(no subject)

[ninefox]

Quick History: Shuos Jedao, the Arch-Traitor
Three hundred ninety-nine years ago, General Shuos Jedao was in the service of the Kel. Because he had a reputation for winning unwinnable fights, they assigned him to deal with the Lanterner rebellion.

In five battles, Jedao shattered the rebels. In the first battle, at Candle Arc, he was outnumbered eight to one. In the second, that was no longer true. The rebels’ leader escaped to Hellspin Fortress, which was guarded by predatory masses and corrosive dust, but the heptarchs expected that Jedao would capture the fortress without undue difficulty.

Instead, Jedao plunged the entirety of his force into the gyre and activated the first threshold winnowers, known ever since for their deadliness. Lanterners and Kel alike drowned in a surfeit of corpselight.

On the command moth, Jedao pulled out an ordinary pistol, his Patterner 52, and murdered his staff. They were fine soldiers, but he was their better. Or he had been.

The scouring operation that had to be undertaken after Jedao was extracted cost the heptarchate wealth that could have bought entire systems, and many more lives.

Over one million people died at Hellspin Fortress. Survivors were numbered in the hundreds.

Kel Command chose to preserve Jedao for future use. The histories said he didn’t resist arrest, that they found him digging bullets out of the dead and arranging them in patterns. So Kel Command put Jedao into the black cradle, making him their immortal prisoner.


What's up with Signifiers anyway
There were, however, historical examples of flagrantly incorrect signifiers. They were estimations, not scryings, in any case. The arch-traitor and madman Shuos Jedao had appeared as a Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, visionary and strategist, but had proved to be an Immolation Fox.


He can talk to you
Cheris tried to form a question. It came out on the third try.

“What defenses does the general have, sir?”

“He can talk to you,” the Nirai said sardonically. “No, don’t laugh. He’s very good at it. When he sounds sane and the rest of the world doesn’t, you know it’s time to pull the trigger. No offense, Jedao.”

“It’s not news that I’m a madman,” Jedao said, still ironic.


An Odd Thing for a Mass Murderer to Say
Jedao was silent for a while. “All right. We can either try to stabilize Footbreak and use it as a launching point for a larger assault later, or spear straight toward the Fortress from the beginning and hope that backwash from Footbreak doesn’t hit us at the wrong time. What’s your preference?”

Cheris knew about the Fortress. She knew, in outline, the most prestigious low languages and the distribution of wealth among their classes. She knew how many citizens the Fortress sent to the academies and the breakdowns by individual academy as well. And she knew about the fabled shields that ran on invariant ice, but everyone knew that.

She knew many things, and she knew nothing. She could feel the inadequacy of her neatly ordered facts confronted by the cacophony of living cultures. Once she had looked up the Kel summation of the City of Ravens Feasting. She had seen her home distilled into a sterile list of facts. Each was individually true, but the list conveyed nothing of what it sounded like when a flock of ravens wheeled into the sky, leaving oracle tracks in the unsettled dust.

“We’re going to have to confront the Fortress sooner or later,” Cheris said. “It might as well be sooner. With any luck, fewer people will die this way.”

“Good,” Jedao said crisply. “I’m glad we care about the same things.”

It was an odd thing for a mass murderer to say, and she wouldn’t figure out its significance until much later.


Jedao is a crazy mass murderer who has never lost a battle

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.


Jedao sounds like he cares about his soldiers but Cheris doesn't know whether to believe him

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.”


Jedao's planet totally got torched and he's totally fine with it!!!! Whatever!

“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.


The point of war is to rig the deck

“Seriously, what’s bothering you?”

“It wasn’t a fair fight.” Jedao’s brief silence spoke volumes.

“The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don’t fold,” he said. “Besides, you didn’t use any resources Nerevor didn’t know of in advance. She knew I was anchored to you. If she couldn’t compensate for it, that’s not your fault.”

“That’s a good way to save lives,” she said, a chill in her voice. They weren’t discussing the duel anymore.

“The faster it’s over with, the fewer people die,” Jedao said. “I realize you have delicate Kel sensibilities, but please accept my advice. You can’t leave advantages lying around, either, or people will use them against you.”


Jedao acting bugfuck crazy to freak someone out

“We can’t afford any weaknesses when we go up against the Fortress,” Jedao said. “The swarm has to be ready to obey, and to believe in our methods, whatever they are, even if I’m involved. Not only did the heretics capture the hexarchate’s most celebrated nexus fortress, they had help. That kaleidoscope bomb wasn’t developed and manufactured overnight. In any case, to unite the swarm, we need them focused on an adversary. Framing one of your own commanders for heresy ought to do the trick.”

Cheris was speechless.

Jedao’s voice cracked without warning. “My gun. Where did I put my gun? It’s so dark.”

Cheris bit back a curse. This had to be a ploy, even though she couldn’t see what an undead general would be getting out of playing a bad joke. “Jedao,” she said, trying to sound composed and failing, “there’s no need –”

Not only was the shadow darker than she remembered it being, Jedao’s eyes had flared hell-bright, and the entire room was heavy with darkness like tongues of night licking inward from some unseen sky. Cheris’s mouth went dry as sand. She’d seen combat before, she’d fought before, and all she could do was freeze and stare like a soldier just out of academy.

Where was her chrysalis gun? There it was at her waist, that unmoving weight. She had to reach for it, had to unfreeze –

“General.” Now Jedao was coolly imperious. “I don’t recognize you, but your uniform is irregular. Fix it.”

She had no idea what had caused him to go mad in the first place, no one did, so she had no idea if he was going mad again. She lost a precious second wondering inanely if snapping a salute would mollify him, then unfroze and fumbled for the chrysalis gun. Just in case.

The nine-eyed shadow whipped around behind her in defiance of all the laws of geometry it had obeyed until now, and then she knew she was really in trouble. All that time she had spent reading up on her swarm’s high officers and what intelligence they had on the enemy – some of it should have been spent researching Jedao.

“You shouldn’t be standing still,” he said. His voice was casual, as though he addressed an old friend. “They’ll get you if you stand still. You should always be moving. And you should also be shooting back.”

“Shooting who?” she said, struck by the awful thought that this was how he had gone crazy at Hellspin Fortress.

The shadow moved slowly, slowly, pacing her. Perhaps if she kept him talking she could buy time, even figure out what was going through his mind.

Jedao didn’t seem to hear her. “If you keep waiting, all the lanterns will go out,” he said, his voice gone eerily soft, “and then they’ll be able to see you but you won’t be able to see them. It’ll be dark for a very long time.”

Lanterns. The Lanterners? Hellspin Fortress? Or some coincidence of imagery?

