A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  She swallowed hard. The window rolled up. They kept moving. Inside the groundcar it was difficult to see what they were driving through; all sound was muffled and the windows were privacy-tinted dark. She kept thinking that she was hearing more of those sounds, the way that a bomb going off made a kind of collapse in the air.

  “Did you know,” she found herself saying, right out loud, bright and brittle and uncontrolled, “that the worst thing on Lsel, the absolute worst thing, is fire—fire eats oxygen—fire rises—fire extinguisher drills are every other day, they start when we’re two or three years old, whenever we’re big enough to hold the extinguisher—fire is bad and explosives are worse.”

  “I don’t know why there’d be bombings at all,” Twelve Azalea said. “This isn’t—no one wants to hurt the City, it’s about who gets to have the City, right?”

  The groundcar slowed again, but there was no halt at any checkpoint. Just a crawl, like they’d hit traffic. “Make the windows transparent,” Mahit said. Nothing happened.

  Three Seagrass’s teeth were gritted very tightly. Mahit could see the tension in her jaw. “Petal,” she said, “it’s the Fleet. Bombing massed civilian uprisings is how the Fleet works. You know that.” And to the driver, “Turn the opacity down, would you?”

  This time, the driver did.

  Through the groundcar’s windows—smoky glass, paling to clear—what Mahit saw at first made very little sense. People didn’t break things, on Lsel—not property, not with cavalier abandon. The shell of a station was fragile and if some part of the machinery of it snapped, people would die: of breathing vacuum, of icy chill, of the hydroponics system shutting down. Casual vandalism on Lsel was a matter of graffiti, elaborate hacks, blocking off hallways with the hull-breach-repair expanding foam canisters. But here in the streets of the City she was watching a Teixcalaanli woman, in a perfectly reasonable suit jacket and trousers, swing what looked like a metal pole into the window of a shop, and shatter the glass there. Do that, walk onward, and do it again.

  Other people were running—they were in the streets, which was why the groundcar had slowed so much. Some of them had the purple larkspur pins, and some of them had no identificatory marks at all to show their loyalties, and some were Sunlit, gold and terrifying and moving in sharp little triads, like scout-ships diving gravityless through descending orbits. There was smoke in the air, drifting in from over one heartbreakingly lovely many-spired building. The groundcar’s driver had taken on an expression of grim and serene determination, pushing forward in spurts that made all of Mahit’s insides slosh against her abdominal wall with every jerk of acceleration.

  “I don’t see legions,” Twelve Azalea said, leaden.

  Three Seagrass had crawled out of the backseat and into the front, beside the driver. “We’re not close enough to the skyport. This is—spillover—”

  They heard the shouting—two sets of shouting, back and forth, rhythmic and poetic like the beating of a heart but out of time, not together, a heart in fibrillation—before they managed to get much farther. It was a wave of sound, punctuated at unpredictable moments by the thump of another explosion. The driver, seeing some opening that Mahit couldn’t spot, floored the acceleration and shot the groundcar around a corner—Mahit was thrown half into Twelve Azalea’s lap—they raced down an alley—and then the street opened up, a blooming, easy roadway, into a plaza. And there they were: two massed groups of Teixcalaanlitzlim, screaming at one another. The car stopped. There wasn’t a way forward through that seething mass.

  Where the two groups touched, violence erupted like fungal growths after a long, wet spring. Blood on the face of a woman with a larkspur pin tied to her arm like a mourning band, blood from how she’d been punched, and the woman who’d punched her—so close to the groundcar that Mahit could hear everything—shouted For the Emperor One Lightning! and smeared her bloodied hand across her forehead, like she was a person in a historical epic marking the sacrifice of her enemy.

  They didn’t look like Teixcalaanlitzlim, Mahit thought. Drifting thought, absurd, disconnected. They looked like people. Just like people. Tearing each other apart.

  There was another one of those terrible thuds of collapsing air, much closer this time. An answering bang from a group of Sunlit, who were abruptly surrounded by quick-spreading white smoke—the people fighting near them began to cough, ran away from the gas, uncaring which side of the street riot they were on. They ran right by the groundcar, eyes streaming, red. Some of the gas began to seep in through the sealed doors, the windows.

