A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER THREE

THE request came in during the early hours of the morning, and so it was the Third Undersecretary to the Minister of Information, who had slept, or not slept (not slept, yet again) in her office, who got to it first. Three Seagrass saw it flash through on the internal Information Ministry network, a bright grey-gold-red cycling pulse in the upper-left quadrant of her cloudhook display: a priority nineteen message in War Ministry colors, the sort of thing that wouldn’t even show up on a regular asekreta’s feed. Three months ago Three Seagrass never would have seen it.

(Three months ago, even if she’d somehow reached this exalted position in the Ministry, complete with her own tiny office with a tiny window only one floor down from the Minister herself, Three Seagrass would have been asleep in her house, and missed the message entirely. There: she’d justified clinical-grade insomnia as a meritorious action, one which would enable her to deal with a problem before anyone else awoke; that was half her work done for the day, surely.)

The request cycled again, blinking. No one was picking it up. Priority nineteen messages cycled four times and then dumped themselves into the First Undersecretary’s private cloudhook, on the basis that an emergency message from someone command-level in another Ministry would at least get answered fast if otherwise it was clogging up Information’s second-in-command’s workflow. If it cycled one more time, Three Seagrass could safely forget about it until whatever it was settled on the Ministry like a fog of pollen, irritating everyone’s mucous membranes—

Even your allusions are becoming terrible. Fog of pollen? Like that is going to be the base of a decent poem—

Two and a half months ago, Three Seagrass had written a decent poem, a lament for her dearest friend, stupidly and uselessly dead, and after that, well. Fog of fucking pollen, and this exquisite prison of an office.

She flicked her eyes up, micromovement to the left, and claimed that request message for her own.

Twenty minutes later, just as the dawn began to flood through her window to pool in extravagant, vision-obscuring beams across her cloudhook display, Three Seagrass put the finishing touches on the second-stupidest idea of her career in the Information Ministry. She did it accompanied by the determined cheerful voice of Fourth Undersecretary Seven Monograph humming the newest top-ten hit arrangement of “Reclamation Song #5” (the same song for three fucking weeks now and at least Seven Monograph had an exquisite command of prosody and imitation, even if he also had a tendency to get songs stuck in his head and share them with the office … but no one could sing two harmony lines at once without artificial help, and some people shouldn’t try), wafting its way down the hall, as it did every morning. The Third Undersecretary—well, any Undersecretary of the six of them, really—had discretionary authority over assigning Ministry personnel on priority nineteen requests, and oh, had this ever been a request and a half. The yaotlek Nine Hibiscus, out on the edges of Teixcalaanli space, wanted a first-contact specialist with diplomatic chops, and wanted one yesterday. To talk to those same incomprehensible aliens that Mahit Dzmare had used to defuse a civil war while Three Seagrass watched, caught up in the strange gravity of her very own barbarian ambassador.

Her cloudhook pulsed pale gold: message incoming.

Patrician First-Class Three Seagrass, asekreta, Third Undersecretary to Information Minister Four Aloe, you have been reassigned. Your new temporary designation is Envoy-at-Large, seconded to the Tenth Legion on the Eternal-class ship Weight for the Wheel, commanding officer yaotlek Nine Hibiscus. Please report to the central spaceport for expedited travel by sunset on 187.1.1–19A (TODAY). Your pay grade: remains the same; your clearances: remain the same; span of assignment: three months, with unlimited extensions. Assigning officer: Three Seagrass, Third Undersecretary to Information Minister Four Aloe. For questions regarding this assignment, please contact your assigning officer. To accept this assignment, reply to this message—

Last chance, Three Seagrass thought to herself, last chance to have second thoughts. Last chance to not set yourself up for an intensely boring disciplinary meeting when you get back.

And blinked a reply affirmative before she could stop herself, feeling shimmering, feeling like she was already weightless and off-planet and terrified, feeling real. She thought of Eleven Lathe, her poetic model, her hero, writing Dispatches from the Numinous Frontier out alone amongst his aliens, the Ebrekti. Could she do worse? Certainly, but perhaps not much worse—and then, gleeful and bitter, she thought, Fuck you, watch me try, in Twelve Azalea’s eternally silenced voice. That had been the first-stupidest idea of Three Seagrass’s career: believing, wholeheartedly and entire, that the Ministry she and Twelve Azalea had served would protect them both from senselessness, even in the face of imminent civil war. Oh, how very stupid a decision that belief had engendered. And she hadn’t been the one to die for it.

Not her, and not Mahit Dzmare. Mahit, who had kissed Three Seagrass once, in the middle of going more native than Three Seagrass had ever seen a barbarian go, and before she’d run away from the whole concept of Teixcalaan. She missed her, Three Seagrass decided. Maybe she should fix that, while she was exploding her nascent political career for the sake of the Empire.

The last time Mahit had gotten herself involved with court politics—and wouldn’t the Lsel Council absolutely hate being compared to the Teixcalaanli imperial court, that pit of internecine intrigue and backstabbing, villain of every faintly anti-imperial holoproj drama—she hadn’t been consciously aware of the clock. This time—walking soundless on soft-soled shoes through the decks of the Station, wending a deliberately random path toward the central ship-hangar—she could almost hear the seconds counting down. She had at absolute most six days before Councilor Amnardbat wanted her in the neurological suite, six days before (in the best case) everyone on Lsel knew that she had not one, but two imago-versions of Yskandr Aghavn in her mind.