The gun was in her hand. She aimed at the shadow, but it was too fast. If she fired, would it send up alarms? She didn’t want to start a panic in her command moth for no reason. She nerved herself and did it anyway, but the shadow anticipated her and whipped out of the way. The gray-green bolt sparked and dissipated harmlessly against the floor. Her next attempts fared no better. Cheris wished the Nirai had warned her that shooting Jedao wouldn’t be simple.

Despite the shadow’s movements, he didn’t sound like he noticed that she was trying to shoot him, either. “You brought a whole swarm here,” he said, voice rising. “They have no idea. It’s going to be a million dead all over again.”

If this kept up she was going to have to aim the gun at herself, terrible hangover or not. But then she’d drop the luckstone; there was still some chance this whole thing was an act. Then why wouldn’t her hands cooperate?

This would be much easier if she knew him well enough to tell whether this was an aggressively irresponsible mind game on his part, or a genuine sign of insanity. Stop hesitating, she told herself angrily. She knew better than to dither like this.

Jedao fell silent. In spite of herself, Cheris hoped that Jedao was done testing her, that he would call the game off. She wasn’t cut out for this. She was about to ask him when his voice started up again. This time he sounded unnervingly young, half an octave higher, like a first-year cadet.

“General?” he said. He wasn’t speaking equal to equal this time. He spoke with deference. Fear, even. “Sir, the dead. I can’t keep count. I don’t, I don’t – sir, I don’t know what to do next.” The eerie thing was that she couldn’t hear him breathing, despite the raggedness. When he next spoke, his voice wavered in shame, then firmed. “It’s my turn to die, isn’t it? I just have to find my gun in the dark –”

A long silence.

And then, quite softly, “My teeth will have to do.”


Jedao psychologically destroys his only ally to make a point
Cheris had seized up again, trying to tell herself this was a trick, that it had nothing to do with Hellspin Fortress, or worse, some other incident she couldn’t remember out of the history lessons she had stupidly failed to review. But this time she was sure. She aimed and fired again, fruitlessly.

“Cheris.” His voice no longer sounded young, and Cheris sensed he was finally in earnest. She half-turned toward the source of the sound, which was across the room from the shadow. Everywhere darkness hung like curtains of sleep. There were starting to be amber points of light not just in Jedao’s shadow, but everywhere, in the walls, in the air, everywhere, like stars coming closer to stare. She had no doubt that when they did, they would reveal themselves as foxes’ eyes.

Jedao recognized her again: he spoke to her as a subordinate, and formation instinct began to trigger. “Not that way. Or that way, either, if you’re thinking to escape. You’re about to swing left. No, don’t freeze, that’s even worse.”

In the swarm of lights she couldn’t figure out what to shoot. His speech, rapid but precise, now came from several directions at once, which only confused her further.

He was half-laughing. “You keep reacting, and you’re reacting with my reflexes, don’t you think I know what you’ll do?”

Her hands clenched. Another bolt hissed against the wall, to no effect. It wasn’t just the sudden cool malevolence of his voice, or its authority, it was that his reflexes were a part of her, he was in her, she couldn’t get him out.

On the other hand, if this wasn’t just a game, if this wasn’t pure pretense, then she might be able to trigger his madness and use it against him. Too bad she couldn’t get him to shut up so she could think clearly –

“You’re determined not to drop the gun, but look at your hand shaking – there it goes, and you’re still fixated on that stupid fucking luckstone. Reprioritize. What’s the real threat – where’s the real game? Go ahead, pick up the gun, try again.”

Cheris couldn’t make his voice go away and she couldn’t stop reacting like him. As a Kel, she couldn’t help responding to the orders, either. She was going to go ahead, pick up the gun, try –

Jedao started to laugh in earnest. “I’m going to enjoy watching you die, fledge.”

The Kel called their cadets that, or inferiors who fell out of line. All her muscles locked up in spite of her intentions. The luckstone felt leaden in her hand. She had taken comfort from it since her mother gave it to her. It gave her none now.

“You have no idea whether that gun works as advertised on full strength,” Jedao said contemptuously, “or how it works if it does, and you never asked. The Kel don’t get smarter, do they? Go ahead, pull the trigger.”

The Nirai technician wouldn’t have lied to her –

She knew nothing of the kind.

“Think about the name of the gun, fledge. You know what a chrysalis is. Where do you think they put me when it’s time for retrieval? I have to go into a container, and your carcass is handy. Remember that despite the fact that I’m a traitor and mass murderer, one of us is expendable, and it isn’t me.”

It was horribly plausible. She fired again, but wildly. Sparks; a dance of staring eyes. Again and again. No better luck.

“Honestly, Captain,” Jedao said, biting down on her usual rank, “if this is a typical example of Kel competence, no wonder Kel Command keeps using a man they despise utterly to win their wars for them.”

Cheris tried to make herself keep firing. Couldn’t. The shadow revealed itself next to the door, the nine eyes arrayed in an inhumanly broad candle smile. She stared at the shadow and felt herself falling into it, toward the pitiless eyes. They were opening wider: she thought she saw an intimation of teeth in them. It was worse that he had called her captain rather than fledge, that naked reminder of Kel hierarchy. Her nerve shattered: too much strangeness all at once. “General,” she croaked. “I didn’t mean to – I don’t know what you want, sir, I don’t understand the order –” She was talking too much, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “I failed you, sir, I’m sorry, I –”

“Cheris.” The eyes dimmed, rearranged themselves into the more familiar line.

“– can’t figure out –”

“Cheris! I’m done. It’s over.”

“Sir,” she whispered like a broken thread, “what are your orders?” Her fingers crept toward the chrysalis gun. She made them stop. What if he wanted something else from her? She couldn’t bear the thought of getting it wrong again.

“Cheris, sit down,” Jedao said gently.



Jedao admits he was a bastard but still has to make his point
“I’m a hawkfucking prick,” Jedao said. Cheris flinched: hawkfucker, fraternizer. “I didn’t realize how badly formation instinct would affect you. You had conflicting orders. The fault isn’t yours.”

“I am Kel, sir.”

“I know.” His voice dipped tiredly. “I misjudged. No excuse.”

She had no idea how to respond to that, so she kept silent. He was her superior. He demonstrably knew how to break her. And yet she was supposed to be able to judge him and kill him if necessary. How did Kel Command expect a Kel to be able to deal with this? The fact that he was always present, always watching her, only made it worse.

“Cheris. Please say something.”

She would have bet that he was sincere, except she had thought the same when he was pressuring her to shoot herself. “The chrysalis gun, sir.” Some use it had been.

“I wasn’t entirely lying about that. It forces me inside and puts us both in hibernation. I don’t know whether it does permanent damage to you. I’m never around for that part.”

