A duplicitous weapons engineer conspires against a daring warlord, even as the pair must work together to conquer an impregnable citadel.
by Devi Lacroix
I present myself to Korravai, the Warmaster, the Uniter, the All-Conquering, in workman’s attire. I aim my eyes down, do not raise them to look at her. But I have studied her: she disdains artifice (this, from an artificer), likes the sort of work that would be described as honest, the stuff of iron and blood. I keep my words direct, not overly formal, promise precisely what I am capable of: that given six months and the appropriate materials, I can build a cannon capable of destroying Basileuousa’s defenses.
I watch her feet as she rises from the throne. She steps closer—too close—and takes my hand into hers, rolls it over to expose the palm, runs a thumb across the desolation she finds there. “You don’t have the hands of an engineer,” she says. And I do not, not in the way she means; I am a mere mechanic by training and trade, rough and informally educated. But I can see how the pieces come together, and where to strike to break them apart. I see that same chance now. I lift my eyes to her lips: a gash of crimson framing teeth of white, like blood on snow. “Would you trust a cavalry officer with clean boots?” I ask.
The lips quirk upward into a smirk. A moment later her command staff laughs—the report of a gun already fired, an echo waiting for action to reply. I will have made enemies with that line. But I watched her feet: the warlord’s boots are comfortable, maglocked for work in low gravity, ready for campaign.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
I am shown to quarters that are nicer than I expect. My escorts say my work begins in earnest tomorrow. Their tone is dismissive, or perhaps jealous; in the days ahead, I must guard myself against both. Tonight, however, I am afforded a moment to check my gear.
I have with me:
-
- my telogreika (the quilted jacket keeps me warm, I’m told, and hides the proof of when I felt warmth too closely)
- a black grease pencil (unlike me, it does not rely on gravity or atmosphere to function)
- blueprints for the promised weapon (in my head, the death of Basileuousa)
- a stiletto (in my hand and in my heart, the death of Korravai)
I also have my name—Orban—and my body, though both have been winnowed by age. War has taken from me my family, and with them I buried my family name; I am not strong enough to carry the dead on my back.
My flesh is little better. I have never had the benefit of gene grafts or pseudoskin, ersatz organs and synthetic sinew. Scar tissue hangs from my bones like sandpaper; shrapnel worms through my body like maggots.
I see no promise in the future, no lineage my loins or my hands will craft. Instead, my sire will be the heavy metals that war and industry have driven into my body, the flechette barbs and smelter off-gasses that have penetrated and impregnated me with their ruin. Ruin, too, will be my legacy: what Basileuousa and Korravai have each meted out will be returned to them in kind. I often imagine my heartbeat the hammer of a gun, my life a shell shot from a cannon. Scarred and alone I may be, but I have within me the determination of a bullet; on impact, I will find absolution.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Byrta is my sister, if not by blood—we are both the detritus of the frontier, orphaned by and materiel for its many wars. Like me, she is a weaponsmith, and we are sworn to each other in common cause: she has come with me to Korravai’s fleet because she also seeks the death of the warlord.
Here is how Byrta dies:
Two months into our efforts, Korravai requests a demonstration. This is reasonable and expected. I have demanded and received access to four of the fleet’s frigates, have spent the intervening weeks instructing work crews on the construction of the heavy cannon that will be mounted along each ship’s spine. It is laborious work, and vessels of every shape and displacement have been press-ganged into my efforts. The captains chafe at such ignominy; they feel they are pack mules for my future glory. One of the dreadnought captains, Halil, is particularly vocal in his dissent, and it is clear he is using this matter as a pretense to set himself in opposition to Korravai.
I can do nothing about this, and it is not as if his skepticism is unfounded. In seven hundred years, the aegis around Basileuousa has not once been breached. It is unbelievable that an unknown woman could emerge from the rimward wastes and bring down its timeless walls, and the truth—that I have dedicated my life to this cause, prepared for this moment against this target for decades, that I understand Basileuousa (and Korravai’s fleet) better than I do my own body—does not sound convincing, is unsettling if true.
Perhaps if I had more of Korravai in me—was stronger, taller, possessed her winning smile and easy strength, had a body that shone like bronze in the light of conquered stars—I could have been someone else, a warrior or a leader. But burns creep down my wrists and up my neck, and I am told that I stare without blinking, that my demeanor is unnerving. There is a growing rumor that I am a witch who has enthralled the warlord, or a siren who will lure the fleet onto shoals with my bitter, sardonic song.
