“Of the Third Palm?” she asked, just to make sure. (Of course the Third Palm; the passed-over military spymaster. The one the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus was for some reason avoiding, preferring to go through Information for her diplomats.)
“If Nineteen Adze wanted your literary opinions, she’d send a better messenger than me,” Five Agate said, dust-dry. “I hate that poet. Yes, the Undersecretary. Do you know him?”
“… I’ve met him,” Three Seagrass said. “We haven’t ever spoken personally. Do you—or Her Brilliance—want my professional opinion of him? The Information Ministry’s opinion? Because if you do, I really can’t have this conversation in a spaceport bar.”
Five Agate shook her head, a dismissal—not a professional query, then. “Would you swear on the sacrifice of your blood that you’re telling the truth, Envoy? You’ve never spoken to Eleven Laurel personally.”
A professional query would have been less disturbing. This was a darker thing: that an ezuazuacat would ask her for her blood in a sacrifice bowl as a promise that she didn’t have some prior relationship with the Third Undersecretary of War made Three Seagrass feel as if she’d fallen, vertiginous, back three months in time. Back to when all of Teixcalaan was convulsed in succession-crisis and almost-civil-war, death and blood, and she’d watched the old Emperor die on full broadcast, poured out in a sun temple like a spilled glass of water, red everywhere. The noodles she’d eaten felt leaden in her stomach.
“I would swear,” she said. “Here, or wherever you and Her Brilliance would like. I don’t know him, I’ve never spoken to him personally.” She held out her hand, palm up. No scars there, not yet. She’d never sworn an oath large enough to scar. Even the one she’d sworn two months ago, with Mahit and Nineteen Adze, had healed to invisibility. The body didn’t care about the size of the promise, only the size of the cut.
“No need,” said Five Agate. “Your promise is enough. Do be careful out there on the front lines, Three Seagrass. Her Brilliance thinks well of you, and it’s frustrating for the rest of us when she loses someone she likes.”
“How frightening,” Three Seagrass said, before she could stop herself. “I’m honored?”
“Go catch your ship,” said Five Agate. “The Flower Weave, yes? You’ve got twenty minutes. I’d run for it. Don’t worry about the check. It’s on the government.”
They must have been watching her the whole time, ever since she’d answered the yaotlek’s request. The City’s camera-eyes, Nineteen Adze’s favorite tools. They always had been, and now that she was Emperor, she’d have every access—the algorithms and the machinery, the Sunlit Three Seagrass had passed coming into the spaceport, who shared a kind of access to the algorithms that Three Seagrass never wanted to think about too closely. Every eye of them the same—and every eye opening to the Emperor Herself. It almost felt benevolent. Almost. If Three Seagrass worked at feeling like she was being protected, not seen.
And had the Emperor wondered, seeing her impulsive decision, if she’d somehow—been suborned by Eleven Laurel? What a complex idea. She’d have to think about it on the trip. She’d have time. Not much, but maybe enough. The Ministry of War was one of the barely-patched-up parts of government—still reeling from the former Minister Nine Propulsion’s ever-so-convenient early retirement. Three Seagrass had immediately understood that move as being a way for Nine Propulsion to get out of the City with her reputation intact, before she could be dismissed by a new Emperor who knew she’d supported an insurrectionist general when push came to shove—
—and most of the War Undersecretaries had turned over with her, replaced by the new Minister’s people … except for Eleven Laurel. Perhaps it was as simple as that.
Nothing was as simple as that.
“Thank you,” she said to Five Agate. “For the warning. And covering the bill.”
Then she ran for it before anyone else could stop her.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Teixcalaan, once we were in the First Emperor’s hands and flying out into the black, learning jumpgates as we went, carrying with us our seeds of civilization like sacrifice-blood welling from the palms of those first planet-breakers—once the Empire was the Empire, extending throughout the universe from jumpgate to jumpgate? Our Emperors were soldiers, and still are, but an empire that holds a galaxy-net of stars in its teeth learns also to speak our poetry in a thousand languages. A soldier-emperor might be a soldier on the field of negotiation, and numbered thus amongst our greatest yaotlekim. For in the latter centuries, those that draw close to this present time, Teixcalaan rules as much through words as through deeds. So it was with the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare, whose life began in the City, second crèche-child of her ancestor, the Emperor One Lapis’s beloved advisor Twelve Sunrise …
—The Secret History of the Emperors, 18th edition, abridged for crèche-school use
* * *
[…] having considered the latest status report on the state of the Station’s evacuation procedures, including the level of community training on rapid lifeboat deployment, supply lines, and the capacity of the mining outposts to shelter refugees, I suggest that we consider what I would previously have dismissed as fearmongering: if we are displaced permanently, how would we rebuild a Station of this size before we ran out of resources to support thirty thousand in diaspora? And where would we build, if we are fleeing a conflict? The following memo begins to outline our deficiencies …
—internal research memorandum addressed to the Councilor for Hydroponics, composed by Life Support Analyst III Ajakts Kerakel and team, 67.1.1-19A (Teixcalaanli reckoning)
ALL right, Mahit said to her imago, a direct query like gritting her teeth inside her mind, what don’t I know about Darj Tarats that I need to know?
