Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHERIS WOKE TRANSFIXED by splinters of a ghost’s carrion glass: invisible and insubstantial, but they hurt as though they pierced each nerve. Carrion bomb, she thought, dredging the memory out of the long-ago briefing. As an exotic weapon, it would have killed Jedao, leaving her free of him.

She remembered the protocol she had read so long ago through a haze of pain: In an emergency, if the general withholds necessary information, the carrion glass remnants can be ingested by a volunteer. Although this procedure is experimental, this will give the general a body so he can be tortured.

The cindermoth was a chrysalis of hard light and heavy fractures and empty spaces where people had been. Every time she moved – to breathe, to blink, to scrabble for purchase on the bruising floor – she felt splinters go into her brain and pin her to Jedao’s memories.

She had a choice. She could take the splinters out and leave them behind. Refuse to look at them.

Or she could scavenge what she could from them. Try to understand Jedao.

The New Anchor Orientation Packet seemed to be from a time long ago and far away, but she remembered Jedao’s warning, when she had first read it, that eating the splinters would drive her mad. Having him around to talk to her all the time had been bad enough. Having him inside her head would undoubtedly be worse.

On the other hand, her world had already gone mad. Kel Command had just turned on her. Her situation was dire. Jedao had clearly known more about what was going on. She needed the information he hadn’t had the time, or the inclination, to give her. What game had he been playing with Kel Command, all those centuries? And what had he known about this Nirai Kujen, whom he had been so desperate to warn her about even as he was about to die?

She had always liked ravens. She would peck what answers she could out of the carrion glass and hope that she could find a workable course of action in them. Her turn to gamble, with her life as the stake.

Gravity was reasserting itself. She had to be careful how she moved. For a while she concentrated on breathing. She had good lungs, but her breaths felt too shallow no matter what she did. It was hard not to panic. If she stood up too suddenly, all her bones would dissolve and she would spill onto the floor like ink out of a jar, a Cheris-shaped blot.

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.

Afterward, Cheris closed the door, which Khiaz had left partway open. Dressed and put her gloves back on. Opened the door and walked to the nearest bathroom, looking neither left nor right, past the people who knew what she had just done. She locked herself in and turned on the water. Listened to the water running.

She peeled back one glove and stared at the veins, and the scar across the base of her palm.

For a long moment she hesitated. Then she took out her Patterner 52 and laid it next to the sink. Rested her hand on it. She was under no illusions that it would be painless. She had experienced too much of battle for that, and anyway, a little pain was a small enough price to pay. At least it would be quick.

Someone started knocking loudly. “Open up or I’ll shoot the door off its hinges,” a voice said over the sound of the water. It was Colonel Kel Gized.

Cheris had a sudden violent desire to take her gloves off and cut them to shreds. People knew now that she wanted to sleep with another soldier, forbidden though it was. The last person she wanted to talk to was a Kel, least of all her chief of staff. Even Khiaz would have been preferable.

“If you make me shoot, it’ll raise a horrible fuss and it’ll upset the host and you know how the Andan hate it when someone spoils a party. You’ll never hear the end of it for years.”

Cheris hesitated, then unlocked the door and stepped back.

Gized practically charged in. She took one long look at Cheris. Her mouth became a flat line.

Cheris glanced involuntarily at the mirror. Her face looked like a stranger’s, angles ground too sharp, eyes abraded of expression. Her hair was a mess, too; she hadn’t thought to run her fingers through it.

Gized closed the door. “It isn’t right, what she did to you,” she said.

“Colonel, I won’t hear you speak against the heptarch,” Cheris said coldly. Technically, Gized could be charged with treason. Most people wouldn’t waste their time with such charges, considering them to be frivolous, but Cheris knew personally that Khiaz was mercurial and might insist. “I could have said no.”

“Bullshit,” Gized said. But she didn’t raise her voice.

“I am a Shuos. She is my heptarch. I belong to her. If that’s how she wants to use me, then that’s how I’ll be used.” She was aware of how Kel she sounded. Nevertheless, it was true. Khiaz had just asserted her ownership.

