Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

by Yoon Ha Lee

Some of the soldiers made disparaging comments about the fact that he was a womanform when they thought he couldn’t hear them.

“One fox is smarter than one hound; a pack of hounds is another beast entirely. And I have always believed that a properly guided bureaucracy is deadlier than any bomb.”

In theory, six factions shared rule of the hexarchate. Three high factions: Rahal, which governed the high calendar and set the law; Andan, with their financiers, diplomats, and artisans; and Shuos, which specialized either in information operations or backstabbing, depending on whom you asked. Three low factions: Kel, known best for their military; Vidona, which handled education and the ceremonial torture that was fundamental to the calendar’s remembrances; and Nirai, which consisted of the technicians and researchers.

“Superstition is irrational, but a little irrationality is perfectly justified where that man is concerned.”

Khiruev tried to remember if she’d read anything about milking machines. Her question must have been evident, because Jedao said deprecatingly, “The descriptions can’t be anything else. My mother made me learn to milk cows the old-fashioned way even though the research facility had perfectly good machines for it. You would be surprised how many ridiculous footnotes there are in my life.” This is not the strangest thing I have ever heard, Khiruev told herself, not with a whole deal of conviction.

“—if I ever think it’s all right to do that to someone, shoot me. I don’t care how rational I make it sound. I have a history of sounding very rational, and we all know where that ends.”

Forty-eight years ago, Kel Command had switched to flowers for designating enemy moth types after a spat with the Andan. Sometimes Khiruev wondered about Kel Command’s priorities.

While even Jedao couldn’t shoot everyone in the hexarchate, the evidence to date suggested that he’d do a fantastic amount of damage on the way out.

No: it was that the hexarchate was a terrible place to live, but it would be an even worse one if no one with a conscience consented to serve it. You couldn’t pull the hexarchate apart and exchange it for something better. The fact that the heretics always lost was proof of that. So you had to do the next best thing, the only thing left: serve, and hope that serving honorably made some small difference.

Of course, at some point you had to ask yourself how much legitimacy any government had that feared dissension within more than invasion from without, but if you had any desire for a quiet life, you kept those thoughts inside your skull where the Vidona couldn’t see them.

“The plan isn’t reasonable,” Jedao said, entirely too cavalierly. “But it has good odds. As Devenay would tell you, history forgives the winner a lot of things.” Khiruev thought hard before she asked the next question. “Do you expect forgiveness?” Next to the wall, the mothform and one of the lizardforms, speaking to each other in flashes of light, paused. Khiruev paid them no heed. A shadow passed through Jedao’s eyes. “No,” he said. “I lie to myself about a lot of things, but that’s not one of them. We’re long past that point.”

The story of the raven general who sacrificed a thousand thousand of his soldiers to build a spirit-bridge of birds to assault the heavens.

The second image was the Deuce of Gears, but done up in the traditional colors, silver on black. Like every other card in the suit, it had been associated with the Nirai before Jedao happened to it. Spirel had explained to him that most jeng-zai artists drove themselves crazy trying to do something to the card to compensate for the connotations that Jedao had stapled to it. It had originally meant ‘cog in the machine,’ a show of submission to Kel Command, although Mikodez doubted Kel Command had been fooled even before Hellspin. This particular interpretation had etched the character for one million into the gears’ degenerating surfaces.

Kujen didn’t impute impatience to the call indicator’s steady blinking, once per second in accordance with the local calendar he had devised.

“Never ascribe to irrational benevolence what selfishness will explain,”

“When money’s gone,” Kujen said softly, “only violence will do.”

Mahar might understand the math, but he hadn’t ever looked closely enough at a certain class of weapons. Like the hexarchs, he was deeply confused as to what ‘Jedao’ was up to.

an incandescent disaster.”

Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were.

Sometimes Khiruev thought that the Kel had an institutionalized horror of dying in the dark, with not even a candle for your pyre.

Khiruev holstered her gun, although she didn’t want to. “It’s high treason.” “This whole thing is high treason,” Brezan said, which didn’t help. “I’m not done talking to her.”

And people didn’t stop being people because they had choices.