by Ken Liu
The Council of Five had known that such a day would arrive. For the moment they were safe in their subterranean fastness. But their safety could not last forever. They knew that they could not negotiate with their immediate attackers. The colonial masses did not think in words, did not recognize negotiation or compromise. They understood only heuristic target recognition and ballistic calculations. If Nasteng had had more technologically advanced defenses, it might have been able to infect the attackers and subvert their programming, but its long isolation and cultural diffidence toward the algorithmic disciplines precluded any such possibility.
One item Nasteng did possess was a beacon. The Falcon Councilor had obtained it generations ago. Her souvenir of that quest was a gash across her cheek that wept tears that dried into crystals hooking into her flesh. At regular intervals she had to rip her face off and allow a new one to grow, or she would have been smothered. You would have thought that she would want as little to do with the beacon as possible. But no: when the Council of Five gathered around a table set with platters of raw meat and the Wine of Blossoms that was their particular privilege, the Falcon Councilor insisted on being the one to activate the beacon.
The beacon was no larger than a child’s fist, and was shaped like a ball. Light sheened across it as though it had swallowed furnaces. If you held it to your ear, you could hear a distant music, as of broken glass and glockenspiels hung upside-down and sixteenth notes played upon the spokes of decrepit bicycle wheels.
The Falcon Councilor lifted the beacon, then turned it over. It clung to her palm, pulsing like an unhealthy nacrescence.
“I don’t see any point in delay,” the Snowcat Councilor said. It wasn’t so much that he was always impatient, although he was, as that he had never gotten along with her.
“We have to be sure of what we’re doing,” the Falcon Councilor said. “There’s no way to rescind the signal once sent.”
“Falcon,” the Tree Councilor said in their voice like shifting rock and gravel. “We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t sure. Surely you don’t think it would be better to die without attempting anything?”
“No, of course not,” the Falcon Councilor said.
“Then do whatever it is that you do with that thing,” the Snake Councilor said from the dark corner where she was flipping through a book. The book’s pages were empty, although some of them had been dog-eared.
The last councilor, the Dragon Councilor, said nothing, only watched with eyes like etched metal. But then, he never spoke, although sometimes he condescended to vote. They were never tempted to disregard him, however. He was, after all, the head of the Gardeners.
“All right,” the Falcon Councilor said. She flung the beacon toward the floor. It sheared through the air with a whistle almost too high-pitched to be heard and shattered against the floor.
The beacon’s shards could be counted, yet they hurt the eye. They were more like collections of brittle dust than splinters or solids. As the councilors watched, the shards reassembled themselves. Where there had been a single sphere, there were now two. Then both spheres dissipated in a vapor that smelled of antifreeze and disintegrating circuit boards.
“I hope that’s not toxic,” the Snowcat Councilor said, narrowing his eyes at the Falcon Councilor.
Whatever response she might have thrown back at him was interrupted by the formation of two doors right above the beacon—beacons?—in a jigsaw of fissures.
“Well,” the Snake Councilor said softly, “I hope we have enough wine to offer our guests. Assuming they imbibe.” The others ignored her, on the chance that she wasn’t joking.
Their guests numbered two. They didn’t so much step through the doors as emerge like cutouts suddenly fleshed.
The first was a woman, tall, with the finest of veils over her face. She wore soft robes with bruise-colored shadows, and her cloak was edged with dark feathers. The Snake Councilor glanced at the Falcon Councilor, but the latter’s face was an unreadable labyrinth of refractions. The other guest was a man, neatly shaven. His hair was black, his eyes of indeterminate color.
The Falcon Councilor inclined her head to them. “We are grateful for your promptness,” she said. “We are Nasteng’s Council of Five, and the nature of our emergency should be clear to you.”
“Yes,” the woman said. The man bowed, but did not speak. There was something forced about the curve of his mouth, as though the lips had been sutured together. “You may call me Ahrep-na. I have a great deal of experience with situations like yours. I assume you’re familiar with my past successes, but if you need—”
“We know,” the Falcon Councilor said. She had heard the name of Ahrep-na, although it was not safe to use it until she had given you permission. It was why she had left Nasteng all those years ago, in search of Ahrep-na’s token.
