A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  Even if Yskandr had to betray Lsel’s interests, he could have found some way to do it that wasn’t so horrifically Teixcalaanli. An imago wasn’t a re-creation of a single person. An imago of the Emperor wouldn’t be the Emperor, not entirely. Didn’t he know?

  None of that explained Eight Loop’s involvement. Except that she was Judiciary Minister, and Yskandr’s corpse was in the Judiciary morgue, not any other morgue in the City—perhaps she’d arranged that …

  Mahit broke open the second infofiche stick, one of the two in anonymous grey plastic. Twelve Azalea hadn’t bothered with verse this time. The message he’d sent was unsigned, simple—as if he’d composed it on a street corner and dumped the sealed infofiche stick into a public mailbox.

  The message read: Have what you asked for. Might have been noticed on the way out. I can’t hold on to it. I’ll be at your suite at dawn tomorrow. Meet me there.

  The last stick was the one with the off-world communication sticky tab. The one which might be another secret message, a warning for a man who was already dead. A rumor of distant conflicts, tremors on Lsel that would have existed no matter what sort of madness the succession crisis of the Teixcalaanli Imperium might cause—or might already be causing. Mahit found herself afraid to open it, and inside that fear, did so all at once: cracking the stick hard enough that it nearly tore the plastic film, printed in familiar alphabetic letters, that was cradled inside.

  This message was shorter than the previous one had been, and dated forty-eight Teixcalaanli hours later: 230.3.11. Still long before she’d arrived in the City, but after she’d left Lsel on Ascension’s Red Harvest. It was titled “For Ambassador Aghavn from Dekakel Onchu, Councilor for the Pilots.” Mahit felt strange, reading it. Like she was eavesdropping, a child snuck unsupervised into a meeting she oughtn’t to have overheard.

  This message will be delivered if there was no response to previous communication. The Councilor for the Pilots hopes that you are well and repeats her warning: Tarats for the Miners and Amnardbat for Heritage have sent a replacement for you to the Empire, at the Empire’s request. If the replacement is loyal to Tarats then she may be trustable; if she is not, or if she is obviously a victim or an engineer of sabotage, the Pilots suggest that you look to Heritage for the source of opposition and—though it gives me no pleasure to refer to it as such—enemy action.

  Be careful. I am unable to discern the precise nature of the sabotage if it exists, but I suspect Heritage has made use of her access to the imago-machines.

  Destroy this communication.

  It was short, and it was worse than the previous one. Mahit wished she could find some way to talk to Councilor Onchu—to tell her that her messages weren’t falling into a blank and silent void, that Yskandr was dead but his successor was listening. But Onchu wouldn’t want to hear it, from her. If she was sabotaged. If she was an unwitting, unwilling agent of Aknel Amnardbat, not just politically supported by her but … if she’d … if she’d damaged her imago-machine, somehow …

  But she couldn’t yet understand why Heritage would do that. What it’d be for. And she’d thought that really, she had been Amnardbat’s choice of successors for Yskandr, so maybe it wasn’t really sabotage, maybe she was just—fulfilling some function that Amnardbat wanted to accomplish within Teixcalaan.

  But if the malfunctioning of her imago wasn’t sabotage, she was damaged, and it was her own fault. So which one of the options was really worse?

  Suddenly she needed very much to meet Twelve Azalea and reclaim the dead Yskandr’s imago-machine. Even if everything else went wrong, Lsel was annexed, she was thrown into a cell in the Judiciary—if she could get hold of it, she could at least keep that secret, hold it in stead, salvage what was left of her predecessor. That might be a kind of penance, if she truly was broken, and the Yskandr she was supposed to have was gone for good.

  Mahit burned the plastic sheet, and wiped all the sticks—they were designed to be easily erased—before opening the door of her room again. Seven Scale was still standing in the hallway, holding his garbage bag, as if he hadn’t moved at all in the ten minutes she’d been reading. It was unsettling. Even an expressionless proper Teixcalaanlitzlim wasn’t as expressionless and submissive as Seven Scale could be. If she didn’t know better, Mahit could think he was an automaton. Even an artificial intelligence had more immediately apparent volition.

  “Here,” she said, holding out the emptied sticks. “I’m finished with these.”

