A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  Liked it, at least, until the cargo barge she’d paid an extortionate price to ride on for eleven uncomfortable, chilly hours docked at the bottom point of one of those spokes and began to unload its crates of—well, whatever was in them was labeled in Verashk-Talay, and thus Three Seagrass wasn’t sure if she was remembering the script for “fish” correctly or not. Freeze-dried fish? Fish powder? Who could need this many crates of fish powder, even out here on a planetless planet made of metal? She’d unloaded herself along with the crates, still in her Esker-1 jumpsuit, and a tall barbarian with an enormous forehead had immediately grabbed her, shoved her up against a wall, and demanded some information in Mahit’s very syllabic and unpronounceable language. Three Seagrass didn’t know what information, and also the wall was metal and hurt to be shoved into, and the cargo-barge engineer took it upon herself to stand around unhelpfully, emitting I told you so in every gesture.

  Maybe she should have worn the special-envoy outfit.

  “I’m Envoy Three Seagrass of the Teixcalaanli Information Ministry,” she said, in her own language, loudly, “and you’re committing a diplomatic offense. Unhand me.”

  The barbarian apparently knew Teixcalaanli. He unhanded her. And then he pressed some button on a flat screen he carried instead of a cloudhook, and a rather loud alarm began to go off: a bright noise, three tones repeated, like the start of a song, if the song was being played in a noisecore club in Belltown Six.

  “You’re who?” asked the cargo-barge engineer.

  Three Seagrass waved a hand at her ears. Can’t hear you, someone’s decided to set off an alarm, also that is a terrible question all considered.

  “I brought what here?” asked the cargo-barge captain, which was insulting. Three Seagrass was a person, not a what. She shrugged. Smiled, Teixcalaanli wide-eyed. Made sure she had control of her luggage, while the barbarian who had grabbed her said, “Don’t move,” in quite passable Teixcalaanli. She didn’t move.

  (Her heart was in her throat. If the alarm went off for much longer, she might actually get scared. Being thrown in jail on Lsel Station would be an abrogation of her duties as an envoy, not to mention that she’d never been in jail unless that terrible few hours trapped in the Ministry during the insurrection counted—she wasn’t supposed to have come here at all—)

  There was a commotion at the other end of the hangar. The barbarian who’d set up the alarm had summoned some more barbarians with it, it seemed like—important ones, for how the attention of all the other Stationers working to unload this barge and the other newly arrived ships had rotated their attention toward them. Three Seagrass could read the feel of the room, even when she was scared, even when it was so loud—that bit of her training hadn’t deserted her, even outside the Empire amongst strangers. One of the newcomers waved an arm, and the alarm silenced itself.

  Three Seagrass exhaled hard into the quiet. Shut her eyes for a quarter second, squeezed the lids together until she saw phosphenes, rolled her shoulders back. Thought, Here we go, then, time to talk my way to Mahit Dzmare, even if I have to tie my tongue in spirals to get through to these Stationers. Opened her eyes again.

  And found Mahit herself standing in front of her, flanked by an old man and a middle-aged woman who looked like a hawk.

  Mahit looked awful, and also rested. Still tall as ever, spare-boned and olive-pale, with the same curly hair—longer now, tendrils down the back of her neck and framing her face, brushing her cheekbones and making them even sharper, as sharp as her nose was. She no longer seemed like a strong shove would knock her sideways, sleepless and shaken; instead she looked surprised, and angry, and faintly sick to her stomach. My barbarian, Three Seagrass thought, which was—oh, inopportune in its fondness, entirely.

  “Hello,” she said to Mahit, and tried smiling like a Stationer again.

  “What are you doing here?” Mahit asked her, and it was very nice to have someone speak her own language so gracefully. “Three Seagrass, I was under the impression you were an Undersecretary now, not in the habit of being smuggled cargo—”

  “You know her,” said the hawk-faced woman. It seemed very like an accusation. Of course Mahit would be in some kind of political mess; she attracted them. Three Seagrass was well aware of that, from direct experience.

