Ancillary Sword

by Ann Leckie

  I still pressed uselessly on the translator’s back, while she lay gasping on the ground, facedown. “Blood stays inside your arteries, Dlique,” I said.

  She gave a weak, shaky hah. “See…” She paused for a few shallow breaths. “Breathing. Stupid.”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes, breathing is stupid and boring, but keep on doing it, Dlique. As a favor to me.” She didn’t answer.

  By the time Kalr Eight arrived with a medkit and Captain Hetnys came running onto the scene, a pair of medics behind her and Sword of Atagaris behind them, dragging an emergency suspension pod, it was too late. Translator Dlique was dead.

  11

  I knelt on the ground beside Translator Dlique’s body. Blood soaked my bare feet, my knees, my hands, still pressing down on the wound on her back, and the cuffs of my shirtsleeves were wet with it. It was not the first time I had been covered in someone else’s blood. I had no horror of it. The two Sword of Atagaris ancillaries were motionless and impassive, having set down the suspension pod they had dragged this far to no purpose. Captain Hetnys stood frowning, puzzled, not quite sure, I thought, of what had just happened.

  I rose to make way for the medics, who went immediately to work on Translator Dlique. “Cit… Fleet Captain,” said one of them after a while. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do.”

  “Never is,” said the proprietor of the tea shop, who was still standing in her doorway. Not tea but blood! scrawled only meters away from where she stood. That was a problem. But not, I suspected, the problem Captain Hetnys thought it was.

  I peeled off my gloves. Blood had soaked through them, my hands were sticky with it. I stepped quickly over to Captain Hetnys faster than she could back away and grabbed her uniform jacket with my bloody hands. Dragged her stumbling over to where Translator Dlique lay, the two medics scrambling out of our way, and before Captain Hetnys could regain her balance or resist, I threw her down onto the corpse. I turned to Kalr Eight. “Fetch a priest,” I said to her. “Whoever you find who’s qualified to do purifications and funerals. If she says she won’t come to the Undergarden, inform her that she may come willingly or not, but she will come regardless.”

  “Sir,” Eight acknowledged, and departed.

  Captain Hetnys had meanwhile managed to get to her feet, with the assistance of one of her ancillaries.

  “How did this happen, Captain? I said not to use violence against citizens unless it was absolutely necessary.” Translator Dlique wasn’t a citizen, but Sword of Atagaris couldn’t have known it was the translator they were shooting at.

  “Sir,” said Captain Hetnys. Voice shaking either with rage at what I’d just done, or distress generally. “Sword of Atagaris queried Station, and it said it had no knowledge of this person and there was no tracker. She was not, therefore, a citizen.”

  “So that made it fine to shoot her, did it?” I asked. But of course, I myself had followed exactly that logic on a nearly uncountable number of occasions. It was such compelling logic, to someone like Sword of Atagaris—to someone like me—that it had never occurred to me that Sword of Atagaris would even think of firing guns here, on a station full of citizens, a station that had been part of the Radch for centuries.

  It should have occurred to me. I was responsible for everything that happened under my command.

  “Fleet Captain,” replied Captain Hetnys, indignant and not trying as hard as she might have to hide it. “Unauthorized persons pose a danger to—”

  “This,” I said, each word deliberate, emphatic, “is Presger Translator Dlique.”

  “Fleet Captain,” said Station, in my ear. I had left the connection to Station open, so it had heard what I had said. “With all respect, you are mistaken. Translator Dlique is still in her rooms in the governor’s residence.”

  “Look again, Station. Send someone to look. Captain Hetnys, neither you nor any of your crew or ancillaries will go armed on this station under any circumstances, beginning now. Nor will your ship or any of your crew enter the Undergarden again without my explicit permission. Sword of Atagaris Var and its lieutenant will return to Sword of Atagaris as soon as a shuttle can take them. Do not”—she had opened her mouth to protest—“say a single word to me. You have deliberately concealed vital information from me. You have endangered the lives of residents of this station. Your troops have caused the death of the diplomatic representative of the Presger. I am trying to think of some reason why I shouldn’t shoot you where you stand.” Actually, there were at least three compelling reasons—the two armed ancillaries standing beside Captain Hetnys and the fact that in my haste I had left my own gun behind in my quarters, three levels below this one.

