A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  He’d never get any better at hiding his thoughts when he talked without practicing. This was definitely true and also not very comforting at all. True things weren’t, mostly. Still, it helped to think about: even if the Emperor knew why he was asking her questions, he’d learn what gave him away, and next time he’d do better. He needed to learn. He was already eleven, and some of the cadets in the Ministry of War were only fourteen and had real responsibilities; that was just three years away, and he wasn’t a cadet, he was the heir to the Empire. He might not have three years to get ready.

  The Emperor was in the Great Hall, as usual for midafternoon: she took public meetings and petitions, like Six Direction had before her, and sometimes she gave pronouncements, and once or twice a week Eight Antidote came to sit by the sun-spear throne and listen, on the Emperor’s request. Watch, she’d said. Watch who comes to ask for help, and who doesn’t. Today wasn’t one of his scheduled days. Today he slipped into the Great Hall, quiet in his grey clothes and his soft shoes, the only thing that didn’t gleam, that wasn’t patterned. The Emperor was wearing gold and white, layers of suiting, the points of her lapels echoing the points of the throne, and she was talking to some ixplanatlim wearing poppy-red, the color of doctors and medical scientists. The verse in the children’s song about the kinds of Palace employees went red for blood and for the ease of pain and had a tune that Eight Antidote wished was either less memorable or less cheerful. He wondered what the Emperor wanted to talk to medical people about, or what they had to say to her.

  She was young. Not like his ancestor-the-Emperor, who had been dying, and talked to medical ixplanatlim all the time. She shouldn’t need them. Not for a long time yet.

  He crept closer. The City-eyes had spotted him, of course, but he wasn’t trying to fool them right now; he just wanted to be quiet. He kept his back to the wall and shifted sideways between the fan-arch ribs of the roof where they met the ground. Sank down on his heels and sat cross-legged there, in a shadow. Grey like a shadow, a darker spot on the tiled floor, not really here—just here to listen.

  “—find out,” Nineteen Adze was saying. “I don’t want your supposition that this woman died in a shop fire in Belltown Two because she was carrying an incendiary device and it went off prematurely. I want your certainty, and I want to know who she was. If it was her device, or if she was carrying it for someone else, or if it wasn’t an incendiary at all but some poor unfortunate in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The ixplanatlim didn’t look happy—they glanced at each other, like they were all trying to get out of being the person who had to say something to the Emperor she didn’t want to hear. Finally, one of them—a woman, her ash-brown hair in a triple queue down her spine, dull against the bright red of her uniform—took a step forward. “We wouldn’t have come without completing the investigation,” she said, “if the dead woman hadn’t had one of those anti-imperial posters pasted over what was left of her face, the ones that were all over the City before the recent—um. Difficulties. Your Brilliance.”

  Eight Antidote could tell when Nineteen Adze was paying attention because she wanted to, instead of because she had to. She made all the air go out of a room, even a room as big as this one. Her fingers tapped on one of the arms of the throne, one-two-three-four-five, and then stilled again. “A defaced battle flag poster?” she asked.

  The ixplanatl dragged her eyes off the Emperor’s hand and back to her face. She nodded. “Plastered to her face with the same glue they’d use to stick it to a wall.”

  “Postmortem.”

  “Yes, Your Brilliance. Someone else stuck it to her corpse. Before any investigation personnel arrived.”

  “And there’s no visual record of this mysterious corpse defacer.”

  “The fire took out the nearest City-eye, and—”

  Nineteen Adze waved a hand, cutting her off. “Go to the Judiciary with this. The corpse, too—any further autopsy should be run out of their facilities,” she said. “You’ll have an appointment with the Minister of the Judiciary by the time you walk over there. Tell Eight Loop what you just told me. And Teixcalaan does appreciate your concern, and your expertise.”

  When people left the vicinity of the sun-spear throne, it was like watching starships try to break orbit—an effort. Eight Antidote had never felt that, that pull. It was probably because he belonged here, and they didn’t.

  “You can come out of the shadows now, Eight Antidote,” said the Emperor, and Eight Antidote sighed.

