Ancillary Justice

17

Luckily for me, I had come out of gate-space on the fringes of a backwater, non-Radchaai system, a collection of habitats and mining stations inhabited by heavily modified people—not human, by Radchaai standards, people with six or eight limbs (and no guarantee any of them would be legs), vacuum-adapted skin and lungs, brains so meshed and crosshatched with implants and wiring it was an open question whether they were anything but conscious machines with a biological interface.

It was a mystery to them that anyone would choose the sort of primitive form most humans I knew were born with. But they prized their isolation, and it was a dearly held tenet of their society that, with a few exceptions (most of which they would not actually admit to), one did not ask for anything a person did not volunteer. They viewed me with a combination of puzzlement and mild contempt, and treated me as though I were a child who had wandered into their midst and they might keep half an eye on me until my parents found me, but really I wasn’t their responsibility. If any of them guessed my origin—and surely they did, the shuttle alone was enough—they didn’t say so, and no one pressed me for answers, something they would have found appallingly rude. They were silent, clannish, self-contained, but they were also brusquely generous at unpredictable intervals. I would still be there, or dead, if not for that.

I spent six months trying to understand how to do anything—not just how to get my message to the Lord of the Radch, but how to walk and breathe and sleep and eat as myself. As a myself that was only a fragment of what I had been, with no conceivable future beyond eternally wishing for what was gone. Then one day a human ship arrived, and the captain was happy to take me on board in exchange for what little money I had left from scrapping the shuttle, which had been running up docking charges I couldn’t pay otherwise. I found out later that a four-meter, tentacled eel of a person had paid the balance of my fare without telling me, because, she had told the captain, I didn’t belong there and would be healthier elsewhere. Odd people, as I said, and I owe them a great deal, though they would be offended and distressed to think anyone owed them anything.

In the nineteen years since then, I had learned eleven languages and 713 songs. I had found ways to conceal what I was—even, I was fairly sure, from the Lord of the Radch herself. I had worked as a cook, a janitor, a pilot. I had settled on a plan of action. I had joined a religious order, and made a great deal of money. In all that time I only killed a dozen people.

By the time I woke the next morning, the impulse to tell Seivarden anything had passed, and she seemed to have forgotten her questions. Except one. “So where next?” She asked it casually, sitting on the bench by my bed, leaning against the wall, as though she were only idly curious about the answer.

When she heard, maybe she’d decide she liked it better on her own. “Omaugh Palace.”

She frowned, just slightly. “That a new one?”

“Not particularly.” It had been built seven hundred years ago. “But after Garsedd, yes.” My right ankle began to tingle and itch, a sure sign the corrective was finished. “You left Radchaai space unauthorized. And you sold your armor to do it.”

“Extraordinary circumstances,” she said, still leaning back. “I’ll appeal.”

“That’ll get you a delay, at any rate.” Any citizen who wanted to see the Lord of the Radch could apply to do so, though the farther one was from a provincial palace, the more complicated, expensive, and time-consuming the journey would be. Sometimes applications were turned down, when the distance was great and the cause was judged hopeless or frivolous—and the petitioner was unable to pay her own way. But Anaander Mianaai was the final appeal for nearly any matter, and this case was certainly not routine. And she would be right there on the station. “You’ll wait months for an audience.”

Seivarden gestured her lack of concern. “What are you going to do there?”

Try to kill Anaander Mianaai. But I couldn’t say that. “See the sights. Buy some souvenirs. Maybe try to meet the Lord of the Radch.”

She lifted an eyebrow. Then she looked at my pack. She knew about the gun, and of course she understood how dangerous it was. She still thought I was an agent of the Radch. “Undercover the whole way? And when you hand that”—she shrugged toward my pack—“over to the Lord of the Radch, then what?”

“I don’t know.” I closed my eyes. I could see no further than arriving at Omaugh Palace, had not even the remotest shadow of an idea of what to do after that, how I might get close enough to Anaander Mianaai to use the gun.

No. That wasn’t true. The beginning of a plan had this moment suggested itself to me, but it was horribly impractical, relying as it did on Seivarden’s discretion and support.

She had constructed her own idea of what I was doing and why I would return to the Radch playing a foreign tourist. Why I would report directly to Anaander Mianaai instead of a Special Missions officer. I could use that.

