A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER FIVE

NO one disappeared her.

The trip back to the palace in the passenger seat of the Sunlit’s vehicle was anticlimactic enough, after the rest of the morning, that Mahit had time to feel shaky and exhausted with spent adrenaline. She wanted very much to shut her eyes, rest her head against the lightly padded seatback, and stop thinking or reacting or trying very hard at all. If she did that, this Sunlit—and possibly every other Sunlit, she’d have to ask Twelve Azalea, or someone else who collected peculiar medical facts, about them if she ever got a chance to—would know she was doing it. So she sat very straight and watched out the window ahead of her as they rose vertically through the levels of the City. The buildings thinned, became more elaborate, more tightly strung together with bridges made of gold-shot glass and steel, until they were back in the palace complex and Mahit almost knew where she was. Not well enough to give directions, but perhaps well enough to not get entirely lost on her own.

Her Sunlit stuck to her elbow all the way through two plazas and a mess of corridors inside the largest building in Palace-North, a rose-grey semitranslucent cube that hunkered on itself like a glowing fortress and bustled with grey-suited Teixcalaanlitzlim, shading to pink or to white for symbolic reasons Mahit couldn’t entirely discern without her imago’s help. They watched her with expressions of bemused interest, which she assumed she deserved: she was still covered in Fifteen Engine’s blood. What Nineteen Adze, in her perfect whites, would think, Mahit neither knew nor particularly cared.

The ezuazuacat’s offices—which Mahit suspected were also her apartments, if her own were any model for City architecture—began with a wide, bright room behind a code-locked door of that same rose-grey, which had slid open as soon as the Sunlit had announced that Mahit Dzmare was here for her meeting. Mahit didn’t miss the sarcastic twist of intonation. Her plan was quite transparent, really. Subtlety was for when you had more time to think. Beyond the door the floor was slate and there were enormous windows, rose-shaded to keep the sky from blazing too much across all the many holograph screens floating in a wide arc of a workspace that surrounded Nineteen Adze in a rough corona. She was still all in white, but her coat had been left somewhere and she’d rolled her sleeves halfway up her forearms. There were other Teixcalaanlitzlim in the room—her servants or assistants or functionaries—but she glowed in the middle of them, drawing the eye. Mahit wondered how young she’d been when she’d started to dress like that, thought to ask Three Seagrass, remembered that Three Seagrass was in a hospital somewhere in the City. Tried to draw herself up straight against the bruising ache where the restaurant wall had fallen on her hip.

Nineteen Adze banished three holographs with a flick of her wrist: two in text, one that might have been a scale model of Plaza Central Nine from above. Their afterimages glowed. “My thanks,” she said to the Sunlit, “for delivering Ambassador Dzmare safely to her meeting with me. Your platoon is to be commended; I’ll make sure of it. You’re dismissed.”

The Sunlit melted away back through the door without protest, and Mahit was alone inside the ezuazuacat’s territory. With grim professionalism she lifted her hands to greet her formally.

“Look at you,” Nineteen Adze said. “Still so correct after the morning you’ve had.”

Mahit discovered she was out of patience. “Would you prefer I be rude?”

“Of course not.” She left her displays and scrolling transparent windows of information to be fussed over by her assistants, and came over to Mahit. “Getting yourself here was well done. The first smart move you’ve made since you arrived.”

Mahit bristled, began, “I didn’t come here to be insulted—”

“Nothing of the kind is meant, Ambassador. And lest you worry, this is only the first time you’ve been smart; you’ve been clever quite a bit.”

The distinction in vocabulary was unkind; that word for “clever” was the one meant for con artists, hucksters, an animal sort of cunning. “Like any barbarian, I assume,” Mahit said.

“Not any barbarian,” Nineteen Adze said. “And better than some other young persons have done, when arriving at court at a particularly agitated moment. Relax, would you? I’m hardly inclined to interrogate you while you’re still wearing someone else’s body fluids, and besides, you’ve practically asked for sanctuary.”

“Not asked,” Mahit said.

“Found, if you’d like.” She twitched her eye behind the white-smoked glass of her cloudhook, summoning one of the assistants to materialize at her side. “Five Agate, if you’d show Ambassador Dzmare to a shower and provide her with some clothing appropriate to her height.”

“Of course, Your Excellency.”

What else was there to do but surrender? At least, Mahit thought, she’d be a clean hostage.

The shower was not palatial or ostentatious. It was tiled in soothing black and white, and had a wall caddy filled with hair products that Mahit didn’t touch—were they Nineteen Adze’s own? Or was this some sort of collective shower for all her assistants? She seemed the type to make them all live with her, but no, that was a literary trope, and Teixcalaanlitzlim were people no matter how hard they tried not to be—and the water was hot. Mahit stood under it and watched what remained of Fifteen Engine sluice down her arms and into the drain.