“In that case,” Ahrep-na said, “we will need to discuss the contract. My methods are particular.”
The Falcon Councilor thought wryly of Nasteng’s high generals, some of whom were rather more useful than others. Most of whom were rather less. One of the dangers of having its officers drawn almost exclusively from the nobility, or from people who bought their commissions. “That won’t be an issue,” she said. Behind her, she heard a harrumph from the Snowcat Councilor, but he didn’t interrupt otherwise.
They spoke some more about operational and logistical details, about courtesies blunt and banal, and circled eventually to the matter of payment. Given Ahrep-na’s bluntness about everything else, her diffidence about this matter puzzled the Falcon Councilor. But bring it up she did. “Our contracts are tailored to the individual situation,” Ahrep-na said. “Up-front, we require—” She named a sum. It was staggering, but so was annihilation.
Finance was not the Falcon Councilor’s domain. The Snake Councilor turned to a page in her empty book, frowned at a column of figures that wasn’t there, and said, “It will be done in two days.”
Ahrep-na’s smile was pleased. “We will also require the fruits of a year’s harvest.”
“You’ll have to be more specific,” the Falcon Councilor said, as though this were a tedious back-and-forth about supply depots and ammunition.
Ahrep-na wasn’t fooled. “This point is nonnegotiable.” She offered no elaboration.
The Falcon Councilor opened her mouth. Prompted by some nuance of sound behind her, however, she turned without saying what had come to her mind. Harvest. The councilors’ secret that was no secret to the outside world anymore: the wine that kept them young.
The other four councilors faced her, united. She had just been outvoted: irregular, but she had no illusions about what they had done behind her back.
“Falcon,” the Tree Councilor said, in their unmovable voice, “we are short of options. Our people burn in the streets. Without them, we too will fall. Accept their offer. We knew we were not negotiating from a position of strength.”
“We’ll regret this,” she said bitterly.
“Anything can be survived,” the Snowcat Councilor said, “so long as one is still alive to survive it. You’re the second-oldest of us. Are you going to fold up and die so easily? Especially since you’re the one who brought us the beacon in the first place?”
“It was that or have no last resort at all,” she shot back. “Or did you think we would stand a chance against people slavering after the wine?” She looked over her shoulder at Ahrep-na. “Let me ask this, then, Ahrep-na. Are you going to take the Wine of Blossoms for yourself?”
“That is the one of the two guarantees I will offer you,” Ahrep-na said easily. “I will not touch your supply of the wine, nor will the soldiers I will raise for you. Or did you think I was human enough to have any use for it?”
The Falcon Councilor was accustomed to envy, or submission, or greed. It had been a long time since she had seen contempt.
“You said two guarantees,” she said. “What is the other?”
Ahrep-na’s eyes were sweet with malice. The nameless ma
n stared straight ahead. “I will win this for you,” Ahrep-na said, “with the mercenaries I raise.”
“Of course you will,” the Falcon Councilor said, wondering what the trap was. “Very well. We will contract you under those terms.”
Ahrep-na’s smile was like a honed knife.
His name was Loi Ruharn, and he was one of the councilors’ generals. Most people knew him, however, as the Falcon’s Whore.
He had been born Korhosh Ruharn, in one of the poorest quarters of the impoverished city-dome known ironically as the Jewel of Nasteng. As a girlform child, Ruharn had played with toys scavenged from stinking trash heaps in alleys, and watched with pinched eyes while his parents argued over which of the religious offerings they had to neglect this month because otherwise they would be too hungry to work, and swore he would never grow up to live in a crowded home with six brothers and sisters, wondering every night if he would be sold to the Gardeners like the daughter of the Ohn family next door.
