“She has guarded us, and we have thrived.”
“It’s a coward’s strategy. You pose no threat to the Empress, sheltered here. She just hasn’t bothered to crush you yet. She bides her time. Your Queen’s afraid, and Zanj was never afraid.”
Yish dropped to the stair before them; he clutched his clipboard tight, wrinkling the pages of his forms with his thumb. “Sister. Please.” His voice sank to a whisper, and his eyes flicked up, and over, into the riot of green and glory. Viv followed his glance but saw nothing at first—then noticed a brilliant yellow bird with a long tail, silent, staring with its weird dark avian eye. The birdsong, Viv realized, had stopped. “You have been away for a long time, and you do not know our ways. Queen Zanj has done what she has done for our sake, in our defense, and we must not question her. We live in comfort and safety here, on the edge of a deep pit full of tigers. If the nexus should fall, our world would shatter with it—and as the Empress sends her fleet against us, she also sends her subtle agents, her spies and informers. You come in the company of strangers, and your story rings of truth—no agent would concoct such a fancy, nor would they arrive in so obvious a manner. But the Empress’s whispers are powerful. A mere three hundred years ago, even our Queen’s own advisors, Feng of the Right, Aunj of the Left, Osso Skysinger—the Empress turned them all. They rose against Zanj, and our Queen cast them down into the depths beneath her tower. In her infinite mercy she brings them forth every twenty years and begs them to recant their treachery, accept her forgiveness—and every twenty years they spurn her. So, sister, welcome home. But for your own sake, listen as you learn our ways. And never, ever question the Queen. Do you understand?” He held out one hand, imploring.
The birdsong and the wind’s music kept silent. Ships slipped past. Viv watched the confusion work through Zanj’s body, followed by anger, followed by a worrying stillness. She had found her people whole, when she expected to find their bones. But a shadow lay over them, a shadow that wore her face and name.
“I do.” Zanj reached out, and took his hand.
Yish sagged in relief—and as he sagged, Zanj pulled him toward her, spun him round, and caught his neck in the crook of her elbow. The Star, shrunk needle-fine, she pressed against his throat, dimpling the skin.
“Now,” Zanj said, her voice vicious low. “You said your Queen placed her generals in prison. Tell me where.”
62
THEY LEFT YISH trussed in one of the storage gourds that seemed to pass for closets here, unconscious thanks to a bit of contact poison Gray claimed would wear off in an hour and leave the young gold-furred Pasquaran with no aftereffects worse than a hangover. Zanj locked the gourd, and waved them downstairs toward a vine bridge.
As they crossed, hundreds of meters above the invisible ground, Viv asked her, whispering in case the birds could hear: “What the hell are you doing?”
“That’s not me,” Zanj said with a nod to the glass tower that bore her shape, invisible now through the trees.
“It looks like you.”
“It’s not,” she snarled. “Whoever the hell that is, she’s turned my people into the Empress’s bodyguards. Look at these trees, so managed, so even. One branch every five meters, regular as clocks.”
“So?”
Zanj whirled on her. “These are mandalons! They should grow so dense even you could climb them! There should be bugs the length of your arm. There should be karshvines and zombie ants and hungry flowers, and instead there’s this mess, with all its edges rounded down.”
“You were gone a long time, Zanj. And they’ve been stuck here all that while. They might have changed things.”
“The trees? The sky? You saw that bird, Viv. You saw it looking at us. Who was that, behind its eyes?”
Zanj fell silent. The bridge creaked beneath them, and wind rustled leaves against leaves. Hong and Xiara breathed. Gray didn’t, not that he ever did unless he had a particular point to make. But aside from the whir of distant machinery, speeder lifts and who knew what other nonsense, the woosh of landing ships and passing speeders, the trees stood songless and quiet. They might have been petrified a thousand years ago, turned to stone, then painted by artists with dead, steady hands and slender brushes to mimic life. A good painter could make you think their canvases were moving.
Utter irrational fear trickled down Viv’s neck and down the hollows that flanked her spine. She did not know why at first. She turned from Zanj to the forest and back in search of anything out of place, and found nothing. Her fear grew. “You might be wrong. We just got here. They could help us.”
