Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  The next step was putting in the swarm order. Cheris felt ridiculous, since swarms only assembled for a general and she hadn’t been brevetted yet. To be fair, she would have felt ridiculous even with the brevet. The system flashed an acknowledgment of “unusual circumstances” and gave an assembly time of 5.9 days.

  Cheris wondered what to do next, then was mortified to find herself yawning.

  “You should sleep,” Jedao said. “You won’t be good to either of us without rest.”

  “I’m worried news will come in the night,” she said. To say nothing of her reluctance to fall unconscious while he remained awake. “Don’t you usually have staff for things like this?” She would feel better knowing there were other Kel around, even if they were strangers.

  “You should,” Jedao agreed, “but they’re trying to minimize the number of officers contaminated by close contact with me, and for a swarm this size you can make do with the moth’s staff.” There went that. “Anyway, I can’t work the monitors, but if you automate some flags, I can wake you if anything exciting happens. I also can’t read more than one thing at a time, but I can keep track of more graphics than a human could. And I don’t mind being an alarm clock.” He laughed at her dismayed expression. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to shock you.”

  Cheris didn’t want to sleep under his watch, and yet she couldn’t stay awake indefinitely. If she’d known that this would be the setup, she would have had serious second thoughts about waking Jedao up. “Ah – where am I to sleep?” she asked in a neutral voice.

  “Go out the way we came, and it’s probably been set up for you already.”

  He was right. The room looked more ordinary now, despite the mirrors. The room was also much larger than anything she’d ever slept in.

  Cheris looked at the reflection. Jedao was smiling mockingly at her. She gritted her teeth and glared back at him.

  “Good,” Jedao said, unfazed, and she wished immediately that she had been less obvious. “You’ll need that in the days to come.” She decided it was best not to answer.

  Her possessions from the Burning Leaf were on a table. She checked: they hadn’t forgotten the raven luckstone. Then she looked through the other things, her uniforms and her civilian clothes, her weapons. She was especially glad to see the calendrical sword, although who knew if she’d have a chance to indulge in any dueling. And it wasn’t – she had looked it up earlier, while Jedao remained disarmingly silent – going to offer her any protection against revenants.

  The Orientation Packet had assured her that she had nothing to fear from him while sleeping, but she didn’t believe it. Not to mention that it was awkward to have her commanding officer around continually.

  “Sleep,” Jedao said. “We’ll see if there’s additional intelligence in the morning.”

  She made herself undress as usual, hesitating only when she reached her gloves. Ordinarily she would have taken them off to sleep, but she didn’t like the thought of Jedao seeing her hands naked. In public, the Kel ungloved only for suicide missions. He had already seen her hands. She did not feel easy about that.

  “I won’t be offended if you keep them on,” Jedao said. “I almost never took mine off, either.”

  If only he hadn’t said anything, she might have overcome her reluctance and ungloved and turned out the lights. The image flashed in her head, her altered reflection in the mirror: Jedao wearing a Kel uniform, Jedao with his hands in the half-gloves that now meant betrayal. “Did you wear yours the day of the massacre?” Cheris said acerbically.

  “Yes,” he said. “They showed me the videos.”

  “You don’t remember?” she said incredulously.

  “Not all of it, and not in order.”

  “You haven’t shown any sign of guilt,” Cheris said, getting the words out like the beats of a drum. “Those were real people you killed. People who trusted you to lead them. I don’t understand why Kel Command preserved you instead of roasting you dead in the nearest sun. The Kel have never lacked for good generals.”

  “Look at my record again,” Jedao said. He sounded grim, not boastful. “I assume you did that before unfreezing me.”

  Cheris knew the high points. They had studied some of his battles in academy.

  He told her anyway. “From the time I was a major onward, I never lost. I was thirty-two when I was promoted to brigadier general, and forty-five when I died. Frankly, they sent me to die, over and over. Because I was good enough to be useful, but I was Shuos so Kel Command didn’t care if I didn’t make it out of horrible crazed no-win situations if there was a Kel general they could spare instead. And you know what? I took every enemy they pointed me at and obliterated them.