So: a demonstration, to both affirm that I am not a charlatan and that Korravai is not a fool. One of the cannons is partially complete and can fire at a percentage of its maximum charge; this is deemed sufficient proof of concept. An asteroid is towed into position and equipped with an aegis approximating Basileuousa’s defenses, and Korravai and her command staff are invited.
On the eve of the test, Byrta appears in my quarters. “I have,” she furtively whispers, “programmed an override into the weapon systems. We don’t have to attend the demonstration—we can overload the cannon from a safe distance and kill Korravai with all her officers.”
I keep my face impassive, betraying no hint of my rising concern. There is a plan, and moving too quickly against Korravai will upset it; a prematurely splintered warband will never fell Basileuousa. “The warlord has the caution of a predator. Our absence would be immediately noted, and she would avoid the trap.”
“Then I will stay,” she says, too quickly; she has already given this topic thought. “The warlord dead, and one of us living—that is a better revenge than we could have hoped.”
“Byrta, stop this,” I say, low and cold. “This isn’t the plan.”
“Of course it—ah. This is about Basileuousa, isn’t it?” The critical moment of realization, and her face sets into stone. She has never understood the hatred I have in my heart for our erstwhile sovereigns. How proud they are of their impregnable walls, how blissfully ignorant they are as to where the blood they use for mortar comes from. Systems like my home are sworn in vassalage to arm and feed the unbroken queen of planets, and then allowed to burn because our masters will not sally out of their defenses and risk defeat. They are worse than Korravai; at least she commands the fire.
But my sister cannot see this. “Byrta.” I say her name again; I cannot think of how else I can convince her. “My plan will work. We will be able to kill the warlord. Once Basileuousa falls, I will be trusted. I can get close—”
“You, Orban? You will get close enough to kill the warlord?” she asks, mouth full of scorn. “Don’t delude yourself. You are too selfish. We have this chance now, and I will not—”
“No,” I say, and I think the iron in my voice startles her as much as the steel in my hand. I tell myself that I intend the blade only for emphasis, proof that I will not be deterred from my course. But the language of violence demands resolution, catharsis.
How easily love transmutes into hate, like a knife to the heart.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The weapons test is a resounding success. The detractors are, if not mollified, then at least momentarily cowed. The warlord drives her advantage home: I see myself invited to the next meeting of her command staff, then the next, again and again until my updates open each briefing. Soon enough, she is asking for my input on matters that range wider afield—technical issues at first, then logistical, questions my obsessive focus on Korravai and her fleet have prepared me to answer.
There is intent here, and it is fascinating to watch Korravai outplay Halil at his own game. The warlord makes support of me a litmus test for her own vision of the fleet, and the way she wields me is breathtaking in its precision, like a skilled hand on a bespoke grip. Her use of me necessitates proximity, too; I am succeeding in the ways I swore to Byrta I would, creeping closer to the warlord’s beating heart.
But I cannot shake a cloying sense of unease. For all her support, Korravai seems to also watch me with a wry sense of humor, a half-lidded detachment, as if her every address is a test and my passing an amusement. A month of this, and she asks me to stay after one of the briefings. She even dismisses her bodyguards; we are alone, surrounded by weapons diagrams and battle plans.
“We found the body of one of your technicians yesterday—Byrta, I think it was?” Her tone indicates she very well knows the name of the victim. “I understand her remains were lodged in an engineering vent; the medical staff tells me she has been dead for several weeks.”
I turn toward a console with a holographic display, watch as it loops projections of my weapon’s efficacy. I feel as vulnerable as the simulated warships before me, armor and aegis disintegrating under the baleful gaze of the warlord. What makes a convincing emulation of surprise, of grief? “A murder, then. Do you have a suspect?”
Korravai shakes her head, grim. “I assure you, I will take every precaution to keep you safe; I have already posted the best of my honor guard, the ones I truly trust, to stand guard at your door. But”—her voice drops into the affected gentleness of a surgeon or a bomb technician—“we have evidence that Byrta was working against our efforts; she might have even planned to sabotage the weapons test. Whatever your relationship to her, it is for the best that her plans have been thwarted.” I almost snort at the irony of her statement.
