A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER SIX

THE problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.

The sun slipping up over the horizon was bright and chilly through the unshaded windowpanes, inescapable; it drove Mahit out of what scraps of sleep she’d managed. It was barely dawn, and yet there were three new infofiche sticks resting in the bowl outside the office door, sealed shut. Did Nineteen Adze have the mail delivered on the hour, every hour, even in the night? Mahit wrapped the enormous feather-filled quilt—presented to her at sundown the night before by the hyper-efficient hands of Seven Scale—around her shoulders. She was awake. Awake, and still alone inside her mind. It looked to be a permanent condition.

Sitting up hurt. Her hip had stiffened more in the night, and when she peeled down her borrowed pajama trousers she could see the bruise there—black-purple, paling to a sick green at the edges—was as large as her spread hand. She wondered if there were painkillers to be had in her new, elaborate prison, as well as the delivered quilt and last night’s tray of serviceable but unremarkable vegetable slices and more of that fibrous paste Three Seagrass had served her for breakfast. Otherwise Nineteen Adze had left her alone. As if Her Excellency was waiting for her new pet to settle, so she wouldn’t snap at outstretched hands.

Still encased in the quilt, and wincing as she stood up and got the hip moving, Mahit went to fish out the infofiche sticks and open them.

The first was as anonymous as the one she’d sent: grey and sealed with undyed wax. She snapped it open, shook it to make it disgorge its light-spun glyphs.

Your friend composes warily on the subject of enclosures

Boundaries, demarcations, edges of knives

But thinks also of you, subject to lonesomeness

And sends twelve flowers as a promise if you need them.

It was poetry. It wasn’t very good poetry, but it seemed to be an allusion meaning oh fuck did the edgeshine-of-a-knife ezuazuacat throw you in prison and can I help?

It was unsigned.

Not that it needed to be signed. Mahit had only sent three messages, and neither the Minister for Science nor the multitude of minor functionaries in the Information Ministry would reply in blatant code. This was Twelve Azalea, and he was probably simultaneously sincere in his desire to effect a rescue if she needed one, and having far too much fun. Coded messages! Anonymous communiqués across departmental lines! And Mahit thought that she had an untoward degree of affection for the genre conventions of political intrigue in Teixcalaanli literature.

Was it untoward if one lived it, in one’s own culture? Yes, she decided. It was untoward when one reenacted it for the sake of the convention. But a Teixcalaanlitzlim wouldn’t think that.

No one had blown up Twelve Azalea, or even tried to do so. His friend might be hospitalized, and his new dangerous political acquaintance might be writing to him from rarefied captivity, but he was still perfectly within his rights to act like he’d walked out of Red Flowerbuds for Thirty Ribbon or some other palace romance.

She wrote a couplet back, thinking at least she wouldn’t be any worse at poetry than he was, and probably better: What encloses me I chose / I seek only what I asked of you: information. And when she sealed the infofiche, she didn’t bother to sign her name either. Someone should have a good time; it might as well be Twelve Azalea, for as long as he could manage it.

The second infofiche stick was not anonymous in any fashion. It was transparent glass aside from its electronic innards, and sealed with deep green wax stamped with a white glyph of a sun-wheel: Science Ministry. When she opened it, it unfolded into an elegant and condescending little letter: Ten Pearl congratulated her on her appointment as Ambassador, expressed formulaic regrets for Yskandr’s unfortunate demise—so formulaic that Mahit instantly knew he’d copied those regrets from one of the practical rhetoric manuals, perhaps the very one she’d learned to write from herself. She had a very Teixcalaanli moment of being insulted at his lack of effort in allusion, and then a very personal moment of satisfaction at having successfully played the dull barbarian, trying so hard to emulate a citizen’s education and only achieving an awkward and pitiable imitation.

At the close of the letter Ten Pearl suggested that of course he would be pleased to greet the Lsel Ambassador socially, perhaps at the upcoming imperial banquet in a day’s time.

A public meeting, then. Safer in some ways; if Ten Pearl thought he was under any suspicion of having killed Yskandr outright, then meeting Yskandr’s successor in public would allay any scurrilous publicity about trying to have that successor similarly eliminated. There couldn’t be any secret murders of foreign dignitaries when the entire court was watching! Safer, for Ten Pearl’s reputation (and Mahit’s actual safety, if he had been responsible for Yskandr’s death), but also politic: it would demonstrate to everyone that there were no hard feelings between Lsel and the Science Ministry.