“I’m coming with you,” Seivarden said, and as though she had guessed my thoughts she added, “You can come to my appeal and speak on my behalf.”

I didn’t trust myself to answer. Pins and needles traveled up my right leg, started in my hands, arms, and shoulders, and my left leg. A slight ache began in my right hip. Something hadn’t healed quite right.

“It’s not as if I don’t already know what’s going on,” Seivarden said.

“So when you steal from me, breaking your legs won’t be enough. I’ll have to kill you.” My eyes still closed, I couldn’t see her reaction to that. She might well take it as a joke.

“I won’t,” she answered. “You’ll see.”

I spent several more days in Therrod recovering sufficiently that the doctor would approve my leaving. All that time, and afterward all the way up the ribbon, Seivarden was polite and deferential.

It worried me. I had stashed money and belongings at the top of the Nilt ribbon, and would have to retrieve them before we left. Everything was packaged, so I could do that without Seivarden seeing much more than a couple of boxes, but I had no illusions she wouldn’t try to open them first chance she got.

At least I had money again. And maybe that was the solution to the problem.

I took a room on the ribbon station, left Seivarden there with instructions to wait, and went to recover my possessions. When I returned she was sitting on the single bed—no linens or blankets, that was conventionally extra here—fidgeting. One knee bouncing, rubbing her upper arms with her bare hands—I had sold our heavy outer coats, and the gloves, at the foot of the ribbon. She stilled when I came in, and looked expectantly at me, but said nothing.

I tossed into her lap a bag that made a tumbling clicking sound as it landed.

Seivarden gave it one frowning look, and then turned her gaze to me, not moving to touch the bag or claim it in any way. “What’s this?”

“Ten thousand shen,” I said. It was the most commonly negotiable currency in this region, in easily transportable (and spent) chits. Ten thousand would buy a lot, here. It would buy passage to another system with enough left over to binge for several weeks.

“Is that a lot?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes widened, just slightly, and for half a second I saw calculation in her expression.

Time for me to be direct. “The room is paid up for the next ten days. After that—” I gestured at the bag on her lap. “That should last you a while. Longer if you’re truly serious about staying off kef.” But that look, when she’d realized she had access to money, made me fairly certain she wasn’t. Not really.

For six seconds Seivarden looked down at the bag in her lap. “No.” She picked the bag up gingerly, between her thumb and forefinger, as though it were a dead rat, and dropped it on the floor. “I’m coming with you.”

I didn’t answer, only looked at her. Silence stretched out.

Finally she looked away, crossed her arms. “Isn’t there any tea?”

“Not the sort you’re used to.”

“I don’t care.”

Well. I didn’t want to leave her here alone with my money and possessions. “Come on, then.”

We left the room, found a shop on the main corridor that sold things for flavoring hot water. Seivarden sniffed one of the blends on offer. Wrinkled her nose. “This is tea?”

The shop’s proprietor watched us from the corner of her vision, not wanting to seem to watch us. “I told you it wasn’t the sort you were used to. You said you didn’t care.”

She thought about that a moment. To my utter surprise, instead of arguing, or complaining further about the unsatisfactory nature of the tea in question, she said, calmly, “What do you recommend?”

I gestured my uncertainty. “I’m not in the habit of drinking tea.”

“Not in the…” She stared at me. “Oh. Don’t they drink tea in the Gerentate?”

“Not the way you people do.” And of course tea was for officers. For humans. Ancillaries drank water. Tea was an extra, unnecessary expense. A luxury. So I had never developed the habit. I turned to the proprietor, a Nilter, short and pale and fat, in shirtsleeves though the temperature here was a constant four C and Seivarden and I both still wore our inner coats. “Which of these has caffeine in it?”

She answered, pleasantly enough, and became pleasanter when I bought not only 250 grams each of two kinds of tea but also a flask with two cups, and two bottles, along with water to fill them.

Seivarden carried the whole lot back to our lodging, walking alongside me saying nothing. In the room she laid our purchases on the bed, sat down beside them, and picked up the flask, puzzling over the unfamiliar design.

