CHAPTER NINE
You’d like him. You’d be proud of him. And every time I see his face I think of yours, and your voice, and what I might have had to guide me. And every time I think of your voice I think of the monstrous creature that might have whispered to me with it—and if I had that creature I would have your ghost, and listen to it—so all in all I suspect I have done right, and my longings are my own to bear. But that’s being the Illuminate Majesty, isn’t it? You always said so. I wish you’d believed it.
This is a terrible idea. What animal doesn’t come back from a long hunt hungry for scraps? But you don’t want to hear pretty Teixcalaanli rhetoric, do you. You want something direct? How about this: every Fleet officer I’ve ever met would get greedy enough to take a little detour into Station-conquering if they were bored enough and had the opportunity of legal proximity. Fuck off about this and give me another year to work. You’ll get your precious isolation.
EIGHT Antidote came into the Ministry of War through the front door, like he was supposed to be there. Like he’d won the right to be there, which he guessed he had. Three Azimuth had told him to come, and Her Brilliance had—well, she’d given him the strange charge of the spearpoint in the middle of the night. The spearpoint and the command: Find out if Three Azimuth means to win this war. He was still chewing that over, the idea of it like a raw place in his mouth where a baby tooth had fallen out and a new one hadn’t come in yet. Whatever it meant, though, he had double permission to come in the front way instead of from the tunnels. (He’d hidden the spearpoint in the drawer where he kept his shirts, a bright heavy secret, nestled amongst the greys and the golds and the reds.)
Eleven Laurel was waiting for him just inside. Eight Antidote abruptly remembered that he hadn’t even touched his problem set puzzle, and wondered if there was time to turn around and pretend he had ended up here by accident. There wasn’t, and anyway, running off was what a kid would do, so he wouldn’t.
“Hello, Undersecretary,” he said, and bowed over his fingertips, inclined just so far, like he was greeting an equal. It felt squirmy and wrong and great, to presuppose that he and the Third Undersecretary of the Ministry of War, his teacher and his elder by fifty years at least, was someone he didn’t have to bow very far to.
“Cure,” said Eleven Laurel, warm and pleased with him. Eight Antidote was blushing by the time he stood up. He hated being so obvious. He shouldn’t be this obvious. “I think you will enjoy today,” the Undersecretary went on. “We have just received some intelligence from the Twenty-Fourth Legion, and the Minister of War thinks you, my young friend, ought to get to see it analyzed.”
“I’d like that a very great deal,” Eight Antidote said, trying to remember who was in charge of the Twenty-Fourth Legion. Not yaotlek Nine Hibiscus—it had been the Tenth at Kauraan, the Tenth was the dangerously loyal one—but another woman, with an astronomical aspect to the noun half of her name. He’d done just one exercise with the Twenty-Fourth as part of a puzzle, a long time ago, back at the very beginning of when Eleven Laurel was teaching him. But he knew the Twenty-Fourth was one of Nine Hibiscus’s yaotlek’s six, her complement of legions to work with on the edge of the battlefront.
“Not from the Tenth?” he asked, following Eleven Laurel through the warren of the Ministry of War. “That’s interesting.”
“A good observation, Cure,” said Eleven Laurel. “No, our intelligence is straight from Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, on fast-courier relay through the jumpgates. She very much wanted the Ministry to have this information right away. I’m extremely curious myself as to what it is she wants to show us.”
Sixteen Moonrise. Eight Antidote had to remember the name this time; at least he’d gotten the astronomical part right. But it’d be much easier to remember her name now that she wasn’t a collection of holographs on a strategy table and instead a Fleet Captain who went above, or around, her yaotlek’s command in order to send intelligence to War back in the City.
For the first time, Eight Antidote wondered if Nine Hibiscus knew that there were elements in the Ministry that had sent her to war hoping she was going to die in it. He figured she must. She wasn’t stupid. No one who could command loyalty like that was stupid. They couldn’t be. He was pretty sure. But maybe she was the kind of person who thought that loyalty protected her, that since all her soldiers loved her so very well, and she loved the Empire (she must, if Nineteen Adze had made her yaotlek), then the Ministry of War would love her and protect her as well.
That seemed like the kind of mistake a person who relied on loyalty would make. He’d have to remember not to make it, when he was Emperor. Loyalty wasn’t transitive. It didn’t move up and down the chain of command smoothly. It could get cut off, or rerouted. Especially if someone else powerful was intervening in the movement of information, like Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise was right now.
Eleven Laurel didn’t take him to one of the strategy rooms this time. They went up an elevator in the center of the Palms instead, and through a series of very secure checkpoints staffed with Fleet soldiers, into what must have been Minister Three Azimuth’s very own office. It was covered in star-charts: beautiful ones on the walls, artist’s renderings of Teixcalaanli space, with pride of place behind the Minister’s desk taken by a vast and glimmering mosaic in a frame, dark crystal slices and golden pinpoint stars made out of glass pieces smaller than Eight Antidote’s littlest fingernail. It was a famous piece: The World, it was called, or sometimes just Teixcalaan, a map of everywhere the Empire had touched as of two hundred years ago when it was made by the artisan Eighteen Coral. Eight Antidote had seen it in holo, and on infofiche, but never before in person.
It lived behind the desk of the Minister of War. Of course he’d never seen it in person.
There were maps everywhere, though. On the large table in front of that desk, some holographic and some paper ones too—on the desk itself, in piles—pinned to the walls next to and overlapping the famous and artistic renderings.
Minister Three Azimuth sat amongst her cartography like a bird in a well-lined nest, her cloudhook glowing silver-white and translucent over the wreckage of her melted ear, her hair a smooth dark cap. Eight Antidote swallowed, his throat feeling suddenly thick, and quickly looked away from her to the other Ministry officials seated around the table to her right and left. There was Undersecretary Seven Aster of the Second Palm, the master of supply chains, and his staff, immediately recognizable by how the hands in their shoulder patches had their fingers pointing to the left; next to him was Twenty-Two Thread, the Fifth Palm, the armaments chief, who had come to give a presentation on new sorts of spaceship engines to Eight Antidote’s ancestor-the-Emperor two years ago. Eight Antidote had fallen asleep while she was talking. But he’d been a little kid then. He wouldn’t do that kind of thing now.
Eleven Laurel’s own staff were waiting for him on the other side of the table; two women Eight Antidote didn’t know, both wearing patches figured with downward-pointing hands for the Third Palm, on their shoulders next to their rank sigils. And two empty chairs. One for Eleven Laurel—and one for him. He sat down. Like he belonged. Like he wasn’t eleven years old.
