Ninefox Gambit

by Yoon Ha Lee

  Cheris was starting to wish she had appreciated her paperwork more. At this rate, she was never going to get a chance to finish it. “Yes, and I’d better hope for a few million soldiers to show up and join me,” she said sarcastically. “Really, a one-man crusade against the heptarchate entire? That’s not cocky, that’s psychotic.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Kujen said, “considering you’ve never lost a battle.”

  She hated it when people bludgeoned her over the head with that, but she held her peace.

  “Besides,” Kujen said, “you’re in luck anyway. I looked at your academy transcripts. I don’t know how it escaped everyone’s notice for so long that you have dyscalculia. Math was the only subject you struggled with, isn’t that right? You need number theory to get anywhere in high-level calendrical warfare. Nine hundred years ago I invented an allied branch of math to make the mothdrives possible. No one else has successfully pulled off a major calendar shift. I’m surrounded by tinkerers, not real mathematicians.”

  Yes, Cheris thought, and you came up with the remembrances, too. Specifically, the fact that they were accompanied by ceremonial torture. She was getting the idea that the torture had been a design parameter, not an unfortunate coincidence. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I have a certain amount of evidence that you’re a sociopath. Why the fuck would I get in bed with you?”

  The thing was, Kujen was making her one hell of an offer. Cheris’s original plan had called for finding a way to assassinate him, because she despised the regime that Kujen represented, and she had thought the only way to replace it with a better one was to annihilate Kujen first. But if she could make use of him instead –

  Kujen grinned at her. “This coming from a former assassin.” He glanced over his shoulder at the corpse. “Instead of killing people one at a time, you get to kill them a bunch at a time now, isn’t that why you traded up? In academy you were good at a lot of things. Languages, for instance. You could have gone into propaganda or interpreting or analysis. Yet you threw everything away to become a walking gun.

  “You need me, General. You won’t find a better mathematician anywhere in the heptarchate. Besides, you’ll always know exactly where you stand with me, none of this pathetic hiding behind niceties. Face it, if not me, then who?”

  Cheris was silent.

  Kujen’s voice softened. “You’ve been fighting alone for a long time, Jedao. You never get close to anyone, no affairs that last longer than a couple of weeks. The Shuos aren’t the only ones who like to pry, you know. I imagine the Kel figure you’re standoffish because you’re being a fox. They have no idea what kinds of secrets you’re trying to keep safe. I’m not your ideal ally, no. But I’m better than nothing at all. We can do this together. You won’t have to be alone anymore.”

  “I’m not sure what the point of this discussion is,” Cheris said, because she didn’t want Kujen realizing how well he had her figured out. “You’re a heptarch. You can destroy me at any time. What kind of assurances can I possibly expect from you?”

  “That’s what I like about you,” Kujen said. He came around the corner of the desk and leaned against the side of Cheris’s chair. Cheris wished her gun were back in her hand, even if she knew better. “Here you are, exposed, and you’re still maneuvering for an advantage. Just what is it that runs in your veins, Jedao?”

  “You’re welcome to cut me open to find out,” Cheris said dryly. “Knife’s on my left hip if you forgot yours.”

  Kujen’s smile was slow and sweet and utterly untrustworthy. “Oh, I intend to,” he said. “Tell you what. There are things the other heptarchs won’t forgive. Being caught conspiring against them is one of them. If I stick my neck out under the same axe, will you believe my sincerity?”

  Cheris didn’t move when Kujen leaned over her. His hand rested on the back of the chair, fingertips brushing her shoulder. What is this, Cheris thought with a flicker of irritation, secondary school? Even so, it was difficult not to react to the sensuous mouth, the long sweep of those ashy eyelashes.

  “I have one question,” Cheris said.

  “Ask,” Kujen said. His breath smelled of smoke and spice.

  “If immortality is so wonderful” – hard to see the downsides for the practitioner if you didn’t care about little things like murder – “why aren’t all the heptarchs doing it?” Assuming they weren’t better at hiding it than Kujen was.