I could have showed her how it worked, but decided not to. Instead I opened my newly claimed luggage and dug out a thick golden disk three centimeters larger in diameter than the one I had carried with me, and a small, shallow bowl of hammered gold, eight centimeters in diameter. I closed the trunk, set the bowl on it, and triggered the image in the disk.

Seivarden looked up to watch it unfold into a wide, flat flower in mother-of-pearl, a woman standing in its center. She wore a knee-length robe of the same iridescent white, inlaid with gold and silver. In one hand she held a human skull, itself inlaid with jewels, red and blue and yellow, and in the other hand a knife.

“That’s like the other one,” Seivarden said, sounding mildly interested. “But it doesn’t look so much like you.”

“True,” I answered, and sat cross-legged before the trunk.

“Is that a Gerentate god?”

“It’s one I met, traveling.”

Seivarden made a breathy, noncommittal noise. “What’s its name?”

I spoke the long string of syllables, which left Seivarden nonplussed. “It means She Who Sprang from the Lily. She is the creator of the universe.” This would make her Amaat, in Radchaai terms.

“Ah,” said Seivarden, in a tone I knew meant she’d made that equation, made the strange god familiar and brought it safely within her mental framework. “And the other one?”

“A saint.”

“What a remarkable thing, that she should resemble you so much.”

“Yes. Although she’s not the saint. The head she’s holding is.”

Seivarden blinked, frowned. It was very un-Radchaai. “Still.”

Nothing was just a coincidence, not for Radchaai. Such odd chances could—and did—send Radchaai on pilgrimages, motivate them to worship particular gods, change entrenched habits. They were direct messages from Amaat. “I’m going to pray now,” I said.

With one hand Seivarden made a gesture of acknowledgment. I unfolded a small knife, pricked my thumb, and bled into the gold bowl. I didn’t look to see Seivarden’s reaction—no Radchaai god took blood, and I hadn’t troubled to wash my hands first. It was guaranteed to lift Radchaai eyebrows, to register as foreign and even primitive.

But Seivarden didn’t say anything. She sat silent for thirty-one seconds as I intoned the first of the 322 names of the Hundred of White Lily, and then she turned her attention to the flask, and making tea.

Seivarden had said she’d lasted six months at her last attempt to quit kef. It took seven months to reach a station with a Radchaai consulate. Approaching the first leg of the journey, I had told the purser in Seivarden’s hearing that I wanted passage for myself and my servant. She hadn’t reacted, that I could see. Perhaps she hadn’t understood. But I had expected a more or less angry recrimination in private when she discovered her status, and she never mentioned it. And from then on I woke to find tea already made and waiting for me.

She also ruined two shirts attempting to launder them, leaving me with one for an entire month until we docked at the next station. The ship’s captain—she was Ki, tall and covered in ritual scars—let fall in an oblique, circuitous way that she and all her crew thought I’d taken Seivarden on as a charity case. Which wasn’t far from the truth. I didn’t contest it. But Seivarden improved, and three months later, on the next ship, a fellow passenger tried to hire her away from me.

Which wasn’t to say she had suddenly become a different person, or entirely deferential. Some days she spoke irritably to me, for no reason I could see, or spent hours curled in her bunk, her face to the wall, rising only for her self-imposed duties. The first few times I spoke to her when she was in that mood I only received silence in reply, so after that I left her alone.

The Radchaai consulate was staffed by the Translators Office, and the consular agent’s spotless white uniform—including pristine white gloves—argued she either had a servant or spent a good deal of her free time attempting to appear as though she did. The tasteful—and expensive-looking—jeweled strands wound in her hair, and the names on the memorial pins that glittered everywhere on the white jacket, as well as the faint disdain in her voice when she spoke to me, argued servant. Though likely only one—this was an out-of-the-way posting.

“As a visiting noncitizen your legal rights are restricted.” It was clearly a rote speech. “You must deposit at minimum the equivalent of—” Fingers twitched as she checked the exchange rate. “Five hundred shen per week of your visit, per person. If your lodging, food, and any extra purchases, fines, or damages exceed the amount on deposit and you cannot pay the balance, you will be legally obligated to take an assignment until your debt is paid. As a noncitizen your right to appeal any judgment or assignment is limited. Do you still wish to enter Radch space?”

“I do,” I said, and laid two million-shen chits on the slim desk between us.

