A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  She shrugged out of one sleeve, was halfway through the next, apologetically turned away, when Mahit said, as narrow and distantly cold as Three Seagrass had ever heard her: “You didn’t mean it. But you said it, Reed.”

  Her nickname, polished and sharpened to wound. In that mouth, which had not known to say it when Twelve Azalea had still been alive.

  She snapped, “You think I said that, because you can’t hear anything but one of us saying you aren’t a Teixcalaanlitzlim whenever we speak to you.” Snapped, and regretted snapping, and at the same time felt that brutal and brittle glee she always had at getting right down to the meat of some argument, some problem, and sinking in her teeth, ready to tear.

  “Don’t you?” asked Mahit. “Say that.” She was very still, very calm. Three Seagrass thought of snakes, of spiders, of all the creatures that stung when threatened. “You remind me I’m a barbarian all the time. Now, in the City before—and not just you, Three Seagrass, the soldiers in the corridors too, but at least they have the honesty not to pretend that I’m anything but what Teixcalaan thinks I am. You? You want to give me uniforms and make me useful and have a clever almost-human barbarian to show off on your arm—you decide that you want me and here I am, you decide it’d be useful if your barbarian exercised diplomatic authority and so I do, you decide I need a uniform so we don’t get stopped in corridors and you don’t think about what it’d look like if you dressed me up like a toy Teixcalaanlitzlim—”

  “I asked,” Three Seagrass said, and she had asked, hadn’t she? She’d asked every time. She was almost sure she’d asked, she’d never given Mahit orders, she wouldn’t, the idea was absurd. But Mahit ignored her and kept going, like words were an infection she was squeezing from a wound.

  “And you’d have liked it if I’d stayed with you in the palace, wouldn’t you have? You could’ve had me all this time to amuse you and not had to come all the way to a war—”

  Before she could stop herself, Three Seagrass said, “Would that have been so awful? You staying with me.” Distantly, she thought it’d be absolutely terrible if she started crying. She’d never cried in arguments. Not since she had grown big enough to leave the crèche. Mahit did all sorts of things to her that she’d never expected, made her feel all sorts of new and complicated kinds of everything, including—apparently—hurt and miserable. All she’d done was suggest that a uniform might make things simpler, and now they were going to have this fight, which felt awful and unfixable and like Mahit had been saving it up, waiting for the inevitable point where she couldn’t stand Three Seagrass any longer and did this to whatever it was they had between them.

  “No,” said Mahit. “It wouldn’t have been terrible to stay with you. Which is why I didn’t.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  Mahit had sat herself down at the central conference table, and now she put her face in her palms and hid her eyes from Three Seagrass. The last time they’d been around a conference room table, they’d stopped a usurpation with poetry. Now they couldn’t even write a message together, because they were having the most useless, incomprehensible, horrible argument Three Seagrass could remember having since her ex-girlfriend Nine Arch had broken up with her in the middle of exams during their second year of asekreta training.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Three Seagrass said again, louder. “It doesn’t. I’m sorry about the uniforms, and the jacket, and I won’t mention it again, but you aren’t being—”

  “Explicable? Understandable? Civilized?”

  “Fuck,” said Three Seagrass, hearing as she said it how her voice had gone narrow and high, uncontrolled. “If you didn’t want to come with me here, you didn’t have to.”

  Mahit took her hands down and looked Three Seagrass straight in the face. It felt like her gaze had weight, weight and edges, a sudden revealed landscape of places to cut oneself open on. Again Three Seagrass found herself wondering what of this person was Mahit Dzmare and what was Yskandr Aghavn, and if all the ruinous confusion between them now was born of Mahit’s precious imago-technology—or if she’d never understood her. Not really. Only pretended to.

  (Only pretended, like they were pretending they understood something of these aliens and their incomprehensible language that hurt humans to hear.)

  Three Seagrass dropped her eyes first.

  Mahit said, “Reed,” softly, and Three Seagrass looked up again, heliotropic, compelled.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “When you figure out why I did have to come with you, we can talk again.”