Well. It wasn’t like Mahit hadn’t already said she’d go to the banquet. What was one more political hazard to negotiate, at this rate? And if she could corner Ten Pearl for a second, more direct meeting after the public bows and smiles he clearly wanted from her, so much the better. She put his message aside and turned to the last of the mail. (The last of the mail that she could get at—the sticks must be piling up inside her apartment in terrible little drifts of undone work.)

The final infofiche stick was another anonymous bit of grey plastic—but this one was flagged with a red tag marked with a black starfield. Off-world communication, routed somehow to her through her own office in Palace-East and Nineteen Adze’s in Palace-North. Not for the first time Mahit wondered if she was being watched by the City, and thought again of the shimmering rise of those confining walls in Plaza Central Nine. Then she cracked the infofiche open, and stopped thinking of the City at once and entirely.

The message inside was not a spill of Teixcalaanli ideographs rendered in holographic light. Coiled into the stick was a machine-printed slip of semitransparent plastic, and when Mahit pulled it free and spread it out to read, the characters on it were alphabetic: her own alphabet. This message had come from Lsel Station.

And it was not addressed to her. Nor was it addressed to The Ambassador from Lsel to Teixcalaan. It was addressed to Yskandr Aghavn, and dated 227.3.11—the two hundred twenty-seventh day of the third year of the eleventh indiction of the Emperor Six Direction. About three weeks ago.

For Ambassador Aghavn from Dekakel Onchu, Councilor for the Pilots, it began.

If you are receiving this message you have personally queried your electronic database since the request for a new ambassador was delivered to Lsel Station. This message serves as a double warning, from those who would still be your allies on the station which was once your cradle and your home: firstly, someone is trying to replace you at the imperial court. Secondly, your replacement may have been sabotaged; she bears an early imago-recording of you which neither the Councilor for the Pilots nor the Councilor for Hydroponics was able to verify the condition of before integration. She was sponsored by Heritage—and by Miners. Be wary. Onchu for the Pilots suspects Amnardbat for Heritage is behind sabotage if same exists and originates on Lsel. Destroy this communication. Further communication may follow if possible.

The message must have been triggered when she’d accessed the Lsel Ambassador’s electronic database the night before, composing her messages.

Mahit read it twice. Three times, to memorize it—automatic habit, born out of years of knowing how to study Teixcalaanli texts, knowing how to pack a collection of phrases and words into her mind, like a heat-compressed diamond of meaning. If sabotage exists and originates on Lsel. Unable to verify the condition. Your cradle and your home—

She found herself thinking—thinking to not think, thinking to let herself feel and exist through the shock and the distress. Practicalities like a veil over the way her stomach twisted, the way she automatically reached for the comfort of the imago that should have been in her mind and wasn’t, and got that dizzy vertigo again for her trouble. Thought that she was going to have to burn Yskandr’s corpse soon. While she thought she tore the plastic sheet into small pieces, and melted them with the handheld lighter she’d used to melt the sealing wax for the infofiche sticks. She hoped she could burn the corpse with full knowledge of who had killed him. It would be a strange, pale form of justice—but even if he never came back to her, she owed him that much. Most successors knew how their imago-predecessors had died: age, or accident, or illness, any of the thousand small ways a station could kill a person. You couldn’t exact justice on a cancer or a failed airlock. There wasn’t any point. But there was a point in knowing how the last person to hold all the knowledge you held had died, if only so that you could correct the mistake and keep your line alive a little longer, a little better. To stretch the continuity of memory just a bit farther, out on the edges of human space where it feathered away into the black.

Mahit folded the quilt evenly at the foot of the couch she’d slept on, dressed—awkward and in pain when she had to lift her leg higher than the height of the opposite calf—again in the same white borrowed trousers and blouse as yesterday, and considered when she’d begun to feel so strongly about Lsel ethical philosophy. Since her imago had abandoned her, probably. If she was being poetic about it. Since she had come unmoored from one of those long, long lines of memory.

She and her predecessor were never supposed to be enemies. And yet she could still hear Onchu’s message (and when had it been sent? How long had it been waiting for Yskandr—dead Yskandr—to read it, and take care?) echoing like the best poetry: if sabotage exists and originates on Lsel—if she was without her imago because of some sabotage engendered by Aknel Amnardbat—but hadn’t Amnardbat wanted her to be the new ambassador? Hadn’t Amnardbat pushed for her, wanted her presence on Teixcalaan, insisted that she be granted the out-of-date imago of Yskandr to help her? Why would she do that, if she meant for Mahit to lose that imago, to be alone in the Empire, to be cut off from everything? Had she been sent to do harm to Yskandr, or to correct his policies? Or neither one?