  I turned to the proprietor of the tea shop. “Citizen.” It took extra effort not to speak in my flat, ancillary’s voice. “Will you bring me tea? I’ve had no breakfast, and I’m going to have to fast today.” Wordlessly, she turned and went into her shop.

  While I waited for tea, Governor Giarod arrived. Took one look at Translator Dlique’s body, at Captain Hetnys standing mute and blood-smeared by Sword of Atagaris’s ancillaries, took a breath, and then said, “Fleet Captain. I can explain.”

  I looked at her. Then turned to see the tea shop proprietor set a bowl of tea-gruel on the ground a meter from where I stood. I thanked her, went to pick it up. Saw revulsion on the face of Captain Hetnys and Governor Giarod as I held it with bare, bloody hands and drank from it. “This is how it will be,” I said, after I’d drunk half of the thick tea. “There will be a funeral. Don’t speak to me of keeping this secret, or of panic in the corridors. There will be a funeral, with offerings and suitable tokens, and a period of mourning for every member of Station Administration. The body will be kept in suspension so that when the Presger come for the translator, they may take it and do whatever it is they do with dead bodies.

  “For the moment, Sword of Atagaris will tell me the last time it saw this wall free of paint, and then Station will name for me every person who stopped in front of it from then until I saw it just now.” Station might not have been able to see if someone was painting, but it would know where everyone was, and I suspected very few people would have stood right next to this wall, in that window of time, who had not been the painter herself.

  “Begging the fleet captain’s very great indulgence.” Captain Hetnys dared, against all wisdom, to speak to me. “That’s already done, and Security has arrested the person responsible.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Surprised. And skeptical. “Security has arrested Raughd Denche?”

  Now Captain Hetnys was astonished. “No, sir!” she protested. “I don’t know why you would assume Citizen Raughd would do something like this. No, sir, it can only have been Sirix Odela. She passed here on her way to work this morning and stopped quite close to the wall for some fifteen seconds. More than enough time to paint this.”

  If she passed by on her way to work, she lived in the Undergarden. Most of the Undergarden residents were Ychana, but this name was Samirend. And familiar. “This person works in the Gardens, above?” I asked. Captain Hetnys gestured assent. I thought of the person I’d met when I’d first arrived. Who I had found standing in the lake in the Gardens, so distressed at the thought of expressing anger. It wasn’t possible she had done this. “Why would a Samirend paint a Xhi slogan in Radchaai script? Why wouldn’t she write it in Liost since she’s Samirend, or Raswar, that more people here could read?”

  “Historically, Fleet Captain—” began Governor Giarod.

  I cut her off. “Historically, Governor, quite a lot of people have good reason to resent the annexation. But right here, right now, none of them will find any profit in more than token rebellion.” It would have been that way for several centuries. Nobody in the Undergarden who valued her life (not to mention the lives of anyone else in the Undergarden) would have painted that slogan on that wall, not knowing how this station’s administration would react. And I’d be willing to bet that everyone in the Undergarden knew how
this station’s administration would react.

  “The creation of the Undergarden was no doubt unintended,” I continued, as Mercy of Kalr showed me a brief flash of Kalr Eight speaking sternly to a junior priest, “but as it has benefited you, you tell yourselves that its condition is also just and proper.” That constant trio, justice, propriety, and benefit. They could not, in theory, exist alone. Nothing just was improper, nothing beneficial was unjust.

