Clockwork Phoenix 5

by Brennan, Marie

  They touch their wrists, Anjalin’s thick-boned and circled by iron, Ystravet’s bird-thin and torqued by velvet. They twine their fingers, Anjalin’s callused by knife hilts and triggers, Ystravet’s shrunken with cold and ailment. They share a tisane of coruscating heat.

  Anjalin’s officers unpack cyclical snake-lyres, a violin with strings of frozen mercury, and a quartet of automatons with fluted hands and parrot throats. The Finch’s treasury is piled high with similar gifts from other choirs, but she does not say so.

  Offerings made, lesser personnel retreat. The hall seals behind them, doors clicking like beaks, windows shutting like claws. Oracle and commander are left to the map.

  Absent an audience, Ystravet sits, careless and cross-legged, on the edge of a solar system being shredded to shadow-dust. “I’m surprised to see you here, Commander. Fallbright was busy with Hamalyon, last I heard.”

  “I’ve left that in the capable hands of our serenade officers.” Hamalyon is no challenge, as most such things are no challenge. Worlds and nations are to the choirs as ripe fruit on the grass: soft and burst-sweet, effortless to pulp. “It’s another operation that I would like your advice on.”

  Ystravet motions with a palsied hand. “You only have to point.”

  “It’s not on this map.”

  “Then I can be of no help.”

  Anjalin undoes the pinions of her armor, tugs apart the rutilated ribcage that shields her torso. She draws forth a length of coordinates bleeding ochre fumes. When it settles on the floor, that section of map blanks out, taken over by a gray ruinscape.

  The Finch runs a tongue along the cracked parchment of her lips. “That is a world under Hegemonic rule.”

  “So it is.” The commander’s face shows bird-blank.

  “What would you do with it?”

  “What does any choir commander do, Revered? I am trained to one purpose. My skill set is particular.” Anjalin holds up her hand, talon-gauntleted, hooked tips shedding icy light. “Therakesorn is a wasteland. What material wealth it had has long been stripped; what intellectual riches it possessed have long been exported. The Hegemony has been on the brink of giving it up. The expenses of administering it have outgrown the gains.”

  “Having it torn out of their grasp and dropping it as a matter of good economic sense are two different things, Commander.” Ystravet passes her hand over the ruinscape, spanning the view outward: stretches of barren fields between flower-cities, arched gates, and spider-bridges that connect nothing. “Your family was from Therakesorn. You’ve risen far.”

  Anjalin’s mouth is a scimitar curve. “Before the Song, all bow alike: each heart a verse, each throat a mouthpiece for the infinite meter. No matter my birth, I’m the equal of anyone in the choirs. Isn’t that right?”

  The Finch sips from her cup of steam and liquid fire. It ignites her briefly from within, stilling the tremors. “Have you considered asking your ancestral land if they want to be liberated from Hegemonic rule? I say this out of theoretical interest. I’m not going to participate.”

  “If I asked, they’d say no.”

  “Presumptuous of you to emancipate them by force, then.”

  “You know why they would refuse. Hegemonic sync has brainwashed them; they would know no other answer, wish for nothing but what they’re told to want.” The commander inhales. Composes herself, line by line. “They don’t know themselves. I do.”

  “I’m sure,” the Finch murmurs, and sweeps her cup over Therakesorn. The Cotillion map returns: binary stars in close orbit, several fission shadows away from a cannibal event. “But that much is beside the point, Commander. I will not do what you ask.”

  Anjalin takes the last of her fruit, latches her armor back in place. It melds onto her frame, seamless. “I hear there will be a wedding here.”

  “A time for casting fortunes, yes, and interpreting the eternal verses. So nuptials and war unite.” Ystravet shudders, pierced by chill. When she speaks again, her voice is rimed by sickness, though as before her expression is serene. “Springrise and Autumnsigh will send their commanders, or at least a delegate of judges. No monastic marriage is ever short on guests. I try to keep it discreet, but the new always leaks, even as far as the Hamalyon frontier.”

  “Whose marriage will it be?”

  “Mine,” says the Finch. “You’re invited, for I can hardly keep you out.”

