The red scholars wake, p.3
The Red Scholar's Wake, page 3
Part of Rice Fish wasn’t there: part of her was flying through the Jade Stream towards the Citadel; part of her was monitoring bots; and part of her was sitting, stiff and upright and unsmiling, at her wife’s mourning ceremony, listening to overblown songs about the Red Scholar’s exploits that were so out of proportion Huân would have laughed in embarrassment. Rice Fish could maintain two avatars with a little effort, but interacting with people on a more than superficial level required more attention – and she’d rather keep all of those processing threads for Xích Si.
As Xích Si walked behind her avatar, Rice Fish changed for her, as she’d changed on her way from the cell to the marriage room: the paintings on the walls becoming the asteroids of the Jade Stream, the silence broken by faint folk songs of the An O empire. She didn’t know what would be a comfort to Xích Si, but she owed it to her to try. Her bots’ legs clicked on the floor – she didn’t need their sensors to see Xích Si’s tense muscles and accelerated heartbeat. This wasn’t just marriage, for her; it was a tearing away from her old life, an acknowledgement it would never return. Rice Fish had seen so many recruits and bondspeople go through it – the denial and the anger and the grief. She could remember, like a distant echo, what it had been like when Huân had picked her, when she’d signed her own contract: the feel of the table at which she’d sat; the smell of incense; the heat of Huân’s bots next to hers. It had felt like being on the edge of a leap into deep spaces, a gesture that once started couldn’t be walked back or erased.
‘Here,’ Rice Fish said, in front of a door with the double happiness symbol shimmering on its metal.
Xích Si pushed it.
It was the room where Rice Fish received her bannerpeople, and dignitaries. The overlay was rich and formal, and half the furniture was physical – not Rice Fish’s preference, but some envoys liked to occupy the physical rather than the virtual layers. Half the room was occupied by a large bed, and on that bed she’d spread the bridal gifts: three red boxes with the golden traceries of two fish slowly turning into dragons. The boxes were open, showcasing what they contained: bridal jewellery, and new bots for Xích Si to bind to her.
‘These are for you,’ Rice Fish said.
Xích Si was breathing hard; Rice Fish’s sensors caught the frantic sound of her heartbeat, the fast blinking, the way her hands clenched and unclenched, the stress worse than the one she’d experienced when she’d signed the contract. She turned to face Rice Fish’s avatar, but Rice Fish had already seen the pallor of her face.
‘I didn’t expect that reaction to gifts,’ Rice Fish said lightly.
‘The bed.’ Xích Si’s voice was shaking. ‘There’s only one.’
Oh. It had been obvious to her, and it would have been obvious to anyone within the Red Banner, or anyone used to dealing with the pirate alliance, but Xích Si was a poor scavenger, and shipminds might as well have existed in another universe.
‘I don’t sleep,’ Rice Fish said. ‘And technically I’m no more present here than anywhere else. I’m not monitoring those rooms other than for critical life support breaches, and you can invoke privacy privileges if you want to be sure my bots or sensors aren’t activated in here. I ask that you not to do it too often – I need to maintain this room as much as the rest of my body.’
Xích Si opened her mouth, and closed it. The fear in her eyes was slowly receding.
‘Present. Your body. You—’
‘I told you. You’re safe here.’
At the mourning banquet, Huân’s son was now pouring wine in a virtual overlay – he had his own command and was on his own ship, and thank Heaven Rice Fish didn’t have to deal with his anger and grief, just with his beamed-in holo. She pulled her awareness away from that avatar, let it be little more than bots running on low-level automatic routines.
Xích Si was breathing hard. She took one, two faltering steps towards the bed – reached for the bots, cradled them in her arms as they activated. There was a workbench nearby: just a materialisation of the access privileges that Rice Fish had given her. She rose, made her way there, the bots spreading across her shoulders – one stretching and melting to cover her palm, and form three rings on her fingers – and stared at the bench for what felt like an eternity.
