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"What worries you the most?" Mikodez asks Zehun before his first meeting with the true Nirai hexarch. It's a habit of speech he's picked up from their own briefings on major players in and out of the faction.
Zehun frowns and doesn't answer for a long moment. They scratch Ajeng behind the ears. While Mikodez waits for them to finish their thought, whatever it is, he tries to remember whether the Shuos Ajeng Zehun's cat is named after was the fox who'd worn a bear costume and attacked her victims with an ax, or the fox who rigged his hexarch's bed with a pressure plate that caused the ceiling to collapse on her. They're all starting to run together in his mind. He's sure it's not the fox who stabbed the hexarch with a sharpened lute while blind.
"That he'll like you," they finally say.
Mikodez places a bet with himself on what the runner-up concern had been. "And the next-biggest worry?" he asks.
"That you'll like him," they say immediately. It's a surprise.
"I thought you were going to say that he'd hate me," he says.
"No," Zehun says, in instructor mode, as though correcting an elementary calculation in a game theory information set. "He's much less of a danger to people he hates."
*
Nirai smiles at Mikodez very brightly. "It's a pleasure to meet you," he says. "I look forward to working together." Mikodez smiles back just as brightly. He can play this game. Exchange polite platitudes while soothing your conversational partner's backbrain into believing you won't stab him in the back. Less important if you intend to literally stab him in the back, actually: the immediate objective here is to disarm, to incapacitate, not to kill. The mission is to gather information, and it's harder to a good job of that while you're fighting for your life. More fun, a lot of Mikodez's faction would say, but there's a reason he didn't take the assassin track in Shuos Academy Prime. Just because something's exciting doesn't mean it's interesting. Not that you don't get information from fighting off an attack, but you get a broader range of intel using other means of data-gathering.
Besides, he's already "killed" one hexarch. He doesn't need to add another one to his tally so soon. His mind's wandering. The emptier of the social pleasantries always did bore him, good as he is at them. Focus, Miki. He thinks it in Istra's voice. Pay attention to what he's saying and not saying. The Nirai hexarch is responding to Mikodez's polite greeting. Deflection, counteroffer of reduced formality ("Call me Kujen,") bid for common ground of shared social interest...
"Do you know any good Andan jokes?" Kujen is asking.
Mikodez smiles some more. He hadn't expected that particular bid for common ground. Is it a veiled comment about his youth? Disappointingly petty and unsubtle, if so, but having met the other hexarchs already Mikodez is unsurprised, although still disappointed. They have power and resources unimaginable to most people. Would it hurt them to lift their conversational game? It's tiresome because he doesn't care that he's the youngest hexarch except for how other people's reactions make it harder to accomplish anything.
He does know some good Andan jokes, actually. He is, after all, a Vauhan. His family's factional affiliations are as much Andan as they are Shuos. He selects a joke, begins to set it up.
Kujen knocks it away. "Heard it before, sorry. Hazard of being so much older than you." Older than anyone else alive, Mikodez knows. "Have you heard the one where..." He hasn't. The joke is long and explicit, with disturbing floral metaphors, about an Andan who tattooed his anus blue so he could enthrall people from behind, but then couldn't control his factional ability because he kept winking. Mikodez only finds it even marginally funny because of Kujen's delivery. He laughs and changes the subject.
"That's a beautiful tea set," he says. He's never collected them himself, but his family has some fine pieces and he went through a pottery phase in his teens. He knows enough to appreciate good work.
"Thank you. The maker was Andan Chieng." Mikodez recognizes the name. A famous potter from the tenth century, connected to Mikodez's faction in that one of their greatest dinner sets was the canvas at the bottom of a notorious Shuos poisoning plot. This tea set is two hundred years older than Mikodez. Perhaps another subtle dig at Mikodez's youth. Or not. They were a famously good potter, after all. And the tea set is beautiful. "These things do pile up when you've lived as long as I have. I'd be honored if you would accept it as a gift."
