A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  “I think I can risk Twelve Azalea’s curiosity,” Mahit said. “Considering I’ve already risked your friendship.”

  Twelve Azalea with possession of schematic drawings was still better than anyone with possession of the actual imago-machine. Mahit could get him to give up the drawings—later. Later, when she wasn’t trapped inside Nineteen Adze’s apartments. When she wasn’t going to have to—somehow (and how had Yskandr done it?—and had it killed him?)—stop the absorption of her Station into Teixcalaan. Later, when she wasn’t thinking of how pleased Three Seagrass had looked.

  * * *

  Coming back to the spare office that she’d been sleeping in, late in the evening, Mahit saw that the incoming mail had arrived.

  Resting in the shallow bowl outside the door were three infofiche sticks—an anonymous grey one that surely would be from Twelve Azalea with his answer to her request, and another in a shade she hadn’t seen before: coppery metal sealed with white wax, the colors of Three Seagrass’s suits. The Information Ministry must have finally decided to tell her who had made sure that a new Lsel ambassador arrived as soon as possible after the old one was—Mahit shook her head wryly—no longer functional. The last was another grey stick, marked with the sticky black-and-red tab for off-world communication. Mahit wondered, her heart rate speeding, if Dekakel Onchu had sent another message to dead Yskandr, a second delivery triggered by some event she wasn’t quite aware of, something more complicated than her own attempt to log into the Lsel Ambassador’s electronic database. She reached into the bowl to pick it up, and found that underneath it someone had left a small branch of a plant she’d never seen before. The stem had been delicately curled around the infofiche stick, but now it lay in a loop of shiny grey-green leaves and a single deep cup of a white flower in the bottom of the bowl.

  Mahit scooped it up. It was fresh-cut, oozing a whitish sap that had gotten onto the Information Ministry infofiche and stuck to her fingers. She hadn’t seen anything like it in Nineteen Adze’s apartments, or even out in the rest of the City, filled with flowers of every shape and color and kind—and yet, it couldn’t have been cut more than fifteen or twenty minutes previous.

  She lifted it up to her face to see if it had a scent.

  “Don’t,” said Nineteen Adze with a whip-crack urgency Mahit had never heard before. She dropped the flower back into the bowl. Her fingertips felt stinging-hot where the sap had made them sticky. Turning, she saw Nineteen Adze standing in the archway at the end of the hall, and had no idea how long she’d been there. Or that she’d been there at all.

  “Did you breathe it?” Nineteen Adze asked, coming to Mahit’s side. Her face was more expressive than Mahit had ever seen it, mouth twisted and tense. It was like looking at a mask dissolving. The stinging in her fingers was transmuting to pain.

  “No, I don’t think I did,” she said.

  Nineteen Adze snapped, “Show me your hand,” like she was addressing a soldier or a disobedient child, and Mahit did. Nineteen Adze took her wrist, the band of her much-darker fingers closing around the bones as if she were gripping a snake behind its head. The touch should have been warm but Mahit felt it as ice. Her extended fingers were red where she’d held the flower, and even as she watched they began to blister.

  “Well, you won’t lose it,” said Nineteen Adze.

  “What?”

  “Come with me,” Nineteen Adze said, “you have to get the sap off before you touch any other parts of yourself. Or sustain nerve damage.” Still holding Mahit’s wrist, she stalked off down the hallway, dragging Mahit in her wake.

  “What was that flower?”

  “A very pretty death.” They turned a corner, through a door which had always been closed to Mahit but which slid open to Nineteen Adze’s gesture, and emerged abruptly into what could only be the ezuazuacat’s own bedroom. Mahit caught a glimpse of a tangle of unmade white sheets, a stack of infofiche and codex-books piled on the pristine side of the bed, and then Nineteen Adze had pulled her into the en suite bathroom.

  “Hold your hand over the sink but don’t turn on the water,” she said. “Water will just spread the toxins.”