‘I’ll leave you,’ Rice Fish said. Of course she’d need time, and solitude. ‘I’ve already asked someone to locate your daughter. But for now, you need sleep…’
Xích Si raised a hand. The bots followed it, flowing up her arm. For a long, stretched, silent period – time that Rice Fish could count, blink by blink – Xích Si stood stock-still, her breath rising and falling. Rice Fish could see the minute shift in her chest muscles, the way she slowly, deliberately got her breathing under control, from the near panic to an even and slow rhythm, an act of sheer strength of will managed while standing absolutely unmoving, and with no other hint of the turmoil that must have been going on inside.
When Xích Si turned back to Rice Fish, her face was hard.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Tell me how your wife died.’
Rice Fish struggled not to take a step back… but she wasn’t about to give way on her own body.
‘It’s your wedding night,’ she said, slowly, gently.
The corners of Xích Si’s lips rose, but only a fraction. ‘And it’s not that kind of marriage, is it? Tell me.’
Rice Fish had misjudged her new wife; she’d thought Xích Si would be bewildered, or lost, or soft – but there was nothing of softness in the way she faced Rice Fish now, with the bots on her, body as taut as a leaping dancer’s. She was… incandescent and proud and utterly, dazzlingly beautiful. Some thing long forgotten twisted in Rice Fish’s innards – in her heartroom, where the organic core of her was plugged into her body, where she was most vulnerable, something expanded and missed a beat. She found herself faltering, as she had during the kiss.
Not that kind of marriage.
Never that kind of marriage.
She and Huân had had mutual respect, and some fondness, but that was all that could be expected. All that she deserved, now and forever.
‘I’ll tell you what happened,’ Rice Fish said.
She moved closer to Xích Si, conjured a chair and sat near the workbench, well away from Xích Si’s enticing tautness, far enough away that she didn’t have to feel or touch her. But of course Xích Si’s feet rested on the floor of one of her cabins, and she felt the minute pressure as she shifted position and walked to the bench. She didn’t sit; she stood in front of it, biting her lips, and finally summoned a screen overlay keyed to both of them – the kind used for a vid or a picture, except that it was empty.
‘Show me,’ she said.
It was an invitation, but one as sharp and as cutting as a knife’s blade: a call to battle.
Rice Fish conjured, one after the other, screen overlays: maps and ships and pictures of the banners and the empires – everything Xích Si would need to make sense of the world she now moved in.
‘Here,’ she said, laying it out like a peace offering. ‘Here is what happened.’
Xích Si cocked her head, and stared, not at the screen, but straight at her. Her eyes were a brown so dark it was almost black, intent and piercing.
‘Thank you,’ she said, holding Rice Fish’s gaze.
I see you, big sis, Huân’s voice whispered in her thoughts.
Do you? She shut it down, mercilessly – redirecting it to the avatar at Huân’s funeral banquet, where it was drowned by rice wine and the weeping mourners. You’re dead, li’l sis. A corpse fractured by deep spaces. Let the living take care of themselves, and of what you left behind.
In her thoughts, Huân laughed – because she knew, as did Rice Fish, that the dead couldn’t be put to rest so easily.
3
Wedding Night
Xích Si inhaled, and stared at the screen.
Everything was dancing and wavering, her thoughts saturated with too much information, too many people, too many grievances and old records. What steadied her was the job: the analysis of the data so she could find the proof Rice Fish needed. It might not be something she’d ever thought she’d ever do for pirates, but it was a familiar job: a steadying task she could keep focused on.
Rice Fish was watching her, sprawled in the chair she’d pulled out. She was sharply defined from head to waist, and then the red and golden wedding robes slowly darkened and sharpened until they became the metal of the egg-shaped chair, and her long hair below the topknot was shadows on the metal. Her gaze was… not predatory or heavy, but simply curious.
‘You don’t have to take it all in now,’ she said, gently.
Affectionately, Xích Si would have said, except that she was a pirate, and she wouldn’t have risen so far if she was weak. She was a pirate, and her kind had killed Ngà.
But when she’d told Xích Si she’d be safe, her voice had been soft, and even: a quiet statement of the way things were, an utter certainty – a hard, comforting fact to which Xích Si could cling.