  He held out the bag. “The gloves too,” he said. “I am awfully sorry about your hand.”

  “It’s fine,” said Mahit. “The ezuazuacat fixed it.” If Seven Scale had been the person who had left the xauitl for her, he’d know that his mistress had prevented it from killing her—but there was no change in his expression. He merely nodded, serene, as if Nineteen Adze administered first aid as a matter of course. Maybe she did.

  “Is there anything else?” he asked.

  I need to escape this very pleasant and very life-threatening prison of an office complex before dawn, in order to receive an illegal machine looted from the corpse of my predecessor. Can you help me with that?

  “No, thank you,” Mahit said.

  Seven Scale nodded. “Good night, Ambassador,” he said, and disappeared down the hall. Mahit watched him go. When he’d turned the corner she retreated back into her office. The door hissed gently shut behind her. She stared mutely at the window-side couch with its folded blanket, thought of lying down and closing her eyes and banishing all of Teixcalaan. Thought also again of going out the window and attempting to escape through the gardens. It was a two-story drop. She’d probably break an ankle, to go along with her bandaged hand and the bruises on her hip from when the restaurant had fallen on her.

  She was still trying to come up with a feasible plan that would get her back to Palace-East by dawn when someone knocked at the door. It was past midnight—the City’s two moons had both risen, tiny distant disks in the sky outside the window. Mahit had thought that everyone else was long asleep.

  “Who is it?” she called.

  “It’s Three Seagrass. Open the door, Mahit, I have good news!”

  Mahit could not imagine what could qualify as good news that would also necessitate the news being delivered at this hour. As she got up to open the door, she imagined Three Seagrass standing surrounded by a small cohort of Sunlit, ready to arrest her; or accompanied by Ten Pearl, ready to kill her. All sorts of possible betrayals.

  But it was only Three Seagrass on the other side of the door, hollow-eyed and exhausted and sparkling like she’d never stopped drinking coffee. Or something stronger. Maybe she hadn’t.

  She ducked under Mahit’s arm without asking if she could come in, and waved the door shut herself.

  “So you wanted a private audience with His Illuminate Majesty, right?”

  “… yes?” Mahit said dubiously.

  “Do you have anything better to wear? Though I guess this is clandestine and we probably shouldn’t treat it like an actual formal audience. Still. Something! But only if you’ve got it, we don’t have much time.”

  “Why does the Emperor want to talk to me in the middle of the night?”

  “I am not omniscient, so I can’t answer you exactly,” Three Seagrass said smugly, “but I am the sort of person who spends fourteen hours wading through bureaucrats and patricians third-, second-, and first-class so that eventually I have a personal conversation with the Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand, and he says that His Illuminate Majesty is, in fact, very interested in meeting with the Lsel Ambassador, and understands the need for both haste and discretion and would we please go now.”

  “I’m going to assume this is both unusual and has the absolute force of imperial command,” Mahit said. Just a few hours previously she would never have thought that a meeting with the Teixcalaanli Emperor would feel most like an opportunity for escape. But if she could manage to slip away into the City before coming back to Nineteen
Adze’s offices, meet with Twelve Azalea, and then return before anyone really knew she was gone … She’d have to let Three Seagrass in on it. It wouldn’t work, otherwise. (And also she wasn’t sure she could find her way back to Palace-East without her.)

  “Yes and yes,” Three Seagrass said. “Nineteen Adze already knows—I think she’s going to escort us in. There’s a level of misdirection I’m not sure who’s responsible for, Mahit—if we are being brought into the palace as if we’re an ezuazuacat’s entourage, as cover—”

  “Of course we accept the invitation,” Mahit said, cutting her off. “Even if it’s secret—maybe especially because it’s secret—”

  “Were you trained for intrigue? On Lsel.” Three Seagrass was smiling as she said it, but Mahit was equally certain she meant it, and as a gentle barb.

  “Just wait until I explain what we’re going to do after we see His Illuminate Majesty,” she said. “Then you’ll really think I was taught deception along with languages and protocol.”