  Mahit did. The blisters on her fingers were puffy, glassy-clear, the skin beginning to split. She felt as if her hand were on fire, the stinging spreading up her wrist like the City’s electricity had spread up Three Seagrass’s. She was still too shocked to feel anything but a distant sort of horror. Who had left that flower for her? How had it gotten into the walled garden that was Nineteen Adze’s office complex? Someone would have had to bring it—someone less than twenty minutes away, the flower had been oozing—one of the blisters on her index finger burst as she watched, and she made a tiny, helpless sound between her teeth.

  Nineteen Adze reappeared over her shoulder, an open bottle in her hand. Unceremoniously she poured the contents over Mahit’s fingers.

  “Mineral oil,” she said, picking up a washcloth. “This will probably hurt a great deal. Hold still.” She scraped the cloth over the blisters, stripping the oil into the sink. Mahit was sure she was stripping her skin away with it. She tried not to pull away. Nineteen Adze poured oil and scraped it off twice more. At the end of it Mahit was shaking, tremors up the backs of her thighs. Nineteen Adze took her upper arm in an iron grip and sat her down on the closed lid of the toilet.

  “If you fall and crack your skull open,” she said, “there will be no point to my having fixed your hand.”

  Whoever had left the flower couldn’t have been Nineteen Adze—why would she have tried to kill Mahit and then dragged her off into the bath and kept her alive? She had been so sharp, when she said don’t.

  (So sharp, and so close. Had she been watching? How long had she been watching? Had she waited to see if Mahit would actually breathe in the scent of the flower—decided only then to prevent her—)

  Did it matter?

  Nineteen Adze had gotten down on her knees next to her, and was wrapping her fingers in individual gauze bandages, as attentive as a battlefield medic. Mahit wondered if she’d been one, once, fought at the side of the Emperor in person, his sworn companion—she was getting epics into her analysis, Teixcalaan was a modern multiplanetary empire, if ezuazuacatlim fought they’d fight from starship bridges.

  “What flower is full of contact poisons?” she asked. Her voice caught in her throat, around the edges of the receding pain and the adrenaline shock.

  “It’s a native planetary cultivar,” said Nineteen Adze. “The common name is xauitl, for the hallucinations it’s supposed to bring you right as you die from breathing in the neurotoxins.”

  “That’s cheerful,” Mahit said inanely. She wanted to put her head in her hands, but it would hurt too much.

  “Before we had spaceflight, Teixcalaanli archers would dip arrowheads in blooms to poison them,” Nineteen Adze went on. “And now the Science Ministry distills the oils into some kind of treatment for palsy. What can kill can cure, if you like that sort of thing. You should be flattered; someone wants you dead artistically, Ambassador.”

  There would be a certain satisfying circularity to the Science Ministry trying to kill every Lsel ambassador. Mahit didn’t trust it—it was like a ring composition in an oration, the same theme coming around again at the end of the stanza. It was too Teixcalaanli, and even if Nineteen Adze hadn’t meant her to think of it, she could guess that she had come up with it because of exactly that kind of overdetermined thinking. Echoes and repetition. Everything meaning something else.

  It was the first time she wondered if Nineteen Adze—if any Teixcalaanlitzlim—could compensate for the sheer thematic weight of how Teixcalaanli logic worked. Wondering felt like being thrown into cold water, shock-bright clarity as the pain in her fingers began to fade. Even if the flower had come from the Science Ministry, it had been brought into Nineteen Adze’s office by someone with full access: Nineteen Adze herself, or one of her assistants. At absolute best they had decided to allow it to be delivered to her; at worst,
one or more of them was actively seeking her death right this moment. Artistically.

  Artistically, and flowers. Blooms, Nineteen Adze had just said. The same word as the one in Thirty Larkspur’s poetic epithet. He’d been solicitous, at the reception—had rescued her from the drunken grasp of that courtier, even—but she didn’t trust his motivations. Their conversation had been barbed, apologetic, ever-shifting. And the war was on, now: a war Mahit was fairly sure Thirty Larkspur did not want, or did not want in the hands of One Lightning—the calculus of loyalties had changed—perhaps she was too dangerous to him, alive. (As Yskandr had been?)

  Not ring composition, this time, but allusion, wordplay. She was over-reading. It was impossible to over-read a Teixcalaanli text. One of her instructors in imperial literature had said that, at the beginning of the course. It had been meant as a warning and Mahit, age fourteen, had seized it like it was instead a balm.