  “Fuck,” said Three Seagrass. “Cover your mouth with your shirt—that’s crowd-dispersal gas—we can’t stay here—”

  Mahit covered her mouth with her shirt. Her eyes burned. Her throat burned.

  Yskandr told her. She was suddenly calm—clear-calm, poised, everything slow. Yskandr doing something to her adrenal glands.

  “We can’t stay here,” Mahit said out loud, and opened the door. The white gas billowed in. “Follow me.”

  She couldn’t breathe—the first breath she took was fire, blazing in her lungs, and Yskandr said, so she ran—not knowing how she was running, not knowing how it was possible for her body to run. Not knowing if anyone was following her at all. Yskandr seemed to know some secret path—some familiar pattern in the horrible swirl of blood and white smoke, and she saw for the first time a Fleet-uniformed legionnaire, grey and gold, a squadron of them—Yskandr spun her, rotated her from the hip, a pivot, and raced her away at an angle. There were footsteps behind her. Rapid ones, matching her pace. She looked back: Three Seagrass, and Twelve Azalea. The driver, too.

  They skirted the edge of the plaza, raced down a street Mahit was sure she’d never seen. How many times did you come this way, she thought, through the pounding of her heart, the way she was gasping for air only when Yskandr thought she couldn’t bear not to gasp.

 

  After another two minutes they slowed to a walk. Mahit was entirely sure she’d faint if Yskandr wasn’t making her keep going. No one spoke. The sounds of the riot receded to a dim roar. They reached the demarcation of the palace from the rest of the City—no one guarded the tiny pathway they followed inside, no Sunlit and no Mist and no legions. Yskandr led them all onward, following muscle memory years old and dead now.

  And then, like a curtain parting, they turned one last corner and Mahit found herself in front of the Information Ministry, which looked entirely unscathed. A clean thing, out of a former world.

  Yskandr said.

  Everything looked so familiar—two minutes of walking would get her to the entrance of the building containing her ambassadorial apartment (that is, if she could go there at all without the interference of the Sunlit and their investigation). But all the tracery of the City’s vast AI was lit up under the plaza tilework, as if the entire palace was a curled beast, preparing to strike.

  “I don’t know how you did that,” Three Seagrass said to Mahit. “When we got into the car you could hardly walk.”

  “I didn’t,” Mahit said. “Not just me. Not exactly. Are we going to go in?” Her voice was a rag. Now that Yskandr wasn’t controlling her breathing she felt like she couldn’t get enough air. Her chest heaved with each breath.

  Three Seagrass looked at their driver, who wore an expression of utter shock: a man undone, a man in a world which no longer made sense. “Are we?” she asked.

  “… yes?” he said, and started for the door.

  Neither Mahit nor Three Seagrass put their feet on the traces on their way into the Ministry building, even when it made walking awkward and strange.

  Inside, there was nothing but the clean and lovely spaces of a Teixcalaanli ministry early in the morning. No sign
of distress. Nothing amiss. Mahit found herself on the verge of tears and didn’t know why. Three Seagrass’s driver led them all into an innocuous beige-shaded conference room, complete with a U-shaped table surrounding an infofiche projector, fluorescent lighting, and a plethora of moderately uncomfortable chairs. It was the least Teixcalaanli room Mahit could remember being in since she’d arrived, but she assumed that places where interminable everyday meetings occurred were much the same throughout the entire galaxy. She’d sat in rooms like this on Lsel, in school and at government functions. She sat in this one now. Dimly—so very dimly, through the thick Ministry walls—she heard another explosion. And then silence. Perhaps the riot had been dispersed. The legions were massing elsewhere. Closer to the skyport.