I feel Korravai step close behind me, a looming gravity that hitches my breath. “I think Byrta was conspiring against me with someone else in the fleet,” she continues, and now there is a hard edge under her welcoming tone. “Revenge, probably—I apparently glassed her world, some time back. There are others like her, spread throughout the armada, any number of which would love to see me brought low. You have my word, I will find who she was working with.”
So there it is, the threat behind the troth. She must know my culpability; her words have been too carefully chosen, too laced with insinuation and innuendo. Again, I am struck by the irony of this situation—Byrta’s self-fulfilling prophecy, proven right by her death, and her murder now rendered meaningless. My hand grips tight to the sheath hidden under my heavy jacket. Then I must settle, just as Byrta recommended; half a revenge is still better than none.
And I succeed, almost. I do take her by surprise, my twisting body obscuring the blade until the last moment. But hard-won instinct carries the day: Korravai brings her shoulder up at the last second, doesn’t so much avoid the knife as lets it sink into her upper arm. She retaliates instantly, faster than I believed humanly possible; I take the blow across the chin, a retort that would lay me out if her other hand wasn’t suddenly around my throat, slamming me back and down on to the console.
She hunches over me, effortlessly pinning me with her wounded arm. The only proof that I have hurt her is a trickle of crimson slipping down her arm and through her fingers—my neck, warm with her blood.
“You are very lucky,” she says, breathing heavily, “that you did this while we were alone.”
The holographic display under me continues to run its scenarios, the glow of simulated weapon tests and exploding vector diagrams bathing the room in pale blue. I see her eyes now—black in this light, the death I have promised her playing across them like a field of stars. The death I have fed the warlord, to get this close. “And why,” I gasp, “is that?”
She grunts, reaches across to pull the stiletto from her shoulder. “My guards are not so understanding as I. They would have killed you where you stood.”
She impales the knife into the table, then pins my wrist near it, my fingers just out of reach of the blade. The grip her other hand has around my throat relaxes slightly, enough that I can feel her fingers shift over my flesh. She is playing with me.
I am not playing with her. She may have my knife, but I still have my grease pencil. With my free hand, I grab at it. Korravai sees the motion and turns her head to assess. All the better: I bring it up, right into her eye.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
After three days’ confinement to my quarters, I am shown to the warlord’s private chambers. They are far more expansive than I realized, and beautiful too—a cavernous library and garden both, set beneath a domed canopy of stars.
Korravai stands in something like a clearing, a small field of grass hedged with bookcases of real wood. It would be the most ostentatious sight I could imagine—this, on a spaceship!—except that the grass is treaded and there are stacks of books that have been pulled out, read but not reorganized. I spy against the far bulkhead a writing desk and an unmade bed, and I am left with the impression that this is her actual home—not an affected showcase designed to impress visitors, but a space she lives in and enjoys, a sanctum that I have been permitted to momentarily share.
But calling me here is an affect in itself, a ham-fisted intimacy. I do not like her the more for this gesture, and there is still the matter of my attempt on her life.
She is practicing with a sword when I am presented to her. Even after her bodyguards withdraw, she continues to swing and step, her heated blade cutting down automated targets in arcs of red and gold, her foes reassembling into a new forms each time they fall. She is sleeveless, the ruddy mark of her most recent injury discernible from the scars that stipple her arms only because it is fresher.
Korravai turns and smiles at me. Her prosthetic eye, I note, is unblemished by where my grease pencil splintered against it. “Let us imagine that you succeeded in killing me,” she begins without preamble; her tone is affable, even genuinely curious. “What did you plan to do after that?”
There is no reason to be coy. “The original plan was to kill you in your moment of triumph over Basileuousa. You and the planet are each owed that fate. There was no exit strategy—just your death, then inevitably mine.”
“That will never do.” She scoffs and shakes her head, as if insulted. “Orban, my engineer, within you are battles yet to win. We must ensure that you live to reach them.” She uses the toe of her boot to scoop up a second sword that lay hidden in the grass, then tosses it to me; I fumble the catch, surprised. “Now, if you do kill me, your immediate goal will be to escape the ship as quickly and quietly as possible. You cannot win against my arrayed host; even Halil, the bastard, will make a show of avenging my death. A prolonged fight is out of the question, but there are a few basics of the sword I could teach you, that—”
I interrupt, bewildered. “Why am I still alive?”