Her disdain vanished. She sat slightly straighter and offered me tea, gesturing slightly, fingers twitching again as she communicated with someone else—her servant, it turned out, who, with a slightly harried air, brought tea in an elaborately enameled flask, and bowls to match.

While the servant poured, I brought out my forged Gerentate credentials and placed those on the desk as well.

“You must also provide identification for your servant, honored,” said the consular agent, now all politeness.

“My servant is a Radchaai citizen,” I answered, smiling slightly. Meaning to take the edge off what was going to be an awkward moment. “But she’s lost her identification and her travel permits.”

The consular agent froze, attempting to process that.

“The honored Breq,” said Seivarden, standing behind me, in antique, effortlessly elegant Radchaai, “has been generous enough to employ me and pay my passage home.”

This didn’t resolve the consular agent’s astonished paralysis quite as effectively as Seivarden perhaps had wished. That accent didn’t belong on anyone’s servant, let alone a noncitizen’s. And she hadn’t offered Seivarden a seat, or tea, thinking her too insignificant for such courtesies.

“Surely you can take genetic information,” I suggested.

“Yes, of course,” answered the consular agent, with a sunny smile. “Though your visa application will almost certainly come through before Citizen…”

“Seivarden,” I supplied.

“… before Citizen Seivarden’s travel permits are reissued. Depending on where she departed from and where her records are.”

“Of course,” I answered, and sipped my tea. “That’s only to be expected.”

As we left, Seivarden said to me, in an undertone, “What a snob. Was that real tea?”

“It was.” I waited for her to complain about not having had any, but she said nothing more. “It was very good. What are you going to do if an arrest order comes through instead of travel permits?”

She made a gesture of denial. “Why should they? I’m already asking to come back, they can arrest me when I get there. And I’ll appeal. Do you think the consul has that tea shipped from home, or might someone here sell it?”

“Find out, if you like,” I said. “I’m going back to the room to meditate.”

The consular agent’s servant outright gave Seivarden half a kilo of tea, likely grateful for the opportunity to make up for her employer’s unintentional slight earlier. And when my visa came through, so did travel permits for Seivarden, and no arrest order, or any additional comment or information at all.

That worried me, if only slightly. But likely Seivarden was right—why do anything else? When she stepped off the ship there would be time and opportunity enough to address her legal troubles.

Still. It was possible Radch authorities had realized I wasn’t actually a citizen of the Gerentate. It was unlikely—the Gerentate was a long, long way from where I was going, and besides, despite fairly friendly—or at least, not openly antagonistic—relations between the Gerentate and the Radch, as a matter of policy the Gerentate didn’t supply any information at all about its residents—not to the Radch. If the Radch asked—and they wouldn’t—the Gerentate would neither confirm nor deny that I was one of its citizens. Had I been departing from the Gerentate for Radchaai space I would have been warned repeatedly that I traveled at my own risk and would receive no assistance if I found myself in difficulties. But the Radchaai officials who dealt with foreign travelers knew this already, and would be prepared to take my identification more or less at face value.

Anaander Mianaai’s thirteen palaces were the capitals of their provinces. Metropolis-size stations, each one half ordinary large Radchaai station—with accompanying station AI—and half palace proper. Each palace proper was the residence of Anaander Mianaai, and the seat of provincial administration. Omaugh Palace wouldn’t be any sort of quiet backwater. A dozen gates led to its system, and hundreds of ships came and went each day. Seivarden would be one of thousands of citizens seeking audience, or making an appeal in some legal case. A noticeable one, certainly—none of those other citizens were returned from a thousand years in suspension.

I spent the months of travel considering just what I wanted to do about that. How to use it. How to counter its disadvantages, or turn them to my favor. And considering just what it was I hoped to accomplish.

It’s hard for me to know how much of myself I remember. How much I might have known, that I had hidden from myself all my life. Take, for instance, that last order, the instruction I–Justice of Toren had given to me–One Esk Nineteen. Get to Irei Palace, find Anaander Mianaai, and tell her what’s happened. What did I mean by that? Over and above the obvious, the bare fact I’d wanted to get the message to the Lord of the Radch?