  The arrival of a carafe of coffee and a basket of some kind of bread rolls was not standard practice for conference rooms, but perhaps Three Seagrass had pulled some strings for them. The coffee was shockingly, blisteringly good: hot but not hot enough to scald, the paper cup warm in Mahit’s palms. It had a rich, earthy taste that wasn’t anything like the instant coffee on Lsel, and in some better moment Mahit thought she’d really like to drink it slowly enough to think about all the different qualities of the flavor—

  Yskandr said,

  He was right. Even in the few minutes Mahit had been drinking the coffee, she felt more present, more acute, conscious of a faint thrumming in her skin.

  It was close to being an apology.

  Twelve Azalea was on his second cup. “Now what?” he asked Three Seagrass pointedly. “We wait for a debriefing? I thought we needed to be getting the Ambassador to the Emperor immediately, if that’s even possible considering what’s happening to the City outside.”

  We. It hadn’t been very long since she’d asked Twelve Azalea to help her steal Yskandr’s imago-machine from his corpse, and yet after only such a little bit of time, here he was committed to at least a semblance of ideological unity with a barbarian. Then again, he had known where to find Five Portico and her anti-imperial activist friends—ideological unity was flexible. Mutable, under stress. Mahit looked at Three Seagrass, who was as under stress as she had ever seen her: grey at the temples, a raw place on the side of her lip where she must have gnawed it open.

  “We do,” she said. “But I owe the Ministry some courtesy, since they came to get us.”

  They came to get us. They drove us through a riot. They brought us coffee and breakfast. The world functions as it ought to, and if I keep behaving as if it will continue to, nothing will go wrong. Mahit knew that line of thinking. She knew it intimately and horribly, and she sympathized (she sympathized too much, this was her essential problem, wasn’t it?), and Three Seagrass was still wrong.

  Mahit said, “I don’t think we have any time at all—the whole City is going to go up like an oxygen chamber with a spark fault.”

  Three Seagrass made a noise surprisingly akin to a hissing steam valve, put her head in her hands, and said, “Just give me one minute to think, all right?”

  Mahit figured one minute was within parameters. Probably. Maybe. Everything was very shimmery and surreal. She wondered what level of sleep debt she’d actually reached. There had been the thirty-six hours before she’d slept at Twelve Azalea’s apartment—and possibly being unconscious after brain surgery counted—

  said Yskandr, and that was all her Yskandr, the light, quick, bitter amusement of him.

  “All right,” Three Seagrass said, so Mahit looked at her, keeping her face perfectly Teixcalaanli-neutral, trying not to visibly need her liaison’s support as much as she actually did.

  Three Seagrass spread her hands, a helpless little gesture. “I’m going to go ask to report directly to the Minister for Information—and she is undoubtedly exceptionally busy just now, so we’ll have an appointment—and we’ll come back when that appointment is scheduled.” She got to her feet. “Don’t go anywhere. Central Desk is just down the hall, on this floor, I’ll be five minutes.”

  It was an incredibly transparent ruse. But transparency had worked for them before; transparency seemed to have its own gravity when placed alongside the Teixcalaanli overcommitment to narrative. It bent the light. Mahit nodded to Three Seagrass, said, “Try it,” and followed that with “And don’t worry about us going anywhere. Where would we go?”

  Twelve Azalea and Yskandr laughed, in simultaneous eerie echo, and then Three Seagrass was gone, slipped out the door like a seed-skiff squirted from the side of a cruiser.

  They waited. Mahit felt naked without Three Seagrass, alone. More and more exposed, the longer she was gone—especially as the time stretched from two minutes to five, to ten. She could hardly feel anything but the low, anxious thrumming of her own heart, transmitted through her chest to weigh heavy on the spot just between the arcs of her ribs. Most of the peripheral neuropathy was gone—just the occasional shimmer in her fingertips, and she had suspicions that might be permanent. She didn’t know how that made her feel. So far she could still hold a stylus, even if she couldn’t necessarily feel the pressure of it. If it got worse again—

  Later.

  When the door to the conference room reopened, and Three Seagrass was there behind it, the release of tension was like being kicked—and then Mahit saw that she was not alone, and the person with her was not wearing Information Ministry white-and-orange at all, but had a spray of purple flowers pinned to the collar of his deep blue jacket. It was fresh; live flowers, cut within the last day. When all of Thirty Larkspur’s supporters had been wearing these at the oration contest, they had been fashion, amusements, Teixcalaanli political signaling on symbolic channels. When they had been wearing them in the streets it was a way to take sides in a war. Now this one looked like a badge of office, or of party loyalty.

