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A book of profanities written in every futile shade of red the human body had ever devised, its pages upended over the battlefield from horizon to horizon.
In a way each battle was home: a wretched home, where small mistakes were punished and great virtues went unnoticed, but a home nonetheless.
“How good to see you haven’t been assassinated,” Kujen said drily. Shuos philosophy was that the hexarch’s seat was yours if you could hold onto it.
Kujen, for his part, tolerated the other hexarchs because his immortality relied on the high calendar in its present form, and the high calendar didn’t just include the numbers and measures of time, but the associated social system.
It was entirely in character for Kujen to think psychological stability was dull.
Certain actions conferred great advantage, but also incremented a heresy clock. As the clock went up, the game’s rules changed. The web piece interacted with the heresy clock and represented the weapon that saved you even as it poisoned your principles.
Her face smiled again, this time with a fox’s patient pleasure, and winked out.
A map distended in her mind. She could feel it as though she could walk her fingers over the tangled strands of voidmoth routes and feel the heat of far-scattered stars.
But she had the tremulous comfort of knowing she wasn’t alone.
Much later she recovered a few impressions: a smell like mint and smoke and sedge blossoms, a heartbeat too slow to be her own, the world tilting and curving. Water the color of sleep, or sleep the color of water.
Toward the end, the hall swallowed Cheris’s footsteps and gave back echoes after a delay that was too long. The walls were black, and so were the floor and ceiling. If you looked too long at the ceiling, which Cheris did once, you started to see stars, faintly at first, then closer and closer, faster and faster, the luminous smears of nebulae resolving into individual jewels of light, and even the velvety darkness admitted cracks behind which great gears groaned – but she stopped looking.
She was developing the dangerous idea that her best bet was to deal with him honestly and see what happened.
She could feel the inadequacy of her neatly ordered facts confronted by the cacophony of living cultures.
Once she had looked up the Kel summation of the City of Ravens Feasting. She had seen her home distilled into a sterile list of facts. Each was individually true, but the list conveyed nothing of what it sounded like when a flock of ravens wheeled into the sky, leaving oracle tracks in the unsettled dust.
The light has gone pale and cold everywhere, as though it came from some land of snow and stinging wings.
Nothing kills respect faster than pity.”
They were the same hands she had grown into, but she kept expecting them to be larger, longer. She was momentarily convinced that if she took her gloves off, her hands wouldn’t belong to her anymore.
“The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don’t fold,” he said.
Although Cheris knew better, she kept expecting the world to change around her in response to the calendrical rot: for the walls to run like water, the light to shiver into turbulent colors, the sounds of human voices to shred into the cries of migrating birds.
“You always were bloodthirsty, Nerevor,” Paizan said, with what might have been affection, and signed off.
The nine-eyed shadow whipped around behind her in defiance of all the laws of geometry it had obeyed until now, and then she knew she was really in trouble.
