“Did your previous anchors –?”
“One of them had some luck, but he was about my height and build, so that may have helped.”
Cheris was struck by the horrible thought that everything he had done to massacre his staff at Hellspin Fortress had burrowed into her sinews and would not be dislodged. But if the memory existed, it wasn’t in a form she could access directly.
“Besides,” Jedao said, “you probably know plenty of ways to kill people. I don’t know what they teach at Kel Academy these days, but I don’t imagine the state of the art stays still on that front.”
A memory tickled at her. “Didn’t you start out as a Shuos assassin?” Not to say she hadn’t killed her share of people, but Jedao sounded more cavalier about it. She’d known plenty of Kel like that, too, however.
“Yes, but I’m sure I’m out of date.”
The thought of assassins having expiration dates almost made her smile.
Shortly afterward, servitors brought in three trays, one large and two small. The servitors were of a variety she had never seen before, snakeforms with six vestigial wings. “The Nirai,” Jedao said, as if that explained everything. It probably did.
Cheris acknowledged the servitors with a polite nod. She would have liked to chat with them, but she had work to do, and she was sure they did, too. They chirruped in a friendly fashion before heading out.
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.”
Back to games. No use playing anymore, then. Cheris looked at the trays. The smell of rice tantalized her.
“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. “Eat. If you fall over from hunger, I can’t revive you, although I imagine someone would figure something out.”
She placed his tray across from hers at the table, then picked up her own cup. One sip, since Jedao couldn’t take the first one, and then the chopsticks. The rice was rice, but the fish was layered with thin slices of pickled radish, and the fiddleheads tasted pleasantly bitter beneath the sauce.
“Did you eat like this when you were alive?” she asked. Three hundred ninety-seven years since his execution. A lot had to have changed.
“We ate whatever the quartermasters could get us,” Jedao said. “I remember one land campaign we came across a cache of jellied frogs’ eggs. Not even a large cache. They were a delicacy in that region. I see from your expression that this isn’t exotic to you, but they were to us. We were hungry, so we ate them anyway. There were a lot of bad jokes about gills afterward.”
Cheris finished her meal in silence after that, thinking about tin cups and disobeying orders and frogs’ eggs. When she had finished, she sipped the last of her tea and eyed Jedao’s cup with its mysterious mist. “Am I supposed to do anything with that?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. I doubt it’s nourishing in any sense of the word.”
One last sip. Cheris put the teacup down and stretched. She was twisting to the left when the grid’s impersonal voice said, “Incoming message.” The communications panel turned black, with the ashhawk-and-sword emblem of Kel Command in blazing bright gold.
Cheris put her uniform in full formal. “I can receive the message now,” she said to the grid as she faced the panel.
It was Subcommand Two, wearing her face again. “General Shuos Jedao,” it said, as if it could see him standing there. For all she knew, it could. “Captain Kel Cheris.”
Cheris was already saluting.
“Try not to let on that its face bothers you so much,” Jedao said. “It’s a bad habit to let people read you so easily.”
She didn’t like the fact that he was giving her advice, especially of that nature, during a communication from Kel Command. Even if there would undoubtedly be more of that in the days to come.
“At ease,” Subcommand Two said, and only then Cheris was sure it couldn’t hear Jedao. “I think you know what this is about. Due to the general’s inability to manifest physically, Captain, you are going to have to serve as his hands and his voice. To facilitate this, Kel Command is brevetting you to general for the duration of the campaign.”
Cheris had expected to feel something – discomfort, elation, confusion – but all that came was weariness.