Ninefox Gambit (38 page)

Kujen came over to the side of the desk. “It’s odd for a brigadier general to spend as much time as you do hacking into classified files,” he said. “Don’t you have other things to do, like shooting heretics?”

Cheris picked up her cards and began shuffling them, bringing her half-gloved hands into view. “Funny thing about this uniform,” she said, “but I’m still a Shuos. I like to keep my hand in.”

“You’re adorable,” Kujen said, “but that’s more bullshit. You can’t deny that you recognized my name. There aren’t many people in the heptarchate who can say that.”

She had blown the chance to play innocent rather spectacularly, at that. “How do I know this isn’t a joke?” she said.

When Cheris had first learned that one of the heptarchs was immortal, she had been skeptical. She could see good reasons for such a man to hide behind a false heptarch. But why weren’t the other heptarchs fighting over the technology, then?

Kujen reached over and plucked one of the cards out of the deck. Turned it around so they could both see it: Deuce of Gears.

Cheris was even more worried. Kujen shouldn’t have been able to spot the card.

“I hear you’re a gambler,” Kujen said. “Are you after immortality, too?”

“Maybe later,” Cheris said. The idea repelled her, especially now that she had some idea how it worked, but she couldn’t afford to reject it entirely. “I just want my heptarch’s position. I’m sorry to be such a boring ordinary Shuos, but that’s all there is to it.”

“Lovely story,” Kujen said, “but I’m not buying. I checked your background, General. If you wanted to backstab Khiaz, you should have stayed attached to her office. I mean, from all reports she was very fond of you.” His smile widened when he said that.

Cheris stiffened in spite of herself, even if her recent encounter with Shuos Khiaz was nobody’s secret. Time to change the topic. “All right, Nirai-zho,” she said without emphasizing the honorific, “since I’m apparently so confused about my own motives, you tell me what the hell it is I’m after.”

Kujen’s long fingers picked more cards out of the deck, slow and precise. He laid them in a circle, face-up. Ace through seven from the suit of Doors. “You want to bring down the whole damn calendar,” he said. “Took me a little while to see it. You’re very conscientious about researching all the heretics near your assignments. It looks a lot like duty, doesn’t it? But I think you’re fishing for allies, even if you haven’t found any that meet your criteria, whatever they are. You want to bring the whole damn heptarchate down.”

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

T
HE 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.

S
HE 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.