We die on the table. Carved open, a Heritage neurosurgeon’s scalpel slipping just enough to accidentally (surely accidentally) sever her spinal cord. The surgical scar from where Five Portico had inserted the dead-Yskandr’s imago-machine into Mahit’s skull ached. She’d grown her hair out to cover it; the tight curls were longer than they’d been in years.

that,> Yskandr said, with too much brittle cheer.

Don’t.

The clock had existed in the City too. She’d started it running the instant she’d begun to investigate her predecessor’s death—or Yskandr had started it a long time previously, when he’d promised a dying, brilliant Emperor an imago-machine and eternal life. Like priming the detonator on an explosive. But Mahit hadn’t noticed the acceleration of time, the reduction of options, until she’d been on Teixcalaan for days. At least this time she could see the flat blank wall of the deadline coming for her. She wouldn’t be surprised.

Yskandr murmured to her as the Station’s hangar opened up in front of them, a busy cavern studded with ships,

I don’t want a meeting, Yskandr, I want a conversation. We’re going to a bar.

Mahit still felt his laughter as an electric shimmer down her nerves, like she always had; it was only that now it shaded into the neuropathic ulnar pain when it reached her smallest fingers. She’d gotten used to it, somewhat. As much as she could manage to get used to it. As long as it didn’t spread, or turn to numbness, she’d be fine. It wasn’t an obvious tell. So very few people knew what had happened to her and Yskandr in Teixcalaan, and all of them were either—well, either her-and-Yskandr, or the entire person they sometimes managed to be, or back in Teixcalaan.

The bar she’d chosen wasn’t one she’d been to before. She hadn’t made a habit of hanging around pilots’ bars as a young person or a student; her aptitudes in spatial mathematics had ruled out pilot-imagos as feasible matches early on, and she’d never quite stopped feeling like they’d all know she wasn’t quite good enough to join them. Now that emotion felt like a vestige of another Mahit entirely, a child-Mahit with a child’s fears and desires. The Mahit she was now wanted a drink, and she wanted a drink with Dekakel Onchu, the sort of Councilor who liked to socialize with her people. And this was Onchu’s drinking establishment of choice—there were publicity holos of her coming out of it on more than one of Lsel’s internal newsfeeds.

Finding her wasn’t difficult. The publicity holos hadn’t lied. She was at the bar: a dulled chrome expanse well scratched by glasses, graffiti, the remains of the original inlaid design, diamond hatching around curved fan-shapes. Mahit thought, What sort of flower is that? Thought it in Teixcalaanli, and had Yskandr chide her with a memory; how popular this particular pattern had been in pilot-deck décor back when he’d been a teenager taking his own aptitudes right here on Lsel. Mahit paused just to the left of the doorway, let the door swing closed behind her and leave her in shadows when an actual set of pilots walked in after. Onchu wasn’t dressed like a Councilor; she was dressed like a spacer, scalp shaved to stubble, bright paint on her mouth and on the rim of her glass, deep lines around her eyes like solar rays. She wasn’t in conversation. She was drinking companionably with the man to her right, a peaceful mutual silence, and there was an open stool on her other side.

I think, Mahit said inside her mind, in the strange-echoing place where she was sometimes herself and sometimes a herself who was also Yskandr Aghavn, that I want you to say hello.

He didn’t take her body, like he had in Teixcalaan or to calm her out of useless panic in her residence pod—Yskandr slipped forward, helped her muscles remember a walk they’d never used, a center of gravity they did not have. A smile wider than Mahit’s own, and a way of leaning on one elbow when she’d arrived at the bar and sat down beside Councilor Onchu.

“Councilor,” Yskandr said—Mahit said, the space between them hardly a space, thought and action fractionally separated—“it’s been a long time. Sixteen years now?”

Onchu blinked. Blinked again, a slow narrowing and release of eyelids, an entirely evaluatory expression. “There are several people you might have been, with that sort of introduction,” she said, “but only one who would be quite as audaciously rude as to make it. Hello, Mahit Dzmare.”

Mahit smiled Yskandr’s smile. “Hello, Councilor Onchu. I hope you don’t mind if I have a drink.”

“It’s a pilots’ bar, but we don’t check your imago at the door for membership,” said Onchu. “What’s your poison?”

<Ahachotiya.>

We are not drinking fermented fruit, ever again, and also we are on Lsel, and also I wanted you to say hello, not to play Teixcalaanlitzlim for effect—

“Vodka,” Mahit said. “Chilled, straight up.”

Onchu gestured to the bartender, a familiar hand flip, and he fetched down a chilled shot glass and a bottle of vodka so cold it poured thick and viscous. “As poisons go, I might like you,” she said.

“Only as poisons go?”

Onchu grinned, white teeth bright against the dark red stain on her lips. “The rest, I’ll see. It’s funny, Dzmare, I thought you might show up a lot earlier than now. Or else not at all.”

Mahit shrugged, the motion still more Yskandr’s than her own. “Didn’t mean to keep you waiting, Councilor.”

“I wasn’t waiting.”

