The holo ended, and Sixteen Moonrise vanished as if she’d never been. The lights came back up. Minister Three Azimuth sat back in her chair, her fingers laced together in front of her chest. She did not look like someone who had just been told that there was a foreign diplomat conspiring with a rogue Information agent running loose around the battlefield of a thus-far-unwinnable war. Eight Antidote would like to look that confident someday. And she was small, not much taller than him, and yet she appeared every inch the master of all six Palms, the encompasser of the Empire’s military mind. She blinked behind her cloudhook, and a two-dimensional image of a tallish woman in a foreign-cut jacket and trousers, high-cheekboned and curly-haired, replaced the holo of Sixteen Moonrise above the table. The image was fuzzy at the edges, the angle strange. Eight Antidote thought it had been pulled off a security camera. But he knew that face. He’d seen that face splashed across newsfeeds over and over after Six Direction died. He’d seen it close up, too: in one of the garden rooms in Palace-Earth, the huitzahuitlim garden, where he went to watch the hummer-birds sip nectar and fly only as far as their invisible netting allowed them. She’d spoken to him then.
“So,” Three Azimuth said. “What do we think of the former Ambassador from Lsel Station, Mahit Dzmare? She, if you recall, of the heartfelt plea that we notice the alien threat, the one broadcast right before the Emperor Six Direction’s death. The one who gave us the direction of our war. Since that esteemed individual is who has just shown up on Weight for the Wheel.”
In the garden, surrounded by the buzzing red-and-gold wings of the tiniest birds in Teixcalaan, Dzmare had made him a strange offer. She’d said to him, You’re a very powerful young person, and if you still want to, when you are of age, Lsel Station would be honored to host you. And he’d known better, right then, as he knew better right now, than to say yes: she’d been lost, and drunk, and sad, and still trying to find an angle of influence. So he’d shown her how to get the huitzahuitlim to drink nectar from her palm, and then sent her away.
He wondered what she’d learned from that night. And what had driven her first away from Teixcalaan and then out to the battlefront itself.
Eight Antidote sat up straight, and paid attention. This conversation was one he’d have to bring back to Her Brilliance the Emperor. Even little spies have secrets, he thought to himself, and was surprised by the degree of his own satisfaction at the idea.
The Ministry of War didn’t like Mahit Dzmare, it turned out. Or at least—some of them didn’t. She was a barbarian, that was just true, and Second Undersecretary Seven Aster (who was new—as new as Minister Three Azimuth, as new as the Emperor Herself) mostly seemed to dislike her because she was a barbarian and was out on a battlefront unsupervised, while possibly having diplomatic authority. That didn’t seem to be Dzmare’s fault, though. She couldn’t help being a barbarian, or that the Information envoy had brought her along—unless she’d somehow made the envoy take her?
The last Ambassador from Lsel Station, Yskandr Aghavn, had seemed like the sort of person who made people do things they never expected. Eight Antidote hadn’t known him, except for knowing the shape of his face and how much his ancestor-the-Emperor had enjoyed his companionship. Aghavn either hadn’t liked kids that much or had better things to do than talk to one. But he’d been in the palace all the time. He’d been friends with everyone. Until he’d died.
Maybe all Lsel Ambassadors were like that.
Eight Antidote was still considering whether being good at making people act in ways they usually wouldn’t would be helpful or unhelpful on a battlefront when Eleven Laurel said, “Minister, my chief concern with Dzmare has nothing to do with her barbarian origins—it is to do with her effects on situations around her. Her destabilizing effects.”
“Go on,” said Minister Three Azimuth. “As you keep reminding me, Undersecretary, you were here when Dzmare was involved with the unfortunate circumstances surrounding our Emperor’s ascension to the throne, and I was not. Is there something specific about her activities then that you think is indicative?”
“You were very busy on Nakhar, I’m sure you didn’t have time to notice these small things,” said Eleven Laurel, which seemed to Eight Antidote like an innocuous statement that really didn’t deserve Three Azimuth’s quick displeased expression. She had been on Nakhar, and military governors were busy by nature, almost as busy as emperors. “Dzmare—and the forces that she either allied herself with or who found her useful—ignores all protocols. She ignores all history—she, like Aghavn before her, just slides blithely in and does what she believes is necessary, and if the institutions of our Empire are disregarded, our processes dissolved or lost—what is it to her?”
Three Azimuth’s face was very still. “My dear Undersecretary,” she said, “I assume you are talking about the early retirement of my predecessor Nine Propulsion.”
Eight Antidote was suddenly aware of how much older Eleven Laurel was than Three Azimuth. He wondered how many Ministers of War he’d served, and if the number was big enough to keep him from even being concerned when the current Minister … implied he wasn’t loyal to her? Was that what was being said here? He felt like he was watching a conversation that had been going on for a long time, long before this meeting.
