Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

Gray cleared his throat. It sounded wet, and mortal, and nothing like thunder.

thunder echoed him, and clouds roiled and spun into dancing, rumbling helices of flame, burning faces grinning and spinning and singing blues. They spread fiery arms, lifting him up; he blurred out into them, interwoven with his family’s smoke, laughing and singing with the sky. Viv realized Zanj was glowering, wondered why, and realized she was tapping her feet in time with the music.

She had wrecked Viv’s life, and this was the closest Viv could manage to revenge: sneaking past beneath her notice.

Pirate queen, perhaps. Stealer of suns, scourge of galaxies. A murderer, certainly. A happy killer in an unkind world. Who tried, when Viv asked, to stop killing.

The Empress shrugged off sleep as she might have shrugged off a mountain’s weight: with that little care. The whole time, Zanj fought her.

“I will kill you,” Zanj spat. “Slowly. Someday, I, or my children, will cut your power from you. We’ll skin you and drink your blood. We’ll string harps with your nerves. There will be no sound in all the world for your screams.”

She had never been weak enough to need meanness.

Organs looked so clear in Mom’s books: hearts, lungs, guts. But on the deck they were a mess.

VIV DIDN’T HAVE a “give up” setting.

She fought when there was hope; she fought when hope was gone.

If you didn’t fight, you let it win. If you fought, you might lose, but better to go down aflame and cackling on a ship you’d sailed yourself.

If she could not free herself, if she could not curse, she would die trying.

But he was already rising from his crouch, grown large in limb and long in claw and red in tooth, his body a tornado of knives and fire, a roar of hunger and rage that shivered the throne room as it crested and crashed onto the Empress.

Saving her. Or at least, giving them a chance. At the cost of everything.

Her face was sweat and blood and rage and scar. The crown seared black against her brow.

“I’d still have done it. I’d have pushed her to the edge. I’d have torn at her eyes. I’d have made her kill me this time. I’d have won.” “You’d be dead.” “That was my right!” She

I carved off all the pieces that weren’t edge. And that road leads to her.”

SOON, THIS STAR would die. The fleet clouded near, and kept killing it.

It had been thirteen years since she last felt nervous around an ex. Granted, most of her exes couldn’t blow up planets.

Archivist Lan’s voice was smooth from infrequent use, like a blade drawn only to shed blood, and well cleaned after.

She lived too far from war to fear those who waged it,

He dreamed in many colors. How sweet. She began, with little passion and less joy, to pry him open. He screamed as his soul cracked.

Lyrical and brutal

Threat estimates and Cloudforms slid into her soul, and battle systems and semiautonomous subroutines digested them—thunder gods of flourishing colors and horrid, hungry grins.

She’d never had cause to piss vehemently before, but there was a first time for everything.

“They’re children playing with guns.” “So we take the safeties off and teach them to shoot.”

Viv would never accuse her of subtlety. If she needed to hide in shadows, she’d just snuff out the sun.

You know, I know: you don’t want to worship the Empress. You want to grow beyond her. I can help.”

Guns the size of moons spoke, and others answered. Motes twisted in the void. She realized they were bodies.

A shot fired in the wrong direction would start the battle, and once it did, Zanj and I could kill and kill and never stop.”

Viv had toured a salt mine in Poland once, the kind of place where workers stayed underground for months at a stretch, stayed so long that they carved every wall with Jesus and Madonna, with dragons and with rolling hills, with saints and sun, in salt. The stairs down to the mine had not taken this long to descend.

hoping luck would save her when strategy failed?

suspended from chains of impossible strength, hung an immense jagged shape whose outlines she could not yet trace.

Viv would have felt better about the situation had the champion in question been able to breathe without wincing.

strike him and cast him down. To feed him to the bones of gods.”

“I’m not crazy. You just lack imagination.”

Understanding is merciless. It casts illusions aside, burns objections. Even misery cannot delay it forever.

Some people just couldn’t find the fun in life. Yes, circumstances might be grim—yes, you might face enormous odds, a vicious foe—but you could still spit in the enemy’s eye, gouge them with your claws, go out fighting. You couldn’t control circumstances, only your reactions.

warriors raised spears and called upon the small gods with whom their ancestors had made bad deals,

An army might march on its stomach, but a starfleet flew on its songs.

assumed I was dead when I took up arms. Every Suicide Queen could tell the same story. That was why we chose the name.”

Xiara reappeared after a long apocalypse-free interval.

came back for you because we’re friends, you idiot. We both fucked up, but now you’re awake, and we’re going to save the world together or get blown up trying.

The ship didn’t lose pressure, and no one died, so all things considered the conversation went better than expected.

where she played when she was young and queen of nothing,

I had stolen worlds from her, captured warsuns, devoured the hearts of ships so I could walk her worlds unseen.

Zanj speared her with the honed skepticism that did double service as her listening face.

She had a sudden terrified vision of what that would look like after a thousand years, or three thousand, a culture grown like a kitten in a bottle, its claws curling back into its flesh, its bones warped so it could not stand.

They looked official and violent even before they opened fire.

The scarred corner of Zanj’s mouth curled up in something that was not at all a smile.

“I have always been myself. I needed all my strength to fight the Empress, and when I rose against her she broke me, scarred me, and locked me in the heart of a star to burn.