She reached for the soap—a cake of it rather than a liquid dispenser like station showers used—and in the moment when her hand entered her field of vision, fingers extended, a perfectly standard motion, her hand was not her hand, it was a rougher, larger hand, the nails flat and square and manicured, Yskandr’s hand reaching toward this soap, in this shower. The water hit lower on his shoulders than on hers—four inches in height would do that. The shape of his torso and his center of gravity, in the chest rather than the hips, overriding her sense of herself. She’d remembered like this when they had first been integrated, just briefly, the shape of his body rather than hers, superimposed—but why would he ever have been in the shower of the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze?

Yskandr? she tried, again. Silence. The ache of muscles that weren’t hers, a kind of exquisite tiredness.

And was herself, her own body, the doubled flash of memory gone: alone in the shower with only the bruised pain of her hip and none of that other body’s shape, thinking of how Nineteen Adze had said he was my friend, how she’d touched Yskandr’s dead face with such strange tenderness.

It would be exactly like Yskandr to have slept with a woman who called herself the Edgeshine of a Knife. That flashfire ambitious person who had been giving himself over to the new combination of him and Mahit Dzmare, a person who would say sedition, probably, when asked what he might have done wrong—it seemed the sort of thing he’d have done.

And it might explain Nineteen Adze’s willingness to offer sanctuary. Or Mahit might be superimposing a moment of neurological failure, some electric signal in her imago-machine flashing and telling her that her body was Yskandr’s body, onto the experience she was having right now. It was possible that she couldn’t trust anything the imago gave her right now—if she and he were damaged (sabotaged—she shuddered under the water).

Mahit scrubbed her arms with soap and rinsed them clean. The whole shower smelled of some dark wood, and roses, and she thought she knew that scent too, or at least remembered it.

Afterward she dressed in the clothes Five Agate had left her, all aside from the undergarments: she wasn’t about to wear someone else’s panties, the ones she’d come in with would suffice, and the bra they’d given her was sized for a woman with more need for bras than Mahit strictly had. The rest of the clothes were soft and white and well made, both pants and blouse. Mahit wished she could put her own jacket back on over them, but it was irreparably stained. She’d have to walk out, barefoot, in what she suspected were Nineteen Adze’s very own garments.

A hostage, but a clean one.

Someone had set out a tea service by the time she made her way back to the central office.

Nineteen Adze was immersed in her workspace, rearranging holographs and projections around her with a fluid rhythm, so Mahit sat down at the low table where the tea was and waited. It had a light scent, floral and faintly bitter. There were only two bowls, shallow ceramic, sized for cupped hands. Tea on Lsel Station was not nearly so formal: tea drinkers had tea bags and mugs and microwaves to heat the water. Mahit drank coffee, when she drank stimulants at all, which was the same process except with freeze-dried coffee grounds instead of the tea bag.

“There you are,” said Nineteen Adze. She sat down across from Mahit and poured the tea into the bowls. “Feeling better?”

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Mahit said. “I do appreciate it.”

“It’d hardly be reasonable of me to expect you to talk before you had a chance to gather yourself back together. From the news coming out of Plaza Central Nine, I imagine you’ve had a traumatic sort of morning.” She picked up her tea and sipped it. “Drink the tea, Mahit.”

“I won’t disparage your hospitality by worrying about poison or drugs.”

“Good! That saves me the time of reassuring you that there are neither, and unless Lsel has vastly changed its conception of human since Yskandr got here, it should also be entirely harmless to you physiologically.”

“We’re still just as human as you,” Mahit said, and drank. The tea was bracing, a bittersweet green flavor that persistently clung to the back of her throat.

“Twenty years is hardly long enough for significant genetic drift, I do agree. And all the other definitions are quite arbitrary, culture to culture.”

“I’m sure you’d like me to ask what Teixcalaan arbitrarily considers inhuman, now.”

Nineteen Adze tapped her index finger against the side of the tea bowl. Her rings clicked, metal on porcelain. “Ambassador,” she said, “I was a friend of your predecessor. Perhaps one of his only friends, though I do hope that wasn’t as true as I suspect. For his sake, I am offering you a conversation. But we can skip to the end, if you’d prefer to forgo the process of building a mutual edifice of common ground.” Her smile, when it came, was that edgeshine-brightness that had gotten into her epithet. “I would like to talk to Yskandr. Either stop pretending to be Mahit Dzmare, or allow him to speak.”

Quite exactly like a knife, Mahit thought.

“With all respect, ezuazuacat, I can’t do either of those things,” she said. “The first is impossible, as I am not pretending to be myself. The second is more complicated than you are suggesting.”

“Is it,” said Nineteen Adze. She pressed her lips together. “Why aren’t you him?”

“On Lsel you’d be a philosopher,” Mahit said, and promptly wished she hadn’t. Even with the formal-respectful “you” she’d used, that was a much too intimate statement in Teixcalaan—but she didn’t know another way of phrasing it which wasn’t the suggestion of selecting a model for allusion and imitation, as Three Seagrass had apparently selected Eleven Lathe.

Nineteen Adze said, “How flattering. Now explain, Mahit Dzmare—I do believe the body you wear was once called that, so it will suit me fine to call you what you like to be called—explain why you are not my friend.”