  “… again, at all?” There was something horrible in the idea: that she’d gone so far wrong that she wouldn’t even have a chance to keep going, keep trying. That there was some flaw in everything that was invisible to her. (She didn’t know why Mahit couldn’t have stayed on Lsel. Politics, of course, but there were other avenues than this mad gambit of a trip to the edge of a war to get out of politics. Mahit hadn’t told her why. She knew she hadn’t told her why, she’d avoided telling her quite deliberately, and now she was somehow supposed to figure it out—)

  “We have work to do,” said Mahit, which wasn’t an answer at all. “We need to get one of these things to think this Fleet is worth talking to.”

  They did have work to do. And less than six hours until the yaotlek would want that work. And yet Three Seagrass felt like she couldn’t think through the urge to cry, or grab Mahit by the arm and shake her until she explained. Until she stopped being—

  Oh, say it, Reed. To yourself if no one else.

  Uncivilized. Refusing to participate, like an animal or a child.

  The silence between them dragged onward, endless and misshapen, as if gravity was off-kilter, the great engines of Weight for the Wheel shifted out of true, the universe undoing itself from its expected course. The room smelled of acidic vomit. Three Seagrass didn’t know what to say. Everything she’d said so far had made things worse.

  She sat down at the table, two chairs away from where Mahit was. It was better than her other option, which was storming out of the room. She needed Mahit. And she needed to do the job she’d set herself when the request for a special envoy came in to the Information Ministry. She should never have been allowed to be here; almost everything about her being here was unauthorized. Aside from the fact that she was very, very good and that she’d found the smartest person she knew to help her with the linguistics and the culture shock of first contact, and that technically she had the requisite rank in the Ministry. But if she didn’t manage it—

  If she didn’t manage it, she wouldn’t have a career. Also, probably, a whole lot of Teixcalaanlitzlim would die at the hands of these invaders, considering what they’d done on Peloa-2 and how the yaotlek was clearly having political problems with one of her Fleet Captains. Of which she had only five, hardly enough to prevent an alien attack force from spilling through the jumpgate and into Teixcalaanli space proper. A lot of dead people, if Three Seagrass didn’t figure out how to talk to aliens. Which was more important than her career. If less immediately stomach-churning.

  And here was Mahit, waiting for her, or waiting for—something. The gulf of silence felt uncrossable.

  She crossed it anyway. “Start with the third sound,” she said. “The one they make when they’re approached too closely. And combine it with—oh, the last one, the one that they made when they were chasing Knifepoint. I think that’s a victory sound.”

  “Approach-danger plus hurrah-we-win,” Mahit said, dry as dust. “Could be worse. I hope we’re right about hurrah-we-win, otherwise we’re saying something like approach-danger and we’re-going-to-chase-you.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” asked Three Seagrass, and was more gratified than she could bear to think about when Mahit nodded, and they began to get to work in earnest.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  You’d like him. You’d be proud of him. And every time I see his face I think of yours, and your voice, and what I might hav
e had to guide me. And every time I think of your voice I think of the monstrous creature that might have whispered to me with it—and if I had that creature I would have your ghost, and listen to it—so all in all I suspect I have done right, and my longings are my own to bear. But that’s being the Illuminate Majesty, isn’t it? You always said so. I wish you’d believed it.

  —the private notes of Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze, undated, locked, and encrypted

  * * *

  This is a terrible idea. What animal doesn’t come back from a long hunt hungry for scraps? But you don’t want to hear pretty Teixcalaanli rhetoric, do you. You want something direct? How about this: every Fleet officer I’ve ever met would get greedy enough to take a little detour into Station-conquering if they were bored enough and had the opportunity of legal proximity. Fuck off about this and give me another year to work. You’ll get your precious isolation.

  —from a letter written by Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn to Darj Tarats, Councilor for the Miners, received on Lsel Station 101.2.11–6D (Teixcalaanli reckoning)

  EIGHT Antidote came into the Ministry of War through the front door, like he was supposed to be there. Like he’d won the right to be there, which he guessed he had. Three Azimuth had told him to come, and Her Brilliance had—well, she’d given him the strange charge of the spearpoint in the middle of the night. The spearpoint and the command: Find out if Three Azimuth means to win this war. He was still chewing that over, the idea of it like a raw place in his mouth where a baby tooth had fallen out and a new one hadn’t come in yet. Whatever it meant, though, he had double permission to come in the front way instead of from the tunnels. (He’d hidden the spearpoint in the drawer where he kept his shirts, a bright heavy secret, nestled amongst the greys and the golds and the reds.)