  “So you’re interested after all.”

  Cheris shrugged. Let Kujen think what he wanted.

  “It can drive people crazy if it’s not calibrated correctly,” Kujen said. “I don’t mean sociopath values of crazy.” The corner of his mouth tipped up for a moment. “I know what I am. I’m talking about useless raving values of crazy.”

  “No good to me either, then,” Cheris said. It couldn’t just be that sociopaths were immune. The heptarchate’s leadership didn’t lack for those, historically speaking.

  “Don’t jump to conclusions,” Kujen said. “They can’t get rid of me because I’m the only one who understands the math, including the black cradle’s governing equations. I can handle the calibrations. If you’re useful to me, I can arrange for you not to end up as a raving wreck. That being said, you’re a little young to be getting panicky about your lifespan, choice of career notwithstanding.”

  “Oh, that’s not the issue,” Cheris said. She had never been afraid of long odds. “I’m more concerned about the fact that I can’t see what’s in it for you. You already have everything.”

  “Is that what you think?” Kujen said. His fingers trailed down Cheris’s back, traced a shoulder blade, came to rest. “You want to strip the system down to its component gears and build something new, if I’m not mistaken.” It was impossible to look away from his eyes, darkly avid. “You’re going to make a new calendar. I want to be there when it happens, and anyway, you can’t do it without me. I can slaughter the math on my own, but I’d never ram this by the fucking sanctimonious Liozh or their pet Rahal. You could handle the calendrical spikes if someone solved the equations for you. You need a mathematician. I need a weapon. We can’t do this without each other, Jedao.”

  “I can already tell you’re not a tactician if you’re pinning your hopes of revolution on one game piece,” Cheris said. “Unless you have your hands on a bunch of mutinous Kel that no one’s told me about.”

  Kujen laughed. “Mutinous Kel are your department, I’m afraid. But we’re two of a kind; that has to count for something.”

  There had been a time when she would have hoped that she and Kujen were nothing of the sort, but by now she knew better. “Fine,” she said, because it was important to preserve the appearance that she was making a choice. “Does it particularly matter to you what I want to install in the place of what we have now?”

  “I can control the technology parameters that matter to me,” Kujen said. “You do whatever the hell you want with the social parameters. I could care less.”

  Cheris didn’t believe this, but they could fight over that later. She rose. Kujen stepped backward to give her room, still with that dancer’s awareness of space. His eyes were both dark and bright. Cheris knelt before him in the formal obeisance to a heptarch, and said, “I’m your gun.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE COMMAND CENTER was full of diffuse reflections, making it difficult to see anything clearly. Cheris spotted her own face in the mirror-maze, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to her. Was there a tipping point past which Jedao’s memories would drive her mad? What if she had passed it already?

  There was carrion glass everywhere, memories spun out in great gleaming crystal spindles. Tangible and visible, unlike Jedao’s. She assumed Jedao’s glass was different because he had been a ghost. People sharded across the walls and burnished into the floor. Had the bomb only hit the command moth? Or had any of the swarm survived? It looked like the grid had been mostly knocked offline, but life-support was still functioning or she would be in real
trouble.

  Either the gravity was settling or she was regaining her coordination. Her breath hitched as she examined a twisted arch of carrion glass. It had once been Commander Hazan. There were faint threaded traces of a tree he had loved as a child, a sister who had died in an accident, things she had never known about him.

  She backed away, wondering if he would ever have chosen to share these things with her, and choked down another of Jedao’s splinters.

  SHE WAS HOLDING a gun, the same Patterner 52 with which she had failed to kill Nirai Kujen, and the same one with which she would murder her staff three years later at Hellspin Fortress. Next year she would rise to general from lieutenant general, have to listen yet again to the gossip about the unseemly haste with which Kel Command kept promoting her.

  This latest campaign, against a heretic faction that called themselves the Aughens, had gotten ugly very quickly, not least because a good many Kel had developed sympathy for the Aughens’ cause. The Aughens fought honorably, made few demands, and wanted mainly to be left alone; but the heptarchate could not afford to cede that stretch of territory because it made the Blue Heron border vulnerable, and that was that.

