“What battles did One Lightning win?” she asked, thinking that she could use this drunkard to try to understand some of the mentality, to find the logic behind the acclamations.
“The fuck kind of question is that,” the man said, apparently deeply offended by her failure to immediately fall over herself in praise of One Lightning, and got up. His hand was still on her arm, gripping very tightly. “You’re—fuck you, how dare you—”
No logic, Mahit thought dimly, just emotion and loyalty, exacerbated by alcohol. He shook her, and her teeth clicked against each other inside her skull. She couldn’t decide if shouting I’m not even one of you! would make him back off or inflame him more, tried, “I didn’t mean—”
“You’re not wearing one of those pins but you might as well be—”
“One of my pins?” said another voice, urbane, serene. The drunk man dropped Mahit—the stone bench hurt to land on but she was glad of it anyway—and spun to see Thirty Larkspur himself, still resplendent in blue and his partial crown.
“Your Excellency,” said the man, and bowed hastily over his hands. His face had gone a shade of nauseous green that didn’t match his suit at all.
“I didn’t catch your name,” said Thirty Larkspur. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Eleven Conifer,” he said, still bent over, muffled.
“Eleven Conifer,” Thirty Larkspur repeated. “How lovely to make your acquaintance. Is there anything you needed from this young woman? She is, I’m afraid, a barbarian—I do apologize if she insulted you—”
Mahit gaped at him. Thirty Larkspur winked at her, over Eleven Conifer’s bowed head. She shut her mouth. Thirty Larkspur was dangerous—smug, and clever, and manipulative, and she understood exactly what Five Agate had meant when she said that Mahit would understand why this man had been made an ezuazuacat and then an imperial co-heir after she’d seen him work in person. He was as flexible as a holograph, bending in the light, saying different words at different angles of approach.
“Now then,” he went on, “you and I will have a discussion later, Eleven Conifer, and see if we can resolve our differences productively, now that I understand that you’re upset enough to commit a crime.”
“A crime?” Eleven Conifer asked, with a delicate sort of horror.
“Assault is a crime. But the barbarian will forgive you, won’t she? For now.”
Mahit nodded. “For now,” she said. Playing along. Waiting to see what might happen.
“Why don’t you leave her to her own devices and go back to the party, Eleven Conifer? Politics all aside, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that there’s better drink and quite a bit of dancing in there, and none at all out here.”
Eleven Conifer nodded. He looked like a man impaled on a spike, wriggling to get free. “That’s true, Your Excellency,” he said. “I’ll … do that.”
“You do that,” Thirty Larkspur said. “I’ll come by later. To make sure you’re having a good time.”
And that, Mahit thought, was a naked threat. Eleven Conifer scuttled back down the hall, and now she was alone with Thirty Larkspur. Two imperial heirs in one night, Yskandr. Did you ever do as well? Her ulnar nerves went all to sparkles again, and she wondered if that was all that was left of her imago. An echo of neuropathy.
“I think I owe you my thanks,” she said to Thirty Larkspur.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” he told her, his hands spread wide. “The man was shaking you. I would have intervened no matter who you were. Ambassador.”
“Nevertheless.”
“Of course.” He paused. “Are you lost, Ambassador? Out here in the hallways.”
Mahit summoned up a Lsel-style smile, all teeth. It managed to discomfit Thirty Larkspur enough that he didn’t smile back. “I can find my own way back, Your Excellency,” she said, lying through those teeth: “I’m not lost at all.”
To prove it, she got up off the bench, and very deliberately walked—trying not to limp where her hip hurt her—back into the roar and noise of the party, leaving the ezuazuacat behind her.
* * *
There was dancing. Mahit decided straight off that she didn’t dance, that her not dancing was part of how she was playing at uncivilization, and also that it was late enough that if she could figure out how to leave (and where she was going, when she left—back to Nineteen Adze? To her own apartments?) she would.
The dancing was in pairs, but also in interlocking groups that traded partners. It formed patterns on the floor, shifting like long chains, fractals. Star-charts, Mahit thought, and then on cue, These things are ceaseless, Nine Maize’s epigram rising to the surface of her mind.
