The Red Scholar's Wake Read online

  The Red Scholar's Wake

  Copyright © 2022 by Aliette de Bodard

  All rights reserved.

  Published as an eBook in 2022 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

  Published in the UK in 2022 by Gollancz

  ISBN 978-1-625676-10-8

  Cover art by Ravven

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Sneak Peek! A Fire Born of Exile

  About the Author

  Also by Aliette de Bodard

  The Xuya Universe

  To my friends, for their support

  1

  Bargains

  ‘The Red Scholar is dead.’

  The words, at first barely a whisper, passed through the fleet, gaining strength as they went – from the largest mindships to the smaller three-plates craft, from the open-the-voids to the planet-hoppers.

  ‘The Red Scholar is dead.’

  There were defiant firecrackers; noisy, screaming processions of mourners; drunken meals which degenerated into fights; all the while, Xích Si, leaning against a wall in the darkness of the hold where the pirates had imprisoned her, prayed to her long-dead ancestors to be forgotten.

  She was one of their only captives: taken from a small and insignificant scavenger the pirates had attacked almost as an afterthought, charring her battered-down ship and breaking her bots with frightening ease, then marching her into this small and suffocating space. Of course they would not expect ransom from such a poor-looking ship. They would press her into service as a bondsperson on their own ships, using her until she broke, if she was lucky. If she was not…

  There were other, darker uses for bondspeople, especially once wine had flowed freely, and if the pirates were in the mood for pain or pleasure, or both.

  Please please please.

  At least she was alive – unlike Diệu Ngà and her former crew-mates from The Leaping Carp, the ship that had been boarded and pillaged so long ago. At least she had a chance of being used, rather than being tortured or killed. She remembered fleeing in the escape pod with the sound of battle still raging around her, back to the safety of Triệu Hoà Port; remembered the vids of Diệu Ngà’s body when the militia had found the wreck of The Leaping Carp, the eyes shrivelled in their orbits, the broken texture of the lips, the teeth rattling loose and refracting starlight like jewels – and the wrists and ankles chafed where she’d struggled against the magnetic holds. They’d pinned Ngà to the ship without an unreality suit, and jettisoned it into deep spaces, and Xích Si hadn’t been there for any of it, hadn’t been able to defend her the way Ngà had defended Xích Si’s presence on the venture to the ship-owners and merchant families.

  At least Xích Si was still alive – but Ngà had been alive, too, before they started on her.

  The door opened, the stench of cheap wine and the din of firecrackers blowing in.

  No, not so soon. Please.

  Xích Si tried to fold herself as small as possible against the bulwark, hands scrabbling for purchase against smooth, oily metal.

  ‘So you’re the one.’ The voice was low, and cultured. For a moment its owner was only a dark silhouette in the doorway, and then the lights came on in the hold, and some kind of ambient filter descended, silencing the noises from outside.

  The newcomer was a mindship – and not with a ship’s usual avatar, but a human shape: a female official with long flowing robes and a topknot – except that where the hair flowed down and met the cloth, there were stars and nebulas, winking in and out of existence – and her eyes had no whites or irises: they were the colour of the void, dark with no glimmer of light.

  ‘You’re the ship,’ Xích Si said.

  The ship on which she was imprisoned, her prison cell only one room in a vast body, the avatar only a fraction of the ship’s full attention – everything else focused on passengers, on moving between the stars, on bots repairing tears on the hull or maintaining recyclers, filtration systems and airlocks.

  The ship. The pirate ship.

  ‘My name is The Rice Fish, Resting.’ Rice Fish used ‘child’ to refer to Xích Si, ‘elder aunt’ to herself. A gulf, but not such a wide one, between them.

  Xích Si knew the name. This was not just any ship. Rice Fish was the Red Scholar’s wife. Her widow, now. The Red Consort, they’d called her in Triệu Hoà Port. The Red Scholar and the Red Consort. Legendary pirates. A ship and a human, the founders of the Red Banner pirate alliance that plagued the Twin Streams, the two asteroid groups stretching in the shadow of the Fire Palace, the red-hot mass that was a long-dead civilisation’s destroyed homeland.

  What could someone like Rice Fish want with someone like Xích Si?

  Behind Rice Fish was a woman of indeterminate age, her hair shorn close to the scalp – she’d have looked like a reprobate monk if not for the harshness of her expression, the gun and knives in her belt, and the lavish haphazardness of her clothing: a magistrate’s winged hat; an elaborate cloth in five layers, two physical ones, and three in overlays, showing clouds and rain, and half-bitten peaches, and other faintly suggestive images. She stood as if at rest, one hand nonchalantly resting on a knife’s hilt, her role as a bodyguard clear.

  The ship’s hands moved, smoothly and far too fast, throwing something towards Xích Si – not just hands. Bots. She must have had her own bots behind the overlay: for even an avatar with the full overlays of perception adjustments couldn’t physically move anything. Something metallic clattered on the floor.

  ‘Pick them up.’

  Restraints? But then Xích Si looked up and saw that they were her dead bots.

  What kind of ordeal was this meant to be?