Talking to Dekakel Onchu was like trying to fix a target on a fast-rotating ship; she looked like she was right there, but she kept showing new faces, shifting too fast. Mahit thought (flood of memory, as sharp as scent, as the taste of Teixcalaanli tea, the light in Nineteen Adze’s old offices), Be a mirror, and went on. “You sent me—well, not me. You sent several messages to the Lsel Ambassador. I regret to note that they reached the current one, not the former one.”

The expression that crossed Onchu’s face—a thinning of the mouth, one side of the lips curling up in a swift, barely visible smile, chagrin or pleasure, too fast to tell—made Mahit think of how she herself had felt, every time the world (the Empire—it was proving impossible to lose the valence of the Teixcalaanli fusion of the two words, even thinking in Stationer language)—shifted around her, reframed itself. Some new piece of information with its load of clarifying horror, slotting into place. Her upsurge of sympathy wasn’t going to be useful here, she knew, but it was real nonetheless.

Onchu drank some of her beer, a swallow neither too large nor too small, a perfectly normal movement (and oh, fuck, how had one meeting with Heritage dropped Mahit right back into the kind of vigilant observation which had kept her alive in the City and which she had been trying so diligently to unlearn enough to imagine she had really come home), and nodded. “Interesting,” she said. “From your behavior up until now, I would never have expected those went anywhere but a dead-letter office.”

“I read them,” Mahit told her. “I—at the time when I read them, I was very glad to have some external confirmation of what I myself was noticing.”

“Drink your vodka,” Onchu told her. “We’re going to take a walk.”

Yskandr murmured.

Good, Mahit told him, and then—because he heard everything she thought anyway, because she was never alone again, Let’s see if interested means “would like me safely dead,” as usual.

The warm prickles of imago-laughter made the vodka shot burn sharper as she took it. “Where to, Councilor?”

“Think I’ll show you around,” said Onchu. “I’m due to inspect the hangar this shift. Come along. It’ll be an education.”

Mahit had been in Lsel Station’s hangar before, but always as a passenger leaving the Station or on the yearly evacuation-safety-training days required for every Station resident. Walking into that cavernous space—cacophonous with talking, the thump and whine of maintenance machinery, the huge hum of cooling fans—next to the Councilor for the Pilots herself was a rather different experience. No one told Dekakel Onchu where to go: she walked amongst her people as if she had never quite wanted to be possessed of an office and a legislative responsibility. Mahit followed at her shoulder, feeling acutely ungrubby and uncalloused. There were so many parts of a spacecraft, and all of them were everywhere, being worked on by Stationers who understood them as intimately as Mahit understood the cadence of Teixcalaanli poetry.

“So,” said Onchu, just loud enough for Mahit to hear over the roar of the fans, “you read my letters, and you thought what?”

“That you must have had real reasons for sending a warning like that,” Mahit said. “An unauthorized communiqué, that—if it had ever reached Ambassador Aghavn—would have meant that our Station’s official ambassador was a danger to him.”

“I knew what I had done,” said Onchu. “You don’t need to prove that you’re competent enough to figure that out.” They were walking in a slow zigzag, tracking back and forth across the hangar floor. Half of Lsel Station’s short-range transports were docked in here, being loaded or unloaded—the usual minerals and refined molybdenum, more unusual (to Mahit’s eyes, at least, and she knew she was less informed than she’d like to be on Lsel’s standard set of exports) pallets of compressed kelp, dried fish, rice … and most of those pallets were stamped with Teixcalaanli import papers. It looked very like Lsel was feeding the Teixcalaanli warships passing through Bardzravand Sector, the ones which were on the way to the war that had begun almost as soon as Mahit had come back to the Station.

Yskandr murmured.

The war that Councilor Tarats started, to preserve us, Mahit thought at him—and then stopped thinking, because Dekakel Onchu was watching her, watching every shift of her body language. Watching for Yskandr, or not-Yskandr. (For evidence of sabotage.) And even as she watched Mahit, she was moving amongst her people, stopping every so often to comment on a piece of work being done, or merely say hello to the pilot or maintenance engineer in question.

Some emperors are emperors of very narrow spaces, just enough to fill entirely with themselves, Mahit thought. When they were passing by a particularly noisy hull repair job, she asked as directly as she could, “What made you suspect Heritage?”

Onchu snorted. “Because it wasn’t Tarats, and the others on the Council had neither access nor motive. Who else but the person who has control over all of our memories, whose responsibility is keeping us safe and cohesive?”

“Culturally safe,” Mahit said.

“Amnardbat is a patriot,” said Dekakel Onchu, who had flown ships in combat for the sake of Lsel Station, who Mahit thought would have given her life for her fellow pilots, and thus for the Station as a whole. She waited to see if the Councilor had anything more to add. In the silence between them the sound of metal banging on metal filled the whole world.

“And so am I, it turns out,” Onchu went on, with an infinitesimal shrug of one shoulder. “Heritage should not be making such unilateral decisions about diplomacy. We’re a council of six, and Miners breaks the ties, not Heritage.”

“What did Councilor Amnardbat do to me?” Mahit asked, and let herself be as miserably upset about the question as she wanted. Which was a great deal.

“Ah,” said Onchu, “then she did succeed,” and Mahit had to stop herself from breaking into snickering, helpless and horrified—Onchu hadn’t even been sure, she’d guessed at the sabotage, and thought it was worth warning the dead Yskandr about regardless.