Mikodez smiles and takes his part in the expected dance of polite refusal and eventual acceptance. He had been prepared to be offered a gift of state.
"Would you consider immortality for yourself? I'm sure you've thought about it since you found out about me. I'd be delighted to have the company of such an interesting new friend. And think of the stability we could bring to the hexarchate. Think of the things you could accomplish, the things you could learn and experience."
He is not prepared for the lurch of revulsion in his stomach at the idea.
"That's very kind of you, Kujen," he says. "Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I'm given to understand there are still some bugs in your process that need working out?" It's the expected response, and does not betray the real source of his discomfort.
Kujen sighs. "It's true that so far I've had limited success up to this point. But I'm confident of further improvements within your... that is to say, within the expected lifetime of someone your age." A deliberate slip. If called on it, no doubt Kujen will claim to mean that if Mikodez accepts immortality he'll live far longer, rather than the obvious intended meaning: that Mikodez himself has sometimes taken longer to eat a roll of dried hawthorn fruit than some Shuos hexarchs have held office. And Mikodez likes hawthorn fruit.
Mikodez smiles again and says something non-committal. Kujen, taking the hint, drops the subject and instead segues into flirting with him. This tactic, too, is uncomfortable and unappealing to Mikodez, but he is not unprepared. It's better than the — threat? offer? — of having to live forever.
*
"How could you be friends with him?" his newest conversational partner asks him. Mikodez raises an eyebrow, but he continues. "No, I know, you can't be a hexarch if you're not a little rotten. More than a little. But you killed all the others, and I don't think you liked any of them before that. Nobody was forcing you to meet him for tea and chatter."
Nothing but my duty as Shuos, Mikodez considers saying. The duty line is a dull scar that twinges whenever he pokes at it, but he still keeps using it even though it makes Zehun give him that carefully neutral disappointed look. But he can't say it now, not to someone who had spent so long at Kujen's mercy.
Besides, it would miss Jedao's point. This Jedao is so very young and simplistic, but what he says is true: Mikodez did like Kujen. Mikodez is rotten enough to have been hexarch for more than forty years. He's committed atrocities to prevent worse ones. He's committed atrocities to maintain his position in the hope that he can prevent further atrocities. He's made compromises no one should make, has been compromised, and done so in order to preserve something that wasn't worth preserving, hoping to protect other people he also liked from the cost of destroying it. And Mikodez does like nearly everyone at least a little bit. His signifier, the one he doesn't share with Jedao, is Ninefox Smiling, sometimes defined as "oh fuck, it's a social manipulator Shuos!" It's easier to manipulate someone if you can like them. It gives you leverage.
But Kujen was different. Kujen interested Mikodez. Right from that first meeting, Mikodez's impression of the man had been Yes, finally, somoene who goes fast enough. In a world where boredom was the only thing Mikodez couldn't bear and nearly everyone else seemed to move slower, Kujen could keep up. In later meetings, in person and by video, he'd caught Kujen stalling sometimes. He would take more time to move the conversation along, even sometimes talk slower. He seemed to do it most when there was no reason Mikodez knew of — and it was Mikodez's job to know — why he would need to stall. In fact, he seemed to do it most often when he had least to gain from it. It had taken Mikodez embarrassingly long to work out that he was doing it on purpose, to savor Mikodez's frustration at having to wait.
He hadn't minded. He knew by then that Kujen took pleasure in causing other people to suffer. He'd just been pleased to figure out what Kujen was doing. He doesn't know how to explain to someone as young as Jedao, let alone someone whom Kujen has harmed so badly, how you can simultaneously like a person and enjoy his company, even rely on him as one of the things that make your job more bearable, yet also consider him to be your most dreadful warning, your most terrible bad example. He'll find out for himself, if he lives long enough (and who knows how long that is for his species.) He'll find out all sorts of things he never wanted to know.
Lightly, he replies "Well, nobody ever called me the Should of the Shuos."