All those years ago, when she had gotten herself seconded to the Kel, Cheris had thought she had escaped the heptarch’s eye. She should have known that a fellow Shuos would have a long-term plan.

Gized glanced at the Patterner 52. “Jedao,” Gized said, even though she never addressed Cheris without her rank. “Give me your gun and your knife.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know exactly what I mean. Give me your weapons. You’ll get them back tomorrow.”

Cheris glared at her. “You’re out of line, Colonel.”

“You can court-martial me tomorrow. After you give me your weapons.” She glared back.

Cheris entertained fantasies of court-martialing Gized, but where was she going to find another administrator as good? After a long moment, she broke eye contact. “I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

Gized’s mouth twisted. “You’re usually a better liar than this, Jedao. Frankly, that worries me more than anything else.”

“I don’t know what you want of me.”

“I’m being remarkably clear, Jedao. The weapons.”

“No.”

“Jedao.”

She hesitated, then handed them over, hating herself for her weakness.

“I’m taking you to barracks, and we’re going to stay up all night playing jeng-zai, which is an incredible concession on my part. You can beat me horribly the way you always do. And when you’re fit to have weapons again, I’ll give them back to you.”

“People will notice us leaving early,” Cheris said.

“I have really obscene things to say about how little I care about people noticing things, including the fact that we’re holed up in the bathroom together. Come on, Jedao. I’ll tell you the worst Kel jokes I know. How many Kel does it take to dig a latrine?”

THE SPLINTER FADED. Cheris was shuddering, and she inadvertently swallowed another splinter while she was trying to sit up.

CHERIS WAS IN the command center of the fangmoth One Card Too Lucky, listening to the latest report on the Lanterners’ position as she kept an eye on her swarm’s formation pivots on the terminal. Gized had said this would be a straightforward engagement. Naturally, this had jinxed the whole operation. At least, Cheris didn’t like what the report implied about her options.

“All right,” she said to her moth commander, “I’ve got this.” She would have to approach this cautiously, in case Kel Command disappointed her. “Communications, get me Kel Command. If nothing else, High General Kel Anien owes me an embarrassing sum because she keeps trying to draw to an inner Crowned Door in jeng-zai. The least she can do is take my calls.”

“Do you play games just to blackmail people?” Kel Gized demanded. She was sitting close by, running through logistical tables for the hundredth time.

“If I wanted to blackmail people, I would actually exert some effort,” Cheris said lightly.

Gized had that expression that meant she wished she could roll her eyes at a superior officer.

They didn’t get High General Anien, but High General Garit, who was much better at jeng-zai than Anien but couldn’t win board games, which everyone but Garit thought was very funny. “All right, Jedao,” Garit said in exasperation, “what’s the emergency?”

“I wouldn’t call it an emergency, sir,” Cheris said, “more like an issue of protocol.” Make the query casual. “No, really. I just got reliable intel that the Lanterners have filled their defensive outposts with children and hospital cases along with skeleton crews to operate the nasty weapons. Honestly, I thought I knew the regs backwards and forwards and something new turns up. They’re broadcasting from their brand-new orphanages in the clear in all directions. Anyway, what do you want me to do about it?”

She had played fox-and-hunters with Garit, and endless rounds of jeng-zai. They had gone on a hunting trip together back when she was a major general, dismaying because shooting gray tigers was too easy and she had no use for the tigers’ deaths, stupid pointless waste, but it was the sort of thing Garit went in for, and it would have been impolitic to turn him down. Most of all, she knew Garit’s three children, one of whom she had introduced to handguns and who was in Kel Academy right now. There was a right way and a lot of wrong ways to handle the situation. She willed Garit to choose the right way.

When Garit answered, she knew immediately that he had picked one of the wrong ways. “There’s no tactical difficulty, though?”