  ‘I don’t understand, Lady.’ She used a pronoun reserved for high officials, abasing herself as abjectly as she could.

  Rice Fish’s face shifted, briefly. Anger? Annoyance? Any moment now, she was going to stride into the cell, or order Xích Si dragged out of it.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t intend any impertinence!’

  Xích Si crawled across the floor, picking up her bots. The weight should have been familiar in her hands, but they just felt… light. Hollow. They’d been charred, and then gutted; in proof, their broken innards spilled in sharp fragments on Xích Si’s palms. She turned them, seeking something, anything that had survived – the myriad legs she’d so painstakingly assembled were snapped off, the sensors crowning the bodies removed, the round, small bodies themselves scored over and over.

  Broken and charred, like everything taken by pirates. Like everyone taken. She closed her eyes, trying to hold back the tears.

  ‘You killed them,’ she said. Her mouth tasted of salt.

  ‘So they are yours. You built them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Xích Si opened her eyes. She was kneeling in the middle of the floor, and there was no cover or shelter for her any more.

  ‘Good.’ Rice Fish moved – one moment she was in the doorway, and the next she was kneeling in front of Xích Si. ‘Look at me,’ she said.

  A gentle pressure under Xích Si’s chin: Rice Fish wasn’t in the physical layer, of course, but the sensation was passed on through the overlays, becoming a perception on Xích Si’s skin, a feeling of oily warmth spreading from Rice Fish’s fingers, just as Rice Fish would feel the cold, shivering touch of Xích Si’s own skin. How Xích Si wanted to pull away, but she couldn’t afford to.

  Rice Fish’s face was a matriarch’s: weathered and lined, with dark brown skin that shone as if lit from within. It looked human, almost – the eyes were black from end to end, and her lips, slightly parted, revealed teeth that weren’t white or yellowed, but the fractured, sheeny colour of metal in deep spaces. She breathed, or appeared to, but what Xích Si heard wasn’t air inhaled and exhaled, but the distant sound of motors, and a faint, haunting melody on an instrument that wasn’t flute or zither.

  ‘Look at me.’

  She couldn’t look away. She might as well been trapped in a black hole’s gravity well, slowly and inexorably drawing close, her own lips parting, air mingling with Rice Fish’s ethereal breath – close enough to make contact, close enough to feel the warmth…

  The ship withdrew her hand. It felt as if she’d cut a puppet’s strings: Xích Si sagged, struggling to gather her confused thoughts again.

  ‘You’ll do,’ Rice Fish said. She was still kneeling, but she
did it like an empress.

  ‘Do what?’ Xích Si said. ‘Please, don’t…’

  ‘I’m not here to torture you.’ Rice Fish’s voice was faintly amused, though beneath it lay that same anger. ‘I need your services.’

  ‘As a bondsperson?’ Fear made her reckless.

  This time it was unmistakably amusement. ‘No. As my wife.’

  The words made no sense, no matter how many times Xích Si turned them in her head.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  The Red Scholar had been Rice Fish’s wife, and she was dead now. Why would Rice Fish want another wife?

  ‘Consider it… a business proposal. There’s no love involved. This is a matter of contracts.’ There was a flicker of something Xích Si couldn’t read, changing the colour of her eyes to indigo blue for a moment. ‘Of… protection.’

  ‘Protection.’ Xích Si’s voice was flat.

  ‘I said I wouldn’t torture you or harm you. It’ll hold true within the Red Banner – which is my fleet, now the Red Scholar is dead –’ again, that flicker of colour. Grief? No, that didn’t seem right ‘–but not everyone here will be so considerate. There are four other banners in the pirate alliance.’

  ‘I don’t want to get married!’ She… Oh, ancestors, she wanted to go home. She wanted to hold her daughter Khanh in her arms, hug the small wriggling body of her six-year-old, hear her peals of laughter – what she wouldn’t have given for even one of Khanh’s tantrums. ‘I have a family.’

  Rice Fish didn’t move. ‘You did.’ And, not unkindly, ‘You know the process.’

  Unless she could prove that she’d taken no part in piracy, either as a pirate or as a bondsperson – which meant being ransomed, and no one in a tribunal or the militia would believe that a small-time scavenger would be held for ransom – she’d be deemed a pirate, and the penalty for piracy was death. It might be a swift or slow one, depending on the magistrate’s mood. There was no going home. Not now, not ever. Khanh… Khanh was lost to her, and that was like a blade of ice in her belly.

  ‘You didn’t have to take me! You didn’t have to break everything… You didn’t have to…’

  She was crying now, struggling to form words. How dare they? How could they snatch everything that caught their fancy, with the same greed as corrupt officials, as venal merchants – how could they tear apart even her small, un-ambitious, utterly unremarkable life, for no other reason than because they could?

  ‘Why did you…? Why?’

  ‘I didn’t take you.’ Rice Fish’s voice was distant. ‘The banner is in disarray after my wife’s death, and they take comfort in pillaging. It’s familiar.’

  Familiar. She remembered Ngà’s brutal death.

