Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

Cheris wasn’t a historian, but she had the awful feeling that Jedao wasn’t making anything up. She didn’t point for the third one. “Colonel Kel Gized.” Jedao’s chief of staff. Jedao’s voice was no longer steady. “Do you want it backwards or forwards?” Cheris pulled up a picture of Kel Gized because she wanted to know. Gized had a round, bland face and an untidy scar, shockingly pale against her dark brown skin, along the side of her head. The hair above it, cropped short, was gray. Her gloves looked like they were made of heavier material than the Kel favored nowadays. “Chronological,” Cheris said. “I met her at one of those damnable flower-viewing parties I had to attend as a high officer. The host was a friend of the Andan heptarch’s sister. They liked to decorate parties with us military types to reassure the populace that the breakaway factions weren’t going to chew the realm to rags. “I was looking at the orchids when I overheard Gized critiquing an Andan functionary’s poetry to his face. I decided I had to find out more about her, so I waited until she was done bludgeoning him about the head with his use of synecdoche, and asked her for a duel.” It wasn’t much of an anecdote, although Kel who cared about literary techniques were oddities the way her ability at abstract mathematics was an oddity. But there was a brittle quality to his tone. “It was over very quickly. I’ve only once lost a duel to a Kel, and it wasn’t Gized. She wasn’t humiliated, she was bored. She’d ...