That would have been useful to know much earlier. Naturally, the Orientation Packet hadn’t mentioned any such thing. She didn’t know why she had expected it to be more helpful. But then, she had gotten herself into this situation, hadn’t she?

Cheris focused on the in-out of her breathing until she felt calm enough to think clearly again. She put the luckstone on the corner of the desk. It made a small click. “I’m done with your game, sir,” she said flatly. “You win.”

“Oh, for love of –” Jedao checked himself. “At the risk of alienating you forever, I have to point out that you lost the moment you agreed to play the game on my terms, without negotiating.”

This was typical Shuos thinking, but she couldn’t disregard it.

“You weren’t serious about playing games with the swarm, sir?”

“I seem to recall someone arguing that the commanders didn’t deserve to be toyed with. No, I wasn’t serious, but it was plausible that I was, wasn’t it? Think about that.”

She frowned. “Was it worth doing that just to make a point?” She was looking at the luckstone.

“You have the lesson backwards, Cheris. The luckstone is incidental. I don’t have hands and I can’t hold a gun. When you agreed to be my opponent, what weapons did you think I had?”



Jedao is ruthless as shit
Cheris entered the message more or less automatically, then stared at the bright columns of text. “What do you mean, ‘gift’?”

“A hostage,” Jedao said. “A high officer, a moth commander for preference. Someone they’ll recognize from public records.”

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” Cheris said. “I’m not feeding the fucking heretics one of my officers.”

“Cheris, listen to me. We have to inject those infiltrators. We can’t shoot our way down there. The Fortress has too many guns, and I’m good, but not that good. If you can’t go through a problem, you have to go around it. The heretics haven’t fired because they’re uncertain, but they’re not stupid enough to let us land troops unless I convince them that I’m not, in fact, a Kel general with an unusual taste for dirty tactics. I have to convince them that I’m really Garach Jedao and that I offer them an advantage.”

“I’m still not –”

He kept talking. “The heretics are teetering right now because I took down the shields, yet there’s no way I could charm or bludgeon my way into a Kel swarm after escaping, let alone a swarm with two cindermoths. We’re going to leave the story to their imagination, because they’re right. I couldn’t do it. But they need to think I did. That’s why we have to send a commander to suggest the story to them. It’s something the Kel would never do, but I might. The Kel don’t fight like that.”

“Damn straight,” Cheris said. “Because we’re not doing it.”

“Very well then, fledge.” Jedao’s tone was formal, and a hot flush crept up the sides of Cheris’s neck. “What is your proposed alternative?” That brought her up short. She didn’t have one.

“Pull back and blow down the defenses with all the bombs we have,” she said.

“I’m happy to evaluate an alternative plan,” Jedao said, correctly ignoring what she had just said in desperation, “but there has to be something to evaluate.”

Cheris had an overwhelming desire to punch him. “Fine,” she said. “If you’re so fucking determined to send someone, send me.”

“Unacceptable,” Jedao said. “Now you’re reacting, not thinking, and when it comes to strategy, thought must trump reaction. If any records exist of you in the Fortress, they’ll have you down as an infantry captain. You’re too insignificant to be of any use as a hostage. At the same time, as my anchor and the current general, you’re too important. I can’t help the swarm if you’re drugged in a cell somewhere. Besides, your shadow and reflection will tell them what’s going on.”

“I can’t ask this of my officers!”

“Sir,” Nerevor said in a dead even voice. She had come out of her chair and was facing Cheris, eyes narrowed.

Cheris realized that she had been shouting.

Everyone had heard her half of the argument.

“Sir,” Nerevor said, more insistently. “What’s the dispute?”

Nerevor shouldn’t have asked, but it was entirely like her to do so. Besides, it was too late to pretend the dispute hadn’t taken place. Cheris said, “General Jedao believes that we need to send the heretics a hostage to persuade them not to fire on the hoppers. The hostage would have to be a high officer to be convincing.”

“Not something any Kel general would do, but something a crazy vengeful Shuos would do, am I right?” Nerevor said, nostrils flaring. “Because we can’t hide the fact that these are Kel moths, so we have to pretend that we were overwhelmed or blackmailed.” She didn’t sound like she thought that was far from the truth. The rest of the command center was very still.

“Yes,” Cheris said.

Nerevor lifted her chin. “Then I’ll go, sir. You won’t do better than a cindermoth commander.”

With winter clarity, Cheris realized she had been manipulated into losing her temper so this conversation would take place. “Hawkfucking prick,” she said to Jedao, remembering the subvocals this time. She studied Nerevor, resisting the urge to glare at the shadow.

Jedao didn’t deny the charge. “She’ll need to be wiped,” he said. “Get Medical to inject her with full-strength formation instinct and revert her to fledge-null. Fastest way to make sure they don’t get intelligence out of her.”

“You’d have to be wiped, Commander,” Cheris said. “Are you sure –”

“You’re wasting everyone’s time,” Jedao said.

“I understand that, sir,” Nerevor said steadfastly. “I am Kel. I will serve, even if this isn’t the service I anticipated when I was assigned to your swarm.”


How Jedao thinks
“I killed that man,” Jedao said, not amused, but without regret either. “However, we can only rescue the loyalists if we have troops on site, so the fact that he’s helping my credibility with the heretics is useful.”

“You expected something like this to happen,” Cheris said slowly. Why was she surprised?

“I believe in planning ahead. The loyalists have no way of knowing I’m here on Kel Command’s orders and there’s no way to let them know. When I announced my arrival, it wasn’t just to intimidate the heretics. It was to provoke the loyalists into revealing information, which would persuade the heretics in turn. And it forced your swarm to adjust to the fact that they’re being led by a madman and traitor.”

“That’s a lot of objectives.”

“It’s only three, and the last one is marginal. You want to accomplish as many different things on as many different levels as you can with each move. Efficiencies add up fast.”


Shuos Jedao: a worse friend than fungus
My dear Zai, I don’t care how hypnotized you are with Jedao’s potential usefulness, and I don’t care how everyone voted, although it’s nice that you’re practicing. Assuming it is Jedao, which seems more plausible now, he behaved nicely for Kel Command up until Hellspin Fortress, and he behaved nicely for Kel Command up until now. You’d be better off trying to befriend a fungal canister. It might have a sense of loyalty.


An enemy analyst insists Jedao did it all on purpose
The thing is, Jedao isn’t just a traitor, even if people’s brains short out around that fact. He’s also a Shuos. The two aren’t equivalent, despite the Shuos jokes. He was a Shuos assassin before he switched tracks, and there’s circumstantial evidence he did some analyst work as well.

Anyway, his career with the Kel was unobjectionable. He kept that up for almost twenty years. As if he were under deep cover. All the way up to Hellspin Fortress.

Hellspin Fortress wasn’t a Kel assault. The Kel wave banners at you before they join battle. You can always see them coming.