  “Kel Command didn’t salvage me because they cared about me, Cheris. The piece you’re missing, because it’s all classified, is that I haven’t lost any of the battles they’ve sent me to fight after they executed me, either. If they ever figure out how to extract what makes me good at my job without the part where I’m crazy, they’ll take it out and put it in someone else. It’s why they keep sending me out, to see if they’ve gotten it right yet. And then, when they have it after all, they’ll execute me for real.”

  “How does any of that excuse what you did?” Cheris demanded.

  “It doesn’t,” he said. He was polite, but not apologetic. The fact that his voice came so close to unconcern made her back prickle. “I could pretend guilt, but those people are centuries dead. It wouldn’t help them. The only thing left for me to do now is to serve the system they died serving, that I was sworn to serve myself. It’s not amends, but it’s what I have left.”

  He was almost convincing. Too bad she didn’t know what his game was. She padded over to the bed and tucked herself in. He didn’t say anything further, but it was impossible not to be aware of his presence, of the candle eyes in the darkness.

  Eventually sleep came. She dreamt of a forest full of foxes with brilliant yellow eyes. Every time she took a step, the nearest fox was revealed as a paper cutout and burned up, leaving nothing but a dazzle of smoke and sparks. When she woke, she was half-convinced that her shadow would be consumed by fire. But there it was, nine-eyed and imperturbable.

  Cheris was hungry, but the grid reminded her that today was a remembrance: the Day of Serpent Fire. Someone had delivered the meditation focus while she slept, a green candle in the shape of a snake slit open, the elongated right lung pulled out and slit crosswise. In the hexarchate’s settlements, the Vidona ritually tortured criminals or heretics on remembrance days, although voidmoths were exempt from this practice. Cheris didn’t like the remembrances. Most people didn’t. However, consensus mechanics meant the high calendar’s exotic technologies would only work if everyone observed the remembrances and adhered to the social order that the Rahal had designed.

  “I don’t recognize this one,” Jedao said in an unreadable voice as she lit the candle. “Who were the heretics this time? Were they burned to death?”

  “They called themselves the Serpentines,” she said, “which is what you might expect. They had some sort of religious heresy involving a belief in reincarnation.”

  “Interesting,” he said, still unreadable. “Well, I won’t interrupt your observance, then.”

  He didn’t say anything about observing the remembrance himself. Cheris wondered if a ghost’s observances even had any effect on consensus mechanics. Still, the fact that he didn’t seem to care for remembrances made her like him better in spite of herself.

  After the required thirty-nine minutes of meditation, Cheris did her morning exercises. She began with stretches, then a series of forms progressing in difficulty. Her body didn’t want to obey her. More than once she had to recover from the conviction that her legs should be longer, her balance higher. Regretfully, she decided not to attempt the sword forms.

  “They say you were excellent at hand-to-hand and firearms,” Cheris said finally, feeling she ought to speak to Jedao, especially after their prickly exchange la
st night. After all, it was technically her fault that they were working together.

  “You have to be in order to keep up with the Kel,” Jedao said, conciliatory in turn. “There’s a chance you inherited what I knew. Whether you do anything with it is up to you, but I imagine it’s work readjusting everything when it’s configured for the wrong body.”

  “Did your previous anchors –?”

  “One of them had some luck, but he was about my height and build, so that may have helped.”

  Cheris was struck by the horrible thought that everything he had done to massacre his staff at Hellspin Fortress had burrowed into her sinews and would not be dislodged. But if the memory existed, it wasn’t in a form she could access directly.

  “Besides,” Jedao said, “you probably know plenty of ways to kill people. I don’t know what they teach at Kel Academy these days, but I don’t imagine the state of the art stays still on that front.”

  A memory tickled at her. “Didn’t you start out as a Shuos assassin?” Not to say she hadn’t killed her share of people, but Jedao sounded more cavalier about it. She’d known plenty of Kel like that, too, however.

  “Yes, but I’m sure I’m out of date.”

