A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER NINE

THE war came in with the newsfeeds in the morning.

When it began, Mahit was sitting opposite Three Seagrass in Nineteen Adze’s dawn-drenched front office, eating porridge with a spoon as if she and her liaison and the ezuazuacat were all some sort of peculiar family, while the array of Nineteen Adze’s infoscreens hovered over the three of them and played an endless succession of stock clips of Teixcalaanli military ships: soldiers going into them, their magnificently large gunports, the brightly painted sun-gold and blood-red insignia on their grey sides. The newsfeed commentators were effervescent and vague. There was a war; it was a war of conquest, a conquering force sent out to claim more of the vast black void of space for Teixcalaan, the vast black void and whatever bright planetary jewels might be nestled in it, all ready to be subsumed under the battle flag of the Empire. An accession war. Everyone was very excited and talking about the trade interests which would benefit most from the Empire being on a wartime footing for the first time in twenty years. Mahit hadn’t drunk enough the previous evening to be hung over, despite her efforts, but she wished she had; it would have given her an excuse to feel this queasy. Steel, she thought. Steel and shipbuilding and supply lines, and Councilor Amnardbat and Councilor Tarats might be able to renegotiate how much money Lsel got from selling molybdenum to the Empire—it could be a useful war …

She knew, thinking it, that she was trying to talk herself out of the unstable, shifting-gravity nausea. The certain knowledge that this could not be a useful war, not for Lsel—not with Teixcalaan as it was.

When the newsfeeds had switched from local tabloid updates to the cheery pomp and circumstance of impending military action—it seemed to be a genre, something that Teixcalaanli broadcasters simply knew how to do—one of Nineteen Adze’s assistants had appeared at her side with a glass press full of what Mahit recognized by scent as fresh-ground coffee, and spirited away the bowls of tea.

Coffee, a stronger stimulant than tea. Everyone was on a wartime footing, weren’t they.

“This is not a very informative war,” said Three Seagrass pointedly, when the newsfeeds had looped around again to the beginning, the opening of the ships, the marching troops in gold and grey, the phatic commentary of the newsfeed hosts.

Nineteen Adze handed her a tiny cup of the coffee, as if that was an answer. “Wait for it,” she said. “Take the breathing room while you can, asekreta, there’ll be little enough of it to go around very shortly.”

“And who,” Three Seagrass asked, imitating with uncanny precision the headlong breathlessness of the commentators, “do you think will be our commander, Your Excellency? Since you have the enormous honor of being an ezuazuacat, and ever so close to the decisions at the heart of the Empire!”

Nineteen Adze, entirely serene, said, “Mahit, your liaison is an actress and an interrogator. What rare luck you’re having.”

Mahit had no idea what to say to that. Three Seagrass was slightly colored through the cheeks, which might imply it had been a compliment. “She’s much less straightforward than I am,” Mahit said. “I will just ask you who you think will be named commander, and whether it really will be One Lightning and not some other yaotlek.”

“It will be,” Nineteen Adze said. “You could make double your wager on it, if you weren’t so conveniently trapped in my apartments, safely away from the corruption of public betting.”

Somehow they had reached a state where Nineteen Adze was joking about keeping Mahit prisoner, and Mahit actually found it funny. She wasn’t sure there was any sense in which she could take this development as a good thing, aside from how it was— nice, pleasant, to not be waiting for imminent death while she ate breakfast. Five Agate had collected her and Three Seagrass at the end of the banquet, and escorted them back into Nineteen Adze’s office complex as if there hadn’t been any other possible exit: perfectly implacable, all decisions already made. It was a terrible concession to have gone back with her, Mahit knew that it was, but it would have been worse to have refused in public—and where would she have gone that was safe, then? After so deliberately getting rid of what allies she had, who would trust her?

And also: Nineteen Adze was publicly tied to her, and to Lsel, as much as she was tied to Nineteen Adze.

Mahit licked the back of her spoon. “The salary my station pays me is entirely adequate without recourse to public betting,” she said.

“And you had Ten Pearl thinking you were an ignoramus,” Nineteen Adze said, amused. “Adequate without recourse to. You’re worse than Yskandr was.”

“How so?”

“Yskandr, when I met him—he was perhaps a year, two years older than you? And already a fixture at court by the time I got back from my last military tour of duty and Six Direction made me ezuazuacat. Yskandr liked Teixcalaan. But you, Ambassador Dzmare, if you weren’t an ambassador you’d apply for citizenship.”

Mahit didn’t flinch; she was proud of herself for not flinching, for saying, “The Minister for Science would never approve such an application,” for taking up another spoonful of porridge. Proud also for how Three Seagrass and Nineteen Adze both laughed. Their laughter covered how she wanted to squirm, wanted to be grateful for being not a barbarian enough that citizenship would have been a possibility and hating herself for wanting to be grateful, all at once.