  It would be so nice if Nineteen Adze were less good at noticing. But that would make her a less good Emperor, too, according to every poem he knew: Emperors saw the whole of Teixcalaan, all at once, so why wouldn’t they see one eleven-year-old kid in a corner? He got up and came over to the throne, thinking, When I’m Emperor, will I see too? and then deciding not to worry about that right this minute. It wasn’t the question he wanted to ask.

  Neither was “Did someone get murdered?” but that was what came out of his mouth first off.

  “Unfortunately people get murdered all the time,” said the Emperor, which was condescending—Eight Antidote knew that; he wasn’t a baby.

  “Most murders don’t have three medical examiners talking to the Emperor about them,” he said.

  “True,” that Emperor told him, her eyes wide-smiling, and Eight Antidote didn’t trust her, really, didn’t know her, really, but his ancestor-the-Emperor had loved her enough to make sure she ended up on the sun-spear throne, and that was something to remember when her smiling at him made him feel seen in the way that he wanted to be seen. “Come sit, little spy, since you’ve been listening already.” She patted the wide arm of the throne.

  Little spy wasn’t half as nice as Cure, but it was more honest. Eight Antidote perched on the throne arm, like a palace-hummer alighting, comfortable—it was more than wide enough for him—but poised to leave at any moment. When he was sitting there, he looked at Her Brilliance and waited, keeping his face as expressionless as he could manage.

  “… You look so much like him, it’s almost reassuring that you spend half your time hiding in shadows,” said the Emperor, and Eight Antidote felt a rush of satisfaction at having made her react to him. He knew he looked like Six Direction. Knew that he’d only look more like his dead ancestor the older he got, and if he tilted his head just a little to the right, and lifted his chin and his eyebrows—

  —Nineteen Adze pulled back from him a good inch before she caught herself doing it. Interesting.

  “My ancestor-the-Emperor would have had a difficult time not being seen,” he said. “You do, too. It is a very large throne.”

  “It is a very large empire, little spy,” said Nineteen Adze, and sank back into that throne. Eight Antidote wondered if it was comfortable if your legs were long enough; it certainly wasn’t comfortable when your legs were eleven-year-old size, like his. He’d tried it out. But Nineteen Adze looked so very much like she belonged in it: the corona of spearpoints like a crown behind her, metal-grey and gold. Like Six Direction had looked. Like a pilot embedded in a ship …

  “I wanted to ask you something,” he said, and knew that he was going to give away what Eleven Laurel in the Ministry of War was teaching him, if he asked his question. It wouldn’t be his secret training anymore, it would be—oh, like everything else. Just part of being him, being him inside the palace. Inside his life.

  From the depths of the throne, Nineteen Adze said, “I’ll try to answer.”

  “Why wouldn’t you be able to?”

  “Ask,” said the Emperor. “Find out.”

  Eight Antidote sighed, shoving air through his nose, curving in on himself until his elbows were on his knees, his chin in his hands, still perched on the throne arm. “Why did you pick Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus to be yaotlek, Your Brilliance?”

  “What a fascinating question. Are you thinking of spending time in the Fleet?”

  He might have been. He hadn’t thought about it out loud,
inside his head, where it could turn into a real desire, something he could ask for and not get. But—maybe. He’d be good at it. He could solve the cartograph puzzles Eleven Laurel set him, even the hard ones.

  “I’m too young,” he said.

  “In all likelihood that will change,” said Nineteen Adze, which she seemed to think was funny and Eight Antidote wasn’t very sure about. “What interests you about Nine Hibiscus, then?”

  He could lie.

  But then he wouldn’t get the answer to his question.

  “Undersecretary Eleven Laurel says you sent her out to die for Teixcalaan. As fast as possible.”

  Nineteen Adze made a noise, a click of her tongue against her teeth, considering. “Honestly,” she said, “I’d prefer she didn’t die very fast at all, if she has to die for us.”

  That wasn’t really an answer. He tried again.

  “Is it because of Kauraan? That you picked her?” Another secret given away. Eleven Laurel probably wouldn’t like him anymore, wouldn’t tell him anything important if he was just going to go tattle to the Emperor Herself.