  * * *

  Under the Song there are no dynasties, and monarchies have been buried in history so distant they may well be apocryphal. But fables of such concepts endure on Therakesorn, and Anjalin imagines the conjugal preparations of those alien creatures—queens and empresses—could hardly compete with those of the Finch and her intended.

  Within these quarters all labor is taken up by human hands. Novices in umbral robes lead obsidian peacocks on silver thread, arrange them in ebb and flow, fall and rise, the trajectory of power and catalyst. Priests trained to cloistered life rather than military duty move in vestments of ivory and pearl, admitting no choir colors. They lay down fiberglass pennants and put up lily mosaics that reflect the map and erase soldier presence. Even when Anjalin has taken off her armor, she doesn’t appear in the lily panels. A glass of polar liquor or slice of rime-bear held in her hand would float in those reflections as though levitating.

  She keeps an eye out for the Finch’s betrothed, who to her exists as a voice at prayer—mezzo-soprano—and not much else. Her senior-most judge reports a glimpse of marble vestment weighted down like roofs, of flanks like arched gates and throat like stone column. Her assassins are more specific: curls of hair the color of jungle jade, an origin in the fallen monastery of the Cormorant. Little by little they construct this person, a house of hearsay, an edifice of impressions.

  Delegates from Autumnsigh and Springrise arrive, then Galetide: all three choirs greater than Fallbright, led by commanders of longer battle records and finer birth than Anjalin’s. Few children of Hegemonic refugees ascend through the ranks as she has. They regard her with bemused wariness, a touch of condescension.

  Inevitably they ask her, “What was it like being a child in those godless bounds? Is it true they brainwash you? Can you truly understand the tenets of Song?”

  To which she answers, “It was a childhood like any other. Outsiders believe we sacrifice infants on Song altars, and that is to my knowledge untrue. I understand the vast music as well as you, for within it we are equal in our insignificance; on that scale, our individual spirits hardly matter, and that’s a sacred certitude which I hope you will not contest.”

  Sometimes the questions are less frank, sometimes more, but she hasn’t achieved her station without weathering worse. Finding tolerable company in Judge Lisvade of Galetide, she asks the senior officer for advice on dress, hair, and presentability. “I’ve never attended a monastic wedding,” she confesses over a small breakfast shared among her, Lisvade, and a Springrise soldier. “And dress is everything.”

  “You aren’t wrong,” Lisvade says, mock solemnly. “You might think we have better things to worry about than who wears what to a prestige event, but when so many choirs gather in one place—well, we’re going to be an embarrassment to ourselves, not that anyone will have the self-awareness for shame. Imagine the laypeople seeing the lot of us squabbling over who’s wearing the fanciest skirt.”

  “Someday one of the birds will append this to the Eight Facets of Virtue: Dress with the opulence of fifty worlds upon you; let the devotee spare neither expense nor good taste.” The Springrise soldier taps their plate with a two-tined fork. “Not that you’ll have trouble achieving that particular virtue, hmm, Lisvade?”

  Lisvade commits no opinion, merely gives one of eir black-lacquer smiles, a flash of tongue the color of bluebells. “Commander. Have you thought of matrimonial presents?”

  “Yes.” Anjalin doesn’t admit that she has noted the Finch’s indifference to the customary offerings of exotic instruments. Presents, too, will be gladiatorial: choir again
st choir, gift against gift. “Galetide’s will be peerless, I expect.”

  Ey flick their hand. “Oh, splendid it will certainly be. Hard to match in scope, that’s how we do things: never halfway. Our commanders neglected to consult me, however, and that’s slightly insulting, seeing Ystravet is one of my wives.”

  “She is?” Anjalin was under the impression oracles, holiest of holy, could only join in matrimony with other priests. Never soldiers. “Is her intended—will that be your spouse as well?”

  “No. We married before she became the Finch, so our wedlock has been annulled unless I abandon military duty and turn monastic. We remain partnered in all but name, though. As for her betrothed, we haven’t been introduced.” This is said with no rancor, matter-of-fact. “Though knowing Ystravet, it’s not going to be a contralto; she can’t stand those. Bass is right out.”