When the newsfeeds changed over to the starburst glyph of Palace-Sky’s internal news service, she was relieved. It would be difficult for Nineteen Adze to interrogate her about her loyalties when all three of them were watching an official announcement. The starburst resolved into Six Direction himself, flanked by a group of Teixcalaanlitzlim that Mahit supposed were the yaotlekim, all of the generals who were on-planet and available for publicity. They bristled and gleamed like a thicket of razor-sharp reeds; in the middle of them Six Direction looked old.

The announcement the Emperor read off his cloudhook was short, a tiny and precise rhetorical detonation: Like a flower turns to the sun or a person takes in oxygen, he said, Teixcalaan reaches again toward the stars—Mahit watched Nineteen Adze’s face, her narrowed eyes, the tension in the corners of her mouth. Admiration, she thought, and something in the same region as fear, but not insult. She had probably vetted this speech, or even been consulted on it. (And how long had she known? Since yesterday at the banquet? Since long before then, when she had been pretending to Mahit and Three Seagrass that she was as ignorant of where the war would be as they were?)

We move toward Parzrawantlak Sector, said Six Direction, his face suddenly overlaid with the star-chart of Teixcalaanli space. The City, a golden planet, hovered between his eyes; then the chart shifted, demonstrating the vectors the fleet would take, the points at which they would converge into an unstoppable spearpoint of ships.

Mahit knew those stars. She knew the sector name, too—but she knew it in Stationer, not filtered through Teixcalaanli consonants. Bardzravand, “the high plateau,” the sector of space that all the Stationers had settled in their long-ago scattering. She’d always seen the vectors on the newsfeed’s star-chart inverted, though, looked at them from the other side: an in-drawing line that had called her since she was a child. Yskandr had hung the same vectored chart above his bed back in the ambassadorial suite: Lsel looking at the Empire.

Of course it wasn’t Lsel that Teixcalaan wanted, though they’d be pleased enough to finally have it: Lsel Station, and all the other tiny stations, were merely in the way of that onrushing tide of ships. Beyond them was alien territory, populated by Ebrekti and species even more foreign, or undiscovered by humanity; beyond them as well were planets to terraform or colonize, resources to extract. The jaws of the Empire opening up again, akimbo, bloody-toothed—the endless self-justifying desire that was Teixcalaan, and Teixcalaanli ways of thinking of the universe. The Empire, the world. One and the same. And if they were not yet so: make them so, for this is the right and correct will of the stars.

Lsel itself would be more than an incidental prize, Mahit thought, as clinically as she could manage: one of the oldest continuously inhabited artificial worldlets, replete with the best pilots, a precisely calibrated resource extraction system for mining molybdenum and iron from stellar debris—and a perfect location in a gravity well that controlled most of local space, including the only two jumpgates in the area.

We entrust the outrushing tide to the swift-reaching hands of One Lightning, and name him the yaotlek-nema, the leader of our legions in this endeavor, the Emperor finished, to no one’s surprise at all.

“Well,” said Three Seagrass. “That’s … certainly that.”

“Yes,” said Mahit. “It seems to be.” She sounded so calm, even to herself.

“Not,” Nineteen Adze said, “my first choice of targets. But he doesn’t always listen to me.” She sighed, squared her shoulders—how could she continue to look so human, so much like she was just like anyone else!—and pushed herself away from the table. “But I think you’ll find that your value as an ambassador has only increased with this news, Mahit. Don’t imagine for a moment that I’d toss you out to the wolves.”

Still a hostage, then. Still useful to Nineteen Adze as an ally, or as something to be controlled. “I appreciate your continued hospitality,” said Mahit.

“Of course you do.” Nineteen Adze could sound apologetic if she wanted, like turning on a floodlight of warmth with a switch—and then off again, brisk and bright. “There will be more meetings than anyone can possibly enjoy today. Running a war takes committees. Do feel free to use the office if you’d like. Seven Scale will be here if you need anything, and to take care of the breakfast dishes.”

She swept out of the room and Mahit sat in horrified, dumb silence in her wake, as if she’d stolen her tongue by leaving.

“Most interesting job I’m ever going to have,” Three Seagrass said, like it was a gesture of solidarity—it was a gesture of solidarity; she’d patted the back of Mahit’s hand, she was trying.

“Ah, so you’re not going to ask to be reassigned,” Mahit said.

“As if I would. At absolute worst, you’re going to be the ambassador who manages your people’s integration into Teixcalaan. We’ll have a very long career together, Mahit,” said Three Seagrass.