Setting up a deathtrap for not one but two armies – that’s not a psychotic break. That’s a plan with a twenty-year setup. A Shuos plan, to be precise. Ambushes, computer systems going haywire, contradictory orders, weapons failing. To say nothing of the infamous threshold winnowers. Too much fancy shooting with his staff, but it worked.

No wonder the Nirai have made no progress. They’ve been trying to cure Jedao, but he was never mad to begin with.

I’ll go you one better. He’s exactly where he wants to be. He’s immortal and he has all the time in the world to carry out his plot, whatever it is. I don’t know why he slaughtered his way into the black cradle. But I will bet you my last sweet bean pastry that even the incomprehensible slaughter served some purpose.


Jedao never forgets his victims are people
“You’re so good at making the Kel follow where you lead,” Cheris said. “How can I trust anything you say?” She raised her tablet and entered a query.

It wasn’t difficult to bring up the available transcripts of Shuos Jedao’s service. Even though she knew how well-regarded he had been, even though she had studied some of his campaigns, the number of deaths he had inflicted before Hellspin Fortress took her breath away. The Kel had known many generals, and he had been one of the best.

It only took a moment’s extra ferreting to find the people who had died at the Siege of Hellspin Fortress, heretics and heptarchate soldiers both.

“All right,” Jedao said quietly. “All of my anchors do this sooner or later.”

At this remove of time, the statistics weren’t precise, but the Kel historians had done what they could. The swarm that Jedao had led against Hellspin Fortress had not been small even by modern standards. His orders had told him to conquer the fortress so the Lanterners could be converted and the calendar repaired from the damage done to it.

Cheris read the number of the dead once, twice, thrice. A fourth time; four for death. Even so, she knew that she didn’t understand numbers, that a number over a million was a series of scratched lines and curves. If she heard tomorrow that her parents had choked on their soup and fallen over dead, it would hurt her more than the deaths of people who would have died anyway generations before she was born. Nevertheless, she started reading capsule biographies in reverse alphabetical order.

She read about two sisters who died trying to veil the dead after the custom of their people. Their reasoning had probably been that it might staunch the threshold winnower’s radiations, which was not illogical, but wrong anyway. She read about a child. A woman. A man trying to carry a crippled child to safety. Both died bleeding from every pore in their skin. A woman. A woman and her two-year-old child. Three soldiers. Three more. Seven. Now four. You could find the dead in any combination of numbers.

Faces pitted with bullet holes. Stagnant prayers scratched into dust. Eye sockets stopped up with ash. Mouths ringed with dried bile, tongues bitten through and abandoned like shucked oysters. Fingers worn down to nubs of bone by corrosive light. The beaks of scavenger birds trapped in twisted rib cages. Desiccated blood limning interference patterns. Intestines in three separate stages of decay, and even the worms had boiled into pale meat.

Two women. A man and a woman. A child. Another child. She hadn’t known there were so many children, even if they were heretics, but look, there was another. She had lost count already despite her intent to remember every one.

I remember every ugly thing I have ever done, Jedao had said. But Cheris wondered. It was impossible that he could remember causing all of this to happen without feeling all those deaths crouching at his side.

Cheris couldn’t bear the silence any longer.

“Say whatever you mean to say,” she said.

“I know things about the victims that aren’t in the records,” Jedao said. He might have been standing right next to her, as a lover would: too close. “Ask me.”

She picked a foreign-looking name from the list. She was sure it belonged to a Lanterner. Her hands sweated inside her gloves.

“You’re thinking I couldn’t possibly say much about a Lanterner,” Jedao said, “but that’s not true. They were people, too, with their own histories. Look at where she died – yes, that’s a reasonable map. The Lanterners were desperate. They had tried using children and invalids as shields before, and they had learned from the second battle that that wouldn’t deter me.” His voice was too steady. “So they sent the dregs of their troops to die first. The report says she was found with a Tchennes 42 in her hand. The Tchennes was an excellent gun. They wouldn’t have handed one out except to an officer, someone they trusted to keep questionable soldiers in line. From her name, you can tell she probably came from Maign City.”

“All right,” Cheris said, digesting that, “another.” She pointed.

“He’s from the technician caste from what’s now the Outspecker Colonies, before the heptarchate annexed them. There was a conflict between Doctrine and Gheffeu caste structure – you’d need a Rahal to explain the details – so his people had to be assimilated. We’d tried raids with Shuos shouters for fast compliance, but the calendricals were too unstable. By the time Kel Command finished arguing with the Shuos heptarch about it, the Gheffeu had thrown in with the Lanterners.

“It was a mess that the Andan should have handled, but we were fighting each other for influence. You’re used to thinking of the hexarchate as a unified entity, but during my lifetime, the factions were still quarreling over Doctrine. The winners would have their specific technologies preserved under the final calendrical order, and the losers – well, we know what happened to the Liozh.

“Anyway, that man. He died among strangers. If you look at the other names, none of them are Gheffeu. The Lanterners didn’t trust their latest recruits and split up ethnic groups. He died during a Gheffeu holy week, and he would have been wearing a white armband in honor of a particular saint.”

Cheris wasn’t a historian, but she had the awful feeling that Jedao wasn’t making anything up.


Jedao tries to pass off a massacre of his own soldiers as a pedagogical exercise

Now he was trying to distract her. “Tell me how you killed her,” she said.

“There’s not a lot to tell,” Jedao said. Pacing again. “She had an analytical mind and wouldn’t have considered me above suspicion. Another ten minutes and she would have concluded that everything going wrong implied a very highly placed traitor. Lucky for me she was never a fast thinker. I shot her through the side of the head.

“It was a bad moment because Jiang and Gwe Pia were also in the command center, and Gwe Pia was a spectacularly good shot. She would have gotten me if she’d been willing to shoot through Jiang, but she wouldn’t have thought of that, even if I did straight off.”

Cheris could think of words for an officer who immediately jumped to shooting through a comrade as a firing solution.

“Now that I think about it, it’s a miracle I didn’t run out of bullets. Getting low on ammunition is an amateur’s mistake. But of course, I hadn’t known I was going to do that.” Still pacing. “Incidentally, if your plan’s that finicky, you’ve already fucked up.”

“This isn’t the academy,” Cheris snapped.

“I’m serious. Sometimes you have to improvise, but why take the chance if you have alternatives?”

“It worked for you,” she said through her teeth. How had she lost control of the conversation?

“You have a chance of being a decent general someday, but not if you pick up bad habits.”

“Are you trying to pass off a massacre of your own soldiers as a pedagogical exercise?”

A ragged silence. “Fine. But listen, if your purpose was to kill a large group of people concentrated in one location, what would be the sensible way of doing it?”