Mahit put down the bowl of tea and left her hands palm-down on the white linen of her borrowed trousers. Nineteen Adze’s grasp of imago theory was amazingly perverse: the idea that Yskandr would be walking around inside her body, with her own self pushed out or vanished or killed, and only her name remaining to her flesh? The Station didn’t waste its children like that. It was nauseating to contemplate—and reminded her far too much of that moment in the shower, where she hadn’t quite felt like her at all. Not her, and not the combined person she and Yskandr were meant to become, either. “I will,” she said, “but tell me first: was the bomb in Plaza Central Nine for me or for Yskandr?”

“I don’t think it was for either of you,” Nineteen Adze said. “At worst it was for Fifteen Engine, and that’s a conjecture I would not put weight upon. The victims of domestic terrorism are most often suffering from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A mild case of political malaise like Fifteen Engine’s links to the Odile insurrection are hardly a reason for someone to blow him up, especially as our local bomb-throwers tend to be for insurrections,” Nineteen Adze said.

Mahit bit back the question she’d meant to ask Three Seagrass, this morning—the Odile insurrection? What is going on in Odile?—thinking, almost sure, that the ezuazuacat was trying to redirect her. She wouldn’t be redirected, not yet. She could ask about Odile and the local bomb-throwers in good time; she needed to know what Nineteen Adze wanted with her before she could deal with the larger troubles of the City.

Nineteen Adze watched her, took in her silence. And went on. “Which does not answer your question about whether anyone save me knows about your Station’s imago-machines, I know.”

She was too sharp. Too old. How long had she been at court? Decades. Longer than Yskandr. And half that time at least in the perilous innermost circle of the Emperor. Clearly subtle misdirection and leading questions weren’t going to work.

Like a knife, Mahit reminded herself, and tried to be a mirror.

“What did he tell you would happen to him after he died?” she asked.

“That it would be unthinkable of Lsel to not send the next ambassador carrying his imago. That it would be—how did he put it. An unimaginable waste.”

“That sounds like Yskandr,” Mahit said dryly.

“Doesn’t it just? Arrogant man.” Nineteen Adze sipped at her tea. “You do know him, then.”

Mahit lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Less well than I’d like,” she said, which was true even if it was deceptive. “And what did he tell you the next ambassador would be like? When she got to the City, carrying his imago.”

“Young. Not completely informed. Fluent in Teixcalaanli, to an unusual degree for a barbarian. Happy to see his friends again and get back to work.”

“The term we’d use,” Mahit said, “is ‘out of date.’ The Yskandr I know is not the Yskandr you knew.”

“Is that the problem we’re having?”

Mahit exhaled, slowly. “No. It is a very small subset of the possible problems we might have had.”

“It is in fact my job to solve problems, Mahit Dzmare,” Nineteen Adze said, “but I tend to find it easier to do so when I know what they are.”

“The problem,” said Mahit, “is that I don’t trust you.”

“No, Ambassador. That is your problem. Our problem is that I am still not speaking to Yskandr Aghavn, and that, despite his apparent death, the same unrest which is an ongoing problem in my City and which surrounded him—even and unto his more distant contacts, like Fifteen Engine—has surrounded you as well.”

“I don’t know anything about other bombs, if there have been any,” Mahit said. “Or Fifteen Engine’s involvement with the sort of people who’d set them, or the sort of people who’d set them against him.” The same unrest. What had Yskandr done? Though, if she knew that, she might know who had killed him, or at least why he had died. And whether it was the sort of thing which would require retaliation in the form of multiple civilian casualties. That didn’t seem—he’d said sedition, when she asked him what he’d most likely done, before he vanished, but sedition was one thing and meaningless death another and she could not quite imagine sharing sufficient aptitudes to have an imago made from anyone who would accept casual terrorism as a reasonable side effect of political action.

“Bombs in pricey restaurants in the City’s center are an escalation, in my opinion,” said Nineteen Adze. “Other similar incidents have kept themselves to the outer provinces. Thus my conjecture that Fifteen Engine may have gotten himself involved with those sorts of people, to his detriment and eventual dismemberment.”

Mahit wondered if Nineteen Adze had just made a joke. It was difficult to tell—the humor of it cut so sharply, if it was humor. A joke like that could flay a person open before they noticed the pain.

“You and he might merely be collateral damage, Mahit,” Nineteen Adze went on. “But I knew Yskandr, and thus I wonder.”

“What I wonder,” Mahit said carefully, “is what this level of domestic terrorism escalated from. In terms of local unrest. How many other bombings have there been?”

Nineteen Adze didn’t answer her directly. Mahit hadn’t precisely expected her to. She said, “Because you are ‘out of date,’ mm?”

“Yes. The imago that I accepted”—and here Mahit was committing sedition again, twice in twenty-four hours, maybe she and Yskandr had been right for one another after all, this was easy—“was made from Yskandr when he had only been Ambassador for five years.”