Mahit could see the way her career on Teixcalaan might curve, now: could see herself becoming like Ambassador Gorlaeth of Dava, trying to find commonality with the other newly conquered. She must have looked stricken, because Three Seagrass said, “Look. We know a lot more now than we did yesterday, and that’s not nothing.”

Mahit admitted that they did. “I wonder if this is what Thirty Larkspur was trying to warn me about,” she said. “The deal is off.”

“You mean that your predecessor had somehow made an arrangement to keep Lsel Station out of the path of annexation,” said Three Seagrass.

Mahit nodded. “And whatever he agreed to was an agreement between him and … His Majesty, I suspect. And now that he’s dead, the deal is off.”

“If I was a suspicious person…” Three Seagrass began.

“You are a suspicious person, you work for the Information Ministry,” Mahit said.

Three Seagrass composed herself into a picture of innocence, which didn’t have any reassuring effects at all. “If I was a suspicious person,” she said again, “I would suspect that it is extremely convenient for whoever wanted the fleet to head toward Parzrawantlak that he is dead.”

“And if I was a suspicious person,” Mahit said, “I would agree with you. Three Seagrass, can you get me a private audience with His Majesty?”

Three Seagrass pressed her lips together, considering. “Under normal circumstances,” she said, “I’d tell you that I could, but there’d be a three-month waiting period and I couldn’t guarantee you’d be alone. But under the circumstances, I believe I might just be able to do better than that. You have very good, very official reasons to want to speak directly to His Illuminate Majesty.”

“I do,” Mahit said. “Arrange it. We have this delightfully equipped office, we might as well use it.”

“It’s all being recorded,” Three Seagrass said, slightly apologetic. “I’d guarantee Nineteen Adze keeps track of every gesture and every glyph.”

“I know,” Mahit said. “But I don’t see us having many other options, do you?”

“As long as you know—”

“Arrange it,” Mahit said, more firmly, and Three Seagrass nodded, got up, and went to open one of the infograph screens. Mahit instantly felt better. She knew it was a false feeling—the sensation of being in control of the headlong, desperate rush was illusory, even if you took the initial leap under your own power—but she could use whatever comfort she could find.

Every moment she wasn’t doing something else, she imagined the vector of ships.

What could she do?

It was a logic problem, or something out of classical physics: given these constraints, what action was possible? Given: that she was trapped in the heart of Palace-North, with only electronic access to her own files and messages, and no access at all to the pile of physical mail which was certainly growing in size and urgency in her own office. Given: that every action she took on an electronic system while here in Nineteen Adze’s apartment would be monitored, which further constrained her ability to communicate unguardedly. Given: that Lsel Station would not know yet that the might of Teixcalaan was about to rush over them like the casually outflung loop of a solar flare, and had nothing like sufficient military capacity to meaningfully resist a full Teixcalaanli expedition. Given: that her predecessor had been murdered, perhaps to allow this conquest to proceed in this direction. Given: that her imago’s presence as conscious memory was malfunctioning, leaving her with only the ghosts of neurochemical feelings that didn’t belong to her, and flashes of memory so vivid they were like living another life. Given: that her imago’s malfunction might have been sabotage, and—think about it, Mahit, let yourself really think about it—that sabotage might have taken place long before she ever arrived on the Jewel of the World—might, in fact, have originated with her own people, for reasons she didn’t understand.

Also given: that if Mahit didn’t do something she was going to shatter out of her skin with nerves. By the rosy quartz windows, Three Seagrass was enveloped in a little shell of infographs, murmuring subvocalizations to her cloudhook as if she were talking to an imago herself. Mahit stood up.

Better to take action than to be paralyzed by the thousands of shifting possibilities. Human beings walked and breathed and stepped out of cycling airlock doors to patch thinning places on a station’s skin, all without thinking about how their limbs moved, where gravity had caught them, whether the internal bellows of lung and diaphragm had inflated enough or too little. She just needed to—not think. Or, to think, but to keep acting while she thought. Like speaking to Thirty Larkspur at the banquet: there was no time for paralysis. At the very least, she needed to make contact with Lsel and give them some idea of what she was dealing with.

She could hope for advice, though she wasn’t sure what use advice even would be. She’d already disobeyed her only real directive when she’d admitted the existence of the imago-machines; she wasn’t sure if further directives would be any more sustainable. But she’d like to feel a little less alone. To hear any voice from Lsel. Any voice which wasn’t the stern and strange warning of Onchu of the Pilots, telling dead Yskandr to beware sabotage. That message hadn’t been for Mahit anyway. The warning of the weapon wasn’t for the weapon to hear.