  The thought of assassins having expiration dates almost made her smile.

  Shortly afterward, servitors brought in three trays, one large and two small. The servitors were of a variety she had never seen before, snakeforms with six vestigial wings. “The Nirai,” Jedao said, as if that explained everything. It probably did.

  Cheris acknowledged the servitors with a polite nod. She would have liked to chat with them, but she had work to do, and she was sure they did, too. They chirruped in a friendly fashion before heading out.

  The trays contained settings for two people, not one, with common dishes on the large tray. Jedao’s bowl was made of beaten metal with the Deuce of Gears engraved into it. The bowl and accompanying plates were empty. A swirling mist filled his cup, like a captive scrap of cloud.

  “At least they’re not wasting perfectly good whiskey on me,” Jedao said, but he sounded like he wished they would. “You’re wondering if I need nourishment. The answer is no, but I suppose they felt protocol demanded it.”

  “Did you eat with your soldiers?” Cheris asked. It was a dangerous question, but that was true of everything she could ask.

  Jedao laughed dryly. His voice, when it came, was calm. “You’re wondering how it’s possible to murder people you spend time at your high table with. I’ve wondered that myself. But the answer to your question is yes. Kel custom has changed over time, you know. In those days every commander brought their own cup to high table. It wasn’t provided like it was the last time I was awake. Do they still do that now?”

  “Yes,” Cheris said, mouth dry.

  He wasn’t done. “When I was alive, I used to pass around something I’d taken off an enemy soldier, a flimsy affair made of cheap tin.” His voice flexed, resumed its calm. “I thought it was a salutary reminder of our common humanity.”

  At one point. “What happened to the cup?” He was waiting for her to ask anyway. Was there a trap in the question?

  “I lost it on campaign. Ambush, a nasty one. One of my soldiers went back for the fucking thing against direct orders because she thought a cup mattered more to me than her life. You won’t find this in the records. I didn’t think there was any sense shaming her family with the details since she was already dead.”

  Jedao could be lying to her and she would have no way of verifying the story. But no one could have guessed that the small details of his life would matter centuries later. If they mattered. What she didn’t understand was, what was he trying to prove with the anecdote? He sounded like a good commander. Of course, everyone had thought he was a good commander until he stopped being a good human being.

  “You cared a lot about your soldiers once,” she said, taking the story at face value. “What changed?”

  “If you figure it out,” Jedao said, “let me know.”

  Back to games. No use playing anymore, then. Cheris looked at the trays. The smell of rice tantalized her.

  “Eat,” Jedao said. “You must be hungry.”

  “How can you remember hunger if you had trouble with colors?” Cheris demanded.

  “It’s hard to forget starvation,” he said. When she hesitated, he muttered something in a different language. It sounded like a profanity. She bet after a few centuries he knew a lot of those. “Sorry, habit. My birth tongue. Your profile said high language wasn’t your native tongue, either?”

  “Yes,” Cheris said. Her parents had ensured that she knew Mwen-dal, her mother’s language, even though it was a low language spoken by a minority even in the City of Ravens Feasting. Cheris only spoke it when she visited them, having learned to restrict herself to the high language in Kel society. The hexarchate regarded all the low languages with suspicion.

  “Yes,” Jedao said. “I still swear in Shparoi, too, although it’s a dead language in the hexarchate. My homeworld was lost to the Hafn in a border flare-up about three hundred years ago.”

  She hadn’t known that. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she was, even though she knew better. Tried to imagine what it was like for your entire planet to be gone. Couldn’t. It was the first time that she had a sense of the centuries that separated them, the fact that the difference between them wasn’t just a matter of rank.

  “Time happens to everyone,” he said, as though it didn’t matter. “Eat. If you fall over from hunger, I can’t revive you, although I imagine someone would figure something out.”

  She placed his tray across from hers at the table, then picked up her own cup. One sip, since Jedao couldn’t take the first one, and then the chopsticks. The rice was rice, but the fish was layered with thin slices of pickled radish, and the fiddleheads tasted pleasantly bitter beneath the sauce.

