“In such a situation, if we survive long enough to go on leave, yaotlek, I’d quite appreciate it.”
“Your confidence is overwhelming.”
Twenty Cicada cast his eyes up toward the ceiling, which had been well colonized by a creeping net of green, laden with tiny white flowers. “You’ve seen their firepower,” he said. “And we both know ours. This is going to be a very bad, very long war, and while the prospect is the furthest thing from what I’d wish for, I don’t think you or I will be the last set of yaotlek-and-adjutant to lead it.”
“We haven’t died yet,” she said. “Despite the best efforts of a great many people.”
“People, yes,” Twenty Cicada said, correcting her. “If it was people in those solvent-spitting ring-ships, I’d be negotiating with you for just how large my service bonus should be. But they’re not people. Perhaps the envoy can turn them into people, but she’s just one Information agent, and she is very young. As is her Stationer companion. You know who that is, don’t you?”
“Mahit Dzmare. The one who was on the newsfeeds when One Lightning was pulling that incredibly stupid stunt at the end of the last Emperor’s reign. I know.”
“Good,” said Twenty Cicada. “Because Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise definitely knows who she is, and if I have her dead to rights—and I almost always do—she’ll find a way to use Mahit Dzmare, or what she represents, against you.”
Nine Hibiscus hummed through her teeth. “You think Sixteen Moonrise is that aggressively opposed to my leadership?”
Twenty Cicada shook his head, blinked to have his cloudhook call up a holoimage of Weight for the Wheel as a flattened schematic map. There was a tracery in electrum-silver threaded through a very large number of the decks. “She’s been haunting us,” he said. “I’ve tracked her. I don’t think it’s exactly that the Fleet Captain of the Twenty-Fourth is opposed to you, Nine Hibiscus. I think someone in the Ministry is. And she’s a very effective agent for their purposes. She knows as much about the aliens as we do, for example. As much as anyone save the envoy and Dzmare. And if she wasn’t trying to find out more, she would have gone back to the Parabolic Compression half a day ago.”
“So she’s a spy?”
“So she’s a spy whose eyes should be trained outward and which have been turned inward by someone else’s hand,” Twenty Cicada said. Which was gnomic, even for him. But Nine Hibiscus thought she got what he was gesturing at. Sixteen Moonrise had, after all, spent the first five years of her recorded Fleet career as a political officer on the same Parabolic Compression she captained now. And political officers were placed on the orders of the Undersecretary for the Third Palm—the Ministry of War’s internal intelligence service.
“You think she’s still Third Palm. Not just served there as a cadet.”
Twenty Cicada smiled, one corner of his mouth twisting. “I think that the Third of the Six Outreaching Palms would like to snatch you back into a more controllable orbit than the one you’re on, and that Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise is as good a pulling-hook as any.”
“Swarm, she isn’t my type.”
He snorted. “No, you like them with more flesh and more masculinity, I’m well aware. Not that kind of hook. The kind that keeps you distracted enough from our real enemy out there that you make mistakes. And we can’t afford mistakes. Not in this war. Not if we don’t want to learn how to sing funerals for a great many more planets than Peloa-2.”
“Consider me warned,” Nine Hibiscus said. “And get her off my ship, would you?”
“I can try—” Twenty Cicada began, and then both his cloudhook and Nine Hibiscus’s went off with a sharp chime: priority message. Something had come back from Peloa-2 after all.
* * *
Of course, he had to wait. Emperors were busy all the time; this was the nature of Emperors, his ancestor had been exactly the same. Eight Antidote only ever had seen him at events or late in the evenings or once, memorably, at dawn, when he showed up to Eight Antidote’s bedroom and took his hand and they went walking in the gardens, like they were parent and child instead of ancestor and ninety-percent clone. He’d been very small then. His ancestor-the-Emperor had plucked a nasturtium and woven it into Eight Antidote’s hair, a red one, and then when he’d said he liked it, a yellow one and an orange one, and he’d worn them until they rotted and he had to be washed.
That was a long time ago, even for someone who was only eleven.