It hurt, how much she didn’t know. How alone she was. Hearing a voice from home should have made her feel comforted, even if it was the acerbic voice of the Councilor for the Pilots, but instead Mahit found herself sitting back on the edge of the couch, her head in her hands, still dizzy. The absence of Yskandr in her mind felt like a hole in the world. And now—now she couldn’t trust herself, her own motives—

Be a mirror, she told herself again. Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone. Be as Teixcalaanli as you can, and be as Lsel as you can, and—oh, fuck, breathe. That too.

She breathed. Slowly the dizziness passed off. The sun had just barely risen above the level of the windowsill. Her stomach growled. She was still here. She knew a little less (about what she was meant to do, as Ambassador to Teixcalaan) and a little more (about what might have been done to her, and why, and from where) than she had before she’d read Onchu’s message. She would compensate.

Mahit left the infofiche sticks on which she’d written her replies in the outgoing basket and padded barefoot out into the warren of Nineteen Adze’s office complex. Most of the doors were shut to her—blank panels that wouldn’t budge for any cloudhookless gesture. If only she had Three Seagrass to open doors, she thought, and was bleakly amused at the difference a single day made in how she felt about that necessity. Fifteen minutes of wandering showed her the front office she’d seen yesterday, still empty of everything but dawnlight, all the infographs quiescent. She passed it by, turned left down a new corridor, and waded deeper into unfamiliar territory. Somewhere in this complex—it must be a floor of the building at least—Nineteen Adze slept. Mahit imagined her denned like a giant hunting cat, the sort that was too large to have retractable claws. Her sides rising and falling in huge, even breaths; eyes slit open even asleep.

Oh, but Mahit hadn’t come to the City to be a poet.

(Why had she come—and under whose control—no. Not now.)

She hadn’t come to the City to be trapped inside the home of an ezuazuacat, either, but here she was.

The corridor ended, opening up through a wide archway into a room that must have been on the opposite side of the building from the front office, judging by the dimmer, softer diffusion of morning light. It was clearly a library: all the walls lined with codex-books and infofiche where they weren’t hung with star-charts. On a broad couch in the center, Five Agate sat with her legs folded under her, lotus-fashion. Above her knee she spun a brightly colored holograph of the City’s local solar system, the orbits marked out in glowing-gold arcs and each planet labeled in glyphs Mahit could read from across the room—and standing in front of the holograph, his small hands busy pulling the planets apart and watching them snap back to their appropriate gravitational wells, was a child who couldn’t be more than six.

“Good morning,” Mahit said, to let them know she was there.

Five Agate looked up, her face flat and unsurprised. “Ambassador,” she said, and turned to the boy. “Map, say hello to the Ambassador from Lsel.”

The child gazed at Mahit critically, and pressed his baby hands together above his heart. “Hello,” he said. “Why are you in the library before breakfast?”

Mahit came forward out of the archway, feeling ungainly and tall. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I like your solar system. It’s very beautiful.”

The child stared at her, unmoved. Teixcalaanli expressionlessness on a person that age was more than a little unsettling.

“Oh, sit down,” said Five Agate. “You’re looming.”

Mahit sat. The boy stuck his hand into the center of the holograph and grasped the sun in his palm, pulling the whole holograph out of Five Agate’s lap. “It’s mine,” he said.

“Map, go work on the orbital maths, won’t you?” Five Agate said. “Just for a moment. You can take the model.”

Mahit thought for a moment he would resist—she’d hated being locked out of adult conversations when she’d been small—but he nodded and retreated to the other side of the couch willingly enough.

“That’s Two Cartograph,” Five Agate said. “I’m sorry. Usually no one is in the library at this hour.”

Two Cartograph, and called Map. Mahit smiled. “It’s not a problem,” she said. “Lsel has lots of children running around—usually in big crèchemate agegroups—I got into all sorts of things when I was that age. I don’t mind. Is he yours?”

“My son,” Five Agate said, and then, with a little bit of pride: “My son by my own body.”

That was unusual on Teixcalaan—unheard of on Lsel. A woman using her own uterus rather than an artificial womb to grow a child was a luxury of resources the Station simply didn’t have—women died doing that, or destroyed their metabolisms or their pelvic floors, and women were people who could be doing work. Mahit had been given her contraceptive implant at the age of nine. When she’d learned that Teixcalaanlitzlim sometimes bore their own children inside themselves, she’d thought of it the way she thought about the water spilling out of one of those flower bowls in the restaurant in Plaza Central Nine. To have that much to easily spend felt both offensive and compelling.

