Clockwork Phoenix 5

by Brennan, Marie

  “I will listen. How may I address you?”

  “That doesn’t matter, not until the ceremony—at the moment I barely exist, being more function than person.” The crescent form swells, traveling from inverted light to ultraviolet edge. “The downside of marrying the great: you’re reduced to an appendage, and even if they are perfectly good, you are still a possession. I adore Ystravet, but sometimes it chafes. Perhaps I should have courted her before she became oracle, but that wouldn’t have deterred her from this office. Nothing could: not me, not even Lisvade … the Galetide judge being whom I wish to discuss.”

  Anjalin doesn’t allow herself the luxury of astonishment. She’s hardly a marriage counselor. “If you feel less than delighted with eir arrangement with the Finch, I fear I’m not the right person to talk to.”

  Another shift, this time to infrared. “Not so. Judge Lisvade—ey’s a most elegant person. Worldly, charming, and kind. The last is a quality not often seen in one of eir rank, and I’ve long wished to make eir acquaintance.”

  “Oh.” She can’t rein in her incredulity this time. “You’ve broached this with the Finch?”

  “She finds it amusing I haven’t worked up the courage to approach em myself, as wooing a choir officer isn’t prohibited to me. Won’t endear me to traditionalists, but being born to the Cormorant, I was never going to be a favorite. It will work out quite well; my courtship of Lisvade would let em and Ystravet spend more time together, so this isn’t entirely a selfish request.” More quietly, “And there are few years of joy left to Ystravet.”

  “I’m not schooled in matchmaking.” Or much else outside the bounds of tactical treatises, the making and maintaining of supply chains, probability flux, and terrain. “To the judge I’m barely more than a stranger.”

  “Ey’s taken a liking to you. All I want is a chance. I am no fool, Commander; all the choirs will try to sway my spouse to interpret the Song in their favor. At the moment, Ystravet is inclined to interpret nothing at all, save minor clauses to make some bureaucratic procedures less painful.”

  The rest needs not be said. A gift, however unique or a proxy of affection from Lisvade, will not suffice to persuade the Finch. “I can make an effort.”

  “I will ask for no more.”

  Anjalin cuts contact as the transfer ends. Another finger of cold runs down her spine, but she pays it no heed. Where she is going, there will be much worse to face.

  * * *

  The moon is not so much home to the hives as made of it: over the cycles of breeding and internecine fighting, lunar surface has been chipped away and remade in hexagons. Birthing chambers are ordered by propriety, larvae raised according to their destiny—to fight, to work, to rule. Swarm cycles bring war and shatter hives in patterns of accretion bloom, but sometimes a peaceable generation veers instead for the nearest sun, there to weave orbit-hives and turn their wings to solar sails, their thoraxes to plasma chassis.

  On arriving, there is no space to land; tetrameter crafts fold into the Canto’s hull, detached wings returning to their joints. Anjalin and her soldiers step out clad in beaked filters and pinion sheaths. Their sidearms are individual and particular, adhering to no stricture or standard. For herself, Anjalin carries a gun whose metal spurns light and whose chamber croons annihilation. The corkscrew knife at her hip bears the promise of polynomial wounds.

  They find an entrance. Their feet are firm: the moon—or the hive-nexus—exerts its own gravity, gives anchor.

  The Shemronn Silk-Orbit had possession of the moon once, a palimpsest colony winding through the lunar body like fabric ligaments through a doll, and those remain even now within the bee-built tunnels. Kites bear scenes from Shemronn epics, taut from their memory of marking the boundaries of corporate concerns. Compound scarves swaddle eggs the size of toddlers; cryogenic silk hangs in tassels, beaded with hydrogen. Some queens lay textiles instead of eggs; adopting the habits of Shemronn silk worms, the judge says, citing it as evidence of the species’s flexibility.

  Anjalin has her doubt, but no better options to offer. She does keep an eye over her shoulder; an expedition like this would be the ideal place to attempt her removal, and though she’s left the choice of personnel to Sarasad, she’s worked hard to build loyalty amongst the aubade. At least two present here, an assassin and a tactical advisor, would see Sarasad downed in Anjalin’s defense.

  The bees are not sapient, it is said, though there are primitive couplets written in ultraviolet ink across the walls, reports of battles between generations and instructions for the next swarm. “What happens,” Anjalin wonders aloud, “if we leave a baby here?”

