A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  Their steps echoed on the marble. On Lsel there was never an inescapable dark, aside from space itself: someone was awake and on shift, always. The public spaces were no different at any point in a person’s own individual sleep/wake cycle. If you wanted darkness you went back to your room and turned down the ambient lighting.

  This entire half a planet was sunless, and would be for four more hours. Mahit hadn’t minded the diurnal cycling when she’d been inside for most of the dark swing. Being out in it was different. The heavy, dim sky felt pressurized, pushing down on the back of her neck, making the headache worse. It was as if darkness conducted sound, dimmed and distorted it, something she knew was impossible.

  The golden tracery of the City’s self-protective AI was the only thing that was more visible at this hour of the night than it was during the day. It ran under their feet in loops and whorls, crept up the foundations of some of the buildings as high as the second story, like some fungal infiltrate, and shimmered in the dimness. Three Seagrass walked across it with such deliberation that Mahit began to suspect she was afraid.

  She wasn’t wearing her cloudhook. She’d taken it off as they’d emerged from the imperial apartments, stowed it away inside her jacket. We’re not anywhere, she’d said, and Mahit had taken that to mean that they were going to traverse the City without leaving electronic traces of Three Seagrass’s official presence. Now, following her into the widening dark, Mahit wondered if she was putting off some confrontation with the City that had, inexplicably, refused to behave as she’d demanded.

  That had set her alight with blue fire instead, like she wasn’t even a citizen. Like the perfect algorithm that Ten Pearl had been so proud of had designated her something foreign, something that needed to be kept out. An infection, to be burned out with that selfsame blue fire.

  It was only that they were sneaking into Palace-East in the middle of the night that was making Mahit come up with imagery like that; Three Seagrass would probably laugh at her if she explained it. It was all of a piece with how unsettled she felt about her meeting with Six Direction—hidden tensions, bubbling to the surface.

  Civil war. The City, at war with itself.

  And had he been right, to want to use an imago-machine to prevent this great devouring animal, this empire, from setting its jaws upon its own flesh?

  Palace-East was brighter than Palace-Earth, but no less uncanny: the brightness came from burning neon tubes, red and blue and orange, that lit up pathways across the plazas, glowing guides to one government building or another. Three Seagrass hesitated at a junction where the AI-tracery had condensed itself into a knot—visibly set her shoulders—and turned away from it to hurry down an orange-lit avenue, waving Mahit after her. The white flowers that lined its sidewalks looked as if they had been dipped in flames.

  Mahit had been awake too long, clearly, if she was seeing fire in flower arrangements. That was the problem. Not at all that she was hallucinating—she was almost sure she wasn’t—but that she hadn’t slept and all the adrenaline from the incident with the poison flower and the meeting with Six Direction was draining out of her.

  Nevertheless, she asked quietly, “Are you avoiding the City?”

  Three Seagrass didn’t stop walking. “No,” she said. “I’m not taking chances, that’s all.”

  They hadn’t talked about what had happened to her in Plaza Central Nine. There hadn’t been time, in Nineteen Adze’s apartments. Or it hadn’t seemed right, to talk about it under the all-observing eyes of the ezuazuacat’s recording equipment. Now, in the dark, Mahit felt either brave or unmoored, or some tongue-untying combination of both. “It’s never done that to you before, has it,” she said. “Thought you were someone it was allowed to discipline.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Patrician second-class, immune from petty justice.”

  “Law-abiding citizen of Teixcalaan, Ambassador.”

  Mahit winced. She reached out and brushed Three Seagrass’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t be sorry for impugning your moral authority?”

  “You can,” said Three Seagrass, “but it’s hardly practical as a use of your time, I’d think. The City … I was surprised.”

  “You were having a seizure, not being surprised.”

  Three Seagrass stopped short, turned around, and looked up at Mahit. “Afterward I was surprised,” she said, with an air of resolute authority. “Afterward I had a lot of time to be surprised. There’s nothing to do in hospitals, Mahit, once you’re finished reciting the hardest political acrostics you know in order to make sure your City hasn’t wrecked your long-term memory.”

  “I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Mahit said.