  A countertenor herself, Anjalin doesn’t pass remark; everyone has their preferences, and choir commanders do more fighting than singing in any case. “Were it up to you, Galetide’s gift would have been different, then.”

  “Drastically.” Ey sketches in the air: hematite feet crusted in amber pollen. “It would have been nice to give her something she likes, and I can’t do that without upsetting my commander. Politics are absolutely tiring, don’t you think? So the gift—let’s say a fruitful apiary. A vice of Ystravet’s. She can’t resist it.”

  And if Anjalin knows few things beyond the theater of war and the anatomy of strategy—engine specifications like ribs, logistics like vertebrae—she knows apiaries. Not as a beekeeper might, but she knows them with the visceral certainty of prions twining and synapses firing the syntax of remember. Thoraxes copper-red and amaranth, wings like platinum filigree. The hives of Therakesorn produce the best; nowhere else is honey so bright from seasons of fierce sun, so gravid with spice.

  Her afternoon she spends in communication with her serenade counterpart, immersed in Fallbright’s internal weave: she is a mote among helixes of light, a verse in the lyrics of her choir. The elation filling her and telling her heart she’s been born for this is an illusion, a drug, to draw her deep into duty, to ensnare so this becomes the entirety of her life and thought. Each time withdrawing from the weave becomes a fraction harder. An exercise of will.

  Hamalyon frontier. Five concurrent battles, but the one that summons her takes place between luminous shadows of blue giants and asteroid ash. The throne-spires of the Hamalyon armada fly clad in palinopsiac coronas, their eclipse-guns black with furled charge.

  Through the weave a battlefield looks slightly different to each commander, adapting to personal parameters, and to Anjalin it is a vast flower forever caught between blossom and decay. Concentric rings of rotating petal-teeth so ripe they are on the cusp of dissolution. Anthers tipped in tapered tusks, sepals sheathed in frictionless frames. To most the virtualization seems nonsensical, but to her they map perfectly to combat, distilled to moments of wither and bloom.

  A Hamalyon throne-spire operates on human minds hung on the trellis of drive and engine-parts, twined to the lattice of artillery targeting and potential-lash. Throne-spires require less than twenty to crew, and entire armadas can fight—and win—with personnel of under a thousand. Even at peak efficiency Cantos need fifty, Envois a hundred fifty.

  But the Cotillion has that many, and more. To secure a vast and wealthy territory that might otherwise fall to the Hegemony, the choirs can spare a great deal.

  Anjalin doesn’t take charge; her serenade counterpart is more than competent. Throne-spires meet Fallbright in sunrise surges and probability whips. The maws of Envois unhinge wide and swallow eclipse fire. Fleeter, smaller Cantos slice into wall formations, ballistic storms ripping through Hamalyon interceptors.

  It ends quickly. These always do. As the throne-spires collapse, she catches a skein of signal, Hamalyon frequency. A plea for mercy, a call for help, inarticulate rage from minds incandescent from machine-merge. One of those, or all of them.

  She is no sadist, does not rejoice in final words from the dying. They rarely vary, in any case. Anjalin ignores the signal and disengages from the weave.

  * * *

  The arctic ranges around the Finch monastery are not home to bees, not even the subspecies that build their hives in the parabolas of space-time, sipping nectar from event horizons lined up like piano keys. The glaciers are too cold for the bees of summer and grass, and not cold enough for the other sort. Three months until the nuptials begin, a short time to prepare an apiary by any metric. In the end, Anjalin enlists one of her contralto judges, a former agriculturist.

  “You’ve set yourself quite the task, Commander,” says the judge needlessly. Sarasad has been with the choir longer than she, and not always at peace with her advancement. For the most part, he puts Fallbright before personal grudge. “But to be sure, it will exceed all other presents, unless Lisvade of Galetide means to sabotage us.”

  “I don’t think ey intends that.”

  He blinks slowly, though he has sufficient control of his facial topography to not show outright contempt. “Your military finesse has never been in question.”

  She cocks her head. “Flattered.”

  “In personal combat you are more than capable.” Sarasad gestures with a hand braceleted in inertial coils. “When it comes to navigating the labyrinth of intrigue and etiquette, Commander …”

  “I’m hopelessly incompetent because I was born outside the Song?”