Her shoulders ached. “Orbital bombardment,” she said reluctantly.

“The way I did it made no sense.” He was trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t imagine what it was.


Jedao is a great believer in rest
“YOU’VE BEEN AT the formations for hours,” Jedao said. “Are you sure you shouldn’t rest?”

“You’re a great believer in rest,” Cheris said. She grimaced at the leftmost pivot of the latest formation. Would skew symmetry get her the results she wanted? The whole thing was moot if they couldn’t wrench the heretics’ calendar into a more favorable configuration, but she preferred to prepare just in case.

“I once had someone swerve her tank out of our column and straight into a house. With a very large basement. Because she was too sleep-deprived to think. It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny then. – Oh, who am I kidding, it was hilarious, even if it was kind of a disaster. I laughed so hard my aide almost shot me.”

“Do I look that tired?”

“Not yet,” Jedao said.


Jedao responds unexpectedly
“A lot of people are going to die because of what I just did,” Cheris said subvocally.

She expected Jedao to explain why it was necessary. Instead, he said, “I’m afraid it never stops hurting.”


Jedao recieves an act of kindness
“I hope it’s redundant for me to say this,” Jedao said, “but you shouldn’t duel. You’re apt to slaughter people by accident.”

Her chest hurt. “I suppose that’s to be preferred to killing them on purpose.”

“When you became a soldier, what did you expect it to be about? Parades? Pretty speeches? Admirers?”

“I know it’s about killing,” she snapped. “I didn’t want it to be about deliberately killing my own soldiers.”

“Sometimes there’s no other way.” The shadow was behind her, so she couldn’t glare at it.

“Yes, well,” Cheris said, “you live your beliefs. How commendable.”

“I wasn’t referring specifically to Hellspin Fortress.” She snorted.

“I am not good for you,” Jedao said. “I know this. But if I were as good at manipulating people as you think I am, you would be taking a nap instead of making all the duelists nervous.”

“You don’t sleep,” Cheris said, remembering. “You don’t sleep at all. What do you do in all that time? Count ravens?”

Jedao was silent for so long that she thought something had happened to him. Then he said, “It’s dark in the black cradle, and it’s very quiet unless they’re running tests. Out here there are things to look at and I can remember what colors are and what voices sound like. Please, Cheris. Go sleep. You will never realize how valuable it is unless someone takes it away from you forever.”

“You’re only telling me this to get me to do what you want,” Cheris said.

“You’ll have to let me know how that works out,” Jedao said. “Something’s bound to go wrong in the Radiant Ward, and they’ll need you.”

“Need you, you mean.”

“I said what I meant.”

Cheris looked around the dueling hall, then let her feet carry her back to her quarters. Before she lay down, she asked, “Are you lonely when I sleep?” He didn’t answer, but this time she left a small light on.


'Jedao' means honesty, lol
“My mother, who was eccentric by our culture’s standards, had three children by three different fathers,” Jedao said. “You’re not supposed to name children after living relatives, it’s disrespectful, but Koiresh Shkan was my father’s name. He was a musician, and I only met him a few times. My other name is derived from a root that means something like ‘honesty.’ You can bet that made my life hell when it got out at Shuos Academy.”

Jedao is a lobotomized ghost in a box
Uwo had brought Shiang to the lab where Jedao was pinned. The room was drab except for a single wall devoted to a one-per-minute cycle of riotously colorful photographs of flowers. Forsythias, cosmos, moss roses, azaleas, everything. Flowers were an innocuous way of giving Jedao access to color when they switched on the portal that could, for short periods, give him a limited window into the world.

“He’s in here, Nirai-zho?” Shiang asked, looking around at the terminals with their graphs and
readouts. One of them was still set to a card game.

“Not precisely,” Kujen said, “but this is the single point of access we’ve allowed him. I didn’t deem it wise to give him an anchor of his own without Kel Command’s approval.”

“I’m authorized to make that determination.”

“Of course,” Kujen murmured.

“Do you wish to talk to him?”

Shiang eyed him. “I did read your reports, but is he stable?”

What was Jedao going to do without a body, put nails through her eyes?

“As stable as anyone is,” Kujen said. “You came all this way, you might as well see for yourself. I should warn you that the time windows are dependent on calendrical mechanics—the equations were in Appendix 5—so you’ll have twenty-three minutes this session if we start now.”

“Let’s do this, then.” Uwo flipped the switch. A chime sounded. A shadow rippled through the room. Nine candle-yellow eyes stared at them through a crack of black-silver. Then the shadow faded, and the eyes with them.

“Jedao?” Shiang said, unmoved by the phenomenon.

“I apologize for being unable to salute, sir,” Jedao said, that same easy baritone with its drawl. It sounded as though he stood in the room facing them, except he’d also have to be invisible.

“What do you require of me?”

“I’m here to evaluate your recovery,” she said.

“Nirai-zho tells me you’ve given no explanation for your behavior at Hellspin Fortress.”

“I have none, sir.”

“Do you remember what happened?” She was frowning at Uwo, as though Kujen’s anchor should have an answer for her.

Jedao hesitated. “I remember it in pieces, sir. The pieces aren’t in order. They showed me some of the videos, including—” His voice wavered. “Including when I shot Colonel Gized. I don’t—I don’t understand why I would want to do that. I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“Can the Rahal get anything out of him now?” Shiang asked Kujen.

“Unfortunately, that’s impossible,” Kujen said. It had, in fact, been one of the design parameters for the black cradle. Not that Shiang was ever going to learn that from him. “Neither of us sleeps. A wolf scrying has no access.”

Shiang swore under her breath, then said, “What do you think I hope to accomplish here, Jedao?”

“I imagine you’re here to render judgment, sir. I’m not sure why I’m being retained as a revenant, however. There must have been a court-martial, but I can’t remember any of it. I realize I killed a great many, including my own people. I am prepared for your sentence.”

“We kept you alive”—Shiang’s nostrils flared—“because Kel Command needs tacticians of your caliber, because you may yet ‘serve’ in an experimental capacity, and because the heptarchate continues to face many threats.”

Uwo coughed. “About that.” This would have gone better if Shiang had read the report as she had claimed.

Shiang glared at Uwo. “You have something to say, Nirai-zho?”

Kujen decided that he needed to go back to picking more physically intimidating anchors. This one was excellent in all other regards. They had marvelous conversations about homological conjectures over breakfast, but even bleed-through hadn’t overcome Uwo’s naturally retiring demeanor.

“Sir,” Jedao said, “I—I would recommend against using me for that purpose. I have difficulty with tactical simulations now. I don’t have any reason to believe that things would be any better in the field.”

“That must be humbling for you to admit, given your former stature,” Shiang said.