  “I’m not fragile,” said Three Seagrass. “I can handle my barbarian wondering if civilization is going to electrocute me again.”

  “Is that really what you think I’m wondering?”

  “It’s what I would wonder.” In the dark, Mahit thought Three Seagrass’s eyes looked like black stones, pupilless, as alien as the sky. “Oh, and whether accidents like that have happened to other people, and under what circumstances. I might wonder that, too.”

  “Have they?” Mahit asked.

  “More than I’d guessed. Eight, in the past six months. Two of the others died.”

  Mahit didn’t know what to say—I’m sorry hadn’t worked, and is it my fault was blatantly begging for reassurance she knew she didn’t deserve: it was probably her fault. Or Yskandr’s fault. Or the fault of that civil unrest that Yskandr had somehow been tied up with. The impending collapse of order.

  “I told you I was surprised,” Three Seagrass said, quite gently. “Come on, Mahit. It’s another twenty minutes on foot to your apartments.”

  All the way there, Mahit felt like the City was watching them, even without cloudhooks to mark electronic traces of their presence; felt it, and told herself she was over-reading again. It was a problem—that the City was killing or hurting citizens—but it might not be her problem. It might not be her fault at all. Surely not everything could be. She could get far enough away from the narrative tendency of Teixcalaanli thought to believe that. She could.

  * * *

  The man inside Mahit’s ambassadorial apartments was a dissolved silhouette between the tall windows: dark clothes, dark hair, invisible in the dimness before he moved. Mahit saw him first as a flash, some instrument in his hand reflecting the hallway light with white fire, and then as a rush of motion toward her. She had come two steps inside through the irised frame of the doorway. Three Seagrass had put her cloudhook back on to talk to the door, was standing to her left, out of the way—

  Terror felt like a kick in the sternum. A sensible person would have run. Mahit had always expected that she’d run, faced with direct physical threat—she’d washed out of the combat-oriented aptitudes early, on Lsel, too much self-preservation instinct and too much flinch. The man—there was something horribly familiar about his face, now that he’d moved into the spilling light from the hall—came at her with the sharp thing in his left hand. It resolved into a needle, thick as a thorn, dull-glinting with some slick fluid on the tip, and Mahit thought Poison, it’s covered in poison as she twisted away from it, backward, lost her balance and fell to the floor, landing on the heel of her bandaged hand. The shock of pain was bad enough that at first she thought he’d hit her. Still flinching after all.

  “The fuck—” said Three Seagrass, in the doorway.

  Mahit saw the man look up, freeze in evaluation—and in this freezing, she knew him, she recognized how he looked when he was surprised and distressed, she’d seen him look that way when Thirty Larkspur had pulled him off of her in the hallways of Palace-Earth. She couldn’t remember his name. He’d tried to recruit her for One Lightning, and Thirty Larkspur had threatened him and—and now he was in her apartments and lifting his terrible needle to point directly at Three Seagrass. Mahit thought of the xauitl, conta
ct poison, and then or injectable, racing through all the neurotoxins she knew, all of them bad—her assailant was fast—there was no way Three Seagrass, still damaged from the electrical shock of the City, would escape unscathed if he hit her with that.

  Mahit rolled, slammed her shoulder into the side of his knee with as much of her weight as she could leverage. Caught at his ankle, yanked it up off the floor, both her hands wrapped around the leather of his boot, and felt spectacular pain—the blisters under the bandage on her hand must have split. Everything below her elbow had gone to liquid fire, molten and dripping. He fell. She felt savage, still terrified, adrenaline like whiteout, a strange sort of bliss—clawed her way on top of him, used all of her barbaric height and the reach of her un-Teixcalaanli limbs.

  He cursed and flipped her—strong, he’d said he’d served in the Fleet, in One Lightning’s own Eighteenth Legion, he would be strong—but she had her good hand in the collar of his shirt, an ankle hooked around his thigh, and he flipped with her, landed on top of her. The tip of the needle approached her neck. It was going to touch her, going to fill her up with paralysis and suffocation, spill into her brain and dissolve her and Yskandr and everything they were together. She made a desperate grab for the man’s wrist with the hand that was still wrapped in bandages. Held on, even through the scream of pain, blisters bursting.

