A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  The Six Outreaching Palms was the Teixcalaanli military establishment: fingers stretched out in every direction to grasp the known universe and reach its farthest edge. The name was mostly archaic; even Teixcalaanlitzlim talked about “the fleet” or named a particular regiment or division epitomized by the great deeds of its yaotlek, the supreme commander of a group of legions. That the Sunlit used it now made Mahit think she was being formally arrested; arrested with appropriate procedure applied. Arrested not just by the City and the Emperor, but by the Ministry of War.

  Not arrested; taken into custody for her own protection.

  And how different were these two descriptions? Not different enough, no matter who was arresting her.

  She pulled the most formal modes of address out of the miserable culture-shocked sludge of her mind, and hoped she sounded vicious and in all of the control she wasn’t. “The custody of the esteemed yaotlek One Lightning is not Lsel diplomatic space. If I am in danger, I’m sure someone can be assigned to guard the door to my chambers.”

  “We are no longer sure such measures are sufficient,” said the Sunlit, “considering the unfortunate accident which befell your predecessor. You’ll come with us.”

  Mahit was almost sure that had been a threat. “Or?” she asked.

  “You will come with us, Ambassador. Your liaison will be taken to a hospital to have her cloudhook adjusted after this regrettable interface with the City, of course. You shouldn’t worry.” The Sunlit took a step forward, and the rest of the troop followed, like an echo. There were ten of them, each indistinguishable from the others. Mahit stood her ground. She wished Three Seagrass was awake and coherent enough to maneuver them around this—to tell her if this One Lightning was a petty military bureaucrat or a political force, whether the Sunlit were usually in the employ of the Ministry of War or if they were making an exception for acts of terrorism in high-end restaurants.

  She was spending so much time wishing her sources of information weren’t incapacitated. Wishing wasn’t helping. She didn’t know. She knew enough to be sure she didn’t want to be taken into custody. Knew enough about the Teixcalaanli military to know she couldn’t run. Knew enough about herself to know that she would have to abandon Three Seagrass if she tried and that she wasn’t willing to do that.

  How else to stop them?

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to go with you,” she said, to buy time. Used the extra few seconds to remember her technical diplomatic vocabulary, the most official forms, and then prepared—feeling as if she was about to deliberately step outside an airlock without checking the oxygen volumes on her vacuum suit—to claim sanctuary. “I am compelled by prior agreement to keep my appointment with the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, whose gracious presence illuminates the room like the edgeshine of a knife, this afternoon. I believe that she would be exceptionally displeased if I instead attended a meeting with the most respected and admired One Lightning without first fulfilling my obligation to her. The tragic situation in the restaurant should not be allowed to disturb the functioning of your government and its negotiations with mine.”

  She hoped she’d gotten the damned epithet right.

  The Sunlit officer said, “One moment, Ambassador,” and turned to the others. Their faceplate-cloudhooks glowed blue and white and red under the gold-tone reflective mirror surface that hid their faces from view as they talked to one another on some private channel.

  One of them came back over to her. It wasn’t the same one who had been speaking before, Mahit was nearly sure. “We will be making contact with the ezuazuacat’s office. If you would be patient.”

  “I can wait,” she said. “But I would appreciate if you would also make contact with an ambulance for my liaison.” Now she remembered the word. It was good to know that years of vocabulary drill and diplomatic training would kick in when she needed them, even if she was soot-stained and covered in mostly-dried blood. Now she just had to hope that Nineteen Adze wanted her—wanted Yskandr, more truthfully, wanted whatever Yskandr had promised her—enough to claim precedence over a military commander who could control the City’s police.

  It was probably best not to think about whether Nineteen Adze had been the one to arrange for the bomb. Not yet. One problem at a time.

