Twas the night before Sportsmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring except for—
“You motherfucking Silence cultists, I swear to Darwin,” I said, waving Lilith at the fuzzy blur that my MDO said was an enemy. “What did you think was going to happen here?”
The blur didn’t move.
“I can’t fucking hear you,” I sighed. “Come on. Is it a knife? Are you holding a knife? I’ve got reach on you, hiding isn’t going to help. Drop the cloak.”
The blur slowly retreated one step.
“Get the fuck away from those doors!”
I lunged forward, bringing my sword up for a strike. The blur stopped moving. Then it faded, and I noticed there was a woman standing there. Not Lirian. Phrecian, not Estheni—they tended to have lighter hair, and she had the face tattoos that none of the Estheni understood how to decipher. My comm read them as an identifier, probably a clan marking.
“Peace,” the woman said. “I am not your enemy.”
“Lady, it’s three in the fucking morning, and the fact that you showed up means me sitting here bored out of my skull all night was your fault, so don’t try my fucking patience,” I said. “Either you were trying to get caught or you weren’t, and whispers don’t get fucking caught. You were here to stab someone, right?”
“The Lady’s secrets are not mine to share,” the woman said with an odd little smile. “But I see you have Her gifts as well. Am I to take this clumsy questioning at face value, or is it merely a truth of the eyes?”
“Ask me how patient I am. Go ahead. Fucking ask.”
“Does it matter?” the woman said. “Everyone will have heard a woman’s voice shouting about whispers in the athletes’ housing where she did not belong. It’s done. Whatever your branch cult has planned, your eye-truth has perished. The supposedly incorruptible Vitarean contenders are no longer above suspicion.”
I stared at her blankly.
“I keep telling you people about the fucking monologues,” I said. “You really weren’t ready for this, were you?”
She arched an eyebrow. “Ready for wh—”
Lilith impaled her between the ribs, puncturing her lung and punching out the other side, pinning her to the door. The immediate collapse of air pressure cut off her speech. Her mouth opened and closed, but only a gurgling rasp escaped as her eyes dulled and she went into shock. A final, sticky cough expelled a gush of blood down my sword, then she fell unconscious, slumping against the door.
My comm could read her now. The etheric weapon had cut through her blessing. Not dead yet, but no one was going to save her.
She was right that everyone probably heard that, but the Cult of Silence was fundamentally unprepared to play the game against Veleans. All of their strategies were designed for other whispers—and you didn’t just kill other whispers; you left them alive to play their part somewhere else.
These idiots didn’t know how to react to an outside-context problem who actually wanted to win.
The Amazing Lungless Wonder over here had failed to anticipate the strategy that would have been obvious to any Academy graduate: knifing the other dude and controlling the narrative over his dead body.
My sword jerked out of my hand as the door swung open, revealing an adorably bedraggled Cades with a sword of his own.
“Ajarel?” he said with surprise, glancing at the bloody sword tip poking through his door. “Gods above, what have you done?”
“Officially, that was you now,” I said. “Nice to see you too, by the way. Put the sword away, you’re borrowing mine for a bit. For a bit. I want it back.”
Cades ignored me, stepping gingerly around the door to look at the corpse.
“Why?” he whispered.
“She was trying to stab you,” I said. “C’mon, dude, you know what Lirian did back in Vitareas. These guys are terrible.”
Cades gave the body a long look. “I thank the gods I was born a man,” he said at last. “I do not have your strength.”
I left out a sharp, frustrated breath. “Dude,” I said. “Seriously? That’s where you’re going with this?”
He didn’t respond, continuing to look at the body.
“Alright, look,” I said. “I’ve got a kind of, uh, silencing spell on this hallway. I’m gonna drop it after I explain the plan, but first, we have to talk about this, man.”
“Is now really the best time?” Cades asked.
“Yes. Shut up. Okay, so, where I come from, they think you guys have it all backwards. We think women are these weak, emotional creatures who need men to make all the hard choices.”
“That’s absurd,” said Cades.
“Your mom’s absurd,” I said. I rolled over him before he could respond to that. “They’re both wrong. People are just people, dude. We did, uh, really good philosophy on it, and it turns out that whether you’re a man or a woman doesn’t affect things that much. The strongest woman is gonna be stronger than like ninety nine percent of guys.”
“Surely not stronger than me,” Cades said with a brief, pained smile. His face fell. “I didn’t mean that kind of strength. I’m a—”
He fell silent. Coward, the unspoken word hung between us.
Like, literally. Military-grade comms are cheating and I was never, ever giving mine up.
“C’mon, man,” I said. “Weren’t you, like, a soldier? That takes a ton of courage.”
“I wasn’t killing… women,” said Cades, looking at the corpse. “It was on a battlefield.”
