“Do you want the demonstration or not?”
Cheris bit back her first response and went to get her luckstone. She slipped it free of its chain. The stone shone in curves of light interrupted by the raven engraving. “All right,” she said. He had better not be wasting her time.
“You’re going to hold on to that stone,” Jedao said. “Consider that an order, if it helps. I’m going to convince you to let it go before the briefing.”
Cheris was already unimpressed. What was he going to do, arm-wrestle her for it with the arm he didn’t have anymore? “That’s all?” she said. Then, grudgingly: “I see. The stone is the Fortress. My hand is the shields. This won’t work, Jedao. Even if you have some way of making me fail a simple task, I can’t persuade our commanders like this.” She was pretty sure the Kel commanders would have much the same reaction she was having. Except they would be less polite about it.
“Oh, we’re not going to bother with rocks—”
“It’s a luckstone,” she said, more sharply than she had meant to, even if she couldn’t imagine that Jedao knew anything about Mwennin custom. It was her birthday-stone, a gift from mother to child, and the raven was the bird of her birthday-saint. Little things that she never discussed with other Kel, because they wouldn’t understand.
“My apologies,” Jedao said promptly enough. “In any case, with the officers we need something bigger. We’ve already made an example of Vidona Diaiya—”
“That was ordinary discipline!”
“Don’t let go.”
Her fingers clenched around the luckstone, then relaxed.
“If it had been to our advantage to save her for future use, I might have advised that instead,” Jedao said. “But that wasn’t the case. No, we need a new target.”
Target? They were out of hostiles for the moment, unless he wanted her to order up more. Where was he going with this?
“We can’t demonstrate on the Fortress because that’s what we’re trying to persuade the commanders we can do in the first place,” Jedao said, “so we’ll have to demonstrate on our swarm. We can afford to lose a moth. Diaiya was going to be my expendable, but as it so happens she torched herself before I could make use of her that way.” His voice was utterly level.
Cheris had a creeping feeling at the back of her neck. How had she forgotten he was a madman? “Diaiya disobeyed orders and broke formation, that’s one thing,” she said, “but the other commanders have done nothing wrong. They don’t deserve to be toyed with.” Assuming he only meant to toy with them, which she had serious doubts about.
She was now remembering, too, his earlier comment about having a use for Diaiya, back when they’d selected her for the swarm. At the time it had slipped her mind as being nothing important. The knot in her gut told her she had been terribly, terribly wrong.
“We can’t afford any weaknesses when we go up against the Fortress,” Jedao said. “The swarm has to be ready to obey, and to believe in our methods, whatever they are, even if I’m involved. Not only did the heretics capture the hexarchate’s most celebrated nexus fortress, they had help. That kaleidoscope bomb wasn’t developed and manufactured overnight. In any case, to unite the swarm, we need them focused on an adversary. Framing one of your own commanders for heresy ought to do the trick.”
Cheris was speechless.
Jedao’s voice cracked without warning. “My gun. Where did I put my gun? It’s so dark.”
Cheris bit back a curse. This had to be a ploy, even though she couldn’t see what an undead general would be getting out of playing a bad joke. “Jedao,” she said, trying to sound composed and failing, “there’s no need—”
Not only was the shadow darker than she remembered it being, Jedao’s eyes had flared hell-bright, and the entire room was heavy with darkness like tongues of night licking inward from some unseen sky. Cheris’s mouth went dry as sand. She’d seen combat before, she’d fought before, and all she could do was freeze and stare like a soldier just out of academy.
Where was her chrysalis gun? There it was at her waist, that unmoving weight. She had to reach for it, had to unfreeze –
“General.” Now Jedao was coolly imperious. “I don’t recognize you, but your uniform is irregular. Fix it.”
She had no idea what had caused him to go mad in the first place, no one did, so she had no idea if he was going mad again. She lost a precious second wondering inanely if snapping a salute would mollify him, then unfroze and fumbled for the chrysalis gun. Just in case.
The nine-eyed shadow whipped around behind her in defiance of all the laws of geometry it had obeyed until now, and then she knew she was really in trouble. All that time she had spent reading up on her swarm’s high officers and what intelligence they had on the enemy – some of it should have been spent researching Jedao.
“You shouldn’t be standing still,” he said. His voice was casual, as though he addressed an old friend. “They’ll get you if you stand still. You should always be moving. And you should also be shooting back.”
“Shooting who?” she said, struck by the awful thought that this was how he had gone crazy at Hellspin Fortress.
The shadow moved slowly, slowly, pacing her. Perhaps if she kept him talking she could buy time, even figure out what was going through his mind.
Jedao didn’t seem to hear her. “If you keep waiting, all the lanterns will go out,” he said, his voice gone eerily soft, “and then they’ll be able to see you but you won’t be able to see them. It’ll be dark for a very long time.”
Lanterns. The Lanterners? Hellspin Fortress? Or some coincidence of imagery?
The gun was in her hand. She aimed at the shadow, but it was too fast. If she fired, would it send up alarms? She didn’t want to start a panic in her command moth for no reason. She nerved herself and did it anyway, but the shadow anticipated her and whipped out of the way. The gray-green bolt sparked and dissipated harmlessly against the floor. Her next attempts fared no better. Cheris wished the Nirai had warned her that shooting Jedao wouldn’t be simple.
Despite the shadow’s movements, he didn’t sound like he noticed that she was trying to shoot him, either. “You brought a whole swarm here,” he said, voice rising. “They have no idea. It’s going to be a million dead all over again.”
If this kept up she was going to have to aim the gun at herself, terrible hangover or not. But then she’d drop the luckstone; there was still some chance this whole thing was an act. Then why wouldn’t her hands cooperate?
This would be much easier if she knew him well enough to tell whether this was an aggressively irresponsible mind game on his part, or a genuine sign of insanity. Stop hesitating, she told herself angrily. She knew better than to dither like this.
Jedao fell silent. In spite of herself, Cheris hoped that Jedao was done testing her, that he would call the game off. She wasn’t cut out for this. She was about to ask him when his voice started up again. This time he sounded unnervingly young, half an octave higher, like a first-year cadet.
“General?” he said.
He wasn’t speaking equal to equal this time. He spoke with deference. Fear, even.
“Sir, the dead. I can’t keep count. I don’t, I don’t – sir, I don’t know what to do next.” The eerie thing was that she couldn’t hear him breathing, despite the raggedness. When he next spoke, his voice wavered in shame, then firmed. “It’s my turn to die, isn’t it? I just have to find my gun in the dark—”
A long silence.
And then, quite softly, “My teeth will have to do.”
Cheris had seized up again, trying to tell herself this was a trick, that it had nothing to do with Hellspin Fortress, or worse, some other incident she couldn’t remember out of the history lessons she had stupidly failed to review. But this time she was sure. She aimed and fired again, fruitlessly.