Why had it been so important? Because it had been. It hadn’t been an afterthought, it had been an urgent necessity. At the time it had seemed clear. Of course I needed to get the message out, of course I needed to warn the right Anaander.

I would follow my orders. But in the time I’d spent recovering from my own death, the time working my way toward Radch space, I had decided I would do something else as well. I would defy the Lord of the Radch. And perhaps my defiance would amount to nothing, a feeble gesture she would barely notice.

The truth was, Strigan was right. My desire to kill Anaander Mianaai was unreasonable. Any actual attempt to do such a thing was not sane. Even given a gun that I could carry into the very presence of the Lord of the Radch herself without her knowing until I chose to reveal it—even given that, all I could hope to accomplish was a pitiful cry of defiance, gone as soon as made, easily disregarded. Nothing that could possibly make any difference.

But. All that secret maneuvering against herself. Designed, certainly, to avoid open conflict, to avoid damaging the Radch too badly. To avoid, perhaps, too badly fracturing Anaander Mianaai’s conviction that she was unitary, one person. Once the dilemma had been clearly stated, could she pretend things were otherwise?

And if there were now two Anaander Mianaais, might there not also be more? A part, perhaps, that didn’t know about the feuding sides of herself? Or told herself she didn’t? What would happen if I said straight out the thing the Lord of the Radch had been concealing from herself? Something dire, surely, or she would not have gone to such lengths to hide herself from herself. Once the thing was open and acknowledged, how could she help tearing herself apart?

But how could I say anything straight out to Anaander Mianaai? Granted I could reach Omaugh Palace, granted I could leave the ship, step onto the station—if I could do that much then I could stand in the middle of the main concourse and shout my story aloud for everyone to hear.

I might begin to do that, but I would never finish. Security would come for me, maybe even soldiers, and that day’s news would say a traveler had lost her mind on the concourse, but Security had dealt with the situation. Citizens would shake their heads, and mutter about uncivilized foreigners, and then forget all about me. And whichever part of the Lord of the Radch noticed me first could no doubt easily dismiss me as damaged and insane—or at least, convince the various other parts of herself that I was.

No, I needed the full attention of Anaander Mianaai, when I said what I had to say. How to get it was a problem I had worried at for nearly twenty years. I knew that it would be harder to ignore someone whose erasure would be noticed. I could visit the station and try to be seen, to become familiar, so that any part of Anaander couldn’t just dispose of me without comment. But I didn’t think that would be enough to force the Lord of the Radch—all of the Lord of the Radch—to listen to me.

But Seivarden. Captain Seivarden Vendaai, lost a thousand years, found by chance, lost again. Appearing now at Omaugh Palace. Any Radchaai would be curious about that, with a curiosity that carried a religious charge. And Anaander Mianaai was Radchaai. Perhaps the most Radchaai of Radchaai. She couldn’t help but notice that I had returned in company with Seivarden. Like any other citizen she would wonder, even if only at the back of her mind, what, if anything, that might mean. And she being who she was, the back of her mind was a substantial thing.

Seivarden would ask for an audience. Would be, eventually, granted one. And that audience would have all of Anaander’s attention; no part of her would ignore such an event.

And surely Seivarden would have the attention of the Lord of the Radch from the moment we stepped off the ship. So, arriving in Seivarden’s company, would I. Tremendously risky. I might not have concealed my nature well enough, might be recognized for what I was. But I was determined to try.

I sat on the bunk waiting for permission to leave the ship at Omaugh Palace, my pack at my feet, Seivarden leaning negligently against the wall across from me, bored.

“Something’s bothering you,” Seivarden observed, casually. I didn’t answer, and she said, “You always hum that tune when you’re preoccupied.”

My heart is a fish, hiding in the water-grass. I had been thinking of all the ways things could go wrong, starting now, starting the moment I stepped off the ship and confronted the dock inspectors. Or Station Security. Or worse. Thinking of how everything I had done would be for nothing if I was arrested before I could even leave the docks.

And I had been thinking about Lieutenant Awn. “I’m so transparent?” I made myself smile, as though I were mildly amused.