It was almost midnight by the time Nineteen Adze was available to see him, and at that hour, she wanted to see him in her own suite. She’d sent an infofiche-stick message to say so, one of the clean white ones that no one else used but her, waiting in the mail slot outside Eight Antidote’s room like he was a grown person who got mail. He broke the seal open, and the holo glyphs that spilled out were simple and inviting: Come by, if you’re still awake. And then her signature glyph, the same one which was on the infofiche seal. No titles.
Well, they were sort of family. And also she’d shown up inside his bedroom without even asking, so just signing a message Nineteen Adze wasn’t that weird. (It was weird. It was one of those small things that made Eight Antidote wonder when a person stopped being a child entirely, and started being something else.) He put the opened infofiche stick into the drawer of his desk, so he could look at it again later, if he wanted to. If he wanted to think about how simple and clear and friendly that message had been, later.
The Emperor’s suite was where his ancestor had lived, and the Emperor before him, and a whole lot of other Emperors also, but that didn’t mean it looked the same as it had six months ago. His ancestor-the-Emperor had liked lots of small, beautiful objects, and bright colors, blue and teal and red, and there had been a plush woven rug on the floor of the front sitting room, with lotus-flower patterns woven in by hand, a gift from the Western Arc families. Nineteen Adze was different. Nineteen Adze liked books. Codex-books, not just infofiche; books and also stones, slices of rock that you could see the light through. She’d lined the walls with cases for them. That lotus-woven rug was hanging on one of the walls instead of being on the floor, so you just saw the bare tiled flagstones, the marble and its patterns that looked like imaginary cities. The floor had been here as long as Palace-Earth had.
The Emperor Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze, She Whose Gracious Presence Illuminates the Room Like the Edgeshine of a Knife, was sitting on a couch, reading one of her books. She looked up when Eight Antidote came in, and patted the arm of the identical couch catty-corner to hers. “Come sit,” she said. “I’m sorry to keep you up this late, but it was the only time we could talk with relatively low chances of emergency interruption.”
Eight Antidote sat. The couches were upholstered in bone-white velvet, with tufted backs, the indentations set with grey-and-gold disks. He always worried he’d spill something on one of them. “It’s all right, Your Brilliance,” he said. “I know emperors don’t sleep. I should get some practice while I can.”
She didn’t smile. He wished she had. Instead she put her book down on the glass end table between the two couches—it was something Eight Antidote had never read, by someone named Eleven Lathe—and looked him over, eyes still narrow and neutral. There was a tiny line between her eyebrows which wasn’t always there.
“What would you like to tell me?” she asked, which wasn’t at all the question he’d expected. It meant he had to choose.
He could start with Eleven Laurel in the garden. That would be telling the Emperor that War and Information—or at least parts of War and Information—really didn’t like each other. But she probably knew that already, and also it would mean revealing how he felt about Eleven Laurel threatening him—and he didn’t want to start with that. Not with the Emperor. It would sound like he was complaining, and asking her to fix it, and he didn’t want Nineteen Adze fixing his problems.
He opened his mouth, and what came out was, “The Ambassador Mahit Dzmare is on yaotlek Nine Hibiscus’s flagship.”
Nineteen Adze clicked her tongue against her teeth. “… How did you learn that?” she asked.
“The special envoy from the Information Ministry brought her there,” he said. That wasn’t exactly an answer. It turned out it was very hard to be a spy, when it came time to tell the secrets you’d learned. It turned out you really, really wanted to keep them for yourself. But at least the fact that Dzmare had been brought along by an Information agent seemed like the sort of additional information he really ought to share.
“Of course she did,” said Nineteen Adze, and Eight Antidote couldn’t decipher her expression at all. Whatever it was, it wasn’t surprise. “What else do you know about the envoy?”
At the strategy meeting in War, no one had liked the envoy, but he wasn’t sure whose dislike was real and whose was inter-Ministry rivalry. There had been a lot of inter-Ministry rivalry, especially between the people who were left over from Nine Propulsion’s administration (like Eleven Laurel and the Fifth Palm undersecretary, the man who controlled armaments and research) and people who had come in with Three Azimuth, or at least at the same time she had, and were still learning their jobs and deciding where their loyalties would go. So he didn’t know anything about the envoy, not for real. Except—
“The Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise doesn’t trust her,” he said. “Doesn’t trust her maybe because of Mahit Dzmare, but maybe because she just doesn’t.”