“Someone did,” she managed, just on the edge of that hysteria. “Quite effectively, really. I thought it was my fault—neurological failure, there are cases where an imago doesn’t take—”

“You’re not alone,” Onchu said. “You don’t move like Mahit Dzmare when I first met her.”

No. No, she didn’t. She’d shown that off very pointedly in the bar, and was probably showing it still—she herself didn’t exactly know how she moved. If she ever moved like the person she’d been when she had been alone. “Some of the damage turned out to be reversible,” she said, which wasn’t not true. It just wasn’t very much of what was true.

“In less complex circumstances, I’d be sending you over to medical to have that very thoroughly investigated, for the purposes of possibly reproducing the reclamation of function,” Onchu said. “I hate losing imago-lines to neuro damage, and pilots—well. Lots of ways to get hit on the head. It’d be good to have a way of reestablishing a line that did manage to come back from an incident—I lose enough people as it is, lately.”

“In less complex circumstances,” Mahit replied, so dry that her tongue felt withered in her mouth, “there wouldn’t be anything to investigate, would there.”

Onchu laughed, soundless under the whine of a metal-cutter saw; laughed, and waved a half salute to the man operating it, who grinned back at her, signed all good, and went back to his work. “We suffer under complexity, Dzmare. So tell me. What made you finally decide to get off your ass and come down to the hangar?”

In six days I’m fucked sideways seemed too much like a confession. Like an appeal for sanctuary. She’d tried that on Teixcalaan, and look where it had gotten her: home, except never home again.

Mahit ignored him. Yskandr—she, too, but mostly Yskandr—had a history of sleeping with emperors. Sleeping next to emperors, or proto-emperors, anyway, while they went their sleepless rounds of work. A thoroughly distracting history. And even if Onchu was worried about losing too many pilot-lines, too many deaths out in the black where Tarats’s alien threat hunkered; Mahit couldn’t trust Pilots to keep her safe through the revelation of her doubled imago any more than she could trust Heritage.

No one can know.

Not now, Yskandr.

“Heritage got off its ass,” she said to Onchu. “Thought I should do the same. Now, how about you tell me what you thought you were trying to accomplish by warning Aghavn about me?”

Onchu pressed her lips together, dark red line like a cut beading blood. “Patriotism,” she said, again. “Ask your imago—if that’s still something you can do, if you’ve got more than muscle memory—about Darj Tarats and his philosophy of empire, and then, if you have more questions … I drink in that bar every seventh shift. Come on by.”

Darj Tarats? Mahit asked, internal query …

… and what she got back was

A formal meal on Weight for the Wheel was a precise affair, a protocol dance, a prescribed sequence of events from the entrance of the commanding officer to the final libation poured out for the Emperor, a few drops of alcohol substituting for blood in this latter fallen age—not that Nine Hibiscus was the sort of Fleet Captain who would rather bleed into a bowl for propriety rather than give up her last swallow of peat liquor. This was a very small formal meal: four settings around a table in a conference room hastily made grand with Tenth Legion banners and the black-and-gold starburst-cloisonné plates that matched their banner colors. Nine Hibiscus herself wore exactly what she’d been wearing while listening to the hideous alien noises, which was her regular uniform with its new rank stars at the collar: not just her Fleet Captain’s four, but the spear-arc collar tabs of a yaotlek, like the top of the imperial throne cut off and turned sideways.

Guests were seated first, and thus Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada came into the room to find Sixteen Moonrise and her adjutant, the ikantlos-prime Twelve Fusion, already seated poised over their empty plates, waiting like scavenger birds. She’d never met Sixteen Moonrise in person before, only over holo—the Twenty-Fourth Legion and her own Tenth had never been posted in the same sector of space before this particular campaign. Sixteen Moonrise was tall, and her skin and hair were the same suite of colors, like she’d been stamped from a die: the color of the moon if the moon was a coin. Pale face, long and straight pale hair, electrum-sheeny, left—for this official, ceremonious meeting—loose of the queue she usually kept it in. She was younger than Nine Hibiscus by a half indiction, according to her official record. Those three and a half years meant they’d never known each other as cadets. She looked serene and hungry at once.

“The yaotlek Nine Hibiscus, Fleet Captain of the Tenth Teixcalaanli Legion,” murmured the soldier acting as steward, and both Sixteen Moonrise and her second bowed over their fingertips, deep inclinations.

“Welcome aboard the Weight for the Wheel,” Nine Hibiscus said.

“We are welcome indeed,” Sixteen Moonrise replied, the rote and required response, “your hospitality is as boundless as the stars, yaotlek, and as light-giving.”

Nine Hibiscus sat. The table was small enough that all four of them were practically brushing elbows, save for Twenty Cicada, who was too skinny to brush elbows with anyone. The soldier at the door gestured fractionally, and another one of her people came in with real bread—every ship had some flour and yeast, for the particular rituals of hospitality that required their products—and the palest distilled wheat spirit, so alcoholic just inhaling it felt like being drunk: starshine, the Emperor’s drink. Every ship had that, too. (Some more than others. Nine Hibiscus kept Weight for the Wheel well stocked.)

When she’d planned this meal—a strategy dinner, a transparent I-know-you-know-I-know ruse for Sixteen Moonrise to chew on along with her bread—Nine Hibiscus had meant to start with that letter demanding an explanation for the long delay in engagement with the enemy. Start with that, with her knowing about it before it had even officially arrived; cut Sixteen Moonrise’s little political maneuver down at the knees and leave it to bleed out. But since then she’d been listening to aliens. Since then she’d seen their spit eat up one of her own.