“Not transparent. Not exactly. Just…” She hesitated. Frowned slightly, as though she’d suddenly regretted speaking. “You have a few habits I’ve noticed, that’s all.” She sighed. “Are the dock inspectors having tea? Or just waiting till we’ve aged sufficiently?” We couldn’t leave the ship without the permission of the Inspector’s Office. The inspector would have received our credentials when the ship requested permission to dock, and had plenty of time to look over them and decide what to do when we arrived.

Still leaning against the bulkhead, Seivarden closed her eyes and began to hum. Wobbling, pitch sinking or rising by turns as she mis-sang intervals. But still recognizable. My heart is a fish. “Aatr’s tits,” she swore after a verse and a half, eyes still closed. “Now you’ve got me doing it.”

The door chime sounded. “Enter,” I said. Seivarden opened her eyes, sat straight. Suddenly tense. The boredom had been a pose, I suspected.

The door slid open to reveal a person in the dark-blue jacket, gloves, and trousers of a dock inspector. She was slight, and young, maybe twenty-three or -four. She looked familiar, though I couldn’t think who it was she reminded me of. The sparser-than-usual scatter of jewelry and memorial pins might tell me, if I stared closely enough to read names. Which would be rude. Across from me, Seivarden tucked her bare hands behind her back.

“Honored Breq,” the inspector adjunct said, with a slight bow. She seemed unfazed by my own bare hands. Used to dealing with foreigners, I supposed. “Citizen Seivarden. Would you please accompany me to the inspector supervisor’s office?”

And there should have been no need for us to visit the inspector supervisor herself. This adjunct could pass us onto the station on her own authority. Or order our arrest.

We followed her past the lock into the loading bay, past another lock into a corridor busy with people—dock inspectors in dark blue, Station Security in light brown, here and there the darker brown of soldiers, and spots of brighter color—a scatter of non-uniformed citizens. This corridor opened into a wide room, a dozen gods along the walls to watch over travelers and traders, on one end the entrance to the station proper, and opposite, the doorway into the inspector’s office.

The adjunct escorted us through the outermost office, where nine blue-uniformed minor adjuncts dealt with complaining ship captains, and beyond them were offices for likely a dozen major adjuncts and their crews. Past those and into an inner office, with four chairs and a small table, and a door at the back, closed.

“I am sorry, cit… honored, and citizen,” said the adjunct who had led us here, fingers twitching as she communicated with someone—likely the station AI, or the inspector supervisor herself. “The inspector supervisor was available, but something’s come up. I’m sure it won’t be more than a few minutes. Please have a seat. Will you have tea?”

A reasonably long wait, then. And the courtesy of tea implied this wasn’t an arrest. That no one had discovered my credentials were forged. Everyone here—including Station—would assume I was what I said I was, a foreign traveler. And possibly I would have a chance to discover just who this young inspector adjunct reminded me of. Now she’d spoken at a bit more length, I noticed a slight accent. Where was she from? “Yes, thank you,” I said.

Seivarden didn’t respond to the offer of tea right away. Her arms were folded, her bare hands tucked under her elbows. She likely wanted the tea but was embarrassed about her ungloved hands, couldn’t hide them holding a bowl. Or so I thought until she said, “I can’t understand a word she’s saying.”

Seivarden’s accent and way of speaking would be familiar to most educated Radchaai, from old entertainments and the way Anaander Mianaai’s speech was widely emulated by prestigious—or hopefully prestigious—families. I hadn’t thought changes in pronunciation and vocabulary had been so extreme. But I’d lived through them, and Seivarden’s ear for language had never been the sharpest. “She’s offering tea.”

“Oh.” Seivarden looked briefly at her crossed arms. “No.”

I took the tea the adjunct poured from a flask on the table, thanked her, and took a seat. The office had been painted a pale green, the floor tiled with something that had probably been intended to look like wood and might have succeeded if the designer had ever seen anything but imitations of imitations. A niche in the wall behind the young adjunct held an icon of Amaat and a small bowl of bright-orange, ruffle-petaled flowers. And beside that, a tiny brass copy of the cliffside in the temple of Ikkt. You could buy them, I knew, from vendors in the plaza in front of the Fore-Temple water, during pilgrimage season.

I looked at the adjunct again. Who was she? Someone I knew? A relative of someone I’d met?

“You’re humming again,” Seivarden said in an undertone.

