A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Revision of aptitude requirements for further study in non-Stationer languages and literatures: high scores on pattern recognition and memory capacity are no longer sufficient in and of themselves for progress beyond the intermediate levels offered to all Lsel citizens. For promotion to the advanced courses, students should also display high aptitudes in group cohesion and social integration with both peers and adults, and have already completed a preparatory (intermediate-plus) course in Stationer history and culture—preferably the same course recommended to prospective members of the Heritage Board.

  —Aptitude and Educational Requirements Handbook for Stationers Ages 13–18, revised edition, issued by the Heritage Board of Lsel Station under the authority of Aknel Amnardbat, Councilor for Heritage

  * * *

  Your tongue is a chrysanthemum

  Because all your words are petals!

  At the heart of language is a stem

  That balances a thousand syllables.

  Add a prefix to say MINE

  Add a suffix to say WHY

  Add an infix to say WHAT

  And see how tongue becomes language!

  —Teixcalaanli rhyming grammar, prepared for crèche- students by Seventeen Frame, Information Ministry (Education Division), in common use

  MAHIT had let herself think she was going to get off-Station entirely clear if not entirely clean (never clean, getting away clean was an impossibility—Teixcalaan had taught her that, Teixcalaan and Yskandr, and now Darj Tarats was proving it to her again). She might manage to get on that shuttle Three Seagrass had called, and leap from an immediate danger into a merely probable one. She might not die under alien gunfire. Sometimes people didn’t.

  And yet, here she was, inches from the just-landed Teixcalaanli shuttle, and staring down Aknel Amnardbat herself. Who had somehow, through ill luck or profound cleverness or both, captured Three Seagrass.

  Mahit could hear her heartbeat in her ears like rushing water, too fast and too loud. She was going to faint, or she was going to break and run for the shuttle, one or the other, and Three Seagrass and Amnardbat were coming toward her like a slow and terrible wave, too large a problem to outpace. Even having Dekakel Onchu standing right next to her wouldn’t do her a bit of good—Onchu had made it perfectly clear that Mahit’s usefulness to her was over. It had ended the moment she’d decided to not immediately mention that she’d received Onchu’s secret notes to Yskandr when she’d returned to Lsel a month ago. Onchu would hand her over to Amnardbat if Amnardbat asked nicely—Pilots needed Heritage to keep approving new pilot imago-lines, since so many were being lost to the aliens out by the Anhamemat Gate. Onchu was here because she was supervising the exit of a Teixcalaanli ship from Lsel Station, and making sure it stayed gone. Not for Mahit. This little scene was all politics, and Mahit wasn’t a player here; she was a spent and useless resource to everyone but Darj Tarats, who only cared enough to let her go, not keep her safe, and to Three Seagrass—

  —who was looking at her with clear and determined and furious eyes as Amnardbat steered her across the hangar bay. With icy clarity, Mahit thought, If I run, I think they may try to kill her for a spy. And icier still: She might be a spy, and I need to get her off my Station, and me with her.

  Yskandr murmured, and she ignored him. She couldn’t think about what she’d promised Darj Tarats. Not now. Not until after this, if there was an after this which contained sufficient time to contemplate what a person promised in extremity. What a person promised when they were half letting their imago lead them into choices they would never have made before they were part of a chain of living memory.

  “Councilor,” she found herself saying, surprised by the ease of her own voice, the smooth unshaking confidence she felt none of. Her own tonality, this time, not Yskandr. All her, and yet that perfect serenity. “What an unexpected surprise; it will save me leaving a message with your secretary. I’ve been unavoidably called away and will have to postpone my uploading appointment.”

  Any minute now, Amnardbat was going to say, No, Mahit, come with me at once, and there would be Heritage security personnel emerging from the shadows like the Teixcalaanli Judiciary’s Mist agents, melting into visibility and taking her away. Any minute now, Amnardbat was going to say, See? Dzmare is compromised, she has allowed this Teixcalaanli agent into our Station, and possibly she wouldn’t even be wrong. Any minute now.

  “Where is it that you have been called away to so urgently?” asked Aknel Amnardbat, mild and colorless as distilled water.