At the end of the table, opposite the Minister, was an empty space where the Emperor would have gone, if she’d been invited. Presumably, if whatever was about to be discussed was important enough, she would be. (Probably. Unless the Ministry of War was hiding something from Nineteen Adze—but that was what he would have to watch for, wasn’t it? Being careful, paying attention. That’s what he’d been asked to do, in the middle of the night.)
“Eleven Laurel,” said the Minister, nodding welcome and then looked right at him and said, “Your Excellency Eight Antidote. Thank you both for coming. I’m going to play a transmission from Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise now. It came in on fast courier a few hours ago, priority communication.”
Eight Antidote was profoundly grateful that the room lights dimmed when the transmission started, so no one could see that he was blushing, his cheeks hot, just from being addressed directly by Three Azimuth with his entire formal title. It was embarrassing and ridiculous. Lots of people called him Your Excellency, and he didn’t usually blush at all.
In holo, Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise of the Twenty-Fourth Legion looked like a statue in a plaza, visible only from the waist up in full three-sixty-degree reproduction and hovering above the table. She bowed over her fingers—or she had, about six hours ago. Six and a half. It took at least that long for a transmission to cross all the jumpgates between the battlefront and the City, even on fastest courier and being bounced across sectors by the strongest repeater stations. Wherever she was, six hours ago, had been dim and metal-walled. Some ship. She was alone.
“A message for Minister Three Azimuth,” she said. “Priority. Security code Hyacinth.” She was speaking softly, just loud enough that her recorder could catch each syllable but not loud enough for anyone to overhear her. Eight Antidote had never heard of security code Hyacinth before. He glanced at the faces of the adults around the table; they showed no obvious surprise or consternation, only attentiveness.
“The Fleet has obtained the corpse of one of our enemies and conducted an autopsy on the alien. A formal report of the autopsy will arrive from yaotlek Nine Hibiscus’s medical team in due course, I’m sure, and I am equally sure that it will be accurate but brief. I myself observed the conclusion of the autopsy. The aliens are mammalian, likely to be scavengers, and carnivorous or omnivorous based on their dentition. More significantly, however, the yaotlek invited a special envoy from the Ministry of Information to be present at the autopsy as well. The envoy brought with her a foreign national from Lsel Station. I have enclosed a visual image of the Stationer. It is my belief that Lsel Station may be attempting to exert diplomatic influence over the decisions of yaotlek Nine Hibiscus via the person of the Information envoy, whom Nine Hibiscus has commanded to initiate first-contact protocols. The Palms should be aware of the possibility that Information may contain compromised individuals, or that the Stationers may be infringing on Teixcalaanli sovereignty. In sending this message I perform my duty as a sworn officer of the Fleet. May Teixcalaan and the Emperor endure a thousand thousand years. End security code Hyacinth.”
The holo ended, and Sixteen Moonrise vanished as if she’d never been. The lights came back up. Minister Three Azimuth sat back in her chair, her fingers laced together in front of her chest. She did not look like someone who had just been told that there was a foreign diplomat conspiring with a rogue Information agent running loose around the battlefield of a thus-far-unwinnable war. Eight Antidote would like to look that confident someday. And she was small, not much taller than him, and yet she appeared every inch the master of all six Palms, the encompasser of the Empire’s military mind. She blinked behind her cloudhook, and a two-dimensional image of a tallish woman in a foreign-cut jacket and trousers, high-cheekboned and curly-haired, replaced the holo of Sixteen Moonrise above the table. The image was fuzzy at the edges, the angle strange. Eight Antidote thought it had been pulled off a security camera. But he knew that face. He’d seen that face splashed across newsfeeds over and over after Six Direction died. He’d seen it close up, too: in one of the garden rooms in Palace-Earth, the huitzahuitlim garden, where he went to watch the hummer-birds sip nectar and fly only as far as their invisible netting allowed them. She’d spoken to him then.
“So,” Three Azimuth said. “What do we think of the former Ambassador from Lsel Station, Mahit Dzmare? She, if you recall, of the heartfelt plea that we notice the alien threat, the one broadcast right before the Emperor Six Direction’s death. The one who gave us the direction of our war. Since that esteemed individual is who has just shown up on Weight for the Wheel.”
In the garden, surrounded by the buzzing red-and-gold wings of the tiniest birds in Teixcalaan, Dzmare had made him a strange offer. She’d said to him, You’re a very powerful young person, and if you still want to, when you are of age, Lsel Station would be honored to host you. And he’d known better, right then, as he knew better right now, than to say yes: she’d been lost, and drunk, and sad, and still trying to find an angle of influence. So he’d shown her how to get the huitzahuitlim to drink nectar from her palm, and then sent her away.
He wondered what she’d learned from that night. And what had driven her first away from Teixcalaan and then out to the battlefront itself.
Eight Antidote sat up straight, and paid attention. This conversation was one he’d have to bring back to Her Brilliance the Emperor. Even little spies have secrets, he thought to himself, and was surprised by the degree of his own satisfaction at the idea.
The Ministry of War didn’t like Mahit Dzmare, it turned out. Or at least—some of them didn’t. She was a barbarian, that was just true, and Second Undersecretary Seven Aster (who was new—as new as Minister Three Azimuth, as new as the Emperor Herself) mostly seemed to dislike her because she was a barbarian and was out on a battlefront unsupervised, while possibly having diplomatic authority. That didn’t seem to be Dzmare’s fault, though. She couldn’t help being a barbarian, or that the Information envoy had brought her along—unless she’d somehow made the envoy take her?
The last Ambassador from Lsel Station, Yskandr Aghavn, had seemed like the sort of person who made people do things they never expected. Eight Antidote hadn’t known him, except for knowing the shape of his face and how much his ancestor-the-Emperor had enjoyed his companionship. Aghavn either hadn’t liked kids that much or had better things to do than talk to one. But he’d been in the palace all the time. He’d been friends with everyone. Until he’d died.
Maybe all Lsel Ambassadors were like that.
Eight Antidote was still considering whether being good at making people act in ways they usually wouldn’t would be helpful or unhelpful on a battlefront when Eleven Laurel said, “Minister, my chief concern with Dzmare has nothing to do with her barbarian origins—it is to do with her effects on situations around her. Her destabilizing effects.”
“Go on,” said Minister Three Azimuth. “As you keep reminding me, Undersecretary, you were here when Dzmare was involved with the unfortunate circumstances surrounding our Emperor’s ascension to the throne, and I was not. Is there something specific about her activities then that you think is indicative?”
“You were very busy on Nakhar, I’m sure you didn’t have time to notice these small things,” said Eleven Laurel, which seemed to Eight Antidote like an innocuous statement that really didn’t deserve Three Azimuth’s quick displeased expression. She had been on Nakhar, and military governors were busy by nature, almost as busy as emperors. “Dzmare—and the forces that she either allied herself with or who found her useful—ignores all protocols. She ignores all history—she, like Aghavn before her, just slides blithely in and does what she believes is necessary, and if the institutions of our Empire are disregarded, our processes dissolved or lost—what is it to her?”