  “Sit down,” said the newcomer to Three Seagrass, and gave her a push. Mahit was half out of her seat immediately, angry, gathering her breath to speak—but Three Seagrass sat down as she’d been told to. She was flushed across the face, furious, but she waved a hand at Mahit to subside, and she did.

  “Ambassador,” said their visitor, “asekretim. I’m obliged to tell you that you will not be permitted to leave the Ministry building at this time.”

  “Are we being arrested?” Twelve Azalea asked.

  “Certainly not. You are being detained for your own safety.”

  “I want,” Twelve Azalea went on, strident, and Mahit was proud of him, sickeningly so, “to speak to Minister Two Rosewood herself about this. Right now. And who are you, anyway?”

  “Two Rosewood is no longer the Minister for Information,” said this person, ignoring Twelve Azalea’s request for his name or affiliation. “She has been relieved of her duties during the current crisis by the ezuazuacat Thirty Larkspur. I can convey to him your desire to speak to him, if you like. I’m sure he’ll get to you as his time allows.”

  “What?” said Mahit.

  “Do you have trouble with your hearing, Ambassador?”

  “With my credulity,” said Mahit.

  “There is nothing to be overly concerned about—”

  “You have just told us we cannot leave and that the Minister has been deposed—”

  “There were questions as to her loyalties,” said Thirty Larkspur’s man, and he shrugged. “Thirty Larkspur intends to keep the Empire in safe and steady hands. There are legions in our streets, Ambassador, it is very dangerous to move about just now. Sit tight. Thirty Larkspur will take care of this, and it will all blow over within the week.”

  Mahit had her doubts. Mahit had more doubts than she precisely knew what to do with: a proliferation of uncertainty, a sweeping tide of being sure that she’d missed something. Thirty Larkspur was executing … what, a coup in advance of One Lightning’s co
up? It was possible she was already too late to do anything to turn the annexation force away from Lsel, whether she had tradeable knowledge of impending external threat to Teixcalaan or not. At the oration contest it had been Thirty Larkspur himself—resplendent in blue and lilac, perfectly serene—who had told her that the deal was off. If he had gained control of the civil service—he who was apparently willing to dismiss Lsel the instant it wasn’t useful to his plans—

  “We cannot,” said Twelve Azalea, and Mahit was very grateful to him for saying anything that would get her out of her own mind, “stay in a conference room for a week. And I still don’t know who you are. Sir.”

  “I am Six Helicopter,” said the man—Mahit stared at him, and wondered when he’d learned to say his name with not only a straight face but with that degree of smugness—“and of course you won’t be spending a week in a conference room, asekretim. Ambassador. You’ll be moved to a safe and well-appointed location, just as soon as we have got one to put you in.”

  “And that will be when?” Twelve Azalea went on. He had perfected a sort of incredulous, high-pitched stridency: the voice of a person who was being inconvenienced and was going to make a scene about it. Distantly, Mahit found it admirable. Strategic. She didn’t interrupt him. “By whose definition of safe? You’re implying that there is an attempted usurpation occurring as we speak!”

  “The yaotlek’s little adventure will be over long before you could call this unpleasantness an usurpation,” said Six Helicopter. “I have a great deal of work to do—I’ll make sure someone brings you three more coffee. Please don’t try to leave. You will be stopped at the door—this really is a safe place right now. Don’t worry.”

  And with that, he left. The door to the conference room clicked innocuously behind him. Three Seagrass promptly, and disturbingly, broke into laughter.

  “Did that actually just happen?” she asked. “Did some jumped-up bureaucrat without an inch of training in protocol just tell us that the Information Ministry is under the control of the ezuazuacatlim? Because I think that was what just happened, and I am at a complete loss; do forgive me, Mahit, this is not within my fucking portfolio of plausible scenarios that I might encounter while acting as cultural liaison to a foreign ambassador.”