  Sarasad holds up a hand gloved in waveform generators. Sonar canaries undulate forth and bring back negative space, a spatial feedback that lets them navigate the hive. Visual feelers would have stirred sleeping queens. “It’s not impossible that introducing a primate might change them, but I’d say their combinatorial threshold doesn’t stretch that far. Or the Shemronn colonists would have already been incorporated into their … configuration.”

  Deeper into the tunnels they silence their communications. The bees are sensitive, quick to hear pulses of data being exchanged, sampling the crevices between sentence and intent the way connoisseurs taste varieties of honey that come in the liquid green of fresh photosynthesis, the fused crimson of red dwarfs, the colorless silicate of bullets. Anjalin avoids the hunters and workers. To meet one detachment is to meet the entire hive, alarm rippling over the strings of shared awareness. While her Canto can bombard the entire moon to grit and salt, she’d prefer to be aboard her ship rather than inside the target.

  Sarasad cross-maps the hive’s structure to similar clusters: as a species, bees are unvarying in their design. He finds, unerringly, the chamber where spare queens are kept.

  Bioluminescence creases in the folds of ancient skirts, brims in the cups of cracked eggs, and capillarizes the angular walls. Nested in the jaw of sharp geometry is a newly hatched queen, proboscis like lacquered teak, jeweled eyes the size of Anjalin’s fist.

  They assemble the cage, shaking containment gossamer over a scaffolding of flexsheet and contradiction mesh. Anjalin kneels by the judge as he peels off membrane and nutrient tubes that attach to the queen’s proboscis.

  A spasm of wings, a quiver of antennae. The queen wakes.

  The response is immediate, a quake of vibration tectonic-deep, sound of wings against wings and bright-banded bodies sweeping through tunnels.

  Anjalin’s first shot obliterates, turns a tide of thoraxes and stingers to carapace shrapnel and hemolymph. “How do we fertilize the queen when we get back?” she asks, calm, contacting the tetrameter crafts. Small and surgical would be best, not the full destructive might of a Canto. “Do we have to capture a drone as well?”

  “We fertilize her with possibility. I asked a former colleague to send a few drones from other subtypes.” Sarasad levels his pistol but refrains from firing. He studies the indigo stains of bee fluids clinically. “By the time we’re back at the monastery, those should have arrived, the Song willing. Were my opinion solicited, I’d say this acquisition is the easy part. The actual breeding and maintaining will be much more complicated.”

  “Duly noted,” she says, and directs the tetrameter to fire.

  * * *

  They leave the moon chipped and blistered, a segment-wound hemorrhaging fabric and hexagon intestines. The hive, Sarasad assures Anjalin, will rebuild and repair. She stifles her absurd guilt; like any choir commander, she’s orchestrated carnage on a far greater scale, draining the heat of planet cores, erasing entire nations. Allowing her conscience to be pricked by taking out some bees is hardly proportionate.

  Within the cage, the queen spends most of its time asleep. On the rare occasion that it rouses to feed, Anjalin fancies that those immense eyes are watching and appraising her, though all studies and treatises indicate these creatures are mindless. The queen has not yet matured; full-grown, it will be nearly half Anjal
in’s weight, three-quarters her height. Enormous, and when something reaches that mass, it is difficult not to ascribe it a little intelligence. Like domestic pets or young children.

  They clear a hall on Fallbright Envoi while Judge Sarasad selects drones sourced from twenty subspecies, former inhabitants of volcanoes and dead oceans, broods that construct their hives from ground fog and blasted glass. Anjalin never suspects the drones of sentience: they are truly blank of thought and memory, receptacles for hive routines. They will have to be induced to mate with the lunar queen, but that is easy to arrange, a matter of chemicals.

  Anjalin issues invitations to Lisvade and Ystravet’s betrothed.

  Lisvade comes first, arrayed in Galetide plumage and claws. “Apologies.” Ey motions at emself, self-deprecating. “Boarding another choir’s Envoi, I have to puff up and overdress. My superiors wouldn’t have let me out without the pomp.”

  “Understandable. What do you think?”