  “What I meant to say was that you are too trusting. Galetide isn’t one of our rivals—we’re far beneath them—but it’s the habit of the powerful to toy with and ruin the lesser.”

  Anjalin smiles with cremation warmth. “I will overlook the irony of you, or any of us, declaring that. I don’t believe Lisvade is an embodiment of virtue and charity. Neither is ey petty. So let’s say we trust my sense of discernment for a day and go through with the bees.”

  Sarasad makes no further remark. “I recommend hybrids. You will prefer ones that produce honey?”

  “We can’t engineer or breed something from scratch in ninety days, can we?”

  “There’s a lunar hive-cluster two transfers away. They are entirely silent, and what they yield is more liquid-metallic hydrogen than honey. You have your work cut out for you, but these hives are constituted from recombinatorial logic. Highly adaptive, receptive to splicing.”

  Two transfers. She would be away at least a month. “We depart in five hours. I leave the team selection to you.”

  They take a Canto and an attendant tetrameter, cochlea hulls unmooring in a flare of hymns and glacial crust. Anjalin spends most of the initial transfer in dreamless rest, gathering her strength. Sometimes she starts awake to a frigid hand on her arm, but her room is empty, her bed containing only herself. Still, a coat of rime clings to the edge of her mattress, crackling as it falls apart. Icicles glow in the dark, gossamer lace across the frame of her window.

  Second transfer, she contacts the Finch.

  Ystravet is reclining on a divan, swathed in thermal layers. Her intended sits close by, a crescent shadow flat in profile, two-dimensional. “Commander,” Ystravet says, eyes shut. “What is it?”

  “When we landed on the monastery, I observed a statue of ice on the roof. It was remarkably lifelike, detailed, if archaic in form and material. Can I assume there might be a reason I’ve been seeing parts of it onboard?”

  “Ah. That’d be when we shared our drink—a glitch contagion. Not to worry; it will pass.” A hand of smoke and shimmering shade closes over Ystravet’s. She returns the contact, skin and nails sinking into penumbra. “I committed an infraction, and as a condition to assuming my office, one of my neurals was sensory-linked to that statue. So a part of me always experiences the ice. I could get rid of it, but that would forfeit my post.”

  “That seems unnecessarily harsh as punishment.” Anjalin absently brushes snow off her shoulder. “The office of the Finch can’t be worth so much. I can tell it’s slowly
killing you.”

  “Put yourself in my place. Do you value your own rank so little? If all your life you’ve directed yourself to it, shaped yourself for this one path, made its pulse your own, and primed your breath to match its pace; if you do this until your life becomes this one trajectory, with a single, inevitable destination—would you surrender it so easily?”

  “I take your point. How long before this—have you chosen a successor?”

  “Referred hypothermia. I’ve held up well but not for much longer. An inventive way to go.” Ystravet clenches her fingers to still the trembling. “As for successors, we oracles do it differently than in the army. We cultivate our candidate for leadership, ensure they are well-versed in the verities of birds, and the holy lottery secretly marks them years in advance. When a present oracle falls, they step up. Last season the Crow heir became the Wren; the Wren’s candidate assumed office of the Dove. I myself was from the monastery of the Shrike. So it goes, our leadership rotating as the seasons do. Difficult to predict or corrupt, in theory. When it manifests, the lottery’s spectacular. All light.”

  Anjalin tightens her thermal. Her body temperature has dropped two degrees off default. “Does Lisvade of Galetide know about your condition?”

  The intended issues a noise less than sigh, fraction-wind whispering across the link between monastery and Canto.

  “I’ll take that as a no.”

  The Finch starts to answer, dissolves into a coughing fit. “It was good of you to call, Commander.” She gathers her breath. “My betrothed would like to consult with you.”

  Anjalin glances at the form slipping in and out of view, ranging the light spectrum. “I’m here to serve.”

  The link shifts, folding into a private channel; the betrothed comes into focus. “Commander Anjalin?” The voice is that mezzo-soprano she heard before, and if it is less powerful speaking than singing, still it is nova-bright. Anjalin is choir-trained and so can stand against it, but a temple supplicant would have been brought weeping to their knees. “I have a favor to ask.”