Cheris froze inside. “Not in the slightest,” she said, keeping her tone relaxed. “But everyone will see the slaughter” – unsubtle word choice, that was the point – “and I thought there might be information operations fallout.”

“Heptarch Khiaz has been working on this propaganda campaign,” Garit said.

Khiaz. It was impossible to escape the fucking woman.

“You should see some of her latest pieces, really brilliant. I have no idea how she does it. But then, I daresay that’s why I’m not a Shuos.” He laughed. “Go ahead and shoot your way through, Jedao. There’s no difficulty with Kel protocol or public opinion considerations.”

She had always wanted children. She had always known it was a terrible idea, given her goal; had only allowed herself the most glancing affairs. But she hadn’t expected the universe to explain to her in such detail why she had been right to avoid forming attachments.

If she defied Garit’s orders, however casually phrased, he would relieve her of command. And then Garit would tell her moth commander to carry out the order. The commander was a good Kel. He would carry out the order. And Colonel Gized was also a good Kel. She would back the order.

Afterward, Cheris could never remember what she said to High General Kel Garit, or anything up until the point where they reached the perimeter and she ordered the swarm to open fire on the first outpost: an interval of two days and sixteen hours. A perfect black cutout in her memory.

She did remember, however, that Gized never even blinked when the shooting began. It was hard not to hate her after that.

Of course, Cheris didn’t blink either. She was too well-trained for that.

CHERIS CHOKED AND forced herself to breathe more calmly in spite of the stinging pain. The splinters wouldn’t stop hurting, but she had to know. She looked around the crystallized command center with its profusion of bleak glass pillars and broken walls.

I need information, she reminded herself.

THE SIEGE OF Hellspin Fortress. The fire-flashes of alerts, blood on the walls and floor and terminals, ricochet marks. A dropped stylus. Cheris could see where it had been chewed on the end. A fallen woman with gray in her hair and a bullet hole in the side of her head, blood puddled on the floor. She tried to think of the woman’s name, she should know this, but it wouldn’t come to her.

Gwe Pia was sprawled next to Jiang. She heard orders over the communications links, a desperate query from Commander Kel Menowen of Tactical Eight, then static. No one knew what was going on. A few people had tried to reassert order, the ones she had predicted would have the presence of mind to do so. But the bombs and logic grenades had taken care of them. Her habit of thorough inspections had made it easy to plant things. With the addition of the threshold winnowers, the Kel siege force was truly broken.

She had expected her hands to be sweating inside her gloves, but they were dry. Calm.

There was a lot of blood. She had not cared for neatness, only efficiency. She had one bullet left over, as she had calculated, and if necessary she could have taken weapons from the dead. They hadn’t so much as clipped her. She had always been fast, and she knew the value of a good ambush.

It had been the weakest part of the plan. Atrocious setup: from a tactical standpoint, it would have made more sense to frame a subset of her staff as the traitors, and turn her people against each other. Easier to finish them off that way.

The problem was, she hadn’t wanted to win.

Cheris turned the gun around in her hand. It was her Patterner 52, a model known for its accuracy. It was engraved on the grip with her personal emblem, the Deuce of Gears. She hadn’t wanted to do it – it felt vainglorious – but it would have raised eyebrows if she hadn’t. The Kel expected their generals to have healthy egos. The metal was still warm, at the exact temperature she expected.

She eased the muzzle of the gun into her mouth. It tasted the way metal should taste. She felt nothing. Not relief, not guilt, not triumph. Everything had gone more or less as she had planned. No one had risen to stop her, to tell her she was wrong, to say there was a better way of fighting the heptarchs. But then, the only one who had known about her rebellion was a heptarch himself. Years with the Kel, sharing the cup, and they had never figured it out.

Her finger tightened fractionally on the trigger. Surely the split second of heat and pain would be better than this roaring emptiness.

I am a coward, she thought, lowering the gun. What she had done was unforgivable. But to do it for no purpose was even worse. She couldn’t quit now.

