Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Now the only question was: How?

  56

  THEY TOOK TURNS waiting for Hong to wake up.

  Lan, whom everyone still called Archivist rather than Grand Rector, had issued him a room of high, clear windows gazing out into space and the kaleidoscope of the ’fleet. She ordered doctors from a hundred worlds to attend him with medicines and surgical nanites, with transfusions of liquid that was not blood, with artifacts whose purpose not even Zanj or Gray could say for certain. Viv did not scoff. Superstition or subtle science—she didn’t have the time for double-blind trials to say which was which in this place, and the ’faith seemed to know what they were doing. If they’d come to her with a piece of the True Cross she’d have said, sure, give it a try.

  Hong lay breathing but otherwise still. Silver traces laced the skin of his chest, where his guard had cracked and the duel remade him. “Just metal,” Gray said huffily. “I don’t see what you’re so bent out of shape about. It does all the same work as the rest of his skin—only better. When he wakes, he’ll be stronger than before.”

  That when seemed optimistic even to Viv.

  After the others left she sat alone, cross-legged on cushions, and watched him for a sign. She wished she could peer through his skin into his soul—reach out and cup him and tell him there was a world out here, with people waiting.

  “You made a difference,” she told him on the first night. “You ended a war. And I came back for you. If I’d listened to you in the first place, maybe we would have found a better way.”

  She waited for some sign he had heard her, and felt all the more foolish for expecting one. He didn’t have the decency to twitch, or alter the slow rhythm of his breath. Even comatose, he remained infuriating.

  On the second day, the war council met in the Grand Rector’s meditation chamber, which was no less impressive with the softly glowing Archivist hovering cross-legged above the dais than it had been with the old Grand Rector towering at its center. At least Viv wasn’t bound in forty pounds of chain this time.

  That wasn’t the only difference. Celestine had stood like an axis of the world, a single pillar without which creation would crash. Archivist Lan drew the world toward her and regarded each of its facets with a jeweler’s care.

  She held the map Viv had opened.

  “The Hierarchs,” the Archivist said, “think we are not ready for this assault—not after months of running battle with the Pride. Even the attempt, some claim, is blasphemy. Few oppose resisting the Empress on principle—to learn from Her that we may one day surpass Her has long been the aim of our faith. But we expected this confrontation would come when we were ready, when we achieved a power like Hers. We are great, as are the Pride,” and here Viv realized that even Zanj had grown, because she did not scoff when the Archivist spoke well of the Pride, “but neither of us could be so arrogant as to claim to match Her, together or separately. I have called you here in search of a plan.” Her gaze passed over each of them in turn; Viv bore it without comment, Zanj rolled her eyes, Gray shifted uncomfortably, Xiara blushed. “You are mighty. But you cannot stand against the Empress yourself.”

  “No,” Viv said before Zanj could jump in all defiant. “We can’t beat her in a fair fight. I want to play this smart.” The Archivist’s gaze had grown more piercing since her elevation. More of the Cloud at her disposal, Viv imagined—not to mention her awareness of the ’fleet, millions of extra limbs, mostly self-governing but present all the same, grafted to her soul. “The Empress is one person, under everything. She can’t be opposed, but she can be misled, misdirected. Right now, I think she’s bringing all her attention to bear on my simulation, unpicking it strand by strand. That’s her mission-critical objective. I feel her in my dreams. It hurts.” She sped on. “She’s used to fighting one thing at a time: one civilization, one battle, one fleet. If we breach the Citadel and hit her all along her border, she’ll be distracted. Then a small team can push through and take her by surprise, while her focus is split between the simulation and the fronts.”

  “Will that be enough?”

  “We have to hope, and we have to try. I don’t even touch the Cloud, and I can feel what she’s doing—so you must have felt it, too.”

  The Archivist bowed her head. “She is binding the Cloud to Her, all through the galaxy. Whole sectors we once thought impregnable have fallen, their cycles reclaimed for some purpose we can only guess. The Bleed circles, gnawing at the edges of Her Citadel, unable to enter—yet.”