“There you are,” said Five Agate, and Mahit turned to see Nineteen Adze’s prize assistant standing just behind her, with one of her hands on Three Seagrass’s upper back, steadying. “I’ve found your liaison, and I’ve been asked to escort you both home.”
Three Seagrass was no longer ebulliently drunk. She was grey-pale at the temples, exhausted. She’d only been out of the hospital for thirty hours, Mahit remembered, and squelched an inappropriate impulse to take her arm. Five Agate, apparently, had the both of them well in hand.
“What did you see?” Three Seagrass asked, as they made their way across the room. Not where did you go? but what did you see. Not a question which chided Mahit for running off on her own. Not quite.
“Birds,” Mahit found herself saying. “A whole garden of birds,” and then they were outside, and in a groundcar, and being shuttled back to Palace-North.
CHAPTER
NINE
SERVICE RECORD LOOKUP for FIFTEEN ENGINE, ASEKRETA, PATRICIAN THIRD-CLASS (RETIRED).
[…] Retired from active Ministry post in 14.1.11 (Six Direction), taking an early pension. Request for retirement made as an alternative to the opening of an inquest into the asekreta’s unauthorized connections to local extremists on Odile and surrounding Western Arc territories. The asekreta maintained throughout the process of his retirement that his contacts on Odile were primarily social and incidentally political, and that he reported seditious and anti-imperial sentiment as expected from an Information Ministry agent. [SECTION REDACTED: SECURITY 19] […] nevertheless when offered retirement or investigation he chose retirement without further comment. Monthly reports of cloudhook activity since the asekreta’s retirement do not suggest seditious tendencies. Recommendation: continue monitoring at current intensity.
—//access//INFORMATION, database query performed 246.3.11 by asekreta Three Seagrass, personal cloudhook from secured in-palace location
* * *
Stationer contacts with nonhumans have primarily been mediated through the auspices of neighboring polities: a salient example is the extant treaty between the Teixcalaanli Empire and the Ebrekti; as Stationer space shares no jumpgate points with Ebrekt space, the Ebrekt peace agreement with Teixcalaan has been sufficient to normalize Stationer relations with Ebrekti ships—though considerations of Stationer sovereignty in treaty-making with nonhumans continue to be brought up by subsequent Councilors for the Miners and Councilors for Heritage over the past six decades. Nevertheless, barring a nonhuman presence in Stationer space and direct contact, there is likely to be little need for a revision in policy […]
—“Stationer Treaty-Making Across Jumpgate Lines,” thesis presented to the Heritage Board by Gelak Lerants as part of his examination for membership; accessed by Councilor for the Pilots Dekakel Onchu, 248.3.11 Teixcalaanli reckoning
THE war came in with the newsfeeds in the morning.
When it began, Mahit was sitting opposite Three Seagrass in Nineteen Adze’s dawn-drenched front office, eating porridge with a spoon as if she and her liaison and the ezuazuacat were all some sort of peculiar family, while the array of Nineteen Adze’s infoscreens hovered over the three of them and played an endless succession of stock clips of Teixcalaanli military ships: soldiers going into them, their magnificently large gunports, the brightly painted sun-gold and blood-red insignia on
their grey sides. The newsfeed commentators were effervescent and vague. There was a war; it was a war of conquest, a conquering force sent out to claim more of the vast black void of space for Teixcalaan, the vast black void and whatever bright planetary jewels might be nestled in it, all ready to be subsumed under the battle flag of the Empire. An accession war. Everyone was very excited and talking about the trade interests which would benefit most from the Empire being on a wartime footing for the first time in twenty years. Mahit hadn’t drunk enough the previous evening to be hung over, despite her efforts, but she wished she had; it would have given her an excuse to feel this queasy. Steel, she thought. Steel and shipbuilding and supply lines, and Councilor Amnardbat and Councilor Tarats might be able to renegotiate how much money Lsel got from selling molybdenum to the Empire—it could be a useful war …
She knew, thinking it, that she was trying to talk herself out of the unstable, shifting-gravity nausea. The certain knowledge that this could not be a useful war, not for Lsel—not with Teixcalaan as it was.