THE SPLINTERS WERE starting to hurt worse and worse, but Cheris couldn’t stop. If she stopped she would lose all courage. Jedao had warned her about Kujen. At the very least she had to find out about him.

She closed her eyes this time, but it didn’t help.

Only later did she remember that Kujen had taken an interest in her mathematical ability.

CHERIS HADN’T ORIGINALLY thought anything much of the refit: perfectly routine, and the Nirai station the swarm had put in at had better amenities than most, not that she was taking advantage of them at the moment. She was in barracks procrastinating on her paperwork for the chief engineer by shuffling a deck of cards that was going to be worn transparent if she kept this up any longer. This particular deck, whose artwork featured anthropomorphic farm animals in the borders, had been a gift from her sister. Nidana had said she’d picked it out because of the geese.

Without any notification, the door whisked open. In a moment Cheris was on her feet, flattened against the wall away from her desk, pistol drawn.

The man who entered was slightly taller than Cheris was, and he paused in the doorway, making a perfect silhouette of himself, the kind of thing you didn’t want to do in front of a former assassin. He wore Nirai colors, black-and-silver, even if the layered brocades and filigree buttons spoke to expensive tastes, and didn’t look terribly practical, either. There was no indication of rank or position, just the silver voidmoth pin. Cheris didn’t relax. The Nirai frequently had odd senses of humor, but it wasn’t usual for them to play pranks on visiting generals who submitted all the proper forms and didn’t push too hard about speedy repairs.

“I’m sorry,” Cheris said, “but what is your authorization for being here?”

“Oh, put that thing down, General Jedao,” the Nirai said, smiling. The man was striking, with a dark, oval face and tousled hair and graceful hands; it was impossible not to appreciate his beauty. Cheris couldn’t help but notice that his tone wasn’t remotely deferential, however. “I’m Nirai Kujen.” He took a step forward.

In academy, one of Cheris’s instructors had said, rather despairingly, that having ninety-sixth percentile reflexes could be just as much of a liability for an assassin as an asset. Cheris hadn’t served as an assassin for years, but the habits of paranoia would not be denied.

She had allowed the Nirai to get too close, but there wasn’t much space in here and she didn’t have time to work through the options. She fired twice into his forehead, then cursed herself for losing her head and wasting a bullet. You’d think Kujen would have reacted when she brought up the pistol anyway, but no.

Kujen fell with an ungraceful thump. Cheris’s pulse was racing. She looked at the fallen body, the lurid splash of blood against the wall, the closing door. She had just committed high treason, even if she could claim that she had reacted to an intruder in barracks.

The bigger problem was that she couldn’t figure out why Nirai Kujen, who had presumably survived the past 500 years by being paranoid himself, had bothered showing up in person.

Four seconds later, the door swished open again. No warning this time, either.

Cheris retreated. Her world narrowed to the doorway.

A shadow fell across the threshold. “Let’s try this again, shall we?” A different man’s voice, deeper, but with the same accent. “Put that thing down. Suffice it to say that I can restore from backups more times than you have bullets, and someone’s going to notice the fuss. I do realize you can probably kill people with your teeth, but it won’t hurt you to hear me out. Besides, I would really rather not have to hop into your body next. No offense, General, but I have other uses for you.”

Fuck. Cheris had known Kujen was immortal. What she hadn’t known was how. She laid the gun down on the floor where Kujen could see it, then backed up. Her gloves felt as though they had turned to ice.

Kujen entered. Cheris saw how carefully he placed his feet, like a dancer, so he wouldn’t get anything on his shoes. This body was also beautiful, but thinner, with a triangular face. Cheris wondered who it had belonged to before Kujen had happened to him.

The door closed, trapping her with him.

“If this is because I tore up my moth’s engines doing that maneuver that last battle I was in,” Cheris said, because at this point bravado was all she had left, “this is overkill, don’t you think? The chief engineer could have just called.”

“Sit down and let’s cut the bullshit.”

Cheris looked at Kujen, then walked over to the desk and sat.

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.”