A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER TWENTY

THEY were keeping the Emperor in a bunker under Palace-North. It took forty-five minutes to walk there, Mahit and Three Seagrass and Nineteen Adze and one of the aides—the young man, Forty-Five Sunset. They went through tunnels, avoiding the curfew, the roving bands of Sunlit. The entire palace complex was riddled with them, deep under the ground. At her left, Three Seagrass murmured, “The rumors are that the palace sinks as many roots into the ground as it does blooms into the sky; we daylight servants of the Empire see only the flowers—justice, science, information, war—and the roots which feed us are invisible but strong.” Mahit liked hearing her talk. It was how they’d started this, barbarian and liaison, Three Seagrass decoding Teixcalaan for her. She liked it, and at the same time she knew that Three Seagrass was doing it to keep herself calm.

Nineteen Adze moved them through checkpoints, guarded first by the shimmering AI-walls of the City—opened by Nineteen Adze’s cloudhook—and then by ever-increasing numbers of Teixcalaanlitzlim, dressed very simply in grey tunics and trousers with armbands bearing the imperial crest on their left arms. Mahit was reminded of the Judiciary forces who had been chasing Twelve Azalea, and thought of Eight Loop, who was Six Direction’s crèchesib, who might have given him a secret personal guard of Judiciary-trained people. They all had shocksticks. Some of them—more, as they went deeper—had projectile weapons, and one woman carried what Mahit would swear was a laser which should have been mounted on the prow of a small warship. None of them wore the full-face cloudhooks of the Sunlit.

The innermost guards wore no cloudhooks at all, and they took the cloudhook Nineteen Adze was wearing from her. She gave it over easily.

One Lightning’s infiltration of the City’s AI-algorithm—One Lightning, working through War—must have gone very deep, to have the Emperor guarded only by people who would be guaranteed free of any influence of it: left as naked and abandoned by the vast flow of Teixcalaanli literature and history and culture and moment-to-moment news as Mahit had been naked and abandoned when she had lost contact with her imago.

Nineteen Adze spoke to some of them; others simply nodded to her. Mahit wondered how many times she’d come this way before—whether she was new to this level of disaster and threat, or if there had been other times in the long history of her service to Six Direction that he had been forced to hide down here in the strange heart of the Empire.

said Yskandr.

easily, my lord,> Yskandr said, and Mahit had to clamp her jaw shut on the words. Instead, she shrugged, spreading her hands wide. Better to not say anything. Better to make this case for Lsel Station, in Teixcalaanli words.

Six Direction looked down at Nineteen Adze. Some communication passed silently between them. She nodded. His hand came off the back of her neck and she got up to her feet, fluid and graceful for a woman in middle age who probably hadn’t slept for a day and a half at least.

“We’ll have to broadcast it,” she said. “On every feed. Imperial override; emergency message. And it will have to be you saying it, Your Brilliance—no one will believe a proxy right now. You saying it, and the Ambassador prerecorded and spliced in as appropriate.”

“As ever, Nineteen Adze, I do trust your judgment.”

Nineteen Adze’s smile was more like a flinch. Mahit suspected she was thinking of how she had allowed Yskandr to die, and doomed Six Direction at the same time. It would be like a thorn in her, a goad. Six Direction must like that, to have something to twist—

“Ambassador Dzmare,” said Nineteen Adze. “Mahit—will you record your statement from your government for us?”

If this was the plan, this was the plan. “Yes,” Mahit said, “I will. Where should I go?”

“Oh, we have everything we need right here,” said Six Direction. “Emperors have lived down here, for months. A holograph recorder is nothing.” He waved a hand toward some of his grey-uniformed attendants, and they swung into motion: some left the room, others approached Mahit and the Emperor on the couch, with some wariness.

“She looks like she’s been dragged through the riots,” said one of them. “The blood on her—I think we should keep it. It suits the gravity of what she brought you.”