Three Azimuth’s face was very still. “My dear Undersecretary,” she said, “I assume you are talking about the early retirement of my predecessor Nine Propulsion.”
Eight Antidote was suddenly aware of how much older Eleven Laurel was than Three Azimuth. He wondered how many Ministers of War he’d served, and if the number was big enough to keep him from even being concerned when the current Minister … implied he wasn’t loyal to her? Was that what was being said here? He felt like he was watching a conversation that had been going on for a long time, long before this meeting.
Eleven Laurel exhaled on a resigned sigh, all of the deep wrinkles in his face settling deeper. “Minister, it is not Nine Propulsion who concerns me—I hope she enjoys her retirement, of course, but she isn’t Minister now, is she?—it is how much our Emperor trusts us here in War, now that she is gone and the yaotlek One Lightning has been sent off in disgrace. And how much Her Brilliance trusts creatures like Dzmare, or Information envoys, or anyone but her Fleet, on Fleet business. That’s all, Minister.”
“That’s never all,” Three Azimuth said, and Eight Antidote, trying to think through what Eleven Laurel had just said—did Nineteen Adze really not trust War? while War was defending all Teixcalaan from incredibly dangerous aliens?—practiced keeping his face as still as he could, as serene as a grown-up, calm as someone who wasn’t trying to put all these pieces together.
The Emperor had sent him to spy on War, though. Hadn’t she. Maybe that meant Eleven Laurel was right. He didn’t know how he felt about that. Didn’t know at all, except that part of how he felt was scared.
The message they came up with was eleven seconds long, and made up of four sounds spliced from the intercepted recording, repeated twice over. As far as Mahit could understand, and based on the best of her ability to communicate in sound waves that made her nauseated, it said something like approach-danger—contact-initiated—hurrah-we-win, in sequence, and then—using their newfound unpleasant knowledge about how the alien noises increased in potency when they were layered on top of each other—played contact-initiated from two opposite directions at once, and then added hurrah-we-win on top of that. Then it repeated again from the start. She wasn’t sure that what she and Three Seagrass were saying was come talk to us in person, it’ll work out great, but she also wasn’t not sure, and that was—well, it was the best they were going to do with this limited data set. Perhaps the message would get them more noises to work with, even if it didn’t get them a live alien negotiator.
They’d finished it, and the instant it was done, all of the fragile peace between them shattered like a glass dropped on the floor. Three Seagrass was sullen and silent and uncomprehending, and Mahit was exhausted. She had never wanted to have that fight—
She hated when he sounded like he knew everything, like twenty years of extra experience and sleeping with the Emperor of all Teixcalaan—both current and former versions thereof—made him an expert on how she felt. But then, he was inside her endocrine system. He knew how she felt, because he felt it the same—and they were getting closer all the time. More integrated.
Her hands hurt, that sparkling ulnar nerve pain. Her head hurt, too, like she’d been trying not to cry for a long time.
I want her to see how she hurts me, she said, in the privacy of her own mind, while Three Seagrass put their message on a fresh infofiche stick and sealed it with her wax sealing kit, the flame-orange wax the same color as her perfect, infuriating uniform. I want her to—notice, when she does, without being told.
A slide, sense-memory and longing, the strange mirrored room of their shared mind reflecting a shard of time: the shape of Nineteen Adze’s shoulder blades, delineated in the palest light of early morning in Palace-East. How Yskandr had felt a terrifying, sweet tenderness—felt it on some morning not too long before Nineteen Adze had let him, with her full knowledge and acquiescence, be murdered. Let him asphyxiate under the watchful eyes of Ten Pearl, Minister of Science. And yet the sense-memory remained, even through death and botched imago-surgery. Mahit looked at Three Seagrass and felt an echo of that tenderness, an echo of that betrayal.
She’s not going to kill me to save her Emperor from corruption, she thought, pointedly.
Yskandr murmured.
You are in my place.
“I’m going to present this to the yaotlek,” Three Seagrass said, light and chilly, and tucked the infofiche stick into the inner jacket pocket of her uniform. “I’ll make sure to point out that it’s more than half your work. Thank you.”
As if they’d never been anything but brief colleagues working on a difficult problem. Mahit felt as if she had broken the world, and hated herself for feeling that way—Three Seagrass, asekreta and patrician first-class, Third Undersecretary to the Minister for Information, special envoy to the Fleet … she wasn’t the world. Mahit had done fine without her on Lsel, had missed her only as much as she’d missed Teixcalaan, which was enormously and with aching frustration.
The right order of things, Mahit whispered back, which was just another shading of pronunciation. That was what felt broken. How she had wanted the world to be.
“I assume,” she found herself saying, “that if it works and they do respond, you’ll let me know.”
Three Seagrass looked at her, a glancing, miserable expression, and dropped her eyes again. “Of course,” she said, too fast. “And I’ll— When they respond, I want you to hear it.”
It almost sounded like I want you to help me. It would have been better, Mahit thought, if she’d actually said that. But Mahit hadn’t particularly left her any room to do so, had she. She’d said, When you know why I had to come with you, then we can talk. And she hadn’t meant, When you figure out the political situation on Lsel Station, she’d meant—
She’d meant, When you understand that when the Empire commands, I can’t say no. She’d meant, When you understand that there’s no room for me to mean yes, even if I want to. She’d meant, You don’t understand that there’s no such thing as being free. Free to choose, or free otherwise.
So all she said out loud was, “Good. Until then, Three Seagrass.”
Three Seagrass didn’t reply. She slipped out the door of the communications workroom like she couldn’t wait to be gone, and left Mahit alone to try to do something about the remains of the vomit and find her way back to the quarters they were supposed to share. All those corridors between her and that limited safety, and her here without the benefit of a uniformed Teixcalaanli liaison to open all the doors, dispatch all the guardians. She’d crippled herself, on this Fleet flagship, farther away from anything she could have ever called home than she’d ever been, for the sake of—what, exactly? For wanting an understanding that she—or at least the part of her that was Yskandr, and it was hard to tell the difference between them now, about this—wasn’t even sure Three Seagrass was capable of comprehending, let alone having?
What was the point of this?
Mahit had thought she’d known, but now she wasn’t sure.
The adjutant ikantlos-prime Twenty Cicada, Three Seagrass discovered, was ubiquitous. She hadn’t gone much farther into the deep corridors of Weight for the Wheel—aiming, by cloudhook map, away from the audio processing room and toward the general area of the bridge in hopes of encountering either the yaotlek or someone who knew where to fetch her from—when he simply materialized out of a three-way passage nexus, like the ship itself had manifested him.