  “I am afraid, Councilor Amnardbat,” said Three Seagrass in Teixcalaanli, “that it is my duty to reclaim the services of the Ambassador from Lsel Station to Teixcalaan.” The language felt wrong to Mahit for the first time in a long time. Out of context. Three Seagrass, in bright flame-orange, Teixcalaanlitzlim-perfect, was like a cut poisonous flower in the center of the hangar. Something beautiful and dangerous that shouldn’t be where it was, that would die and in its dying take what was nearby with it.

  Amnardbat glanced from Three Seagrass to Mahit to the waiting shuttle, its doors open, her eyebrows raised and her mouth pursed like she’d tasted citrus-flavoring powder straight from the packet. And then she let go of Three Seagrass’s arm.

  I wonder if there’ll be bruises, Mahit thought.

  Yskandr whispered, and there was something utterly filthy in how he said it that made Mahit want to hide from the inside of her own mind. Had that inflection been hers or his? Both? How hard was it going to be to tell, going forward?

  Amnardbat did not speak in Teixcalaanli, even though Mahit knew she could use the language perfectly well. But she must also have known that Three Seagrass couldn’t understand much Stationer at all. “Is that so, Dzmare? Are you headed back to the Empire, despite owing your home the repository of your memory?”

  Mahit winced. “I’m—we’re—going to the war, not the City. Councilor.” That plural. She should watch her plurals. She’d meant her and Three Seagrass, surely.

  Yskandr, a flicker of the younger, damaged version, less prurient, more vicious:

  Mahit wished both of them would let her think, and also wished she hadn’t wished it. She’d wanted him back so badly, when he’d been gone.

  Amnardbat looked her over, and looked Onchu next to her over, too. There was a vast judgment in that gaze, and a sense of utter disregard: Well, if you want. What use are you, anyway. Mahit was projecting. Almost certainly. Assigning narrative where there wasn’t any. She didn’t seem to be able to stop. She hadn’t been able to stop since the City. But then Amnardbat said, still in Stationer, “There are so many easier ways to commit suicide, Dzmare, than going to someone else’s war.”

  Mahit didn’t think that barb was pointed at her at all. It was for Onchu, and maybe for Darj Tarats through Onchu: someone else’s war. A waste of Lsel’s resources, again, at the mercy of Teixcalaanli whims.

  If you hadn’t threatened me, I wouldn’t be going. I didn’t mean to leave Lsel. I just came home. I came home, Councilor.

  Thought was cheap. “I expect to be back, alive,” Mahit said. “Anything else, Councilor?”

  Now, surely, would come the security personnel, or Onchu would step in, or Three Seagrass would stop looking like she could suddenly develop telepathy and tell Mahit what to do if she glared with sufficient expression.

  “Oh, go on, then,” said Aknel Amnardbat, easy as anything, and waved a hand at the shuttle. “Enjoy yourself, while you’ve got breath for it.” She gave Three Seagrass a pat on the shoulder—Three Seagrass visibly flinched. “Onchu? A word, while the Teixcalaanlitzlim and her … charge … get out of our controlled space?”

  “Of course, Councilor,” said Onchu smoothly. “Good luck, Mahit. And good luck to you as well, Envoy.”

  Onchu, at least, had bothered to r
evert to Teixcalaanli when directly addressing Three Seagrass. She also had the wherewithal to immediately walk away from where she and Mahit had been standing, drawing Amnardbat along with her in her wake: these little things—a Teixcalaanlitzlim, a broken Ambassador—all of that was not important when one Councilor of Lsel was having a conversation with another. It was blunt. Blunt and skillful. Mahit could imagine growing into a woman like that, if she lived so long—

  The open door of the shuttle looked like a dark mouth. Mahit picked up her luggage—less than she’d taken to the City, by far—and walked into it, Three Seagrass just behind her to the left, snapping back into place like a detached limb suddenly remade. As if they had never stopped being Ambassador and liaison, barbarian and opener-of-doors. As if everything hadn’t changed.

