Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

THE NEEDLEMOTH DIDN’T look like anything Cheris had ever stepped in before, small surprise. It wasn’t much larger than a hopper, but it didn’t take any genius to realize that it was a hell of a lot more valuable. It had been intended to be operated by one person, with perhaps a single human-sized guest. As it was, she and the two servitors fit snugly.

Cheris was still certain that none of the humans had survived the carrion bomb. There was carrion glass everywhere. Shuos Ko spindled into dark, imperturbable strands. Shuos Liis, except Cheris hadn’t been able to make herself go near the rippling glass once she knew who it had been, as though Khiaz waited just around the corner, smiling her inescapable smile.

The servitors had appeared dead, but Cheris had been willing to bet that the bomb’s designers hadn’t given a moment’s thought as to how it would affect them. Although she wasn’t a technician, it was impossible to spend as much time with servitors as she had without picking up a few tricks. With some improvised tools and a lot of swearing, she had managed to revive a deltaform. The deltaform had then helped her revive a birdform.

There hadn’t been time for more, because the birdform, whose scanners were in better shape than the deltaform’s, had informed them of the intruder.

They had agreed that the intruder was either after Cheris or Jedao, depending on how much they knew about anchoring, that they were relying on the needlemoth’s systems to track Cheris, and that they probably weren’t a Kel. Not that non-Kel were good news at this point, either. Cheris still regretted that they hadn’t been able to take the woman prisoner, or find out so much as her name. But at least their ploy had worked. Cheris had first kept the intruder distracted while the deltaform paced them and the birdform raced to the needlemoth and hacked its systems. Cheris had considered using traps to delay the intruder and sprinting to join the servitors at the needlemoth so they could hightail it off the cindermoth, but they couldn’t risk leaving the intruder alive so she could leak Cheris’s survival to the Kel. So instead, Cheris made a distraction of herself so the deltaform could make certain of the intruder’s death.

“We had better get out of here before anyone else shows up,” Cheris said to the two servitors. “I hope you know how to drive a moth, because one of me doesn’t and the other of me is hopelessly out of date.”

The deltaform was already making irritated cheeps as it wrangled the needlemoth’s grid. The mothdrive hummed lowly and sweetly.

The birdform tilted its head, lights whirring from green to yellow to orange. It asked her who she really was.

“I’m Ajewen Cheris,” she said. She would call herself Kel no longer. “But I’m also Shuos Jedao. And apparently it’s not time for me to stop fighting.”

She had eaten the fox’s eyes. She had seen what he had seen.

At the center of the blast, there was a mass of fossilized pasts and devalued futures. The better part of a Kel swarm reduced to carrion glass. Over 8,000 Kel and those in service to the Kel, all to guarantee the death of one man.

The deltaform wanted to know where they were going.

Cheris smiled crookedly at it. She yanked off her gloves and set them neatly to the side. There was a cold, pale fire in her heart. The hexarchs had no idea how badly they had fucked up.

She had gone to a lot of trouble to put herself into the black cradle, one bad option among many worse, so she would have time to run her campaign against the heptarchate. But she couldn’t win her own war. The key to calendrical warfare was mathematics, and the only mathematician she had access to, Nirai Kujen, was more monstrous than she was.

Now she had an alternate mathematician, so to speak.

I’m dead, she thought, very clearly, as I wanted to be, but I’m alive enough to carry on the war.

All her life, she had lived to the hexarchate’s high calendar. Now she lived to another calendar. She would measure her years by the death-day of her swarm, and not by the cold, prim feasts of the Rahal, the Kel’s parades, the Vidona’s cutting remembrances. Her every maneuver would be to the sandglass necessity of rebellion. The tide in her heart turned to the memory of amputations and evaporated soldiers, to deaths spent like counterfeit coins.

Cheris finally knew the meaning of Hellspin Fortress. She had killed a terrifying number of people for the heptarchate. When it came to the Lanterners, she decided she was done. A Lanterner’s life had worth the way a heptarchate soldier’s life had worth. A life was a life. It was a simple equation, but she hadn’t been a mathematician then, and Kel Command had failed to understand the notation.

That hadn’t been the only reason – she couldn’t help being a Shuos – but it was the one that mattered.

Calendrical warfare was a matter of hearts.

But numbers could move hearts, with the right numbers, and with the right hearts.

She had learned that not all masters were worth serving. It was time to carry the fight to the hexarchs.

I’m your gun.

Calendrical rot had set in again.