“Was it difficult?” she asked, genuinely curious. “The process.”

Five Agate’s eyes went smugly wide in a Teixcalaanli-style grin: “I spent two years getting into the best physical shape of my life beforehand,” she said. “And it was still difficult, but I was a good home for him, and he came out exactly as healthy as he would have from an artificial womb.”

“He’s beautiful,” Mahit said, with complete honesty. “And clever, if he’s doing orbital mechanics that young.” It was so gratifying to have a conversation with a Teixcalaanlitzlim that wasn’t immediately, entirely politically barbed. Especially here in Nineteen Adze’s offices. “Do you live here, the both of you?”

“Recently, we do,” said Five Agate. “Her Excellency is very good to us.”

“I wouldn’t imagine she would be anything else,” said Mahit. It was even true. “You’re her people, aren’t you?”

“For a long time now. Since far before I had Map.”

Mahit wanted to ask Five Agate several questions, each more intrusive than the last: what do you do for her was the first one, and then how did she make you hers, and possibly on to did she want you to have a child? But what she asked was, “What changed? Recently, before you moved in.”

Some of the openness in Five Agate’s face shuttered, like an anti-glare coating coming down over the viewport of a shuttlecraft. “We’re all working late, nowadays,” she said. “And the commute was very long. I wouldn’t want my son to be alone so much. And Her Excellency thought Map would be—better. Here. Close by.”

Better. Mahit heard that word as safer, and thought about long commutes by subway, and how a bomb might devastate a subway car just as easily as it had a restaurant yesterday.

Her expression must have betrayed something of what she was thinking, because Five Agate changed the subject. “Were you just looking for the library, or…?”

“Looking for anyone who wasn’t asleep.”

“Two Cartograph gets up with the sun, so I do the same.” Five Agate shrugged one shoulder. “Do you need anything, Ambassador? Tea? A particular book?”

Mahit spread her hands open on top of her knees. She didn’t want to treat Five Agate like a servant; and she couldn’t afford to forget that this woman, as barefoot and casually dressed as herself, was Nineteen Adze’s prize assistant. And therefore at least half as dangerous as her master. “No. Unless you’d like to tell me about the Emperor,” she said. “I was watching the newsfeeds all last evening, but newsfeeds assume a kind of familiarity with local political emotion that someone from outside the City can’t have—let alone someone who isn’t Teixcalaanli.”

“What do you want to know that I would know? I’m not even a patrician, Ambassador.” Five Agate had a way of speaking—when she wasn’t talking about her son—which was so dryly self-deprecating that the humor was nearly invisible. Not even a patrician, but instead an ezuazuacat’s servant—a much more important post, even if it had lower rank at court.

“Based on yesterday I’d take you for an analyst, which perhaps benefits from not being a patrician,” Mahit said. It was like fencing; but a friendlier version than with Nineteen Adze. So far.

“All right,” Five Agate said with a trace of a Teixcalaanli-style smile, her eyes widening. “If I’m an analyst. What do you want to know that I would know?”

And that you would tell me, Mahit thought. “Why doesn’t His Brilliance Six Direction have a certain successor? Surely even if he hasn’t got a child of his body he could have a child of his genetics. Or name a designate unrelated heir.”

“He could,” Five Agate said. “In fact, he has.”

“He has?”

“He’s associated three people to the Imperium. Three designate co-imperial heirs, none of whom have any superiority over the others—they’re all co-emperor. Do Stationers not get centralized broadcast? The last time he designated anyone, Thirty Larkspur, there was nothing else but the ceremony on any newsfeed for months.”

“We’re not Teixcalaanli,” Mahit said, thinking all the while of Thirty Larkspur, who Nineteen Adze had said was both an ezuazuacat like herself and benefiting from public fear. Public fear and trying to control import-export trade to benefit his own family’s planetary holdings. “Why would we get centralized broadcasts?”

“Still. Just because you live two months out by ship—”

Mahit said, pointedly, “We manage,” and watched Five Agate curl her lip up, wry, noticing that she’d slipped—the unconscious assumption that everyone in the universe would want exactly the same things as a Teixcalaanli person would want. Mahit took some pity on her, and said, “Though we remain ignorant of why Thirty Larkspur was worthy of being associated.”

“His Excellency Thirty Larkspur is the most recent member of the Emperor’s ezuazuacatlim. He has risen quite quickly in court, based on his wisdom—and,” Five Agate said, tilting one of her hands ambivalently, “perhaps also for his strong family connections to the patricians from the planets on the Western Arc of the Empire.”