It’d have been easier if Xích Si could trust her.
‘You’ll want me to hold up on my end of the bargain,’ Xích Si said, more sharply than she meant to.
A raised eyebrow. ‘You’re no use to me if you crash and burn.’
‘And I’m of no use to myself if I go around like a backwater planet bumpkin.’ Xích Si closed her eyes. Her bots nested on her shoulders and hands again; they felt worn and comforting. They shouldn’t have – not when she’d seen the previous ones gutted and burned, had held their corpses – but these had the same feel and the same heft, recreated with painstaking attention to detail. An apology, of sorts; and of course she couldn’t work without them. ‘Tell me again.’
‘Everything that led up to it?’ Rice Fish considered. ‘On the surface, it was an uneventful raiding season. The usual number of merchant ships that weren’t careful enough, weren’t protected enough.’
It almost sounded bloodless. It almost sounded… fair. Which it couldn’t be. It was pillaging and blood and pain, parasites taking what they wanted and destroying the rest. It couldn’t be fair. It would never be.
‘You said “on the surface”?’
‘Yes.’ Rice Fish sipped a cup of tea that had materialised out of nowhere. ‘We have our own rules. The alliance has five banners, out of which the Red Banner is only one. And each smaller pirate craft owes loyalty only to their banner scholar. In turn, the council oversees the banner scholars.’
‘And you’re the Red Scholar.’
‘Not officially. Not yet,’ Rice Fish said. ‘It’s likely that I will be, but the council would need to confirm me as Huân’s heir first.’ She considered. ‘I said “on the surface” because things were happening in the background. Little things at first. High tension within the Citadel. Arguments at flower-poetry contests. Too many brawls, too many incidents between banners in teahouses. More raids than usual that ended in slaughter. Larger targets.’
‘Because you don’t slaughter outright?’
Rice Fish paused, and Xích Si tensed, but she merely went on.
‘Not as much as you seem to fear. We do this for money. But some… Yes, they seemed to be doing it for cruelty’s sake. And at first it was one banner, and then it was several. It was starting to look like someone in the banners was making a power play.’
Xích Si frowned. She called up the display again, looked at the ships that had killed the Red Scholar. Massive open-the-voids and the smaller three-plates. They moved far too smoothly, without any of the lags she was used to in the Twin Streams. They were too sleek, too smooth.
‘Those ships aren’t pirate ships. They’re official. So why talk of banner politics?’
‘No, those ships weren’t from the banners. You’re right. They’re imperial. They belonged to Censor Trúc. I think someone in the banners – someone who wanted Huân dead – found a common cause with the imperial forces, who want all pirates dead as a matter of principle.’
‘Imperial ships. The empire.’
‘There are two empires, but yes. The one you come from.’
Her voice was even, dismissive.
How could she?
‘It’s my home,’ Xích Si said.
A quirk of Rice Fish’s lips.
‘You think I should be making one here.’
‘I think birds have wasted away in cages looking south,’ Rice Fish said.
It was one scholarly metaphor too many.
‘You’re the one holding the keys of the cage!’ The words were out of her mouth before she realised what she’d said, and to whom. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have… Please don’t—’
‘Don’t what?’
Rice Fish rose, and stretched. As she did, her hair lengthened and changed, became the Twin Streams, the river of stars across the sky. She wasn’t an imperial shipmind; she wasn’t a wife or a friend. She was a pirate consort, one who pillaged and burned and killed. Why would she spare a mouthy scavenger who’d offered her nothing of value?
Xích Si threw herself to the floor – or tried to, because Rice Fish was suddenly there, and her bots were holding her immobile, pinned to the chair, Xích Si’s own bots swept aside and clattering to the floor.
‘Don’t,’ Rice Fish said, and this time the anger in her voice was unmistakable. ‘Not ever again. Don’t ever think of degrading yourself as a solution to anything again. Or apologising for your anger.’