She’d retreated to her residence pod from the hangar bay. It was quiet in here, curved and soothing-smooth, and in the intimate privacy of whatever internal landscape an imago and successor shared—she thought of it as a room sometimes, a room with unexpected mirrors—she discovered without much regret that this conversation was easier to have in Teixcalaanli.
Not that it was easy to have. Yskandr was chimerical, slippery; an imago wasn’t really a separate person, but sometimes, sometimes Mahit felt like she was sharing herself with a possessing, secretive alien. Right now even the direct question didn’t do her much good: there was no answering Yskandr-voice, no sense of partnership, just a flicker of visual memory (hands on a table, grey-brown, the veins prominent right up to the knuckle, and the reflection of stars through a Station window) which dissolved if she tried to look at it closely. Imago-memory wasn’t always accessible; it was associational at best, not like her own living memories. She couldn’t reach back into what Yskandr remembered and pull up Darj Tarats like a holofilm. The only transfers which worked like that were skill transfers. Language, decorum. How she could do partial differential equations now, because Yskandr had known how. Partial differential equations, and matrix algebra, and ciphers based in both.
But if he didn’t want to help her—and oh, every time he went silent she was afraid, so desperately afraid of being alone and broken again, it was a horrible worm at the core of her, how afraid she was that it had never been sabotage at all, that she was merely broken, merely somehow corrosive to her imago, never suitable, not a rightful inheritor for any memory—
You could stop scaring me, also.
Mahit was not going to let him bait her into enjoying herself, taking pleasure in the wry and vicious cast of his humor (What did you do, Yskandr? Oh, sedition, probably, fragment-memory, her first hour on Teixcalaanli soil, when she’d only had the edges of how wrong being the Lsel Ambassador could go), not when she really, really needed him to stop fuc
king around and give her what information he had.
Get on with it, Yskandr. Darj Tarats, Councilor for the Miners, he who rescued us and this Station by sending me coordinates of ship-destroying aliens to feed to Teixcalaan in exchange for our freedom. Your patron, according to absolutely everyone, including you. Spill. Or at least let me see.
I know. Let me see.
And the mirrored room that was her mind unfolded like a flower, floating in some jeweled pool in Palace-East, blue petals like drowning.
Not a cohesive string of memory—not the being-Yskandr she’d experienced in flashes, under sedation and a laser-knife, when she’d had her damaged imago-machine replaced with one carrying an older version of the same imago. Not narrative at all, but a way of seeing. A way of knowing a man for a long time. What a distant, antagonistic friendship was like, conducted over interplanetary distances. They’d written letters, Yskandr Aghavn and Darj Tarats had—back and forth for twenty years, in the same cipher Tarats had used to send her the coordinates of the alien incursion. A long time to talk into the dark at someone you didn’t like—
Yskandr had liked him at the moment of receiving a new letter, liked him in the anticipation of being challenged and surprised and having to figure out how to push back, keep what he himself intended in Teixcalaan unobserved. Liked, too, the brazenness of Darj Tarats’s own planning, the equality-in-revolutionary-thought he’d found in that long, slow epistolary. Liked being just useful enough to his patron back on Lsel to be part of his dream of a future for Teixcalaan as well as Yskandr’s own—
Mahit still wasn’t getting to the heart of it. The elision, the blank. The drowning-blue unfolding that felt like terror and incomprehensibility and was probably just Yskandr not wanting to show her what Darj Tarats’s imagined future was, like he hadn’t wanted to show her how he’d loved the Emperor Six Direction with his mind and his body and eventually his loyalty to Lsel. All of that, all of him, given over. She leaned—a kind of internal pressure, like trying to remember the cadence of a poem, the stroke order of a glyph she’d only seen once, the specific word in Teixcalaanli for ibis, that long-legged bird that dipped its narrow feet through the pools of Palace-East, disturbing the lotuses, that same blue—
The spike of feeling down her ulnar nerves wasn’t numbness or electric fire but actual pain. Idiopathic, she thought, biting back a hurt little noise, idiopathic and psychosomatic, and it’s probably just going to get worse, every time something goes wrong with us. Yskandr—
Her hands felt like lumps that burned, fingerless, as if pain had rendered them invisible, insensible.
Blue, in a glass. Alcohol with a faint blue tint—
You know I pushed for you to be Ambassador because I knew you’d make Teixcalaan need you, trust you, love you and through you, us, Tarats had written, but perhaps you never managed to alight on why I would want such a hideous thing as imperial desire focused on our Station or on its representative. But what better way to draw a monstrous thing to its death than to use its functions against itself? Teixcalaan wants; its trust is rooted in wanting; it is in this way you and I will destroy it.