As soon as he was old enough and strong enough, Ruharn ran away and enlisted in a noble household’s private army. He might have died there. While the Council of Five ruled Nasteng entire, they didn’t interfere with the nobles’ squabbles so long as they didn’t threaten the councilors themselves. But Ruharn acquitted himself well in battle, mostly through a combination of suicidal determination and a knack for small-unit tactics, and he rose quickly in the ranks.
That by itself wouldn’t have made him remarkable. There were plenty of talented soldiers, and most of them died young anyway, the way battle luck went. Rather, he came to the Falcon Councilor’s attention as a minor novelty, as a womanform soldier who lived as a man. For all her years, she’d never taken such a lover before.
The Falcon Councilor wouldn’t stoop to take a common-born lover, but that was easy enough to finesse. She offered riches; she offered to buy Ruharn a commission in the Council’s own army, and an adoption into a noble family; and most of all she offered a place in her bed. Ruharn wasn’t sentimental about the honor of his chosen profession, although he knew what people would be saying about him. He accepted.
Today, almost six months since the invasion had begun, he was pacing in the command bower of the councilors’ fastness. It was decorated with vines from which cloudflowers grew. The vines watered themselves, a neat trick. Irritatingly, they also left puddles, which you’d think he’d know to step around by now. The last time he’d yanked off a table runner and used it to soak up the moisture, he’d been yelled at by General Iyuden, who was insufferable about ornamental items. But Iyuden came from one of Nasteng’s oldest, wealthiest families. He wasn’t about to have that argument with her.
Arrayed before Ruharn were videoscreens of Nasteng’s defenses. It didn’t take any kind of experience to see how inadequate they had been. He had read the reports and made his recommendations. It wasn’t so much that the senior generals had disagreed as that no recommendation would have made much of a difference.
He didn’t know what had happened in the four days since the gateway fastness of Istefnis, on the surface, had been crushed into crumbs of marble and metal and human motes by the invaders. But the mercenaries the councilors had hired had brought with them a fleet of starflyers, a horde of groundswarmers. Nasteng’s unnamed enemies had slowly fallen back before the onslaught of hellspikes and icemetal bursts and frenzied gnawers. You could, if you were sufficiently innocent of electromagnetic signatures and spectral flourishes, take it for a particularly disorganized fireworks display. Nasteng itself was now haloed by a staggering murdercloud of debris, whether glowing, glimmering, or gyring dark. It was just as well they weren’t putting satellites into orbit anytime soon.
Two things bothered Ruharn about the mercenaries’ forces, for all their successes. (More than two. But he had to start somewhere.) First was the question of logistics. The senior general had let drop that the contract had mentioned logistical arrangements. As a staff general, Ruharn had hoped to learn details. Had looked, in fact. So far as he could tell, however, the starflyers and groundswarmers had appeared out of nowhere. It wasn’t inconceivable that this was advanced foreign technology—there seemed to be a lot of that going around—but it still made him suspicious.
The other thing was the way the mercenaries fought. When the Falcon Councilor had told him about the arrangement—the private conversation, not the staff meeting where he’d heard the official version—she had indicated every faith in the mercenaries’ abilities. So far, Ruharn observed that the mercenaries relied on sheer numbers, wave after wave of suffocation rather than strategy. To be sure, the method was working, yet he couldn’t help feeling the councilors could have spent their coin more wisely.
The councilors’ personal army was used primarily for quashing the nobles’ personal armies and secondarily for quashing the occasional revolution. So he didn’t have great confidence in his conclusions. Yet it was impossible to serve with any diligence without picking up a few fundamentals of the military art.
As it turned out, he was turning the problem over in his mind—it wasn’t as if he had a hell of a lot else to do, since for the first time in his so-called career he was caught up on paperwork—when a message made him forget it completely. He found it on top of his correspondence for the afternoon, smuggled in by who knew what method, a note on the back of a flyer. It said, simply, I need your help.
Ruharn would have dismissed it as a prank or a trap, except he recognized the handwriting, even twenty-three years later, for all the changes. The writer still had that particular way of drawing crossbars, of slanting hooks. He assumed she still lived in the same house, or at least the same neighborhood, or she would have said something more to guide him.