This was why there were imago-lines for diplomats. So no one would be alone.

Yskandr, please. If you’re there at all—

Static, like electric prickles down her arms. The ulnar nerves through the elbow to her smallest fingers. But the imago was just as silent as he’d been since that first hour in the morgue.

No time for cascading neurological disaster either. She’d think about it later. She’d fix it later, somehow. Now Mahit summoned up her own infograph halo and, standing at the opposite end of the office from Three Seagrass, began to compose two messages to the Council on Lsel. She composed them at the same time. They looked like the same message—and how she wished she could show off what she was doing to Three Seagrass, so busily arranging meetings on her behalf. Three Seagrass would understand ciphering a second message inside the first, and she’d admire it.

It wasn’t a good cipher. It wasn’t even a poetic cipher that would require a Teixcalaanli asekreta to fashionably decode. It was a book substitution cipher. Mahit had worked it out when she was a teenager, bored and playing at being Teixcalaanli: a master of intrigues and byzantine plots, a person who encrypted everything, and she’d used a Teixcalaanli glyph dictionary as her key. The most common one, Imperial Glyphbook Standard, the one which was distributed Empire-wide—and beyond the official borders of Teixcalaan—to teach barbarians and children to read. It had all the useful words, after all: “to hide,” and “to betray,” and so very many interlocking words for “civilization.” She’d picked Standard to make her cipher out of simply because it was the most likely to be present in any location. Not even Teixcalaanlitzlim could possibly remember every glyph in their ideographic writing system. There was a copy in Nineteen Adze’s library, and it was the work of only a few minutes for Mahit to go fetch it.

Yskandr had laughed inside her skull when she’d suggested her old cipher to the Council as a method for hidden communication; had laughed more when they’d agreed. The ciphering process required that she write in Stationer, which had a thirty-seven-letter alphabet, and that the receiving decoder knew to look at the first letter of each Stationer word for the page number in IGS; the second letter for the line number; the first glyph in that table for the meaning. It wasn’t meant to be a hyper-secure code; just enough encryption to get messages through. A little cover. A shield.

The message she wrote in Stationer she expected to be read, first by Nineteen Adze, then by the Imperial Censor Office, and perhaps even by the captain of the ship that would take it toward Lsel. It contained no more information than the newsfeeds had; instead, it recapitulated them exactly, along with—Mahit thought—a relatively reasonable note of distress and concern.

That extra distress and concern gave her enough words to encode the hidden message, an ungrammatical sequence of Teixcalaanli nouns and verbs: PRIORITY. Former ambassador compromised—movement (self, on foot, round-trip) restricted—memory bad—sovereignty threatened—request Council guidance.

Even as Mahit was enclosing the double message in an infofiche stick she doubted guidance would reach her in time for it to matter. But she had asked. And she had provided warning. Even if it was clear from any examination of the fleet’s vectors that they were headed toward Lsel space, it was possible that no broadcasts of the fleet vectors would be sent out toward Lsel anyhow—why would the Empire warn their prey?

She tucked the stick into the silver basket marked for outgoing mail on its table to the left of the office’s door, where it sat innocuous with all the others aside from its red-wax marker for urgency, and the red-and-black sticky tab for off-planet communication. Soon Seven Scale would appear on his rounds through the office and bear it away into the City, through the labyrinth of the Censor Office and out.

“Three Seagrass,” Mahit said, turning back and thinking of the similar basket back in the ambassadorial apartments, certainly overflowing now with angry messages on their pretty sticks, “is there any useful way I can get access to the work I’m supposed to be doing? The infofiche messages?”

“Huh,” said Three Seagrass. She considered it. “Maybe part of it. How do you feel about breaking a very minor law?”

“What kind of minor law?” Mahit asked.

“The kind a Teixcalaanlitzlim breaks the first time when she’s about nine years old. Using someone else’s cloudhook.”

“I am sure,” Mahit said dryly, “that it gets more complicated when the person doing the using is not a citizen.”

Three Seagrass reached up to the side of her head and lifted her cloudhook from over her eye. “Absolutely,” she said, “but that just means you shouldn’t get caught. Come over here.”

Mahit came close. “We’re being recorded,” she said, even though she knew Three Seagrass was well aware.

“Bend down, you barbarians are unreasonably tall.”

Mahit bent—thought suddenly and vividly of kneeling in front of the Emperor—and then Three Seagrass was settling the cloudhook over her eye. Half her vision went to data, an endless stream of it that resolved into a list of queries and requests. The interface was surprisingly intuitive: the cloudhook recalibrated to Mahit’s own tiny eye movements rapidly, and the structure of the files was a version of the electronic version of her own office, just seen through Three Seagrass’s accesses. It was a very small amount of cover, but it was cover. If she used Three Seagrass’s cloudhook to access her own files, Nineteen Adze wouldn’t be able to see that she’d gone in at all. Only that she was wearing her liaison’s cloudhook.