There’s never been a ship AI that took human form, Three Seagrass reminded herself. That’s a holodrama plot. And besides, he’s touched physical objects where I could see him do it. He is definitely a real person. Nevertheless she felt sufficiently—oh, sufficiently a lot of things, but mostly exhausted and unhappy and brittle-bright, ready to snap—that being surprised by Twenty Cicada was downright spooky. Then she remembered that Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise had called him Swarm, which was a fascinatingly nasty nickname for someone who had a fascinatingly untoward name: an insect for his noun signifier. Swarm, though …
“You’re everywhere at once,” she said to him. “Aren’t you.”
The light in the corridors of Weight for the Wheel was directionless; it made Twenty Cicada’s shaved head gleam, olive-gold like patina on old coins. He seemed to consider this statement, tilting his head ever so slightly, like he was calculating a vector of attack. Three Seagrass was going to have to look him up when she had access to the Information network again; she wanted to know everything about his military record. Had he flown Shards? Been in hand-to-hand combat? Or had he always been a logistics and operations officer, arranging the movement of ships and supply lines across jumpgates under the peculiar spiritual guidance of his balance-obsessed religion?
“I’m where I should be,” he said.
“I have the message we prepared for the yaotlek to broadcast,” Three Seagrass told him, trying not to wince over the we; she needed to not think about Mahit right now. She’d been doing so well! Not thinking about her. She wasn’t going to start now. She needed to pay attention to what was happening right in front of her. “Is she on the bridge?”
Twenty Cicada made a gesture with one hand that could mean certainly and could mean I assume, if you like. It showed off the edges of his homeostat-cult tattoos, slipping out from the cuffs of his uniform in pale green fractal shapes. He was frustratingly difficult to read; too strange and too exactly-Teixcalaanli-soldier at the same time.
“Walk with me,” he said, instead of giving her a proper answer, and Three Seagrass decided that she would.
They did not turn toward the bridge. Three Seagrass dismissed her cloudhook’s navigational function with a blink; it kept sending her small alerts at the corner of her vision that she really ought to have turned left, and now it had to recalculate her route, and she could do without that sort of petty annoyance. She set it to record her movements and build a new area map instead—as she had not done on Lsel Station, and what did it mean that she was willing to conduct surveillance mapping of one of the Empire’s flagships and not a foreign sovereign state?
It says, she thought, deliberately, like pressing on a bruise, that you trusted Mahit Dzmare too much.
Twenty Cicada led her down two levels of the ship. He was not talkative, exactly. He asked questions, but not like an interrogator or an asekreta would. She couldn’t put her hands on his goals. They were slippery.
“Have you seen what these aliens do to human beings?” he asked. “I believe Nine Hibiscus sent along some of the holorecordings of what we found on Peloa-2.”
She had. Three Seagrass had glanced through them and felt nothing: Oh, look, another war. Someone else’s atrocity, far away on the edges of the known world. But she was very close to those edges now. “They like evisceration,” she told Twenty Cicada. “An interesting preference for mass casualties. Messy.”
“Wasteful,” he said, correcting her.
“What, because it takes too much effort to pull out the entrails on every single human being? You saw the claws the dead one has; it can’t be that inefficient for them to do.”
Twenty Cicada said, “The dead creature was a scavenger, or its presentient ancestors were—that mouth, the eyes on the front of the skull—and yet it left all those guts to rot. That’s wasteful.”
They’d come to a heavily sealed door, airtight enough that Three Seagrass wondered for a moment if she was about to be unceremoniously spaced through an airlock. Twenty Cicada stepped close to it, let it read his cloudhook: the clear glass over one eye flowing full of tiny grey-gold glyphs, like a storm boiling up over the City. It opened—and behind it was heat, and warm wet air, and the scents of soil and growth and flowers. A hydroponics deck. Three Seagrass followed him inside with a gratitude she had not expected to feel: her skin drank the moisture, starved for nonprocessed air. She wanted to luxuriate in it. A place on this ship that felt like—like Teixcalaan, like the Jewel of the World. A garden heart. She took deep breaths. The drag of humidity in her lungs was delicious.
Twenty Cicada had much the same expression as she did, she suspected: a blissed relaxation of all the tension in his face. This was a place he loved—of course he did, how could he not—which meant, of course, that he’d brought her here to use it as a setting, a frame for the argument he was making to her. A place powerful enough to be worth a detour, rather than bringing her and her work straight to the yaotlek who had ordered it done. This argument must be deeply important to him.
She’d listen. She’d rather have the second-in-command of a Fleet flagship try to manipulate her with humidity and the amazing scent of rice, sorrel, and lotuses growing in hydroponic pools than think about Mahit Dzmare.
“How many people do you feed?” she asked, following Twenty Cicada to the edge of one of the terraced pools. The effect was like standing on a balcony: they leaned on the fine-wrought metal railings of a catwalk, looking down into green.
“The capacity is five thousand,” Twenty Cicada said. “On emergency rations, for three months. With Weight for the Wheel’s usual crew numbers, we’re entirely self-sufficient, at better than subsistence levels.”
“And enough flowers for every deck,” Three Seagrass added. “All those lotuses…”
“As I said: better than subsistence.”
Beauty, then, was part of his definition of self-sufficiency. Three Seagrass had always thought that homeostat-cultists weren’t supposed to like anything overly pretty or overly ugly, but this hydroponics deck was—gorgeous. And so were all the lotuses. Every color: blue and silver-pale, white and the sort of pink that looked like sunrises.
“What are the casualty rates looking like?” she inquired, after a moment of deliberate quiet, the both of them breathing the thick air like nectar. “Aside from Peloa-2. Our casualty rates.”
“Don’t you know?” He lifted the place where his eyebrow would be, under the cloudhook, as if to indicate her Information-issue dress.
“We’re not omniscient by virtue of being in the Information Ministry, ikantlos-prime. And even if we were, there’s a difference between reading reports and hearing from a soldier on the front.”
Twenty Cicada made a small, considering noise: a click of the tongue against the teeth. “Omniscience is somewhat crippled by lack of omnipresence, I’d agree. And—too high. That’s what our casualty rate is. Too high, for a Fleet that is waiting to decide what to do next, who has not yet found the source of these enemies, despite our best scouting efforts throughout the sector.”
We don’t know where they grow, Three Seagrass thought. We don’t even know what the garden heart of their home would look like, except that it wouldn’t look like this deck, this place that Twenty Cicada values. “You’d prefer action,” she said.
“My preferences are hardly the point, Envoy. I merely—dislike waste, and wasteful things.”
And you think these aliens are—offensive. Your word for “offensive” is “wasteful.” Three Seagrass wrapped her fingers around the railing, felt the slick dampness of the metal. “What would you ask them? If they do answer our message and come to talk to us.”
