“You’re back!” Andrea exclaimed. And then rising, worried, “Are you having symptoms? Headache? Fuzzy vision?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing like that.”
“So you’re the Chatcaavan Emperor,” Dominika said. When he glanced at her, the pard nodded toward Andrea. “She told me, or I would never have guessed.”
“No,” the Emperor said. “No one did.”
Andrea had come close enough to touch him. Just as he found himself hoping she would, she did, resting a pale-skinned hand on his arm. “What brings you by?”
He glanced at Dominika. Was he willing to expose his weaknesses before someone else? And yet, had not the Worldlord’s slaves seen him brought to his nadir? What did it matter, if they saw that doubt and pain persisted into the shell of a dragon? “I came to ask after Simone. And for advice.”
Again that radiant smile. “Simone’s in stasis, which is the best thing for her. Healer Crosby’s been keeping an eye on her.”
“You have too.” To the Emperor, Dominika said, “He’s given her work in the clinic.”
“It’s the closest thing to the job I used to have. Besides, if what we’re guessing is true, it may be useful to have more than one hand in the clinic.”
“And you have heard...what?”
Dominika stretched, her long tail curling as her arms pressed outward. “That we’re off to war? It’s hard not to draw the conclusion when a Special Forces team is sneaking around enemy territory with the Emperor of the Chatcaava and nationals from a foreign ally.”
The Emperor wondered what the Chatcaava of the court, or even of the Worldlord’s circle, would have thought of this kind of analysis springing forth from the mouths of aliens they’d dismissed as animals.
“Of course,” Dominika finished, “We’re also one very small ship, with almost no people on board to speak of, sailing around an enemy empire at least twice the Alliance’s size. So the likelihood of us doing anything useful seems…remote, we’ll say.”
“I don’t know how you can say that!” Andrea said, laughing. “For Heaven’s sake, arii. We rescued the Chatcaavan Emperor!”
The pard snorted. “The Sword and his fake pets rescued the Emperor. We just came along for the ride.”
“No,” the Emperor said. “Andrea is correct. You, no less than the Ambassador, kept me alive and sane. Though… to what end, I don’t know yet.”
“You see?” Andrea said.
“I see that you’re impenetrable when it comes to things you have faith in,” Dominika said with a grin. “But I like that about you. And of the two of us, I hope you’re the one who’s right.” She slid off the stool. “I’m off, unless you want my help?” She stopped before the Emperor. “I’m a counselor, I think Dellen told you?”
“Yes, but… I am…” What was he? Certainly not all right. “Functional, for now. I appreciate your offer.”
For a moment her insouciance faded. The woman looking up at him, he could well imagine confiding in. “Take me up on it if you need it, alet.” She paused. “Can I call you that?”
That broke through his melancholy, finally, and while he couldn’t laugh he could find it amusing, just a little. Poignant as well, this question of names and titles, so fraught with protocol and truth. “You can. I hardly expect you to call me Emperor.”
“A bit grandiose,” she agreed, grinning with teeth. “Do you prefer Survivor, then?”
“My name is Kauvauc.”
“Kauvauc-alet, then.” She nodded to him. “Andrea, see you after your shift.”
“Sure, arii.”
That left him alone with Andrea and the realization that he had given away his name as if it mattered more than his title, because it did to these aliens. And that he didn’t find it offensive. Strange, though. Frightening. Maybe it was in his eyes when he raised them because Andrea smiled. “It’ll get easier.”
“Will it?” And then, perplexed. “Do you even know what I am struggling with?”
“No,” she said. “But you are struggling with it. And practice makes you better at anything.” She grinned. “Sit. Did you really come here to talk to me? I’m glad.”
“I still don’t understand why,” he murmured.
She perched on one of the empty beds. “Do you have to?”
Did he? Why did she puzzle him so much? Where did she find her font of baffling questions? “Dominika is not wrong to doubt what we can accomplish.”