  “Fleet Captain,” began Governor Giarod. Indignant. “I hardly think—”

  “Everything necessitates its opposite,” I said, cutting her off. “How can you be civilized if there is no uncivilized?” Civilized. Radchaai. The word was the same. “If it did not benefit someone, somehow, there’d be plumbing here, and lights, and doors that worked, and medics who would come for an emergency.” Before the system governor could do more than blink in response, I turned to the tea shop proprietor, still standing in her doorway. “Who sent for me?”

  “Sirix,” she said. “And see what it got her.”

  “Citizen,” began Captain Hetnys, stern and indignant.

  “Be silent, Captain.” My tone was even, but Captain Hetnys said nothing further.

  Radchaai soldiers who touch dead bodies dispose of their impurities by means of a bath and a brief prayer—I never knew any to bathe without muttering or subvocalizing it. I didn’t, myself, but all my officers did, when I was a ship. I presumed civilian medics availed themselves of something similar.

  That bath and that prayer sufficed, for anything short of making temple offerings. But with most Radchaai civilians, near contact with death was entirely another matter.

  If I had been in a slightly more spiteful mood I would have gone deliberately around the small makeshift concourse, indeed around this entire level of the Undergarden, touching things and smearing blood so that what priests came would be forced to spend days on it. But I had never noticed that anyone profited from needless spite, and besides I suspected that the entire Undergarden was already in a dire state, as far as ritual uncleanness went. If Medical never came here, others had certainly died here before, and if priests would not come, then that impurity had certainly lingered. Assuming one subscribed to such beliefs, in any event. The Ychana probably didn’t. Just one more reason to consider them foreign and not worth basic amenities every Radchaai supposedly took for granted.

  A senior priest arrived, accompanied by two assistants. She stopped two meters from Translator Dlique’s corpse in its puddle of blood, and stood staring at it and us with wide-eyed horror.

  “How do they dispose of bodies here?” I asked no one in particular.

  Governor Giarod answered. “They drag them into the corridors around the Undergarden and leave them.”

  “Disgusting,” muttered Captain Hetnys.

  “What else are they supposed to do?” I asked. “There’s no facility here for dealing with dead bodies. Medical doesn’t come here, and neither do priests.” I looked at the senior priest. “Am I right?”

  “No one is supposed to be here, Fleet Captain,” she replied primly, and cast a glance at the governor.

  “Indeed.” I turned to Kalr Five, who had returned with the priests. “This suspension pod is functional?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then Captain Hetnys and I will put the translator in it. Then you”—indicating the priests with a gesture that my barehandedness made offensive—“will do what is necessary.”

  Captain Hetnys and I spent twenty minutes washing in blessed water, saying prayers, and being sprinkled with salt and fumigated with three kinds of incense. It did not dispense with all of our contamination, only mitigated it so that we could walk through corridors or be in a room without anyone needing to call a priest. The soldier’s bath and prayer would have done as well. Better, in fact, strictly speaking, but it would not have satisfied most of the residents of Athoek Station.

  “If I go into full, traditional mourning,” Governor Giarod pointed out, when that was finished, and Captain Hetnys and I were dressed in clean clothes, “I won’t be able to go into my office for two weeks. The same goes for the rest of Administration. I agree, though, Fleet Captain, someone should.” As the rite had gone on, she had lost the harried expression she’d arrived with, and now seemed quite calm.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “you’ll all have to be lesser cousins. Captain Hetnys and I will act as immediate family.” Captain Hetnys looked none too pleased about that but was not in any position to protest. I dispatched Kalr Five to bring a razor so that Captain Hetnys and I could shave our heads for the funeral, and also to see a jeweler about memorial tokens.

  “Now,” I said to Governor Giarod, when Five was away and I’d sent Captain Hetnys to my quarters to prepare for the fast, “I need to know about Translator Dlique.”

  “Fleet Captain, I hardly think this is the best place…”

  “I can’t go to your office as I am.” Not so obviously just after a death that put me in full mourning, when I should be fasting at home. The impropriety would be obvious, and this funeral had to be absolutely, utterly proper. “And there’s no one near.” The tea seller was inside her shop, out of view. The priests had fled as soon as they thought they could. The Sword of Atagaris ancillaries had left the Undergarden at my order. My two Mercy of Kalrs, standing nearby, didn’t count. “And keeping things secret hasn’t been a very good choice so far.”