  Cheris stood at the center of a line of Kel with rifles beneath a green-violet sky, down the field from five Kel soldiers bound and stripped of rank. It was a rainy day, and the air smelled of damp leaves, earthy-pungent; of bitter salts. In the near distance she could hear the trees with their branches rattling in the wind, the roar of the sea. She wiped rain out of her eyes with the back of her glove and raised her gun.

  The five Kel had failed their formation, and Cheris couldn’t help but think that formation instinct, however repugnant, would have been a great help in the battle. So much had depended on that last siege, and after every battle she ended up executing cowards and deserters. But then, formation instinct wouldn’t be developed until after she was executed for high treason. Back when she had been alive, it would have been a controversial measure. The Liozh in particular would have studied its implications carefully, and others would have protested it. By the time it was invented, after the fall of the Liozh, Kel Command and the hexarchs installed it into the Kel without any qualms.

  The Kel virtue had been loyalty. Formation instinct deprived them of the chance to choose to be loyal.

  Cheris fired five times in rapid succession. Five flawless head shots. Her instructors at Shuos Academy would have approved. She had to remind herself to see the blood. The Kel with rifles would have finished the job for her if she had missed, but it was a point of pride with her not to miss.

  The Kel approved of efficient kills, too. They had had their doubts about her at first. Most Shuos were seconded to the Kel military as intelligence officers. She had come in sideways as infantry on the strength of her tactical ability, but no one trusted a fox. She had had an opportunity to prove herself, if you could call it that, as a lieutenant: the Kel officers who outranked her had all been killed, and she’d gotten the company out of a bad situation. After that, the Kel took notice of her competence, mostly by giving her the worst assignments. A Shuos was always going to be more expendable than one of their own. It had only given her more incentive to get good faster.

  After the Aughen campaign, Kel Command assigned her to fight the Lanterners. Cheris had considered abandoning her original plan and turning coat, Kujen be damned. The Lanterners worried the heptarchs, which was a good sign. For her part, she had spent a great deal of time getting to know the best Kel generals and how they thought. The card games and hunting trips hadn’t been entirely frivolous. If it had simply been a matter of battle, she could have offered her services to the Lanterners. She was confident of her ability to defeat anyone the Kel could field.

  It hadn’t been difficult to win the respect of the Kel. The Kel, being practical, liked people who won battles. If she could have done her work with that alone, she would have tried. But two things forced her hand. The first was technological advances in augments. The Kel were going the route of composites, and there was a good chance that she wouldn’t be able to hide her intentions – two decades plotting high treason – from a hivemind. The second problem was Nirai Kujen, who could turn on her at any time. If she was going to act, she had to act sooner rather than later.

  The hard part wasn’t getting rid of the heptarchs. It was creating a functioning, stable, sane society from the heptarchate’s ashes. She still had no idea whether it would have been possible to convince the Lanterners to give up remembrances, assuming some alternative could be found that gave them a viable calendar. When the Lanterners used their children as shields, however, she knew they wouldn’t work out anyway.

  She didn’t have a lot of time left, so all she had was Hellspin Fortress. The massacre fixated the Kel on her and made her infamous. The Kel had respected her. Now they feared her.

  Respect was a good lever, but fear was better. If she was going to make a bid for immortality, she needed a very good lever.

  Terrible irony: if only she’d waited, if she had known what the Liozh were debating in their white-and-gold chambers, she could have offered her services to them instead. She wouldn’t have needed to resort to mass murder. But the Liozh heresy reared up two decades after her death and some time before the Kel first revived her. Worse, there was a good chance that the calendrical disruption caused by Hellspin Fortress was what led them to investigate alternate forms of government, which led to their particular heresy. Democracy.

  CHERIS STRAIGHTENED. IT no longer surprised her that their overseers had decided to kill Jedao. But they could have used a simple carrion gun to do so. They could even have handed her the gun and ordered her to do it herself, as a loyalty test.