“All right.” Andrea pulled her legs up and sat cross-legged, hands on her knees. “Why do you say that?” At his sharp glance, she said, “You need to talk, arii, that’s obvious. And you’re talking with me, maybe, because I didn’t know you before. I don’t have any expectations that you’re worried about upsetting. I won’t judge you for not knowing what to do next. Right? So go ahead, I’m listening.”
His wings sagged behind him. “Why you would, why you say such things… is it because you hope to end the war and see me as the only way?”
“Like I said.” She met his eyes, grave. “I don’t expect anything from you.”
“But… then…”
“Because you’re my brother,” she said. “God loves you. So I do too.” She grinned suddenly, sweet and merry. “Don’t ask me why I love you because I don’t know either. I don’t have all the answers.”
But she had seen into his heart when it had been broken open. Maybe it was as simple—and as difficult—as that. He drew in a breath and said, “The Empire is larger than the Alliance.”
“How much bigger?” she asked. “I was never really up on interstellar politics. It wasn’t relevant to where I was. Or… at least, I thought it wasn’t.”
“Too big to lose,” he said. “Despite all the mistakes they are going to make. If my replacement keeps them united, they may not remain so after the war… but they will come apart on the shattered corpse of the Alliance.”
Weakness had been so interesting to him before. Revelatory. He’d wanted to pry everyone and everything open and discover how it worked. But he found the flicker of dismay in Andrea’s eyes distressing, and watched her worry at her lower lip without any joy at this insight into her state of mind. Did he still want to know how people worked? He thought so, but he no longer wanted to push them to find out.
“There’s no hope at all, then?” she asked, soft.
He sat on the bed across from her, lifting his wings to keep them from catching on the edge. He noticed such things more, now that he’d spent so long out of this shape. “If the current Emperor can keep the Chatcaava united, the devastation will be… extreme. But I don’t know that he will.”
“And then we’ll survive.”
“And then some of you will survive,” the Emperor corrected. “But wherever they put their attention first… those places will suffer.” He imagined the Empire, saw the map clearly in his mind. “Unless.”
“Unless?”
“Unless they fall apart prior to their first strike. But then there will be war here, and we will not survive that either.” He shook his mane back, realized by the need for it that he’d let his head fall. “Andrea… I don’t know how to stop this from being a catastrophe. For everyone.”
“Is it your responsibility to stop it?” she asked, eyes grave.
“It is everyone’s who could possibly prevent it. But… I do feel my responsibility outweighs everyone else’s. It was my empire to lead.”
“It was? Or is?”
He glanced at her.
“I just want to know,” she asked, quiet, “if you’ve given up already.”
Had he? He gave her what he’d been unwilling to give anyone else yet: the truth. “I don’t know a way out of this.”
“Maybe there isn’t a way out of it, like you said,” Andrea answered. “And maybe it’s beyond any one person. That’s what prayer is for.”
He couldn’t help a smile, then. “Would Emlyn argue with you about its efficacy?”
She grinned. “A little less vehemently than before our rescue.
But that’s what God does. He pushes us toward uncertainty.”
“That seems… contrary to what a god in need of worship would desire,” he said. “Wouldn’t they prefer certainty? You have spoken often of having faith.”
“And I do,” Andrea said. “But faith requires me to be all right with uncertainty. That’s the test of life, you see? Otherwise there’s no point. For all this to work, you have to start with the understanding that you don’t know everything and never will, and you can’t fix everything, and never will. Part of faith is being all right with knowing you can’t control everything, and shouldn’t.”
He laughed, unwillingly. “Of all the things you have said, alet, that is the one least likely to work for me.”
“But the one most likely to discomfit you?” She grinned at him. “That’s what God asks of us. The willingness to let go and let Him in.”