  The Emperor was leaning up out of the throne and putting her hand on Eight Antidote’s shoulder, a warm weight. There were calluses on it. He knew the stories about her, how she’d been a soldier, how she’d met his ancestor-the-Emperor on a ground campaign, where they fought with shocksticks and projectiles. On a planet, in the dirt.

  “Yes,” she said. “But not because I thought she was too dangerous to keep alive, little spy. Because I thought she might just be dangerous enough to stay alive.”

  * * *

  By the time Three Seagrass reached her sixth commandeered passenger berth (six different ships taking her through six different jumpgates, and none of them very nice to ride in), she’d packed up her special-envoy suits in favor of an expensive, difficult-to-wear jumpsuit-overall in some black wool crepe that made her look like she had a great deal of money and a vastly different cultural background than the one she’d actually got. It exposed most of her sternum when she wasn’t wearing its matching jacket, and its matching jacket had eight zippers. She’d bought it at her fifth stopover, on Esker-1, a planet on the Western Arc she’d never been to before: full of rich import-export families, the sort that Thirty Larkspur, lately demoted to Special Advisor on Trade from the heights of attempted insurrection, had come from. Esker-1 produced trade, and also choral singing, which Three Seagrass found inexplicably overwhelming to listen to. The choral singing, not the trade. Trade was easy. It let her buy terrible wealthy-importer-family-scion jumpsuits and catch a ship off-planet that was headed someplace a member of the Information Ministry in good standing oughtn’t be, unless she was on assignment.

  Esker-1 was in a system situated squarely between three jumpgates: two full of traffic, in and out of Teixcalaanli space, and one that dumped you out near a backwater planetary system that was contested territory when some emperor bothered to contest it, but was otherwise content to be loosely attached to the Verashk-Talay Confederation … and was four days sublight travel from the back end of the Anhamemat Gate, or what Three Seagrass was almost entirely sure was the back end of the Anhamemat Gate. It was that backwater where Three Seagrass had gotten to, and she felt, vertiginously, like she really had exited the properly ordered and expected universe.

  That might be the number of jumpgates she’d been through in three days. She’d never crossed this many in this short a time, and she kept thinking about those debunked tabloid newsfeed articles from half an indiction back—the ones that said too much jumpgate travel would scramble your genetics and possibly give you cancers.

  It also might be that while she’d been off-City—had even done her mandatory stint on a distant border post, like any good asekreta cadet who wanted all the best marks on her work history before graduation—Three Seagrass had never once yet been outside of Teixcalaan entirely. Outside the world. In the places that were—otherwise. Where the stars rose and set by different rules, and no one bowed over their pressed fingertips to say hello, and too many people smiled like Mahit had: all teeth.

  The ridiculous jumpsuit helped. It let her pretend she was the sort of person who would like being here, in a dingy resource-poor spaceport full of barbarians, looking for the right ride off this shithole. Not deeper into Verashk-Talay space—thank fuck, she was terrible at their languages, she’d taken the mandatory six-month class as a cadet and forgotten everything about it as soon as she’d passed the exam. She’d been on the political specialist track, not the negotiator-with-not-currently-hostile-enough-to-bother-with governments track. Her current and regretful capacity to communicate in either Verashk or Talay was limited to asking for the location of a washroom and ordering one large beer, please, the sort of phrase that bored cadets yelled at each other gleefully in hallways.

  Right now she had ordered one large beer, please, and was trying to convince a cargo-barge engineer to shove her in along with whatever she was shipping to Stationer space. Whatever it was had to be somewhat circumspect, since this barge was headed through that back-end jumpgate she was pretty sure would spit her out right next to Lsel Station. The same jumpgate the aliens had come through, according to Mahit’s intelligence. Three Seagrass wondered if this engineer was worried about alien attacks, or being caught in a war zone. Probably not—but fear of aliens could certainly be why Three Seagrass had only been able to find this one ship headed where she needed to go.

  “I don’t care what it is you have in the crates,” she said in Teixcalaanli. “I want on your ship, that’s all.”

