A Memory Called Empire

Flickers, in the interstices, of the version she knew. Nevertheless she felt invaded, heavy with the unfamiliar mental weight of someone else, someone who had more life than her, had seen more than her, who knew Teixcalaan better—she thought, helpless and sudden, of how that ninety-percent clone would feel if he ever had all of Six Direction stuffed into his ten-year-old head, and ached with sympathy.

The Yskandr-sense—heavy weight and bright rag both—backed off. That might be some kind of apology.

Mahit mustered her courage, braced for the inevitable physical consequences, and opened her eyes. The headache spiked immediately along with the light, as she’d expected it would, but she didn’t vomit and she didn’t have another convulsion or experience any immediate visual distortions. Could be worse.

She was lying on a turquoise couch, just like the other turquoise couch Five Portico owned, the one in her front room. The fabric under her cheek was upholstery fabric. Maybe Five Portico had an entire set of turquoise furniture. Maybe she’d bought them all on sale. The last time Mahit had woken up from brain surgery she’d been in the medical center on Lsel, in a sterile and soothing silver-grey room. This was … different.

said Yskandr, bone dry. Mahit snickered, which did hurt.

Moving carefully, and feeling like every part of her body had been desiccated in vacuum, she sat up. Neither Five Portico nor Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were in visual range. That gave her a long moment to brace herself for the nauseating process of standing up and walking toward the only visible door. Her ribs felt constricted when she tried to take a full breath—oh, that was the sport bandage, still wrapped around her lower floating ribs exactly where it had been before the surgery had begun.

It was strange, the things which could make you trust someone: Mahit felt profoundly grateful to Five Portico for not having done more to her than she’d asked for. Only the requested violation, thank you: she still had the letter from Darj Tarats, and now, with Yskandr’s help, she could read it.

If the others were outside that door, waiting for her to wake up—probably wondering if she’d wake up—this might be the best time to decrypt it, while she was alone.

As alone as she was ever going to be again.

said Yskandr.

And then you vanished on me, Mahit told him. All right. Show me how to read this, if you can.

She lifted her shirt and unwound the wrapping. The communiqué was wrinkled from how she must have rolled on it, curved to the shape of her ribs, but still whole and still entirely readable with her own book cipher, except for the encrypted section at the bottom. It says you have the encryption key. Or you did, fifteen years ago.

Yskandr told her, and she knew he felt the wash of relief that spilled over her as strongly as she did.

said Yskandr, unfair.>

She wished she could tell whether he was being dryly sarcastic or expressing a genuinely held opinion—but that wasn’t new. That confusion was inherent to every Yskandr, from the first moment she’d had him in her head, back on Lsel.

Here’s a pencil, she thought at him. Teach me how to read what Tarats wants me to do about having an annexation force pointed at our station.

They—she, she with Yskandr’s prior knowledge flooding her, opening unexpected windows in her mind—decrypted the message, letter by letter, through the sequential matrix transform that Yskandr had memorized twenty years ago, on his way into Teixcalaan: how he’d spent those long weeks in transit. She caught a flash of memory, a spinning scrap—Yskandr on his first night in her (his) ambassadorial apartment, burning the piece of paper Tarats had handed him, that he’d learned from.

Mahit was working so hard on the process of decryption that she hardly paid attention to the contents of the message until the entire thing existed in plaintext. It wasn’t long. She’d known that, before this entire terrible adventure—it couldn’t be long, there weren’t enough characters, there wouldn’t be the sort of elaborate instructions that she wanted. No one would tell her how to get out of what was happening. There would only be advice.

What advice there was terrified her.

Demand re-route of annexation force; claim certain provable knowledge of new-discovered nonhumans plotting invasion at points as given below; withhold coordinates until confirmation given.

She felt a little like Yskandr was the only thing holding her up. Her head ached viciously. Yes, she thought. I know all of Pseudo-Thirteen River, I can memorize a coordinate string.

How?

