A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  The knife clattered to the metal floor of the sun temple.

  It did not take him long to die.

  In the silence afterward, Mahit realized she had been holding Three Seagrass’s hand so hard her fingernails had cut into her palm. The only sound in the universe seemed to be the two of them, breathing. In her mind Yskandr was a vast and empty void of triumph and grief. She looked away from him. She looked at nothing at all.

  On the screen: Nineteen Adze, soaked in red, her suit stained beyond recognition, had caught up the knife.

  The Emperor of Teixcalaan greets you, she said. Her face was wet. Blood. Tears. Wet and grim and absolutely determined. Be calm. Order is a flower blooming at dawn, and dawn is breaking now.

  * * *

  There was quiet for a little while, and then there was the expected sort of chaos; all those grey-uniformed imperial guards, trying to figure out what to do. Where to go. How to get to their new Emperor and then move her to some sort of safety, considering there was still a legion-leading starship with all of its weaponry pointed at the City, in low orbit. Mahit and Three Seagrass sat in the middle of it—no one seemed to care very much about them. They weren’t doing anything. They didn’t seem to be an immediate threat to anyone.

  “He set her up for it,” Three Seagrass said wonderingly. “She didn’t know until she was up there next to him. Her Brilliance. The Edgeshine of a Knife. I guess it’ll fit. Still.”

  They’d reversed emotional positions, somehow. Mahit couldn’t stop crying for very long; even if it wasn’t entirely her own endocrine response, her body had decided to dissolve into the weight of grief. Yskandr wasn’t gone—she didn’t think she’d ever feel that hollow blank-space wrongness again—but both versions of him were bleak, scoured-cold landscapes, rooms without air, and Mahit kept weeping, even when she wanted to talk.

  She wiped at her nose with the heel of her hand. “Of course it’ll fit,” she managed. “The office will bend around her and she’ll bend around it, too, and it’ll all be … a story. Her Brilliance, the Edgeshine of a Knife. Like it was never supposed to be any different.”

  That seemed to be comforting for Three Seagrass to hear. Mahit herself felt comfortless, angry, blown open and empty: she kept remembering how much blood there had been, how Six Direction had said released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun, as if she’d written it for him.

  For him, and not for her or for Lsel.

  Nothing touched by empire stays clean, she thought, and tried to imagine it was Yskandr saying so when it wasn’t Yskandr at all.

  * * *

  It took thirty-six hours for the insurrection to be over.

  Mahit watched most of it on Three Seagrass’s Information Ministry newsfeed, lying in what used to be Yskandr’s bed in her ambassadorial apartment with the other woman’s cloudhook over her eye like a permanently affixed crown. Getting up seemed both difficult and unnecessary.

  One Lightning’s soldiers turned out to be more unwilling to slaughter large numbers of marching, singing Teixcalaanlitzlim than Mahit suspected he had counted on. But then he’d been expecting his opponent to be Six Direction—old, failing, his military victories a long time over, beset by an uncertain succession. Not a new-crowned emperor, sanctified by a blood sacrifice like something out of the oldest epics. Before Nineteen Adze’s emperorship was a day old the yaotlek had recalled all his troops under the cover of their protection of the City being unnecessary, and had appeared on a news program standing next to Nineteen Adze, to get on his knees and put his hands between hers and swear his loyalty.

  There was no mention of the war of conquest.

  “That’s the Station saved, then,” Mahit said to the ceiling. Yskandr’s garish and lovely painting of all of Lsel space as seen from Teixcalaan was the only thing that heard her, and she could take its silence as mockery.

  Yskandr himself was merely a whisper, a

  Mahit ignored him. When she paid too much attention to him she had crying fits, weeping, inconsolable, on and on until she was physically sick. It made her angry; it wasn’t even her grief. She hadn’t figured out what her grief was about, yet.

  That night she dreamed of Six Direction saying her poetry, speaking her thoughts, and thought she might be getting closer.