“The lower-level requests to the Ambassador’s office—visa queries, that sort of thing—are all things you could be telling me to do,” Three Seagrass said, “if I wasn’t having a fight on your behalf with three protocol officers and a queue system.” Her fingers were warm on Mahit’s temples. “If you want to do work while I sort out when you get to speak with the Emperor Himself, there’s your list.”

“Thanks,” Mahit said. She straightened. “You don’t need it?” She gestured at the cloudhook. Half her vision was gone, like she’d had a hemispheric brain injury that had replaced her eye with a to-do list.

“Not for an hour or so. Be useful, Ambassador.”

Mahit thought she sounded—fond. Indulgent, even.

It was going to hurt so much if she had to stop pretending Three Seagrass was possessed of no agenda but her own ambition and a mild affection for barbarians.

The list of queries to the Ambassadorial Office of Lsel Station was approximately half requests to have a visa renewed and half somewhat offensive public interest queries as to “how Stationers conduct their daily lives, particularly with regard to holiday celebrations or other days of local excitement!” Mahit would have been irritated by all of them had they not been a perfectly distracting way of spending the time. As it was, answering tabloid journalists and distressed commercial traders was quite soothing. It took her nearly an hour to notice that there was one particular sort of business query that she had received absolutely none of: no one had written to ask her what she wanted done with Yskandr’s body, still nestled in the basement of the Judiciary morgue. It had been more than half a week since ixplanatl Four Lever had asked her what she wanted done with it, and yet no one had followed up—not even an undersecretary.

Had they asked, and someone had prevented her from receiving the request? It could be as simple as her lack of access to messages sent on infofiche sticks, but surely someone placed as highly as ixplanatl Four Lever would have noticed that the Lsel Ambassador was quite publicly living in the offices of the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, and rerouted the mail. She would assume that if the request had been sent, it had been deliberately mislaid.

Or Four Lever hadn’t asked, assuming that she would make inquiries first. Or hadn’t asked, assuming that until she made an inquiry he could keep hold of Yskandr’s body. Mahit thought of how she’d first met Nineteen Adze, sweeping into the morgue without any sort of retinue or reason for being there. Imagined her hands, unerringly reaching for the imago-machine at the base of Yskandr’s skull to retrieve it before Mahit could have the body properly burnt. Someone had given her access. Perhaps it had been Four Lever. Mahit could imagine many things an ezuazuacat could provide for a Judiciary scientist in exchange for an unsupervised visit to the dead. Worse, she could also imagine many other people who could trade favors or influence or money for an hour or two alone with the body of her predecessor and all of his illegal imported neurological technology.

It was a problem. It was a problem that couldn’t be fixed by simply requisitioning the body, either: Mahit imagined having the undecaying corpse of her predecessor brought into Nineteen Adze’s office complex—perhaps she could prop it up on the couch, or lean it against the wall like a coat rack.

That would certainly make Nineteen Adze herself happy.

There had to be a better solution.

“Three Seagrass?” Mahit asked. “How long have you known Twelve Azalea?”

Three Seagrass extricated herself from her whirl of infographs. “Did he write to the office?” she asked, puzzled. “I thought he was entirely enamored of sending you anonymous messages on infofiche sticks.”

“He didn’t write, no,” Mahit said. “But I might write to him. Do you trust him?”

“That is a very different question than how long I’ve known him.”

“The one leads into the other,” said Mahit.

“Do you trust me?”

She could look so calm and ask such personal questions. Maybe it was a Teixcalaanli trait. It reminded Mahit of Nineteen Adze, which didn’t exactly make her feel more trusting.

Nevertheless, she said, “As much as I trust anyone in the City,” and said it honestly.

“And with us only working together for half a week.” Three Seagrass smiled, the corners of her eyes tilting up. “Not that you are spoiled much for choice, considering! I like Twelve Azalea, Mahit. We’ve been friends since we both joined the Information Ministry as tiny ignorant cadets. But he is conniving and theatrical and convinced he’s immortal.”

“I’ve noticed,” Mahit said dryly.

“So trusting him depends entirely on what you want him to do. What do you want him to do?”

“Something he’ll probably enjoy, as it’s both conniving and theatrical. And … secret.” Mahit gestured at the infograph screens, and then at her ears.

“Well, he’ll like it. Whatever it is. But I can’t tell you if he’ll do it if I don’t know what it is.”