“Fleet Captain,” she began. Sixteen Moonrise inclined her head a fraction. “About an hour ago, while you were in transit, we engaged the enemy forces for the first time.”

There was an expression there, but not much of an interpretable one. Twelve Fusion was more obvious: he put his glass of starshine down on the table with a sharp click. “And you’re having us for dinner?” he asked. “Why aren’t you on the bridge?”

“Because you’re my guests, and my Fleet Captains—particularly the eager ones—are my best tools in the campaign that is about to begin in earnest,” Nine Hibiscus snapped. There, that was the I-know-what-you-did portion of the meeting gestured at. If she moved fast enough, she wouldn’t need to expand into a full dressing-down. Sixteen Moonrise was a Fleet Captain, and Nine Hibiscus was going to need the full complement of the Twenty-Fourth Legion—she could have used a triple six of legions, not just a yaotlek’s standard complement of one six, if she was being brutally honest with herself about the situation at hand. Unknown numbers of aliens, a force strong enough to silence whole planets, and here she was with only one six of legions—but she’d been outnumbered before. She’d been outnumbered on Kauraan, and Kauraan had won her this posting, for whatever good it would do her. “And besides,” she finished, ripping a chunk of bread off her roll with her teeth, “the enemy that dared engage us has been neutralized entirely. We aren’t in an active combat situation, Twelve Fusion. Do you think I’d have let you risk yourself and your Fleet Captain coming aboard during one?”

“No,” Sixteen Moonrise answered, cutting off her subordinate with a sharp gesture of one hand. “You haven’t half enough legions to waste one on a stunt strategy dinner, yaotlek. Nor are you stupid—”

That was rich, coming from a woman who was legally her subordinate.

“Stupid is not the invective usually shouted at me, no,” she said, and tore off another mouthful of bread. It was sour, and delicious, and the crust was sharp enough to cut her soft palate. Eating it showed her teeth, and she caught Twenty Cicada’s faintly reproachful expression. But propriety wasn’t at all what she wanted to convey just now. No, she wanted a sense of rapid motion, of hunger. “A holo of the combat is already on your shuttle for you to peruse on your way back, Fleet Captain,” she continued. “And the Twenty-Fourth will come and join us at the point position in case more of these spitting, ship-dissolving things attack us. We’ll be ready, with your able assistance. Twenty Cicada, play the audio.”

She had warned him she was going to do this. She wasn’t cruel. (And she’d noticed he hadn’t eaten a single thing save for his obligatory sip of starshine, and hoped she’d keep her own bread down in her belly where it belonged.)

“You picked up a transmission?” Sixteen Moonrise began, and then the air was made of the hideous noise of the aliens again, and Nine Hibiscus at least had the pleasure of seeing the other woman go even paler than her standard color, and snap her jaw shut against an upsurge of bile.

After it was over, Nine Hibiscus said, “I’ve sent for a translator from the Information Ministry.”

“You don’t need a translator, you need a winnowing barrage,” Twelve Fusion said. “Whatever made that shouldn’t exist.”

“Ah, I expect they think the same of you and me,” Twenty Cicada said, as viciously dry as evaporating starshine liquor. “Perhaps we should try to talk to them and find out if there’s anything else they’d like from us instead. Unless you enjoy watching Shard pilots dissolve from the ship inward. Ikantlos-prime.”

Nine Hibiscus could not ask for a better second than the one she had. She knew he knew she knew it, too, even if he wasn’t looking at her.

Sixteen Moonrise placed her hands flat on the table. Nine Hibiscus wondered if they were shaking, or if she was trying to claim space—touching Nine Hibiscus’s ship, getting her palms on it. “Yaotlek,” she said, with the highest level of formality. “Leaving aside the opinion of the entirety of the Twenty-Fourth, which I represent here, that talking to something that talks like that is a waste of all of our time, why the fucking Information Ministry?”

“What, do you want to talk to it instead?”

“I’d like to shoot at it. Without the interference of a bunch of manipulative spooks.”

Nothing in Sixteen Moonrise’s records as Fleet Captain of the Twenty-Fourth had suggested to Nine Hibiscus that she was more bloodthirsty than a standard Teixcalaanli soldier; Nine Hibiscus could imagine saying something similar. I’d like to shoot at it. She would, in fact, like to shoot at anything that came near her right now, including Sixteen Moonrise her own self. And no one in the Six Outreaching Palms was terribly fond of Information; Information were civilians. The eyes of the bureaucracy, of the City, out beyond the jumpgates where the actual City couldn’t see. Eyes, quite often, on Fleet ships, reporting in secret to whoever their master was—either the Minister of Information, spidered away safe planetside (if you believed Fleet rumor), or all Teixcalaan expressed through the person of the Emperor (if you believed the propaganda Information put out). Nine Hibiscus usually neglected to believe the propaganda. Information were—oh, it would work to use Sixteen Moonrise’s term, in her own mind, just for the moment—manipulative spooks.