  Governor Giarod gestured rueful resignation. “She arrived with the first wave of rerouted ships.” The ships that neighboring systems had sent here either in the hope that they could find a different route to their original destinations, now the gates they needed to traverse were down, or because their own facilities were overwhelmed. “Just her, in a tiny little one-person courier barely the size of a shuttle. I’m not sure how it could even carry as much air as she needed for the trip she said she was making. And the timing was just…” She gestured her frustration. “I couldn’t send to the palace for advice. I cast omens. Privately. The results were disturbing.”

  “Of course.” No Radchaai was immune to the suspicion of coincidence. Nothing happened by pure accident, no matter how small. Every event, therefore, was potentially a sign of God’s intentions. Unusual coincidences could only be a particularly pointed divine message. “I understand your apprehension. I even, to a certain extent, understand your wanting to confine the translator and conceal her presence from most station residents. None of that troubles me. What does trouble me is your failure to mention this alarming and potentially dangerous situation to me.”

  Governor Giarod sighed. “Fleet Captain, I hear things. There’s very little that’s said on this station—and, frankly, most of the rest of the system—that I don’t eventually become aware of. Ever since I took this office I’ve heard whispers about corruption from outside the Radch.”

  “I’m not surprised.” It was a perennial complaint, that transportees from annexed worlds, and newly made citizens, brought uncivilized customs and attitudes that would undermine true civilization. I’d been hearing it myself for as long as I’d been alive—some two thousand years. The situation in the Undergarden would only add to those whispers, I was sure.

  “Recently,” said Governor Giarod, with a rueful smile, “Captain Hetnys has suggested that the Presger have been infiltrating high offices with the aim of destroying us. Presger translators being more or less indistinguishable from actual humans, and the Translators Office being in such frequent and close contact with them.”

  “Governor, did you actually hold any conversations with Translator Dlique?”

  She gestured frustration. “I know what you intend to say, Fleet Captain. But then again, she apparently left a locked and guarded room in the governor’s residence with no one the wiser, obtained clothes, and walked freely around this station without Station being aware of it. Yes, talking with her could be downright peculiar, and I’d never have mistaken her for a citizen. But she was clearly capable of a great deal more than she let on to us
. Some of it rather frightening. And I had never thought the rumors were credible, that the Presger, who had left us alone since the treaty, who were so alien, would concern themselves with our affairs, when they never had before. But then Translator Dlique arrives so soon after gates start to go down, and we lose contact with Omaugh Palace, and…”

  “And Captain Hetnys spoke of Presger infiltration of high offices. Of the highest office. And here I am, a cousin of Anaander Mianaai, and arriving with a story about the Lord of the Radch fighting with herself over the future of the Radch, and an official record that clearly did not match what I actually was. And suddenly you had trouble dismissing the previously incredible whispers about the Presger.”

  “Just so.”

  “Governor, do we agree that no matter what is happening elsewhere, the only thing it is possible or appropriate for us to do is secure the safety of the residents of this system? Whether there is a division within the Lord of Mianaai or not, that would be the only reasonable order you would expect from her?”

  Governor Giarod thought about that for six seconds. “Yes. Yes, you’re right. Except, Fleet Captain, if we have to buy medical supplies, that may well mean dealing with outside sources. Like the Presger.”

  “You see,” I said, very, very evenly, “why it wasn’t a particularly good idea to conceal Translator Dlique from me.” She gestured acquiescence. “You’re not a fool. Or I didn’t think you were. I admit my discovery of Translator Dlique’s presence has somewhat undermined my assurance on that score.” She said nothing. “Now, before I officially begin the fast, there’s other business that needs to be taken care of. I need to speak to Station Administrator Celar.”

  “About the Undergarden?” Governor Giarod guessed.