“Sixteen Moonrise of the Twenty-Fourth. Did you know, little spy, that she used to be one of Eleven Laurel’s students, too?”
Eight Antidote shook his head. (Of course Eleven Laurel had had students before him; there was no reason to feel jealous of some grown-up faraway Fleet Captain. But he did: squirmingly jealous and a little ashamed. Was that how the Emperor thought of him, now? As Eleven Laurel’s student? Did he want her to think of him that way? Even if Eleven Laurel had threatened him, made him wonder if the Sunlit would protect him, made him wonder if Nineteen Adze didn’t trust her own Minister of War?)
“She was,” Nineteen Adze went on. “A good one. The Third Palm was sad to lose her to command, I believe. Mm. Tell me how you discovered this dislike you mentioned, and then I think I ought to send you to bed. It’s going on for moonset. Have you been sending messages to the Fleet yourself, and hearing back?”
“I’m not that enterprising,” said Eight Antidote, and liked how saying that made Nineteen Adze’s eyes crinkle up at the corners, like she was laughing, silent and appreciative.
“Not yet you aren’t. Go on.”
He tried to remind himself that the Emperor had sent him into the Ministry of War, that she already knew what he was doing there, that he wasn’t betraying anyone’s secrets except possibly Sixteen Moonrise’s, and certainly none of his own. But it was still hard to start. Hard enough that Nineteen Adze tapped her fingertips on the couch arm, once, a little patter of impatience that made Eight Antidote want to apologize for everything, and then resent her for being able to do that to him. It wasn’t fair that he had a child’s emotions, a child’s endocrine system and sympathetic nerves, and that children reacted to authority figures in very predictable ways he had studied with his tutors. It wasn’t fair at all.
Finally, he said, “She sent a priority message—fast, the kind that overrides the jumpgate mail protocols, I think it came through on a Fleet courier—from the Fleet to Minister Three Azimuth. And in that message—the Minister played it for all of the Palms and their staff, and me, I guess—the Fleet Captain pointed out that all the, um. What happened two months ago—” (They hadn’t talked about it. He didn’t want to, not really, it was easier to just call it what happened and be done, instead of saying when my ancestor made you Emperor and died on live newsfeed for the sake of Teixcalaan.) “That Mahit Dzmare was involved in that, and now she was out on the battlefront, and that this was probably not good at all, and Information was involved.”
“Oh, little spy,” said Nineteen Adze, “you are very good at what I asked you to do, aren’t you.”
He wasn’t sure that was a compliment. “Do you think she’s right?” he asked. “The Fleet Captain. I only met the Ambassador once, so I can’t tell.”
Nineteen Adze hesitated—the first time, Eight Antidote thought, that he’d ever seen her hesitate and not do so deliberately, for effect. “To be perfectly clear with you,” she said, at last, “I haven’t decided. And I’m not sure what I think matters as much as what Three Azimuth does. If you get a chance, you should try to find out.”
He had to tell her, now. Or—ask her, if he didn’t want to tell her about what Eleven Laurel had said in the garden. He at least had to ask. (Asking was a way of not telling a secret. That was a useful thing to know.)
“Your Brilliance,” he said, very careful, trying to frame the question right, “do you think Minister Three Azimuth would disagree with you?”
The Emperor looked at him, long enough for one slow eyeblink. He swallowed. His mouth was dry. She asked, “On the matter of Mahit Dzmare, or in general?”
She was treating him like his questions mattered. He tried not to feel either nervous or grateful, and felt both things anyway. Took a breath, and in breathing decided he was going to tell her about what Eleven Laurel had insinuated. Not that he had threatened him. Just that he’d … threatened Minister Three Azimuth, who could probably take care of herself. “In general,” he said. “Because—in that meeting, when we heard the recording, Eleven Laurel kept talking about the old Minister of War. Nine Propulsion. And how she’d retired. And about how you might not trust the new Minister, either.”