Her brow creases in confusion as she steps back from modeling a beginner sword stance; she must think her reasoning self-evident. “I need your cannons to level Basileuousa’s defenses, and if I executed everyone who took a swing at me, I’d have no fleet left. Take off your jacket, too; the heated blade with catch clothing on fire.”
Under protest, I pull off my telogreika; if Korravai is shocked by what she sees, she betrays no hint of it. I still try to change the thrust of the conversation. “I did more than try to punch you, warlord. I do intend to kill you. And I’m a nobody; you must know this. I have technical knowledge, but I’m not an engineering savant.”
She looks at me, hard and probing. I am used to people staring at my burn scars; I am not used to being seen like this. Finally, she sighs and turns to gaze up and out, at the star field far above.
“I need your cannons to level Basileuousa’s defenses, Orban,” she repeats, but her emphasis has shifted. “Immediately. This season. No other weapons expert has presented themself thus; it must be you, or no one. I have held the fleet together this long, but if I do not give it this victory…”
She turns back to me, and again her eyes shine with the light of ten thousand thousand prophesied deaths. Her face is resolute. “For me, this conquest is a fire that consumes, a need that claws out from under my skin. I feel as if I have trained all my life to break Basileuousa. And yet I cannot do it alone. And I must believe that you, too, know in your heart what it means to have an impossible dream, to want to mar the world before it leaves you behind. So I will make you this deal, Orban: give me Basileuousa—let me see it in ruin, let me watch it burn with my own eyes—and I will give you my throat.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
I now eat at the warlord’s table—to her left, two chairs down. Closer to her, but out of line of sight; it stops me from staring at her from across the room. It does not stop me from imagining the shape of her throat under my knife.
My ascendency continues to rankle the officer corps, worse by the day. I may yet be the stumbling block of my own designs. They whisper behind Korravai’s back and speak it plainly to my face: that I am unwelcome, that I forget my station, that I am grotesque. I cannot resent them. Their intuition is right. By my hand will I end their way of life. Even if I fail to kill Korravai, my weapons will destroy Basileuousa, and the powers of old will shift; if they rise up to destroy my cannons, the warband will fracture just as well.
Korravai ignores the murmuring. It is the correct course of action. So long as the rumors stay muted, she is not obligated to reply—is incapable of replying, bound by convention and position to not exercise her power to quell good-natured dissent. The play will only move to the next act once someone makes a misstep, breaches into overt insubordination that forces her hand.
Tonight, one of her officers commits to just such an error: a conversation held a little too loud, one of the epithets used to describe me spoken with a touch too much vim. There is an instinct among these predators, carefully attenuated to the smell of blood, and by the time Korravai has turned away from her own conversation, the hall’s noise has strangled to a stop.
“Ishak,” she says, identifying the speaker with faux magnanimity. “I hear you boasting back there. Stand, and tell your joke to us.”
I recognize him; he is part of Halil’s cortège. I doubt his outburst was an accident, but he still looks shellshocked from being called to the floor so swiftly.
“There was no boast, my lord,” he manages, recovering as he speaks; Halil has chosen his catspaw well. “I was simply sharing an adage I heard once, about how lepers multiply. No offense to your august engineer was meant.”
Too bold, intentionally so; there is no room left for Korravai to diplomatically maneuver. The warlord stands and descends the dais, beckons for the man to step away from his table and present himself before her.
“An adage! How thoughtful.” Her back is to me; from where I sit, I must imagine the vicious smile on her face, shining white accented by blood red. “Allow me to return one in kind. Our ancestor Timur was called ‘the Lame,’ on account of a crushing injury she received to her thigh in her youth. Can you imagine it, Ishak—to have conquered six hundred star systems, and still be known for your gait?”
A bead of sweat has formed on the man’s brow. “I believe, my lord, that I understand your meaning.”
Korravai continues, as if oblivious to the response. “Now during a particularly fateful meal, a young cavalier decided to joke about his warlord’s limp. The man did not mean ill. He had probably been put up to this by his friends, or simply had the misfortune of speaking during a lull in conversation. But nonetheless, it placed the warlord in a predicament.” Here, she places a gentle hand on the man’s shoulder. “Do you know how Timur handled this affront, Ishak?”
Color has seeped from his face. “She c-crushed the man’s leg, in a mirror of her own injury.”