“That is a problem,” said Nineteen Adze, quite sympathetically, which made it worse.

“But not our problem,” Mahit went on. “I don’t think you understand, Your Excellency, what an imago is.”

“Enlighten me.”

“It’s not a re-creation. Or a double. It’s a—think of it as a mindclone language and protocol program.”

Like an afterimage, Yskandr in the back of her mind:

Frantic, she thought, Are you there?

Nothing. Silence, and the ezuazuacat talking again, and Mahit didn’t have the attention to spare and she’d probably imagined the whisper anyway, called it up like a ghost or a prediction.

“—that is not how Yskandr described the process,” Nineteen Adze was saying.

“An imago is live memory,” Mahit said. “Memory comes with personality. Or they’re the same thing. We found that out very early. Our oldest imago-lines are fourteen generations as of when I left, and might be fifteen now.”

“What role is worth preserving over fifteen generations on a mining station?” Nineteen Adze asked. “Governors? Neurobiologists, to keep making the imago-machines?”

“Pilots, ezuazuacat,” said Mahit, and found herself vividly and suddenly proud of the Station, a sort of upwelling patriotism she hadn’t considered part of her emotional vocabulary. “We, and the other stations in our sector, haven’t been tied to a planet since we colonized the area. There aren’t planets to live on in our sector, only planets and asteroids to mine. We’re Stationers. We will always preserve pilots first.”

Nineteen Adze shook her head, a wry, humanizing gesture; some of her short dark hair fell across her forehead and she pushed it back with the hand that didn’t hold her bowl of tea. “Of course. Pilots. I ought to have guessed.” She paused; Mahit thought it was more for effect than anything else, an indrawn breath to mark that moment of delighted mutual discovery and then to discard the connection it had made between them. “Memory comes with personality, then. Let’s grant that. Which makes it all the more interesting that you still haven’t told me why I’m not talking to Yskandr right now.”

“Ideally the two personalities integrate.”

“Ideally.”

“Yes,” Mahit said.

Nineteen Adze reached out across the low table between them and put her hand on Mahit’s knee. The touch was heavy, grounding, firm. Mahit thought of being pinned beneath an entire planet’s mass, the gravitational fall of descent. “But this is not ideal, is it,” Nineteen Adze said, and Mahit shook her head, no. No it wasn’t.

“Tell me what’s gone wrong,” Nineteen Adze went on, and the worst part of it wasn’t that it was a demand, but that her voice had become so endlessly, vastly sympathetic. Miserably, Mahit thought she was learning something about interrogation techniques. The kind that worked on angry, exhausted, culturally isolated people.

“He was here,” she said, wanting more than anything to get it over with. “My Yskandr, not yours. We were here. And then he wasn’t. He shut up on me; I can’t reach him. Which is why I’m not able to oblige you, Your Excellency. At this point I wish I could. It’d be simpler, considering how thoroughly my predecessor has dismantled the secrecy of our state secrets. No point in hiding it.”

Nineteen Adze said, “Thank you, Mahit, I do appreciate the information,” and took her hand away from Mahit’s knee; took the weight of her attention away in the same motion, all of the intent pressure vanishing somewhere internal to her. Mahit felt … she wasn’t sure. Relieved, and angrier now that she was relieved. Now that there was space across the table for relief. She took two breaths, deliberately even.

“I would have been Mahit Dzmare even if my imago was as present as we’d both like,” she said. “The pair always takes the name of the newest iteration.”

“The habits of Stationer culture suit Stationers,” Nineteen Adze said, which was a dismissal if Mahit had ever heard one.

She tried again, differently. (A mirror. A clean hostage.) “I’d like to know why someone thinks blowing up Fifteen Engine was an appropriate escalation of hostilities. In your most-estimable opinion, ezuazuacat.”

“There are always people who don’t love being Teixcalaanli,” said Nineteen Adze, dry and sharp. “Who wish we’d never broken atmosphere, never stretched out our hands across the jumpgates from system to system and had stayed … oh, something that isn’t an everlasting state ruled by a man like Six Direction under the guidance of the brilliant stars. They’d like us to be a republic, or to stop annexing new systems even when those systems ask us to, or—any number of things which look sane on the surface and aren’t, when one looks at them closely. Some of those people become Ministers, or think they could be Emperor themselves, and change everything to be as they see fit. Teixcalaan has always had problems with that sort, as I’m sure you’re well aware. If you’re as much like Yskandr as you claim his successor would have to be, you’ll know all our histories.”

Mahit did. She knew a thousand stories, poems, novels—bad film adaptations of poems—all of which told the stories of people who had tried to usurp the sun-spear throne of Teixcalaan, and mostly failed—or succeeded, and been acclaimed Emperor, and by virtue of their success declared the previous emperor a tyrant, unfavored by the sun and the stars, unworthy to hold the throne, and justly replaced by a new version of himself. The Empire survived the transfer of power, even when the emperor didn’t.

“I have some idea,” she said. “What’s the other sort of person? Since domestic terrorism doesn’t usually lend itself to a glorious return to ideal rulership, as most of the populace can’t possibly enjoy it enough to like their new emperor afterward.”