  “This is the asekreta Three Seagrass,” Mahit began, and Three Seagrass found herself utterly, peculiarly delighted to be introduced. It was like they’d reversed roles, liaison and barbarian inverted, and hadn’t they just, she was on Mahit’s planet—station—now, wasn’t she? “Patrician first-class, Third Undersecretary to the Teixcalaanli Minister for Information. My former cultural liaison.”

  “Most interesting job I’ll ever have, being your cultural liaison,” Three Seagrass added, thinking, Except perhaps this one I’m doing now. She bowed over her fingertips at the strange barbarians. “You have my advantage; Mahit, if you would be so kind as to introduce your—companions?”

  Diplomacy was a lovely refuge. There were rituals for it, and none of them involved being arrested. Usually.

  Mahit’s expression had gone from faintly ill to a mix of chagrin and pleasure. She was so expressive. All Stationers seemed to be: the other two that Mahit had come in with looked positively scheming, observant and attentive and not displeased so much as—anticipatory.

  Mahit said, “You are quite honored, Three Seagrass; these are two members of our governing Council. Darj Tarats, the Councilor for the Miners”—she gestured to the old thin man to her right—“and Dekakel Onchu, the Councilor for the Pilots. I believe you are Councilor Onchu’s problem, as you’re in her hangar. Illegally.”

  Three Seagrass asked, with as much apology as she could muster, “Councilors. Do you understand Teixcalaanli?” (Really, she needed to learn Stationer properly, more than the amateur level of vocabulary she currently had, even if Mahit’s language had noises in it that a civilized tongue disliked.)

  The hawk-faced woman, Onchu, nodded. Just once. She hadn’t said a word yet. She didn’t need to; everything about her demanded Three Seagrass justify herself posthaste or be ejected out the nearest airlock, of which there were two in direct line of sight.

  “My deepest apologies for the unorthodox method of my arrival,” Three Seagrass went on, “but I needed to come to Lsel Station with absolute speed, and there was no way to circumvent the sublight travel time aside from traveling through the Anhamemat Gate instead of the usual one. I do understand that I may have inadvertently violated the treaties between our two peoples by not announcing my intentions, but trust me, I am not here in secret or for purposes that would damage our relations further.”

  Councilor Onchu’s eyebrows were as expressive as the rest of her. They’d climbed nearly to where her hairline would have been if she hadn’t shaved her head bald. “What are you here for, then?” she asked. Her Teixcalaanli was more than passable. “What requires absolute speed? And why were we not informed of a situation that would cause you to choose this method of coming into our territory, Undersecretary?”

  Some things had been easier when she was simply an asekreta. People seemed to expect Undersecretaries of any variety to have staff, and press releases over the newsfeeds, and probably to file their intersystem travel plans ahead of time.

  “I need,” said Three Seagrass, figuring that clarity was the simpler part of valor, “to borrow the Ambassador.” She gestured at Mahit, who had gone Teixcalaanli-still around the eyes. “She is still the Ambassador, is she not?”

  * * *

  Once he’d sealed the door to his bedroom shut behind him, Eight Antidote could pretend that he had some privacy. He knew better: there were two camera-eyes in here that he was aware of, and another one in the bathroom, discreetly pointed at the window rather than either the shower or the toilet. (That one was to look for intruders and people who might want to kidnap an imperial heir, not for watching the imperial heir wash himself. He hoped. Even so, he’d always showered with his back to the window and his genit
als facing the corner of the shower stall.) But shutting the door made him feel alone.

  Eight Antidote told his holoprojector to cue up an episode of Dawn with Encroaching Clouds. It was a serial drama with an absolutely enormous costume budget and a set that was partially built out of a real historical warship, a museum piece from four hundred years ago, the same time as when the story took place. There’d been special permission from the War Ministry for using it, during the filming. The current episode he was watching was from the fifth season of six. The fifth season was called Sunlight Dissolves Tendrils of Haze, and it was the part of the story where the Emperor Two Sunspot—having faced down the first-contact negotiation with the Ebrekti and returned through the jumpgate she’d fled through, only to reencounter on the other side her former ezuazuacat, the attempted usurper Eleven Cloud—began a yearlong campaign of attrition against the usurper’s legionary ships. It was Eight Antidote’s favorite part, or at least it had been before the whole insurrection and usurpation last year. Now it was harder to watch, but it made him—feel nervous, and excited, and interested, and a little awful.