“Even barbarians can make sacrifices,” said Six Direction. “We could all take note of that.”

As the attendants helped her up from the couch and led her into a room which looked identical to the imperial briefing room Mahit had seen on the newsfeeds when she’d watched the annexation war being announced from Nineteen Adze’s breakfast table, she tried very hard not to feel filthy. Corrupted. Made useful. It didn’t work.

It didn’t work, and it didn’t stop her from telling her secrets again, this time to the recording cameras, as clearly and persuasively as she could.

The Emperor and Nineteen Adze had a brief, vehement argument about where they would broadcast the announcement from—Nineteen Adze was for everyone remaining hidden underground, but Six Direction waited her out, let her say all sorts of flattering things about his welfare and fragility, and then proclaimed that he was, in fact, the Emperor of all Teixcalaan, and he would make this announcement, fearlessly, from the sun temple at the top of Palace-North, and that she would come with him and stand beside him while he did it. There was no real arguing with him. Mahit could feel the weight of his authority, even diminished and under threat—the long shadow of his eighty years of peace stretching out to shape even this moment.

After the argument was over, there was the usual administrative chaos of orchestrating a complex public appearance on no notice—a rapid twenty minutes of imperial attendants talking briskly to one another, sending messages. The Emperor and Nineteen Adze vanished under heavily armed escort. Mahit caught sight of the child, Eight Antidote, being whisked off into the chaos of that escort, and thought of how many times he might have been moved similarly: relocated at the whim of one political moment or another. He looked at her, as he went— a small, thin boy, observant, straight-backed. Mahit thought of the birds in the garden in Palace-Earth. They don’t even have to touch you, Eight Antidote had said, then. He’d been talking about the birds—she’d thought at the time—but it was true. They didn’t touch him. They moved him without laying hands on him at all.

She herself was taken into another room, smaller, more private—strewn about with infofiche and print-books, half-erased holoprojections still up on screens. A workroom. There was a couch in the middle of it, and Mahit sat down on it. Someone brought her a warm washcloth to wipe the blood and dust off her face; someone else brought her Three Seagrass, who was bemusedly holding a large cup of tea, and the two of them ended up sitting on the couch next to one another, watching the swirl of activity around them. Mahit felt unmoored, entirely cut away from the world. All her tethers gone. Even Yskandr in her mind was a banked, quiet presence.

Half the wall in front of them was taken up by an enormous holoprojection, the only one still active. It had begun broadcasting the imperial seal and flag, with a countdown timer superimposed—forty-eight minutes until the Emperor would speak to his people. At thirty-seven minutes the attendants, save for a guard at the door, all vanished, the great machine of imperial work lifting away and alighting somewhere else. Mahit had played her part. She’d given her secrets up. There was nothing she could do now but wait.

Three Seagrass put her empty teacup down on the floor. Thirty-five minutes. The quiet was velvet-soft. Mahit couldn’t stand it.

“What do you think they’re doing?” she asked, just to hear sounds that weren’t her own breathing or Three Seagrass’s, lighter and more rapid.

Three Seagrass swallowed, pressed two fingers between her eyebrows, as if she was shoving back tears. “Oh, I’d guess they’re finding Eight Loop,” she said, and her voice was not at all steady—Mahit turned, looked at her with real concern. “For the visual impact of imperial authority, all of them standing together—”

“Three Seagrass, are you all right?”

“Oh, fuck,” Three Seagrass said, “no, I’m not, but I was so hoping you wouldn’t notice?”

They were alone. The door guard was guarding the door, looking away, a silent and still presence. They were suspended out of time, out of the inexorable forward flow of events. Mahit reached out—horribly conscious that this gesture wasn’t hers, wasn’t even Yskandr’s, but belonged to the Emperor—and cupped Three Seagrass’s cheek in her hand.

“I notice,” she said.