  The judge peers through the observation lens. “More flowers?” A laugh. “I only know what Ystravet likes, not how to achieve it. It looks to be coming along well, so I leave it in your hands. And I’m glad. She needs more things that are good for her heart, even if it comes with obligations.”

  It is three days before the intended comes aboard, wrapped in billowing haze. The ensemble leaves their hair visible, alike to snake vines in hue and thickness, braids that stir and purr liturgies.

  They bow to the judge. “Judge Lisvade of Galetide. It thrills and honors me to make your acquaintance.”

  Ey returns the curtsy. “My pleasure, though I’m at a loss as to how to properly address you.”

  “I can’t speak my name or title.” The intended pulls a sheaf of scattered light over their hand, perhaps scribbles down a sign, a sentence. “Will this do?”

  Too collected for surprise, Lisvade doesn’t quite widen eir eyes. Ey takes the glimmering hand briefly, a brush over sacred matter. “Then I’m doubly graced by your presence. Shall we look at the queen?”

  Over the weeks the queen grows fast, its colors deepening. Blue bands on thorax, lightning veins on wings, and frost-coated antennae. This last prompts Anjalin to ask Sarasad, “Is that normal?” To which he answers, easily, “It’ll integrate into an arctic ecosystem.”

  When the first batch hatches, Lisvade and the betrothed are there to watch. When the larvae pupate, Ystravet’s intended is the first to give touch. Bare hands for once—sculpted palms and tapered fingers that can’t help but captivate, all the more for being the only part of them broadcast in the clear. Workers alight on their wrists, bangles of furred bodies and snowflake-motif wings, and leave spots of rime like gifts.

  Betrothed and judge don’t appear to converse much, save perhaps on a private channel, but Anjalin hears no complaint and assumes the bride contented enough. Piously, Sarasad has engineered the new brood to produce according to hymns, and Ystravet’s betrothed takes delight in singing the workers to honey like quicksilver and rose gold, honey like larimar and the glow of blue giants. Judge Lisvade never fails to attend and listen.

  Anjalin will have her cast of fortune, her bid for Therakesorn. Even the sound of buzzing and the waft of sweetness—homesick-making both—pale beside that.

  The hive solidifies around the queen, a nimbus of frost radiating into chambers for storing, birthing, hibernating, and data ingestion. Inexorably, it also traps its ruler. Anjalin decides not to draw comparison between brood and monastery.

  The wedding closes in, and the hive approaches completion. Drawing perhaps on inherited memory, it takes on the appearance of ghost nebulae, in visuals if not in temperature, verdigris frost and silver lace; without music, the workers fall back on the habit of converting sugared water and peach liquor to metallic hydrogen. Sarasad and Anjalin take turns guiding them with liturgical praise and the occasional secular aria. She introduces him to music from Therakesorn—more cymbals and stringed instruments than vocals, but she focuses on the ballads. He goes along grudgingly at first, obeying her out of obligation to protocol. Later she catches him rendering the haunted verses and eight-ten meter on his own. More choir-orthodox than she likes, not that she is going to criticize. She teaches one of the ballads to the betrothed as well, who—charmed—spins it into a weave of their own design boasting a novelty of pitch Anjalin attributes to Cormorant idiosyncrasies.

  The date arrives. Anjalin prepares for it as she would for battle; the intended must be doing likewise. Even if they’re perfectly good, you’re still a possession. Anjalin can’t imagine what that is like. Though Fallbright has etched its ownership onto her soul, her relationship to it isn’t quite the same. Of all people, she understands that distinction.

  By the nuptial day, the glacier has gone from cabochon to faceted with Cantos from six choirs; the greater Envois have lifted off to orbit, too immense to be borne by arctic shore or the dreams of deep-sea ice. Anjalin’s entourage is the smallest at the reception. It seems the other choirs have taken their troops off duty just to attend this, pausing invasions and halting skirmishes. So much rides on a monastic wedding, and no choir would spare expense or officers. Were such events more frequent, Anjalin thinks, the choirs would find hardly any time to wage genocide.

  The first gift is an engine of halo blades and seismic wheels; expanded, it will integrate into the monastery as a defense strong enough to hold off Cantos. Ystravet Dal acknowledges the practical use of this and accepts the engine with a token of grace: a tail feather, chiseled from glister ivory.