  That second Sunlit slipped back into the whole group of them. Mahit lost which one it was—she concentrated on standing quite still, on holding up Three Seagrass, on keeping her face expressionless and displeased at once by remembering how Yskandr could transform her mouth into a withering sneer of imperial-style contempt just by shifting the wideness of her eyes. She waited, and imagined she was invincible, like the First Emperor clawing her way off-planet or Three Seagrass’s beloved Eleven Lathe, philosophizing amongst aliens—and wasn’t she just. Doing that. Right here. The minutes droned on. The Sunlit conversed with each other through their faceplates. Three Seagrass made a nearly intelligible what? sound and buried her face in Mahit’s shoulder, which was almost sweet.

  The first Sunlit, or an indistinguishable Sunlit from that first, made a gesture to the others. They dispersed into the remains of the crowd, talking in low voices, taking statements from the bystanders. Mahit took it as a good sign: they weren’t going to subdue her by brute force.

  “An ambulance has been called,” the Sunlit said.

  “I will wait until it arrives before keeping my appointment with the ezuazuacat.”

  There was a pause; Mahit imagined that the Sunlit’s expression under that faceplate was quite annoyed, and felt pleased at the imagining.

  “You may wait,” the officer said, “and then we will escort you to the ezuazuacat’s office ourself. It would be inappropriate for you to use public transportation at this time. Many of the subways are in fact closed, and service has been suspended in this sextant during our investigation.”

  “I do appreciate the investment of your personal time,” Mahit said.

  “We do not have personal time. There’s no inconvenience.”

  The Sunlit use of the first-person plural was unusual and slightly disconcerting. That last “we” ought to have grammatically been an “I,” with the singular form of the possessing verb. Someone could write a linguistics paper, for girls on stations to gush over late on sleepshift—

  It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t happen. The ambulance was arriving, a sleek grey bubble of a vehicle, flashing with white lights and a sharp piercing high note, repeated as a siren. It disgorged medical ixplanatlim in their scarlet tunics. None of them were Yskandr’s morgue attendant, and Mahit was glad of it. They took Three Seagrass away from her with gentle hands and were reassuring about her recovery prospects. City-strikes happened all the time, they said. More now than a few years ago. It was just neurostunning, a mistake in the wiring, a fluctuation in the numbers of the enormous algorithmic AI that ran the City’s autonomic functions.

  “Are you ready to go, Ambassador?” said her Sunlit.

  Mahit wished she could get a message to Nineteen Adze: something along the lines of incoming with police escort, terribly sorry, hope you enjoy political mess, if I don’t show up I’ve been disappeared, but she couldn’t quite think of how she’d manage to do it.

  “I wouldn’t want to be late,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Before the Teixcalaanlitzlim broke orbit in force—while we were still bound to a single resource-diminished planet, studded with what cities we were able to scrounge out of steppe and desert and salt-laden water, but nevertheless a shell we had outgrown—before the First Emperor took us into the black and found for us the paradise which would become the City—it was common practice for leaders of men and women to select from amongst their closest companions a sworn band, tied together with blood sacrifice: the best and most trustworthy friends, the most necessary compatriots, who would if necessary spill all their veins into the cup of an emperor’s hands. And these sworn companions were called the ezuazuacatlim, as they are today, when their reach extend
s the emperor’s will throughout the stars. The first ezuazuacat to the First Emperor was called One Granite, and her life begins as follows: she was born to the spear and the horse, and did not know the city nor the spaceport …

  —The Secret History of the Emperors, 18th edition, abridged for crèche-school use

  * * *

  … the Council shall be comprised of no less than six (6) Councilors, who each receive one vote on matters of substance, with ties being broken by the Councilor for the Pilots, in recognition of that Councilor’s symbolic representation of the initial Captain-Pilot who led the stations into Bardzravand Sector. The Councilors shall be appointed in the following ways: for the Councilor for the Pilots, an election by single vote amongst active and retired pilots; for the Councilor for Hydroponics, appointment by the previous Councilor for Hydroponics, or if such a member is deceased, by their will, or if no will exists, by general popular vote amongst the people of Lsel Station; for the Councilor for Heritage, the inheritor of the previous Councilor’s imago …

  —from the bylaws of the governing Lsel Council

  NO one disappeared her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Not asked,” Mahit said.

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

  “Of course, Your Excellency.”

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A hostage, but a clean one.

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

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

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

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

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