  * * *

  The imperial chambers reminded Mahit more of Nineteen Adze’s office complex than the starry brilliance of the oration-contest ballroom: they were a warren of white marble shot through with gold veins, patterned like ruined—or fantastical—cityscapes under lightning-arc skies. Nineteen Adze knew them well enough to smile and exchange pleasantries with most of the people they passed; she practically matched the marbling where her jacket wasn’t an even brighter, even colder white. Mahit and Three Seagrass ghosted in her wake. If Nineteen Adze had opinions about the Emperor’s request to meet Mahit in private she hadn’t shared them. She’d only tugged her boots on over bare feet, looked Mahit over as if she was evaluating her suitability in an entirely new fashion—there was a naked intimacy in that evaluation that Mahit thought originated somewhere between when she’d had the impulse to reach out for Nineteen Adze in the bathroom and when she’d rejected that impulse—and then whisked them away into the depths of Palace-Earth.

  It was like climbing down into the heart of the world: chambers opening like the valves between atria and shutting tight again behind them as they passed through. Even after midnight the innermost parts of the palace pulsed with a headlong rushing; the soft tramping of slippered feet, the whisk of some patrician’s suit around a corner. Distant low voices. Mahit wondered if the Emperor slept. Maybe he slept in snatches. Up every three hours to do another hour of work, read another night’s worth of reports from all of vast Teixcalaan.

  The Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand met the three of them in an antechamber whose walls had deepened from marble to antiqued gold tapestry. He was short—as short as Three Seagrass, who barely came up to Mahit’s shoulder—with a thin face and a fashionably low hairline. He and Nineteen Adze raised their eyebrows at each other, like partners sitting down on opposite sides of a familiar game board.

  “So you are keeping her in your offices,” he said.

  “Make sure to give her back once His Brilliance is done with her, Twenty-Nine Bridge,” Nineteen Adze said, and waved Mahit forward before she could form any polite protests as to having come here by her own designs and with her own liaison.

  Three Seagrass said, perfectly metrical, “The honor of meeting you in person, Twenty-Nine Bridge, is like stumbling upon a fresh spring in the mountains,” which had to be an allusion if not an outright quotation.

  Twenty-Nine Bridge laughed like he’d been given a present. “Come sit with me, asekreta, while your Ambassador has her meeting. You must tell me how you managed to defeat all of my sub-secretaries in only one day.”

  “Careful,” said Nineteen Adze, “that one is sneaky.”

  “Are you actually warning me of something?” asked Twenty-Nine Bridge. His eyebrows touched his hairline when he raised them. “What under starlight did this child manage to do to you?”

  “You’ll find out,” Nineteen Adze said, smug as a cat. Then she turned to Mahit, tapping her on the wrist, right above the bandage she’d wrapped there.

  “You don’t have to do all of what he asks,” she said, and spun on her heel to sweep out of the room before Mahit could try to determine whether that “he” had meant the Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand or Six Direction Himself.

  “I appreciate your help in arranging this meeting,” Mahit said to Twenty-Nine Bridge, trying to take some control of the proceedings. “And I hope we are not keeping you from your rest.”

  He spread all his fingers apart by his sides, a Teixcalaanli gesture that Mahit read as nonchalance. “It isn’t the first time. Not for a Lsel ambassador and certainly not for me. Go in, Ambassador Dzmare. He’s blocked out an entire half hour for you.”

  Of course Yskandr had been here before her. Promising eternal life and continuity of memory. Mahit found herself wishing, for what might have been the first time in her life, that she didn’t know Yskandr so well. That she didn’t see quite so clearly how he might have made the choices he’d made. But imago-recipients were chosen for psychological compatibility with their predecessors, and she and Yskandr—if only they’d had enough time!—at the beginning of their partnership had been so very fluid. She did understand.

  But she was alone, and that was Yskandr’s fault. Both of him: the dead man and the vanished imago. His fault, even if there had been sabotage from Lsel. Mahit bowed from the chest and left Twenty-Nine Bridge to entertain (or be interrogated by) Three Seagrass, and went through the last door between herself and the Emperor Six Direction.