“I see,” said Mahit. She thought she did, actually. When Six Direction had made Thirty Larkspur an imperial associate, he was shoring up his support from the wealthy inhabitants of the Western Arc systems. Thirty Larkspur’s family, along with the other patrician families who made the Western Arc— a distant string of resource- and manufacturing-wealthy systems all linked heavily together with jumpgates—would be assured of having a voice not only in the current government but in the next one. And—if Mahit understood the centripetal nature of the kind of usurpation attempt that did get celebrated in Teixcalaanli histories—the Emperor was also preventing those wealthy-but-distant aristocrats from throwing their support behind anyone but Thirty Larkspur. Revolts led by yaotlekim (like One Lightning’s almost-revolt happening right now, being shouted about in the City) came from the outer corners of the Empire, where people were more loyal to their own commanders than to some distant figure in the palace. They were often bankrolled by just the sort of people like the Western Arc families. By giving Thirty Larkspur power, the Emperor ensured that his family was loyal to the man who had given him that power: His Brilliance Six Direction.

“You’ll see if you meet Thirty Larkspur, Ambassador.”

“And the other successors? You said there were three.”

“Eight Loop, of the Judiciary—she is nearly as old as His Brilliance Himself, they were crèchesibs together—”

Mahit had read enough novelizations of Six Direction’s early life to recognize Eight Loop; his sister by either blood or emotion, the brutal politician behind Six Direction’s military brilliance and sun-given favor. She nodded. “Of course, Eight Loop.”

“And Eight Antidote, who is hardly older than my Map,” said Five Agate. “But who is a child of Six Direction’s genetics. A ninety-percent clone.”

“A very disparate crowd.”

From behind them, Nineteen Adze said, “Who could replace His Brilliant Majesty, after all?”

Mahit scrambled to her feet. “It takes three people?” she said, trying to feel less like she’d just been caught.

“At least,” Nineteen Adze said. “Have you been interrogating my assistant?”

“Mildly,” Mahit said. It seemed better to lead with self-awareness.

“Did you learn what you wanted?”

“Some of it.”

“What else would you like to know?”

That was a trap, baited and set with something as sweet and easy as the infinite weight of Nineteen Adze’s concerned regard, and Mahit decided to step into it anyhow. “How a succession would work in an ideal time, at an ideal place. The histories, Your Excellency, tend to focus on the exciting variants.”

Nineteen Adze smiled, as if Mahit had answered entirely sufficiently. “An emperor has a child, of their body or their genetics, and the child is of age and mental capacity, and the emperor crowns them co-emperor. And thus, when the old emperor dies, there is already a new emperor, who the stars know and love and favor; made in blood, acclaimed in sunlight.”

“How often does that happen,” Mahit said dryly.

“Less often than some military commander backed by a hundred thousand loyal legionary soldiers claiming that the good regard of the universe has designated them emperor. The histories, Ambassador, are both exciting and all too accurate.”

And how often does an emperor appoint a ruling council of three to succeed him? Not very often, I suspect, Mahit thought. Only when there is something not quite right. No suitable successor. Not entirely. Even if Thirty Larkspur and Eight Loop are meant to stand as regents for the ninety-percent clone, that’s going to be a long and contentious regency.

“If you’ve had enough of politics,” said Nineteen Adze, “there’s tea. And you have acquired a visitor. In the front office.”

“I have?” Mahit asked, surprised.

“Go see,” Nineteen Adze said, and snapped her wrist, as if Mahit was an infograph in the wrong place.

Three Seagrass looked terrible, but it was a version of terrible that had improved relative to the last time Mahit had seen her, half catatonic after a City-induced seizure. Now she was ashen in the face and bruised under the eyes, but upright, impeccably dressed in her Information Ministry suit, her hair raked back from her forehead and knotted in an unfashionable but functional tail. Mahit had no idea what had possessed her to come here after the hospital had let her out instead of going home like a sensible person who had suffered a substantial neurological event.

Nevertheless, seeing her standing in the middle of Nineteen Adze’s front office hit Mahit with a wave of relief—some small bit of familiarity here in Mahit’s new prison-sanctuary, some kind of continuity. And she had apparently cared enough to come find Mahit, instead of going home, however unsensible it might be.

“You’re not dead!” Mahit said.

“Not yet,” said Three Seagrass, “but it’s only a matter of time.”

