THE JUSTIFIED
Ann Leckie
Het had eaten nothing for weeks but bony, gape-mawed fish—some of them full of neurotoxin. She’d had to alter herself so she could metabolize it safely, which had taken some doing. So when she ripped out the walsel’s throat and its blood spurted red onto the twilit ice, she stared, salivary glands aching, stomach growling. She didn’t wait to butcher her catch but sank her teeth into skin and fat and muscle, tearing a chunk away from its huge shoulder.
Movement caught her eye, and she sprang upright, walsel blood trickling along her jaw, to see Dihaut, black and silver, walking toward her across the ages-packed snow and ice. She’d have known her sib anywhere, but even if she hadn’t recognized them, there was no mistaking their crescent-topped standard, Months and Years, tottering behind them on two thin, insectile legs.
But sib or not, familiar or not, Het growled, heart still racing, muscles poised for flight or attack. She had thought herself alone and unwatched. Had made sure of it before she began her hunt. Had Dihaut been watching her all this time? It would be like them.
For a brief moment she considered disemboweling Dihaut, leaving them dying on the ice, Months and Years in pieces beside them. But that would only put this off until her sib took a new body. Dihaut could be endlessly persistent when they wished, and the fact that they had come all the way to this frigid desert at the farthest reaches of Nu to find her suggested that the ordinary limits of that persistence—such as they were—could not be relied on. Besides, she and Dihaut had nearly always gotten along well. Still, she stayed on the alert, and did not shift into a more relaxed posture.
“This is the Eye of Merur, the Noble Dihaut!” announced Months and Years as Dihaut drew near. Its high, thready voice cut startlingly through the silence of the snowy waste.
“I know who they are,” snarled Het.
The standard made a noise almost like a sniff. “I only do my duty, Noble Het.” Dihaut hunched their shoulders. Their face, arms, torso, and legs were covered with what looked like long, fine fur but, this being Dihaut, was likely feathers. Mostly black, but their left arm and leg, and part of their torso, were silver-white. “Hello, sib,” they said. “Sorry to interrupt your supper. Couldn’t you have fled someplace warmer?”
Het had no answer for this—she’d asked herself the same question many times in the past several years.
“I see you’ve changed your skin,” Dihaut continued. “It does look odd, but I suppose it keeps you warm. Would you mind sharing the specs?” They shivered.
“It’s clothes,” said Het. “A coat, and boots, and gloves.”
“Clothes!” Dihaut peered at her more closely. “I see. They must be very confining, but I suppose it’s worth it to be warm. Do you have any you could lend me? Or could whoever supplied you with yours give me some, too?”
“Sorry,” growled Het. “Not introducing you.” Actually, she hadn’t even introduced herself. She’d stolen the clothes, when the fur she’d grown hadn’t kept her as warm as she’d hoped.
Dihaut made a wry “huh,” their warm breath puffing from their mouth in a small cloud. “Well. I’m sorry to be so blunt.” They gave a regretful smile, all Dihaut in its acknowledgment of the pointlessness of small talk. “I’m very sorry to intrude on whatever it is you’re doing down here—I never was quite clear on why you left, no one was, except that you were angry about something. Which . . . ” They shrugged. “If it were up to me”—they raised both finely feathered hands, gestured vaguely to the dead walsel with the silver one—“I’d leave you to it.”
“Would you.” She didn’t even try to sound as though she believed them.
“Truly, sib. But the ruler of Hehut, the Founder and Origin of Life on Nu, the One Sovereign of This World, wishes for you to return to Hehut.” At this, Months and Years waved its thin, sticklike arms as though underlining Dihaut’s words. “She’d have sent others before me, but I convinced her that if you were brought back against your wishes, your presence at court would not be as delightful as usual.” They shivered again. “Is there somewhere warmer we can talk?”
“Not really.”
“I don’t mean any harm to the people you’ve been staying with,” said Dihaut.
“I haven’t been staying with anyone.” She gestured vaguely around with one blood-matted hand, indicating the emptiness of the ice.
“You must have been staying with someone, sib. I know there are no approved habitations here, so they must be unauthorized, but that’s no concern of mine unless they should come to Merur’s attention. Or if they have Animas. Please tell me, sib, that they don’t have unauthorized Animas here? Because you know we’ll have to get rid of them if they do, and I’d really like to just go right back to Hehut, where it’s actually warm.”
Unbidden, her claws extended again, just a bit. She had never spoken to the people who lived here, but she owed them. It was by watching them that she’d learned about the poisonous fish. Otherwise the toxin might have caught her off guard, even killed her. And then she’d have found herself resurrected again in Hehut, in the middle of everything she’d fled.
“They don’t have Animas,” she told Dihaut. “How could they?” When their bodies died, they died.
“Thank all the stars for that!” Dihaut gave a relieved, shivery sigh. “As long as they stay up here in this freezing desert with their single, cold lives, we can all just go on pretending they don’t exist. So surely we can pretend they don’t exist in their presumably warmer home?”
“Your standard is right behind you,” Het pointed out. “Listening.”
“It is,” Dihaut agreed. “It always is. There’s nowhere in the world we can really be away from Merur. We always have to deal with the One Ruler. Even, in the end, the benighted unauthorized souls in this forsaken place.” They were, by now, shivering steadily.
“Can’t she leave anyone even the smallest space?” asked Het. “Some room to be apart, without her watching? For just a little while?”
“It’s usually us watching for her,” put in Dihaut.
Het waved that away. “Not a single life anywhere in the world that she doesn’t claim as hers. She makes certain there’s nowhere to go!”
“Order, sib,” said Dihaut. “Imagine what might happen if everyone went running around free to do whatever they liked with no consequences. And she is the Founder and Origin of Life on Nu.”
“Come on, Dihaut. I was born on Aeons, just before Merur left the ship and came down to Nu. There were already people living here. I remember it. And even now it depends who you ask. Either Merur arrived a thousand years ago in Aeons and set about pulling land from beneath the water and creating humans, or else she arrived and brought light and order to humans she found living in ignorance and chaos. I’ve heard both from her own mouth at different times. And you know better. You’re the historian.”
They tried that regretful half smile again, but they were too cold to manage it. “I tell whichever story is more politic at the moment. And there are, after all, different sorts of truth. But please.” They spread their hands, placatory. “I beg you.Come with me back to Hehut. Don’t make me freeze to death in front of you.”
“Noble Dihaut,” piped their standard, “Eye of Merur, I am here. Your Anima is entirely safe.”
“Yes,” shivered Dihaut, “but there isn’t a new body ready for me yet, and I hate being out of things for very long. Please, sib, let’s go back to my flier. We can argue about all of this on the way back home.”
And, well, now that Dihaut had found her, it wasn’t as though she had much choice. She said, with ill grace, “Well fine, then. Where’s your flier?”