  ‘And that’s what you’d protect me from? I don’t even know why…’

  A raised eyebrow. The ship hadn’t moved, and didn’t show any sign of discomfort. Her hair spread in a pool of blackness on the floor, and stars slowly wheeled and changed within it. The bodyguard was still in the doorway, but she might have been light-years away.

  ‘Your bots,’ Rice Fish said. ‘And your ship. You like technology. You’re good with it.’

  Xích Si tinkered, because there was only a knife’s edge between survival and death, out there between the asteroids in the Twin Streams. She didn’t have the supplies, or the time or the money to pay a bot-handler. So she tinkered.

  ‘I’m no one.’

  ‘I disagree. Everyone is someone.’

  ‘I don’t need your pity! I don’t want… I don’t want to get married.’

  ‘We seldom do what we want in life.’

  ‘You haven’t explained to me what you want me to do in it. Or why I care.’

  ‘Careful now. You’re growing bold, aren’t you?’

  ‘Or what? You’ll silence me?’

  A shrug. ‘Prisoners are not a rarity.’

  ‘I got the feeling you needed me specifically. And my bots. The ones you broke.’

  Laughter. ‘Some spunk at last? Better.’ And, more seriously, ‘I won’t make the threat, but remember that anyone from another banner might. Make sure you know what they need from you. Specifically – bot-handling doesn’t require you whole.’

  Whole.

  Xích Si’s innards twisted. ‘You—’

  ‘I said I wasn’t going to make the threat.’ Rice Fish shifted, slightly. So did the pool of stars around her. ‘Huân – my wife – shouldn’t have died.’

  Xích Si clamped her lips on the hurtful reply.

  ‘The imperial censor’s ships, the ones that ambushed Huân on her return from raiding season, shouldn’t have known where we’d emerge from deep spaces.’

  ‘So you have an informant on board. I don’t see where I can help.’

  A smile, showing radiance as dazzling as the Fire Palace. ‘Oh, I don’t just have an informant on board. There’s someone within the alliance who is trying to tear it apart, and I know who. But I don’t have proof.’

  Movement behind Rice Fish. The woman with the suggestive robe had winced at those words, and was hastily trying to hide it by turning away from Xích Si.

  Politics. Intrigue, and way above Xích Si’s capabilities.

  ‘I’m just a scavenger!’ She belatedly realised she’d just admitted she was expendable. ‘I didn’t…’

  Rice Fish raised an eyebrow. ‘Scared?’ she asked, her black-on-black eyes entirely too perceptive.

  Never admit fear to a predator.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Good.’ Rice Fish watched her, for what felt like an infinite time. ‘I want you to find my proof, which will require being… creative. I can handle people, but no one is going to hand me a confession, or at least not one that’s worth much of anything, politically speaking. I need your bots to watch and listen to people. To trawl the network for information. To follow and incapacitate them, if needed.’

  Technical expertise. Xích Si forced herself to breathe. Of course. That made sense.

  ‘As I said, it would be a partnership,’ Rice Fish said. ‘Our marriage will ensure you have status and protection, but there’s nothing else involved.’

  A twist of the lips, and suddenly Xích Si’s confusion resolved into the truth that of course nothing else could be involved. This was a grieving, angry widow looking for revenge.

  And a pirate, like the ones who’d killed Ngà. The words came welling out of her, and she knew exactly how wounding they would be.

  ‘No forcing me to sleep with you? I suppose I should be thankful for that.’

  Rice Fish’s face didn’t move. ‘Rape isn’t allowed in this banner. The penalty is death by spacing.’

  ‘Now you’re going to tell me it’s different in other banners.’

  Laughter. ‘Hoping I’ll get annoyed enough to kill you? That’s a dangerous path. I might decide to do something smaller and more painful to you instead.’

  ‘Why marriage? A partnership doesn’t require marriage.’

  ‘It shouldn’t. But things… are in flux at the moment.’

  ‘In flux.’

  ‘Dangerous. I did say the Red Scholar’s death had thrown the banner into disarray. Some of… the usual codes have been forgotten. Marriage is the oldest contract. The kind of protection and status everyone will respect. The best I can offer you. So?’

  Xích Si didn’t want to choose. She didn’t want to be responsible for setting aside her entire life. It would have been easier if she’d been forced. If, from the moment she was taken, everything had been out of her control. If she hadn’t been in the middle of this ship – of the ship kneeling in front of her – being offered a choice.

  The last time she’d made a choice of similar import – it had been Ngà and her offer to trade on The Leaping Carp instead of scavenging, to get larger profits, earn a new life. It had all turned to fractured, bloody pieces, and Ngà herself had never come back.

  Reaching out for more always ended up in broken hands.

  ‘What if I say no?’

  A shrug. ‘As I said, prisoners aren’t a rarity.’

  ‘But you won’t protect me.’

  Another smile. ‘Why would you need the protection? An obscure bondsperson toiling in the belly of our ships… you might never come to the attention of another banner.’

  Xích Si shivered. No rape, she’d said. Only there were so many other ways to be hurt.

  ‘I want to know what’s happened to my daughter.’