  Which was how he felt anyway, after talking to the Emperor herself about Nine Hibiscus on Kauraan and the new war, so it worked out.

  Eleven Cloud, or the actress playing her, was in the middle of having her Fleet Captains reaffirm their vows of loyalty to her and their acclamation of her as Emperor. Which of course meant she couldn’t just surrender to Two Sunspot, even though they’d grown up together and loved each other. It was a very dramatic episode, with flashback sections where Eleven Cloud and Two Sunspot were in bed together in Palace-Earth, before everything went wrong between them. The sex was pretty graphic. Eight Antidote knew that kids his age probably weren’t supposed to watch Dawn with Encroaching Clouds, there was a no-sex-and-less-blood version of the story of Two Sunspot and Eleven Cloud called Glass Key, which was labeled as appropriate for crèche-school use, but the writing in it was awful.

  Also Eight Antidote had never had any restrictions on his media accesses. He’d watched a lot of people have sex on holoproj. It seemed messy and also made people do stupid things afterward.

  Probably the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus hadn’t gotten stuck with leading an unwinnable war because of sex, though. It looked more like politics to Eight Antidote, and everyone had politics, even if only some people had sex. He kept thinking about what the Emperor had said: that Nine Hibiscus might be good enough to stay alive. Which was so different from what Eleven Laurel seemed to want him to think—that there was something so dangerous about her, and her people’s loyalty to her, that it was better if she died nobly.

  Well, if she died nobly, nothing like what happened to Eleven Cloud could happen to her, and to Teixcalaan through her. Her loyal legions couldn’t convince her to become Emperor if she wasn’t there to convince.

  It seemed like such a waste to him, though. To let someone who could come up with how to find a victory on Kauraan just—die, because of what might happen. Not everything was like it had been four hundred years ago. Nineteen Adze didn’t even know Nine Hibiscus, not really, Eight Antidote didn’t think they’d met more than one time in person.

  Not everything was like a holodrama, though, either. Even if the holodrama was a visual version of a novel that was a version of an epic poem that still got sung at concerts in the palace. Some things were new, and also recent. Like the former yaotlek One Lightning, and his loyalist legions, and how Eight Antidote’s ancestor-the-Emperor had died. Maybe that was part of the answer. Not letting anyone who had a chance of being like One Lightning close enough to know, or like, or even stick around long enough to think maybe they should be Emperor instead of Nineteen Adze.

  Instead of him, too. He didn’t want to think about that.

  (Sometimes, when he felt really awful and interested at the same time, when he was already nauseous and unhappy, he would pull up the newsfeeds from the day of the riots and look at pictures of Six Direction dying. He always wondered if he’d look like that, when he was old, when he was dying. That same expression. Probably. It was like seeing the future.)

  Next time he went to see Eleven Laurel, he decided, he was going to find out how the war was going, for real.

  * * *

  It wasn’t, Three Seagrass thought, the worst place she and Mahit had sat down together. That was probably the bunker underneath the palace, where they’d watched Six Direction die on live newsfeed. (Or maybe not: that had also been when they’d ended up kissing. Even if Three Seagrass had been about to cry the whole time that had been happening, and had almost certainly ruined the whole experience because of it. It had only been that one time. If Mahit wasn’t going to mention that kissing had happened, she certainly wasn’t either.)

  Mahit hadn’t mentioned much, yet. Just extracted her from both the utter disaster of Lsel Station customs and the clutches of not one, but two high government officials, after she’d gone and demanded Mahit come with her. So far, she’d come with Mahit instead. They’d walked through the hangar and out into the deck—so many Stationers, it was fascinating, and most of them ignoring her very pointedly—and Mahit had unerringly steered her through a maze of corridors until they’d arrived at a tiny room. A pod, really, hanging in a rack like a two-person-sized seed, the only thing that could grow from a metal world like this Station—with curved walls and curved couches inside to match. Mahit had keyed it open with her infopad, and it had descended from its row of other, identical pods and opened up for them. Three Seagrass had looked over Mahit’s shoulder while she was calling it (they kept standing close to each other, Three Seagrass was just used to it from back in the City, or at least she had been, and it was simple to pick up the habit again, stand at Mahit’s left shoulder like she belonged there), and thought that the transaction was a financial one.

