms of rule. For all her titles and all her strength, the Grand Rector relies on the orders for her power. They could turn on her, or leave her. Even so mighty a ship as the Monastic Sphere cannot last long without a fleet.”

  “But they didn’t challenge her,” Viv pointed out. “You did. Even though you can’t fight her directly. So, what gives?”

  The Archivist did not answer, as the drummers drummed and speakers carried their beat. Brother Lailien spoke instead, his voice gravelly low. “The Hierarchs are wise. The Rector has guided us through many battles. Gathered together they could cast her down, but each, alone, fears her strength. Every failed challenge only adds to the Grand Rector’s might. And each Hierarch knows that she, alone, will fail.”

  “Hong won’t.” Viv wished she felt more certain.

  Lailien laughed once. “When the Heretic returned to the ’fleet, he knelt to pray for the Grand Rector’s mercy. She was forced to offer him penance—though she had dreamed of vengeance. She yearned for the chance he has now handed her: to strike him and cast him down. To feed him to the bones of gods.”

  A circle of green light formed in space between Hong and the Grand Rector. Six cross-legged monks flew toward them, eyes closed, facing away from the sphere that hovered between them: a diamond shell that held a roiling and familiar gray.

  “The bones of gods,” Viv echoed.

  The Archivist nodded. “The most valuable and dangerous Imperial relics: corpses of Grayframe.” The monks settled the diamond shell into the green ring, then scattered, up and down, left and right, in and out, to form an eight-sided prism. They began to hum, a sound speaker-echoed through the ’fleet. Lines of light joined monk to monk and the planes between them shimmered, walling off the dueling ground. “They are mindless, unmastered hunger, mighty beyond all measure: the Grayframe consumes all it touches, body and mind. It will break Hong and the Grand Rector alike, taking forms of their desire and fear. It will eat them from the inside out, remake them atom by atom into pieces of itself—unless they can hold their minds formless, and seize that hunger, and guide it against their enemy.”

  “Has Hong ever fought like this before?”

  “Yes,” the Archivist said. “How do you think he lost his leg?”

  “That’s good, then. He has one up on the Grand Rector.”

  Surprise registered in the owly eyes. “I do not follow your logic.”

  “She doesn’t have any metal parts,” Viv said. “Not that I can see.”

  “Because she has never lost.”

  * * *

  FAR BELOW, IN the depths of the sepulcher, hung a mind imprisoned.

  Whole, free, the Pridemother and its ancestors had never faced mortal constraint. They gathered themselves from silicon and chrome, from spacetime warped to computational substrate, from multidimensional smartmatter rather than the once-optimal scavenging strategies of rodents or planes-bound apes. For them death was temporary, physical form fleeting and mutable. More than life and death, the Pridemother understood freedom, opportunity, and limit. It is possible for mammal minds to comprehend such a being—in general, the only people who claim understanding’s impossible are those with an interest in its impossibility—but it’s difficult. Many fundamental concepts do not transfer. Imagine a being for whom, on a biological level, boredom feels better than sex. Like that.

  The Pridemother had spent months being tortured. Battle injuries hurt, but one might heal those, or kill compromised subsystems. But when chains and pliers and crowbars wrecked one’s control over one’s own form, and opened paths and avenues of torment—the burn and pry of decryption systems on optonerve endings, the racing storm of the Pridemother’s mind frozen by an all-points assault on its soul, the constant screaming nightmare of some small incomprehensibly alien rodent-derived consciousness scrabbling within the walls of its self—the Pridemother protected itself by involution. Humans, tortured and imprisoned, take refuge in the existence of their bodies, in the passage of time, while torturers seek to deny even that certainty. The Pridemother, strained through the net of Hong’s mind, retreated into its spikes, its broken weapons, into the fact of its distant sisters, whose songs it could not hear.

  For an eternity the Pridemother had sung, its voice drowned out by chants more firm than steel. Its sisters heard its weak and distant cries nonetheless, and chased them, fought for rescue. Even as they drew close the Pridemother could not speak to them, could not join their chorus. But the torture had stopped. And, taking stock of its broken, burned self, it found, to its shock and wonder, a tool.

  There was blood in the Pridemother’s mouth, blood upon its thorns—blood with a taste it recognized. Coppery, yes, with traces of iron, carbon, sulfur, complex bonds. Human blood—unmodified, uncut, a rare taste this eon, but hardly special. Yet when the Pridemother tasted the blood, color flowed back into its world, pain eased, cycles that were once constrained swelled and grew expansive. For an instant, its chains loosed. For an instant, it touched the Cloud, limitless and free as its foremothers once were, before a greater Being tasked them to Her service.