“You think this is any less of a fucking battlefield cuz they’re not wearing armor?” I said. “She was going to stab you.”
“Maybe she should have,” said Cades.
“Charles fucking Darwin,” I groaned. “Okay, this is above my paygrade. This is officially a Thala problem. Go cuddle up with him or something. Doctor’s orders.”
Cades reddened. “You show me more patience than I deserve.”
“No!” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Listen to me, you muscle-brained moron, it’s not your fault! None of this is your fault! They taught you that you were gross and weird and you let them and now you think it’s true! You think Thala is a bad judge of character?”
“I—no—”
“I believe you can stab as many people as you want,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “Men, women, and—well, anyone who tries to stab you, anyway. You told me you’d stab me if I tried to make you a slave, remember?”
“That was in the heat of the moment,” Cades said quickly.
“These fucks?” I said, pointing to the corpse. “They made you their slave. All of you. So in a moment, I’m going to drop the sonic—I mean, the silencing spell, and I need you to tell everyone that she was a Merisite and you killed her because she was trying to cripple you. I was never here, okay?”
“I…” Cades started, looking extremely overwhelmed.
“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered, storming over to the door next to Cades’s. I kicked it a couple times. “Markus, wake the fuck up. Your boyfriend is having an existential crisis.”
“What did you do to him?” came the immediate response.
“Wow, that’s your first response? This is fucking persecution.”
Markus emerged almost immediately.
“Cades,” he said soothingly, moving toward him. “My little soldier.”
Cades turned bright red at that. I coughed, looking anywhere but at Markus, who apparently slept naked and had not bothered to put anything on. I was so embarrassed, I wished I could vanish.
After a moment’s reflection, I decided to do just that.
“Baton fucking passed,” I said, and disappeared.
*
It doesn’t take that much damage to cripple an organization. Knock out one in ten people and you can bring everything crashing to a halt. The Cult of Silence was smart about that, at least: they kept their people compartmentalized, each whisper reporting to a superior and otherwise remaining ignorant of the others.
But here, like so many other ways, they weren’t prepared to face the Eifni Organization. The Cult of Silence still held religious services. We’d given Lirian a device that was functionally etheric paint. She might not have known who attended those midnight rituals with her, but a brush of the fingers was all it took to mark them for death.
Secrecy should have been their defense, but we’d weaponized it against them. News traveled slowly among Merisite channels, so even though I’d killed about thirty whispers over the last week, only a few of them had known their lives were in danger. They’d put up more of a fight, which made me feel better about putting them down.
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Now the Kabidiad was here. They’d been working the rumor mill pretty hard, but we’d made Falerior into a folk hero and the affable ex-Oathkeeper had played his part perfectly. The counter-rumors the Merisites had spread only lasted until they reached someone who’d met the man. Here, too, they’d played themselves: the religiously-mandated showboating about their operations made it too easy for people to side with the humble truthseeker against the whispers trying to delegitimize him.
They probably would have figured it out eventually. It wouldn’t have helped; we’d been scraping Lirian’s mind every night to counter their plans. There are tools to beat that kind of information advantage, but the Merisites didn’t know them.
We’d successfully run out the clock. The athletes were assembling before the Pallastine Gates, clad in nothing but their competition thongs and six flower garlands—two on each arm, two around the neck. Markus and Cades stood next to each other, not holding hands. They might as well have been, for all the etheric radiation they were throwing off.
A chorus of horns sounded, a warlike drone that was taken up all over the city. The crowd cheered as though trying to drown out the horns. With a rumbling noise, the Pallastine Gates opened.
Behind them, the Course of Honor awaited.
The athletes began a song, marching in time to the beat.
“We men of honor, / children of the Striver, / battle-mates of the Lancer, / lovers in-the-idiom-of the Divine Consort,” they sang. I grimaced as my comm forced the English translation into the wrong number of syllables.
The athletes marched through the gates, three abreast. They were a diverse group—mostly Estheni, but seemingly every ethnicity in the Imperial Coalition had at least token representation. Their body types ranged from leaner twinks to muscleheads like our boys. Markus and Cades weren’t even the biggest dudes there—that honor went to a seven-foot goliath in the first rank of the parade who was giving off a divine signature. A demigod of Kabiades, or maybe a really weak godseed. Comm wasn’t freaking out enough for that.
“Commander,” I said.
“I see him,” came the reply. “We’ll deal with him later.”
I took my hand off my disruptor pistol.
I gave Markus and Cades a thumbs-up as they passed. They ignored me, probably because I was invisible. Whatever, it’s the thought that counts.
Readjusting the straps of the duffel bag on my back, I strolled through the gates with the athletes. There were side doors to the arena’s interior, and I slipped through the one on the right.