“Oh, I’m sure they would.” One corner of Zanj’s lip curled up, completely without humor. “Haven’t you been paying attention, Viv? They’d be oh so happy to bring us in. To wrap themselves around us. They’d strangle us to death before we realized it wasn’t a hug. I don’t know what sickness got this place while I was gone, but it’s not me.” Only at the end did she sound desperate. The rest sagged with the weight of truth.
“She’s right,” Xiara said. “I can feel the station. There are so many people here, all their minds woven through the Cloud. And they’re being managed. I don’t think even they know. It guides what they can see, it binds what they can know. And it’s looking for us.”
“Do you believe her, at least?” Zanj asked.
Viv didn’t want to. That was the truth. She wanted to believe they had come through the wall to safety, that Zanj’s people waited here to receive and help them, that whoever ruled them would understand the danger the Empress posed, and turn against her for once and all. That this, at least, would be easy.
Couldn’t they have landed, for once, on a non-shitty planet?
Hong set his hand on her arm. “Viv,” he said. His voice sounded even, and cautious. “The birds.”
Of course, she almost snapped back, of course we can’t hear the birds, Zanj said that already, but Hong was not the kind of person to repeat the obvious. And he was staring out and up, off the bridge, into the trees.
She had seen nothing out of place in the forest before, nothing that did not belong. But birds belonged in a forest. Small, bright-colored birds a passing glance might take at first for flowers. Immense black scaly-eyed unblinking birds with carrion beaks, flaking bark off the great trees as they shifted weight. Tiny almost-hummingbirds, sculling wings invisible. Sleek owl-like birds with heads turned at odd angles, their great dark front-facing saucer eyes fixed on the bridge.
On Viv, and on her friends.
If she had a flashlight she could have swept it through them and watched the jewel glints flick on and off as the birds blinked away the brilliance. If they did blink. But she realized with a chill that the birds would not have blinked, that they and the mind that guided them would match the light glare for glare—would have stared into the sun, not the fake sparksun in the station’s sky but the real fierce sun of Viv’s lost Earth, until they boiled. The will that led them was that strong.
“Okay.” Viv had to swallow to loosen her clenched throat before she could say anything more. “You have a point.”
As one, the birds fluffed and spread their wings.
“What now?”
“Now,” Zanj said, “we fight our way to whoever’s done this.”
“And then?”
She shrugged, as if there were no simpler question in the world. “Then we hit them until they stop.”
Before Viv could think of a response, the birds attacked.
63
THE BIRDS TORE through the forest. They did not call or cry, but their wings beat furiously like dry leaves tossed in a hurricane. Viv curled herself over Xiara, covered her with her arms, and she was vaguely aware of Gray shifting form before the birds struck. Talons and beaks drew bright, painful scratches across her arms and shoulders and back. Nails caught and pulled her short hair. For that first gross minute she only heard wingbeats, and the creak of tendons against the wind.
The worst, for Viv, was the smell of them,
acrid oil and down and that weird tang of old paper. That smell, that taste, that was the birds inside her. Airborne bits of them filtered into her as she breathed.
Then it was over. The birds swept past, and Viv and the others were running, over the bridge and up a corkscrew ramp as the forest around them moved, vines uncoiling like snakes from tree branches to slither toward them. She took stock as they sprinted through the wood: Zanj in the front, unharmed; Gray in the rear, shifting back from the shell he’d grown to shelter them into his customary, more mobile form. Hong bore a host of minor scrapes, and one deep cut on his arm. And Xiara—
“Don’t do that again,” Xiara called back over her shoulder.
“What?”
“Protect me,” she said. “How am I supposed to save you, if you keep saving me first?”
Viv did not answer her except with a grin. That grin made all the difference when the column of birds circled back—Gray’s shell saved them long enough to reach the lee of an enormous mandalon tree—and it made all the difference when vines fell from above and snared Viv’s neck before Hong’s clubs burned through them. Because if Xiara could grin, and take umbrage at being saved, they were still fine. Even if all Pasquarai was out to kill them.