Mahit said, “This message-task list that I’m using—that’s on your cloudhook, isn’t it. And a person’s cloudhook is private to them.”

“Or to whoever is wearing it,” Three Seagrass said, pleased. “I think I get the idea. Pass it back over when you’re ready.”

Composing a message to the Ambassador of Lsel and sending it to herself was fairly trivial. Mahit wrote, drawing glyphs in the air with her finger on the cloudhook’s projected screen that only she could see: Twelve Azalea should return to the morgue and retrieve the machine we discussed. Then she lifted Three Seagrass’s cloudhook off her head, blinking at the restoration of the other side of her vision, and gave it back.

After she had read the message, Three Seagrass asked, “Do you want that for yourself?”

“No,” said Mahit. “I have one, and besides, that one isn’t useful anymore—it’s recording decay and nothing else.”

“Could it record something else?”

Mahit thought about it. “If it was correctly installed, maybe? I’m not sure. I really am not an ixplanatl, Three Seagrass.”

“Mm. Well, Twelve Azalea will do it, I’m sure, and he’ll even keep quiet about it, but—” She shrugged.

“But what?”

“You’ll owe him a favor. And he’ll probably take it apart and make schematic drawings. He’ll tell you it’s out of his own curiosity, and he won’t even lie. Him being curious is how we used to get into half of the trouble we got into.”

“How,” Mahit asked, amused despite herself, “did you get into the other half?”

“I make friends with terribly interesting people with terribly complicated problems.”

“So nothing has changed,” Mahit said, feeling on the verge of laughter; feeling again the absolute danger of thinking Three Seagrass was her friend like a Stationer could be her friend.

“I did say you were my first barbarian. So, a little change.”

Like that. That unbridgeable gap. Maybe if Mahit hadn’t been the ambassador, if she’d met her at an oration contest, in some other life where Mahit had never taken up Yskandr’s imago-line but had won a travel visa and a scholarship—maybe in that life she could have argued. Told Three Seagrass more of the truth of what she felt.

“I think I can risk Twelve Azalea’s curiosity,” Mahit said. “Considering I’ve already risked your friendship.”

Twelve Azalea with possession of schematic drawings was still better than anyone with possession of the actual imago-machine. Mahit could get him to give up the drawings—later. Later, when she wasn’t trapped inside Nineteen Adze’s apartments. When she wasn’t going to have to—somehow (and how had Yskandr done it?—and had it killed him?)—stop the absorption of her Station into Teixcalaan. Later, when she wasn’t thinking of how pleased Three Seagrass had looked.

Coming back to the spare office that she’d been sleeping in, late in the evening, Mahit saw that the incoming mail had arrived.

Resting in the shallow bowl outside the door were three infofiche sticks—an anonymous grey one that surely would be from Twelve Azalea with his answer to her request, and another in a shade she hadn’t seen before: coppery metal sealed with white wax, the colors of Three Seagrass’s suits. The Information Ministry must have finally decided to tell her who had made sure that a new Lsel ambassador arrived as soon as possible after the old one was—Mahit shook her head wryly—no longer functional. The last was another grey stick, marked with the sticky black-and-red tab for off-world communication. Mahit wondered, her heart rate speeding, if Dekakel Onchu had sent another message to dead Yskandr, a second delivery triggered by some event she wasn’t quite aware of, something more complicated than her own attempt to log into the Lsel Ambassador’s electronic database. She reached into the bowl to pick it up, and found that underneath it someone had left a small branch of a plant she’d never seen before. The stem had been delicately curled around the infofiche stick, but now it lay in a loop of shiny grey-green leaves and a single deep cup of a white flower in the bottom of the bowl.

Mahit scooped it up. It was fresh-cut, oozing a whitish sap that had gotten onto the Information Ministry infofiche and stuck to her fingers. She hadn’t seen anything like it in Nineteen Adze’s apartments, or even out in the rest of the City, filled with flowers of every shape and color and kind—and yet, it couldn’t have been cut more than fifteen or twenty minutes previous.

She lifted it up to her face to see if it had a scent.

“Don’t,” said Nineteen Adze with a whip-crack urgency Mahit had never heard before. She dropped the flower back into the bowl. Her fingertips felt stinging-hot where the sap had made them sticky. Turning, she saw Nineteen Adze standing in the archway at the end of the hall, and had no idea how long she’d been there. Or that she’d been there at all.

“Did you breathe it?” Nineteen Adze asked, coming to Mahit’s side. Her face was more expressive than Mahit had ever seen it, mouth twisted and tense. It was like looking at a mask dissolving. The stinging in her fingers was transmuting to pain.

“No, I don’t think I did,” she said.