  She looked up at Nineteen Adze’s face. Nineteen Adze, who had decided—perhaps at the last possible moment—not to let her die. She was watching her, blank and unreadable. Mahit’s hand hurt, a low sick pain, and she thought of freefall, of tumbling undirected through space, and then of steering, attitudinal compensation, vernier thrusters. She took a large breath. It didn’t hurt to breathe, at least.

  “Your Excellency,” Mahit said, “since you knew about imago-machines—I do know you knew, you practically told me—what were you trying to do when we first met? In the Judiciary morgue. What did you intend for my predecessor’s body?”

  Nineteen Adze quirked up one side of her mouth, fractional wry motion. “I keep underestimating you,” she said. “Or estimating you differently than you end up being. Here you are, nearly poisoned, in a bathroom, and you take this opportunity to ask me about my motivations.”

  “Well,” Mahit said. “We’re alone.” As if it was an answer. It was, in a way. She wasn’t sure she’d have this chance again. (She wasn’t sure if she’d have another opportunity to catch Nineteen Adze even this much off-balance. When had she decided to save her life? Was she regretting it, even now?)

  “So we are. All right, Ambassador Dzmare. Perhaps you’ve earned a little clarity. I wanted the machine, of course. But you already had guessed that.”

  Mahit nodded. “It’s what made sense. I arrive, I plan a funeral—if you wanted it, you couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “Yes.” Nineteen Adze sat back on her heels, composed and patient.

  Mahit asked the next question. “What did you want it for?”

  “When I saw you in the morgue? Then, I wanted a bargaining chip, Mahit. There are many interests at court who might want to control that machine—and control you, through the release or withholding of it.”

  “Then.”

  “I hardly need that now, do I?” Nineteen Adze gestured at the bathroom—at the two of them, sitting in it. Mahit nodded, wryly acknowledging. Having the Lsel Ambassador was much better than having the means to buy the Lsel Ambassador’s attention and influence. And Nineteen Adze had a live imago-machine now, the one inside Mahit’s skull. Though she’d have to cut her open to get it, and it was malfunctioning badly.

  “I imagine,” she said, “that I am of less use to you in the current circumstances than you expected I’d be.”

  Nineteen Adze shook her head. Reached out and patted Mahit’s knee, familiar and too, too kind. “If you weren’t useful you wouldn’t be here. Besides, how often does a barbarian challenge my decisions in my own bathroom? If nothing else, you enliven the experience of daily living. Which is exactly like your predecessor. I am finding the similarities very funny, especially after you went to such trouble to inform me of the disambiguation.”

  Mahit considered what Yskandr would have done; remembered, imago-echo that wasn’t hers and wasn’t really anyone’s now, how easy he’d been in his body. How he’d moved hers in fluid, expansive gesture. He’d cover Nineteen Adze’s hand on her knee with his, now. Or reach out—

  (his hand flat against her cheek, the skin cool and smooth, she laughs and turns her face inward, her lips against his palm)

  The memory-flash receded. Mahit could repeat the echo, she had her suspicions about the nature of the friendship Nineteen Adze claimed with her predecessor, she could reach out and touch her cheek—

  Ring composition. Overdetermined.

  Instead she met Nineteen Adze’s eyes, held them a beat too long, and asked, “What did Yskandr promise you, to keep you this interested in us?”

  “Not me,” said Nineteen Adze. “His Imperial Majesty.”

  She rocked back on her heels, gathered her feet under her, and stood up, as if she was giving Mahit time to process the unfolding revelation. To remember the sick heat of Six Direction’s hands on her wrists, the terrible fragility of him, as if he was being ravaged by some fast-moving disease.

  Held out her forearm, so that Mahit was obliged to touch her—to accept the help in standing up, even as she was thinking: Yskandr, you bastard, you convinced the Emperor of Teixcalaan he would never die.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  There is no star-chart

  unwatched by her

  sleepless eyes, or unguided by

  her spear-calloused hand, and thus

  she falls, a captain in truth.