This time, the noise he made was not so considering. “What makes you think they’re going to want to talk? No matter how clever you and the Lsel Ambassador have been in your sound-splicing—oh, bloody stars, one of them’s gotten into the rice again.”
“One of what?” Three Seagrass started, but Twenty Cicada had already swung his hips up over the railing and landed with a splash, water up above his knees and soaking the pants of his uniform. He waded with purpose and annoyance—paused, entirely still, like an ibis waiting to spear a fish with its beak—and ducked to grab a small dark shape from amongst the stalks of rice.
It squalled. He held it out at arm’s length, by the scruff of its neck, and brought it back to her as if it was an unpleasant trophy. “Hold this,” he said, and shoved it through the bars of the railing for Three Seagrass to grab.
“It’s a cat,” she said. It was. A black kitten, by the size of it, with enormous yellow eyes and the usual needle-claws that kittens had, all of which were now sunk into Three Seagrass’s jacket sleeve, and her skin underneath. It was also dripping and damp, and unlike any other cat she had heard of, didn’t seem perturbed by the water.
Twenty Cicada clambered back onto the dry side of the balcony. “It was a cat,” he said darkly, “several thousand years ago before it became an arboreal pest that lives in the mangrove swamps on Kauraan. An arboreal pest that has escaped into the air ducts of my ship because someone on the down-planet team thought they were cute and brought back a pregnant one.”
The kitten climbed onto Three Seagrass’s shoulder. It was very sharp. It also was much better at holding on to her than she remembered kittens being, the last time she’d been close to a kitten, in the sitting room of some patrician’s poetry salon back in the City. That kitten had been fluffy, pale, and uninterested in sitting on her shoulder. This one had very long phalanges, like the fingers of a human being, and a sort of thumb that was quite nearly opposable. “They’re in the air ducts,” she repeated, dumbfounded and delighted.
“They, like me, are everywhere,” said Twenty Cicada, and sighed so as not to laugh. “And they shouldn’t be in here. They’re not native to the hydroponic ecosystem and their waste products have too much ammonia. You can have that one.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?” Three Seagrass asked. “I have a report to give to the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus—I can’t keep a kitten.”
“It won’t stay with you long. Just take it out with you and leave it on a deck that isn’t this one. And don’t worry about Nine Hibiscus. I’ll give her your message.”
“Will you?” Three Seagrass asked, knowing that what she was asking was closer to ought I to trust you, now that you’ve shown me how little you think these enemies are worth talking to at all?
“Nine Hibiscus asked for it,” said her adjutant, as if this fact rendered the universe entirely simple. “So I’ll bring it to her. I always know where she is.”
He could have gone straight to Nineteen Adze right after he left the Ministry of War. There was no reason not to: it wouldn’t be suspicious. Eight Antidote lived in Palace-Earth, same as the Emperor did, and he went to see her all the time. And he did have—well, not actionable intelligence, like people talked about in spywork holodramas, but useful information of the kind that Her Brilliance had specifically asked for. He could have walked right in.
But it felt wrong. It felt like—oh, like being a tattletale, not a spy. Like being someone else’s ears, instead of his own person, making his own decisions. He would tell her about Ambassador Mahit Dzmare and Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, of course. And—maybe, probably—about Eleven Laurel’s concern that Her Brilliance didn’t trust the War Ministry. He’d even tell her today. But first—well. First he wanted to really understand, for himself, what he’d learned.
Which was why Eight Antidote had walked into the lobby of the Information Ministry, announced himself with all of his titles, and asked the nice asekreta trainee who was staffing the public information desk to find him someone who could spare a half hour to explain rapid communications through jumpgates to the future Emperor of all Teixcalaan.
“It’s for my education,” Eight Antidote had said, extremely cheerfully, and the trainee had actually stifled a conspiratorial giggle behind her hand. Yes, he thought. You’re helping the heir to the Empire with his homework. Keep thinking that.
He only had to wait a little while, and he kept himself amused by looking at the way the Information Ministry presented itself, so different from the Six Outreaching Palms: clear and clean, serenely white marble walls coupled with ever-present coral-colored accents, like the sleeves of their asekretim had bled into the architecture. Coral inlay on the floor, done in a carnelian-stone mosaic of an enormous chrysanthemum framed by smaller lotuses. Eternity, Eight Antidote remembered from some very long-ago tutoring session, when he’d been extremely small, hardly older than a baby. Everybody learned flowers first. Chrysanthemums are eternity, and lotuses are memory and rebirth, which is why the Information Ministry sigil has got both. They like to think that they know everything and always have and always will. Or at least that’s what Eleven Laurel would say.
He wasn’t sure what he’d say. Yet.
The person who showed up to talk to him was a round, broad-shouldered man with an open sort of face, the kind of face that seemed friendly even when it wasn’t. A good face for an Information Ministry employee.
“Your Excellency,” he said. “I understand you would like to discuss interstellar communication?”
Eight Antidote made himself look like his ancestor-the-Emperor, composed his mouth and eyes into that same knowing, interested, serene expression that had made Nineteen Adze flinch back from him in surprised recognition. He was getting good at it. It worked even on people who hadn’t known his ancestor so well; it was an adult expression, and people got nervous in a useful way when he made it with his kid’s face. “I would, very much,” he said. “If I’m not taking up your valuable time, asekreta—I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”
“One Cyclamen, Your Excellency,” said the asekreta, “and I have the honor of being the Second Sub-Secretary of the Epistolary Department of the Ministry of Information, which means I am the person who spends a great deal of time on the intricacies of interstellar communication through jumpgates—a process, Your Excellency, which is so very automated and regular that my time is absolutely most valuably spent on informing you about it. Would you like to come into a conference room?”
One Cyclamen was amazingly obsequious, and in such a way that Eight Antidote felt more flattered than annoyed. He wished he could learn that skill. “Yes please,” he said, and wondered what the camera-eyes of the City would think of him now: following an Information agent into a white-and-beige conference room. No holographic strategy tables here, no star-chart outlines of the universe. Only a holoprojector at one end of a regular sort of table, decorously turned down to a low flicker of light. The chairs were too big for him. His feet didn’t touch the floor, so he tucked them up under himself, sitting cross-legged. It was better than letting them swing. He felt steadier.
“How does a message get to the Jewel of the World from thousands of light-years away in just a few hours, Second Sub-Secretary?” he asked, in tones of high politeness, as if he was speaking to one of his tutors. “And can it go faster than usual? Or slower?”
“In the most technical sense, a message cannot go faster or slower than it can be routed through a jumpgate, Your Excellency,” said One Cyclamen. “The jumpgates are our sticking point. Forgive me—you do understand how they work, do you not?”