A second wave of birds struck them from the side. Something wren-sized slammed into Viv’s temple. Small nails scraped her cheek; she caught the wren’s tiny body and threw it off the platform into space; it whirled and whirled, wings flaring in a mass of other wings, and she did not see if it caught its balance before it struck ground.
She looked up then, and out into the canopy. There were more birds coming, and other things, too. Jagged-jawed centipedes the length of her arm. Red scurrying carpets that must be ants, spanning gaps from tree to tree with bridges of their writhing bodies. And behind them all, Pasquarans in black uniform swinging from branch to branch, slung with weaponry, their movements in perfect time. Viv did not need to stare into their eyes to know they’d have the same glassy look as the birds’. Nobody home. Busy signal. This body is otherwise engaged, please try again later.
How would it feel to be used like that? Would you rail, would you scream? Poor officious eager Yish had seemed happy with his lot, excited to share Pasquarai with guests. He might call it an honor to be taken up like a tool and used, he might even enjoy being held by some mind he believed greater and more noble than his own, take more shelter in it the greater the atrocity he was driven to commit—free to enjoy the visceral thrill of flesh gobbed on his hands while feeling a just and proper revulsion at his deeds. He had no choice. This was not his will. He merely acted out the grim, irresistible judgment of Another.
Viv did not know these people. She tried to imagine her friends, her lovers, this blank-eyed, this willingly surrendered. In some cases, she did not have to imagine. She had lost cousins and coworkers to the last round of hysteria back home, people she’d known and even almost trusted, who refused to see what was coming until far, far too late. After the dust cleared, after things bottomed out, a few repented. Most slept on, and refused to talk about what they’d been, what they’d become. So things got worse.
She had a sudden terrified vision of what that would look like after a thousand years, or three thousand, a culture grown like a kitten in a bottle, its claws curling back into its flesh, its bones warped so it could not stand. And then she turned right, and saw Zanj under wire tension, firm, and understood her rage.
“Can you fight off a forest?”
Zanj tightened her fists. Her tail twitched. She looked so ready to try. “Not without tipping my hand. I don’t want whoever’s running this show to recognize me yet.”
“We need to get out of here.” Blood trickled down her scalp.
“Stay behind me,” Zanj growled, and jumped.
* * *
“I’D IMAGINED SOMETHING more subtle,” Viv said after their hijacked flatbed speeder broke through the forest canopy.
Zanj ignored her and gunned the engines. Viv’s seat belt slipped out of her hands—good thing she didn’t need one in the chase that followed, as they smashed through vines and foliage and veered at high g to avoid the interdictor guns of the speeders that erupted from the trees below.
Viv, under pressure, tended to resort to sarcasm.
That said, her lack of seat belt turned out to be an asset when hoverbelt-clad security personnel leapt aboard from a flanking speeder to rush the controls. They moved with lurching puppet-speed, their guns and eyes level, and Viv appreciated the freedom to dodge and duck and fight back without having to unhook herself first.
Gray spread his arms gelatinous and wide, snared three of the cops, and dumped them overboard. Hong fought two, his face smooth save for a half twist of smile. Viv kneed one of them in the crotch, which worked well enough. Xiara caught the back of his uniform and threw him off the speeder.
“Shouldn’t we lie low?” Viv shouted to Zanj. “Plan our attack?”
“No.” Zanj did not turn from the controls. “This ends now.”
Birds billowed from the forest, cries and calls and trills merging to a wail, and Zanj pulled their speeder into a sheer climb. Viv caught the back of a chair to keep from falling. Branches curled between them and the sky, but Zanj struck the trees with the Star and they careened through.
Viv’s grip slipped, she tumbled, and Gray caught her. They broke free into the ring-split sky—where four massive goose-winged craft circled, each emblazoned with a sunburst shield insignia. They looked official and violent even before they opened fire.