  Eleven Laurel was waiting for him just inside. Eight Antidote abruptly remembered that he hadn’t even touched his problem set puzzle, and wondered if there was time to turn around and pretend he had ended up here by accident. There wasn’t, and anyway, running off was what a kid would do, so he wouldn’t.

  “Hello, Undersecretary,” he said, and bowed over his fingertips, inclined just so far, like he was greeting an equal. It felt squirmy and wrong and great, to presuppose that he and the Third Undersecretary of the Ministry of War, his teacher and his elder by fifty years at least, was someone he didn’t have to bow very far to.

  “Cure,” said Eleven Laurel, warm and pleased with him. Eight Antidote was blushing by the time he stood up. He hated being so obvious. He shouldn’t be this obvious. “I think you will enjoy today,” the Undersecretary went on. “We have just received some intelligence from the Twenty-Fourth Legion, and the Minister of War thinks you, my young friend, ought to get to see it analyzed.”

  “I’d like that a very great deal,” Eight Antidote said, trying to remember who was in charge of the Twenty-Fourth Legion. Not yaotlek Nine Hibiscus—it had been the Tenth at Kauraan, the Tenth was the dangerously loyal one—but another woman, with an astronomical aspect to the noun half of her name. He’d done just one exercise with the Twenty-Fourth as part of a puzzle, a long time ago, back at the very beginning of when Eleven Laurel was teaching him. But he knew the Twenty-Fourth was one of Nine Hibiscus’s yaotlek’s six, her complement of legions to work with on the edge of the battlefront.

  “Not from the Tenth?” he asked, following Eleven Laurel through the warren of the Ministry of War. “That’s interesting.”

  “A good observation, Cure,” said Eleven Laurel. “No, our intelligence is straight from Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, on fast-courier relay through the jumpgates. She very much wanted the Ministry to have this information right away. I’m extremely curious myself as to what it is she wants to show us.”

  Sixteen Moonrise. Eight Antidote had to remember the name this time; at least he’d gotten the astronomical part right. But it’d be much easier to remember her name now that she wasn’t a collection of holographs on a strategy table and instead a Fleet Captain who went above, or around, her yaotlek’s command in order to send intelligence to War back in the City.

  For the first time, Eight Antidote wondered if Nine Hibiscus knew that there were elements in the Ministry that had sent her to war hoping she was going to die in it. He figured she must. She wasn’t stupid. No one who could command loyalty like that was stupid. They couldn’t be. He was pretty sure. But maybe she was the kind of person who thought that loyalty protected her, that since all her soldiers loved her so very well, and she loved the Empire (she must, if Nineteen Adze had made her yaotlek), then the Ministry of War would love her and protect her as well.

  That seemed like the kind of mistake a person who relied on loyalty would make. He’d have to remember not to make it, when he was Emperor. Loyalty wasn’t transitive. It didn’t move up and down the chain of command smoothly. It could get cut off, or rerouted. Especially if someone else powerful was intervening in the movement of information, like Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise was right now.

  Eleven Laurel didn’t take him to one of the strategy rooms this time. They went up an elevator in the center of the Palms instead, and through a series of very secure checkpoints staffed with Fleet soldiers, into what must have been Minister Three Azimuth’s very own office. It was covered in star-charts: beautiful ones on the walls, artist’s renderings of Teixcalaanli space, with pride of place behind the Minister’s desk taken by a vast and glimmering mosaic in a frame, dark crystal slices and golden pinpoint stars made out of glass pieces smaller than Eight Antidote’s littlest fingernail. It was a famous piece: The World, it was called, or sometimes just Teixcalaan, a map of everywhere the Empire had touched as of two hundred years ago when it was made by the artisan Eighteen Coral. Eight Antidote had seen it in holo, and on infofiche, but never before in person.

  It lived behind the desk of the Minister of War. Of course he’d never seen it in person.