  * * *

  Eight Antidote woke up with the Emperor standing in the frame of his bedroom window, moonlight thick behind her. She glowed like a dream-apparition, a ghost, dressed in the white she’d worn before she’d been made Emperor. Eight Antidote wondered if he’d awoken a year ago, if the entire world he’d fallen into after his ancestor-the-Emperor killed himself would dissolve into dreamsmoke, fade to nothing. Maybe he was ten years old. Maybe all that would happen today was that he’d go see the palace-hummers in their garden, and recite poetry for his tutor, and avoid whoever the other child who had been provided for him to socialize with was. And forget—

  Nineteen Adze was watching him. The world as it was refused to slip away into half-recalled snatches. He was eleven, and sole imperial heir, and yesterday he’d convinced the Minister of War to show him how to be a commander.

  “I have something I want to show you,” said Nineteen Adze. The weight of her eyes was very heavy. She was paying all of her attention to him right now, and he was in bed without a shirt on. Abruptly he was embarrassed, and pulled the sheet up to his chest as he sat up.

  “… Your Brilliance?” he said, trying not to sound like he’d been asleep just a minute ago. Or too much like a kid.

  She came away from the window, a shadow separating. She had something in one hand. A sharp something, metal. Eight Antidote couldn’t understand the shape of it. Maybe it was a knife. Maybe she was going to stab him and keep the sun-spear throne for herself and her heirs, whoever they would be, forever. Could he stop her? Eleven Laurel had taught him basic grappling, and he knew how to use an energy pistol, but he didn’t have an energy pistol, and Nineteen Adze outweighed him twice over and also he was lying down and she was standing up, so she had all the advantages she’d need—

  It wasn’t a knife. Not exactly.

  It was shaped like an arrowhead, like something Eight Antidote had seen in historical holos about pre-spaceflight humans and how they killed each other. But it was big. Big as a palm, and made of a dark brassy metal. The moonlight caught the edge of it. It looked rusted. It wasn’t rusted. It was stained. Blood, old enough it should have flaked off. Nineteen Adze held it out to him. “Go on,” she said. “Take it.”

  He did. It was heavy. It had been coated with some kind of thin clear lacquer, which kept the blood on. A memory, then. The tip of a spear, like the points of the sun-spear throne. Down the center of it was a raised part, like a spine, and when he ran his thumb over that ridge, he could feel indentations. He pressed down on the deepest one. A thin panel of the metal spine slid soundlessly back, and inside was—a hologram. Like the entire object was a giant infofiche stick, and he’d just broken it open.

  It was an image. Very small, without any glyph annotations. But Eight Antidote could recognize it clearly. There was his ancestor-the-Emperor, middle-aged, strong, with his hair unbound and reaching almost to his hips, sitting on a four-legged animal (a horse, he remembered, that’s a horse, or else a camel, but I think it’s a horse). And next to him, on another horse, was Nineteen Adze in the uniform of a soldier in the Third Legion, no rank marks at all. Eight Antidote wasn’t that good at judging ages, but he thought she might have been twenty. At most.

  They were both laughing, in the holo. Like they shared a secret. Nineteen Adze had a long stick with a metal point on the end in her hand, and there was blood dripping down it, and blood on her forehead in the shape of the Emperor’s fingers, like he’d dipped them in an enemy and pressed them there. It was the same spearpoint on that stick that Eight Antidote was holding now. He was absolutely sure.

  “Why are you showing me this?” he asked.

  The Emperor didn’t smile. She came to the edge of the bed and sat down on it instead. Her weight hardly disturbed it. For the first time, Eight Antidote thought of her as narrow. Unfashionably tall, but in the full imperial regalia, she always seemed broad-shouldered, strong—but here she was, featherlight, like a ghost in the moonshine from the window. “Because I loved your ancestor, Eight Antidote. I would have died for him, in his service. See us there? I don’t know anything of the next thirty years there. Not what I would do, or what he would do, or what he’d ask of me. But I already knew that I believed in his Teixcalaan. In an empire strong enough to be at peace, if only we could build that strength high enough. And we did. We did, for decades. Built it and held it.”

  “It didn’t last,” Eight Antidote said. He couldn’t look at her while he said that, only at the tiny hologram-Emperor, unstained with sheets of his own sacrificed blood. Thirty years away from that blood, and still Eight Antidote could almost see it, how it would look. It would get all over the horse.