  Like an emperor she falls, her blood painting the bridge

  Where shift after shift she had stood.

  —from Fourteen Scalpel’s “Encomia for the Fallen of the Flagship Twelve Expanding Lotus,” the opening of the verses on the death of Acting Captain Five Needle

  * * *

  […] we have always been between powers, in this sector—I cannot imagine that our predecessors intended to place us in such a way so that we are required to bend first this way toward Teixcalaan, then that way toward the systems of Svava or Petrichor-5 or Nguyen, depending on who is most ascendant on our borders—but we hold the only access to our jumpgates, and we are thus a narrow and significant road that all these powers must travel upon. Nevertheless I cannot help imagining a more indigenous sovereignty for us, where Stationer power belongs to Stationers and is not in service to our survival […]

  —TARATS//PRIVATE//PERSONAL//“notes toward a new Lsel,” entry updated 127.7.10-6D (Teixcalaanli reckoning)

  WEARING a pair of disposable gloves, the sort Mahit would have used to handle refuse back on the Station, Seven Scale disposed of the xauitl while Mahit watched. He’d been waiting for her when she came back to the door of her room—approaching the bowl of infofiche sticks again as if nothing of the last hour had happened, the only difference being her bandaged hand and the blazing realization of what Yskandr had sold to the Empire. Hardly any visible difference.

  Seven Scale put the xauitl inside a plastic bag, paused to consider, and then added the bowl itself.

  “I’m not sure I know how to wash it correctly,” he said, apologetic.

  “What about the infofiche sticks?” Mahit asked. “Can you wash them?” She wasn’t about to lose access to the scraps of information she’d managed to get the City to give her.

  “Probably not? But if you wore gloves, you could break them open and read them before I put them through the disposal with the autoclave and the furnace.”

  As opposed to the regular disposal, Mahit assumed, grimly amused. “Give me yours,” she said. “And wait outside, I’ll only be a moment.”

  Seven Scale stripped the gloves off and held them out, pinched gingerly between his fingertips. “There are more in the kitchens,” he offered uncertainly.

  Mahit took the contaminated ones, and then the infofiche sticks. “These are fine. I’ll be one minute. Stay.”

  He stayed. It was a little terrifying; did Nineteen Adze keep him around for unquestioning obedience? (Did he, ubiquitous, carry in the flower he was now so assiduously disposing of? It’d have been simple. No one would notice Seven Scale carrying flowers. He probably did it all the time.)

  Mahit closed the door on him. Carefully she put
on the contaminated gloves. The latex caught on the bandage around her hand and she winced, but it was still better than how the sap had felt. The infofiche sticks broke easily in her fingers, one after the other, cracking along their wax seals. She could still exert pressure. The muscles and tendons and nerves running down her palm were undamaged. The toxin hadn’t spread that far. She assumed she had Nineteen Adze to thank for that, Nineteen Adze and her speedy intimate mercy. Her rethinking.

  The stick from the Information Ministry exuded a pretty graphic announcing itself as an official communication and then presented Mahit with a single-line answer to her question: just four glyphs, and two of them were a title and a name. She’d asked who authorized the rapid arrival of an ambassador from Lsel.

  Authorization given by Imperial-Associate Eight Loop.

  Which—was unexpected. At the banquet, Eight Loop had been the only one of the three presumptive heirs who had entirely ignored Mahit. All Mahit knew about her was what was on newsfeeds and encomiastic biopics of the Emperor. His crèchesib, who had been the Minister for the Judiciary before her elevation. An agemate. The particular glyph she used for her name’s numerical signifier was the same as the glyph the Emperor’s ninety-percent clone was using in “Eight Antidote,” which said something about what loyalties the Emperor owed her, but not anything about why she’d want an ambassador from Lsel Station as soon as possible. Unless she knew what Yskandr had sold to the Emperor, and … had wanted it to happen, and wanted it to happen even if Yskandr was dead and she’d have to import another ambassador to accomplish it? Wanted to revoke it, by virtue of replacing Yskandr with an ambassador who had different ideas of what might be traded away to Teixcalaan, even in exchange for keeping the open maw of the Empire pointed at some other prey?