The warlord nods, as if having received advice she would have not thought of herself. “Fortunately for you, what afflicts my august engineer Orban is not leprosy.” Korravai lets out a good-natured laugh, and Ishak nervously joins in.
“They’re burn scars,” she continues, and the hall goes deathly still. “Can you imagine, Ishak—to have ninety percent of your body left a testament to your tenacity and your courage, and still be known for your appearance?”
She unsheathes the sword at her side; from here, I can see the blade is already an angry, incandescent red. The man breaks and begins to beg; no one speaks in his defense. Korravai’s hold on his shoulder becomes a death grip pinning him in place. “There is one way, Ishak, in which leprosy and fire are similar—they catch.”
She puts the edge of her blade against his uniform, and in an instant its heat has turned cloth into conflagration. He screams and falls, beating at the flames with hands become wax, then bone. After a moment, Korravai brings her heel down on to what was once his throat, a final mercy.
“He was your man, Halil,” she says, turning back to the dais. “You may piss on him to put out the flames.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
“You think that was unnecessary,” she suggests during our next training session.
“On the contrary,” I reply, clumsily blocking a swing. “I think that your prior actions left you with no other recourse.”
Korravai drops her sword and laughs heartily at my dry, judgmental tone. “You wound me, my little grease pencil. Please, please”—she motions with her off-hand, as if she is a fencer giving a bow to a superior opponent—“continue with your pillorying of my leadership abilities.”
“You have wed yourself too closely to me. I am unpopular, and I have admitted to you my disloyalty; I may not have to do anything at all, to see you brought low.”
The warlord looks pensive at this. I think, for a moment, that she might be treating this subject with the gravity it deserves. And then: “Wed? They say Basileuousa’s empress names her gardens after her wives and consorts. I had intended to rename them after star clusters my armies have conquered, but I could make an exception for you.” She glances at me from the corner of her eye, watching my expression with a self-satisfied, conspiratorial smirk.
I refuse to engage with her needling. “As if I will let that come to pass. I intend to keep you to your promise.”
She sheathes her sword and steps closer, unruffled. “And I promised you better instruction—may I?”
The All-Conquering Warmaster is asking for permission to take my hand. I would laugh at the absurdity, were I not so terrified of touch and proximity. And yet I nod.
She gently folds her fingers around mine, closes my grip around the hilt imperceptibly tighter. “This is your main hand, the seat of a swordswoman’s power. The blade is as much a weapon as a symbol, and my officers are meticulously trained to wield it.” Her hand slips off and up my hand, dragging back the telogreika just enough so that her fingers can loop over my scarred wrist. My breath quickens, but I do not flinch. “They won’t watch your sword, they will watch your wrist—predict where your weapon will be, then move to counter before you’ve even swung.”
“Why are you doing this?” I croak, the heat of her touch leaving my throat dry.
“Because that same training limits them. They see only codes of honor and rules of engagement. It makes them weak and predictable, unlike you. You are not a swordswoman.” The way she growls those words, they sound like a compliment. She steps behind me, her chest to my back; I am certain she can feel the thundering of my heart through armor and cloth. Her free arm wraps around me, her fingers coming to rest on the knuckles of my empty hand. “Your power resides here, in the offhand. Ignore their theatrics. Swing around their defenses; hit them, gouge them, claw at them—hurt them quickly and unexpectedly. End the fight before they get a chance to use their superior swordsmanship.”
“Why are you teaching me this?” I clarify. “Why are you showing me how to defeat your officers?”
She is so much taller than me, and stronger, but she stoops to place her lips to my ear. “I told you—I am willing to pay any price for this conquest. I have promised myself in collateral; do you think I would be more sentimental with the lives of my men?” Her breath, like her touch, is warm on my skin. “You are the most important woman on this ship, Orban; only you can destroy Basileuousa. If it brings you victory, I will teach you to kill every person in this armada.”
Her whispers taste of the sweetest poison, her reasoning rings hollow. My own preparation could not extend to the inner workings of the armada, and yet Korravai is eager to lay it all bare—no secret of her fleet is too great to divulge. Why? What does she gain from this? Why does she care?
And yet I almost thank her, for whatever this is; absurd. Still, the notion grips me so tight that I can only break it by admitting some other truth. “There are overrides built into each of the cannons,” I blurt out, Bryta’s treachery a last defense in this conversation. “I can command them as my own.”