Eleven Laurel exhaled on a resigned sigh, all of the deep wrinkles in his face settling deeper. “Minister, it is not Nine Propulsion who concerns me—I hope she enjoys her retirement, of course, but she isn’t Minister now, is she?—it is how much our Emperor trusts us here in War, now that she is gone and the yaotlek One Lightning has been sent off in disgrace. And how much Her Brilliance trusts creatures like Dzmare, or Information envoys, or anyone but her Fleet, on Fleet business. That’s all, Minister.”
“That’s never all,” Three Azimuth said, and Eight Antidote, trying to think through what Eleven Laurel had just said—did Nineteen Adze really not trust War? while War was defending all Teixcalaan from incredibly dangerous aliens?—practiced keeping his face as still as he could, as serene as a grown-up, calm as someone who wasn’t trying to put all these pieces together.
The Emperor had sent him to spy on War, though. Hadn’t she. Maybe that meant Eleven Laurel was right. He didn’t know how he felt about that. Didn’t know at all, except that part of how he felt was scared.
* * *
The message they came up with was eleven seconds long, and made up of four sounds spliced from the intercepted recording, repeated twice over. As far as Mahit could understand, and based on the best of her ability to communicate in sound waves that made her nauseated, it said something like approach-danger—contact-initiated—hurrah-we-win, in sequence, and then—using their newfound unpleasant knowledge about how the alien noises increased in potency when they were layered on top of each other—played contact-initiated from two opposite directions at once, and then added hurrah-we-win on top of that. Then it repeated again from the start. She wasn’t sure that what she and Three Seagrass were saying was come talk to us in person, it’ll work out great, but she also wasn’t not sure, and that was—well, it was the best they were going to do with this limited data set. Perhaps the message would get them more noises to work with, even if it didn’t get them a live alien negotiator.
They’d finished it, and the instant it was done, all of the fragile peace between them shattered like a glass dropped on the floor. Three Seagrass was sullen and silent and uncomprehending, and Mahit was exhausted. She had never wanted to have that fight—
She h
ated when he sounded like he knew everything, like twenty years of extra experience and sleeping with the Emperor of all Teixcalaan—both current and former versions thereof—made him an expert on how she felt. But then, he was inside her endocrine system. He knew how she felt, because he felt it the same—and they were getting closer all the time. More integrated.
Her hands hurt, that sparkling ulnar nerve pain. Her head hurt, too, like she’d been trying not to cry for a long time.
I want her to see how she hurts me, she said, in the privacy of her own mind, while Three Seagrass put their message on a fresh infofiche stick and sealed it with her wax sealing kit, the flame-orange wax the same color as her perfect, infuriating uniform. I want her to—notice, when she does, without being told.
A slide, sense-memory and longing, the strange mirrored room of their shared mind reflecting a shard of time: the shape of Nineteen Adze’s shoulder blades, delineated in the palest light of early morning in Palace-East. How Yskandr had felt a terrifying, sweet tenderness—felt it on some morning not too long before Nineteen Adze had let him, with her full knowledge and acquiescence, be murdered. Let him asphyxiate under the watchful eyes of Ten Pearl, Minister of Science. And yet the sense-memory remained, even through death and botched imago-surgery. Mahit looked at Three Seagrass and felt an echo of that tenderness, an echo of that betrayal.
She’s not going to kill me to save her Emperor from corruption, she thought, pointedly.
Yskandr murmured.
You are in my place.
“I’m going to present this to the yaotlek,” Three Seagrass said, light and chilly, and tucked the infofiche stick into the inner jacket pocket of her uniform. “I’ll make sure to point out that it’s more than half your work. Thank you.”
As if they’d never been anything but brief colleagues working on a difficult problem. Mahit felt as if she had broken the world, and hated herself for feeling that way—Three Seagrass, asekreta and patrician first-class, Third Undersecretary to the Minister for Information, special envoy to the Fleet … she wasn’t the world. Mahit had done fine without her on Lsel, had missed her only as much as she’d missed Teixcalaan, which was enormously and with aching frustration.
The right order of things, Mahit whispered back, which was just another shading of pronunciation. That was what felt broken. How she had wanted the world to be.
“I assume,” she found herself saying, “that if it works and they do respond, you’ll let me know.”
Three Seagrass looked at her, a glancing, miserable expression, and dropped her eyes again. “Of course,” she said, too fast. “And I’ll— When they respond, I want you to hear it.”
It almost sounded like I want you to help me. It would have been better, Mahit thought, if she’d actually said that. But Mahit hadn’t particularly left her any room to do so, had she. She’d said, When you know why I had to come with you, then we can talk. And she hadn’t meant, When you figure out the political situation on Lsel Station, she’d meant—
She’d meant, When you understand that when the Empire commands, I can’t say no. She’d meant, When you understand that there’s no room for me to mean yes, even if I want to. She’d meant, You don’t understand that there’s no such thing as being free. Free to choose, or free otherwise.
So all she said out loud was, “Good. Until then, Three Seagrass.”
