Jedao gestured for Communications to mute the channel, which he should have done earlier. “The battle’s basically won and we’ll see the cascade effects soon,” he said. “What do you have in mind?”
“It’s not ideal,” Korais said, “but a heretic general is a sufficient symbol.” Just as Jedao himself might have been, if the assassin had succeeded. “If we torture kae Meghuet ourselves, it would cement the victory in the calendar.”
Jedao hauled himself to his feet to glare at Korais, which was a mistake. He almost lost his balance as the pain drove through his head like nails.
Still, Jedao had to give Korais credit for avoiding the usual euphemism: processed.
Filaments in the feet. It was said that that particular group of heretics had taken weeks to die.
Fuck dignity. Jedao hung on to the arm of the chair and said, as distinctly as he could, “It’s a trick. I’m not dealing with Dhaved. Tell the Lanterners we’ll resume the engagement in seven minutes.” His vision was going white around the edges, but he had to say it. Seven minutes wouldn’t give the Lanterners enough time to run or evade, but it mattered. It mattered. “Annihilate anything that can’t run fast enough.”
Best not to leave Doctrine any prisoners to torture.
Jedao was falling over sideways. Someone caught his arm. Commander Menowen. “You ought to let us take care of the mopping up, sir,” she said. “You’re not well.”
She could relieve him of duty. Reverse his orders. Given that the world was one vast blur, he couldn’t argue that he was in any fit shape to assess the situation. He tried to speak, but the pain hit again, and he couldn’t remember how to form words.
“I don’t like to press at a time like this,” Korais was saying to Menowen, “but the Lanterner general—”
“General Jedao has spoken,” Menowen said crisply. “Find another way, Captain.” She called for a junior officer to escort Jedao out of the command center.
Words were said around him, a lot of them. They didn’t take him to his quarters. They took him to the medical center. All the while he thought about lights and shrapnel and petals falling endlessly in the dark.
COMMANDER MENOWEN CAME to talk to him after he was returned to his quarters. The mopping up was still going on. Menowen was carrying a small wooden box. He hoped it didn’t contain more medications.
“Sir,” Menowen said, “I used to think heretics were just heretics, and death was just death. Why does it matter to you how they die?”
Menowen had backed him against Doctrine, and she hadn’t had to. That meant a lot.
She hadn’t said that she didn’t have her own reasons. She had asked for his. Fair enough.
Jedao had served with Kel who would have understood why he had balked. A few of them would have shot him if he had turned over an enemy officer, even a heretic, for torture. But as he advanced in rank, he found fewer and fewer such Kel. One of the consequences of living in a police state.
“Because war is about people,” Jedao said. “Even when you’re killing them.”
“I don’t imagine that makes you popular with Doctrine,” Menowen said.
“The Rahal can’t get rid of me because the Kel like me. I just have to make sure it stays that way.”
She looked at him steadily. “Then you have one more Kel ally, sir. We have the final tally. We engaged ninety-one hellmoths and destroyed forty-nine of them. Captain-magistrate Korais is obliged to report your actions, but given the numbers, you are going to get a lot of leniency.”
There would have been around 400 crew on each of the hellmoths. He had already seen the casualty figures for his own fangmoths and the three Rahal vessels that had gotten involved: fourteen dead and fifty-one injured.
“Leniency wasn’t what I was looking for,” Jedao said.
Menowen nodded slowly.
“Is there anything exciting about our journey to Twin Axes, or can I go back to being an invalid?”
“One thing,” she said. “Doctrine has provisionally declared a remembrance of your victory to replace the Day of Broken Feet. He says it is likely to be approved by the high magistrates. Since we didn’t provide a heretic focus for torture, we’re burning effigy candles.” She hesitated. “He said he thought you might prefer this alternative remembrance. You don’t want to be caught shirking this.” She put the box down on the nearest table.
“I will observe the remembrance,” Jedao said, “although it’s ridiculous to remember something that just happened.”
Menowen’s mouth quirked. “One less day for publicly torturing criminals,” she said, and he couldn’t argue. “That’s all, sir.”
After she had gone, Jedao opened the box. It contained red candles in the shape of hellmoths, except the wax was additionally carved with writhing bullet-ridden figures.
Jedao set the candles out and lit them with the provided lighter, then stared at the melting figures. I don’t think you understand what I’m taking away from these remembrance days, he thought. The next time he won some remarkable victory, it wasn’t going to be against some unfortunate heretics. It was going to be against the high calendar itself. Every observance would be a reminder of what he had to do next—and while everyone lost a battle eventually, he had one more Kel officer in his corner, and he didn’t plan on losing now.
Author’s Note
As I’ve said elsewhere, the tactics in this story are based on that of the Battle of Myeongnyang in the Imjin War, in which Admiral Yi Sun-Shin was even more outnumbered against the Japanese, won, and took fewer casualties than Jedao did. I didn’t want to push suspension of belief too far. The nice thing about Myeongnyang is that I was writing for a Western audience who would probably never have heard of the Imjin War. If that describes you, there’s nothing wrong with you; unless you’re Korean or Japanese (or maybe Chinese), there’s no reason you should know. The world is full of history and no one person can be familiar with it all.
While this story was published a few years before Ninefox Gambit, I wrote it second. It honestly needed to be another 2,000 words longer; the original draft was 10,000 words. But Clarkesworld, which had asked me to consider submitting a story, then had a limit of 8,000 words, so I chopped out those 2,000 words.
At the time “Candle Arc” was published, I had no idea if Ninefox would ever find a home. I figured I’d get a bit of money out of the setting while I could. But I guess it worked out in the end!
Calendrical Rot
THIS IS THE way the hexarchate tells it, the one true clock, but they’re wrong. When incendiaries candle across dire moons, when voidmoths migrate across the missile-scratched night, when exiles carve their death poems into the marrow of ruined stars, the whisper across the known worlds is not unity.
In the year 1251 of the high calendar, on the 26th day of the month of the Hawk, a judge of the Gray Marches was assassinated. As a member of the high court, she was to sentence the city-station of Nran. Nran’s underworld dated its transactions using a calendar sewn together from perfect numbers and criminals’ death-days. The hexarchate often approved local calendar conversions in concession to celestial cycles, but the criminal calendar conflicted with the high calendar, and this the hexarchate would not abide.