But she had no one in her legion who could handle learning to talk to aliens that made human planets vanish into silence. And Sixteen Moonrise wasn’t a trustable ally, not with her transparent power play of a challenge via concerned letter. Not with her immediate distrust of Information—that sounded like Third Palmer talk, Fleet intelligence, with their habitual distrust of anyone else’s spywork. The Third Palm had never been one of Nine Hibiscus’s favorite divisions to deal with. They were obstructionist, insistent on using only their own methods, their own people, anytime a Fleet engagement drifted out of strict combat and logistics and into overt psychological manipulation. Usually, Nine Hibiscus gave the orders she would have given anyway, and neglected to ask permission of the nearest political officer.

Sixteen Moonrise was a Fleet Captain, of course, not a political officer, but—she’d have to check the woman’s early service record. Perhaps she had been, once. Either way, Nine Hibiscus didn’t have the luxury of agreeing with her. Not now. Perhaps not at all.

“Information,” said Nine Hibiscus, “talks to aliens as a habit. All of that bullshit with Dispatches From the Numinous Frontier, xenophile poetry and philosophy? These things can’t fuck with Information’s head, Information comes prefucked. It’ll save us time, having them do the diplomacy and extract as much intelligence as possible, while we do the maneuvering. I want you to bring the Parabolic Compression up to meet Weight for the Wheel, with your full complement of Shards, and your stealth cruiser—what’s it called, Twenty Cicada? The fast one.”

“Porcelain Fragment Scorched,” Twenty Cicada said, as smooth as an AI on cloudhook. “It’s a very nice ship, Fleet Captain, you should be proud of the acquisition—where did you get it? From the Sixth Legion in trade…?”

Sixteen Moonrise said, “You’d know, Swarm, wouldn’t you,” and fuck but she was going to push every inch of the way. Nine Hibiscus knocked back her glass of starshine, leaving only the Emperor’s share, the last sip.

“He would,” she said. “We’re going to take back Peloa-2, even if there are more spitting ships waiting out there in the dark. You’re going to, with Porcelain Fragment Scorched. Ask for whatever expertise you need from the Tenth, though I’m sure you’re well staffed. This sector is Teixcalaanli. Let’s remind ourselves of that while we wait for Information’s input.”

“This is a sop,” Sixteen Moonrise said, her voice flat. “I am not a fool, yaotlek.”

“On the contrary, Fleet Captain. You’re just smart enough to know what I’m doing and that it will make you look like you’ve won when you come back to your co-conspirators in the Seventeenth and the Sixth Legions. Here’s the action you requested. And here’s my plan for a larger-scale engagement. You get both. Shall we go to work?”

Sixteen Moonrise made her wait, drawing out the tension between them for a long and ugly moment, and then she flipped over her starshine glass. The last mouthful spilled onto the table and glistened like the spit of their enemy.

“The Twenty-Fourth will execute this mission as you command, yaotlek,” she said. “It is our honor to serve the Empire. Your hospitality has been impeccable—you remind me ever so much of Minister Nine Propulsion.”

Ex-Minister Nine Propulsion, her former patron. That was the core of this, somehow. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t quite see what Sixteen Moonrise wanted. Not yet, not with how she was still half-hearing the alien noise and watching the best alcohol in the Empire evaporate, formal gesture of détente-ended. Not yet, but it was surely Ministry politics, out here at the edge of the world; the long reach of the Palms mattered for politics as much as for firepower. Which was a sort of pity. She smiled instead of saying anything, her eyes wide, and tipped out her own glass. Thought, rote pattern, May His Brilliance see a thousand stars, and then corrected, internally. Her Brilliance.

“Fourth shift,” she said to Twenty Cicada and the retreating backs of her guests. Eighteen hours away. “Recrew Knifepoint and ready Dreaming Citadel as support for the Fleet Captain’s advance into the Peloa System.”

It was kind of brilliant, really, how fast the people in Inmost Province Spaceport got out of Three Seagrass’s way now that she was dressed as a special envoy. Teixcalaanlitzlim loved a uniform, a well-turned suit in shining colors—and Information cream and flame had never spun her wrong before when she’d needed to make an impression—but an envoy’s suit, with its faint echo of a Fleet uniform done all up in that same flame-colored fabric? People deferred. She was tiny, and her rib cage was never going to be broad enough to write home about—no wide orator’s lungs for her, no substance to her, at least physically—no matter how many poems she declaimed at court. And yet absolutely no one had gotten in her way, even though Inmost Province was as swarmingly crowded as ever. Merchants and freight pallets and soldiers and a thousand thousand Teixcalaanli citizens scattering like seeds to the stars. It was heady. She felt just exactly like she had when she’d been a trainee and skived off from class: a gorgeous and unfolding sense that she was getting away with something.

And it was all entirely, completely, and thoroughly legal. She’d signed off on it herself.

Admittedly, having done so, she’d left an out of office message on repeat outside her office door in cheerful doggerel glyphs, gone home to her flat to pack underwear and hair products and receive delivery of five identical envoy-at-large uniforms, and pointedly ignored any communiqués by cloudhook or infofiche stick that might have arrived with contradictory orders. Also she’d not done the dishes before she left for the spaceport and points unknown, but that wasn’t unusual. She hadn’t done the dishes all week.