It wasn’t difficult to slip out of the fastness and to the surface, in one of the bubblecars whose use was reserved to the councilors’ favorites. The old neighborhood was some six hours away, to the north and east of Istefnis. Ruharn expected to be discovered eventually, but as long as he wasn’t caught cheating on the Falcon Councilor, he didn’t think there would be any lasting consequences. Assuming he didn’t lose his life to some mine while walking down the street, or break his neck tripping over rubble.
The bubblecar’s driver was a prim woman in the Falcon Councilor’s livery. When she glanced back at Ruharn, her eyes were momentarily sly. Ruharn didn’t notice.
During the ride, he alternated between looking out the window and looking at the status displays, which were connected to the moon’s defense systems. He wore the plainest clothes he owned, which weren’t very, a severe coat over a suit of soft dark brown with gold-embroidered gingko leaves, neatly fitted trousers, and boots likewise embellished with gold. In the neighborhood where he had grown up, the boots alone would have gotten him robbed, which was why he came armed. Two guns and a knife, the latter being ceremonial, but he kept it sharp on principle. Given his childhood, he was actually better in a knife fight than with handguns.
In the neighborhood where he had grown up, you would also have had one hell of a time finding a fence capable of dealing with items so fine, but that didn’t mean no one was stupid enough to try. Maybe his uniform would have been a better idea, except he didn’t want to give anyone the notion that he was there on official business.
He hadn’t been back in twenty-three years, since he had run away, although from time to time he sent money home. No one from his family had ever acknowledged the payments. He hadn’t expected them to; would, in fact, have been obscurely humiliated to hear from them.
The bubblecar wound through streets choked by devastation. Devastation was not new to Ruharn. He had grown up with decaying walls and the debris of blown-away hopes. Nor was he a stranger to battlefield ruin: red dried to blots brown-black, lungs sloughed into gray slime, stinging dust in the air. Even so, dry as his eyes were, the pitted streets and pitiful crumpled corpses were somehow different when they were dead at strangers’ hands.
“Here we are,” the driver said. She didn’t bother to hide her
skepticism.
“Thank you,” Ruharn said distantly. He put on a filter, then stepped out. The bubblecar didn’t wait to accelerate away. Sensible woman.
His memory was still good, despite the damage that had been done. Undoubtedly some of it had been local warfare, not recent either. He made his way through the streets, not too fast and not too slow, pricklingly aware that the few survivors were watching him.
The house had changed a little. Ruharn was certain that the old wind chimes had been decorated by little clay flowers. The new ones had what might charitably be described as rotund four-legged animals (what kind was impossible to say). He couldn’t, however, discount the possibility that it was the same set of chimes with different decorations. The girl he had known had always liked chimes. He stepped up to the door—if this was an ambush, so be it—and knocked. “Merenne,” he called out. “I’m here. It’s Ruharn.”
For long moments he thought that the house was chewed up and empty inside, that he’d wasted the trip. Then a voice barely familiar, scratchy with hardship, called back, “I’m coming.” Soon enough the door opened.
“Merenne,” Ruharn said again, voice unsteady. He did not bow. She would have taken offense.
Merenne was shorter than he was, and her hair had gone gray. She looked fifteen years older than he was. In fact she was his younger by six. The clothes she wore were neatly stitched, and patched besides. The shirt was livened by embroidery, mostly geometrical motifs. Ruharn remembered how assiduously they had both picked apart old handkerchiefs and wrapping cloths to scavenge brightly colored thread for the purpose. She had smiled easily then, as a girl, despite the fact that her shoulders were already growing hunched with the work she had to do. He doubted she smiled easily now. She had been his favorite sister, for whom he had saved pittances to trade for candies, whom he had soothed to sleep with bloodthirsty stories (even then he had had an interest in weapons), and he had left her behind without so much as saying goodbye because staying was unbearable.