Jedao sounded puzzled. “I wish to serve, sir, but it’s important that you have an accurate assessment of my capabilities.”

“And if I decided that the Kel would best be served by your permanent death?”

“Then I will die, sir.”

“Do you want to die, Jedao?”

“I wish to serve, sir,” he said again.

“It’s not for me to question your orders.”

“Are you happy here?”

“I am waiting to serve, sir. That’s all that matters.”

Shiang flipped the switch herself, banishing Jedao.


Jedao gets his soul vivisected
Kujen inspected the primary display. He had certain instruments that the Rahal didn’t know about. In his readings, the central signifier, Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, never changed. It suggested that Jedao was not just more intact than he was letting on, but that he was manipulating the entire situation. Kujen hadn’t yet caught him at it, though. The weighted network of secondary signifiers had taken more work. Kujen had done a lot of jiggering to replace the problematic Immolation Fox in the motivational vertices with the more tractable Rose Chalice, that-which-receives. “Jedao,” Kujen said, “I have to dismantle you. It will hurt.”

Kujen knew how to give High General Shiang half of what she wanted. To make Jedao sane and functional, to give him back the ability he had had in life. Kujen would have to build around the latter because he didn’t understand it well enough to mess with it, but it could be done. He could transmute that all-consuming guilt into a desire to make amends. The hard part would be giving Jedao some sense of proportion. The man had a judgmental streak a planet wide.

Of course, that was only half of what Shiang had demanded. If Kujen wanted the Kel to think he was in bed with them, he was also going to have to pretend to be hostage to their desires.

“Nirai-zho,” Jedao said, “I was made to serve. If this is the service I am to give, then it doesn’t matter how much it hurts.”

The sad side-effect of making Jedao like this was that he was no longer an entertaining conversationalist. Thank goodness it was temporary. “I wish you’d shut up about service,” Kujen said.

Slight pause. “What would you rather talk about?”

“Aren’t you even going to ask me why I have to take you apart?”

“It doesn’t matter, Nirai-zho, unless you’d like to tell me. I expect you have a good reason for it.”

If Kujen wasn’t mistaken, Jedao was trying to comfort him.

“There’s one thing I can do for you,” Kujen said, because it was easier to work with a calm subject and after a certain point Jedao wouldn’t realize he’d been deceived. “I’m not saying you’re much more than a doll as it stands, even if you have no idea what I’m talking about, but you’re not out of your mind with the desire to commit suicide, either. I can take away your memory of this time. You’ll be broken but you won’t remember once having been patched up. It might hurt less that way.”

“If it makes you happy, Nirai-zho—” Jedao used to understand that this was a very risky line of thought.

“I’m asking what you would prefer.”

“I want to remember,” Jedao said, his voice suddenly steady.

So Jedao hadn’t entirely lost his understanding of pain or pride or ugly bargains after all. Good to know. “Fine,” Kujen said. “We’ll begin now.”

He flipped the switch, leaving Jedao trapped in the black cradle’s sensory deprivation. Over the next week, Kujen modified the setup so he could hear Jedao without Jedao hearing him. Jedao turned out to be good about not talking to himself, unlike Esfarel. If it hadn’t been for the readings, Kujen would have wondered if Jedao had died in there.

He started dismantling the work he’d done to stabilize Jedao so he could reinstall the death wish.

After seven months and three days in utter isolation, Jedao broke his silence. “Nirai-zho? Are you there? Please—” His voice was brittle.

Kujen didn’t answer. Instead, he started the finicky work of suppressing more of Jedao’s memories now that Jedao had cracked. If Kujen was going to spend eternity with someone, he might as well guarantee that that someone would be pleasant company. Esfarel had gone mad in the black cradle, but Kujen had figured out better techniques since then. Jedao was more resilient to begin with if he’d lasted this long.

Sixteen days after Jedao spoke, Kujen noticed the thrashing. The instruments didn’t pick up on it, but as a revenant himself he could feel it. Esfarel had done that when he was newly undead and trying to figure out how to kill himself.

Eighty-three days after that, just as Kujen thought he’d be able to move on to the next phase, Jedao spoke again, very quietly. “Kujen, please. I miss you. It’s so dark. Are you—are you there?”

That wasn’t fear.

It was loneliness.

Kujen happened to know that even monsters seek companionship. Or an audience, anyway.

“Shut up,” he said, suddenly irritated. The only reason they were in this situation to begin with was Jedao’s ridiculous grand strategy. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

Jedao still couldn’t hear him. Hear anything, really.

Kujen returned to work.


Jedao goads his flesh leash through a bit of inspirational spectacle
Cheris went on. She couldn’t pause every time Jedao said something.

“The shields have a weakness. They rely on a human operator who can be made to falter. You will receive further instructions when we begin the siege. I have knowledge you don’t, and we still don’t know how or why the Fortress fell. I won’t risk that information falling into enemy hands.”

On the word “hands,” she unsheathed the combat knife, then retrieved her left glove. The knife was sharp in the way of bitter nights. Cheris made a show of sawing off each of the glove’s fingers in turn. They fluttered to the floor, looking like hollowed-out leeches. When she was done, it looked like a ragged imitation of Jedao’s fingerless gloves, the kind no one had worn since his execution.

The silence could have swallowed a star.

She put on the amputated glove, then cut all the fingers off its mate. She put that one on, too.

“I give the orders here,” Cheris said. “We have already seen what happens when a moth commander falls out of line. I will not tolerate any further lapses in discipline. I trust I have made myself understood.”

Cheris didn’t dare glance back at Kel Nerevor, but a muscle was working in Kel Paizan’s jaw. Colonel Kel Ragath looked amused, of all things.

“Say something,” Jedao said. “Don’t let up.”

“You are thinking,” Cheris said, “that this can’t possibly work. But the fact is that out of all the great and terrible weapons in the Kel Arsenal, Kel Command saw fit to send us a single man. If you cannot trust in Kel Command, you are not fit to be Kel.”

It was a gamble saying this to officers who had, in some cases, served longer than she had been alive, but the argument felt right. It was a Kel argument, an appeal to authority. They looked at her in silence.

“Acknowledge,” Cheris said.

“Sir,” they said in one voice.

She wondered what Shuos Jedao could have achieved in life with the Kel united behind him. His soldiers had loved him; the histories were mercilessly clear on this point.


Jedao killed his best friend
“I met her at one of those damnable flower-viewing parties I had to attend as a high officer. The host was a friend of the Andan heptarch’s sister. They liked to decorate parties with us military types to reassure the populace that the breakaway factions weren’t going to chew the realm to rags.

“I was looking at the orchids when I overheard Gized critiquing an Andan functionary’s poetry to his face. I decided I had to find out more about her, so I waited until she was done bludgeoning him about the head with his use of synecdoche, and asked her for a duel.”