“If I get confused, I’ll tell you,” Eight Antidote said, and folded his hands together to make a cup for his chin, looking up at One Cyclamen intently. Everyone knew how jumpgates worked. They were like narrow mountain passes: the only way to get from one side to the other was through the aperture. Except instead of two pieces of land with a mountain range dividing them, one side was a sector of space and the other side was a completely different one, which could be anywhere. There wasn’t a connection between the sectors, except for through the gates, and some sectors of Teixcalaanli space, well … no one knew exactly where they were in terms of vectors away from the Jewel of the World. But you could get there, just as easily as you could take the subway out to Plaza Central Nine, if you knew which jumpgate to go through.
And if you didn’t, you’d have to crawl at sublight speeds across the galaxy, hoping to run into where you meant to go before you died. Jumpgates were why the Empire worked.
One Cyclamen was talking, and had been talking for several seconds, and Eight Antidote wasn’t sure if it was good or bad that he had apparently learned to look like he was paying attention when he wasn’t.
“… electronic communication is essentially transmittable at faster-than-light speeds—practically instantaneous!—via our signaling stations within a sector, and has been for hundreds of years. But only physical objects can go through a jumpgate, and only nonphysical ones can be transmitted via the imperial signal service. You see the problem?”
“Someone has to carry the message on an infofiche stick through every jumpgate between its origin and destination.”
“Yes! Which is why I have a job, Your Excellency, incidentally. Or—why my job exists. The Epistolary Department staffs the jumpgate postal services. We’re the only Information workers who fly spaceships—though they’re quite short little flights, back and forth through the jumpgate with the mail, and most of them are automated these days.”
Eight Antidote nodded. “Unpiloted ships.”
“It’s a very simple routing algorithm,” One Cyclamen said, shrugging. “No reason to use a person unless it is a rush job or the jumpgate is very tricky or heavily trafficked.”
A rush job, like Sixteen Moonrise’s. Had Information passed the very message that was so anti-Information? Did Information read the physical messages, or did they merely arrive, a pile of infofiche sticks, like the worst possible heap of unanswered palace mail? Eight Antidote imagined a sack of the things, or a series of crates, and was a bit horrified at the idea of so many messages all at once.
He didn’t ask how a rush job got scheduled. That would be too—obvious. And he was being a spy today. (It was possible that once a person started being a spy, they were going to be one forever, which was definitely something he would need to think about later.) What he asked instead was, “Does Information process everyone’s mail? From all of Teixcalaan?”
One Cyclamen paused. There was a faint line between his eyebrows, a tension line, like he’d just remembered that he was talking to an imperial heir and not any crèche-kid doing an enrichment project. “We don’t process,” he said. “We transmit. Unless ordered to do otherwise by Her Brilliance the Emperor, of course. But I’m sure that’s not what you meant, Your Excellency—perhaps you wanted to know if there were other mail carriers?”
“Are there?” said Eight Antidote, and waited. The waiting was another adult trick. A Nineteen Adze trick. She did it to him all the time: made him answer questions while not knowing why she’d asked them, and learned what he was thinking by how he answered, whether he wanted her to or not.
“Aside from the Fleet, which carries its own orders on its own ships … no official ones,” One Cyclamen said, “but any vessel moving through a jumpgate can carry a message with them, of course. And then there are sector-wide mail services, a great number, some governmental and some private businesses—would you like a list? I can have one prepared and sent to your cloudhook.”
He wasn’t about to turn down information, even if it wasn’t information he currently could think of any actual use for. Except for that moment where One Cyclamen had said the Fleet carries its own orders on its own ships. Had Sixteen Moonrise’s message come in that way? “I’d like that,” he said. “Thank you.” Then he paused, as if he was suddenly remembering another question, and leaned forward on his elbows, smiling wide-eyed—I’m eleven, I’m small, I’m harmless, I’m doing my homework—and asked one more question. “Has anyone ever—delayed jumpgate mail? Or captured it, or changed it, or sent it through other jumpgates than the ones it was routed to?”
One Cyclamen laughed. Eight Antidote thought it was the kind of laughter that was meant to cover being uncomfortable. “Like pirates, Your Excellency? Mail pirates?”
Eight Antidote shrugged. Maybe. Go on. Tell me how this process can be fooled, or accelerated, or stopped.
“… Historically, there have been a few incidents, of course, but we try very hard to prevent them. And truly significant messages go through on Fleet ships, of course, just like the Fleet’s own orders; diplomatic communiqués, imperial proclamations.”
There. “Because Fleet ships have right of way through jumpgates.”
“Quite so, Your Excellency. If something needs to move fastest, it will be on a Fleet ship. But do be assured that the Information Ministry doesn’t lose your letters.”
“I would never think that,” Eight Antidote said, cheerfully. That tension line in One Cyclamen’s forehead deepened. “Thank you so very much for spending time with me and answering all these questions!”
“Of course. Giving out information—well, that’s what we’re for, here in Information.”
Yes, Eight Antidote thought. That’s what you’re for. And I wonder how many of your jumpgate postal offices Sixteen Moonrise skipped right over when she sent that message to the Minister of War. I bet it was most of them. And Eleven Laurel doesn’t mind that kind of circumventing protocols. Not when what’s being circumvented is the Information Ministry.
If she stayed on this ship for much longer, Mahit thought grimly as she turned one last corner and finally arrived at the sealed door of the quarters she and Three Seagrass had been assigned, she was going to have to find some way to requisition a cloudhook. For navigation’s sake, if nothing else. Weight for the Wheel was a tenth of the size of Lsel Station, and many thousands of times smaller than the Jewel of the World, and yet here neither her nor Yskandr’s knowledge of place sufficed for not having to ask, humiliatingly, for directions. More than once. At least she’d been headed away from the more restricted decks, instead of into the ship’s heart: no one asked her why a barbarian was alone, so far away from barbarian territory.
On the touchpad-lock next to the door was a piece of sticky disposable plastifilm, which read your password is VOID: the Teixcalaanli glyph shaped like a giant hollow circle. For a moment, Mahit wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do if her door-unlocking code was already expired—and then she realized it was a preset. An easy glyph to draw, to unlock your room before you could change the code. She unpeeled the plastifilm and drew a VOID on the touchpad, and the door hissed open.
Silhouetted against the light from the room’s single lamp was a tall, narrow figure. It took a step toward Mahit—
She had dropped to her knees on the floor before she quite knew why, a flare of whiteout-panic—and then she was rolling, rolling toward the figure, getting her feet under her and throwing herself at the figure’s legs in a headlong tackling leap. They collided. Her shoulder spasmed like she’d hit it with a hammer—or a knee—and the person she’d hit fell heavily over her, grunting, their palms striking the floor in a slap. Where’s the needle? Mahit thought. I have to get away from the needle, it’s poison—
Whoever it was rolled down her shoulder and somersaulted to their feet, leaving Mahit in a heap on the floor, scrambling away, waiting for the sharp prick and the end of everything—
You’re not dying. How many times had she said that to him, in the middle of the night, when he’d woken them up from dreams of asphyxiation?