  The engineer was stony-faced. Not politely neutral like a Teixcalaanlitzlim, but aggressively flat. “The shipping manifest is for cargo only,” she said, shaping the syllables with deliberate care. “Cargo only. Not persons from Esker-1.”

  I’m not from Esker-1, Three Seagrass thought, with a tiny internal cascade of despair. I’m from the Ministry of Information. None of this would help her. It would make things worse. If this engineer didn’t want a wealthy trader from the Western Arc on her barge, she definitely wouldn’t want an Information Ministry agent.

  “Where I am from is not important,” she tried. “It is where I am going that matters.”

  “There are other barges. Go buy them beers.”

  There were other barges. None of them were trying this route, the skip into Stationer territory through the back end. It had taken her hours to track down this one.

  “Your barge is fastest and most direct.” Three Seagrass tried a Stationer smile, with teeth. It didn’t do much; the engineer remained unmoved. “Really, I have no idea what is in your crates, and I don’t want to know. I want you to take me through the Anhamemat Gate.”

  “And what then?” asked the engineer.

  “And then you drop me with your cargo, on Lsel Station.”

  “And you will tell the customs agents what? I think no. I think this is a bad idea, for you, and also for us.”

  Three Seagrass knew how to do this conversation as an Information agent; she knew how to do this conversation back on Esker-1, where she’d just been City Teixcalaanli and thus mysterious and interesting. The first one was the exercise of social power, and the second one was grift: being too compelling to ignore, and too slippery to hang on to. Neither was going to work here. (She’d always liked aliens. But there was a difference between liking and knowing how to talk to—and this was why she needed Mahit—)

  She had one option left, though less of it than she’d had before she’d acquired the ridiculous jumpsuit.

  She blinked, micromovements of one eye behind her cloudhook, and projected a shimmering, twisting hologram of a very large number onto the table between her and the engineer. “I think this is a less bad idea than you do,” she said, “and all I need is the address of your barge’s financial institution to show you how … Perhaps you have some debts, some refurbishing costs, that you would like not to worry about?”

  The engineer’s face moved for the first time. She wrinkle
d her nose. Three Seagrass wasn’t sure if that was distaste or interest. The silence went endlessly on. Three Seagrass suspected the engineer was talking over a private subvocal line to her captain, checking whether the amount was enough. It had better be; after this Three Seagrass was broke, and writing to the Ministry for more discretionary funds was very unlikely to produce them. Certainly not in time for it to matter. Maybe she’d be stuck on this nowhere planet forever. She’d have to improve her Verashk. Or possibly her Talay. Immersion would help—

  “We won’t be responsible for you on the Station,” the engineer said at last. “And you pay before you board. You pay right now.”

  * * *

  Darj Tarats had beaten her to the best seat at the bar. Seeing him—aged and cadaverous to Yskandr’s eyes, familiarly skeletal to her own memory, the burnt-clean shell of a man who’d spent the decades of his early working life in an asteroid mine, and then had become a politician, who had been a philosopher of ruining-empire and quiet revolution all that time—made Mahit’s stomach flip over, a quick nauseating spike, and then settle into shimmering alert. Alive to the possibility of disaster.

  She was beginning to think this was the most comfortable state for her to function in, and wasn’t that just delightful.

  She sounded like Yskandr to her own self, sometimes. More lately.

  Darj Tarats was sitting next to Dekakel Onchu, and they were both on their second-at-least glasses of vodka. Mahit was, clearly, late.

  Late, and surprised: she’d expected to find only Onchu here, at the same pilots’ bar as their first meeting; the Councilor’s suggestion, when she’d sent an electronic note saying that she had, indeed, asked her imago about Darj Tarats. Darj Tarats, who wanted the war now being raged all around, but not in, Stationer space, and was content to use Lsel as bait to draw Teixcalaan out. Darj Tarats, who Yskandr trusted more than she did, even though she’d done what he’d wanted and Yskandr never had. Mahit resolved to ignore all of the signals her endocrine system would send her for the duration of this conversation, knowing even as she made the decision that it was both impractical and likely physically impossible to accomplish.