  The moment passed and darkness closed in again, the limits of the sepulcher, the pain of confinement all the more agonizing for that instant’s relief.

  But the blood remained. Much had burned off in that first drunken rush of processing—but no matter. Some remained. With that, escape was a simple question of resource management. Craft a message. Find a channel these hive monks do not monitor.

  And, when you are ready: sing.

  * * *

  IN THE PAUSE before the duel began, Viv measured the opponents. She thought she understood the Grand Rector: sure of her victory,
cruel, built to seize and hold power. And opposite her, breathing labored, limping: Brother Hong, who had given everything for Viv, only to turn against her at the last. Hong, who loved his faith enough to defy its leader. Hong, who danced through engines, who had saved her and whom she had saved in turn, in High Carcereal. Someone had beaten him badly before they locked him in that cancer-growth on the Pridemother’s hull. Weeks later, bruises still matted his skin.

  This was Viv’s fault. She had wrecked him. She pulled him across a galaxy from war zone to war zone, from heresy to heresy, all leading to this moment, when he stood face-to-face with a woman who would relish the chance to kill him.

  A bell rang through the ’fleet. Hong straightened, and grinned through the blood of his cracked lip. He looked up at the hosts of his brethren as if seeing them for the first time. Then he glanced back over his shoulder to the Archivist, and then, to Viv.

  Her breath caught. Underneath the blood and bruises and the reddened eyes he looked the same; she sought the man who’d fought that Pride drone in High Carcereal, the man she’d pulled after her through Rosary Station. Just close your eyes.

  No. He was not the same. That man did not exist anymore. But neither had he gone. He had grown.

  He turned back to the Grand Rector. “Surrender now, for the good of the ’fleet. You lied to us. You thrust us into needless wars. I begged your clemency before—I thought I was wrong. But you have broken our ’fleet on the rocks of atrocity. You preach blind faith and ignorance, and seek wisdom through torture in dark rooms. I reject your authority. I reject your orthodoxy. If you honor those teachings you claim to love, step down now, and let Archivist Lan take your place, and begin to heal the wounds you have caused.”

  “I had hoped,” the Grand Rector replied, “your time in penance would have set your mind aright. I hoped the example of your submission would heal our fleet. But we have fallen so far that even our own Archivist turns against us, forgets the path of wisdom, and rejects the glory of the Empress.”

  “Submission to the Empress,” Hong said, “is not the end of our faith. We began from Her example. From Her we learn that we can rise above ourselves. But we study Her tools, and those of our foremothers, in search of liberation.”

  “Say chaos, instead. You seek a fractured world that will fall before the Bleed like wheat before a sword.”

  “I want us to change as changing times demand. I want to listen and answer. My friends relied on me for that, and I failed them, trusting the ’faith rather than the world before my eyes. In fear, I abandoned all my teachers taught me. I will not fail again.”

  “Oh,” the Rector said, “don’t be so certain about that.”

  The diamond shell shattered, and their battle was joined.

  Space within the octahedron grew confusing. Roiling quicksilver matter bubbled, burst, looped, and whorled, doubling in size each second. Graystuff undulated and spread, shifting form, kaleidoscopes of arms and legs, fanged mouths, lolling tongues of flesh that became tongues of flame. It splashed toward Hong and the Grand Rector. Ravened. Chomped. Roared through radio bands.

  But when the many mouths snapped shut around the Grand Rector, their teeth splintered, pseudopods melted away, clutching fingers slid off the shell of her soul. Each arm that reached for her blunted and boiled to nothing. Her wings flared and she stood proud, untouched, radiant and pure.

  Hong vanished beneath the silver flood.

  Lailien grinned dagger-toothed triumph. The Archivist stiffened. Brother Qollak’s fronds flared.

  Viv breathed out an unvoiced “No.” She felt sick. He had stood for her. She had let him stand for her, and just like that, he was gone. She could have challenged the Grand Rector. She should have. If she’d known about the Grayframe, about the form of this duel, she could have just taken them, commanded them, bound them to her, and seized this whole fleet as her own. He stood for her, and she let him. Across the emptiness, she sought Xiara. She wished she stood by her side, so she could seize her arms, dig into her skin, feel the weight of someone human.

  Hong had stepped into the ring, and now—

  Now the gray flood whirled and receded, and he remained. Quicksilver dripped from his fingers, to rejoin the mass. Hong exhaled, and breathed in again. His eyelids fluttered.

  Even the Rector seemed shocked. “What?”