When the newsfeeds had switched from local tabloid updates to the cheery pomp and circumstance of impending military action—it seemed to be a genre, something that Teixcalaanli broadcasters simply knew how to do—one of Nineteen Adze’s assistants had appeared at her side with a glass press full of what Mahit recognized by scent as fresh-ground coffee, and spirited away the bowls of tea.
Coffee, a stronger stimulant than tea. Everyone was on a wartime footing, weren’t they.
“This is not a very informative war,” said Three Seagrass pointedly, when the newsfeeds had looped around again to the beginning, the opening of the ships, the marching troops in gold and grey, the phatic commentary of the newsfeed hosts.
Nineteen Adze handed her a tiny cup of the coffee, as if that was an answer. “Wait for it,” she said. “Take the breathing room while you can, asekreta, there’ll be little enough of it to go around very shortly.”
“And who,” Three Seagrass asked, imitating with uncanny precision the headlong breathlessness of the commentators, “do you think will be our commander, Your Excellency? Since you have the enormous honor of being an ezuazuacat, and ever so close to the decisions at the heart of the Empire!”
Nineteen Adze, entirely serene, said, “Mahit, your liaison is an actress and an interrogator. What rare luck you’re having.”
Mahit had no idea what to say to that. Three Seagrass was slightly colored through the cheeks, which might imply it had been a compliment. “She’s much less straightforward than I am,” Mahit said. “I will just ask you who you think will be named commander, and whether it really will be One Lightning and not some other yaotlek.”
“It will be,” Nineteen Adze said. “You could make double your wager on it, if you weren’t so conveniently trapped in my apartments, safely away from the corruption of public betting.”
Somehow they had reached a state where Nineteen Adze was joking about keeping Mahit prisoner, and Mahit actually found it funny. She wasn’t sure there was any sense in which she could take this development as a good thing, aside from how it was— nice, pleasant, to not be waiting for imminent death while she ate breakfast. Five Agate had collected her and Three Seagrass at the end of the banquet, and escorted them back into Nineteen Adze’s office complex as if there hadn’t been any other possible exit: perfectly implacable, all decisions already made. It was a terrible concession to have gone back with her, Mahit knew that it was, but it would have been worse to have refused in public—and where would she have gone that was safe, then? After so deliberately getting rid of what allies she had, who would trust her?
And also: Nineteen Adze was publicly tied to her, and to Lsel, as much as she was tied to Nineteen Adze.
Mahit licked the back of her spoon. “The salary my station pays me is entirely adequate without recourse to public betting,” she said.
“And you had Ten Pearl thinking you were an ignoramus,” Nineteen Adze said, amused. “Adequate without recourse to. You’re worse than Yskandr was.”
“How so?”
“Yskandr, when I met him—he was perhaps a year, two years older than you? And already a fixture at court by the time I got back from my last military tour of duty and Six Direction made me ezuazuacat. Yskandr liked Teixcalaan. But you, Ambassador Dzmare, if you weren’t an ambassador you’d apply for citizenship.”
Mahit didn’t flinch; she was proud of herself for not flinching, for saying, “The Minister for Science would never approve such an application,” for taking up another spoonful of porridge. Proud also for how Three Seagrass and Nineteen Adze both laughed. Their laughter covered how she wanted to squirm, wanted to be grateful for being not a barbarian enough that citizenship would have been a possibility and hating herself for wanting to be grateful, all at once.
When the newsfeeds changed over to the starburst glyph of Palace-Sky’s internal news service, she was relieved. It would be difficult for Nineteen Adze to interrogate her about her loyalties when all three of them were watching an official announcement. The starburst resolved into Six Direction himself, flanked by a group of Teixcalaanlitzlim that Mahit supposed were the yaotlekim, all of the generals who were on-planet and available for publicity. They bristled and gleamed like a thicket of razor-sharp reeds; in the middle of them Six Direction looked old.