  There were maps everywhere, though. On the large table in front of that desk, some holographic and some paper ones too—on the desk itself, in piles—pinned to the walls next to and overlapping the famous and artistic renderings.

  Minister Three Azimuth sat amongst her cartography like a bird in a well-lined nest, her cloudhook glowing silver-white and translucent over the wreckage of her melted ear, her hair a smooth dark cap. Eight Antidote swallowed, his throat feeling suddenly thick, and quickly looked away from her to the other Ministry officials seated around the table to her right and left. There was Undersecretary Seven Aster of the Second Palm, the master of supply chains, and his staff, immediately recognizable by how the hands in their shoulder patches had their fingers pointing to the left; next to him was Twenty-Two Thread, the Fifth Palm, the armaments chief, who had come to give a presentation on new sorts of spaceship engines to Eight Antidote’s ancestor-the-Emperor two years ago. Eight Antidote had fallen asleep while she was talking. But he’d been a little kid then. He wouldn’t do that kind of thing now.

  Eleven Laurel’s own staff were waiting for him on the other side of the table; two women Eight Antidote didn’t know, both wearing patches figured with downward-pointing hands for the Third Palm, on their shoulders next to their rank sigils. And two empty chairs. One for Eleven Laurel—and one for him. He sat down. Like he belonged. Like he wasn’t eleven years old.

  At the end of the table, opposite the Minister, was an empty space where the Emperor would have gone, if she’d been invited. Presumably, if whatever was about to be discussed was important enough, she would be. (Probably. Unless the Ministry of War was hiding something from Nineteen Adze—but that was what he would have to watch for, wasn’t it? Being careful, paying attention. That’s what he’d been asked to do, in the middle of the night.)

  “Eleven Laurel,” said the Minister, nodding welcome and then looked right at him and said, “Your Excellency Eight Antidote. Thank you both for coming. I’m going to play a transmission from Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise now. It came in on fast courier a few hours ago, prior
ity communication.”

  Eight Antidote was profoundly grateful that the room lights dimmed when the transmission started, so no one could see that he was blushing, his cheeks hot, just from being addressed directly by Three Azimuth with his entire formal title. It was embarrassing and ridiculous. Lots of people called him Your Excellency, and he didn’t usually blush at all.

  In holo, Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise of the Twenty-Fourth Legion looked like a statue in a plaza, visible only from the waist up in full three-sixty-degree reproduction and hovering above the table. She bowed over her fingers—or she had, about six hours ago. Six and a half. It took at least that long for a transmission to cross all the jumpgates between the battlefront and the City, even on fastest courier and being bounced across sectors by the strongest repeater stations. Wherever she was, six hours ago, had been dim and metal-walled. Some ship. She was alone.

  “A message for Minister Three Azimuth,” she said. “Priority. Security code Hyacinth.” She was speaking softly, just loud enough that her recorder could catch each syllable but not loud enough for anyone to overhear her. Eight Antidote had never heard of security code Hyacinth before. He glanced at the faces of the adults around the table; they showed no obvious surprise or consternation, only attentiveness.

  “The Fleet has obtained the corpse of one of our enemies and conducted an autopsy on the alien. A formal report of the autopsy will arrive from yaotlek Nine Hibiscus’s medical team in due course, I’m sure, and I am equally sure that it will be accurate but brief. I myself observed the conclusion of the autopsy. The aliens are mammalian, likely to be scavengers, and carnivorous or omnivorous based on their dentition. More significantly, however, the yaotlek invited a special envoy from the Ministry of Information to be present at the autopsy as well. The envoy brought with her a foreign national from Lsel Station. I have enclosed a visual image of the Stationer. It is my belief that Lsel Station may be attempting to exert diplomatic influence over the decisions of yaotlek Nine Hibiscus via the person of the Information envoy, whom Nine Hibiscus has commanded to initiate first-contact protocols. The Palms should be aware of the possibility that Information may contain compromised individuals, or that the Stationers may be infringing on Teixcalaanli sovereignty. In sending this message I perform my duty as a sworn officer of the Fleet. May Teixcalaan and the Emperor endure a thousand thousand years. End security code Hyacinth.”