Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were. [loc. 4627]
General Khiruev's war-swarm has been mobiised to fight the invading Hafn, whose technologies -- unlike those of the Hexarchate -- seem to work pretty much anywhere. They are a threat to be reckoned with: and Kel Command have seen fit to send Khiruev an undistinguished captain, one Kel Cheris.
Except that it's not exactly Kel Cheris who shows up. Instead, it's apparently the undead mass-murdering military genius Shuos Jedao, inhabiting Cheris' body and invoking Kel formation instinct -- the emotional need to maintain hierarchy -- to create instant, fanatical loyalty.
General Khiruev does her best to stand up to Jedao. So does Lieutenant Brezan, whose formation instinct is weak enough to let him pull a gun on Jedao: Jedao sends him away, because his loyalty is unreliable. Brezan can't help wondering if Jedao's aim is really to defend the Hexarchate, and not to defeat it ...
I read this middle volume of the Machineries of Empire last, having started with the finale (Revenant Gun) and continued with the first in the sequence (Ninefox Gambit). Finally everything has slotted into place! I understand what Jedao / Cheris accomplished; I appreciate why Brezan is so popular; and I have a better sense of the wider Hexarchate. The things I liked about the other novels are still true of Raven Stratagem: characterisation, depictions of gender and sexuality, glimpses of the cultures that comprise the Hexarchate, the weirdness of the calendrical system. Memory and its lacunae, loyalty and sacrifice, atrocity and love.
Interestingly, despite having read the bracketing novels, I didn't work out the plot of Raven Strategem -- the long game, with many players, at its heart -- until well into the book. I think that's a positive indication of the complexity of the novel, and the choice of viewpoint characters (Brezan, Khiruev, the Shuos hexarchate Mikodez, and more) who illuminate different angles of the game.
And there is a random glimpse, almost an aside, that makes me wonder if Cheris was uniquely qualified to play host for Jedao: a memory of a folktale from her people, the Mwennin. 'The story of the raven general who sacrificed a thousand thousand of his soldiers to build a spirit-bridge of birds to assault the heavens.'[loc. 3624]
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