The boy takes the chain, though its weight challenges his. The adolescent affixes the moths and butterflies to eir hair, though their proboscises chill eir scalp. The duelist, ungifted, sheathes her steaming sword. Its lease on being will run out soon, the stress of protracted battle having cracked its limits. “How is Tiansong?”

“The planet of your nativity fares very well. Of all subjects in our administrative bounds it’s among the most favored. Its nationals keep their names, their traditions. This much we promised you, and we honor that pledge.”

The boy lifts his eyebrows; the adolescent chuckles, low. “Not that, envoy. You married one of us. Iron Gate and Moth River were related of old, so in a way you’re my in-law many times removed. Tell me about your spouse, what Iron Gate is like now, what they served at your wedding feast, which clan is feuding against which. Honor your elder, envoy, and share a little gossip.”

“Gossip isn’t my specialty.” Damassis glances at the empty seats, away from the three that are Jingfei. “Before I recalibrate your genesis algorithms, shall we perform an integrity check?”

Jingfei smiles, each slightly differently. This part is ever the same. “Always.”

The envoy folds her hands. Some of the cranes have emerged from the decanting chamber, nudging her with wet shining beaks. “What is your name and origin?”

“Jingfei of Moth River, once a national of the planet Tiansong.”

“What is your earliest memory?”

“Standing beneath a sky churned by giants. The touch of embers on my cheeks as the dead fell down. That was my first vision, which midwifed me.” Jingfei waits for the envoy to ask whether this is apocryphal, as the rest of them have done, but Damassis lets it pass.

Instead the envoy chooses to correct her language: “Which doctored your birth. Decanting assistants are hardly uniformly female anywhere.”

“Hegemonic pedantry! That’s how we would have said it too, in some of our slaughtered languages where little is gendered. Oh, we were as enlightened as you; annexation didn’t bring us anything new.” The duelist cants her head. “But this Tianhua is what my descendants speak, so I’ve been led to believe, the sole language you left us with after you culled other tongues and dialects. Or have I been misinformed? Does my home continue to thrive with more than a hundred nations, each with its own wealth of peculiarities and languages?”

Damassis does not confirm or deny: it is not her role, and the question of whether a homogenized world is easier to control answers itself. “This is what is known. Tiansong, the Lake of Bridges, was ruled by two hundred war-empresses who sent out their commanders to terraform and conquer. At the apex of its might, Tiansong held seven worlds in its imperial grip. They sent tributes of soldiers and riches, secret knowledge and power, so that on Tiansong all court scholars might clothe themselves in the dreams of a continent and each lowly menial might dine on the wealth of a nation.

“For centuries they were ascendant, growing in strength and reach, searching ever further outward for new territories and strange rarities, delicacies with which to hone their palate. Not an infant born among them was permitted to taste deprivation; grace and opulence were the right of all. The war-empresses, in turn, harnessed their altar-ghosts to achieve life everlasting. As the monarch’s flesh failed, she would select a body of her line and claim it for her own. But this was a price willingly paid, so it is recorded.”

Jingfei has heard this before, the frozen history of her native shore thawing from an envoy’s mouth. It is always the same, with minor variations to suit the political temperament of the outside universe. Even that temperament itself rarely shifts. Her instances lean against a marble pagoda, pace in widening circles, paying no particular attention.

“This went on,” Damassis says, mouthpiece for a ritual generations old, “until one of the tyrants felt her body falter: her limbs, once puissant, grew leaden. Her sight, once precise as the measure of her territories, grew faint. She considered her lineage, the hundreds of children and grandchildren, and their by-blows in turn. One was especially high in her favor, a linguist who specialized in the languages of incense and burnt offerings, of moths and radial cremations.”

“For an account of the way things were, yours is stuffed with apocrypha. Pick one—fact or fable, it can’t be both.”

“I welcome corrections.” The envoy inclines her head, a few degrees short of a bow.

The boy has wandered away, the chain heavy around his neck and shoulder and hips, the gleam of it disappearing with him.

“Why would I be a spoilsport?” the adolescent says, draping eir arms around the pagoda, flesh embracing stone. “Let me fill in the rest. The linguist, wise to her sovereign’s intention, fled on a ship of horn and lamellar. She sought a then-nascent alliance of worlds as yet too far from the empresses’ conquering gaze. Perhaps she imparted to them a crucial weakness of Tiansong, perhaps she gave them the secret of incense and moths. In any case, the empresses were overthrown. So ended their ruthless appetite.”

“So it ended,” the envoy agrees. “But you remain, Jingfei of Moth River, who speaks the words of eternity and gave us Tiansong. The mainframe which holds your memory and maintains your instances is your final secret, and I’m here to bargain for it.”

Jingfei straightens to her full height: she is shorter than the envoy, but her build carries perhaps more heft, though she does not think it’ll ever come to a physical contest. “Your colleagues have asked before and you ask it again, but recall that I was a linguist, not an engineer. I’ve always ‘failed’ this check, but my memory isn’t in error. I can’t hand over what I never had.”

Damassis pauses her recording; her subroutines, charting little maps on her face, dim and extinguish. Fortress dusk falls, shrouding them in a fall of phantom soot and combusting antennae. She does not look at Jingfei as she says, “If you insist on that, then you admit you’re no longer of use. That the Record of Tiansong has outlasted its purpose and must be concluded.”

“So it will end,” Jingfei agrees. “And nothing will remain.”

*   *   *

Above the fortress’ roof, suns and stars chase one another, their brute velocity leaving trails of shadows that fill the mouth with a taste of acid honey, that incise redshift after-images on the retina. Jingfei flies solid-state kites here, plated dragon-fish spilling mandarins from their whiskers, scaled horses with burning tails, and cloud-spirits the shade of opals. By tradition they are symbols of auspice and fortune, but Jingfei has given them blank faces and gaping mouths, gray tongues twitching like earthworms in dry soil.

She lets the envoy lead. Watches Damassis and her calm, unfailing even under this light, this sky. Previous envoys have shown unease, throats twitching and stomachs heaving, as she would expect of those unaccustomed to this environment. Perhaps Damassis has been trained, made familiar with the conditions of swarm-fortresses.

They walk—march—across the mirror sheen of the roof, to the pavilion shaped like a scorpion’s pedipalp: red-black and downward, poised to snap shut. Within its septic glow the mainframe stands cold and absolute, shielded by a lesser cousin of the aegis that holds the swarm’s shape and sutures shut its interstices. Damassis dissolves this protection with a whisper of decryption, a bracelet of code. She does this without fanfare, without throwing Jingfei a knowing glance over her shoulder. In this way Jingfei knows the envoy is confident in her authority, requiring no great show to make a point of what mastery she holds over Jingfei, over the fortress itself.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Jingfei again reaches to test the limits of the envoy’s tolerance. “How long do people live, now, out there?”