Kujen heard what she wasn’t saying. “I’ll do my best for him, Anien.”
He could have gotten rid of her if it looked like she was going to be an obstacle, but this way was easier, and he was looking forward to taking Jedao apart.
KUJEN SHOULD HAVE known that his life would be filled with inconveniences after High General Kel Shiang was appointed his new liaison. High General Anien had died of a rare cancer, leaving him her collection of playing cards. A strange thing to offer someone who technically didn’t have hands.
Shiang was a tall, tawny woman with a broad frame. The forcefulness of her movements made him wonder if the facility was going to thunder itself into rubble around her. Kujen’s current anchor, a shorter manform named Uwo, found this intimidating. Kujen couldn’t blame them, but it was a bit of a distraction.
Uwo had brought Shiang to the lab where Jedao was pinned. The room was drab except for a single wall devoted to a one-per-minute cycle of riotously colorful photographs of flowers. Forsythias, cosmos, moss roses, azaleas, everything. Flowers were an innocuous way of giving Jedao access to color when they switched on the portal that could, for short periods, give him a limited window into the world.
“He’s in here, Nirai-zho?” Shiang asked, looking around at the terminals with their graphs and readouts. One of them was still set to a card game.
“Not precisely,” Kujen said, “but this is the single point of access we’ve allowed him. I didn’t deem it wise to give him an anchor of his own without Kel Command’s approval.”
“I’m authorized to make that determination.”
“Of course,” Kujen murmured. “Do you wish to talk to him?”
Shiang eyed him. “I did read your reports, but is he stable?”
What was Jedao going to do without a body, put nails through her eyes? “As stable as anyone is,” Kujen said. “You came all this way, you might as well see for yourself. I should warn you that the time windows are dependent on calendrical mechanics—the equations were in Appendix 5—so you’ll have twenty-three minutes this session if we start now.”
“Let’s do this, then.”
Uwo flipped the switch. A chime sounded. A shadow rippled through the room. Nine candle-yellow eyes stared at them through a crack of black-silver. Then the shadow faded, and the eyes with them.
“Jedao?” Shiang said, unmoved by the phenomenon.
“I apologize for being unable to salute, sir,” Jedao said, that same easy baritone with its drawl. It sounded as though he stood in the room facing them, except he’d also have to be invisible. “What do you require of me?”
“I’m here to evaluate your recovery,” she said. “Nirai-zho tells me you’ve given no explanation for your behavior at Hellspin Fortress.”
“I have none, sir.”
“Do you remember what happened?” She was frowning at Uwo, as though Kujen’s anchor should have an answer for her.
Jedao hesitated. “I remember it in pieces, sir. The pieces aren’t in order. They showed me some of the videos, including—” His voice wavered. “Including when I shot Colonel Gized. I don’t—I don’t understand why I would want to do that. I can’t believe she’s gone.”
“Can the Rahal get anything out of him now?” Shiang asked Kujen.
“Unfortunately, that’s impossible,” Kujen said. It had, in fact, been one of the design parameters for the black cradle. Not that Shiang was ever going to learn that from him. “Neither of us sleeps. A wolf scrying has no access.”
Shiang swore under her breath, then said, “What do you think I hope to accomplish here, Jedao?”
“I imagine you’re here to render judgment, sir. I’m not sure why I’m being retained as a revenant, however. There must have been a court-martial, but I can’t remember any of it. I realize I killed a great many, including my own people. I am prepared for your sentence.”
“We kept you alive”—Shiang’s nostrils flared—“because Kel Command needs tacticians of your caliber, because you may yet ‘serve’ in an experimental capacity, and because the heptarchate continues to face many threats.”
Uwo coughed. “About that.” This would have gone better if Shiang had read the report as she had claimed.
Shiang glared at Uwo. “You have something to say, Nirai-zho?”
Kujen decided that he needed to go back to picking more physically intimidating anchors. This one was excellent in all other regards. They had marvelous conversations about homological conjectures over breakfast, but even bleed-through hadn’t overcome Uwo’s naturally retiring demeanor.
“Sir,” Jedao said, “I—I would recommend against using me for that purpose. I have difficulty with tactical simulations now. I don’t have any reason to believe that things would be any better in the field.”
“That must be humbling for you to admit, given your former stature,” Shiang said.
Jedao sounded puzzled. “I wish to serve, sir, but it’s important that you have an accurate assessment of my capabilities.”
“And if I decided that the Kel would best be served by your permanent death?”
“Then I will die, sir.”
“Do you want to die, Jedao?”
“I wish to serve, sir,” he said again. “It’s not for me to question your orders.”
“Are you happy here?”
“I am waiting to serve, sir. That’s all that matters.”
Shiang flipped the switch herself, banishing Jedao. Kujen hated it when strangers touched his equipment. Uwo would have said something, but Kujen held them back. He didn’t want to pick a fight over this when there were more important matters at hand.
Shiang scowled. “He’s respectful, obedient, self-effacing, and sounds nothing like the cocksure bastard who bet a fortune that he could get his army through the Battle of Spiral Deluge with under ten percent casualties, and who came in under seven,” she said. “Congratulations, Nirai-zho, you’ve turned him into a sheep. There’s nothing of the general left.”
Kujen would have smiled. He had botched the job on purpose. “You wanted a perfect wind-up soldier,” he said. “I gave you one. I can’t make him any better than this. He’s stable and he’ll serve you no matter how poorly you treat him.”
“And your report admitted that his tactical ability tests under the thirty-seventh percentile on all four of the simulators we provided. A squirrel with a bowl of marbles could do better. When they say he’s never been defeated, do you appreciate what that means? We didn’t send him off to a bunch of easy battles on a lark. Most of his assignments should have killed him. A Shuos officer was always going to be more expendable than one of our own. It just so happened that his choice was to be brilliant or not to die. He figured out how not to die. Kel Command expected him to be annihilated at Candle Arc, outnumbered eight to one, and he didn’t just win, he smashed the enemy. This experiment is no good if he isn’t usable.”
“It was a necessary compromise,” Kujen said. This was the part he had to sell. “People aren’t lumps of clay. You have to work with what’s already there. With Jedao, you can either have perfect obedience or you can have the little box in his head that magically tells him what his opponent is going to do so he can tie them in knots, but you can’t have both at the same time. Please don’t ask me how to put the little box back in while he’s like this. I can’t. You’d need a psych surgeon who was also a tactician.” That part was even true. “If you know where to find someone like that, send them my way. I’d love to talk shop. What exactly is it that you expect of me, High General?”
Kujen had misgivings about Shiang’s smile. He used to have one like it, back when he was alive.
“He seemed at peace,” Shiang said. “I had a niece who served under him at Hellspin, did you know that? I’ll make this easy for you. If you can’t make him better, make him worse. Break him. Cripple him. He’s a fucking traitor, Nirai-zho. He doesn’t deserve to have his life handed back to him, even like this. He needs to suffer.”