The Hierarchy of Feasts had worked free of the phantom terrain and was now orbiting the Fortress at a respectful distance from its guns’ effective range. The other Kel moths straggled after it, resuming formation as they came clear. The Fortress hadn’t opened fire on the bannermoths and scoutmoths. Probably even a crashhawk Shuos agent had second thoughts about a contest of guns with the Immolation Fox. Besides, it must have occurred to her that Jedao could have rigged the winnowers to go off if something happened to him.
“Are we going to fight about this?” Mazeret said.
“No,” Jedao said after a telling pause. “I came to fight the Hafn. You’re in the way, but you’re not my target.”
“Kel Command should have destroyed you after Hellspin Fortress.”
Khiruev had to admire the commandant for speaking so bluntly to somebody with Jedao’s kill count.
“It’s not an uncommon opinion,” Jedao said.
The Hafn were now out of scan range.
“I’ll have to get them another way,” Jedao said. “Good luck with Kel Command.” He signed off before Mazeret could answer.
Khiruev looked at him and couldn’t help thinking that for someone who had lost an opportunity to smash nails into the enemy, Jedao’s smile was worryingly pleased.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ACCORDING TO HIS augment, Mikodez had two minutes before the conference started. He had watered his green onion in the morning, just when his schedule said to, and was resisting the temptation to do so again because he didn’t want to kill it. He was also resisting the temptation, in advance, to suggest container gardening as a hobby for the Kel hexarch, even if it would be a good idea for Tsoro to learn to relax. Even—especially—given the latest news.
Forty-two years ago, Mikodez had become the youngest Shuos hexarch in almost three centuries. No one had taken him seriously then. Shuos hexarchs regularly backstabbed their way to the top. As a result, few of them lasted longer than a decade, if that. Two decades if they were particularly good. People took Mikodez more seriously now, but they still disregarded his advice on the salutary effects of a few well-chosen hobbies. Their loss, really.
“Incoming call on Line 6, top priority,” the grid informed him.
Mikodez leaned back and smiled. “Put it through.”
The other five hexarchs’ faces appeared in the subdisplays with their emblems below them, as if he hadn’t learned those as a toddler. Rahal with its scrywolf above Nirai’s voidmoth, Andan’s kniferose above Vidona’s stingray, Shuos’s ninefox with its staring tails above Kel’s ashhawk.
Rahal Iruja spoke first, her right by tradition. She was a dark woman with coiled gray hair cropped short, and would have been beautiful if not for the severity of her eyes, the absolute lack of humor. He liked that about her. “We all know what this is about,” she said. “General Shuos Jedao survived an assassination attempt that Andan, Vidona, and I were assured he couldn’t escape.”
“I can’t believe you let him run off with a swarm,” Vidona Psa, a large, pale man with incongruous hunched shoulders, said to Kel Tsoro. Psa wasn’t bothering to conceal his scorn. “Jedao walked right in and your general let him pull rank.”
Tsoro’s scarred face was impassive. The scars were an affectation, but no more so than the face: Tsoro spoke for the entire hivemind that formed Kel Command. “We don’t make a practice of stripping the dead of rank, Vidona,” she said. “He served after his own fashion. We had no reason to believe that he could survive the carrion bomb.”
Psa harrumphed. “Well, he clearly did.”
“Jedao has been discharged, but it’s anyone’s guess as to whether any of the Kel in that swarm will be allowed to receive the bulletin we’ve been transmitting. We tend to doubt it.”
“What I don’t understand is how he got off the Unspoken Law,” Nirai Faian said. She had been promoted from false hexarch to actual hexarch in an emergency meeting after convincing everyone that Nirai Kujen had, in fact, vanished, but she had trouble getting the others to give her the respect due her rank. She was a quiet woman with wavy shoulder-length hair framing a face like fine ivory, usually mild. There was no mildness in it now. “It’s unfortunate that he convinced Cheris to let him possess her. We should have had the cindermoth destroyed with invariant explosives as well to get rid of her.”
“Yes,” Andan Shandal Yeng said sourly. She was fidgeting with her sapphire rings, all of which were the exact sultry blue of her satin dress with its embroidered seed pearls and smoke-colored diamonds. “Except we only have so many cindermoths, and the Kel keep complaining they can’t afford to build another six.” Not least because of certain Andan monopolies; Tsoro’s face remained impassive. “I’m honestly surprised that Kujen was lying about wanting to retrieve that anchor for dissection or mathematical foreplay or whatever it is that he does.”
Faian wasn’t interested in discussing Kujen’s extracurricular activities. “All the hoppers and transports on the Unspoken Law were accounted for, so how—?”
“I checked the analysis,” Mikodez said. “Wasn’t there that suggestion that one might have gone astray? Looked like it was hard to piece everything together, given all the damage.”
“That’s a dissent among my analysts,” Faian said. “And even so, either Cheris or Jedao would have had to repair the hopper and fly it all the way to the Swanknot swarm, or rendezvous with a conspirator. Neither is known for being an engineer. Too much doesn’t add up.”
“We can figure that out later,” Shandal Yeng said. “We have to deal with the reality that we have a vengeful madman loose with a Kel swarm at his disposal.”
“Jedao won’t have taken the assassination attempt personally,” Mikodez said. “Appeals to his extravagant death wish and all that. He’ll be pissed that we blew up his soldiers. Delicious, really.”
About 8,000 soldiers, in point of fact. Nirai Kujen had wanted to be sure of catching Jedao with one of the few weapons that could kill him, and had insisted on blowing up the swarm, too, for good measure. Mikodez hadn’t pushed back too hard because by then he had acknowledged that Jedao’s victory at the Fortress of Scattered Needles had dangerous repercussions. You had to admire Jedao for coming out ahead. Upgrading to a bigger swarm, even.
Psa scowled. Like many drawn to the Vidona, he was obsessed with rules and as flexible as a pane of glass. Most people in the hexarchate feared the Vidona, who served as a police force against low-level heresy, but Mikodez found it boringly easy to finesse his way around Psa. “I’m sorry, Mikodez,” Psa said, “but you do remember Hellspin Fortress?”
Mikodez suppressed a sigh. At least Kujen, who did remember, wasn’t around to make snide remarks. Actually, Mikodez wouldn’t have minded the snide remarks. It was just bad form to show it.
“Let’s not retread ancient history,” Shandal Yeng said. “We still have to decide what to do about Jedao and his submissive army of Kel.” She must be rattled. No matter how much she disliked Tsoro, she was generally better at tact than this. Unless—hmm. Maybe that wasn’t Shandal Yeng after all. Mikodez paid closer attention to her face.
“We have to concede that he put a good scare into the main Hafn force,” Tsoro said dryly.
“If your agent hadn’t intervened, Mikodez,” Iruja said, “we’d have one less threat operating in hexarchate space.”