The announcement the Emperor read off his cloudhook was short, a tiny and precise rhetorical detonation: Like a flower turns to the sun or a person takes in oxygen, he said, Teixcalaan reaches again toward the stars—Mahit watched Nineteen Adze’s face, her narrowed eyes, the tension in the corners of her mouth. Admiration, she thought, and something in the same region as fear, but not insult. She had probably vetted this speech, or even been consulted on it. (And how long had she known? Since yesterday at the banquet? Since long before then, when she had been pretending to Mahit and Three Seagrass that she was as ignorant of where the war would be as they were?)
We move toward Parzrawantlak Sector, said Six Direction, his face suddenly overlaid with the star-chart of Teixcalaanli space. The City, a golden planet, hovered between his eyes; then the chart shifted, demonstrating the vectors the fleet would take, the points at which they would converge into an unstoppable spearpoint of ships.
Mahit knew those stars. She knew the sector name, too—but she knew it in Stationer, not filtered through Teixcalaanli consonants. Bardzravand, “the high plateau,” the sector of space that all the Stationers had settled in their long-ago scattering. She’d always seen the vectors on the newsfeed’s star-chart inverted, though, looked at them from the other side: an in-drawing line that had called her since she was a child. Yskandr had hung the same vectored chart above his bed back in the ambassadorial suite: Lsel looking at the Empire.
Of course it wasn’t Lsel that Teixcalaan wanted, though they’d be pleased enough to finally have it: Lsel Station, and all the other tiny stations, were merely in the way of that onrushing tide of ships. Beyond them was alien territory, populated by Ebrekti and species even more foreign, or undiscovered by humanity; beyond them as well were planets to terraform or colonize, resources to extract. The jaws of the Empire opening up again, akimbo, bloody-toothed—the endless self-justifying desire that was Teixcalaan, and Teixcalaanli ways of thinking of the universe. The Empire, the world. One and the same. And if they were not yet so: make them so, for this is the right and correct will of the stars.
Lsel itself would be more than an incidental prize, Mahit thought, as clinically as she could manage: one of the oldest continuously inhabited artificial worldlets, replete with the best pilots, a precisely calibrated resource extraction system for mining molybdenum and iron from stellar debris—and a perfect location in a gravity well that controlled most of local space, including the only two jumpgates in the area.
We entrust the outrushing tide to the swift-reaching hands of One Lightning, and name him the yaotlek-nema, the leader of our legions in this endeavor, the Emperor finished, to no one’s surprise at all.
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“Well,” said Three Seagrass. “That’s … certainly that.”
“Yes,” said Mahit. “It seems to be.” She sounded so calm, even to herself.
“Not,” Nineteen Adze said, “my first choice of targets. But he doesn’t always listen to me.” She sighed, squared her shoulders—how could she continue to look so human, so much like she was just like anyone else!—and pushed herself away from the table. “But I think you’ll find that your value as an ambassador has only increased with this news, Mahit. Don’t imagine for a moment that I’d toss you out to the wolves.”
Still a hostage, then. Still useful to Nineteen Adze as an ally, or as something to be controlled. “I appreciate your continued hospitality,” said Mahit.
“Of course you do.” Nineteen Adze could sound apologetic if she wanted, like turning on a floodlight of warmth with a switch—and then off again, brisk and bright. “There will be more meetings than anyone can possibly enjoy today. Running a war takes committees. Do feel free to use the office if you’d like. Seven Scale will be here if you need anything, and to take care of the breakfast dishes.”
She swept out of the room and Mahit sat in horrified, dumb silence in her wake, as if she’d stolen her tongue by leaving.
“Most interesting job I’m ever going to have,” Three Seagrass said, like it was a gesture of solidarity—it was a gesture of solidarity; she’d patted the back of Mahit’s hand, she was trying.
“Ah, so you’re not going to ask to be reassigned,” Mahit said.
“As if I would. At absolute worst, you’re going to be the ambassador who manages your people’s integration into Teixcalaan. We’ll have a very long career together, Mahit,” said Three Seagrass.
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