“Good.” She pulls away and nods thoughtfully, as if confirming something she had already suspected. “Good. I would have it no other way.” And then she unclips the sword sheathed at her side and moves to hand it to me. “You will need this more than I.”
“We both know I lack the skill to use it, and you just said that I shouldn’t rely on symbols.”
“Yes, you are learning! Of course it’s a symbol—it’ll draw their eyes to your main hand all the more.” She flashes that same damnable smirk. “And don’t worry about me. For what it’s worth, I’m good with my offhand, too.”
How like her, to take refuge in puerile humor. But I clip the sword to my own belt, and sleep with it in my hand that night.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The mutiny begins when Halil walks up to me and introduces himself.
I am standing on a narrow catwalk over the viewing promenade. Beyond are my cannons, aglow with the heat of a week’s continuous bombardment, salvos of blue-white plasma tearing at the aegis that surrounds Basileuousa.
Below is Korravai, flanked by a host of officers. She perches on the edge of the promenade, watching as her dreams come to fruition. I am too far away to see it, too high, but I know she grips at the railing like a woman drowning, that her lips are pulled back in a rictus grin. Fitting, given the bargain she has made to see her ambition fulfilled.
But I remember, too, how her eyes looked in the glow of looped holograms, and how she looks at the stars and how she looks at me.
“It’s a wonderful sight, isn’t it?” Halil says, suddenly at my side.
I glance over and see he is not watching the siege but the deck below, and my blood runs cold. “You have about a minute to make a choice,” he continues, voice mellifluous as a disturbance seizes the crowd, a rippling unease as a half dozen men push through. “I know how you look at her; you must hate her as much as I do. So here is what I propose—”
He’s saying something about me helping him, about using my knowledge to finish the siege; I will be trusted and well regarded in his fleet. And some distant part of me realizes that this should have once been sufficient—that I can hold my tongue and watch as his men murder the warlord, that getting to witness the death of my foes from this vantage is something like victory. The co-opting of her legacy by this lesser man would be the finest revenge I could ever craft.
But Byrta was right. I am too selfish.
“Kor—” I shout, knowing she will not hear me from this distance.
But she does hear the report of the gun as Halil shoots me in the back. This is a mistake, and not just because he has lost the element of surprise against the warlord. So prosaic is my telogreika, that it never occurs to him I wear body armor under the quilted fabric; he ought to have shot me in the head.
The concussion knocks me to the gangplank, and I struggle for breath. Halil must think these death spasms, and this gives me an advantage. When he leans down to roll me over, I surprise him with a fist to his face and a kick at an exposed ankle. He tumbles over, and by the time he has scrambled back to his feet, I’ve pulled myself up, too, torn off what remains of my jacket and unsheathed Korravai’s sword. And the warlord was right: the moment Halil sees the filigree on the basket-hilt, his lips twist into a snarl.
From it, he concludes that I am skilled with the blade; his strikes are calculated, precise, and wasted on an opponent as poor as I. But he is vain and self-certain, and despite our lack of an audience, it’s clear he intends to end the fight with a flashy decapitation. I’m too slow to block or parry his attacks; a few months of training have not made me a master swordswoman. But Korravai has been an instructive example, even before she tutored me on swordplay; when he swings for my neck, I bring my shoulder up at the last moment, and the blade digs deep into my arm. If I were a better fighter, this would be a crippling strike, my sword arm maimed. But the armor does not catch fire, and my ruined flesh is inoculated against pain; for a moment, it is Halil who is at a disadvantage, his blade stuck in my pauldron.
Hurt them quickly and unexpectedly, she said. I lunge forward, twisting my free shoulder into Halil even as I pivot my wounded arm away. The motion unbalances him, enough that when we connect, he tips backward—
—and we go over the side of the catwalk together, my elbow to his throat. It takes every ounce of my willpower to not brace for impact, to keep my hold on him even as I watch the deck rush up to meet us. I think he realizes my intent a moment before impact, opens his mouth to scream at the same instant his skull connects with steel. And then its bone and viscera and the full weight of my falling body against his twisted neck.
It is an unpleasant victory. My elbow shatters—a human larynx makes for poor padding—and I bite clean through my cheek when my jaw and face hit the deck. The pain threatens to overwhelm me, and I’m certain that I’m going to die right here, sprawled among the gore of a would-be king. But suddenly Korravai is there, braced in front of me, guarding me with sword and body. It’s a precarious scene: two of the mutineers are dead at her feet, but she is wounded, badly, and the remaining four have spread out to flank her. The warlord’s one saving grace has been me, apparently: my meteoric descent into the melee has left her assailants reassessing the battlefield.