Nineteen Adze laughed, and Mahit felt an outsize satisfaction. Like making this woman laugh was a victory, hard won, long sought-after, each time a prize. Perhaps Yskandr had been Nineteen Adze’s lover—and even if Mahit was lacking his voice and his memory, she still had his endocrine system response.

“The other sort of person,” said Nineteen Adze, when the laughter had subsided, “doesn’t want power; they want the destruction of what power currently exists, and nothing else. We only sometimes have problems with them. But we have been having one now, for some span of years. We are a very large empire, as of late, and peaceful, and it gives men and women a great deal of time to think about what displeases them.” She got to her feet. “Come over to the infographs, Ambassador. Work waits for nothing, even interesting young barbarians like yourself and our Yskandr.”

Our? Mahit thought, startled—and didn’t ask. Watched.

Nineteen Adze’s servants reappeared as if they’d merely been waiting for a signal; one clearing away the tea service, another—the same one who had brought Mahit to the shower, Five Agate—surrounding herself with her own arc of holographs. Returning to the work, now that her boss was finished with extracting the sensitive information from the hostage. Nineteen Adze said, “Summarize it, Five Agate, and get me the Sunlit’s reports on the survivor interviews,” and Five Agate made an elegantly abbreviated version of one of the gestures for acquiescence.

“Mahit,” Nineteen Adze went on, just as if she was one of her servants—her apprentices, perhaps, that was better, more accurate—“what did you intend to ask Fifteen Engine about? Your meeting with him was the most public he’d been since he retired. He moved out of the palace and practically vanished into the outer boroughs. He looked like he was living quietly, even if he was dissatisfied with the direction in which His Brilliance the Emperor was taking us.”

That must be what she’d meant, earlier, when she’d talked about Odile—Fifteen Engine being unsatisfied with how the Odile insurrection, whatever it was, was being handled. Mahit said, “I intended to ask him about how Yskandr died.”

“Anaphylaxis due to allergies.”

“Really,” Mahit said.

“Suspicion will certainly serve you well at court,” Nineteen Adze said, perfectly straight-faced. Behind her busy screens, Five Agate might have snickered.

“We’ve been so direct with each other so far,” Mahit said, daring a little. “I had to make an attempt.”

Nineteen Adze flicked her wrist, vanishing one set of holographs and calling up another. “I don’t know the precise physiological process that killed him. The ixplanatl’s report said allergies.”

“For someone with your illustrious career at this court, Your Excellency, I would have assumed you’d be more suspicious.”

Nineteen Adze laughed. “I do like you, Ambassador. I think Yskandr would also have.”

That hurt to think about, in a way Mahit hadn’t expected. A sort of loss she hadn’t thought to expect, to go along with missing the Yskandr she did know. Not every link in an imago-sequence knew their predecessor personally, but it was always considered a sort of honor if one had—if a person had been chosen, not just come up all green on the aptitude tests and the practical exams. She’d thought that she didn’t care: she was going to be an ambassador, she was significant and necessary, and of course it’d never be personal for her, hardly anyone came back to Lsel from Teixcalaan, and all her aptitudes had been aimed at getting her to the City even before she knew whose imago she’d receive or if she’d even earn one at all.

But all the same, she wished she could have met the Yskandr who had been embodied here, whose corpse she had been presented with. And she missed home, missed planetrise above the Station, and being clever and ambitious and not responsible yet, talking to Shrja Torel and her other friends in the ninth-tier station bars, imagining what they might do and not actually having to do it.

All she said was, “We are carefully selected for compatibility with our predecessors, yes.”

“Did Fifteen Engine like you, then?” Nineteen Adze asked. “If you’re that compatible.” Mahit thought she might be amused, or that interest was close enough to amusement for her that the two had become essentially indistinguishable.

“No,” she said. “I asked too many questions, while simultaneously failing to be the person he worked with twenty years ago, before he retired. Did you like Fifteen Engine?”

“He was secretive, combative, and deeply connected to several patrician families that have little taste for me. During his tenure in Information he was often a thorn pricking my thumb. I was glad he retired, though I found it suspicious and still do—but he’d been quiet after his retirement. On the surface, at least. I will attend his memorial out of respect for a good opponent, an erstwhile drinking companion, and a former friend of my friend, the former Lsel Ambassador.”

She paused, and looked directly at Mahit, expressionless, like a dark glass wall. Her cloudhook glowed in her eye. “Does that count for like, on Lsel?”

“Close enough,” said Mahit. Of course Yskandr would be sufficiently charming to collect friends both assigned and attracted, and keep both kinds even when they weren’t to each other’s taste. “Who benefits from Fifteen Engine’s death, ezuazuacat?”