Mahit stopped short. “Are you serious? You should go back to the hospital—”

“Mahit, I am making a joke in poor taste about the inevitability of mortality,” Three Seagrass said with a brittle gaiety. “And here you were telling me you were fluent in Teixcalaan.”

“Humor is the last thing anyone learns in a second language,” Mahit said, but she knew she was blushing, embarrassed—as much for the overt concern as for the linguistic slip. “What are you doing here?”

“When he came to pick me up at the hospital, Twelve Azalea implied you were being held against your will and forced to send unsigned infofiche messages through the palace maildrop. I thought I’d—rescue you? Being as you’re my responsibility, and I nearly got you blown up yesterday.”

“Twelve Azalea may have overstated slightly,” Mahit said.

“Only slightly,” said Three Seagrass, with a pointed look at Mahit’s all-white borrowed outfit.

Mahit protested, “I was covered in Fifteen Engine’s blood. It’s not—”

“You’ve spent the night with the most dangerous woman at court and you’re wearing her clothes.”

Mahit pressed two fingers to the space between her eyebrows, trying not to laugh. “I swear, Three Seagrass, between your insinuations of impropriety and Twelve Azalea’s unsigned messages, I really will feel like I’m a character in Red Flowerbuds for Thirty Ribbon.”

“Putting aside how I’m not sure how that ever got past the imperial censors and out to Lsel,” Three Seagrass said dryly, “and that I would never accuse an ezuazuacat of taking advantage of a foreign dignitary, at least not while in the recording range of that same ezuazuacat’s own front office, and certainly not an ezuazuacat who I personally respect and admire—Her Excellency isn’t letting you leave, is she?”

There was a hectic flush in Three Seagrass’s cheeks, beneath the hollow shadows under her eyes. Mahit wished she’d sit down. But no, she stood in the center of the room like the reed Twelve Azalea called her, narrow and wind-whipped and still doing her job: warning Mahit that they were most certainly being observed. Mahit said, “There were demonstrations in Plaza Central Seven. Acclamations.”

“A very good excuse to keep you off the streets. I’m not arguing, Mahit. It’s … the City is strange this morning, even this close to the center. Bombings do that, I imagine.”

Mahit sat down herself, on the same couch she’d been interrogated on the evening previously, and made sitting an invitation for Three Seagrass to join her. It was gratifying when she did: sympathetic mirroring, and also not having to look at her, standing so very still and looking half shattered. She wondered if there were aftereffects of being attacked by the City itself. Physical, or psychological. Both, she’d guess, from how Three Seagrass carried herself.

“Tell me how it’s strange?”

Three Seagrass tilted one hand back and forth in the air. “Not enough pedestrians. It’s like a collective case of nerves. And of course Central Nine is blocked off, and the subway isn’t running—”

Running, Mahit heard, an echo from a long distance off. A sensation like electric sparks ran from her shoulders through her elbows to hover in her outmost fingers, buzzing.

“—keeps your new integrated subway running at all hours without operators,” Yskandr Aghavn is saying. He leans his elbows on the inlaid wood table that Ten Pearl—new-made Science Minister Ten Pearl, who wears a mother-of-pearl ring on each of his fingers like a living pun on his name—has installed in his office. “There’s surely some methodology the City used when the lines were separate, and some new methodology of yours now, and I admit to a profound curiosity.”

Ten Pearl has refined Teixcalaanli expressionlessness to a high art: he conveys utter disdain with the tiniest of sighs, but Yskandr knows this kind of person—what he really wants is to show off his project. And his project was connecting every part of the transit of the entire planetary City, subway and rail both, and rendering them seamlessly autonomous. It had won him his ministry—he headed Science now.

“Ambassador,” says Ten Pearl, “I cannot imagine that you need a subway on Lsel Station.”

“We do not,” Yskandr agrees, willingly enough, “but an automated system that can be trusted to move hundreds of thousands of people, without error and without conflict—that, you must imagine, is of enormous interest to anyone who lives in a less-perfect automated system, as those of us who are planetless do. Have you embedded minds within the City’s extant AI? A corps of volunteers, like the Sunlit, all together watching over this system?”

Ten Pearl warms to the subject: Yskandr watches him thaw by inches. Yskandr has said something to him which is almost right, but just wrong enough that his natural desire to inform and educate a barbarian is going to override his much more prudent wish to keep his new technology safely under wraps. His eyes widen a fraction. Yskandr waits for him: this is like drawing out a hungry animal from its lair.

“Not like the Sunlit,” says Ten Pearl at last, “the City is not a collective mind.”