  Somehow the situation sounded worse when someone else described it. Viv had felt this way when politics went sour back home: she knew that whatever happened she’d keep fighting, with her teeth if necessary. The real terror came when she heard someone else talk through their inevitable defeat. She hadn’t found a better answer back in the day than to ignore other people and press on. She wasn’t sure this was the right technique then, or now. Either way, she let it go.

  The Archivist finished her litany, and fixed Viv with a question. “Do you think two fleets will suffice to stop Her?”

  “Not just two,” she said. “I have other ideas.”

  Even before her elevation, the Archivist had been excellent at waiting.

  “First, we’ll ask Zanj’s old allies for help.”

  “The hell we will,” Zanj cut in. “I knocked her over the head with a spaceship, remember?”

  “We’ll ask,” Viv said. “And I think we know another fleet that could be brought back into service.” Xiara’s eyes flicked left toward her, but she said nothing. “Beyond that—”

  Gray shook his head before Viv could finish. “No. I mean, boss, I’ll ask, I sure will, but you have to understand, She made the Grayframe to serve Her. It feels skin-crawling even to be part of this conversation. I’m not saying they’re a lost cause, I mean, look at me, anyone can change, but we can’t count on them for, you know.” He trailed off, finally feeling the weight of Viv’s eyes as she waited for him to finish. “Help.”

  “We can try,” Viv said. “At the very least, do you think you can get us past them? Keep them busy, or convince them to stand down?”

  “I’ll do my best.” She knew him well enough by now to see the fear he hid.

  “Two problems,” Zanj said. “First, we don’t know where we’re going. Nobody’s mapped the Citadel since it was closed off. The Empress might be anywhere inside. Even if we did know where she was—Viv, how do you plan to breach the wall in four places at once?”

  “That,” she said, “is where the Archivist comes in.”

  The Archivist raised the map sphere. Stars took shape over them, revolving, the whole galactic pinwheel tagged and coded in an angular script Viv could not read. “We found this in a broken vessel of the Diamond Fleet, flown by the Empress’s allies in the last Bleedwar. We suspected it was a map, but could not open it until Vivian came along. And, as you may notice…”

  “It’s complete.” Zanj pawed at stars. The hologram warped and wriggled around her fingers.

  “Complete, yes—and surprising. We’ve found a few sectors inside the wall itself, between the Citadel and normal space. Our analysis suggests these sectors are nodes that sustain the system. Linchpins. If the right one breaks…”

  “The wall unravels,” Zanj said, wondering. “It’s possible.”

  “We have not finished our decryption. We’ll know more soon. But if our hypothesis proves true, we could infiltrate the wall, find the linchpin, and remove it, paving the way for a broader assault. Meanwhile, our ’fleet is still recovering, as is Brother Hong. But the analysis will take time.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  “And yet time is needed. I suggest we rest. We will need our strength.”

  So they rested, and kept vigil.

  Still, watching a man sleep for nights on end got boring pretty quick, so instead of watching Hong, Viv began to search the room for traces the others left. Zanj scratched the deck plating with her fingernail in her idleness, scrapes parallel
and close together as record grooves; every night after Viv relieved her she found the whole room subtly altered, medical devices shifted on shelves, cushion a few inches to the left or right, Hong’s pillows fluffed or piled about him in a nest. Gray left the wastebasket full of bamboo snack packages, aluminum pouches of nutrient paste, and cracked peanut shells. Xiara drank cup after cup of bad tea-flavored water, which Viv didn’t even know where she had found, since the ’faith would bring you good tea if you asked—and she read. Actual paper books. The Archivist must have brought them for her, or Brother Qollak, whom Zanj had knocked out and trapped in a glass tank soon after her arrival but had left otherwise unharmed, and who, to everyone’s surprise, seemed to have taken the whole thing in the spirit of a practical joke. (When Viv asked him about this, it emerged that, on the planet where he grew up, government in general was regarded as a particularly grotesque and lethal practical joke.) Viv couldn’t read the script on Xiara’s books, but their cover illustrations, flushed in pink and blue and involving various bare-chested sophonts of a range of apparent genders, suggested that some things hadn’t changed in a few thousand years.