“Excuse me.” I took a sip of tea. “It’s a habit I have. I apologize.”

“No need,” said the adjunct, and took her own seat by the table. This was, fairly clearly, her own office and so she was direct assistant to the inspector supervisor—an unusual place for someone so young. “I haven’t heard that song since I was a child.”

Seivarden blinked, not understanding. If she had, she likely would have smiled. A Radchaai could live nearly two hundred years. This inspector adjunct, probably a legal adult for a decade, was still impossibly young.

“I used to know someone else who sang all the time,” the adjunct continued.

I knew her. Had probably bought songs from her. She would have been maybe four, maybe five, when I’d left Ors. Maybe slightly older, if she remembered me with any clarity.

The inspector supervisor behind that door would be someone who had spent time on Shis’urna—in Ors itself, most likely. What did I know about the lieutenant who had replaced Lieutenant Awn as administrator there? How likely was it she’d resigned her military assignment and taken one as a dock inspector? It wasn’t unheard of.

Whoever the inspector supervisor was, she had money and influence enough to bring this adjunct here from Ors. I wanted to ask the young woman the name of her patron, but that would be unthinkably rude. “I’m told,” I said, meaning to sound idly curious, and playing up my Gerentate accent just the smallest bit, “that the jewelry you Radchaai wear has some sort of significance.”

Seivarden cast me a puzzled look. The adjunct only smiled. “Some of it.” Her Orsian accent, now I had identified it, was clear, obvious. “This one for instance.” She slid one gloved finger under a gold-colored dangle pinned near her left shoulder. “It’s a memorial.”

“May I look closer?” I asked, and receiving permission moved my chair near, and bent to read the name engraved in Radchaai on the plain metal, one I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t likely a memorial for an Orsian—I couldn’t imagine anyone in the lower city adopting Radchaai funeral practices, or at least not anyone old enough to have died since I’d seen them last.

Near the memorial, on her collar, sat a small flower pin, each petal enameled with the symbol of an Emanation. A date engraved in the flower’s center. This assured young woman had been the tiny, frightened flower-bearer when Anaander Mianaai had acted as priest in Lieutenant Awn’s house twenty years ago.

No coincidences, not for Radchaai. I was quite sure now that when we were admitted to the inspector supervisor’s presence, I would meet Lieutenant Awn’s replacement in Ors. This inspector adjunct was, perhaps, a client of hers.

“They make them for funerals,” the adjunct was saying, still talking about memorial pins. “Family and close friends wear them.” And you could tell by the style and expense of the piece just where in Radchaai society the dead person stood, and by implication where the wearer stood. But the adjunct—her name, I knew, was Daos Ceit—didn’t mention that.

I wondered then what Seivarden would make—had made—of changes in fashion since Garsedd, the way such signals had changed—or not. People still wore inherited tokens and memorials, testimony to the social connections and values of their ancestors generations back. And mostly that was the same, except “generations back” was Garsedd. Some tokens that had been insignificant then were prized now, and some that had been priceless were now meaningless. And the color and gemstone significances in vogue for the last hundred or so years wouldn’t read at all, for Seivarden.

Inspector Adjunct Ceit had three close friends, all three of whom had incomes and positions similar to hers, to judge from the gifts they’d exchanged with her. Two lovers intimate enough to exchange tokens with but not sufficiently so to be considered very serious. No strands of jewels, no bracelets—though of course if she did any work actually inspecting cargo or ship systems such things might have been in her way—and no rings over her gloves.

And there, on the other shoulder, where now I could see it plainly and look straight at it without being excessively impolite, was the token I had been looking for. I had mistaken it for something less impressive, had, on first glance, taken the platinum for silver, and its dependent pearl for glass, the sign of a gift from a sibling—current fashions misleading me. This was nothing cheap, nothing casual. But it wasn’t a token of clientage, though the metal and the pearl suggested a particular house association. An association with a house old enough that Seivarden could have recognized it immediately. Possibly had.

Inspector Adjunct Ceit stood. “The inspector supervisor is available now,” she said. “I do apologize for your wait.” She opened the inner door and gestured us through.

In the innermost office, standing to meet us, twenty years older and a bit heavier than when I’d last seen her, was the giver of that pin—Lieutenant—no, Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat Awer.