It was not unexpected when Three Seagrass burst into tears, but it was awful; Mahit felt guilty, like she’d caused it, this little shattering. Like she’d tapped too hard on the shell of an egg and it had splintered, held together only by the internal membranes inside. “Hey,” she said, “hey, it’s—” It wasn’t all right, and she wasn’t about to say so. Instead, acting on instinct and an upswelling of care, a feeling like her vagus nerve had been expertly struck and was vibrating, she reached to pull Three Seagrass into her arms. She came willingly; the slight weight of her rested against Mahit’s shoulder, and her face was pressed into Mahit’s collarbone. Hot tears dampened her shirt.

Gently, Mahit stroked her hair, still unbraided from its habitual queue. The world was spinning on and on and on—the countdown at thirty-two minutes—and she couldn’t fathom the wrenching depths of what this must feel like to Three Seagrass, who had looked like she would cry at the very mention of civil war, back in Twelve Azalea’s apartment.

“I thought I was fine,” Three Seagrass said, muffled, “but I keep thinking of all the blood. Fuck. I miss Petal so much, already. It’s been three hours and I miss him so much and that was such a stupid way to die—”

Oh. Not civil war at all. Something much deeper, much more immediate. Mahit squeezed her arms around her, and Three Seagrass made a miserable, hiccupping sound. “This is—the whole world is changing and I’m crying over my friend,” she said. “Some poet I am.”

“When this is over,” said Mahit, “you’ll write Twelve Azalea a eulogy that people will sing in the streets; he will be a synecdoche for everything Teixcalaan is suffering right now, needlessly. No one will ever forget him, and that will be your doing, and—oh, I’m just so sorry, this is all my fault—” She was going to cry too, and what good would that do anyone, two people crying on a couch underground?

Three Seagrass picked up her head from Mahit’s shoulder, looked up at her, tearstained, red in the face from crying. There was a brief, strained pause. Mahit could swear she could hear the rushing of blood in her own capillaries. They were breathing exactly in time.

When Three Seagrass kissed her, Mahit opened up for her as if she was a lotus floating in one of the City’s gardens at dawn—slow, inexorable, like she had been waiting a long, long time through the night. Three Seagrass’s mouth was hot; her lips wide and soft. One of her hands settled in Mahit’s short hair, held on tight, almost tight enough to hurt. Mahit found her hands had landed upon Three Seagrass’s shoulder blades—they were sharp under her palms—she pulled her closer, halfway into her lap, without breaking the kiss.

This was a terrible idea. This was lovely. It was the nicest thing that had happened to her in hours—in days—Three Seagrass kissed like she’d made a thorough study of the practice, and Mahit was glad of it, glad that she’d done it, glad of the distraction from everything else.

They broke apart. Three Seagrass’s eyes, inches from hers, were very wide and very dark, and red at the corners where she’d wept.

“Petal was always right about me,” she said. Mahit tucked a stray strand of her hair behind her ear and let her talk. “I do like aliens. Barbarians. Anything new, anything different. But I also—if I’d met you at court, Mahit, if you were one of us, I’d have wanted to do that just the same.”

What she was saying was exquisite, a balm and a comfort, and horrible at the same time: If you were one of us, I would want you just the same, and Mahit wanted simultaneously to climb back inside her mouth and shove her out of her lap. She wasn’t Teixcalaanli, she was … she hardly knew anymore, except that she wasn’t Teixcalaanli and wouldn’t be no matter how many lovely asekretim climbed into her arms, tearstained, wanting to be held. Wanting to be held after sacrificing nearly everything she was for Mahit’s sake.

“I’m glad you did,” she managed, because she was, because it had been sweet. “Come here, let me—let me.” Her hands in Three Seagrass’s hair, on the narrow channel of her spine. Holding her.

They didn’t kiss again, just breathed together in time, until the holoprojection screen chimed—fifteen minutes—and changed, beginning to show a series of aerial images of the City, what someone might see from the vast height of the sun temple on top of Palace-North. The eyes of the Emperor, opening up.