  She asked Xiara about the books one night in bed—she tried to stay polite, just expressing interest, but Xiara blushed anyway, and when Viv laughed she rolled onto her side, and threw a pillow that hit Viv in the face. “They’re nice,” she said after the ensuing tickling vengeance had wound its way through the usual gasping sequence of affairs. “Simple.” She lay back, slick, one hand tracing her belly. “You know what the problem is, and you know how it will all turn out. It’s fun to watch it happen. Unlike all this.” She didn’t mean the bed they shared, or the surrounding room, hung with mandala tapestries, or the ’fleet outside. “I don’t feel sure of anything anymore. I’m not even sure who I am.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “I was Ornchiefsdaughter—that meant adventures, spear in hand, and someday, perhaps, I’d stand for the clan in great moots in my mother’s place.”

  “You’ve had adventures.”

  “I left because I wanted the stars. But now—I’m someone else. I’ve seen the stars, sailed them. I fought gods. I’ve been a fleet. Even here, I can feel it waiting for me. And then there’s us.”

  “Yes.” Viv stretched, and stroked her. “What about us?”

  “I reached for you to save you from my mother, and because you were beautiful, and exciting. It started simple. It didn’t stay that way.”

  “It never does,” Viv said, and kissed her. “I used to think that was a problem. Before I met you, I mean. I kept tripping into things that felt good, freaking out when they got deeper—when I had to change, or when they started to change for me.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Oh, I fucked up. Over and over again.” It felt odd to smile at those memories, but distance, time, and circumstance made all the nonsense which seemed so important to her back then feel silly and small. “I chased them away. Work was my big trick, my hole card: I’d disappear for months at a time, then show up again unannounced with huge plans now that I was free, come on, let’s hide out for three months in the Philippines, eagle safari in Mongolia, things like that. Most of my partners couldn’t drop their lives to go with me; even if they did, they knew I’d just disappear right after, back to work.”

  “Eagle safari?”

  “Big birds,” she said. “You hunt with them. They’re huge, about the size of your whole body—but, birds, right, so they’re very light. Like someone took cotton candy and made it sharp.”

  Xiara set her hand on Viv’s biceps, squeezed, and made a skeptical face. “It’s a good thing they’re so light. Otherwise you couldn’t carry them.”

  “Hey.” She tried to reach for her, but Xiara pressed her arm down to the mattress field. Viv could have fought free if she had to, but it felt good to let herself be held down. “I’ll have you know people think I’m pretty buff, where I come from.”

  “I would go hunting with you,” Xiara said. “And the eagles. And if you tried to run away, to work or anywhere else, I would keep you by my side.”

  “I can be wily.” One hand on Xiara’s elbow, another on her side, a twist of the hips, and she went tumbling; Viv mounted her, pushed her shoulders against the sheets, and grinned, only Xiara was smiling in another way, and pulled her down, into another aching, gasping interval. Viv went with it: let herself be held, played, worked. When she tried to reciprocate, she found her hands pressed away, pressed back, pinned down. She knew there was something wrong, but in that moment, as she gasped for breath, she felt too selfish, too hungry, to stop, to ask what.

  After, as she lay breathing heavily, sprawled open, unspooled, the words came easier. “You’re worried,” she said. “If you don’t want to tell me, fine. But you can.”

  Xiara sat up, and stared out into the ’fleet. “You’re too good at that.”

  “Practice.”

  “Your plan depends on the fleet. On my fleet.”

  Viv waited.

  “When I sank through Groundswell into the fleet, I felt … whole. I didn’t need this anymore.” She lifted her arm and let it fall, as if her puppeteer had lost interest. “The meat, the bones. All I wanted was the sky. Until you came back.” Her fingers dug furrows in the sheets. “When you’re here, I remember what this body’s for. I left the rush of all those extra senses, of antimatter engines, of thinking faster than light for this, because I like this. I like you. But you need the fleet. I don’t think I could bear to forget how tachyons taste again—to make myself this small after being so large.” Her eyes glistened. “You must think I’m a fool.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t want to let you down. But I want to fight by your side as me. As Groundswell, maybe. Not as the fleet. I should be ready to offer up my flesh, my self, for you. It is my duty to fly and fight. But I do not want to give this up.”