“—You do not take surprises well,” said the intruder, and Mahit shoved her hair out of her eyes and managed to look up, focusing.
She had just attacked Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise and come out rather the worse for it. The Fleet Captain looked entirely unperturbed, not a hair out of place. Mahit felt her face go dark with an embarrassed flush.
Just because I was ambushed in my apartment once shouldn’t mean I react like this every time I’m surprised by someone in a room, she thought miserably, and got nothing but Yskandr’s rueful and sympathetic acknowledgment in return.
“… No,” she managed. “I don’t. My apologies, I didn’t intend to—assault you. Fleet Captain.”
A slim pale gold hand appeared in front of her, offering, and Mahit took it. Sixteen Moonrise pulled her up to her feet. “It’s quite understandable,” she said. “I didn’t know you’d been in combat, Ambassador Dzmare. I ought to have left a note on the door. But I did want to talk to you alone.”
“I haven’t been in combat,” Mahit said. “I—oh, for fuck’s sake, I failed the physical combat aptitudes by eighteen points, I’ve never been near combat.”
“One hardly needs good aptitudes to have ended up in situations where combat happens,” Sixteen Moonrise said, dismissively, “and regardless, you have good instincts. Shall we sit down?”
Mahit’s mouth tasted of adrenaline, bitter and metallic, and she was shaking very slightly; there seemed to be no plausible way, barring another attempt at bodily force, to remove the Fleet Captain from the room. And the first attempt had been bad enough. She glanced around, looking for something to sit on, or at, and found that there was a small folding desk which had already been pulled down from the wall, and two stools, one on either side of it. Sixteen Moonrise must have been here for a while. She’d had time to prepare. Probably she hadn’t expected Mahit to get horribly lost in the ship and had gotten bored enough to investigate the furniture—Mahit was being hysterical, even in the privacy of her own mind. What limited privacy her own mind had, anyway.
She sat. Gestured at the other stool. Welcome to my office, such as it is. And folded her hands tightly together in her lap, willing them to stop shaking.
“I imagine you’re wondering why I’ve been waiting for you,” said Sixteen Moonrise, taking the opposite seat. Mahit nodded, a rueful bit of acquiescence. Sixteen Moonrise folded her hands—on the table, where Mahit could see them. Mirroring. Establishing rapport.
I can’t handle an interrogation, she thought, miserably, not now.
Mahit took a breath. Settled back on her pelvis, straightened her spine. She was of a height with Sixteen Moonrise, at least when they were both sitting down. “From your reaction to Special Envoy Three Seagrass and me,” she said, “I would expect nearly anything except you waiting for me, Fleet Captain. What was it you said—the spook and her pet?”
“I did say that,” Sixteen Moonrise agreed, easily enough, and didn’t apologize for it. “She is a spook, and you are—or you certainly were brought here as—her pet. I imagine she told you all sorts of things about how your presence could ensure a diplomatic voice for the Stations in whatever negotiations she ends up conducting with our enemies, yes?”
Not quite, Mahit thought. That would have been transparent. This is Three Seagrass. Transparency is beyond her. Beyond us both. She lifted one hand from her lap, tilted it back and forth—maybe yes, maybe no, go on.
“Mm,” Sixteen Moonrise said, an evaluating noise. “Why are you here, Ambassador Dzmare? I imagined you’d want to be shut of Teixcalaan, after being involved in that mess in the capital three months ago.”
“I like challenges,” Mahit said. “I’m a translator. Who wouldn’t want to be involved in a first-contact scenario?”
“Nearly everyone who has ever been near an alien,” said Sixteen Moonrise. “I don’t believe you, Ambassador Dzmare. Glory-seeking naïveté does not match up with the woman who started this war for us. Your broadcast before Six Direction’s death was masterful, by the way. You horrified me, and I don’t horrify easily.”
“With all due respect, Fleet Captain, it was the aliens who started this war. I alerted the Emperor to it. I considered it an act of good citizenship.”
“You’re a barbarian.”
“Barbarians,” Mahit said, imagining Three Seagrass’s face the whole time she was saying it, “are human beings; good citizenship in the face of existential threats extends beyond the boundaries of sovereignty. Or at least that is what we barbarians are taught, on my Station.”
It wasn’t. Mahit had never been taught anything of the kind. But it made Sixteen Moonrise’s electrum-colored eyes widen, not a smile and not a grimace—but a veritable hit. And it was a useful lie.
Sixteen Moonrise exhaled through her nose, as if in exasperation. “Let me put it this way, Ambassador,” she said. “I’ve watched your work on the newsfeeds during One Lightning’s idiotic little usurpation attempt, which the Fleet really could have done without, by the way. You’re too smart and too much of a politician to be here only as the envoy’s pet—and you’re already having difficulties with the envoy, aren’t you? I notice she isn’t here, and you aren’t on the bridge with the yaotlek. Not to mention that your precious Stations are right next to this sector, which is full of aliens with ship-dissolving spit. One jumpgate away. That’s not very far at all.”
“I’ve seen the holographs of Peloa-2,” Mahit said. “Is it so strange that I’d want to be part of stopping what is happening here? And yes, stopping it from reaching my home as well?” She wasn’t going to talk about Three Seagrass. It was bad enough that Sixteen Moonrise, who was clearly no friend to either of them, had noticed that there was something wrong between them, and noticed from only the evidence of an absence. She wasn’t going to confirm it. Not now, not ever.
“It’s not strange,” said Sixteen Moonrise, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “It’s merely—interesting. You show up in the most fascinating places, Ambassador. And you seem to be quite convinced by the envoy’s argument that talking to our enemies will deliver the halt to hostilities you so reasonably desire.”
“You think otherwise?”
“Oh, I reserve judgment until an attempt is made,” said Sixteen Moonrise, and for a moment Mahit could see how she would be as a commander: the sort of person who evaluated, and evaluated, and then struck, a flurry of orders and decisions, no hesitation. “But I have lost twenty-seven soldiers in the past week, and I am beginning to be sick of funeral hymns. I have what I would consider perfectly reasonable doubts about the envoy’s efficacy. And yours—at first-contact negotiations, at least. You may be a very skillful barbarian, Mahit Dzmare, and you may have wrapped the Information Ministry around your finger like a satellite caught in orbit, but you’re no Emperor Two Sunspot. And these things aren’t the Ebrekti.”