Three Seagrass didn’t reply. She slipped out the door of the communications workroom like she couldn’t wait to be gone, and left Mahit alone to try to do something about the remains of the vomit and find her way back to the quarters they were supposed to share. All those corridors between her and that limited safety, and her here without the benefit of a uniformed Teixcalaanli liaison to open all the doors, dispatch all the guardians. She’d crippled herself, on this Fleet flagship, farther away from anything she could have ever called home than she’d ever been, for the sake of—what, exactly? For wanting an understanding that she—or at least the part of her that was Yskandr, and it was hard to tell the difference between them now, about this—wasn’t even sure Three Seagrass was capable of comprehending, let alone having?
What was the point of this?
Mahit had thought she’d known, but now she wasn’t sure.
* * *
The adjutant ikantlos-prime Twenty Cicada, Three Seagrass discovered, was ubiquitous. She hadn’t gone much farther into the deep corridors of Weight for the Wheel—aiming, by cloudhook map, away from the audio processing room and toward the general area of the bridge in hopes of encountering either the yaotlek or someone who knew where to fetch her from—when he simply materialized out of a three-way passage nexus, like the ship itself had manifested him.
There’s never been a ship AI that took human form, Three Seagrass reminded herself. That’s a holodrama plot. And besides, he’s touched physical objects where I could see him do it. He is definitely a real person. Nevertheless she felt sufficiently—oh, sufficiently a lot of things, but mostly exhausted and unhappy and brittle-bright, ready to snap—that being surprised by Twenty Cicada was downright spooky. Then she remembered that Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise had called him Swarm, which was a fascinatingly nasty nickname for someone who had a fascinatingly untoward name: an insect for his noun signifier. Swarm, though …
“You’re everywhere at once,” she said to him. “Aren’t you.”
The light in the corridors of Weight for the Wheel was directionless; it made Twenty Cicada’s shaved head gleam, olive-gold like patina on old coins. He seemed to consider this statement, tilting his head ever so slightly, like he was calculating a vector of attack. Three Seagrass was going to have to look him up when she had access to the Information network again; she wanted to know everything about his military record. Had he flown Shards? Been in hand-to-hand combat? Or had he always been a logistics and operations officer, arranging the movement of ships and supply lines across jumpgates under the peculiar spiritual guidance of his balance-obsessed religion?
“I’m where I should be,” he said.
“I have the message we prepared for the yaotlek to broadcast,” Three Seagrass told him, trying not to wince over the we; she needed to not think about Mahit right now. She’d been doing so well! Not thinking about her. She wasn’t going to start now. She needed to pay attention to what was happening right in front of her. “Is she on the bridge?”
Twenty Cicada made a gesture with one hand that could mean certainly and could mean I assume, if you like. It showed off the edges of his homeostat-cult tattoos, slipping out from the cuffs of his uniform in pale green fractal shapes. He was frustratingly difficult to read; too strange and too exactly-Teixcalaanli-soldier at the same time.
“Walk with me,” he said, instead of giving her a proper answer, and Three Seagrass decided that she would.
They did not turn toward the bridge. Three Seagrass dismissed her cloudhook’s navigational function with a blink; it kept sending her small alerts at the corner of her vision that she really ought to have turned left, and now it had to recalculate her route, and she could do without that sort of petty annoyance. She set it to record her movements and build a new area map instead—as she had not done on Lsel Station, and what did it mean that she was willing to conduct surveillance mapping of one of the Empire’s flagships and not a foreign sovereign state?
It says, she thought, deliberately, like pressing on a bruise, that you trusted Mahit Dzmare too much.
Twenty Cicada led her down two levels of the ship. He was not talkative, exactly. He asked questions, but not like an interrogator or an asekreta would. She couldn’t put her hands on his goal
s. They were slippery.
“Have you seen what these aliens do to human beings?” he asked. “I believe Nine Hibiscus sent along some of the holorecordings of what we found on Peloa-2.”
She had. Three Seagrass had glanced through them and felt nothing: Oh, look, another war. Someone else’s atrocity, far away on the edges of the known world. But she was very close to those edges now. “They like evisceration,” she told Twenty Cicada. “An interesting preference for mass casualties. Messy.”
“Wasteful,” he said, correcting her.
“What, because it takes too much effort to pull out the entrails on every single human being? You saw the claws the dead one has; it can’t be that inefficient for them to do.”
Twenty Cicada said, “The dead creature was a scavenger, or its presentient ancestors were—that mouth, the eyes on the front of the skull—and yet it left all those guts to rot. That’s wasteful.”
They’d come to a heavily sealed door, airtight enough that Three Seagrass wondered for a moment if she was about to be unceremoniously spaced through an airlock. Twenty Cicada stepped close to it, let it read his cloudhook: the clear glass over one eye flowing full of tiny grey-gold glyphs, like a storm boiling up over the City. It opened—and behind it was heat, and warm wet air, and the scents of soil and growth and flowers. A hydroponics deck. Three Seagrass followed him inside with a gratitude she had not expected to feel: her skin drank the moisture, starved for nonprocessed air. She wanted to luxuriate in it. A place on this ship that felt like—like Teixcalaan, like the Jewel of the World. A garden heart. She took deep breaths. The drag of humidity in her lungs was delicious.
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