The absurdity of the conversation was somehow soothing. He was arguing theology with an alien with whom he’d been rescued from one of his own worldlords, on the vessel of an enemy who’d come for him at the behest of a lover. The galaxy was about to convulse in the grips of an impossible war from which there was no positive outcome, and yet, here he was. What did it all mean?
“I still don’t know what to do,” he murmured.
“So,” she said. “Ask.” At his dour look, she smiled, but this time without merriment, and it was arresting. There was something stern in it, like steel, and gentle, and challenging. “Your Living Air is listening. So. Ask.”
“Just like that,” he said.
She inclined her head.
He’d started walking to the door before he realized he was in motion. At the hatch, he paused. Perhaps something of how lost he felt was in his eyes, because she said, “I’ll be here.”
So he went.
‘Just ask,’ she’d said, as if prayer were simple. As if receiving a reply was inevitable. She had said similar things to Emlyn in the Worldlord’s prison: that the human God noticed even a sparrow falling. In the cabin he shared with the Ambassador he queried the computer and finally discovered what a sparrow was. The unprepossessing bird that fluttered and hopped on the screen confounded him. It wasn’t even large enough to make a useful meal. Who would notice such a thing?
In the head, he stared at himself in the mirror, the very large and unnecessary mirror the Alliance had installed in a warship’s head: a silhouette cut out against the light gray wall, so dark he lost the details of his own edges until he moved them and the play of light picked out his arm against his chest, or his mane against his shoulder. He made himself watch as he Changed, though his twitching eyes lost the exact moment of transition. He had never noticed the effects of the Change on his vision as his eyes shifted, and how in the first few heartbeats afterwards everything was blurry. His far paler skin bled into the wall, the natural camouflage of a prey animal.
Would this shape be easier to pray in? Would a human God notice a human body, even if the spirit in it was something other? When had he ever called on the Living Air and believed in it, anyway?
These were, he thought, the sorts of questions that had caused the Chatcaava to despise the Change. These existential unknowns that made one wonder what a Chatcaavan was, if a Chatcaavan could be… anything.
“Are your bones solid?” Lisinthir asked from the door into the bathroom.
The Emperor looked at his hands, turning them in the light, then ran his palms over his ribcage. “I assume. We could ask the healer in the clinic.”
The Ambassador was leaning against the door frame, arms folded over his chest. He looked… much like he had when first they’d met, wearing a coat in cinnamon red edged in bisque and bronze. Too fragile a shell to house the incandescent spirit the Emperor knew used it for lodging. Again, that question: what relation the body to the soul? Were there even souls? How could he not know, when he could shift bodies at whim and remain himself?
His lover was studying him with that too-cautious gaze. Still worried, then, though his voice reflected only that perfect dispassion the Emperor had once admired in the throneworld court. “We could ask. No doubt he would find the experiment intriguing.”
“I am not…” What wasn’t he? The Emperor knew what his lover feared, but could not find a word to describe it, not one that didn’t sound histrionic. Chatcaava did not mope, did not moan, did not suffer introspection. “I am not brooding.”
Lisinthir moved behind him, standing a full head taller: white and rust and far too somber. “Has this shape become one you can wear without cost, then?”
“Without cost,” the Emperor murmured.
The Ambassador said nothing, waiting.
“They all have a cost,” the Emperor said. “But they all have something to teach me.”
“And what were you trying to learn, here before this mirror?”
“Whether a dragon can become as important as a small and witless bird.” The Emperor turned from the mirror to look up at the other male. “Have we successfully crept from the system, then?”
“Not yet,” Lisinthir said. “A few days, Meryl says. She prefers a conservative approach to sneaking in and out of enemy territory. Even with directions and a near guarantee that we were avoiding a trap, she chose a long and circuitous path into the sector to rendezvous with the Admiral-Offense.” He smiled a little. “It’s a pity we have no poetry this time for the Knife to translate. Lacking it, her caution is even more exaggerated.”
“Poetry?” The Emperor frowned.
“Apparently how your partisans communicate their intentions,” Lisinthir answered. “Some sort of religious tracts.”