We either win or die here. I will my crippling pain into abeyance and claw up to my feet behind Korravai. Before our enemies can respond, I shakily raise my one good arm to point through the promenade windows, motioning toward a particularly large dreadnought. “Halil’s family is on the Sharanga, yes?” I snap my fingers, and the ship is engulfed in blue-white plasma: in an instant, my cannons melt the hull, then the ten thousand people aboard. “Well. Not anymore.”
The mutineers understand immediately the calculus at play. I smile, my teeth rows of bloody daggers, and press the advantage. “Choshen, your husbands are aboard the Hrotti. Less armor than a dreadnought, that one. And you, Iskander—you have no family, but your lover works as an agricultural tech on the Halayudha. I’ve read that the decompression of a biodome is truly breathtaking.”
Their opposition buckles, as surely as if their own bodies were under cannon barrage. Korravai still executes them, of course, but at least their families are only decimated.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Korravai, the Warmaster, the All-Conquering, the Despoiler of Unbroken Basileuousa, presents herself to me in a library that is also a garden, under a domed canopy of stars.
“I give you the queen of planets,” I say, and above us hangs a world that burns amber, centuries of wealth and history rendered a final time in glowing gold and saffron. We stand like this for a long while, silently savoring our victory, this indelible scar we have together left on the face of history. From here, the firestorm looks almost pastoral.
But I do finally steal a look at her. Her wounds have healed, mostly, enough that among her crew she again moves with certainty and grace. But here she rests heavily, pulls open her jacket with a hiss. Under her loose blouse I can see the canvas of scars that bleed across her chest; history has reached back and marked her, just as it has also marked me.
“I figured it out, you know,” I say. “Why you were helping me.”
“Oh?” She turns away from her prize to focus on me, attentive. What terrible comfort, her earnestness.
“You as good as told me, the last time we practiced—the sword and the offhand. You doted on me, used me as a lightning rod to attract the ire of those who opposed you. And then, with their hands turned against you, you drilled me on how best to kill them, under the guise of teaching me how to escape. Basileuousa yours, the enemies within your armada ruined, and me the instrument of both—the obverse of my plans. How very proud of yourself you must be.”
“Then an apology is in order, as you were far more forthright in your machinations.” She smiles, and I find it almost sad. “I did use you, as a warrior wields a sword. One might even call that teamwork. But…” She takes hold of my hand and bends to gingerly kiss its back; when she withdraws, I find she has slipped my stiletto—lost since I tried to kill her—into my palm. “… I also made an oath to that sword.”
The dagger is far heavier than I remember, and I am forced to admit that I did not expect her to so readily bare her neck to the executioner’s blade. I thought she would kill me, or ignore me, or try to convince me with humor and wealth that there was some other future for her and I, one that wasn’t both our deaths. Truly, what woman would willingly commit to such a self-destructive course and, with the power to change her fate in her grasp, hold to it solely as a matter of pride and principle?
And then I realize that I do know one other such woman—that she stands in this very room, hands stained with the blood of friends and foes alike, equally committed to obliteration, absolution. But Korravai has always known this; it is why she trusted me.
My face must betray me, as hers splits into a mighty grin, genuine and reassuring. “Oh come now. We broke an unbreakable thing, didn’t we? I cannot think of a finer legacy, except perhaps the shocking tale of sorrow that follows: the audacious warlord, struck down in her prime by the very woman who made her victory possible. It will be magnificent.”
I see again the lines that crisscross her body—so many stories she has, threads of victories and defeats written in that most indelible and ephemeral ink. I can erase them all with a final verse of crimson, the one wound that will never heal.
How easily hate transmutes into love, like a knife to the heart.
“As if I will give you immortality so easily,” I scoff and pretend insult, then toss the blade onto the map I have been reviewing; past Basileuousa lies the inner rim and then the galactic core, a dozen dozen more worlds of preening wealth and dry kindling. “Korravai, my warlord, you will have to try harder to earn that fate—within you are battles yet to win. We must ensure that you live to reach them.”
A special thanks to Cossmass Infinites, where this story was originally published, and to my sister.