  If she’d been at home on Lsel, she suspected that the integration therapists would have an absolute field day with her and Yskandr. They’d get a scientific paper out of it. By the next morning even Yskandr found this funny—bright shimmers in her nerves, a bit of actual energy. She got up. She ate noodles and chili oil and a protein cube that tasted almost like a Lsel protein cube, but probably was made of some kind of plant. And then she lay down again, exhausted by that small effort, and watched the newsfeeds.

  There was little sign of Two Lemon and the other anti-imperial activists. No bombs in restaurants. No protests. Mahit assumed they’d gone back underground, quiescent for the moment, and wondered—wondered like a person contemplating the impossibility of lifting an enormous rock to look at what grew underneath it—what Five Portico would do with the remains of her faulty imago-machine.

  Thirty Larkspur’s part of the insurrection took a bit longer to wind to a close—there was a loose détente established, a series of small newsfeed reports that a new Information Minister had been appointed—a man Mahit had never heard of—and that Thirty Larkspur had himself been given some sort of advisory role on commerce.

  Not one of Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze’s ezuazuacatlim. But not out of the government either.

  It wasn’t Mahit’s problem.

  She wanted it to be, which was part of the problem. It was so difficult to put everything down, to trust that anyone, anywhere, would in fact do their jobs. That there was any safety.

  She wondered how Nineteen Adze felt about it. About the same, she suspected.

  * * *

  On the third day after Six Direction’s death, after Mahit had received a beautiful infofiche stick, bone-white—made from some animal—and sealed with the imperial seal, inviting her as the ranking representative of her government to attend the funeral and coronation, she decided that the absolute least she could do was get back to answering the mail. The mail which was three months and two weeks late now. There was still a bowl of it, infofiche sticks in every possible color, from utilitarian grey plastic to Nineteen Adze’s solid bone-and-gold, and—

  And she’d come here to serve Lsel Station, and its people who had come to live in Teixcalaan. Who had just lived through an insurrection and a change in emperorship, too, and probably wanted their permits permitted, and their visas approved.

  She sent Three Seagrass a message on one of the utilitarian grey sticks: You left your spare cloudhook here. Also I could use some help with the mail. She didn’t really need help—Yskandr knew how to do all of this, and so she did too—but they hadn’t talked. Since.

  Four hours later Three Seagrass showed up with the sunlight slanting through the windows, looking evanescently thin and grey-pale at the temples and around the eyes, but just as impeccable as she’d been when she met Mahit coming off the seed-skiff: every corner of her suit pressed, orange flames creeping up the sleeves. Information Ministry again, undisgraced.

  “—hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” said Mahit, and abruptly remembered nothing but how Three Seagrass had felt in her arms, and suspected she’d blushed scarlet. “—thanks for coming.”

  The air between them felt fragile; more so when Three Seagrass sat down next to her, and shrugged, and quite clearly didn’t know what to say.

  They’d done better with poetry. They’d done better with politics. Fuck, they’d done better with kissing, and that had been a mad reaching-out for comfort. Mahit wanted to do it again; wanted, and immediately thought better of it. They’d been watching the end of an imperial reign, then. Now it was just the two of them, and the slow, outgoing tide of aftermath, and Mahit couldn’t
quite imagine how to begin such a thing.

  “I half thought you’d have gotten yourself made Minister for Information,” Mahit said, light, light enough to be joking, “and wouldn’t have any time for me.”

  Some of the tension went out of Three Seagrass’s shoulders. “Her Brilliance offered me Second Undersecretary to the Minister, actually,” she said, “but I’m still your cultural liaison, if you want.”

  Mahit thought about it—thought about it while she took Three Seagrass’s hand in her hand, and laced their fingers together, and said thank you with all the honorific particles she could remember tacked onto the end, so that it became both enormously sincere and utterly hilarious, all at once. Thought about working with Three Seagrass, here in this apartment that had been Yskandr’s, and finding her way toward being—what? Something Nineteen Adze, Her Brilliance on the sun-spear throne, might need? (That would be a way to begin, with Three Seagrass, too.)

  Yskandr said.

  She might. And then she remembered Three Seagrass saying If you were one of us, I would want you just the same, and felt an echo of that encompassing anger—she wouldn’t be Teixcalaanli, even if she stayed, even if she did everything Yskandr had done. She wouldn’t be a creature that could play, like Three Seagrass played, with language and poetry at oration contests. And she’d never stop knowing it.