The words were too clear to be organic memory—they were grooved in, words that Yskandr had repeated and reread, thought about so often that they’d become part of his internal narrative. Whether they were Tarats’s actual words almost didn’t matter. They were the story that Yskandr had told himself, remembered being true; they were scent-linked, color-linked, and they were her memory now too, as much true for her as they were for her imago, live memory carried over on sense and image.
Very carefully, like tonguing a wound, Mahit let herself wonder which part of those words had been what made Yskandr recoil away from them and drop his glass of gin. To draw a monstrous thing to its death was what had hooked in her like a barb in her lip, a phrase that might tear.
To hear that there was nothing of how you loved one another that was clean.
Yskandr murmured.
Mahit imagined it, civilization—humanity—blooming like tiny flowers, caught between mouths in the dark, lips that kissed and talked and built. It was a gorgeous phrase, in Teixcalaanli. You might have been a poet, if you hadn’t died—
That stung. She smeared tears out of her eyes (and when had she started crying?) with the back of one numb, painful hand. It felt like using a mitten. It also hurt less than it had before, which was some bare comfort. She tried to breathe slowly, an even flow of oxygen.
Did you know? she asked, after a long while. Did you at least suspect, that the Councilor for the Miners was using you as bait to draw Teixcalaan into the war the Empire is fighting now? You, and the whole Station right along with you?
Mahit didn’t get a straight answer; she got the emotional equivalent of a flinch, a squirming sense of avoidance, of needing to think of something else. Got that, and took it for yes, and also for and I wished I hadn’t understood. The silence in her pod felt hollow, oppressively bleak. She had helped to start that war, out of desperation and need: doing exactly what Tarats had always wanted Yskandr to do, what he’d always refused. Squirming guilt rose up in her stomach. No wonder Yskandr hadn’t wanted to share this with her. No wonder her hands hurt so badly.
Resigned, from a very long distance away:
Mahit tried to imagine it herself: Lsel Station, if the Teixcalaanli Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare had never found a jumpgate that spilled her out into this sector of space. If there had never been a historical epic written about that discovery by Pseudo-Thirteen River, if Mahit had never learned that epic in language classes and quoted it to imperial subjects to prove her erudition. She failed entirely. She wouldn’t exist. There would be no constellation of endocrine response and continuity of memory that bore a single bit of resemblance to Mahit Dzmare. The feat of imagination that Tarats was attempting was—there was no other word for it but heroic.
Like something out of a Teixcalaanli epic poem. That heroic.
Mahit laughed, a raw sound that ended in a bubbling, weepy cough, choking on her own ridiculous fluids. She couldn’t do it at all. She thought in Teixcalaanli, in imperial-style metaphor and overdetermination. She’d had this whole conversation in their language.
Deliberately, she thought in Stationer, We’re not free.
And in the same language, Yskandr agreed:
* * *
Inside Palace-Earth there were three kinds of ways to be seen. There was the normal way, where Eight Antidote was in a place with other people and they looked at him with their eyes or their cloudhooks. He was good at avoiding the normal way, if he wanted to. It helped that he’d never lived anywhere else, and most of Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze’s staff had come over from Palace-East and were still getting lost in corridors even two
months later. It also helped that he was small, and had a tunic and trousers in soft grey that eyes slid off of, in addition to all the bright gold and red and grey things that stuffed his wardrobe otherwise. He managed not being seen all the time.
But there were two other ways, and he hadn’t figured out how to disappear from them yet at all. There were the City-eyes, its cameras and locational tracking and the collective link of the Sunlit to crosscheck any errors, how the Emperor always knew exactly where he’d gone. Eight Antidote had checked his clothes for a tracking bug once, and found absolutely nothing, and felt pretty stupid afterward: locational tracking was algorithmic. He’d learned that from one of his tutors, one of the ones Minister Eight Loop sent him from the Judiciary, like an economist was the kind of present a kid would want. The City mapped him based on capturing his image and the location of his cloudhook, and predicted where he’d been when he’d dropped out of view for a minute, and it was really accurate. He’d done the math, for that same tutor. Most of it. Some of it was too hard still, kinds of equations he’d never seen.
The third way was the trickiest. The third way was being seen because of asking questions. Having someone—some adult, usually—see inside his head. And the person who was most dangerous to ask questions of (well, most likely to use those questions to figure out what Eight Antidote was thinking without him ever saying anything out loud) was the Emperor Nineteen Adze. It figured that she was definitely the person he needed to ask about the Kauraan campaign. Everybody else wouldn’t tell him the truth, or would tell him something that sounded true and was slanted away from it, like a tree growing out of the side of a building where it didn’t belong. A tree that looked like you could put your weight on its branches and swing, but if you tried, the whole wall would come down along with you and the tree instead.
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