  “You weren’t supposed to fight back,” he spat, “filthy barbarian—”

  He hadn’t cared very much about whether she was a barbarian when he’d wanted her to join a Teixcalaanli legion, had he.

  Mahit bent his wrist back, as hard as she could, shoving his hand toward his neck. The edge of his needle scraped his throat, left a long line there, beaded red—swelling up immediately—going purple, fuck, what was in that toxin? The man made a guttural strangled noise. She could feel his body stiffen—spasm—begin to jitter, a meaningless, horrible thrashing. The needle fell from his nerveless fingers and landed on the floor by Mahit’s head.

  Mahit shoved him away, scuttled backward on her ass and elbows. She should have screamed a while back. It was very quiet now; just the harsh scrape of her breathing.

  After what felt like the longest minute of her life, she heard the door to the suite hiss shut, and the overhead lighting clicked on. Then Three Seagrass came to sit beside her. Both of their backs were pressed against the wall. In the perfectly normal ambient lighting, the body of the man who’d attacked her looked small, incongruous, not at all like something that had moved and breathed and might have killed her. The needle lay beside him like a quiescent snake. His name came back to her along with the slowing of her breath. Eleven Conifer. A person. A dead person, now.

  “Well,” said Three Seagrass shakily, “this is definitely a new kind of trouble to be in. Are you all right?”

  “I’m not hurt,” Mahit said. It seemed wisest to stop there.

  Three Seagrass nodded; Mahit could see the motion out of the corner of her eye. She couldn’t look away from the body. “Mm,” Three Seagrass said. “Good. Have you ever … done that before?”

  “What, murder someone?” said Mahit, and oh, that was what she had just done, wasn’t it. She was going to be sick.

  “There’s a fair argument for self-defense, but sure, if you like. Have you?”

  “No.”

  Three Seagrass reached over and patted Mahit gently on the shoulder, a hesitant feather-pressure. “Somewhat of a relief, really; I was wondering if Stationers were primed for explosive violence as well as carrying around dead people inside their heads…”

  “Just once,” Mahit said, with a sort of desperate and useless frustration, “I’d like you to imagine I might do something because it’s what a person does.”

  “Mahit, most people don’t—”

  “Get ambushed by strangers with terrifying weapons in their own apartments while evading their only political ally in order to have a secret meeting on a foreign planet? No. I assume that doesn’t happen to Teixcalaanlitzlim.”

  “That doesn’t happen to anyone,” Three Seagrass said. “Not as a rule.”

  Mahit dropped her head into her hands, and then jerked away when her damaged palm brushed against her cheek. She wanted, abruptly and with an absurd intensity, to be asleep. Asleep inside the narrow, secure walls of a room on Lsel, preferably, but mostly asleep. She ground her teeth together, bit the side of her tongue. It might have helped. She wasn’t sure.

  “Mahit,” Three Seagrass said again, softer. Then she reached into Mahit’s lap and caught her good hand in hers, lacing their fingers together. Her skin was dry and cool. Mahit turned to stare at her.

  Three Seagrass shrugged, and didn’t let go.

  “It happens in histories,” Mahit said inanely, like she was trying to make a gift of it: an allusion for a Teixcalaanlitzlim. For the sort of woman who would take her hand for no reason at all. “Pseudo-Thirteen River. Not exactly, but this sort of thing. When the yaotlek Nine Crimson is ambushed on the edge of known space—”

  “It’s not that bad,” Three Seagrass said, but she swept her thumb over Mahit’s knuckles. “You only killed one person, and he’s definitely not secretly your clonesib defected to the wrong faction of the Empire. Histories are always worse by the time they get written down.”

  Mahit smiled despite herself, despite the corpse lying across from her, slowly swelling up, purple-red and bloated. She asked, “Do they teach you that, when they teach you to remember them?”