  “Did you eat like this when you were alive?” she asked. Three hundred ninety-seven years since his execution. A lot had to have changed.

  “We ate whatever the quartermasters could get us,” Jedao said. “I remember one land campaign we came across a cache of jellied frogs’ eggs. Not even a large cache. They were a delicacy in that region. I see from your expression that this isn’t exotic to you, but they were to us. We were hungry, so we ate them anyway. There were a lot of bad jokes about gills afterward.”

  Cheris finished her meal in silence after that, thinking about tin cups and disobeying orders and frogs’ eggs. When she had finished, she sipped the last of her tea and eyed Jedao’s cup with its mysterious mist. “Am I supposed to do anything with that?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so. I doubt it’s nourishing in any sense of the word.”

  One last sip. Cheris put the teacup down and stretched. She was twisting to the left when the grid’s impersonal voice said, “Incoming message.” The communications panel turned black, with the ashhawk-and-sword emblem of Kel Command in blazing bright gold.

  Cheris put her uniform in full formal. “I can receive the message now,” she said to the grid as she faced the panel.

  It was Subcommand Two, wearing her face again. “General Shuos Jedao,” it said, as if it could see him standing there. For all she knew, it could. “Captain Kel Cheris.”

  Cheris was already saluting.

  “Try not to let on that its face bothers you so much,” Jedao said. “It’s a bad habit to let people read you so easily.”

  She didn’t like the fact that he was giving her advice, especially of that nature, during a communication from Kel Command. Even if there would undoubtedly be more of that in the days to come.

  “At ease,” Subcommand Two said, and only then Cheris was sure it couldn’t hear Jedao. “I think you know what this is about. Due to the general’s inability to manifest physically, Captain, you are going to have to serve as his hands and his voice. To facilitate this, Kel Command is brevetting you to general for the duration of the campaign.”

  Cheris had expe
cted to feel something – discomfort, elation, confusion – but all that came was weariness.

  “I also have one other piece of information you might find helpful.”

  Cheris tensed.

  “Readings suggest the heretics are keying their regime to seven as their central integer. You’ll have better data sooner than we will, but keep that in mind.”

  Seven. Were they suggesting a revival of the Liozh heresy? She wished she had paid more attention during the obligatory history survey her first year in academy. As it stood, she had done well in all her courses, but some of them had gone clean out of her head as soon as she got her grades back.

  “That’s all. Best wishes.” The panel went blank.

  “This is not good news,” Cheris said.

  “We already knew that,” Jedao said. “Ah – your uniform, Cheris. Take care of it before you forget.”

  Kel Command had ordered it. There was no need to feel like a cadet embarking on a tasteless prank, but she did anyway. “Brevetted rank, general,” she said. The uniform replaced the captain’s talon with a general’s wings.

  “I want to take another look at the high officers in the swarm,” Jedao said. “I hope I’m not the only one nervous about the Vidona.”

  Starvation Hound was commanded by Vidona Diaiya, who had a reputation for finding loopholes in orders. It was unusual for a Vidona to rise to command in the Kel military. Like most citizens, Cheris had a healthy respect for the Vidona, who were responsible for disseminating Doctrine and reeducating dissidents, but she preferred to respect them from a distance. “Commander Diaiya has a lot of commendations,” she said, determined to avoid unnecessary trouble.

  “They were very carefully worded,” Jedao said. “I imagine she has high connections.”

  “That can’t be the only explanation,” Cheris said. “Besides, if it’s not her, then we have to go with Simplicity Eye or Six Spires Standing.” The former had a commander with two reprimands for “excessive brutality,” which Cheris hadn’t even known Kel Command cared about. The latter was overdue for repairs.

  “Yes, bad options all around,” Jedao said. “Diaiya, then. We’ll have to watch her carefully, but I might have a use for her anyway. And we’ll need Colonel Ragath’s cooperation. I’ve flagged a couple of his Nirai as potential problems, but we’re going to have to rely on him to keep them from getting creative.” He gave her the names.