“Anyone who didn’t want you to know Yskandr’s old friends,” Nineteen Adze said, calling up a fresh infograph and annotating it with rapid small shifts of her fingertips, forming a list of word-glyphs in the surface of the air. “But more likely: anyone who wants people who quietly speak out against imperial methods of quelling insurrection to stop thus speaking. Or someone attempting to foment public fear, of which there is a great deal lately, much encouraged by incidents like this one and the anti-imperial activists who claim responsibility for them. So who benefits—what an interesting way of phrasing it, Mahit. Add half the ezuazuacatlim, particularly Thirty Larkspur, who’d like to shut down any trade which doesn’t come from a system where his family has an economic interest, and will take xenophobia as a happy excuse to do so, and xenophobia is easily stoked when Teixcalaanlitzlim get exploded while at lunch … oh, and you. If you wanted to eliminate your predecessor’s allies in order to take a radically new position on Teixcalaan–Lsel diplomatic relations.”

“I didn’t set that bomb,” said Mahit, trying to remember Odile and Thirty Larkspur, trying to remember public fear—commit them to memory now, so that later she could hold the whole puzzle up in her mind, spin it, look for how it fit together.

“Did I say I thought you did, Mahit?” said Nineteen Adze, and there was that weight of her attention again, the intimation of sympathetic total intimacy. Mahit imagined her and Yskandr in bed, a flash of possible-memory that might just have been desire. Skin on skin. Something more than a political friendship. (Would it matter, if they had? Mahit had no intention of—not that she wouldn’t, Nineteen Adze was—)

“If I might interrupt, Your Excellency,” Five Agate broke in, to Mahit’s considerable relief. “But you should look at the feeds from Plaza Central Seven.”

Nineteen Adze lifted both eyebrows. “Shove them over here, then,” she said. Five Agate did, with a broad sweep of her palm that caught the trailing edge of one of her infographs and sent it sailing over to Nineteen Adze’s workspace. Nineteen Adze caught it through a combination of hand and eye gestures, positioned it, expanded its borders until it hung like a window in midair. Mahit stepped closer, standing at Nineteen Adze’s left elbow like Five Agate stood at her right.

Plaza Central Seven, rendered in transparency from some high-up camera—planted by Nineteen Adze’s agents? By the Emperor? The Sunlit? Or did the City itself watch itself?—looked much like Plaza Central Nine, if less grand by an order of magnitude. It had the same spread-petal shape that Mahit now knew could unfold into barrier walls; it was lined with shops and restaurants and what she suspected was either a government building or a public theater, from its size and from the statues arrayed in front of it. It was also full of Teixcalaanlitzlim.

Some of them had placards.

They were shouting. The sound came through the feed like a distant roar, indistinct.

“Can you—” Mahit started.

“Turn it up, yes,” said Five Agate. “A little. It’ll depend on what they’re shouting, how clear it is—”

“They’ll be shouting ‘One Lightning,’” Nineteen Adze said. “I will buy you a new suit for the Emperor’s banquet this week if I’m wrong, Five Agate. But turn it up.”

They were shouting “One Lightning”—the name of the yaotlek who had been mentioned by the Sunlit while they’d been trying to arrest her. The yaotlek who was commander of the fleet nearest to the City right now. They were shouting his name, and a four-line snatch of iambic doggerel that Mahit made out primarily as rhythm, built around an excited repetition of “Teixcalaan! Teixcalaan! Teixcalaanli!” that ended the verse.

“Are they trying to acclaim him without a military triumph?” asked Five Agate wonderingly.

Nineteen Adze said, “Not yet.” She spread her fingers away from her palm like a starburst, and the feed zoomed in, onto the faces of the demonstrators. Some of them had streaked their foreheads horizontally with red paint. Mahit thought of the sacrificial crowns that returning Teixcalaanli generals wore in poetic epics: not paint but blood, their own mixed with that of whoever they’d defeated. Entirely symbolic, now, in this age of interplanetary conquests.

“I was under the impression that such things were illegal,” she said.

“Ineffective, not illegal,” Nineteen Adze said. “Five Agate, the purpose of military acclamation. For the edification of the Ambassador.”

Five Agate coughed and caught Mahit’s eyes sidelong. Mahit thought she looked slightly apologetic. “To confer legitimacy upon a prospective emperor of Teixcalaan, who does not ascend by congruence of blood or by the appointment of the previous emperor, a military acclamation is public demonstration of his virtue—which is to say, public demonstration of the favor of the ever-burning stars.”

“And the form of that favor?” asked Nineteen Adze, prompting.

“Traditionally, a major military victory. Or a great number of them. Preferably a great number.”

Nineteen Adze nodded. “Quite right. The great number of victories is the proof; all else is shouting, and a functional bureaucracy or a marginally intelligent citizenry—both of which we are blessed with—can strip all legitimacy from mere shouting.”

“You’d like me to ask why they’re shouting for One Lightning anyway,” Mahit said. “Since he does not have the military achievements that would make him a viable emperor. Or at least such achievements have not reached the distant and uninformed regions where Lsel Station lies.”