  The second is a lepidoptery of monarch masks and moth mantles, sicklewing gloom and tortoiseshell veils—evidently meant for the intended. Ystravet rewards the tribute with a bird’s tongue, shaped of fine scrimshaw.

  Through all this the betrothed is silent behind the Finch, contained within a pennant that radiates colorless chill. More reserved than ever, as though the weight of ceremony has drowned their voice.

  Then it is Fallbright’s turn. Anjalin advances and removes the containment web from her offering.

  This split-off chamber, housing a cadre of hunters and workers, doesn’t possess the grandeur of the hive entire. Still it demands attention, holds the gaze fast. A glory of rime and hydrogen chiffon done in the best, most jealously guarded Shemronn embroidery. A low buzz primed to a Therakesorn ballad metered in Fallbright symphony.

  “This hive has been bred to Song guidance.” Anjalin stands before Ystravet, hands clasped behind her. “They make honey in flavor, texture, and color according to music of the holy. So we have proven that even brute animals may be brought into the eternal harmony, taught to give tribute in what form they may.” Dogma for the audience’s benefit; let Sarasad never complain again of her lack of formal manners.

  The apiary fragment doesn’t match the flair of the lepidoptery or the puissance of the engine, and to any other bird-oracle, it would have been so humble as to cause umbrage. Ystravet straightens slightly, her gaze sharpening with interest. “A demonstration, Commander? It should be quite the way to open the feast.”

  Anjalin gestures her assent, and as though this is a stage and all of them yoked to a script, the intended glides forward.

  The bathyal depth of their bridal garb gashes open, a wave of vituperative cold and voice. The same ballad Anjalin taught them, filigreed in Cormorant mezzo-soprano: liquid sunlight peering through threshing black. The first stanza reels the bees in, workers and hunters circling in mesmerized orbit. The third and fourth loosen them into a corkscrew spiral, blue-banded, lightning-winged.

  The fifth stanza crests. The bees hover in coiled tension.

  Anjalin’s breath snags. She reaches for her pistol. Knows she will be too slow after all.

  The hunters are almost quiet under the ballad’s climax. They are exact as they would never have been on their own, animal instinct leashed by human intent: all precision.

  Ystravet stiffens, doubles over without noise. Her betrothed, still singing, follows and catches her. Or perhaps to use her as a shi
eld when the guns come out. Anjalin does not toggle the safety off, but points hers all the same. In this moment it is important to fulfill a specific function, if only in appearance.

  “She lives!” The intended is a flux of sun-struck sea and abyssal dusk; the hunters lie about them, dead and spent, dusted in snow. “She’s more alive than she has been for years.”

  Understanding crystallizes. Anjalin lowers her gun and negotiates her way past other choir commanders, past Judge Lisvade who stands feet apart and weapon leveled at the intended’s throat. Eir face is hard and ashen, jaw a concrete line.

  “May I verify that?” Anjalin says to the rapid-fire shift between ocean colors as gently as she knows how. At a nod she kneels and pulls Ystravet to her, puts her finger on the Finch’s arm where the bees stung. No inflammation. A scan informs her Ystravet is in perfect health. Entirely too perfect. There was never apid venom dispensed, only a surgical severing of a neural link.

  “Ystravet Dal is well,” she says loudly, voice trained to carry like anyone else’s. “Her vitals are pristine, and her neural signs couldn’t be finer.”

  The phase-shift in expressions—the intake of breath—tells her who knows of Ystravet’s condition and who doesn’t. Lisvade sags in relief, uncomprehending.

  “Then,” a Springrise officer says, “she is no longer the Finch.”

  “She is not.” The veil of frigid water falls, sluicing away. For the first time, the betrothed is bare to sight, attired only in a thin robe. Anticlimactic in their plainness: the jungle-green hair, the sharp bones, the ordinary tears on ordinary cheeks. Anything but anticlimactic in what crawls on their skin. “But I am. As Cormorant candidate to succeed the Finch, I’m ready to assume my post.”

  The lottery shudders along their arched flanks, their columnal throat. It writhes in splats of light, resolves to the lexicon of bird-oracles. Anjalin can’t decipher all. Still, she’s learned enough to know that the betrothed speaks true, despite the Cormorant being institutionally extinct. This she does not say aloud—best to see how matters turn first. Instead she murmurs, “Is this claim disputable?”