  “Not exactly,” said Three Seagrass. “More an observation from experience—whoever inscribes the history has an agenda and that agenda’s usually half dramatics. I mean, Pseudo-Thirteen River, everyone in that is desperately upset about mistaken identities and communication delay, but if you read Five Diadem instead on the very same expansion campaign, she wants you to think about supply lines because her patron was the Minister for the Economy—”

  “We don’t have Five Diadem on Lsel. Is that actually her name?”

  “If your name was Five Hat, and you lived during the golden age of epic historiography, where everyone else was getting feted at court and taken out on campaigns as eyewitnesses, you would publish under a loose pseudonym too, Mahit.”

  Three Seagrass was so earnestly serious that Mahit found herself laughing, short sharp bursts of it that hurt her chest. It was possible she was hysterical. It was extremely possible, and a problem. It still took her half a minute to catch her breath. Three Seagrass squeezed her fingers, gently, and she exhaled hard through her teeth.

  When she could manage it, Mahit asked, “Do you know why a man who accosted me at the Emperor’s oration-contest banquet might have tried just now to kill me?”

  “Is that who he is?” Three Seagrass said, and let go of Mahit’s fingers. “Do you remember his name?” She got to her feet, and approached the corpse with her hands clasped primly behind her back, as if she was afraid to touch it accidentally. She peered at it, crouching. The panels of her jacket pooled on the floor, like the just-unfurled wings of a new insect.

  “Conifer,” Mahit said, “I think—Eleven Conifer. But I wasn’t sober. Neither was he.”

  “Tell me how you met him,” Three Seagrass said. With the tip of her shoe, she nudged the dead man’s head, tilting it up so she could see his face.

  “He was looking for anyone Thirty Larkspur didn’t already own,” Mahit said. “And then I insulted him. And he tried to … grab me? Hurt me. And then Thirty Larkspur himself called him off—”

  “You shouldn’t go places without me,” Three Seagrass said, but she didn’t sound reproving. “So he knows you. At least a little. Enough to dislike you. Now, he’s not anyone I know, and he’s not wearing anyone’s colors or favors—not that an assassin would, no matter what people do in poetry or histories—”

  “You do think assassin, then.”

  She straightened up. “Do you have other ideas?”

  Mahit shrugged. “Kidnapper, thief—someone who wanted to intercept this meeting, except I can’t th
ink of who would know—”

  “Except me,” Three Seagrass said, only a little bit wry. “And Twelve Azalea, who asked to meet you here.”

  “Three Seagrass, if I begin by assuming you are trying to kill me, I—”

  She waved one of her hands, a falling gesture of dismissal. “Assume I’m not. Didn’t we agree on that, the first day you were here? I’m not trying to sabotage you, and you’re not an idiot. Killing you counts as sabotage.”

  That conversation—in this same room!—felt like it had been months ago, though Mahit was entirely aware it had been only four days. Five, now that the sun was beginning to rise.

  “Not you, then,” she said, “for simplicity’s sake. Which leaves Twelve Azalea and … anyone who intercepted his message before it got to me. He did say he was being followed.”

  “A person who can intercept a message on infofiche would either have to be right there when he sent it, or else Information Ministry, to unseal the stick and seal it up again.”

  “Information Ministry is still you or Twelve Azalea, Three Seagrass.”

  Three Seagrass looked at her for a long moment, and sighed. “There are a lot of asekretim. Some of us probably work for whoever it is that wanted Yskandr dead, or you dead, or wants Twelve Azalea dead—”

  “What if it’s not interception?” Mahit asked, cutting her off. “Before he—before I—from what he said, he said you weren’t supposed to fight back, I think he meant to threaten me, get me to give him something. I don’t think he wanted to kill me at all. I think he wanted what Twelve Azalea has, the imago-machine, and I think he wanted me to hand it over. Maybe he was sent.”

  “Who would send him?”

  Mahit thought of saying One Lightning, but that would assume that everyone knew about the imago-machines, everyone in Teixcalaan, not just everyone in the palace; One Lightning was up in a flagship somewhere in Teixcalaanli space—when would he have heard?

  Instead she said, “Thirty Larkspur? If he exploited what Eleven Conifer did to me. He was very deliberate about pointing out that what he’d done was assault, and that he’d be talking to him later…”