  “I think,” Mahit said, right out loud, once Three Seagrass had stopped laughing and had let Mahit touch her cheek, very gently and just once, “that you should be Second Undersecretary to the Minister for Information. You’re too interesting for this job, Three Seagrass. You should do what you planned to do when you got it, which is use me as a stepping-stone toward vainglorious ambition. And get back to being a poet.”

  “What are you going to do without me?” Three Seagrass asked. She did not protest more than that.

  “I’ll think of something,” said Mahit.

  AFTERMATH

  A PERSON could glut themselves on a surfeit of beauty, it turned out, especially if that beauty was enlivened by collective grief and deep xenophilia: the coronation of the Emperor Nineteen Adze, She Who Gleams Like the Edgeshine of a Knife, Her Brilliance, Lord of all Teixcalaan—Mahit mostly remembered it as a sequence of overwhelming snapshots. The procession that wound its way through the City, reflected and replayed on every screen. A hundred thousand Sunlit marching, kneeling at the Emperor’s white-slippered feet, rising, moving on. The algorithm readjusted, or merely accepting Nineteen Adze as the rightful ruler of the Empire. The City itself lit up gold and red and a deep, rich purple, blooming, blooming. The interment of the exsanguinated body of Six Direction, buried in the earth to rot. Encomia upon encomia; new poets on every corner. The massing of soldiers—young Teixcalaanlitzlim volunteering for the coming war against the aliens, over and over and over. Singing, sometimes, as they went.

  There were two new songs that went I am a spear in the hands of the sun. One was elegiac and beautiful and a choir sang it at the moment the great imperial crown was placed on Nineteen Adze’s head. The other one was bawdy and obscene and relied on a pun in Teixcalaanli that Mahit would have understood if she’d been studying the language only one year: anyone could understand how spear could be interpreted in a multitude of ways.

  Mahit learned that song. It was hard not to.

  The way Nineteen Adze’s face never changed, not during the interment and not when they put the crown on her—that Mahit learned, too. It was hard not to.

  * * *

  Once the City had exhaled enough ceremony, and felt more like an exhausted runner, leaning out of breath, trying to adjust to the deep ache in its lungs, small funerals bloomed like fungi after rain: there were more and more announcements each day, some arriving by infofiche and some by public newsfeed. Three hundred and four Teixcalaanli had been killed during the insurrection, according to the official reports; Mahit suspected that number was too small by an order of magnitude.

  She wore her best mourning-black, black for the void between the stars, Lsel-style—not red for blood given, like a Teixcalaanlitzlim—when she went to Twelve Azalea’s. There wasn’t a body. He’d donated it to the medical college, which was so like him that it hurt. There was only a cenotaph, with the lovely glyph of his signature on it, placed in a wall inside the Information Ministry alongside hundreds of others: every one of them an asekreta who had died in service to the Ministry.

  She saw Three Seagrass there, and heard her read a poem for Twelve Azalea: a stark, bleak thing, vicious in its grief. An epitaph for worlds ripped out of the sky, for unfairness. For all the senseless deaths. It was beautiful, and Mahit felt … guilt, when she thought of all the senseless deaths that were still waiting. All those Teixcalaanlitzlim, singing as they signed up for the legions.

  All those planets they would touch, and devour.

  * * *

  She had Yskandr’s corpse burned—so simple, at the last, to send a request to Judiciary, signed and sealed on infofiche, addressed to ixplanatl Four Lever, Medical Examiner. The ashes were waiting for her in her apartments that evening. A box the size of her hand, full of bones and half-mummified flesh, all rendered to dust.

  Would you want me to taste? she asked her imago, the twinned strangeness of him.

  A very long pause. All the young Yskandr, the first one. Hers. And then,

  Which was all the old Yskandr, the one who remembered dying. Mahit considered when that would be, when she wouldn’t want to make sure that she was doing some justice to her imago-line—and put the box of ashes away.

  * * *

  She did not meet the Emperor in the imperial apartments in Palace-Earth, and neither did she meet her in Nineteen Adze’s office complex back in Palace-East. Mahit imagined the latter had been shuttered.