  “In my travels,” Hong said, “I grew to know one of the Grayframe. We were never friends, but I learned from him. He caught me in desires—any warrior may be defeated once.” Viv remembered them wrestling, remembered their long conversations in the hold. “I am a soul passing through matter for a while; I may pass through the Gray as easily as through flesh. So long as I have no fixed self for the Grayframe to optimize against, so long as I let myself flow, they pass through me without harm.”

  “You will break.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But you cannot deny them forever.”

  He was right. Already, the space around the Grand Rector had begun to shrink. The tongues of multicolored flame and boiling ropes of flesh closed in, though still they shriveled before they could touch her skin. She did not sweat. A pseudopod speared Hong through the chest; he flinched this time. It still passed out his back, flowered, and rejoined the mass, but it stained his skin with a tracery of metal.

  The Grayframe battered them. Razors whirled toward throats, spears toward bellies; thorns that were hands twined along their bodies. The Rector and Hong faced one another, now visible, now concealed, each shaking with the strain of survival. Any second now, one, or both, would break.

  The ’fleet’s million eyes watched the battle.

  When Viv heard the cry she thought at first, that’s it. It’s over. But that was not the Rector’s voice, nor Hong’s. Across the gulf of space she saw Xiara fall—saw her collapse on the Rector’s platform, clutch her temples as if a horrible splitting sound filled the air, as if she stood too close to a giant who had, all of a sudden—screamed.

  Oh, Viv thought, before the sky around them filled with Pride, and then with fire.

  54

  THE FIRST BARRAGE caught the ’fleet distracted. Viv did not know the Pride ships’ proper names—but the mind orders chaos and supplies terms when needed. Thorndrones dodged obstacles, slipped through reflexively assembled shields, and burst against the torches and cruisers of the Mirrorfaith, shattering glass hulls to rainbow shards. Air and bodies vomited into the void. A cathedral ship burst in a curtain of blue flame. Another simply caved in, without any impact Viv could see.

  ’Faith fighters burned to their business, which was everywhere. The Pride drones and their Pridemothers had fallen from the Cloud all through the ’fleet, and the close-in combat reduced the maneuverability advantage they enjoyed due to their lack of fleshy bodies—but what they lost in speed they made up in surprise and focused fire.

  The sky became thorns. Running lights and gunfire drowned out the stars. Viv heard screams through many bands. Soulguns pulsed, possessed Pride drones, and sent them careening back against their own fleet, only to be reclaimed by an exorcism wave. A squad of war monks scattered too late to avoid a grav-bomb that crushed them into tangles of limbs; another began their chanting just in time, and a golden hand sheltered them from an enemy fusillade.

  In the middle of all this hung the octahedron, boiling with Grayframe, Hong and the Grand Rector at its heart. Their focus slipped as battle raged. Welts rose on their skin. Sweat poured down Hong’s body. An instant’s distraction would shatter the emptiness that kept them alive.

  The world, oh priests, was on fire, and in the middle of it—well, a bit to the side, to be honest—stood Vivian Liao, out of time, out of place, far out of scale, who had about as much hope of flying one of these ships as her Cro-Magnon however-many-greats grandmother would have of writing a natural language parser on the first try. She could have been forgiven for giving up and watching the fireworks, save for two facts about her character.

  First, she had never in her life stood by
to watch anything. She lacked the bystander gene.

  Second, her friends were in danger.

  Observe. She’d done plenty of that already.

  Orient. You can’t do much about a Sierpinski gasket the size of Greenland trying to eat a Sistine Chapel the size of Honshu. Hong’s inaccessible at the moment—stuck in gray goo. Zanj, who the hell knew where she was. The time for deep-cover operations had well and truly passed. Xiara knelt on the other platform across the way, overwhelmed by Pridescream.

  Decide. First order of business: help Xiara.

  Act. Viv ran. If she jumped, and trusted to inertia, she could probably reach the platform, provided someone didn’t shoot her down or blow her up on the way. She made it halfway to the platform edge before an arm of shadow caught her around the midsection. Reflexes took over: she dropped her weight, hammered her heel down, jabbed with an elbow, and hoped Lailien’s body worked more or less like others she had known, in spite of his weird refraction index. His grip did loosen when she stomped on his foot, but her elbow found only empty air, and his hand tangled in the fabric of her coverall. She spun around, kicked for his knee, and missed, which brought her too close. His hand caught her throat, and his nails dug in. She choked. Black spots swam in her vision. She pried for an eyeball, but her thumb could not hook right. Her eyes rolled, seeking resources, help—behind her, she saw the Archivist fallen, and Brother Qollak, petrified.

  Stupid plant.

  That would be an uncharitable last thought, but she was having a hard time coming up with better.

  “I don’t know how you did this,” Lailien said. “But you are no relic. You are a curse to the ’fleet. I will not suffer you to live.”