  “You have rent-an-offices on the Station?” she asked, brightly, when they were inside. The couches were a pale grey-blue, one on each wall. There was a table between them. Three Seagrass rested her elbows on it—cold metal—and wished for her Information Ministry jackets, still safely folded inside her luggage.

  “They’re efficient,” Mahit told her, “and use-fungible. Also I can’t take you off this deck. You’re not really here.”

  “I really did come to get you, though. I’m here enough for that.”

  Mahit looked at her for a moment, sufficiently long to make Three Seagrass want to turn away. Instead she widened her eyes and propped her chin in her hands and made herself wait.

  Finally, Mahit said, “Did you come? Or did Nineteen Adze send you?”

  Her barbarian always did ask the clever questions.

  “I came,” Three Seagrass said. “I’m really not meant to be here at all. But it’s on the way to where I’m going, and I did come here for you. Her Brilliance—well, I imagine she knows exactly where I ended up, but it was my idea.”

  “She knows where most people end up,” Mahit said.

  “She’s the Emperor,” Three Seagrass agreed. “And also she’s herself, so, yes. I should tell you, she sent Five Agate to bother me in a spaceport bar before I left, and I hadn’t filed a single travel plan with the City. She found me anyhow.”

  “Five Agate, really. I’m trying to imagine her in a spaceport bar.”

  “She wanted me to swear a blood oath that I wasn’t suborned by one of the Undersecretaries of the War Ministry, it wasn’t incongruous at all, she sort of—slots into whatever setting—”

  Mahit had reached across the table, and now her fingertips were touching the skin just above Three Seagrass’s right elbow. Warm fingertips. “Reed,” she said—and Three Seagrass felt like a spike had gone right through her throat, no one called her that anymore, Mahit never had before now, but oh, oh—“Reed, are you in the sort of trouble you had to run away from?”

  She wished she was. If she was, the next part of this story would be where the imperial agent and the barbarian stole a small fighter-ship and went off through the nearest jumpgate
into the black, together. She’d always liked those sorts of poems, even if they invariably ended in tragedy.

  She covered Mahit’s hand with her own. “No. I’m fine. I don’t even know Undersecretary Eleven Laurel. I’m supposed to go to war, that’s all. And talk to aliens. Come with me. You’re the best at talking to aliens of anyone I know.”

  “That’s because you Teixcalaanlitzlim insist on thinking that I’m the alien,” Mahit said, but so very gently. Three Seagrass didn’t think she was behaving in a way that would need gentleness, not from Mahit Dzmare, but quite honestly she couldn’t be sure; Mahit surprised her all the time, which was also why she wanted to take her to the front.

  “You’re only almost an alien,” she told her, firmly. “Wouldn’t you like to meet some real ones? And try to understand them faster than the Ministry of War can shoot them down?”

  Mahit didn’t answer her questions, or say yes—or even say no. She said, “First explain why it’s you going to war. And wearing that.”

  At least she hadn’t moved her hand from under Three Seagrass’s. “… It’s a very expensive jumpsuit,” she said.

  “Are you in disguise?”

  “Not currently!”

  Mahit actually laughed, and Three Seagrass found herself smirking at her. This, this was what she had missed. The dizzying speed of events, the hilarious and absurd questions that nevertheless needed to be asked. She would never have had this in her office in the Ministry.

  “I needed to get here fast, that’s all,” she explained. “That’s why I came through the wrong gate. And several of the stops along the way were—easier if I wasn’t me. Briefly. But you should see my special envoy uniforms. I could have one made up for you, if you weren’t so tall.” She paused. Squeezed Mahit’s hand, knowing very well that she was structuring this conversation, offering and enticing, the sort of manipulation she really oughtn’t be doing to someone she wanted to trust and be trusted by in turn. But she also wanted her to say yes. Needed her to, now that she’d come all this way. “I mean. If you’re willing to serve as Ambassador again. Ambassador, and special political agent seconded to the Tenth Legion, via the Information Ministry.”