Mahit stared at the coordinate string for a full minute—set it to rhythm and meter in her head, held it like she’d hold a poem. And then she tore the strip of paper she’d written the plaintext on off the original communiqué and stuffed it in her mouth, thinking the whole time: We eat the best parts of our dead. Whose ashes am I consuming now?

She had to chew to get the paper to go down, and chewing hurt the surgical site. She did it anyway. It was something to do, while she considered her options.

Who was she supposed to demand this of? The Emperor?

You’re biased, Yskandr.

Maybe he was. Maybe what she should do was exactly what Yskandr would have done if he wasn’t dead, and march into Palace-Earth with these coordinates on her tongue like a string of pearls to trade for peace.

When she finally made her way into the front room of Five Portico’s apartment—giving the surgery door a wide berth—both Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were sitting, side by side like children in a waiting room, on the other turquoise couch, and Five Portico was nowhere to be seen. Three Seagrass was on her feet the instant Mahit came through the door. She ran to her and threw her arms around Mahit in a tight hug that broke every personal-space taboo held by Lsel or Teixcalaan. Mahit could feel the racing of her heart through the wall of her ribs.

“You’re alive!” Three Seagrass said, and then “—oh fuck did I hurt you?” before letting Mahit go with nearly the same degree of force as she’d embraced her. “Are you—you?”

“… yes, not any more than I hurt already, and that still depends on the Teixcalaanli definition of you, Three Seagrass,” Mahit told her. Smiling also hurt the surgical site, but not as much as chewing.

“And you can talk,” Three Seagrass went on. Mahit wanted to stroke her hair back behind her ears; she hadn’t put it back up in its queue since they’d run away from the Judiciary officials, not even during the time between when Mahit had gone into the surgery and now—whenever now was, Mahit wasn’t sure of the hour—and with it loose Three Seagrass looked devastatingly young.

“I think I retained most of my higher faculties,” she said to her, as neutral-Teixcalaanli as possible.

Three Seagrass blinked several times, and then laughed.

“I’m glad,” said Twelve Azalea from the couch. “But did it … work?”

“Yes,” Mahit said, out loud and internally at once. “At least it worked enough. I decrypted the message.”

“What does it feel like?” Twelve Azalea asked, just as Three Seagrass said, “Good. Given that, what would you like to do next?”

Mahit would have liked to sit down, if she had a preference. Possibly to sleep until everything was over, and there was a new emperor, and the universe returned to normal. If she slept that long she would probably be dead. Sitting down, though, that she could do, at least for a moment. She made her way to the couch, Three Seagrass at her elbow—keeping a decorous foot of distance now, which Mahit vaguely regretted—and sat.

“I need,” she said, “to get back to Palace-Earth and speak with His Brilliance Six Direction.”

Yskandr said, a whisper like fire behind her eyes.

“Must have been some message,” Twelve Azalea said.

Mahit very gingerly put her head in her hands. “An annexation force is headed for my home, the Empire is on the verge of civil war, and I requested immediate guidance from my superiors in government, did you expect a neutral statement of affirmation?”

“I’m not an idiot,” said Twelve Azalea. “I got you here, didn’t I?”

“You did,” Mahit said. “Forgive me. I’ve been mostly unconscious for … I don’t know how long, what time is it?”

Three Seagrass patted her lightly on the back, once. “Eleven hours. It’s around one in the morning.”

No wonder Mahit felt this ill. She’d been under anesthetic for a long while. “How much of that was surgery? And where is Five Portico? I’d like to thank her, I think.”

“She went … out,” Twelve Azalea said, “about an hour back; but you were only in the surgical suite for three, maybe four hours.”

“We weren’t entirely sure you’d wake,” Three Seagrass said, all too evenly. Mahit could hear the remnants of distress in her voice, and she wondered again about how badly hurt Three Seagrass had been, when she’d been hospitalized after the City’s electric-strike. “Five Portico was the opposite of reassuring.”

“I don’t think I was being very reassuring myself,” Mahit said. “Is there … could I have some water?” Her throat was still dry enough to hurt when she talked, and she didn’t expect to stop talking as long as Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were awake to talk back to her.