A disturbing flicker of thought: neglecting the dishes all week was standard-overworked-Information-agent, neglecting the dishes before a three-month trip to a war zone was the sort of tell that a good interrogator would notice. Three Seagrass could imagine the conversation perfectly: You weren’t really planning on coming back, asekreta, were you? asked the imaginary interrogator, and imaginary future-Three-Seagrass would have to shrug and say, I wasn’t thinking about that, I was preparing to serve Teixcalaan, and then it’d be up to the two of them to figure out if she was lying.

None of this was her current problem, and all of it was unpleasant to consider. Three Seagrass strode through a group of off-planet tourists disembarking from a passenger cruiser and scattered them like leaves; wove her way past an enormous crate of brightly scented, spiky-skinned fruit being offloaded onto pallets; and walked straight up to the ship she knew would get her to the first stop on her route fastest of any ship currently at port in Inmost Province. It wasn’t a military vessel. The Flower Weave was a medical resupply skiff, made for darting out-City loaded with equipment that had an extremely limited shelf life. Potent botanicals straight out of the Science Ministry’s laboratory, offgassing to uselessness if they sat around too long, for example. Or—like this particular ship on this particular run—organs for transplant. Hearts. Nice fresh ones on ice, loaded up with antigens that were apparently—according to her quick and dirty research—quite common in the City but in very rare supply on a small planet right next to the first jumpgate that Three Seagrass wanted to move through.

She blinked directions to her cloudhook, microshifts of her eye, and cued a government official is here to annoy you message to the Flower Weave’s captain. It didn’t take him long to show up, the doors of his hangar bay folding back like a membranous fan. He looked harried. Excellent.

“Captain Eighteen Gravity,” Three Seagrass said, “My name is Special Envoy Three Seagrass, and I need you to take me along with your cargo when you break orbit.”

He blinked. “Envoy,” he said, and bowed over his fingertips, which gave him enough time to collect himself; she could watch him do it. “I’m a medical supply ship,” he went on, as he straightened up. “I can’t detour. My cargo is time-sensitive. I know the regulations say I’m supposed to take envoys anywhere they want to go, but—”

“You’re headed to Calatl System. I am also headed to Calatl System, Captain. And you’re leaving fastest of any ship in this whole spaceport.” Sometimes it was very difficult for Three Seagrass not to smile like a barbarian: bared teeth and gleeful. She’d probably learned that from Mahit. The impulse remained repressible, however, so she repressed it.

“Oh,” said Captain Eighteen Gravity. “If you don’t mind the cramped quarters in the hold, that’s fine, then. We don’t really have a passenger cabin, it’s just me and my first officer and the ixplanatl tech.”

“I am very small,” Three Seagrass said, delightedly. “I squish. Put me in between the boxes of hearts, I’ll do just fine.”

There was a moment where the captain seemed to be attempting to marshal an appropriate response, and then he visibly gave up. “We break orbit in an hour and forty-seven—forty-six, sorry—minutes,” he said. “If you’re squished in with the hearts in an hour and thirty, you can go wherever we go. Envoy.”

“Excellent,” Three Seagrass told him. “Your service to Teixcalaan and Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze does you credit! See you soon.”

An hour and thirty was enough time to grab dinner from one of the multitude of spaceport bars, and Three Seagrass figured she’d need it, if she didn’t want to contemplate carpaccio of medically significant human heart at an inopportune moment. Teixcalaan devours, she thought, and then—no, that wasn’t how Mahit said it at all. She could ask her, maybe, when she got to Lsel Station.

It was on the way to the war. It was in fact right next to the war, in a way that her barbarian must have known would happen when she gave the coordinates of their enemy as sinecure for her Station’s freedom and thought the danger worthwhile. So Lsel was, in fact, a reasonable stop to make—especially if Three Seagrass was meant to learn to talk to aliens, which she was. She could use an alien who was good at talking to humans. Barbarians were the next best thing to aliens. Mahit was the best of the barbarians Three Seagrass had ever met, and also she missed her.

In the bar she ordered thick noodles in soup with chili oil and shreds of smoked beef, on the basis that it would be a long time before she could have proper in-City food again. She amused herself by drawing her route on one of her cloudhook’s graphics vector programs: to that nearby jumpgate on the Flower Weave, and then to three more jumpgates by whoever was fastest at each stop, doing a complex end run around the two months of sublight travel that getting to Lsel usually took. She would come out the wrong gate, when she got there, and have to convince whoever was piloting her ride to take her to the Station. The wrong gate—which Mahit had called the far gate—would be much closer to Lsel than the usual gated approach to Stationer space, from territories properly controlled by Teixcalaan. The far gate was outside the Empire, and she’d have to switch to non-Teixcalaanli vessels to access it at all, especially from the non-Teixcalaanli side. That side of the Amhamemat Gate was in territory nominally controlled by the Verashk-Talay Confederation, who had an absurd habit of electing their leaders by popular vote. Or at least Three Seagrass thought it was. Verashk-Talay space wasn’t mapped very well, and the Anhamemat Gate also led to places where incomprehensible aliens were making trouble for the Fleet’s newest yaotlek, trouble bad enough to call Information for help rather than stick with the Third Palm’s military-intelligence services …

“Good evening, Three Seagrass,” said someone behind her, and she dropped her fork with a clatter and turned around.

“You might consider reducing the intensity of your startle reflexes, with where you’re going,” said Five Agate, once Nineteen Adze’s prize student and chief aide, and now one of her ezuazuacatlim, the Emperor’s sworn band of loyal servants. She hadn’t changed her style of dressing with her elevation in status. She was still in white, like all of Nineteen Adze’s people had been, in imitation of their mistress’s former signature style.

