Ninefox Gambit (39 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No answer came.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, Cheris knew she had already decided.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello yourself,” Cheris said. She fanned out her hand, face-up, for Yeren’s amusement.

“Oh, you’re not even pretending not to cheat,” Ruo said. Cheris had arranged to draw a straight of Roses.

“Only because I don’t have any real flowers to offer you, Yeren,” Cheris said, “so I had to make do with the sad cardboard substitute.”

Yeren eyed her sidelong. “I’m pretty sure that line wasn’t in Introduction to Seduction when I took it last year.”

“I hate that course,” Cheris said. “Seriously, all the Andan bars we practice at overcharge for drinks because, hello, the Andan are all rich. You’d think they’d figure it into our stipends, but I think it’s supposed to incentivize us to commit fraud to get by.”

“I don’t see what your issue is,” Ruo said dryly. “You’re terribly good at persuading people to buy you drinks, especially with that whole ‘I just got here from the farm and you civilized city people confuse me’ routine.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Cheris said. Besides, it was technically an agricultural research facility, even if her mother jokingly referred to herself as a farmer.

“You poor thing,” Yeren said. “Drown your sorrows?” She offered her drink.

“See what I mean?” Ruo said.

Cheris took a sip. “That’s a lot of honey,” she said. The local spiced tea was something she was still getting used to. It wasn’t very popular where she came from.

“It’s to cover the taste of the poison,” Yeren said, very seriously.

“Excellent thinking.” Cheris drank again, more deeply, then handed the tea back.

“By the way,” Yeren said, “I keep looking through the competition standings and I’m stumped. Where did you hide your game?”

“Don’t get me started,” Ruo said. “I can’t even get him to play any of the more intriguing entries, let alone admit to entering.”

Cheris shuffled the straight back into her deck and did her best “you civilized city people confuse me” impression. “It’s much less stressful to watch everyone else tie themselves into knots. You heard about how Zheng got caught breaking into the registrar’s computer systems?”

“That’s so yesterday,” Yeren said, “and I don’t believe you for one second. Ruo told me how you
volunteered
to be outnumbered five to one in that training scenario and you care about
stress
?”

“Did he also mention I lost that one?” Cheris narrowed her eyes at Ruo, who looked innocent.

“Only after you struck the instructor speechless with your novel use of signal flares,” Ruo said helpfully.

“Got lucky,” Cheris said.

Ruo rolled his eyes. “No such thing as luck.”

Cheris drew three cards in rapid succession: Ace of Roses, Ace of Doors, Ace of Gears. “Sure there is,” she said ironically.

Yeren, who had taught Cheris most of the card tricks herself, ignored this. “I suppose you might take some kind of ridiculous pleasure in an anonymous entry,” she said, “but they’ll trace it to you anyway. Why not put your name on it from the beginning?”

“That’s only if I entered,” Cheris said. “Say, Ruo, you entered a shooter, didn’t you? How’s it doing?” She hadn’t looked it up, but Ruo had talked about it a lot while wrestling with the coding, even if he’d turned down her offer to help by playtesting.

“High middle,” Ruo said, “for its category. As good as I could hope for. I haven’t embarrassed myself, that’s all I ask.” There were always a few entries that did so poorly that they damaged the cadets’ future career options.

Yeren wasn’t distracted. “Jedao, first-years don’t get a lot of opportunities to impress the instructors. I didn’t think you’d pass this one up. Especially considering how much you like games.”

“It’s very altruistic of you to point this out to me,” Cheris said, “but it’s done now, either way.” She touched Yeren’s hand. “We could go for a walk by the koi pond. It wouldn’t kill you to get away from all the competition analysis for an hour or two.”

“This is my cue to go elsewhere,” Ruo said cheerfully. “Don’t scare the geese.” Cheris often thought she should never have mentioned that her mother liked to say that, even if they hadn’t had all that many geese.

“Like you don’t have a hot date of your own lined up,” Yeren said. Ruo looked awfully smug, at that.

“That would be telling,” Ruo said. “Have fun, you two.” He kissed the top of Cheris’s head again, and strolled off.

Yeren shook her head, but she didn’t pull her hand away from Cheris’s, either.

As a point of fact, Cheris had entered anonymously. A small percentage of competition entries were anonymous each year (although Yeren was correct that most didn’t remain that way for long), but Cheris had an unusually good reason. You scored points in her game by manipulating other people, from cadets to dignitaries, into heresies. Celebrating the wrong feast-days. Giving heterodox answers on Doctrine exams. Inverted flower arrangements. Small heresies, for the most part.

Cheris hadn’t intended for many people to fall for it, even if the Shuos had a known love of dares. It had been more in the nature of a thought experiment. The heptarchate’s laws were becoming more rigid as the regime became ever more dependent on the high calendar’s exotic technologies. She had wanted to show how easy it was to inspire people to a little heresy, to demonstrate how fragile the system was. Shuos Academy encouraged games, so a game – especially during the yearly competition – was the perfect vector.

She hadn’t checked up on her entry since releasing it, or any of them, for that matter; that was the kind of mistake that got you caught. In fact, she was asleep in Yeren’s bed when she found out.

“– Jedao,” Yeren was saying urgently. “Bad news.” Her voice shook.

“Hmm?” Cheris said. But she came fully awake.

Yeren was sitting at her terminal, wrapped in a robe of violet silk. Her hair fell down around her shoulders, and blue light sheened in the dark curls. “A cadet committed suicide over one of the games,” she said. “At least, they’re claiming it’s a suicide.”

Cheris sat up and made a show of hunting for her clothes, even though she knew where they were under the covers. She still didn’t realize the significance of what Yeren had said. “Anyone we know?” she asked.

“They haven’t released the name. But I did some poking around. I – I think it might be Ruo.”

Cheris’s heartbeat thumped rapidly in her chest. Yeren was still talking. “It was over one of the games,” she said. “I remember glancing over it earlier. The anonymous one involving heresies. Except the cadet didn’t just fool one of us over some minor point of Doctrine. He got caught framing a visiting Rahal magistrate.”