“It’s amazing,” the Knife whispered behind him.
The Emperor scanned the horizon. “I see now why we chose the throneworld.”
“It aspires to this sky,” the Knife said. “But it is a pale mimicry. The size of it…!”
“Yes,” the Emperor murmured and together they stared at the shimmer of their ancestral stars, so vivid against the backdrop of an abandoned world.
After the Knife backed away to help distribute their rations, the Emperor sat on the edge, resting his hands on his knees and craning his head back to stare into their native night. No one approached him, not even the Ambassador, though again he sensed the Eldritch’s nearness like the warmth of a fire. And while he longed to go back to Lisinthir Nase Galare and tell him how poorly prepared he felt for this journey, he did not. He remained on the ledge as the coolth became cold and his lips and the tender skin around his eyes grew chilled, and he let the night look into him, empty him of all his ambitions, his fears, and his needs.
They resumed climbing a few hours later through the dense, complex shadows of a sunrise obscured by distant cliffs. When the light finally spilled unobstructed onto the Temple prominence they were already well on their way, and the shock of the yellow light on the steps and wall stunned Lieutenant Baker into halting. And then they all did, staring toward, though not at, an old and enormous star. How small they were, and how high; the breeze tugged at them insistently. If the Emperor were to spread his wings, it would carry him away on this air, so softly perfect for flying. But he kept his pinions tight against his back and made his way, as all pilgrims did, by foot.
Partway through the day they halted for a rest on the steps. Andrea went down the column, checking vital signs with a portable medkit. She made a face at the Ambassador and murmured something to him. The Emperor caught words in Universal when the wind allowed: ‘acclimatization’ and ‘blood oxygen.’ The Eldritch permitted an injection, which mollified the human, and she returned to her place in line to sit on a step and eat the rations passed down to her by Baker. Conversation was muted, died quickly. Their more urgent conversation was taking place in silence, with the world and the stone beneath them, and the sky overhead.
Their plateau that night faced the ocean, not the cliffs from which they’d sailed. The veil of stars was reflected on those black waters, and from this height it was hard to hear their waves. The Emperor sat on the lip and gazed as if into infinity, and his skin prickled along his sides for reasons owing nothing to the cold. He kept this vigil until he passed out of humility and into self-abnegation, and then he sought the tent where the Ambassador was lying on a pallet. He was welcomed into those arms, and needed them to remind him that he had a shape, and that the shape still had meaning, no matter how fleeting his span in it.
They reached a final plateau in the third afternoon, with the sun slanting low against the stone walls, and this smaller ledge had a single basin carved from the wall and a plaque beside it. Incised into that plaque, in letters worn with wind and hands, were the words, ‘Be clean before your god.’
The Knife touched the last word, eyes wide. His incredulity needed no translation—the Chatcaava had long since ceased to swear by any god, and even when they’d worshipped the Living Air few were the sects that had called it by that title.
“What does it say?” Andrea asked, hesitant. “I can’t read.”
“We should use the water to wash,” Lieutenant Baker said after telling her. “I guess symbolically, since it’s too small for a whole body.” She stepped to the basin and cupped her hands under the water. The spout lacked ornament, just a stone tube from which water trickled in a continuous stream into the equally austere bowl. With that water, Baker splashed her face and patted her neck and arms, then backed away for Andrea, who followed her example. One by one they made their ablutions, the Ambassador pushing back his ornate sleeves to expose white skin washed by the late sunlight before bending his face to the water. The Knife too bent his head directly, tilting it to fit it in the space between spout and basin, and backed away gasping.
The Emperor’s horns did not allow him to follow suit. He was not blind to that symbolism. Cupping his hands under the water like the two females, he washed more sedately and looked at the final landing, more of a decorative ramp than anything like the stairs they’d been using. This time, Baker hung back so he could lead, and he did, up the spiral, into the light, and to the flattened top of the prominence where the Temple rose, a squared-off tower like a single talon. He’d expected flourishes, carving, lacework arches, architecture like that of the palace which had been built as a monument to Chatcaavan power. This looked more like an extension of the mountain. Like…
“An aerie,” the Ambassador murmured.