  She took a ragged breath, then another. Candied corpses in every direction. The command center’s walls were warped, and the cracks in the floor were webbed together by fused strands of glass.

  Maybe she was wrong about the extent of the damage. Maybe there were other survivors. She’d have to check manually. A cindermoth was a large place, but she had nothing better to do.

  “Jedao?” she asked, because she couldn’t help hoping.

  No answer came.

  Jedao had provoked the attack by convincing her to reveal the extent of her mathematical abilities, which alerted Kel Command that they had given him access to someone who could handle a high-level calendrical rebellion for him. But he hadn’t expected Kel Command to risk two cindermoths plus a swarm to execute him. And now the heptarchs – hexarchs, she corrected herself – had finally caught on, and Kujen had abandoned her.

  Cheris smiled grimly. She was already starting to think of herself as Jedao.

  Jedao had tried to give her what he could. Don’t make my mistakes, he had said. A few words and a lifetime of memories.

  He had wanted her to continue the game for him. Or perhaps she was supposed to decide whether the game was worth playing at all. If only he had been able to trust her with more.

  Cheris wasn’t done with splinters. But she hesitated. Now that she knew about Nirai Kujen, she had a better idea how his form of immortality worked.

  If she abandoned the splinters, Jedao would be truly dead, and his terrible treasonous war with him. If she devoured the last of them, she could carry on the fight, but the person doing so might not be Kel Cheris.

  Had he meant to manipulate her into this choice? She didn’t think so, but this was Jedao.

  Still, Cheris knew she had already decided.

  The next two splinters took her through the eyes like bullets.

  CHERIS WAS SITTING at a table outside, shuffling and reshuffling her favorite jeng-zai deck. Normally she didn’t lack for opponents – this was Shuos Academy, after all, and there was always someone who didn’t believe a first-year could be as good as she claimed to be – but the yearly game design competition was going on, and everyone was distracted.

  Someone came up from behind and kissed the top of her head. “Hey, you,” said a familiar tenor: Vestenya Ruo, the
first friend she’d made here, and her occasional lover. “Dare I hope that I’ve finally gotten the drop on you?” He came around and took a seat on the bench next to her. Like Cheris, he wore the red cadet uniform. The two of them had a theory that the first Shuos heptarch had picked her faction’s colors to make her own people extra-special easy to assassinate from a distance.

  Cheris quirked an eyebrow at Ruo. “Hardly,” she said. “You came around that corner by the gingko tree, didn’t you? I saw your reflection in the perfume bottle that guy was fiddling with earlier. Pure luck.”

  Ruo punched her shoulder. “You always say it’s luck. Even at the firing range. You don’t get aim that good with luck.”

  “I don’t know why you make such a big deal of it when you’re the better shot.”

  “Yes, and I’m going to make sure it stays that way.” Ruo grinned at her. “But it’s annoying that I can’t beat your reflexes.”

  “I’m hardly a threat to you,” Cheris said patiently. As a point of fact, when they’d first met at some party, Ruo had picked a fight with her. Lots of bruises, no hard feelings, although she had since learned that picking random fights out of a spirit of adventure was the kind of thing Ruo did. She wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened, but it wasn’t long before she started hanging out with him, partly because he always thought up terrific pranks, like the one with the color-coded squirrels, but partly so she could keep him from getting into too much trouble.

  “Bet you say that to all your targets,” Ruo said. Periodically he tried to persuade Cheris to declare for the assassin track with him, but she hadn’t decided yet. “Say, shouldn’t that girlfriend of yours be done with class about now?”

  “‘That girlfriend’ has a name,” said Lirov Yeren, who had come up behind Ruo. Sometimes Cheris despaired of Ruo’s situational awareness. Although Yeren could walk silently, she hadn’t been making any particular effort to be quiet. “Hello, Jedao. Hello, Ruo.” Yeren leaned down, careful not to spill her drink, her curls falling artfully around her face. She and Cheris kissed.