Tseya twisted around and kissed the side of his face, then his chin. “I could let it hang in tangles and go around as a ghost.”
“Why do ghosts in the stories always have long, tangled hair?”
She pushed him down with one hand, which he didn’t resist, and regarded him with a slow smile. “Do all Kel get sidetracked that easily, or are crashhawks special?”
It almost didn’t hurt when she said that, especially considering what she was doing with her other hand. He slitted his eyes at her and said, “Are you ordering me to answer?”
“What, you won’t volunteer the information?”
“Kel never volunteer if we can help it. I thought you’d heard.”
Her hair brushed over his face. It tickled, but if he laughed it’d get in his mouth, which Tseya found hilarious. He craned his head up, and she dipped her head so they could kiss.
He woke alone some time afterward. Tseya never stuck around, although hot tea always awaited him on a side table. The other thing Tseya liked to do was leave his clothes folded over a chair. Brezan couldn’t help wondering if this was something they taught in Introduction to Seduction at Andan Academy, or if this was some personal quirk. Kel speculation was divided on just what was in that course’s curriculum. He was almost tempted to ask. Brezan got dressed and drank the tea quickly, since Tseya wasn’t there to watch.
Then he went to the silkmoth’s command center. By now he had almost developed the knack of ignoring the aquarium in the command center, which took the shape of a fluted column. It was filled with seahorses and striped colorful fish with comical eyes and snails and green-dark kelp. Once he would have thought the Andan were frivolous. Now he suspected advanced psychological warfare. Tseya refused to say which.
Tseya was already there. It had been evident from early on that she had a lot of specialized training, especially with the moth’s scan suite, some of whose functions were more advanced than what they’d had on the Hierarchy of Feasts. Tseya had grimaced when he remarked on it, and confirmed what he’d heard about silkmoths: “There are trade-offs. We can sneak, run, or see things far away, but we’re only good at two of the three at any given time. Right now we’re running and sneaking so we can catch up to Jedao without getting caught, so the scan suffers a lot.”
“Anything interesting?” Brezan said as he took his seat.
Tseya nodded at him, all business. “Take a look at the chatter,” she said.
Brezan picked through the backlog of communications, which the mothgrid had sorted according to their criteria. An alert flashed red just as he got through the second of the digests. He groaned. “Jedao again?”
“More propaganda, I expect,” Tseya said, leaning forward. “I want to see what he has for us this time.” She played the message.
The piece opened with the Deuce of Gears, which Brezan wouldn’t have minded burning up or melting down, then went into a two-dimensional animation, brushstrokes applied to elegant spline curves, unrelieved black and white. Swarms of moths as stylized as paper airplanes flew and wheeled and fought against a backdrop of—
Those weren’t stars, although it only became evident when the camera zoomed in on one moth colliding with another. Those were lanterns. The battle dissolved into ashes. The ashes became ink; the brushstrokes condensed into a single column of calligraphy: penance. And that was just the introduction, in a few seconds.
“Fuck you,” Brezan said as the propaganda continued to play, as though Jedao stood in the command center with them smiling his tilted smile.
“I admit this wasn’t the angle I expected him to take,” Tseya said after the rest of the piece had finished. The earlier propaganda pieces had included maddeningly irrefutable documentation of how the commandant of the Fortress of Spinshot Coins had prevented Jedao from mauling the Hafn. Said commandant had been removed, but no one knew the full story. You would expect the Shuos to have broadcast a rebuttal; no such luck. Jedao had also made straightforward requests for specific systems not to interfere with swarm operations, which they tended to honor, mainly because his requests were sensible.
“It’s infuriating that people are retransmitting his broadcasts,” Brezan said, “but I suppose people will be people. What I want to know is, why would he want to remind his nervous but gossipy listeners about Hellspin Fortress? How does that help him?”
Tseya’s smile had a curious sour quality. “Brezan, he’s rewriting the story. It’s one thing to have it out of the archives, or some drama no one expects to be historically accurate, and another to hear it told by someone who was there.”
Brezan bit off what he’d been about to say and busied himself with a map depicting Jedao’s movements over the last two weeks in red. Hafn movements appeared in a ghost-cloud of gray. The latter had speared past the Fortress of Scattered Needles in the Entangled March and into the adjacent Severed March. Ever since the battle at Spinshot Coins, Jedao and the Hafn had been feinting at each other without engaging. The two swarms were now approaching Minang System, home to a wolf tower. The tower acted as a calendrical beacon, facilitating navigation, and contained one of the great clocks by which the hexarchate reckoned time.
Tseya was going through more of the chatter. “Here’s another one,” she said. This time it concerned the Vidona extermination of the Mwennin. Very little text on this one, either.
“Hold on,” Brezan said when the video got to an appalling clip of a screaming boy and an instrument made of hot curved wires. He paused it. “Who the hell is passing Jedao these?” A quick check confirmed that this particular clip hadn’t been released by the official news services, but he wasn’t sure he bought that Jedao had faked it, either. The video displayed the Vidona seal in the corner. The mothgrid believed the seal was authentic.
Tseya pursed her lips. “An excellent question, although there’s not a lot we can do to find out. All the histories go on and on about Jedao as a tactician, but he did graduate from the Shuos before running off to play soldier. I presume he learned something about setting up intelligence networks while he was there. No, what I want to know is, why has the hexarchs’ response been so tepid?”
“What response?” Brezan retorted. “Other than the occasional bulletin, they haven’t done anything to counter the damage he’s doing to public morale.” Not that that was ever good to begin with.
“Yes, exactly,” Tseya said. She had pulled out her hairstick and was fiddling with it, her hair in disarray. “Managing information fallout is what the Shuos are for. Is Mikodez asleep or something?”
Brezan noted, with sharp alarm, the odd familiarity with which she mentioned Mikodez. She didn’t use an honorific, just the personal name, as though they were equals. Just how high a position had she occupied before her disgrace?
Tseya tapped the hairstick against the base of her palm, looking for all the world like she wished she could pin Mikodez and make him get to work. “It just figures,” she said. “We finally have a Shuos hexarch capable of hanging on to the seat longer than a hiccup, and the man has the attention span of a ferret. He probably got bored of the invasion in the first week and is off learning to bake custards instead.”
Ever since Exercise Purple Paranoia, Brezan had belonged to the category of people who thought about Shuos Mikodez as little as possible, in the belief that this would keep him from coming to Mikodez’s attention. But Brezan always remembered what Shuos Zehun had told him about Mikodez. He couldn’t help thinking that Tseya was missing part of the picture. Shuos cadets were not known for being willing to cooperate with each other. The fact that Mikodez had persuaded his classmates to do so for the exercise, put together with his forty-two years in power, suggested that he was dangerously charismatic, ferret or no ferret.