The Emperor mantled his wings and walked inside.
The smell in that dim, vast space was indescribable. Sweet with incense. Bracing with sea-salt. Complex with the scent of the world, carried on its highest winds, which whistled and sang high, fluting songs in the roof of the Temple, where the converging pylons were perforated with delicate openings. That music, the richness of the smell, the poignancy of the vacant hall, so large to be so empty… he stopped abruptly, his heart pounding hard. The station overhead had been an antique. This… this was ancient.
“The Emperor comes to the Temple, at last.”
The voice was soft, sonorous. A male’s voice, and that male resolved out of the shadows swathing the furthest wall. He wore a loose robe in some dark color, and he himself was some dark and difficult-to-discern hue, as if a statue had separated from the Temple’s stone.
“Dare I ask if there was a prophecy?” the Emperor found himself saying.
A laugh. “No. A hope, perhaps. But never a certainty. Few are the certainties in this life.” He drew closer, and there were blues in his skin, in the folds of the robe. His eyes, though, were the pale, luminous green of a new leaf.
The Emperor said, “No. There are not. I was told… I was invited.”
“And you have come, which was more than expected.” The priest turned his face to the Emperor’s entourage. “And you bring alien guests.”
“If they are guests, then I am as well.” The Emperor shook his head, fighting vertigo. “High Priest… why did you invite me?”
“That would be the reason,” the male said. “I am not the Breath of the Living Air. I am the Male-in-Waiting, Most Exalted Emperor, and I am hoping you will one day bring back our High Priestess so that our faith will once more have its voice.”
“Your… your what?” the Knife whispered.
“Our High Priestess,” the male said. “The head of our religion is, has always been, and must be a winged and shapechanging female. But we have nearly succeeded in breeding them from our ranks, and so our Temple waits.”
The Emperor swayed, knew it only because the Ambassador caught his elbow.
“You will bring her home to us, won’t you, Exalted?” the priest said, staring at him now.
“Wait, I don’t understand,” Lieutenant Baker said in her flawless Throne Chatcaavan, startling the priest into looking at her. “You’re telling me a woman is the highest authority of your only religion? How can that be when women are chattel?”
“Because without females, there would be no Chatcaava as we know them. It is through females that the patterns we learn are passed on to our get. They were the ones who Touched fliers to give us wings. They were the ones who touched the armored predators, to give us the hide that protected our spines and the horns that guarded our heads. Every advantage we could derive from the creatures we shared this world with, they secured for us through the Change, and they made those Changes permanent,” the priest said. “We are what we are because of them.”
“How is that possible!” the Knife said, stunned. “Unless females with four arms can shift and are unaware of it…?”
“No. The wingless females were created generations and generations ago. We made one Change too many, and gave birth to monsters,
and that trauma scarred us.” The priest looked at the Emperor. “We fought over the decision, you understand. Whether to seal ourselves in our bodies forever, and bar the possibility of future abominations… or to risk everything to remain who we are.”
“And you chose against the Change,” the Ambassador breathed.
The priest inclined his head. “The decision was made. Overwhelmingly, in fact… for in those times there were no intelligent aliens. All the patterns that could be learned were those of brute animals, so no one could see how to prevent the Change from returning us to savagery ourselves. The females Changed themselves so they could no longer Touch or Change, so that traits could no longer be heritable. So that any mistakes would be fleeting, make monsters only of individuals who would die without passing them on. The misbegotten were erased from history, sent far, far away. But not all the Chatcaava agreed with what was done. You find their descendants here.”
“A dead religion,” Andrea whispered.
