“Call for High General Kel Brezan on line 10-1,” the grid said again, with its usual inhuman patience.
Brezan took a moment to check himself in the mirror, something he was only just getting in the habit of doing. Being de facto head of state: almost as good as having a drill sergeant for improving your grooming habits. Not that he’d been slovenly as a staffer, exactly, just... not a public figure, either.
“Accept the call,” Brezan said, simultaneously hoping the person on the other end hadn’t already given up and dreading who it might be.
The image that the grid projected before him belonged to his older sister Miuzan. Miuzan was a twin, but he’d never had any trouble telling her apart from Ganazan even when they’d all been children. Among other things, Miuzan had always been the bossy one. Not that Brezan planned on saying that to her face.
For the call, Miuzan had made a point of wearing her Kel uniform in full formal. The only reason Brezan’s uniform had more braid, to say nothing of the chains descending from one epaulet that jingled irritatingly whenever he moved, was because Emio had called in a fashion designer to do him up a whole new one for the purposes of impressing people. He doubted it was going to work on his sister of all people.
“Hi, little brother,” Miuzan said, her voice hard. “Take my eyes off you for a second and this is what you get up to.”
“Good to see you too,” Brezan said, determined to be polite. She’d addressed him in the high language, so he answered her in the same, although they’d grown up speaking one of the low languages. It wasn’t, in fact, entirely clear what etiquette called for. In military terms he outranked her; she was a colonel on General Kel Inesser’s staff, while Kel Command had vaulted him to the not exactly wanted position of high general in a desperation gambit. Of course, people had questioned his legitimacy as soon as he announced himself temporary head of state.
Beyond that, Miuzan was older than he was by six years. She remembered overseeing the servitors changing his diapers. (Their three fathers had been paranoid about diaper-changing.) And she’d helped him with his homework when the oldest, Keryezan, was too busy to. So talking to her at a low formality level would just have been bizarre.
“Brezan,” Miuzan said, brows drawing low, “just what in fire’s name do you think you’re doing?”
He knew from the particular emphasis she gave his name that this conversation wouldn’t go well. The sane thing to do would be to hang up on her and go get some sleep the way Emio had told him to, because there was no way he’d be able to talk her around. But she was family, dammit, and he hadn’t seen her in person for years. He had to try.
“Trying to put the hexarchate back together,” Brezan said. “Except better than before.”
“‘Better’ my ass,” Miuzan said. “I’m trying to figure out any version of this story where my annoying little brother”—Thank you so much, Brezan thought—“didn’t go crashhawk and team up with the Immolation fucking Fox to become hexarch. You’re not helping me much.”
Brezan successfully bit down his instinctive response, which was to say, But I haven’t declared myself hexarch. Among other things, while technically true, it didn’t address her anger. “Why,” he said, “because the old system was so great?”
The moment the words left his mouth he knew he’d said a different wrong thing, not the right thing. Assuming there even was a right thing. His formation instinct might be broken, but Miuzan’s most assuredly was not. While not all Kel served with equal enthusiasm, he’d never had any doubts about Miuzan’s beliefs.
Sure enough, Miuzan recoiled as though he’d sprouted a second head. “This is my fault, isn’t it,” she said.
That took him by surprise.
“I ragged on you too much when you were a kid,” she continued, “and it did things to your head. I should have realized—”
She went on in this vein while Brezan gaped at her. “Miuzan,” he said at last, interrupting the stream of self-recriminations, “it has nothing to do with you.” Granted, he must be getting better at lying because this was not completely true. Half the reason he’d gone into the Kel in the first place was so he could live up to Miuzan. As much as she aggravated him, he’d looked up to her as a child. He wrestled with the uncomfortable awareness that maybe he did, in fact, like showing her up for once. “Miuzan.”
“What?”
“You’re going to believe what you’re going to believe,” Brezan said, a safe, bland statement to launch from. “Will you at least let me tell you why I thought this was a good idea?”
“Yes,” Miuzan said, diverted. “Make it good.”
Nothing he said would be good enough to persuade her. But that wasn’t why he was going to try. All across the hexarchate were people like his older sister: loyal citizens, decent people in their day to day lives, many of whom had benefited even from a system that ran on regular ritualized torture. He’d been one of them once, or liked to think he was. Those were the people he had to reach. He might as well start with the hardest audience of all.
“Do you remember the first time you told me about the Day of Shallow Knives?” Brezan said. It had come around two days ago, high calendar. Naturally, it wasn’t observed anymore among his people.
Brezan remembered that first time distinctly, although it was also accompanied by irrelevancies like his dislike of the feather-patterned wallpaper and the whining of a mosquito that the ecoscrubbers hadn’t been able to get rid of. His youngest father had stopped working on a commissioned painting and hurriedly rinsed his hands in a basin of water, although it didn’t do much for the ink stains further up his arms or daubed on his shirt. Brezan had been playing with a toy voidmoth and pretending it didn’t bother him that one of the wingtips had broken off. He’d had an awareness that the calendar was full of special days, but not why it mattered; had never thought to question it. As a child, why would he have?
Miuzan was frowning at him as though she could already see where he was going to go with this line of thought. “Not really.”
Oh.
She added, “There are a lot of remembrances, Brezan. They all sort of blur together after a while. I show up and I do what the bulletins tell me to.”
Brezan blinked, regrouped. He’d always thought of his sister as taking the remembrances very seriously. Certainly she and his oldest sister, Keryezan, had led him through the required meditations until he was old enough to manage for himself. He’d never questioned her sense of devotion.
“There was a lot of blood,” Brezan said, thinking back to the video broadcast.
The Vidona who’d led their local observance had worn the traditional robes of green lined with bronze, and bronze jewelry in the shape of stingray spines. Her knife, too, had had a bronze hilt, with an edge that winked brightly. Brezan had been fascinated by the deftness with which she used it to slice up her victim. The heretic hadn’t screamed only because his mouth had been sutured shut. This wasn’t the case for all remembrances, something that Brezan had learned rapidly.
Miuzan’s face had that stony expression he knew so well. “They’re heretics, Brezan. Are you trying to argue for some kind of clemency? You know how much trouble they cause. Even if they weren’t all bad in themselves”—she said this as though the thought had just occurred to her—“we can’t allow calendrical rot.”
“Yes,” Brezan said bleakly, “I used to think the same thing.” Or anyway, he’d thought it just enough to reconcile himself to it, which he imagined was the same thing from the luckless heretic’s viewpoint. Then he’d signed on to be a Kel like his oldest father, like Miuzan after that. He’d been both relieved and disappointed when he’d ended up in Personnel rather than as a field officer.