  “Nothing does,” Nineteen Adze told him, which was awful: especially because she said it with such flat, resigned finality. A true thing, from the land of being a grown-up. From the land of being Emperor. “But I still believe in that Teixcalaan. When Six Direction made me Emperor in the sun temple, he entrusted that Teixcalaan to me. And to you, after me.”

  “I’m eleven,” said Eight Antidote, as if he could make her go away by saying it. He held on to the metal memory-spear so hard his knuckles were white. The tiny hologram wavered. Stabilized.

  “You’re eleven, little spy,” Nineteen Adze agreed, and sighed. “You’re eleven, and you’re not Six Direction, no matter what your face looks like. I made sure you didn’t have to be.” Her mouth twisted. “Sometimes I’m amazed that Six Direction handed me Teixcalaan after I made sure of that. After what I did to make sure of it. But I know you’re not him, Eight Antidote. I know that quite definitively.”

  He wanted to ask her, What did you do? What did you do to make you look like that, when you say so? What might have happened to me if you hadn’t? He couldn’t find his voice.

  “Which is why we won’t be friends the way your ancestor and I were friends,” she went on. “And you are eleven. But you’re involved already. A kid who finds his way into the Ministry of War and extracts a promise from Three Azimuth is a politician even if he’s a kid. You know that.”

  “I know,” Eight Antidote said, very quietly. “I’m sorry I went.”

  “Oh, blood and stars, don’t be,” said Nineteen Adze, brisk. “I’d rather have a clever, annoying, interesting successor than a dullard or a bore. How else are we going to build your ancestor’s Teixcalaan?”

  She was using the collective plural. Like they were equals. Like they were grown adults and she trusted him. It probably wasn’t true, but he didn’t know why she’d say it if she was lying to him or keeping him from knowing something he was too young to know.

  He asked, “Aren’t we at war, Your Brilliance? How can we have Six Direction’s empire of peace if we’re fighting these aliens?”

  “We can’t,” Nineteen Adze agreed. “So we’re going to have to win, or we’re going to have to change the parameters of the conflict.”

  “Three Azimuth’s projections make winning look—”

  “Unlikely, yes. I’ve heard. In detail. Here’s what I want you to do for me, little spy. Little successor. You hold on to this spearhead, and you look at it when you aren’t sure what your Emperor wants for you. You remember what I’ve said tonight. And you go into the Mi
nistry of War, and find out for me what is happening there. Find out why Eleven Laurel is so interested in you. Find out if Three Azimuth means to win this war or if she wants to maintain a permanent state of conflict. Be you, exactly as you have been—but pay attention.”

  Eight Antidote felt like his tongue had gone numb, and his fingers. His heart was thrumming. He didn’t know why Three Azimuth wouldn’t want to win a war. Wasn’t that what Ministers of War were for, winning Teixcalaan’s battles? But he managed to nod—how could he not nod?—and clutched the spearhead to his chest.

  “Good,” said the Emperor. “Now go back to sleep. You are only eleven. You get to sleep for a while yet.” She reached out, touched his cheek with cool fingertips. A kind, small touch. And then she got up and left. The door to his rooms irised shut behind her with the faintest of clicks.

  Eight Antidote didn’t sleep at all. He watched the dawn come up instead, glittering through the hologram, making his dead ancestor look transfigured, sunlit, like a god.

  * * *

  After Peloa-2, there were funeral orations every few hours. Nine Hibiscus kept the old tradition of a Fleetwide broadcast on a seldom-used frequency, a recitation of the names of the dead. When the Tenth Legion wasn’t in active combat, it sang its way through a thousand years of previous casualties, cycling every week and a half from the most recent fallen soldier in the Legion to the very first Teixcalaanlitzlim who had died wearing this uniform. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t forget his name, or the low tone it was sung on during the litany—Two Cholla. A spear-name, all cactus needles, a name that would have sounded very fine with captain or ikantlos in front of it. Two Cholla had died a thousand years ago, at seventeen, before any titles or ranks could accrue around his name. There were a lot of names that came after his.