It wasn’t much of an anecdote, although Kel who cared about literary techniques were oddities the way her ability at abstract mathematics was an oddity. But there was a brittle quality to his tone.

“It was over very quickly. I’ve only once lost a duel to a Kel, and it wasn’t Gized. She wasn’t humiliated, she was bored. She’d come to enjoy the party and I was getting in the way. But I looked up her profile. Mediocre duelist, excellent administrator. When Kel Command gave me my pick of staff, I chose her. You would have liked her. She tolerated all the games I challenged her to despite never figuring out how to bluff at jeng-zai, but it was always clear that I was wasting her time.”

“Then why do it? Why the games?”

His voice came from a little ways off, as though he had paced to the far end of the room. “You probably have some notion that we wield weapons and formations and plans. But none of that matters if you can’t wield people. You can learn about how people think by playing with their lives, but that’s inhumane.” The word choice jarred Cheris. “So I used ordinary games instead. Gambling. Board games. Dueling.”

“You haven’t challenged me to anything,” Cheris said, wondering.

“What, and interrupt your dramas? You’re entitled to leisure time. I have to admit, I don’t even know what to make of the episode with the dolphin chorale.” Now he was trying to distract her. “Tell me how you killed her,” she said.

“There’s not a lot to tell,” Jedao said. Pacing again. “She had an analytical mind and wouldn’t have considered me above suspicion. Another ten minutes and she would have concluded that everything going wrong implied a very highly placed traitor. Lucky for me she was never a fast thinker. I shot her through the side of the head.

“It was a bad moment because Jiang and Gwe Pia were also in the command center, and Gwe Pia was a spectacularly good shot. She would have gotten me if she’d been willing to shoot through Jiang, but she wouldn’t have thought of that, even if I did straight off.”

Cheris could think of words for an officer who immediately jumped to shooting through a comrade as a firing solution.

“Now that I think about it, it’s a miracle I didn’t run out of bullets. Getting low on ammunition is an amateur’s mistake. But of course, I hadn’t known I was going to do that.” Still pacing. “Incidentally, if your plan’s that finicky, you’ve already fucked up.”

“This isn’t the academy,” Cheris snapped.

“I’m serious. Sometimes you have to improvise, but why take the chance if you have alternatives?”

“It worked for you,” she said through her teeth. How had she lost control of the conversation?

“You have a chance of being a decent general someday, but not if you pick up bad habits.”

“Are you trying to pass off a massacre of your own soldiers as a pedagogical exercise?”

A ragged silence. “Fine. But listen, if your purpose was to kill a large group of people concentrated in one location, what would be the sensible way of doing it?”

Her shoulders ached. “Orbital bombardment,” she said reluctantly.

“The way I did it made no sense.” He was trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t imagine what it was.


POTENTIALLY TRIGGERING EXCERPTS BELOW


TW: suicide. Jedao's family ends poorly
Jedao laughed. “And here I was thinking that you have much better taste in dramas than my mother.”

She was disconcerted by the thought that Jedao had had a mother. She didn’t know anything about his family.

“I’m told someone murdered her while I was being interrogated,” Jedao said, as though he were reporting the number of cucumbers a battalion ate in a month. “My father was already dead. We were never close to begin with. My brother –” Suddenly the unsentimental voice became raw. “My brother shot his partner and their three daughters in their sleep exactly a year after Hellspin Fortress, then killed himself. And my sister vanished. Probably ran right out of the heptarchate. She was always the practical one.”


TW: Jedao is suicidal
Sudden despair crashed over Cheris. She looked around the command center, and the knowledge of her failure was like a black knife. She was so tired, she had been in the darkness for so long, and she was fighting against long odds. If only she could fold asleep, just for a little space; and if only the universe had any mercy, she would never have to wake.

Cheris reached for her combat knife. She hadn’t thought she’d have further use for it on a moth, but there it was. She weighed it in her hand, then brought it up to her –

“Cheris, stop it.” It was Jedao, whispering as across a hollow distance.

“What happened to you?” she asked without interest.

“It hurts,” he said simply. “Cheris, put the knife away.”

“I failed,” she said, “and all of it was for nothing.”

“Cheris, I mean it.” His voice grew sharper. “You’re experiencing bleed-through. I’m sorry. But you need to put the knife away.”

She didn’t want to obey. It was tempting to close her eyes and use the knife anyway.

“The knife, Cheris.”

Then she understood. “This isn’t me,” she said, jolted out of the despair. “It’s you. How long have you been suicidal?” She sheathed the knife.

He had been a ghost for 397 years. She imagined that if there were a way for him to kill himself, he would have figured it out by now. Something she could use against him if he tried to pull mind games on her again.

“The bleed-through will pass,” Jedao said coolly, “and you’ll be all right. Prepare orders for the infantry and the Shuos infiltrators. The operator can’t sustain the shield inversion – look at the scan. They’re disabling the entire Fortress to get us. We’ll have to endure.”


TW: non-con. Cheris remembers.
She caught sight of her shadow, and the absence of Jedao’s nine eyes hurt her, but there was no time to grieve. She swallowed a splinter. It punctured her heart on the way down.

CHERIS FELL INTO a memory of blurred voices and laughter and the mingled smells of wine, perfume, flowers, a door half-open: a party. A woman dark-haired and fragrant and sweet of face, a long red coat draped over her shoulders, was pressing herself against Cheris. The woman’s mouth was beautiful, but never kind. She was wearing gloves so dark a red they were almost black, in terrible taste, but no one could tell her no. It was Heptarch Shuos Khiaz, and she had backed Cheris into a shadowed room.

Khiaz’s hands were in her hair, drawing her head down for a kiss. One hand drifted across Cheris’s chest, unerringly finding all the scars beneath the black-and-gold uniform, then lingering over the brigadier general insignia. She was telling Cheris to take off her gloves. The gloves were black and fingerless. Cheris knew she couldn’t afford to sleep with a heptarch, but she couldn’t afford to say no, either.

“Congratulations on the promotion,” Khiaz said. “I always knew you’d go far.”

“Shuos-zho,” Cheris said, very formally. She was remembering her origins as Shuos infantry, a decade ago, and why she had transferred out of Khiaz’s office and into the Kel army at the earliest opportunity. “Pardon me, can I get you anything to –”

Khiaz shrugged off her coat in a single languorous motion. Underneath it she was wearing a Kel uniform. It was perfectly tailored to her.

For that matter, the gloves weren’t dark, dark red. They were black. Kel gloves, taboo for a Shuos to wear. Cheris was aware of the suddenness of her erection, and of the fact that in one moment she had been comprehensively outflanked.