Amazing how quickly his mind’s shattered focus collapsed into a single point, like the tip of a lance. “What?”
“Poetry?” Lisinthir repeated. “From scriptures? I assume from your religion.”
Was it wrong that he was suddenly so certain? And yet it made perfect sense. He lifted his eyes to the other male’s.
“What?” the Ambassador asked, low. “Tell me.”
“The Living Air has temples,” the Emperor replied. “Many temples. But there is one on the homeworld, the Source, where it began.”
Lisinthir paused, eyes growing distant. Then he chuckled. “Of course. It may be too obvious, though.”
“To us, because we know that our partisans are using scripture as a signal,” the Emperor said. “To everyone else? A dead religion on a world long relegated to insignificance by an empire intent on expansion? We put our throneworld near the border so that we could supervise our depredations on the worlds of aliens more closely. Who would go backwards, who could go forth?”
“And who would go down, who could go up?” Lisinthir murmured. And nodded, slowly. “Yes.”
“The homeworld is in a dead sector, poor and abandoned. Perhaps we will find nothing there. But…” He inhaled, his heart racing in this thin-skinned body, poorly suited to it. The glory of the hunt beckoned and it didn’t matter that he might not be up to it. That he might not be right. That he might fail in the fight. It was still his fight. “But even if we find nothing there, something can be made there.”
“Out of obscurity,” Lisinthir said, mouth twitching upward.
“I came from obscurity,” the Emperor said.
His lover studied him for several long moments, then laughed and wrapped him in his arms. Against the Emperor’s hair, he breathed, “There. A hint of the hunter I remember.”
The Emperor rested a hand on Lisinthir’s back. “He is still in me, too. So many mes in me, Ambassador.”
“And all of them you.”
He sighed a little, then pushed the Eldritch back. “Let us find the others and have a discussion with them about where we are going next.”
“Now that we know.” Lisinthir grinned at him, all predatory anticipation, and ducked back out of the head.
The Emperor paused, glancing in the mirror at his human self. Would Andrea call it divine inspiration? And yet, he hadn’t prayed, had he?
He would have to ask her about it, later. For now, there was work to be done.
CHAPTER SIX
The pirate left her in the bedroom for hours. The Queen found this unsurprising. She had yet to meet a person uncertain of their own consequence who could resist leaving their lessers waiting, and in her opinion the pirate was far too fanatical about power not to be afraid, in her secret heart, that her control over her enterprise was tenuous.
It was not at all tempting to rise and investigate the chamber. The Queen didn’t know where the surveillance devices were hidden but she was certain they existed; she had been lucky in the Empire, with her chambers being exempted from cameras. She would never make that assumption again. No, like so many other times in her life, this one called for patience. So she remained kneeling by the bed, her hands folded on her thighs. Her eyes closed, though she did not sleep. She breathed through the silence and the isolation, and thought her private thoughts: about the Emperor, and the Ambassador; about the nervous Glaseah she’d been forced to abandon in the cargo bay; about the eunuchs of the palace, the ones she’d been unable to rescue.
Eventually she ran out of fresh thoughts and let the repeating ones drift away until they yielded her to stillness. That was the state in which her ‘hostess’ found her, striding into the room with a swish of fabric and calling up the lights.
“The floor!” exclaimed the alien. “That’s not necessary. But they trained it into you, didn’t they. Rhacking bastards.” She pronounced the epithet with gusto. “Here, sit on the bed. Let’s look at you. Not a scrap of clothing… naturally. Men are pigs.” She stalked to one of her cabinets, opening it. “I’m not sure I have anything that’ll fit you through the shoulders. What do your kind normally wear?”
“Females? Never wear clothes,” the Queen said, watching. “Ornaments, perhaps. A wrap if we’re cold.”
The pirate queen stopped and stared at her, teeth bared. “They keep you naked? Like animals?”
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