“A nearly dead religion,” the priest answered with a faint smile. “But what few females we could save, we have, and it is through them that we have preserved ourselves as we were born on this world. Because we deemed that the Living Air gives no gift it does not intend us to use. Our ability to Change allowed us to fly. We thought that one day it would once again save us.” He looked at Andrea and Baker. “And strangely, here we are. Which brings me back to you, Exalted.” He returned his gaze to the Emperor. “We know why you have come to the Source. We know you aim to retake your Empire. And we have heard you have befriended aliens and that through them you know the Change. If you succeed, you will win your throne on the strength of the poetry in our ancient litanies, and the promises they make the Chatcaavan people. Will you restore our worship?”
“Your worship does not need my permission for that,” the Emperor said. “That this fleet orbits your world is proof enough that belief in the Living Air never died. And that it cannot.”
“A person might survive but not thrive, Exalted. A belief system is not so different.”
“If you ask me if I will welcome your temples, then the answer is yes,” the Emperor said. Glancing at Andrea and remembering her bickering with Emlyn, he added, “I will not forbid other temples, however.”
The priest blinked, laughed. “Truly, a Changed male.” He bowed, wings spreading. “That suffices as promise. Save the final request. We are absent the Breath, and without the Breath we cannot live, Exalted. Find us our High Priestess.”
His heart was racing, painfully. “I will.” I have. “I swear it.”
The priest smiled, bright teeth in the dimness. “Then we have all that we might ask for from our Emperor. Is there aught our Emperor would ask of us?”
“Tell me,” the Emperor said. He felt the presence of the companions at his side. “Tell us. Everything you know about the Change.”
The Temple was not absent technology. Its members lived in a complex carved beneath the building like the aerie to which the Ambassador had likened it, and in that sanctuary they had access to most modern conveniences. It was an eerie reminder that this world had seen the Chatcaavan rise to space, that they had built those ships and satellites after modifying themselves genetically and convincing themselves the Change was poison. Had he not said it to the Ambassador himself? That he had not Changed because he had never wanted to descend to the level of the animal? To sully himself with the cell-deep knowledge of wingless freaks?
Sitting outside the Temple, waiting for the shuttle summoned for them by the priest, the Emperor wondered how many generations ago they’d stopped questioning the origin of that belief. Had it already been embedded in their psyche when spacefaring Chatcaava had met the first aliens? It had to have been, or they would have become some different society. One more open to the alien, the new, the different. A society that throve on knowledge and delighted in diversity.
Joining him, the Ambassador sat with his knees up and his arms resting on them, staring not toward the cliffs or the sea, as one would expect of a wingless alien, but at the clouds in the endless sky. “The Knife is beside himself.”
“Unsurprising,” the Emperor said. “This revelation is shattering.”
The Ambassador glanced at him. “You say that with a certain quality, Exalted.”
“That quality being?”
“Less hyperbole and more prophecy.”
The Emperor closed his eyes. “Can you disagree? When this knowledge is made public?”
“So you will? Make it public?”
“Perfection,” the Emperor said, chiding. Softer. “Lisinthir. When the Queen becomes the Breath of the Living Air, how then can it be kept secret? How would it be right?”
The Ambassador dipped his head with a quiver and closed those expressive alien eyes. “You had the same thought.”
“Who else?” the Emperor asked, voice low. “If she is willing. But she has always used the Touch and the Change to understand the universe. Who better?”
With his brow against his knees, the Ambassador said, “My lovers become luminaries.”
The Emperor curled a wing around the Eldritch, surprising him into looking up. “Do you fear that you will be outshone by us?”
“No,” the Ambassador replied with a lopsided smile, and leaned into him. “I am a luminary myself, though I did not know it when I first came to you.” When the Emperor canted his head, the Ambassador finished, “While I was away I discovered my abilities are grown more significant than typical. By my people’s standards I am now a thing out of legend. A mind-mage, they call me.”
“A mind-mage,” the Emperor said, bemused.
“I can command bodies against the wills of their owners,” the Ambassador said, leaning into him. “And even, at times, the air itself.”