That is already interesting, as it implies that the Sunlit are such a collective: and yet Yskandr had recently met a young Teixcalaanlitzlim who was very excited about joining the imperial police, and was very much an individual person. It implies a process, a making of the Sunlit, and Yskandr wonders whether it is anything like an imago process, and how an empire so completely opposed to neurological enhancement thought about it. None of this is worth asking; all of it would expose his own interests too obviously. What Yskandr asks is, “If not a collective, is there a mind?”

“If you consider an artificial, algorithm-driven intelligence a mind, Ambassador—then yes, the City now has a mind, and that mind watches the subway for conflicts.”

“How remarkable,” Yskandr says, with only the faintest edge of mockery. “An infallible algorithm.”

Ten Pearl says, “It hasn’t failed me,” implying that it is good enough to have made him Science Minister, and Yskandr thinks: It hasn’t failed you yet.

More electric prickles swam in Mahit’s fingers. Her nose filled with the remembered scent of ozone, the blue flash of light from the City’s algorithm going very, very wrong and catching Three Seagrass unawares and—

She was back, alone again in her body instead of remembering some conversation Yskandr had had more than a decade ago.

Three Seagrass was still talking. Mahit thought she’d missed perhaps a half second, nothing more—a half second with an entire flash of memory in it, minutes of it. “—and the acclamation in Central Seven wasn’t the only mass gathering, there was an old-fashioned sacrifice out in Ring Two, it showed up in the Information Ministry Bulletin this morning—”

“You checked that from the hospital?”

“Decryption’s good for making sure I still have all my higher brain functions,” Three Seagrass said, and Mahit began to get a sense of what had scared her worst about the scene in Plaza Central Nine. She could sympathize. The echoes of the imago-flash were still buzzing in her smallest two fingers. Ulnar nerve damage, or the facsimile of it.

“And I was bored until Petal came by with your unsigned communiqués,” finished Three Seagrass.

“I think he’s having fun,” Mahit confessed.

“I know he is,” Three Seagrass said, and sighed. “He brought me chrysanthemums.”

Mahit was trying to remember what chrysanthemums meant in Teixcalaanli symbolism, and coming up mostly blank—eternal life? Because they were star-shaped?—when Nineteen Adze, emerging from the doorway like a sudden apparition, said, “How sweet of your friend, asekreta. I’m pleased to see you’ve survived yesterday’s unfortunate accident.”

Three Seagrass made to get to her feet and Mahit put her hand on her forearm—personal space norms or not—and held her still. “If I’m Your Excellency’s guest,” she said to the both of them, “then Three Seagrass is mine, and she’s welcome where I am.”

Nineteen Adze laughed, a short, bright sound. To Mahit she said, “Of course, Ambassador, as if I would be so rude to the guest of my guest,” and then, sitting across from them, she looked Three Seagrass plainly in the face and told her, “Three days and you’ve got her loyalty. I’ll remember you.”

To Three Seagrass’s credit, she didn’t flinch, and she didn’t take her arm away from Mahit’s hand. “I’ll be honored by your recollection,” she said.

Mahit thought she ought to say something, if only as an attempt to reclaim some control over the conversation, if such a thing was even possible with Nineteen Adze and Three Seagrass both in the room. “What makes a sacrifice old-fashioned?”

She sounded like an ignorant barbarian, but she hardly had a choice about that. Not here. Not now.

“Someone died,” Three Seagrass said.

“Someone chose to die,” Nineteen Adze corrected her. “Some citizen made opening cuts from wrist to shoulder and knee to thigh and bled out in a sun temple, calling on the ever-burning stars to take them up in exchange for something they wanted.”

Mahit’s mouth was dry. She thought of the vivid spill of Fifteen Engine’s arterial blood over his shirtfront and her face. A sacrifice for no particular reason. A Teixcalaanlitzlim would describe it that way. Not a death he chose. A waste of a sacrifice. “What does a citizen get, in exchange for their life?” she asked.

Three Seagrass, whose arm was still under Mahit’s fingers, said, “Remembered,” sharp and sure.

Nineteen Adze had that same expression as she’d had when Mahit had wished aloud for a joyous reunion with her predecessor back when they’d all stood in the morgue around what was left of Yskandr. That twist of emotion that Mahit couldn’t parse. “The asekreta is right. Such a citizen is remembered as long as sacrifices are named in sun temples. You should attend a service, Mahit, and hear the litany of names. It’d be a cultural experience.” She settled back onto the couch. “All aside from its memorial applications, dying in a temple is not in fashion. It is an extreme response to perceived threat.”