Five Agate’s expression looked slightly shocked; more than slightly intrigued. “He’s ambitious,” she said, and when Nineteen Adze nodded at her she went on. “He’s the sort of ambitious which looks for opportunities. He’s won skirmishes out in some of the wilder sectors, not to mention a small campaign or two to quell local unrest or head off out-Empire incursions—and his troops have spectacular morale reports. He wasn’t at Odile, but he trained the commander who is there, Three Sumac, and she remembers to thank him every time she is on the newsfeeds. He wants significant military achievements, and he has enough backing to assure his soldiers that they’ll have an opportunity to get them under his command.”

“An acclamation based on belief in the future,” Mahit said dryly. An acclamation based on needing a war to fight. “I wish him the greatest of personal success. Since he apparently lacks significant military achievements aside from taking credit for there not being more than one bomb in Plaza Central Nine today.”

“A person might suspect you of being a diplomat, Ambassador,” said Nineteen Adze.

“A person might.”

“And she’d be right, if she suspected. But there is one significant factor you are missing, diplomat or no—and you’ve missed it only by having spent your first forty-eight hours here so eventfully.”

Mahit tried to navigate between feeling insulted and feeling amused, and came up with sarcastic. “Enlighten me, ezuazuacat. If it wouldn’t trouble you too much to skip to the end.” After the conversation over the tea she oughtn’t to have been able to manage sarcasm—but perhaps that was part of the point of Nineteen Adze: that the glittering quick-spoken politician who made you want to toss quips back and forth with her was the same creature who could slice a conversation to ribbons and make you want to weep that she understood.

She wished for Three Seagrass again: for anyone at all who could be a distraction or a covering shield. A friend. Her own friend, not some ghost-emotion friend of Yskandr’s.

Nineteen Adze had zoomed the camera feed out. The whole mass of cheering Teixcalaanlitzlim hung in the center of the air between them and rotated slowly around a central axis when she inscribed the turn with a twist of her wrist. “The Emperor Six Direction, our light-emitting starlike ruler, brighter than jewels and more kind, he to whom I am sworn and for whose sake I would spill the last drop of my blood: he is eighty-four years old and has no biological offspring. That is what you’re missing, Ambassador.”

“You have a succession problem,” Mahit said, because she couldn’t say I’m so sorry that you’ll soon lose your friend; it seemed—unkind. Unnecessary. Not on topic. And how was she to know whether an ezuazuacat was really a friend of the Emperor, or just a symbolic one? This was the problem with an entire society that obsessively re-created its own classical literature, and wouldn’t she have liked to explain that to herself two weeks ago. Or to talk to Yskandr about it. She was sure he’d have something to say.

“One Lightning’s shouters certainly think we do,” Nineteen Adze said. She flicked her hand at the feed and it folded in on itself and faded out. “I am reserving judgment, myself. But you picked a fascinating moment to arrive at court, Ambassador.”

“I didn’t pick,” Mahit said. “I was summoned.”

Nineteen Adze tilted her head to the side. “With urgency?” she asked.

“With unseemly urgency,” Mahit said, thinking of herself and Yskandr, shoved together with only hope and three months of meditation to make them one agent of the Station.

“If I were you,” said Nineteen Adze, “I would find out who authorized your entrance permit. I suspect it would be quite revelatory.”

Was it a leading question? Did she intend to have Mahit go through some laborious investigative process only to come up with the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze as her answer? No, Mahit decided—she was too canny to want to watch Mahit squirm on the long-line of a tether. Tricks like that were for stock villains, melodramas, and even Teixcalaanli obsession with narrative was mostly reserved for good narrative. This was worse: this was Nineteen Adze giving her an assignment, like she’d give one of her servants. Go find out, tell me what you know. As if Mahit belonged to her. (As if Yskandr had belonged to her—but she was beginning to believe he hadn’t, not entirely, not even if she’d shared her bed with him, and that had been part of the problem the two of them had had with one another.)

She said, “An interesting idea. When I return to my own workstation, in my own apartments, I’ll be sure to look into it.”

“Don’t wait so long,” said Nineteen Adze. “After all the work you did to get yourself to a place of relative security, do you imagine I’d send you back out into the palace alone? While we still don’t know who is willing to blow up innocent citizens right next to you?”

“My cultural liaison—” Mahit began, intending to argue that she certainly was not alone.

“Should be out of the hospital soon enough. I have more than enough infograph displays to spare one, Mahit. I’ll have Seven Scale set up a temporary office for you.”

Right here, where I am not on Lsel diplomatic ground, Mahit thought, but she schooled her hands into one of the gestures of formal thanks—and when the young man who had disposed of the tea service came to lead her away into the further depths of Nineteen Adze’s territory, she went with him.

The office—Mahit was doing her best to not think of it as a prison cell, and mostly managing—was flooded with late-afternoon light, shaded pink through a bay window. Tucked into its curve was a low, wide couch. Seven Scale showed her how to open her very own infograph display and provided her with a stack of blank infofiche sticks in neutral, impersonal grey. He was calm and incurious and efficient, and everything about him was a relief in comparison to Nineteen Adze. Which had likely been designed. She introduced comfort and withdrew it like a master interrogator, and Mahit was agonizingly tired of the emotional swing. When Seven Scale left, closing the door behind him, she lay down on the couch, turned her face to the wall under the windowsill, and drew her knees up to her chest until her bruised hip ached.