A heartbeat; her eyes holding Xích Si’s; her hands replacing the bots, a soft and warm touch that spread to Xích Si’s body. It was relayed through the perception layers, a touch that wasn’t physical and no longer prevented Xích Si from rising. She could have shaken Rice Fish off with a shrug. She tried to say something sarcastic or wounding, but the expression in Rice Fish’s eyes stopped her.
‘Your old life ended when you were captured. I can’t give it back to you. I can’t turn back time. I’d say it’s not my fault, but it was my banner, so it is my responsibility.’ Her eyes filmed red, like the heart of a star, like bridal clothes. ‘You don’t want to hear it from me, but… you have to make the most of what you have.’
Something Xích Si had heard so many times, from so many condescending elders and officials. Except that Rice Fish’s voice wasn’t contemptuous or dismissive, but worried.
She cares.
So few had. Parents, long dead, worn to nubs by the scavenging life. Ngà, once. Auntie Vy and her wife. Thấy An Sơn, a nun at the pagoda who’d given her scraps of metal for her bots, and taken Xích Si’s own offerings with utter seriousness, no matter how small and inadequate they’d been. Her scavenger friends, Hoa and Vân and Ngọc Nữ, who’d always known when to bring braised dishes and spare rice.
Rice Fish had withdrawn her hands and taken a step back, but she was still staring at Xích Si with an intensity that could have seared metal, and around her the room was growing darker and warmer, with faint flashes like a storm on the sun’s surface. Xích Si could still feel the imprints of the ship’s hold on her, and part of her – the treacherous, oblivious, primal part – longed to be held; not pinned in the chair, but wrapped in someone’s arms and held as though she mattered.
Don’t ever think of degrading yourself as a solution to anything again.
Everyone is someone.
‘We’re business partners,’ she said, finally, because words had fled and all she had left were scattered thoughts. ‘I understand that.’
Rice Fish stared at her, for a little longer than necessary. Xích Si saw a flicker of hurt in the depths of her eyes.
Why?
‘A business arrangement,’ she said, finally. Her voice almost sounded smooth – but not quite enough.
‘You said someone from the banners was making a power play,’ Xích Si said, returning to their safer and more innocuous conversation, though it was still filled with so many landmines. She had work to get to. ‘And… two empires?’
‘We’re attacking the An O Empire’s merchants. The Đại Việt are on the other side of the Twin Streams. Their dynasty is younger, beleaguered and in desperate need of money, so they train us and let us loose in return for a percentage of the profit.’
Xích Si had seen many Việt merchants in Triệu Hoà Port. She was vaguely aware of them, and of the hostility the empire had for them – they’d been at war once, a long time ago.
‘All right. When you said someone in the banners, it sounded like you had someone very specific in mind.’
‘Mmm. The first banner that started behaving… oddly was the Green Banner. Kim Thông, the Green Scholar, is a long-time enemy of Huân and I.’ Rice Fish moved slightly, her hair and the chair shifting with her.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Rice Fish said. ‘But she’s always wanted the power Huân and I were wielding, and she’s always been resentful. She started becoming more and more aggressive in council sessions, and then outright trying to displace us. So it would make sense.’
‘What about the other banners?’
‘The Black and White Banners are neutral, but their scholars are weak,’ Rice Fish said. ‘The Purple Banner…’ A hitch, in her voice. ‘The Purple Scholar is our son. Mine and Huân’s. We don’t get on, but I have no reason to doubt his loyalty.’ The words were a little too quick: there was pain there, buried deep, and Xích Si didn’t feel brave enough to probe. ‘And the last member of the council is the Đại Việt envoy. She doesn’t head any banners, but she represents the empire bankrolling us, so she’s entitled to a seat.’ There was amusement in her voice. ‘The Green Banner is the one you should focus on, for the time being.’
‘To find your proof.’
‘Yes.’ Rice Fish’s voice was hard. ‘If Kim Thông is indeed in communication with Censor Trúc and the An O Empire, then I have a problem that goes beyond a political struggle. The whole alliance would be at stake, because Censor Trúc wants to destroy us. But the council would never dismiss the Green Scholar without evidence.’
Without the strongest kind of evidence.