“Your Excellency,” Three Seagrass said, in the highest level of formality she could muster with noodles in her mouth.

“Chew your food,” Five Agate told her, and Three Seagrass suspected that she used exactly the same tone when addressing her small son, Two Cartograph; absently parental. Three Seagrass had met the kid once, during the insurrection three months ago. He was very healthy and clever for someone who had been born from a uterus, on purpose. She chewed her food. Swallowed.

“What can I do for you, Your Excellency?”

“Her Brilliance has a question for you.”

Her first reaction was an entirely terrifying spike of But if I go to Palace-Earth, I’ll miss my ride, an absurd thought: her Emperor wanted to talk to her and she was concerned with her own somewhat-unauthorized exit from all the responsibilities that same Emperor had been gracious enough to grant her? There was something wrong with her for even experiencing the emotion. Best to pretend she hadn’t.

“Of course,” she said, and waved for the nearest waiter. “Let me settle the bill and then—”

“No need,” Five Agate said. “I can ask it, and you can finish your meal.”

“Please.”

“The Emperor would like to know your opinion of Eleven Laurel.”

Three Seagrass blinked, and tried to summon up her mental inventory of people named Eleven Laurel who the Emperor would want to know her opinion of—rejected out of hand the asekreta trainee serving as an office assistant on the eighth floor of the Ministry, and also the poet-orator who had died when Three Seagrass was thirteen and convulsed the capital in an ecstasy of internal rhyme for months—and was left with the Third Undersecretary to the Minister of War. Who she technically shared rank with, though that also seemed hilarious; Eleven Laurel was a war hero, and she was … herself. So far.

“Of the Third Palm?” she asked, just to make sure. (Of course the Third Palm; the passed-over military spymaster. The one the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus was for some reason avoiding, preferring to go through Information for her diplomats.)

“If Nineteen Adze wanted your literary opinions, she’d send a better messenger than me,” Five Agate said, dust-dry. “I hate that poet. Yes, the Undersecretary. Do you know him?”

“… I’ve met him,” Three Seagrass said. “We haven’t ever spoken personally. Do you—or Her Brilliance—want my professional opinion of him? The Information Ministry’s opinion? Because if you do, I really can’t have this conversation in a spaceport bar.”

Five Agate shook her head, a dismissal—not a professional query, then. “Would you swear on the sacrifice of your blood that you’re telling the truth, Envoy? You’ve never spoken to Eleven Laurel personally.”

A professional query would have been less disturbing. This was a darker thing: that an ezuazuacat would ask her for her blood in a sacrifice bowl as a promise that she didn’t have some prior relationship with the Third Undersecretary of War made Three Seagrass feel as if she’d fallen, vertiginous, back three months in time. Back to when all of Teixcalaan was convulsed in succession-crisis and almost-civil-war, death and blood, and she’d watched the old Emperor die on full broadcast, poured out in a sun temple like a spilled glass of water, red everywhere. The noodles she’d eaten felt leaden in her stomach.

“I would swear,” she said. “Here, or wherever you and Her Brilliance would like. I don’t know him, I’ve never spoken to him personally.” She held out her hand, palm up. No scars there, not yet. She’d never sworn an oath large enough to scar. Even the one she’d sworn two months ago, with Mahit and Nineteen Adze, had healed to invisibility. The body didn’t care about the size of the promise, only the size of the cut.

“No need,” said Five Agate. “Your promise is enough. Do be careful out there on the front lines, Three Seagrass. Her Brilliance thinks well of you, and it’s frustrating for the rest of us when she loses someone she likes.”

“How frightening,” Three Seagrass said, before she could stop herself. “I’m honored?”

“Go catch your ship,” said Five Agate. “The Flower Weave, yes? You’ve got twenty minutes. I’d run for it. Don’t worry about the check. It’s on the government.”

They must have been watching her the whole time, ever since she’d answered the yaotlek’s request. The City’s camera-eyes, Nineteen Adze’s favorite tools. They always had been, and now that she was Emperor, she’d have every access—the algorithms and the machinery, the Sunlit Three Seagrass had passed coming into the spaceport, who shared a kind of access to the algorithms that Three Seagrass never wanted to think about too closely. Every eye of them the same—and every eye opening to the Emperor Herself. It almost felt benevolent. Almost. If Three Seagrass worked at feeling like she was being protected, not seen.

And had the Emperor wondered, seeing her impulsive decision, if she’d somehow—been suborned by Eleven Laurel? What a complex idea. She’d have to think about it on the trip. She’d have time. Not much, but maybe enough. The Ministry of War was one of the barely-patched-up parts of government—still reeling from the former Minister Nine Propulsion’s ever-so-convenient early retirement. Three Seagrass had immediately understood that move as being a way for Nine Propulsion to get out of the City with her reputation intact, before she could be dismissed by a new Emperor who knew she’d supported an insurrectionist general when push came to shove—

—and most of the War Undersecretaries had turned over with her, replaced by the new Minister’s people … except for Eleven Laurel. Perhaps it was as simple as that.

Nothing was as simple as that.

“Thank you,” she said to Five Agate. “For the warning. And covering the bill.”

Then she ran for it before anyone else could stop her.