  Only as she blinked against the change in ambient light—the antechamber had been dimmed for the hour, but the Emperor’s receiving room was ablaze under full-spectrum dawnlamps—did she remember the intensity of her imago-inflected limbic system reaction to the Emperor at the oration-contest banquet. She felt shimmering with nerves, like she was about to meet an examination committee or a secret lover, and here was another reason to wish that she didn’t know Yskandr, didn’t have the afterimages of his neurochemical memory echoing through hers.

  The Emperor was sitting on a couch, like a person. Like an old man still awake in the small hours of the morning, his shoulders more stooped than they’d been at the banquet, his face drawn and sharp. His skin was greyish and translucent. Mahit wondered just how ill he was—and in what way, whether it was one of the waves of minor illnesses that marked old age or something that was deeper, worse, a cancer or an organ system failure. From the look of him she suspected the latter. The dawnlamps were probably for keeping him awake— full-spectrum light could do that to a person if they were sensitive—but they surrounded him with a mandorla of sunlight that Mahit thought was deliberately reminiscent of the sun-spear imperial throne.

  “Ambassador Dzmare,” he said, and beckoned her closer with two fingers.

  “Your Imperial Majesty.” She considered dropping to her knees, genuflecting, letting the Emperor wrap his hot hands around her outstretched wrists again. Wanted it, and in the wanting found reason enough to discard the impulse. Instead she squared her shoulders and asked, “May I sit down?”

  “Sit,” Six Direction said. “You and Yskandr are both too tall to look at properly, standing up.”

  “I’m not him,” Mahit said. She sat in a chair pulled up next to the couch. Some of the dawnlamps, noticing the presence of another breathing person in the room, obligingly rotated to shine on her.

  “My ezuazuacat told me you’d say that.”

  “I’m not lying, Your Majesty.”

  “No. You’re not. Yskandr wouldn’t have needed to be escorted past the bureaucrats.”

  Brazenly, as a panacea against feeling poised on the verge of drowning, Mahit said: “Forgive me. It must be difficult, meeting your friend’s successor. On Lsel, there’s more support for the transition down the imago-line.”

  “Is there,” said the Emperor. It was less of a question than an invitation.

  Mahit wasn’t ignorant of how information-gathering worked. She knew she was injured, exhausted, immersed in a culture-shocked numbness that she couldn
’t see the edges of, and talking to a man who controlled a quarter of the galaxy, whether or not he was dying by inches; she’d like to crack open like an egg and leak out words. How much of that was good interrogation technique and how much of that was limbic-system echo of trust wasn’t even a useful question.

  “We have a long tradition of psychological therapy,” she said, and stopped, hard, like biting down. One sentence at a time.

  The Emperor laughed, more easily than she’d expected. “I imagine you need it,” he said.

  “Is that based on your impressions of Yskandr or of me?”

  “On my impressions of human beings, of which you and Yskandr are only one interesting set of outliers.”

  Mahit took the hit, smiling—too wide, close to the feeling of Yskandr’s smile—and spreading her fingertips apart in that same Teixcalaanli gesture that Twenty-Nine Bridge had used. “And yet there is no comparative tradition in Teixcalaan.”

  “Ah, Ambassador Dzmare—you have only been with us for four days. It is possible you’ve missed something.”

  A great many things, Mahit was sure. “I would be fascinated to hear about Teixcalaanli methods of coping with psychological distress, Your Brilliance,” she said.

  “I do think you would be. But that isn’t why you asked so insistently for this meeting.”

  “No.”

  “No. Go on then,” said Six Direction. He laced his fingers together. The knuckles were age-swollen, deeply lined. “Make your case for where else I should send my armies.”

  “How are you so sure that’s what I came here to ask?”

  “Ah,” he said. “It is what Yskandr asked me for. Are you so different, then? To care more for some other cause than your station.”

  “Was that the only thing he asked you for?”

  “Of course not. That’s just what I said yes to.”

  “And will you say yes to me, if I ask?”

  Six Direction looked her over, with a patience that felt infinite—didn’t they only have a half hour, couldn’t she get away, the muscles in her side where the falling wall had bruised her ached with holding so still, and she could feel her heartbeat pulsing in the wounds on her hand—and then he shrugged. The motion was almost lost in the complexity of the lapels of his jacket. “I wonder if you are a failure-state or a warning,” he said. “It would be useful to know before I answer you. If you are able to say.”