“Of course,” said Twelve Azalea, “there’s got to be a kitchen in this apartment somewhere.” He levered himself off the couch, with the effort of someone who had been sitting in the same place for a very long time—Mahit felt a little guilty, but not much—and disappeared around a corner.

She and Three Seagrass were alone. The silence between them felt strange, charged again like it had been in the restaurant: until Three Seagrass asked, quietly, “Are you still you? I … can I talk to him? Is that a possible thing?”

“I’m me,” Mahit said. “I’ve got continuity of memory and continuity of endocrine response, so I’m as me as I am going to get. It’s not—a second person, inside me. It’s me, with adjustments.”

Yskandr whispered inside her skull.

We are talking to her, Yskandr.

“All right,” Three Seagrass said. “I think the entire process is terrifying, Mahit, and I also think you ought to know that, but I intend to treat you exactly as I did before, until you behave differently.”

Mahit suspected Three Seagrass was trying to say, I trust you still, and not quite managing to get there. She smiled at her, Lsel-smile, even though it hurt, and got a wide-eyed Teixcalaanli smile back.

Before she could say anything else, there was a commotion of voices from the direction Twelve Azalea had gone—Five Portico, returning, and with company.

“Who is he? Five Portico, you didn’t say you had clients.” A woman’s voice, pointed.

“He’s not the client, Two Lemon, he’s the client’s contact. Come in, he’s not the only one.”

“This is not the time for clients,” said Two Lemon, “the yaotlek’s just landed a military force at the port—” and then the whole lot of them poured into the room where Mahit was sitting. There were five, mixed in genders and in age; none of them wore cloudhooks. (None of them wanted to be watched by the City and its algorithmic heart.) Twelve Azalea, water glass clutched in one hand, was swept along in the middle of them.

“That’s a barbarian,” said one of the newcomers.

“A foreigner,” another one said, as if making a weary correction he’d made a hundred times.

“Foreigner, barbarian, I don’t care,” said Two Lemon— a plump woman with a straight spine and steel-grey hair in a perfect queue—“what’s next to her is a spy. Five Portico, why is there Information Ministry here?”

Three Seagrass had become very still, poised and frozen at once. Mahit wondered if they needed to run. She wasn’t sure she could.

“She came with the barbarian, and when the barbarian arrived,” said Five Portico, and no one bothered to correct her on the use of the word, “they had an interesting problem and were willing to pay for it to be solved. Two Lemon, you know very well that I deal with who I want to deal with.”

“You could have warned us before we came to your house,” said one of Two Lemon’s companions, the one who was so interested in foreigners, “to have an emergency planning meeting for actions tomorrow—”

Two Lemon affixed him with a flat stare. “Not in front of the spy.”

“I am not a spy,” said Three Seagrass, faintly indignant, “and I do not care what you are planning, or who you are. My assignment in the Ministry has nothing to do with any of you.”

“Oh, but you are a spy, asekreta,” Five Portico said, “though I think you might get better, with proper treatment.”

“Is that a threat?”

Mahit put her hand on Three Seagrass’s arm. “The asekreta is here with me,” she said, “and I claim her for Lsel Station. She is my responsibility.”

Yskandr said admiringly.

Yes, and they don’t know that.

Two Lemon peered at Mahit down the slope of her nose. “You’re the Lsel Ambassador, aren’t you.”

“I am.”

“The newsfeeds from the Judiciary do not like you,” Two Lemon said, with very grudging admiration.

“I wouldn’t know,” Mahit told her, “I was unconscious most of the day. Ask Five Portico.” Under her hand, Three Seagrass trembled faintly, all adrenaline.

Five Portico snickered, and shrugged when Two Lemon looked at her. “The Ambassador isn’t wrong.”

“Is she going to die if she isn’t under medical supervision?” Two Lemon asked.

Mahit thought this was a very good question, and that she’d like to know the answer herself, and had to clamp down on the urge to giggle inappropriately.

“Eventually,” said Five Portico. “But not because of anything I did.”