Ninefox Gambit

The problem with authority is that if you leave it lying around, others will take it away from you.

All communication is manipulation,” Jedao said. “You’re a mathematician. You should know that from information theory.

But then, war is about taking the future away from people.

The silence could have swallowed a star.

According to the Shuos," Jedao said, "games are about behavior modification. The rules constrain some behaviors and reward others. Of course, people cheat, and there are consequences around that, too, so implicit rules and social context are just as important. Meaningless cards, tokens, and symbols become invested with value and significance in the world of the game. In a sense, all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work.

The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don't fold.

Remember that despite the fact that I'm a traitor and mass murderer, one of us is expendable, and it isn't me.

I wish I knew I was doing this right," Cheris said, "but there's nothing to it but to move forward." "The only unforgivable sin in war is standing still," Jedao said. "It's better to be doing the wrong thing wholeheartedly than freeze.

Taking away people's names denied their power, a lesson Cheris tried not to think about.

The universe ran on death. All the clockwork wonders in the world couldn’t halt entropy. You could work with death or you could let it happen; that was all.

I once had someone swerve her tank out of our column and straight into a house. With a very large basement. Because she was too sleep-deprived to think. It's funny now, but it wasn't funny then. – Oh, who am I kidding, it was HILARIOUS, even if it was kind of a disaster. I laughed so hard my aide almost shot me.

He was as susceptible as the next Shuos to thinking up ways to assassinate people with unlikely objects.

You can learn about how people think by playing with their lives, but that's inhumane.

The knife was sharp in the way of bitter nights.

Immortality was like sex: it made idiots of otherwise rational people.

When he sounds sane and the rest of the world doesn’t, you know it’s time to pull the trigger.

The archtraitor and madman Shuos Jedao had appeared as a Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, visionary and strategist, but had proved to be an Immolation Fox.

Dead is dead, Cheris. Do you think it makes any difference whether you're killed by a knife in the back or a bullet?

She didn't need ordnance; she needed someone who could work around the problem. And that left her the single undead general in the Kel Arsenal, the madman who slept in the black cradle until the Nirai technicians could discover what had triggered his madness and how to cure him. Shuos Jedao, the Immolation Fox: genius, arch-traitor, and mass murderer.

The Kel virtue had been loyalty. Formation instinct deprived them of the chance to choose to be loyal.

Feet scraped inside-out next to unblemished boots. Black-and-gold Kel uniforms braided into cracked rib cages. Gape-jawed, twisted skulls with eye sockets staring out their sides and strands of tendon knotted through crumbling teeth. A book of profanities written in every futile shade of red the human body had ever devised, its pages upended over the battlefield from horizon to horizon.

How in the name of ash and talon did that fucking Vidona fit a fucking fungal canister on a fucking bannermoth?

The Kel unsheathed their swords, each tinted differently, blank bars of light. Cheris's ran from blue near the hilt to red at the tip. As they closed with the enemy, numbers blazed to life along the lengths of the blades: the day and the hour of your death, as the Kel liked to say.

In mathematics you had peer review, definite proofs and answers, but war was nothing but uncertainty multiplied by uncertainty.

How much have they told you?” Cheris said. “About this outing?” Jedao said. “Nothing. Information is a weapon like any other. I can’t be trusted with weapons.

Calendrical warfare was a matter of hearts. But numbers could move hearts, with the right numbers, and with the right hearts.

A Lanterner's life had worth the way a heptarchate soldier's life had worth. A life was a life. It was a simple equation.

But numbers could move hearts, with the right numbers, and with the right hearts.

I’m dead, she thought, very clearly, as I wanted to be, but I’m alive enough to carry on the war.

Respect was a good lever, but fear was better. If she was going to make a bid for immortality, she needed a very good lever.