Mahit found it within herself to laugh—it wasn’t her laugh, exactly, it was some sort of self-mocking amusement that belonged mostly to the younger, half-dissolved Yskandr, his flashfire arrogance and bravado. “They’re worse than the Ebrekti, based merely on their noises—did you know those sounds function as a self-reinforcing amplifying sine wave when played from different directions, Fleet Captain? I thought not. And I am certainly much worse than Her Brilliance Two Sunspot. As a negotiator, and as a person with weight on the world. I would never compare myself to an Emperor of all Teixcalaan.”
It felt good to say. To be vicious in her own despair, to display the wound of her desire in full: No, I will not be Teixcalaanli, I am incapable, I know, let me hold the bleeding lips of this injury open for you to see the raw hurt inside. To say, I would never compare myself to one of you, with full consciousness that she would, and had, and could not stop.
Like a reflection, a shard of memory, hers or Yskandr’s, too blurred to discern: Nineteen Adze saying, It’s a shame you’re not one of us—you argue like a poet. Or had that been Three Seagrass? She couldn’t tell. She wished she could. It might mean something, if she could remember if that had been her or Yskandr, the now-Emperor or the asekreta, wishing for her—for them—to be otherwise than they were.
“Ah,” said Sixteen Moonrise. “And yet you have willingly tried to bring them to a negotiating table.”
“I use,” Mahit said, feeling very tired and very cold, “what skills I have available.”
“As does your Station, I see. What skills, and what people.”
And she doesn’t even know for certain that I’m a spy, Mahit thought. Here for herself, and her Station, surely—and here also for Darj Tarats, in payment for how he would spare her from Heritage’s scans and knives. Her eyes were only her own until she made her first report back to him. And once she did that—once she did that, she might have to choose whether or not she would be a saboteur as well as a spy, to keep being spared.
“Would you prefer we sent fighter ships rather than ambassadors?” Mahit asked the Fleet Captain. “We have a few. Not nearly so many as Teixcalaan, of course.”
Sixteen Moonrise looked at her, considering and expressionless. “There may be a time, Ambassador, that we need every ship we can find,” she said. “At that time, I’ll remind you of what you’ve said to me. And until then—well. Good luck, with the envoy and the aliens and the yaotlek. I assume Stationers believe in luck?”
“When we need it,” Mahit said.
“You’ll need it,” said Sixteen Moonrise, and left Mahit at the worktable alone, vanishing into the hallway as if she had never been lying in wait for her at all.
Mahit put her face in her numb hands, numb elbows on the table, and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes. The last thing she wanted to do was cry. She didn’t have time to cry. She had to think about why Sixteen Moonrise—a Fleet Captain, out of place, drifting through a flagship not her own, sneaking into the rooms of Information agents and barbarian ambassadors—would have wanted to challenge her, test her motivations, warn her—if it was a warning and not a threat—of how little the Fleet wanted to talk to these aliens. How much they wanted to kill them instead. How inconsequential the desires of Information agents, barbarian ambassadors, and even yaotlekim might be against the long weight of habitual violence that was the Teixcalaanli legions.
When she exhaled, hard through her nose, trying to expel all the spent air from her lungs and start again, her jacket rustled—like it was full of paper
(like the jacket she’d worn in the City had been full of ciphertext instructions for how best to start this war and prevent Lsel from being devoured by Teixcalaan)
(it had crackled the same way)
—and she reached into her inner jacket pocket and came up with The Perilous Frontier! A graphic story exactly the size of a political pamphlet. She’d forgotten she’d bought it.
Aknel Amnardbat was very distracting, Mahit told Yskandr. At the time. And then, finding herself hoping for a distraction that was neither tears nor Aknel Amnardbat, she opened it and began to read.
Graphic stories had never been of particular interest to Mahit as a literary form—they’d always seemed unnecessarily hybrid, not quite holoproj, not quite still art, not quite prose. And as a child—all right, as an adult as well, and continuously—most of what she read when she had time to read for pleasure was in Teixcalaanli. The Perilous Frontier! was in Stationer. Drawn by Stationers, and written by Stationers, for Stationers. How old had the kid at the kiosk been who sold it to her? Seventeen at most. Mahit hadn’t been any good at being seventeen. She wouldn’t have known what to do with an artist collective writing graphic stories if one had been tossed at her head, when she was seventeen.
Reading it—Volume One of an as-yet-incomplete cycle of at least ten—felt more like an anthropological exercise than anything else. The protagonist, Captain Cameron, a pilot from a long imago-line of pilots, was on the first spread in the midst of getting into nasty trouble trying to fly through an asteroid cluster, apparently aiming for an abandoned mine and some other character trapped in it. Mahit didn’t know if she was supposed to know what was going on, or if there was some sort of Volume Zero she’d missed. Yskandr was no help: graphic stories hadn’t been youth-culture fashion when he’d been young at all. Mahit found herself grasping for the background, the referentiality and citation, that she’d expect in a Teixcalaanli text, even an unfamiliar one—and didn’t find it.
What happened next was Captain Cameron dodged an ice-comet, flew in close to an asteroid large enough to have an atmosphere of its own, practically a planetoid, and searched grimly through the snow that atmosphere was producing for a person named Esharakir Lrut and the secret archive of ancient Lsel documents that she had apparently hidden in said abandoned mine. Lrut was drawn thin, attenuated, an exaggerated version of how someone might look if they were much younger than their imago, and also had eaten nothing but protein cakes for months. It was impressive art. Mahit couldn’t imagine sitting still for long enough to draw all of this, in ink, by hand—and make it look so evocative, without any colors at all.
Esharakir Lrut had been hiding documents to preserve them in their original forms. Cameron was there to rescue her, or the documents—and the majority of the middle of the story was Lrut arguing that yes, she would come back, and with the documents, but that Cameron had to promise to support her versions rather than the official, Heritage-sanctioned ones, when they got back to the Station. Otherwise she wasn’t going anywhere at all. She’d stay in a mine, on an asteroid, in the snow, and wait for someone else to agree to defend the memory of Lsel.
Wrote and drew, Mahit thought. I guess there’s a reason it’s the same size as a political pamphlet, after all.
I haven’t been home long enough to know why artist kids would be angry—
And even if Mahit had, she wouldn’t have ever been friends with these people, who made art out of ink and paper, about Stationer memory, Stationer art, Stationer politics. She’d always spent her time with the other Teixcalaan-obsessed students. Writing poetry. Imagining the City. The Perilous Frontier! was as alien to her as—oh, not quite as alien as the beings that had made the sickening noises she and Three Seagrass had been trying to work with, but almost. Or felt that way, at least.
Mahit winced, and shut the book. I don’t want to talk about Three Seagrass.
Mahit pictured Three Seagrass reading The Perilous Frontier! all despite herself, and wished her imago was less right about what she thought, and how it made her feel. But he felt it too. More and more all the time.
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