“Domestic terrorism is perceived threat,” Three Seagrass said.

“So are rumors of impending war,” said Nineteen Adze.

Three Seagrass nodded. “The situation in Odile—the troop movements lately—everyone knows someone in the fleet, and everyone in the fleet knows the fleet is mobilizing.”

“Even so,” Mahit interjected, thinking again Odile, thinking the Empire is less stable than it seems, “I didn’t know you held One Lightning’s shouting partisans in such high esteem—they can’t force the yaotlek to begin a war, just wish he’d already had one to celebrate.” When Nineteen Adze nodded to her, acknowledging the point, she was savagely pleased—pleased, and then angry at herself for being pleased. Nineteen Adze was using her; was using the both of them to think through the politics aloud. They weren’t her retinue.

They were her guests. Her hostages. And how many stories, in Teixcalaanli literature, described the fate of children traded to one court or another before the Empire, one system to another within the Empire, hostages and guests both, made Teixcalaanli enough and then discarded when it was politically expedient. Enough that Mahit should stop trying to impress the ezuazuacat. There wasn’t a point. There was the narrative which said she was being used—

Three Seagrass had no such qualms. “A blood death in a temple was how we used to ensure the success of a war, Mahit,” she said. “One death from every regiment, hand-selected by the yaotlek. No one does it anymore. Not for hundreds of years. It’s terribly selfish, for one citizen to take away the responsibility of calling on the favor of the stars from everyone else.”

“Selfish” wasn’t how Mahit would have described it. She’d say “barbaric,” if she was speaking a language where that would be an intelligible sequence of words to describe a Teixcalaanli religious practice.

“What I’d like to know,” she said, “is where the war will be, considering those troop movements that Three Seagrass mentioned.” Some of those troop movements were detailed in those unsigned-but-sealed documents that had been in her initial pile of infofiche: requests to move Teixcalaanli warships through the Lsel jumpgates, on the way to somewhere.

“You’re not alone in wondering,” said Nineteen Adze. “His Brilliance has been remarkably closemouthed about his current thinking on that matter.” She looked pointedly at Three Seagrass, as if she was a synecdoche for all of the secrets held by the Information Ministry, and might have an opinion.

“Your Excellency, even if I knew where His Brilliance had decided Teixcalaan was next looking to expand, I couldn’t say. I’m an asekreta.”

Nineteen Adze spread her hands wide, one palm-up, one palm-down, like a set of scales. “But the Empire expands. First principles, asekreta, not to mention evidence. So there is a where.”

“There is always a where, Your Excellency.”

A where and a why now. Mahit thought she knew the why now—the uncertainty around Six Direction’s succession. Three equal associated-heirs, each with their own agenda—and one a child who was too young to have an agenda—was no stable mode of government. Something would have to bend; Thirty Larkspur or Eight Loop would emerge with the chief share of authority, or declare themselves regent for the ninety-percent clone, or—

Or One Lightning would declare himself Emperor by right of conquest and public acclamation.

(And somewhere in the midst of it, Yskandr had tried to intervene—she knew him too well to think he could have left this alone. She was turning it over and over, like tumbling a stone inside her mouth, and Yskandr was more political than she was. More political and more dead. The inheritor of an imago-line was supposed to learn from her predecessor’s mistakes.)

“Perhaps we’ll find out at the banquet tomorrow,” Mahit said.

“We’ll find out something,” Three Seagrass replied, with some of that same brittle delight Mahit had heard in her voice earlier. “And as long as I don’t actually get you blown up this time—”

Nineteen Adze laughed. “Of course you both are attending.”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” said Three Seagrass. “The Ambassador was invited. And I wouldn’t miss one.”

“Certainly not. Are you presenting a composition?”

“My work is in no way the equal of someone like Two Calendar,” Three Seagrass said, theatrically self-deprecating in her comparison to the poet whose work was providing the mail decryption cipher this month, “and more importantly I’m not at the banquet as an orator, but as Mahit’s cultural liaison.”

“The sacrifices work asks of us,” said Nineteen Adze. Mahit couldn’t tell if she was joking.

“Will we see you there?” Three Seagrass inquired.

“Naturally. You both can join me on the walk to Palace-Earth tomorrow evening.”

When Mahit, envisioning the political statement that entering the banquet in Nineteen Adze’s company would make, opened her mouth to protest, Nineteen Adze gestured to cut her off and said, “Ambassador, the City is quite disturbed. I have plenty of guest space. Did you really think you would be leaving?”