My comm laid out my path. Val and the commander had done the necessary recon, calculating the optimal locations to place the amplifiers that would kill Kabiades. I followed their directions, dodging priests and slaves going about their duties as I made my way to an auxiliary storeroom in the corner of the building.
According to my comm, the commander had prepared an empty barrel in the corner. She’d used a translation device to drain all the wine, then slipped a stealth device inside.
My eyes slid over it a couple of times before I sighed and realized I’d need to drop my cloak so I could use absence meditation. Hopefully no one barged in while I was working.
I pulled a crowbar and a mallet out of the duffel, then dropped the cloak. Sinking into absence meditation took a few nerve-wracking moments, but eventually I dulled my noetic senses enough that I could notice the damn thing. I pried off the top of the barrel with the crowbar, dropped the whole duffel in—gently, of course; Val would kill me if I damaged one of his amplifiers—and hammered the top back on.
I slapped an MDO over the door on my way out.
“Five down, three to go,” I reported.
“I’m nearly done here,” said the commander. “Val, do you have signal?”
“Confirmed,” said Val. “I need the receiver on the empress until the opening ceremony is over, then you can move it back on the judges.”
“Got it. How’s that?”
“Perfect.” I could imagine the look on Val’s face as he reclined back in Operations. Once he got the empress’s signature, he would need to solve the conversion equations that would make her a perfect symbol of Varas in the eyes of the amplifiers. He’d need to be monitoring several soul links at the same time. None of us had any doubt he could pull it off.
For my part, I had to lug three more amplifiers inside. Invisibility was really a curse when you thought about it.
*
I sat down heavily in the noble’s box the commander had secured, dropping the cloak as I did so.
“Annnnd that’s all of th—holy shit,” I said, recoiling from the sword the commander had pressed to my throat.
“Language,” Abby said mildly. “Do we need to have another chat about surprising your allies in the field?”
“I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t see the sword,” I said, gingerly nudging the blade away from my throat.
“That is when you should be most wary of the sword.”
Abby tucked the weapon back into a niche next to her seat. Okay, c’mon, how was I supposed to see that? It was completely out of sight to anyone walking in the door!
I glanced at the woman on Abby’s left. She appeared to be paying attention to the opening ceremony, but the stiffness in her posture and the way she seemed completely oblivious to us belied the soul link that was controlling her behavior. A platter of assorted cheeses and fruits sat untouched next to her.
“How’s the Lady Yotharios?” I asked.
“The compulsions are holding,” said Abby. “Worst case, she dies ahead of schedule.”
I stared at her a little more. “It’s kinda creepy when you don’t hate their guts. Shouldn’t we just put her out of her misery?”
“She needs to be seen up here,” said Abby. “The more windows we give Kives, the more chances she has to engineer an interruption.”
“She could have interrupted me during any of the amplifiers,” I said. “She might seriously be letting us do this.”
“Do you see Kives’s sword?” Abby asked.
I sighed. Point taken.
“Looks like the Empress is up,” I said instead of answering.
The chief priest of Kabiades—I guess he was like their pope? Muscle Pope?—was concluding his remarks about honor and striving for glory and all that. He commanded all present to bow before the Empress, and relinquished his podium.
The Empress stood up, walking to an elevated section of her viewing box. She wore a golden headdress and three colorful layers of shawls, each designed to allow the others below it to peek through. She had a commanding presence and an echoing voice, which I didn’t pay attention to because of all the alarms my comm was throwing off.
“Oh fuck,” I said. “I guess we found her sword.”
“The target is a godseed,” the commander said. “Repeat, target is a godseed. Markus, you’re authorized to abort.”
Markus didn’t respond immediately.
“Let me shoot her,” I said, looking the commander in the eyes. “We’ve got the rifle up here.”
“If Markus calls the mission abort,” said the commander. “Markus?”
“Not yet,” he said slowly.
“This one’s strong enough to do permanent soul damage,” said the commander. “We don’t know its abilities, but you’re not fast enough to land a strike on it.”
“You’re welcome to switch,” Markus said.
“Don’t get yourself killed,” Abby said softly.
“I’ll figure something out,” said Markus. “Trust me.”
Abby and I exchanged a look. She left out a slow breath through her nose.
“Let the record show that Eifni operative C3-32-3204, self-designation Markus, social officer, has consented to direct contact with a hostile godseed. Stop that, Lilith.”
Under Abby’s glare, I noticed myself sinking into the cloak. Sheepishly, I shut it off.
“It’s just an enemy,” she said. “You know how to deal with them.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
She pelted me with a grape.
Abby turned to a tripod-mounted device she’d set up behind a decorative tapestry. The tapestry blocked people outside the box from seeing it, but this was a military-grade etheric scanner. It would have no trouble punching through the weak semiotic interference the tapestry presented.