She almost said no, even if the heptarch could pull her from Kel service for defying an order. Destroy the career she had worked so hard for, the plan she had nurtured for so long. But as a Shuos, she was the heptarch’s property. There was no one she could appeal to.

The Shuos didn’t believe in sex without games and obligations. Khiaz’s hands moved down. For one red-black moment Cheris considered killing her just to get away. Khiaz had very clever hands. Cheris’s heartbeat sped up despite her best efforts not to react. Khiaz liked to ask embarrassing questions to punctuate her caresses.

Then Khiaz reached up to unbutton her uniform’s jacket. Before she could stop herself, Cheris caught her wrist. Begged her to leave it on.

And I call myself a tactician, Cheris thought savagely. Of all the subterranean desires to be caught out in. Her breath hitched. She could wring an advantage out of this if she retained some shred of control. She started answering Khiaz’s questions, maneuvering the conversation in a better direction. As long as Khiaz thought Cheris was overcome by desire rather than nurturing a plot against the heptarchate, she was safe.

Khiaz murmured something about fear and courage and the zigzag paths people take between the two. “What are you so afraid of?” she asked, mocking. “Do you think I’ll hurt you?” She knelt, still in the uniform, and took Cheris in her mouth, velvet-warm.

Voice breaking like a boy’s, Cheris gasped out a terror of death. Banal, but believable. Khiaz’s eyes were momentarily bright with triumph beneath the long lashes.

Years later, Khiaz would remember, as Cheris had intended her to; and in the aftermath of Hellspin Fortress, she would consign Cheris to the black cradle’s terrible undeath.

Khiaz wasn’t done. Cheris hadn’t expected her to be satisfied that easily, so this came as no surprise. Over and over as it happened, Cheris thought, I’m not here. I’m not here. But of course she was. After a certain point she gave up trying to mislead Khiaz with clever ripostes. She had no words anymore, only the miserable awareness that she couldn’t make her heart beat more slowly.


TW: non-con, gore, eyesquick. Jedao has complicated feelings about being a ghost sex pet.
JEDAO HAD A list of things he hated about being a revenant. The inability to sleep, however, came near the top of the list. He lingered in the dimly lit room not out of choice but because his anchor, the blond Hafn boy, had fallen asleep on the couch after the latest round of sex.

Kujen had gotten up already and was sitting on the edge of the couch, splendidly nude, as he scribbled notes on a slate. “You’re about to say something,” he said without looking up, “so you might as well get it over with.”

“I wouldn’t dream of disappointing you, Nirai-zho,” Jedao said with a hint of sarcasm. “I was only thinking of how satisfying it would be to report you to Kel Command.”

“Wouldn’t do you any favors,” Kujen replied, unperturbed. “Half the hivemind is still convinced that it ought to throw away the key and leave you in the darkness forever. Which could still be arranged, if you’re feeling masochistic.”

Jedao said nothing. Kujen liked needling him about his fear of the darkness. He was well aware that his vacation from the black cradle came thanks to Kujen; that his unusual degree of freedom during this jaunt was another such gift. When Kel Command ordered him chained to an anchor, Jedao ordinarily had no influence over the anchor except to speak to them, a voice that no one else (but Kujen) could hear. This time, however, Kujen had adjusted the bond so that Jedao could exert a certain degree of control over the body.

Kujen set the slate down on a table next to the couch and leaned back, bonelessly folding into the crook of Jedao’s arm. Jedao was ambivalent about considering the Hafn boy’s body “his,” since strictly speaking, the boy hadn’t had any choice in the matter. But the strengthened anchor bond meant that he could feel what the body felt, as though—almost—he inhabited it himself. Kujen had been at pains to demonstrate the benefits of this.

“Considering how hard Kel Command worked you in life,” Kujen said, his voice throaty, “I should think that you’d welcome a little vacation.” He twisted and resettled himself, kissing Jedao’s jaw and earlobe in a lazy meandering line.

The body woke; Jedao used its voice to speak. He still hadn’t gotten entirely used to the clear, pure tenor, or the telltale foreign accent. But of course, Kujen had selected it for its beauty, including the beauty of its voice.

“If Kel Command thinks to inventory the black cradle while we’re out here, we’re fucked.” Kujen shrugged. The motion translated itself to Jedao’s arm. Kujen’s proximity, the lithe brushstroke perfection of his limbs, had its usual calculated effect, and Jedao’s cock began to harden.

“My double can handle that,” Kujen said. “They won’t catch on. Besides,” and he reached over to nestle a hand in the curling blond hairs at Jedao’s chest, “you really must learn to enjoy a chance to relax when you have the opportunity for one.”

“Next you’re going to be telling me that you’re doing this for my benefit.” Jedao held still with an effort, although he couldn’t do anything about the wild pounding of his heart. Kujen couldn’t be unaware of it.

Kujen’s eyes widened. “But I am, my dear. Even you can only withstand so much sensory deprivation.” He hoisted himself up to straddle Jedao, nudging him to the side so that there would be enough space for his knee. (It was a wide couch, but still.) “We’re promised to each other, aren’t we? Which wouldn’t do me any good if you went mad in the black cradle between assignments.”

“You mean between assignations,” Jedao retorted.

“I said what I meant,” Kujen said, mildly enough, but his fingers dug into Jedao’s skin, leaving marks.

Jedao tensed, resisting, despite pleasure and the memory of pleasure. He closed his eyes.

“Stop thinking,” Kujen murmured right into his ear, inescapable. His hand moved; moved again. Jedao’s teeth clenched against a moan. “You can hate me tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that. We’ll have all eternity for that, after all.”

“I’ll never forget what you are,” Jedao said, still with his eyes closed. If he didn’t look, he could pretend that it was just sex, no obligations, no complications, rather than the latest ploy in a game unfolding over centuries.

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Kujen said, unperturbed. Little by little he moved down, leaving a trail of touches like moths’ wings, and a while after that he began to use his mouth.

I will not forget, Jedao thought in the last dissolving moments before surrendering himself. As Kujen worked, Jedao entertained himself with thoughts of killing the other man. A blow to the side of the head. Strangulation, although Kujen’s body was, inconveniently, the stronger one, so forget that one. Putting out the eyes with his thumbs. Messy, but what death wasn’t? And Jedao had dealt his share of ugly deaths.

“Oh, is that what you’re thinking of,” Kujen said in barely a whisper, right on cue. “You’re so predictable, my dear.”

Jedao would have cursed himself for being so obvious. But the beautiful thing was that here, now, it didn’t matter. It had no bearing (so he told himself) on the schemes that the two of them came up with, or wielded against each other.

And even better: as despicable as this was (the latest atrocity in a long litany), Kujen really, truly did not care; would never care; would never judge. It was the headiest seduction he could offer. Which was as well, because Jedao wasn’t in any position to say no.