“The longer we stay,” Zanj explained as she cursed and veered and dodged, “the more time this place has to get us. Now it doesn’t know who we are, or what we can do. But it’s learning.” A shot from one of the goosewings caught their speeder in the side. The lurch would have tumbled them all down into the trees had Gray not spread himself into a net to keep them on board. Zanj tried to level the speeder, but the best she could do was keep it listing to the left, trailing smoke. It flew straight—more or less. Zanj swore. A goosewing drew behind them, gained altitude; its belly guns swiveled into firing position.
Hong stood, one leg wrapped through his safety belt, his clubs drawn, and waited. His robe flapped in the wind, his expression serene, head cocked as if listening. Before the goosewing’s guns spoke, his arms began to move.
His clubs met the guns’ plasma in midair, and when the blinding flash cleared, Viv saw—only saw, seconds would pass before she could hear again—two goosewings dropping toward the canopy, gushing smoke and trailing fireworks displays of sparks. Hong blinked, serenity broken to surprise, his face caked with charcoal, his robes flared out at jagged angles from his body, his clubs crackling with current—but whole.
“Yish said—”
“Whoever’s running this show,” Zanj growled with an angry jerk of her head toward the spire drawing ever closer, “she’s not me.” Zanj hauled back on the controls, but still their speeder lost altitude. She yanked the stick one last time, then punched the control panel, which shattered.
“I don’t see how that was supposed to improve our situation,” Viv said.
“Hold on.” She unbuckled herself, judged distance to the nearest goosewing, and jumped.
She landed out of sight, leaving Viv to ponder the smashed controls, the rapidly approaching tree line, and her own surging white-knuckled indignation, for which she was, on a detached level, grateful, since it drowned out the terror. She tugged on the stick, which responded even less to her than it had to Zanj, looked up again, and saw bodies rain from the goosewing onto which Zanj had vaulted; it surged forward, swept beneath their own damaged craft, and, on its bridge, at the stick, Zanj raised one hand, inviting: jump!
Arriving on the goosewing’s deck—Gray threw Viv across the gap, with her grudging permission, and Hong caught her—did little to improve matters, unfortunately, as deadly metal rocs screamed across the sky toward them. Military craft. And, though the Zanjspire towered mountainous high, they were still mile
s away from its root.
“The imposter,” Zanj shouted over her shoulder, over the wind, over the sound of blaster fire, “threw my friends in jail because they stood up to her! Does that sound like something I’d do?”
“Yes,” Viv admitted.
“Definitely,” Gray said.
Hong nodded.
“If you were in a bad mood,” Xiara said. “Or a good one. Or just a mood, generally.”
“I hate you all.” It was the most lighthearted Zanj had sounded since landing. The rocs fired; Zanj danced left, danced right, but even their misses singed the air, and left Viv coughing. “Okay. Dammit. Hold on, I’ll nab one of those birds.”
“Don’t.” Xiara opened the wheels of her eyes, and spread silver traces across her skin. One hand crooked clawlike and with a snarl she lifted it, fast, as if upending a table. As one, the rocs veered at right angles into the sky and scattered, spinning frantic for control. She slumped back into the chair, exhausted; Hong, impressed, offered her a hand of congratulation, which she clutched as if it were the only thing keeping her in her seat.
That was when the artillery opened fire.
The goosewing lasted longer than Viv expected, thanks to Zanj’s evasive action and to an uncharacteristically wild barrage from the ground guns. Perhaps the animating intelligence hadn’t expected them to get this far; perhaps it wasn’t used to artillery, or didn’t want to blast them out of the sky without learning where they’d come from, and how. But one volley caught the goosewing’s underside, and the control panel blared warnings, and Gray gathered them close and wrapped them in a bubble of his glittering substance, and when the speeder blew they soared out and down on wings he made to land, Graystuff flowing from their limbs, in a crater at the Zanjspire’s foot.
Zanj found her feet first, and Viv, to her own surprise, found hers second—Hong and Xiara struggled to rise, both exhausted by the battle, and Gray was still gathering himself into a pool at the crater’s deepest point, digesting soil and grass as he pulled himself together.
Empress of Forever Page 48