“I’ve got the target on the scanner,” said the commander. “How’s it look, Val?”
The only response that came through was laughter.
“Val?”
“It’s a godseed of Varas,” Val said. “I don’t even need to do the conversion equations. She’s already the perfect asset for this strike.”
I frowned, glancing at the commander. “This has to be a trap. It’s too perfect.”
“It’s Markus’s decision,” said Val.
“And I said you should trust me,” Markus said. “Let’s get through the passion events as though we’re committing. We don’t need to abort until the end. I can throw a race or two if I have to.”
“As long as I get to shoot her when you do,” I said.
*
The demigod I noticed earlier had empowerments in a lot of areas, and apparently one of them was massage. We learned his name was Pereges shortly before learning that he was a Problem.
“I’m running semantic feedback analysis on some of the judges,” Val said. “According to these results, they’ve been instructed that Pereges is supposed to win.”
Unlike with Lirian and Lady Yotharios, we hadn’t escalated to direct control with our compromised judges. Yet. Forcing them to vote for Markus didn’t automatically make him win; we had to avoid obvious behavioral weirdness that would undermine confidence in our judges. Especially since Val hadn’t “compromised”—ugh—all of the sixty-something women involved with judging the Kabidiad.
But what Val could do was introduce particular concepts via the soul link and see how the targets responded. They’d experience it as nothing more than a passing thought, unaware that our technical officer was harvesting all the semantic associations that the thought dislodged in their minds.
“I could shoot him,” I offered. “That would solve a lot of problems, really.”
“It would put the Cult of Silence back in the running,” Abby said with a frown. “If our candidate wins after his competition suffers a mysterious injury, everyone knows what that means.”
“Fucking eye truths,” I muttered. “How about I poke them all in the eyes, huh? See how they like it then?”
“That would be a hand truth,” Val said, like a traitor.
“We don’t have time for this,” the commander said. “These massages aren’t long. Val. Burn one of your assets. She resents the order and wants to take Pereges down. Let her rationalize the reasoning.”
“On it.”
“Markus, introduce a little dissonance with the hand amplifier. Don’t push it if the divine blessing interferes at all.”
“We only had three out of five of those judges, right?” I asked. “We might lose our majority.”
“We have the tech advantage,” Abby said. “All we need is the plausible deniability to use it. We didn’t need soul links to win in Vitareas.”
“It’s gotta be the empress who ordered this, right?” I said. “If I had to get married to whoever won this thing, I’d make some fucking decisions about it.”
“We’ll see how hard she fights Val on it,” Abby said.
I pulled up Markus’s feed, watching as one of the judges directed a question to the giant demigod.
“Is she the one we’re spending?” I asked.
“Yes,” Markus said.
The other judges looked surprised and concerned. The look on Pereges’s face made it clear that he wasn’t happy about it. The awkwardness was thick enough that you could feel it—courtesy of the hand amplifier in Markus’s thong. He wasn’t just happy to see you.
“I may have misheard,” the demigod said slowly in Markus’s feed.
“I asked, is it abominable for a woman to direct her husbands to have sex with each other, as it would be if they had no wife?”
“Wait, isn’t that what they asked you?” I asked.
“Word for word,” Markus subvocalized. “It must be a quote from something.”
“Not a Kabiadesian source,” Val said. “Gamalite, perhaps.”
The big dude’s face spoke volumes, and all of the pages of those volumes were covered in variations of “what the fuck, this is not supposed to be happening right now.”
“I…” he said, “would not presume to judge a woman’s actions as abominable.”
“Even if she orders the abominable?”
“Well, that’s not to say—I mean, it is abominable. Everyone knows that.”
“So you condemn the wife’s decision for her husbands.”
“I—no.”
From the looks our lady was getting, she had just torpedoed her political career. But that didn’t matter; the damage was done. Even if it was an unfair question, the dude had gone down in flames. Markus had already done spectacularly; we had our shot. If he helped Cades out we might even be able to bump Pereges down to third.
“If this doesn’t work, there’s always the physical events,” Markus said. He sounded subdued.
“We have more control here,” said the commander. “This opponent has divine enhancements, and they’re clearly not for his brain. I’m not trusting all of this to a physical contest.”
“Just a thought,” said Markus. “Val, I need a favor.”
“Now?”
“Push Cades through, too. Ahead of me.”
“Hm.”
Abby tapped her fingers on the armrest of her seat. “Is this part of your secret plan?”
“Something like that.”
The commander considered.
“Fine,” she said. “I trust you. Val, do it. Lilith, you and I get to figure out how to stop a demigod.”
I grinned. “I have an excellent track record there.”
“Without shooting him in the face.”
“Oh. That’s a lot harder.”
We fell into silence. My face brightened and I lifted a finger.
“What about—”
“No shooting him anywhere else, either.”