“Did he now,” said Nineteen Adze.
Guilt was a squirming uncomfortable feeling in Eight Antidote’s stomach. Eleven Laurel was his teacher, and here he was—doing this. He nodded, though. He couldn’t lie. Not right after he’d told the truth, anyway.
“The technician’s garden of the War Ministry grows all sorts of flowers, little spy,” the Emperor said to him. “But especially the sort that poisons. That’s what a weapon is, Eight Antidote. A poison flower. Whether it’s dangerous or not depends on who is holding it.”
“I don’t understand,” Eight Antidote said, just as guilty, and now embarrassed for not being able to decipher the allusion. “Not without knowing who the poison flower is supposed to be.”
Nineteen Adze laughed, which made him feel worse. “All of them,” she said. “But gardens need outside grafts, sometimes, to keep them healthy. Ask your biology tutors about that, if you have time while you’re finding out what Three Azimuth thinks about Mahit Dzmare.”
The outside graft had to be Three Azimuth. Maybe that meant Nineteen Adze did trust her. Or—thought that she’d be good for War, which wasn’t the same thing at all—
He nodded. “I’ll try,” he said, because he guessed he was the Emperor’s spy before he was anything else except the Emperor’s heir. And he could figure out the rest later. He wasn’t stupid. He read all kinds of poems. He’d find one with poison flowers, and figure it out.
* * *
By the time Mahit’s voice had gone completely—a heat-struck rasp, wrung out from attempts at singing and the strangling moistureless air—she and Three Seagrass and the alien, who they were calling Second (as opposed to its somewhat taller and much quieter companion, First) had a mutual vocabulary of approximately twenty words. Most of them were nouns, or things like nouns. Nouns were easy. One pointed at an object, and said its name, and then the alien said its name for the object, and thus they’d acquired energy pistol (or at least “weapon”), shoe, water, sand, and what was either flower or picture or shade, depending on whether Second understood representational objects, and to what degree.
They also had some verbs, but none of them made much sense. There was drink, or what Mahit hoped was drink, but could have been consume, internalize, or even perform an action on command—Second used the pitch-growl sound of that word when it wanted her or Three Seagrass to repeat what it was saying. Maybe drink was for both water and
for concepts. To take in. Their other verbs were not much clearer: something which might have been fly, land, or pilot a spacecraft, and something else which was probably stop. Though that sound wasn’t necessarily a verb. It could have been just the negation sound, no and zero and not that. Or a threat: don’t continue, or harm will come to you. Second had raised its claws to them twice. Once when Three Seagrass had stepped quite close to it, and offered an open palm—Mahit had thought of poison, of contact poison, of all the ways Teixcalaan could seep through the skin—only to be met with bared teeth, that noise, and claws at her throat that made her skitter backward, pale as glass. And the other time, when one of their soldier escorts had come out from under the shade of the tapestry to bring them more water. Both First and Second had made the no sound, then, and followed it with a resonant scream that made that soldier gag and drop the precious water to spill in the sand.
Mahit wished that she could convey the concept of waste, seeing that dark puddle vanish, drunk up by Peloa-2’s silica dust. But she couldn’t even get close. The aliens had watched the water disappear, too, but they didn’t react to it in any way she could understand, any way she could hook onto, emotionally or linguistically. Was their whole planet desert? Were they used to loss? Did they even have the concept of loss?
The other problem was that as far as either she or Three Seagrass was able to tell, they weren’t learning a language. They were learning a pidgin. There was no alteration in form, pitch, or volume of any of the words they’d put together when they were used in different contexts. None of the verbs related to objects. None of the verbs had tenses, or referred to the future or the past, completed or uncompleted actions. They were all pinpoints, unrelated to everything surrounding them. Even more frustratingly, they had not in the slightest been able to establish the concept of names. Of selves, at all. No pronouns, no name signs, nothing. No I.
Mahit thought, with exhausted irony, And how wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of “you”?—that question she’d asked Three Seagrass so very many times in the City. No way to ask it here. If these aliens had a concept of you, it was entirely opaque.
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