Who are you? Hemiola wondered.
The hexarch and Jedao had danced together in one of the rooms at Tefos. Hemiola remembered how it and the other two servitors had changed the decorations each day for the hexarch’s delight. Mostly paper lanterns with black-and-silver moths painted on them. It didn’t know the significance of the lanterns, even now. How solicitously the hexarch had reviewed the steps with Jedao, whispered the patterns to him when he faltered.
“I have a personal question,” Hemiola said to Cheris.
Cheris was bent over a subdisplay, reading up on research budgets. “Go ahead,” she said without looking at it.
“Whenever you visited Tefos,” it said, not knowing of a more tactful way to phrase the question, “you were always clumsy. Here, though—”
“I’m not?”
“Yes.”
“Kujen liked to put Jedao in clumsy bodies,” Cheris said simply. “It was a simple enough modification on his end. Psych surgery isn’t the only kind of medical intervention he’s versed in. He liked reminding Jedao of what he’d lost.”
A long way from the boy who had wanted to feed hungry children, then. Or perhaps Hemiola had misunderstood the boy all along. “Who taught the hexarch to dance?”
“He never told me,” Cheris said. “He never talked much about where he came from. He’d seen a great many worlds die, battlefields and testing grounds for weapons we don’t have names for anymore, worlds torn apart by their own problems. By the time he met me, deaths didn’t move him much.” Her mouth twisted up on one side. “We had that in common, anyway.”
Cheris was much more convincing when she wasn’t trying to tell it how corrupt the hexarch was. As if corruption had any meaning to a hexarch. Did corruption matter, when he had shared his gifts of knowledge and technology with the hexarchate for all his life? It wasn’t sure where it fell on that question.
Worlds upon worlds knew Cheris, or Jedao, as the Immolation Fox. Those same worlds didn’t know the hexarch’s name. It had learned that much. The hexarch preferred to move in the shadows. And while people didn’t whisper the hexarch’s name with fear, they feared the world he had made.
What went wrong? Hemiola wondered.
“Kujen grew homesick from time to time,” Cheris said. “That much I know. I don’t think his home was a good place. But it was his, and it stopped existing, and that kind of thing matters. Shuos Mikodez told me once that Kujen had been a refugee once upon a time. It’s hard to imagine it, but Mikodez’s information tends to be reliable. I usually wish it wasn’t.”
“You and Kujen must have had the best conversations,” 1491625 said, snidely.
“We did,” Cheris said, regaining some of her good mood “I remember the one time right after we’d—made an alliance. Back when Jedao was still alive, and our first meeting.” She waved toward Hemiola. “Before Tefos, even, years before.”
“Do tell,” 1491625 said, its lights strobing with sarcasm.
“If you hate my stories so much—”
“I want to know,” Hemiola said.
Cheris’s smile lacked humor. “We’d agreed that the heptarchate needed to be reborn,” she said. “We... discussed things for a while. It was a precarious moment.”
From Cheris’s elevated pulse and temperature, Hemiola could guess what form some of that discussion had taken. But it didn’t point that out. If she didn’t want to bring it up, it wasn’t going to either.
“I was talking about changes to the military code as part of a general program of social reform.” Cheris’s drawl had gotten stronger. “For some reason I was intent on overhauling the section that dealt with courts-martial. Maybe I should have stuck with it. It might have come in useful later.”
“I thought they never court-martialed you,” 1491625 said.
“That’s technically correct.”
“So your dishonorable discharge—”
“I wouldn’t dream on standing on regulation,” Cheris lied. Neither 1491625 nor Hemiola called her on it. “Anyway, Kujen propped himself up on an elbow and demanded, ‘While you’re fussing with regs that no one else cares about, who’s going to run the heptarchate?’ And I said that I’d have to do the job while a provisional government was set up, unless he wanted it.” Her mouth twisted. “I suggested we arm-wrestle for it. It was funny at the time. At which point—”
“Yes?” Hemiola said when Cheris fell silent.
Cheris’s breath huffed out in remembered irony. “He was incredulous that I’d consider surrendering power. And he was right. I knew, on some level, that if I lingered I was always going to wield power whether I wanted it or not. And I didn’t—but no one who topples an entire government is going to be credible on that point. It’s why I left High General Brezan nine years ago. I didn’t want to get in the way of the transition.”
This time Hemiola believed her, even if it couldn’t unpuzzle her motives. More troublingly, though—“The hexarch knew? And he didn’t try to stop you?”
Cheris didn’t laugh at it or mock it. “Hemiola,” she said, “Jedao was a weapon in the Kel Arsenal. I belonged to Kel Command. When Hexarch Nirai Kujen brought me along to Tefos, do you imagine he had their permission?”
It could guess the answer to that question.
“Why would he want to destroy the world he built?” Hemiola said.
“His puppets were becoming less willing to be moved by the master’s hand,” Cheris said. “During Jedao’s lifetime, the Liozh had grown in power. And they were starting to ask inconvenient questions about the remembrances, and whether they could be repealed. This displeased Kujen.”
We are a nation of thousands upon thousands of worlds, and we can’t prevent a child from starving right next to one of our faction academies.
“I can’t reconcile the hexarch you remember with the hexarch in his early writings,” Hemiola said. “Later on, though... he’s more absorbed in his studies, and less concerned with people, except as they’re useful to him.”
“That’s becoming a theme,” Cheris said. “I don’t know how it is for servitors. Humans don’t live for 900 years. Even in the space of a normal lifetime, we change a lot.”
Hemiola didn’t have to ask how she knew, the part of her that was Jedao. Everyone knew the Immolation Fox’s story. It had even watched some dramas about him, although it hadn’t had the nerve to ask her what she thought of them.
“He must have told you something of his motives,” Hemiola said. “What did he want?”
“He claimed it was about watching the world be reborn,” Cheris said. “I didn’t believe it for a moment. Kujen never cared about high-minded abstract principles. The only thing that really matters to him is mathematics. In any case, he wouldn’t have stuck out his neck for a high-minded abstract principle. He devoted himself to the most basic pleasures. Food. Sex. Beautiful clothes. He... didn’t sleep much, but he liked watching other people sleep.” Cheris leaned back in her seat and rubbed her eyes tiredly. “I figured out straight off that he didn’t like being vulnerable. Made himself the perfect defense.”
“But you cared about principles,” Hemiola said, understanding at last. “And you didn’t like the hexarch’s system.”
“No.” Cheris’s eyes had gone cold and intent, a killer’s eyes. Jedao was watching it from behind her eyes. “I would have liked to kill him. But killing him wouldn’t have solved the problem even if I’d been able to manage it. I tried, when I first met him. He simply hijacked a new body, and after that I realized I didn’t have a way of getting rid of him permanently. So I had to get close to him to learn what I could, and try to reform his system. Besides,” and she pulled a face, “we needed each other.”