Nineteen Adze snapped, “Show me your hand,” like she was addressing a soldier or a disobedient child, and Mahit did. Nineteen Adze took her wrist, the band of her much-darker fingers closing around the bones as if she were gripping a snake behind its head. The touch should have been warm but Mahit felt it as ice. Her extended fingers were red where she’d held the flower, and even as she watched they began to blister.

“Well, you won’t lose it,” said Nineteen Adze.

“What?”

“Come with me,” Nineteen Adze said, “you have to get the sap off before you touch any other parts of yourself. Or sustain nerve damage.” Still holding Mahit’s wrist, she stalked off down the hallway, dragging Mahit in her wake.

“What was that flower?”

“A very pretty death.” They turned a corner, through a door which had always been closed to Mahit but which slid open to Nineteen Adze’s gesture, and emerged abruptly into what could only be the ezuazuacat’s own bedroom. Mahit caught a glimpse of a tangle of unmade white sheets, a stack of infofiche and codex-books piled on the pristine side of the bed, and then Nineteen Adze had pulled her into the en suite bathroom.

“Hold your hand over the sink but don’t turn on the water,” she said. “Water will just spread the toxins.”

Mahit did. The blisters on her fingers were puffy, glassy-clear, the skin beginning to split. She felt as if her hand were on fire, the stinging spreading up her wrist like the City’s electricity had spread up Three Seagrass’s. She was still too shocked to feel anything but a distant sort of horror. Who had left that flower for her? How had it gotten into the walled garden that was Nineteen Adze’s office complex? Someone would have had to bring it—someone less than twenty minutes away, the flower had been oozing—one of the blisters on her index finger burst as she watched, and she made a tiny, helpless sound between her teeth.

Nineteen Adze reappeared over her shoulder, an open bottle in her hand. Unceremoniously she poured the contents over Mahit’s fingers.

“Mineral oil,” she said, picking up a washcloth. “This will probably hurt a great deal. Hold still.” She scraped the cloth over the blisters, stripping the oil into the sink. Mahit was sure she was stripping her skin away with it. She tried not to pull away. Nineteen Adze poured oil and scraped it off twice more. At the end of it Mahit was shaking, tremors up the backs of her thighs. Nineteen Adze took her upper arm in an iron grip and sat her down on the closed lid of the toilet.

“If you fall and crack your skull open,” she said, “there will be no point to my having fixed your hand.”

Whoever had left the flower couldn’t have been Nineteen Adze—why would she have tried to kill Mahit and then dragged her off into the bath and kept her alive? She had been so sharp, when she said don’t.

(So sharp, and so close. Had she been watching? How long had she been watching? Had she waited to see if Mahit would actually breathe in the scent of the flower—decided only then to prevent her—)

Did it matter?

Nineteen Adze had gotten down on her knees next to her, and was wrapping her fingers in individual gauze bandages, as attentive as a battlefield medic. Mahit wondered if she’d been one, once, fought at the side of the Emperor in person, his sworn companion—she was getting epics into her analysis, Teixcalaan was a modern multiplanetary empire, if ezuazuacatlim fought they’d fight from starship bridges.

“What flower is full of contact poisons?” she asked. Her voice caught in her throat, around the edges of the receding pain and the adrenaline shock.

“It’s a native planetary cultivar,” said Nineteen Adze. “The common name is xauitl, for the hallucinations it’s supposed to bring you right as you die from breathing in the neurotoxins.”

“That’s cheerful,” Mahit said inanely. She wanted to put her head in her hands, but it would hurt too much.

“Before we had spaceflight, Teixcalaanli archers would dip arrowheads in blooms to poison them,” Nineteen Adze went on. “And now the Science Ministry distills the oils into some kind of treatment for palsy. What can kill can cure, if you like that sort of thing. You should be flattered; someone wants you dead artistically, Ambassador.”

There would be a certain satisfying circularity to the Science Ministry trying to kill every Lsel ambassador. Mahit didn’t trust it—it was like a ring composition in an oration, the same theme coming around again at the end of the stanza. It was too Teixcalaanli, and even if Nineteen Adze hadn’t meant her to think of it, she could guess that she had come up with it because of exactly that kind of overdetermined thinking. Echoes and repetition. Everything meaning something else.

It was the first time she wondered if Nineteen Adze—if any Teixcalaanlitzlim—could compensate for the sheer thematic weight of how Teixcalaanli logic worked. Wondering felt like being thrown into cold water, shock-bright clarity as the pain in her fingers began to fade. Even if the flower had come from the Science Ministry, it had been brought into Nineteen Adze’s office by someone with full access: Nineteen Adze herself, or one of her assistants. At absolute best they had decided to allow it to be delivered to her; at worst, one or more of them was actively seeking her death right this moment. Artistically.