If she stared at the blank white paint, and stretched one hand over her head to touch the curving sill around the top of the couch, she could imagine she was in her room on the Station. The safe three-by-three-by-nine tube of it, the gentle eggshell cup of its walls: tiny and inviolate and hers, hanging in rows with everyone else’s rooms. Soundproof. Lockable. You could curl up with a friend there, spine to spine, or belly to belly with a lover, or— It was closed. It was safe.

She made herself sit up. Outside the window a Palace-North courtyard was a riot of blue lotuses floating in ponds and star-shape paths, busy with Teixcalaanli feet marching on Teixcalaanli business. She considered first the impulse to go out the window herself, and second the equally unsuitable impulse to try to write fifteen-syllable verse about how she felt.

Hey, Yskandr, she thought, like throwing a stone into the dark water of one of those ponds. What did you miss most about home?

Then she turned on the infograph display and signed into it like she’d been instructed. As she did so, she realized that it was the first time she’d signed into her own equivalent of a cloudhook, instead of having Three Seagrass open doors for her. So strange, to have as much freedom as she’d demanded in her own apartments—her own diplomatic territory—and only to receive it here, where she was some very complicated kind of prisoner. With perfect knowledge that Nineteen Adze was almost certainly recording everything she did, Mahit got to work.

The interface was, when one wasn’t trying to decrypt basic communication, more intuitive than Mahit had expected. She gestured and the infograph responded—spreading her hands and twisting her wrist spawned multiple transparent workscreens, and she could make her own halo of information. She found Nineteen Adze’s preset camera feeds and called up the one that was still trained on the demonstration in favor of One Lightning—let the ezuazuacat think what she wanted about Mahit’s continuing interests—and set it to run off to her right side. Over her left shoulder she put a window full of a running stream of tabloid headlines, and resolved to improve her vocabulary of casual and insulting vernacular—and perhaps also to learn something more about anti-imperial activists, or Thirty Larkspur, or just what Teixcalaanli tabloids thought about bombings in restaurants. In the center she found a basic text input and began composing messages, routing them through her own accesses as Lsel Ambassador.

She’d probably have to encrypt them with that encomiastic verse, wouldn’t she. If she wanted to be taken seriously—

No. She’d leave them unadorned. Uncivilized. Written in unseemly haste and urgency by a woman away from her home office (she thought, with absurdist longing, of the basket of unanswered infofiche sticks that was probably overflowing in her apartment right now) who was a stranger to the City. A mirror could reflect more than one thing—she’d been a knife, when she reflected Nineteen Adze. Now she’d be a rough stone: inescapable, blunt, barbaric. Expected, except for those people who had expected her to be Yskandr, and wouldn’t she find out who they were, now?

In plain language, the sort that she’d discarded after her first trip through the aptitude exams in Teixcalaanli language, she wrote to the last man who had ever seen Yskandr alive. The Minister of Science, Ten Pearl. She asked for a meeting. She expressed a desire for normalization of relations—took out “normalization” and put in “I hope our offices will be on good terms in the future,” since wishes didn’t require any more specialized grammar than the future tense, and “to normalize” was a resumptive verb and required the speaker to have more than a passing acquaintance with tense sequencing and the subjunctive.

Teixcalaanli was a terrible language, sometimes, even if it did sound beautiful in fifteen-syllable verses. But there was nothing in that message to suggest that she was interested in investigating the death of her predecessor—nothing to suggest that she was even a marginally competent political operator.

So deeply in over her head, the new Lsel Ambassador. Did you hear? She had to ask Her Excellency Nineteen Adze to keep her from getting arrested.

Mahit snickered to herself. The sound was loud in the room, even over the muted roar of the feed from the demonstration. She schooled her face to imperial impassivity, as if she’d been caught in a compromising position.

The other messages were easier to compose. One to Twelve Azalea, asking him to check on Three Seagrass—surely he’d be interested in his friend Reed being hospitalized, and might even be inclined to let her know if her liaison was going to recover from that neurological insult. One to herself, copying both of the previous two messages so that she’d have a record delivered into the marginal physical safety of Lsel diplomatic territory, not just the limited safety of her electronic access—and one final message, to the Ministry of Information, addressee unspecified, requesting an account of who had approved her entrance permit.

Let Nineteen Adze watch what she did.

After Mahit had impressed her letters onto the infofiche sticks she’d been provided, and checked that each one would spill out her message when cracked open, she sealed them with hot wax. The wax came out of a sealing kit on the endtable by the office door, and had to be melted with a handheld ethanol lighter. Mahit burned her thumb, pouring it. So perfectly imperial, to have messages made of light and encrypted with poetry, and require a physical object for propriety’s sake.

Such a waste of resources. Time and energy and material.

She could wish it didn’t delight her.