“Appropriate for a lover of dragons.” The Emperor rested his head against the Eldritch’s and said, “O my Perfection,” very, very low.
“She lives,” the Ambassador whispered.
The Emperor did not ask if the Eldritch was sure. As the priest had said, certainties in this life were few.
“What will you do?” the Ambassador asked at last. “With the information about the Change.”
What else? “Practice.”
Their return to the Silhouette was not heralded with sufficient fanfare for the magnitude of the revelations they’d been granted. Three days in orbit had seen more ships join their force, and the Admiral-Offense and the Fleet captain had coordinated and run several training exercises with the Worldlord’s son. The Emperor’s arrival occasioned a conference discussing the results of those exercises and detailing the strengths of the new arrivals, and he gave them his customary attention. He approved of the industry of his subordinates and authorized them to continue their work, and then he repaired to the gym. Alone.
Standing before the mirrors, he drew a deep, centering breath and said, “Computer. Single foe. Engage.”
His simulated opponent darted from the corner of the room and he leapt for it, talons extended. As it fisted a hand to punch him, he Changed into a Seersa to take the blow on a more solid torso before ducking behind the fighter. Without allowing himself time for doubt, he reached for the Eldritch shape. It ached, moving into it, and the Change was slow and jerky. He took several kicks while finishing the transition, but he made it and spun out from the foe’s reach, panting. Behind the solidigraph’s shoulders he saw his white body, his flat face and long mane.
You can always Change, no matter what form you’re in. Your shape is not you. It is not capable of limiting your abilities or you would be unable to switch back.
You are always, at core, Chatcaavan, and Chatcaava Change.
A moment of triumph, of vaulting triumph twined in grief and loss, for all they had given up and all that others had suffered, and all the choices they’d made that had seen them to this terrible turning point. And yet, they were still Chatcaava, and it was not too late to Change.
Then the simulation punched him in the gut
. Shocked back into motion, the Emperor resumed practicing. Live for me, my Treasure. Live for us. We're coming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
what do I do what do I do what do I do
Her bare feet didn’t make decisive clicks on the deck plating, not the way her boots did. She strode anyway. Her hand was throbbing on the grip of the gun. Water dripping… water was dripping… blood was dripping.
stay focused do the job stay focused
The guards at her door were staring at her. They shouldn’t be staring. Her arms rose. Behind her, a man barked, “STOP STARING STOP STOP LOOK AWAY NOW.”
One of them did. The other didn’t. At least not fast enough. The spray pattern on the wall by her door—
sell it make it work you need help
That thought caused a skip in the pattern.
help
Memory of Daize. ‘One of our first military vessels.’ She turned to the guard who’d lived. “The Faulfenza in the cargo bay. I want them. I want them all.”
“W-what?”
“Say yes, just say yes,” the man behind her hissed.
“Yes,” her door guard said, his breathing shocky and his eyes too wide. She knew by this that she had the gun pointed at his head. Mouth this time. The forehead was getting hard. “Ma’am?”
“That’s right,” Sediryl said. “I’m in charge now. Go get me my Faulfenza. I like furry things.” She smiled. “Be quick and you will be rewarded.”
“Right away.”
He ran. She turned to the remaining guard. “Stay here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned her back on him and stepped through her door, into her quarters. Two sets of eyes, looking up at her.
“I need to change,” she announced. It seemed important to say something else. “We’re leaving.”
The bathroom now. Her eyes flicked up to her face in the mirror—look away don’t look just wash it off—and she splashed water on her face. That wasn’t enough, that wasn’t ever going to be enough. She turned the water in the shower on—can’t tarry don’t wait do it quick too much to do—and rinsed off. Her hair felt too heavy. Too much red in it. No time to braid it up now. She yanked her fingers through it, undoing the last of the bedroom tangles, ignoring the scarlet drizzle.
In Extremis Page 37