  They met just before dawn, in the plaza in front of the Judiciary, with its pool full of deep-red floating flowers. Mahit was awake by virtue of being summoned by a grey-suited imperial attendant knocking at her door, and wished vehemently for coffee, or tea, or even a nice simple caffeine pill. Nineteen Adze looked as if sleep was something that happened to other people, who happened not to be emperors. It was beginning to suit her; or her face was settling into it. The new hollownesses, the focus of long-seeing eyes.

  “Your Brilliance,” said Mahit.

  They were sitting on a bench. There was one attendant-guard with them, and she did not wear a cloudhook, and she carried a projectile weapon. Nineteen Adze folded her hands in her lap. “I’m almost used to it,” she said. “People calling me Your Brilliance. I think when I’m used to it, that will mean he’s really dead.”

  “No one is dead,” Mahit said carefully, “who is remembered.”

  “Is that Lsel scripture?”

  “Philosophy, maybe. Practicality.”

  “I assume it’d have to be. Considering how wrapped up you are in your dead.” Nineteen Adze lifted one hand, let it fall. “I miss him. I can’t imagine what it’d be like having him in my head. How do you make decisions?”

  Mahit exhaled hard. In her mind, Yskandr was all fondness, warmth, laughter. “We argue,” she said. “A little. But mostly we agree. We’re … we wouldn’t match, I wouldn’t be his successor, if I wasn’t going to mostly agree with him.”

  “Mm.” Nineteen Adze was quiet, then, for a long moment. The wind ruffled the petals of all the red flowers: a vast confined sea. The sky lightened from dark grey to paler grey, shaded gold where the sun would burn off the clouds.

  When she couldn’t stand the silence any longer, Mahit asked, “Why did you want to meet with me?” She left off the honorific. She left it a plain sentence: Why did you, one person, want to meet with me, another person?

  “I thought I’d ask you what you wanted,” said Nineteen Adze. She smiled; that viciously gentle smile, all her attention focusing down onto Mahit. “I ca
n imagine you might like to extract some promises from me.”

  “Are you planning to annex my Station to Teixcalaan?” Mahit asked.

  Nineteen Adze laughed, a brutal, shoulder-shaking sound. “No. No, stars, I hardly have time. I hardly have time for anything. You’re safe, Mahit. You and Lsel Station can be as much of an independent republic as you’d like. But that’s not what I asked. I asked what you wanted.”

  In the pool, a long-legged bird had alighted: white-feathered, long-beaked. Two feet high at the shoulder, at least. As it stepped, it didn’t disturb the flowers; its great feet slipped between them and rose again, dripping. Mahit didn’t know the word for the kind of bird it was. “Ibis,” maybe. Or “egret.” There were a lot of kinds of birds in Teixcalaanli, and one word for “bird” in Stationer. There’d been more, once. They didn’t need more than that now. The one stood for the concept.

  She could ask for … oh, an appointment to a university. A place in a poetry salon. A Teixcalaanli title. A Teixcalaanli name to go with it. Money; fame; adulation. She could ask for absolutely nothing, and remain in service, the Ambassador from Lsel, and answer mail, and sing a song in Teixcalaanli pubs that once she’d written some of the words to, a long time ago.

  Nothing the Empire touched would remain hers. Very little was hers already.

  “Your Brilliance,” said Mahit Dzmare, “please send me home, while I still want to go.”

  “You keep surprising me,” said Nineteen Adze. “Are you sure?”

  Mahit said, “No. Which is why I want you to send me home. I’m not sure.”

 

  Trying to see who we are. What is left of us. Who we might be now.

  * * *

  Approached from the underside of the largest of the pockmarked metallic atmosphereless planets that formed the Lsel System, the station hung suspended, perfectly balanced in the gravity well between two stars and four planets. It was small, a dull metal toroid, spinning to maintain thermal control. Rough from fourteen generations of solar radiation and small-particle impact. Thirty thousand or so people dwelling in the dark. More, if you counted the imago-memories. One of them at least had recently tried to sabotage one of those long memory-lines, and would be waiting to see what had come of her attempt.