  Viv wrapped her arms around her, and her legs, rested her head on her shoulder, did not speak. Xiara held her while she was held in turn.

  And after a long while, Xiara said, “You have an idea.”

  Viv blinked. “And you say I’m good.”

  “I learn fast.”

  “I thought this was one of those times when you might need support more than ideas.”

  “I would value either. Or both.”

  “Well.” Viv breathed, and felt Xiara breathing. “In that case. I did have a thought.”

  57

  THE ORNCLAN WENT to war.

  They took no joy in battle. They boasted and sang of it, and trained from the day they could first hold spears, but boasts and songs and the display of scars were just another sort of shield, tough hide pulled taut to guard weak flesh. The warriors of Orn used their boasts and dances and songs to shelter from the truth that they were no less mortal than anyone else. The fiercest might fall to a bullet if their songs failed, or sicken from a cut. All who gathered near the fireside to trade tales knew this without need to speak of it. They took no joy in battle, the warriors of Orn, but in survival, and victory.

  The Ornchief led them. By rights her eldest daughter should have gone in her stead, but her eldest daughter had traipsed off a-voyaging beyond the stars, and around the fire they already whispered prophecies of her return. The prophecies were jokes so far; those who told them knew of few women less likely than Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter to return upon a crystal chariot, rainbow-crowned, to lead her people to glory in the stars. Had she a crystal chariot, they said in their cups, around the fire, Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter would use it to seek out another, shinier crystal chariot, and another after that. If she ever made it home, that one, it would be because she had chased some beauty around the universe and back again. And yet, though the elders spoke those prophecies and laughed, already their grandchildren repeated them for truth.

  So the Ornchief led. Her next youngest son showed promise as a builder and planner, not a fighter; the son after that was eight. She led, trusting Djenn at the flank guard, an
d crept through thin trees, over fallen towers, toward the camp.

  A high-pitched whine cut the air, and she bent low behind a vine-draped statue of some name-scoured ancestor; a black needle bobbed through the sky, an enemy wasp, searching. The Ornchief let out her breath and trusted the runes of her armor, and trusted, too, Djenn’s flank guard force to hold their fire. None of the warriors at her command would dare draw or strike before her whistle, but Djenn’s hotheads might slip his rein at any moment. Outnumbered, they could not afford discovery.

  She could blame no one but herself for this war. She had raided for minds to feed the Graytooth; she let travelers fall into his maw. When they escaped, their families, rightly, sought vengeance. So would the Ornchief, in their place. And after the Pride came, after the battle that scorched heavens and Orn, after the huge burning chunks of metal Zanj scattered as she tore her enemies asunder wrecked the Ornclan’s decades-wrought defenses, neighboring clans who for years had quailed before the Ornclan’s might began to whisper that together they might do more than take revenge. Confederated, they might seize the manufactory and split its wealth between them. Many no doubt considered such a move and backed away out of respect for tradition or for the Ornchief herself, but the clans of Kronn Ornchief called Bloodarm, and Alyra Ornchief called Carver, rich and strong from recent victories and long covetous of the Ornchief’s valley and her manufactory, were brave or stupid or eager enough to try.

  Such an alliance might seem ideal, but it would kill them both, even should they triumph. Any union that seized the manufactory would tear itself apart in the struggle for control that followed. There was, after all, only one manufactory. One small, fierce clan might guard it, trade its wealth with others, and so live, so long as it never became too rich or too complacent, and served its neighbors well—but two large clans such as the Bloodarms and the Carvers would come to grief over the wealth it offered, and scheme against one another. In prosperity, small resentments had ways of growing large. War would follow within a decade, and war between two clans would attract others.