Artistically, and flowers. Blooms, Nineteen Adze had just said. The same word as the one in Thirty Larkspur’s poetic epithet. He’d been solicitous, at the reception—had rescued her from the drunken grasp of that courtier, even—but she didn’t trust his motivations. Their conversation had been barbed, apologetic, ever-shifting. And the war was on, now: a war Mahit was fairly sure Thirty Larkspur did not want, or did not want in the hands of One Lightning—the calculus of loyalties had changed—perhaps she was too dangerous to him, alive. (As Yskandr had been?)

Not ring composition, this time, but allusion, wordplay. She was over-reading. It was impossible to over-read a Teixcalaanli text. One of her instructors in imperial literature had said that, at the beginning of the course. It had been meant as a warning and Mahit, age fourteen, had seized it like it was instead a balm.

She looked up at Nineteen Adze’s face. Nineteen Adze, who had decided—perhaps at the last possible moment—not to let her die. She was watching her, blank and unreadable. Mahit’s hand hurt, a low sick pain, and she thought of freefall, of tumbling undirected through space, and then of steering, attitudinal compensation, vernier thrusters. She took a large breath. It didn’t hurt to breathe, at least.

“Your Excellency,” Mahit said, “since you knew about imago-machines—I do know you knew, you practically told me—what were you trying to do when we first met? In the Judiciary morgue. What did you intend for my predecessor’s body?”

Nineteen Adze quirked up one side of her mouth, fractional wry motion. “I keep underestimating you,” she said. “Or estimating you differently than you end up being. Here you are, nearly poisoned, in a bathroom, and you take this opportunity to ask me about my motivations.”

“Well,” Mahit said. “We’re alone.” As if it was an answer. It was, in a way. She wasn’t sure she’d have this chance again. (She wasn’t sure if she’d have another opportunity to catch Nineteen Adze even this much off-balance. When had she decided to save her life? Was she regretting it, even now?)

“So we are. All right, Ambassador Dzmare. Perhaps you’ve earned a little clarity. I wanted the machine, of course. But you already had guessed that.”

Mahit nodded. “It’s what made sense. I arrive, I plan a funeral—if you wanted it, you couldn’t wait any longer.”

“Yes.” Nineteen Adze sat back on her heels, composed and patient.

Mahit asked the next question. “What did you want it for?”

“When I saw you in the morgue? Then, I wanted a bargaining chip, Mahit. There are many interests at court who might want to control that machine—and control you, through the release or withholding of it.”

“Then.”

“I hardly need that now, do I?” Nineteen Adze gestured at the bathroom—at the two of them, sitting in it. Mahit nodded, wryly acknowledging. Having the Lsel Ambassador was much better than having the means to buy the Lsel Ambassador’s attention and influence. And Nineteen Adze had a live imago-machine now, the one inside Mahit’s skull. Though she’d have to cut her open to get it, and it was malfunctioning badly.

“I imagine,” she said, “that I am of less use to you in the current circumstances than you expected I’d be.”

Nineteen Adze shook her head. Reached out and patted Mahit’s knee, familiar and too, too kind. “If you weren’t useful you wouldn’t be here. Besides, how often does a barbarian challenge my decisions in my own bathroom? If nothing else, you enliven the experience of daily living. Which is exactly like your predecessor. I am finding the similarities very funny, especially after you went to such trouble to inform me of the disambiguation.”

Mahit considered what Yskandr would have done; remembered, imago-echo that wasn’t hers and wasn’t really anyone’s now, how easy he’d been in his body. How he’d moved hers in fluid, expansive gesture. He’d cover Nineteen Adze’s hand on her knee with his, now. Or reach out—

(his hand flat against her cheek, the skin cool and smooth, she laughs and turns her face inward, her lips against his palm)

The memory-flash receded. Mahit could repeat the echo, she had her suspicions about the nature of the friendship Nineteen Adze claimed with her predecessor, she could reach out and touch her cheek—

Ring composition. Overdetermined.

Instead she met Nineteen Adze’s eyes, held them a beat too long, and asked, “What did Yskandr promise you, to keep you this interested in us?”

“Not me,” said Nineteen Adze. “His Imperial Majesty.”

She rocked back on her heels, gathered her feet under her, and stood up, as if she was giving Mahit time to process the unfolding revelation. To remember the sick heat of Six Direction’s hands on her wrists, the terrible fragility of him, as if he was being ravaged by some fast-moving disease.

Held out her forearm, so that Mahit was obliged to touch her—to accept the help in standing up, even as she was thinking: Yskandr, you bastard, you convinced the Emperor of Teixcalaan he would never die.