Kujen laughed incredulously. “My peach”—the Kel hated condescending endearments as much as anyone else—”you realize your operational parameters contradict themselves? Do you want a torture chew-toy, or a useful commander?”
“You’re such a genius, Nirai-zho,” Shiang retorted. “All the Nirai tell us so—but I guess you program them that way. Why don’t you prove it to the rest of us? Find a way. Make Jedao a tactician again. Make him suffer as he serves the Kel.”
“Feel lucky that I despise you, High General,” Kujen said, “and that I can’t wait to get you off my facility. Anything I can do to Jedao, I can do to you. Face it, Jedao’s a lot more complex than you are.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing,” Shiang said. “Try anything and some fangmoths will blow your precious equipment into radioactive little pieces. You know us Kel, we’re great at breaking shit. Anyway, I believe I’ve made Kel Command’s requirements clear, Nirai-zho, or do I need to repeat myself?”
“No, you’re perfectly clear,” Kujen said. He had gotten what he wanted.
“NIRAI-ZHO,” JEDAO said after the eighth round of jeng-zai, “what’s troubling you?”
It took a ridiculous set of accommodations to enable Jedao to play the game without an anchor, but Kujen remembered how much Jedao liked it. Unsurprisingly, Jedao’s little box affected his skill at gambling. Right now he was terrible at it. Kujen was good at jeng-zai himself, but he shouldn’t have been winning so easily. Between moves, his anchor was doing a logic puzzle, since revenants could talk to each other directly.
“How do you feel, Jedao?” Kujen asked.
A bemused pause. “Correct me if I’m mistaken, Nirai-zho, but aren’t you sitting on top of a bunch of instruments that tell you more about what I feel than I know myself? I’d remind you what they’re called, but I can’t pronounce the names.”
“Don’t give me that,” Kujen said. “I know how good your memory is, too.” Except the pieces he had locked down as a security measure. It wouldn’t do for Jedao to let something slip to the Kel while he was still vulnerable. “You know what every last one is called.”
“Still flunk the math,” Jedao said cheerfully.
That was true. While Jedao had excellent geometric and spatial intuition, he had never developed better than scrape-by competency at the algebraic underpinnings of calendrical mechanics. Kujen had considered fixing the dyscalculia, but it was more convenient not to.
Kujen inspected the primary display. He had certain instruments that the Rahal didn’t know about. In his readings, the central signifier, Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, never changed. It suggested that Jedao was not just more intact than he was letting on, but that he was manipulating the entire situation. Kujen hadn’t yet caught him at it, though.
The weighted network of secondary signifiers had taken more work. Kujen had done a lot of jiggering to replace the problematic Immolation Fox in the motivational vertices with the more tractable Rose Chalice, that-which-receives. “Jedao,” Kujen said, “I have to dismantle you. It will hurt.”
Kujen knew how to give High General Shiang half of what she wanted. To make Jedao sane and functional, to give him back the ability he had had in life. Kujen would have to build around the latter because he didn’t understand it well enough to mess with it, but it could be done. He could transmute that all-consuming guilt into a desire to make amends. The hard part would be giving Jedao some sense of proportion. The man had a judgmental streak a planet wide.
Of course, that was only half of what Shiang had demanded. If Kujen wanted the Kel to think he was in bed with them, he was also going to have to pretend to be hostage to their desires.
“Nirai-zho,” Jedao said, “I was made to serve. If this is the service I am to give, then it doesn’t matter how much it hurts.”
The sad side-effect of making Jedao like this was that he was no longer an entertaining conversationalist. Thank goodness it was temporary. “I wish you’d shut up about service,” Kujen said.
Slight pause. “What would you rather talk about?”
“Aren’t you even going to ask me why I have to take you apart?”
“It doesn’t matter, Nirai-zho, unless you’d like to tell me. I expect you have a good reason for it.”
If Kujen wasn’t mistaken, Jedao was trying to comfort him.
“There’s one thing I can do for you,” Kujen said, because it was easier to work with a calm subject and after a certain point Jedao wouldn’t realize he’d been deceived. “I’m not saying you’re much more than a doll as it stands, even if you have no idea what I’m talking about, but you’re not out of your mind with the desire to commit suicide, either. I can take away your memory of this time. You’ll be broken but you won’t remember once having been patched up. It might hurt less that way.”
“If it makes you happy, Nirai-zho—”
Jedao used to understand that this was a very risky line of thought. “I’m asking what you would prefer.”
“I want to remember,” Jedao said, his voice suddenly steady.
So Jedao hadn’t entirely lost his understanding of pain or pride or ugly bargains after all. Good to know. “Fine,” Kujen said. “We’ll begin now.”
He flipped the switch, leaving Jedao trapped in the black cradle’s sensory deprivation.
Over the next week, Kujen modified the setup so he could hear Jedao without Jedao hearing him. Jedao turned out to be good about not talking to himself, unlike Esfarel. If it hadn’t been for the readings, Kujen would have wondered if Jedao had died in there.
He started dismantling the work he’d done to stabilize Jedao so he could reinstall the death wish.
After seven months and three days in utter isolation, Jedao broke his silence. “Nirai-zho? Are you there? Please—” His voice was brittle.
Kujen didn’t answer. Instead, he started the finicky work of suppressing more of Jedao’s memories now that Jedao had cracked. If Kujen was going to spend eternity with someone, he might as well guarantee that that someone would be pleasant company. Esfarel had gone mad in the black cradle, but Kujen had figured out better techniques since then. Jedao was more resilient to begin with if he’d lasted this long.
Sixteen days after Jedao spoke, Kujen noticed the thrashing. The instruments didn’t pick up on it, but as a revenant himself he could feel it. Esfarel had done that when he was newly undead and trying to figure out how to kill himself.
Eighty-three days after that, just as Kujen thought he’d be able to move on to the next phase, Jedao spoke again, very quietly. “Kujen, please. I miss you. It’s so dark. Are you—are you there?”
That wasn’t fear.
It was loneliness.
Kujen happened to know that even monsters seek companionship. Or an audience, anyway. “Shut up,” he said, suddenly irritated. The only reason they were in this situation to begin with was Jedao’s ridiculous grand strategy. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
Jedao still couldn’t hear him. Hear anything, really.
Kujen returned to work.
KUJEN CONTEMPLATED MAHAR. He’d taken a brilliant young student and ruined him utterly, done him a favor no one else could have done, promised him luxury and power and his brother’s life in exchange for the use of his body. The anchor lived a restrained lifestyle, given that, but that was his affair.
Kujen had laid out the terms clearly. It worked best when he was up-front; he had figured that out early on. In a just universe, he should be a lonely pile of cinders beneath some rock, rather than hanging around to parasitize his own people, but he had never cared for justice anyhow.