That bureaucracy parted for Three Seagrass like over-irradiated plastic, rotten-soft under pressure. There was something wrong with it; they were moving too easily up the great needle-spear of the Judiciary.
Mahit thought about mentioning her growing sense that she was following Three Seagrass into a trap. But if she mentioned it perhaps that trap would close around them, needle-teeth like a thousand Judiciaries pointed inward …
Eight Loop could have been waiting for her all along. (Nineteen Adze had suggested as much, when she’d insinuated that Mahit should find out who had sent for her in the first place. But she couldn’t afford to use Nineteen Adze’s judgment in place of her own.)
An elevator took them up the last few floors to Eight Loop’s own offices: a tiny red-crystal seedpod of a chamber, semi-translucent. Inside of it the air felt hushed, charged. Mahit found herself staring at how the light fell on Three Seagrass’s face, turning it from warm brown to a ruddy color as if she’d been dipped in blood.
“This is too easy,” she said.
Three Seagrass tipped her head back, rolled her shoulders. “I know.”
“And yet we are in this elevator—”
“I could make Petal press the emergency stop, but it’s a bit late to have second thoughts, Mahit.”
“Clearly Eight Loop wants us to have this meeting,” Twelve Azalea said. “As we also want to have this meeting, I am not seeing the reason for your distress.”
“Eventually,” Three Seagrass said, dry and distant and a little regretful, “you might have to do something someone else wants, Mahit.”
The part of her that was cued onto Teixcalaanli double meanings, allusion and reference and hidden motives—that part of her which, if she was being honest, was why she was a good politician, why her aptitudes had spelled for diplomacy and negotiation and came up green, green, green with Yskandr’s—that vicious part suggested that it was entirely possible that Three Seagrass had been working for Eight Loop this whole time. If she was so insistent on Mahit keeping this meeting …
And would it change anything?
It should. It didn’t. It was too late, anyway. The elevator doors opened.
Eight Loop’s office was nothing like Nineteen Adze’s white-quartz serenity of a workroom: despite being at the very top of the Judiciary tower, it felt tightly enclosed, almost claustrophobic. The pentagonal walls were lined with infofiche and codex-books, overlapping and stacked double on the shelves. The windows—and there were windows centered in each of those faceted walls—were drawn over with heavy cloth blinds. Daylight crept out from under them and advanced only an inch. In the middle of the room Eight Loop herself sat like the central core of an AI, a slow-beating heart nestled in information-bearing cables: an old woman behind her desk, transparent holoscreens in a vast arc above her. They were all inward-facing: the images on them backward, pointed toward Eight Loop’s eyes and not Mahit’s, feeding her a dozen views, Cityscape and dense-glyphed documentation and what Mahit thought was a star-chart rendered in two-dimensional flats.
“Good morning, Ambassador,” said Eight Loop. “Asekretim.”
Mahit bowed over the triangle of her hands pressed together. “Good morning. Thank you for agreeing to see us.”
Nothing about Eight Loop’s expression shifted; she was statue-still, unmoved, flat black eyes lacking either interest or dismay. “It saves time,” she said. “You coming to me.”
“I came a very long way on what has turned out to be your command,” said Mahit. There was little point in dissimulation; she was here to ask why. Why Eight Loop had possessed such urgency, two months ago, when Yskandr had died; why she needed a Lsel ambassador at all.
“I appreciate the promptness with which Lsel answered my request,” Eight Loop said. “It is admirable; that kind of cooperation will only help your people in the future. I suggest you stick to it.”
That sounded like a dismissal: No, I don’t need you after all, go and supervise the entry of Lsel into Teixcalaanli space like a good barbarian. The absorption of her Station into the Empire. Cooperatively. Mahit had only just arrived here. What had she done—or not done—in the week she’d been at court that had rendered her useless to Eight Loop? When Eight Loop had wanted her so badly?
Had she never wanted her at all, but instead a Yskandr—or just any Stationer, anyone with an imago-machine which could be harvested for use—if she was the Emperor’s crèchesib, if she’d been in on Yskandr’s idea of keeping Six Direction alive through imago-machines, then she would have wanted a new ambassador right away, whoever it was, as long as that ambassador could get an imago-machine. Or could have their own pulled out of them.
Anger broke over her like a distant and enormous wave. She felt icy cold.
“Your statement in the newsfeeds this morning,” she found herself saying, “didn’t suggest that you were in favor of the annexation of Lsel. Or of annexation in general. Quite the opposite, in fact; I found myself quite offended on behalf of His Brilliance’s judgment—”
“Mahit,” said Three Seagrass warningly.
“Don’t concern yourself with your charge’s impropriety, asekreta,” Eight Loop said. “Her confusion is understandable.”
“You demanded an ambassador,” Mahit said. “I’d like to know why. And what I might do for you which does not involve merely my meek cooperation.”
Still perfectly, insufferably calm, Eight Loop spread her hands out on the surface of her desk. Her knuckles were gnarled, hugely swollen; Mahit couldn’t imagine her holding a stylus. “In the two months it took you to arrive, Ambassador,” she said, “the situation here has shifted. I am sorry if you had hopes that I retained some special purpose for you. I am afraid I do not, in our current circumstances.”
Helpless, in less control of herself than she thought she’d ever been—worse than when she’d killed the man in her apartment, worse than feeling all of Yskandr’s neurochemistry light up in fireworks at the touch of Six Direction’s hand, Mahit asked: “What do you want me to do?”
She sounded plaintive. Desperate, like an abandoned child. Three Seagrass’s hand was on her waist, suddenly, small fingertips pressed to her spine, and she realized what she was saying, and shut her mouth.
“Go back to work, Ambassador,” Eight Loop said. “There will be a great deal of it for you, no matter who sits on the sun throne or stands behind it. No matter whether Six Direction gets his war and draws One Lightning off with it; or gets his war and fails to do so; or doesn’t get it at all. Or points it at some sector you don’t care about. There will be work for the Ambassador from Lsel Station. That is enough for any citizen; it should be enough for you.”
The elevator doors were open, behind them. Backing into them, Mahit felt as if she was stumbling, hardly able to keep her feet; in the small red-lit chamber of their descent, all she could hear was the harshness of her own breathing.
What had she missed? What had shifted? What had made Eight Loop first want someone with access to imago-machines, if that even had been what she had wanted a Lsel ambassador for—but what else was one specifically good for—and then decide that there was simply no point in having one at all?
Looking at Three Seagrass’s and Twelve Azalea’s faces, tinted red, concerned, she thought that three hours of sleep in a garden really hadn’t been enough; she was erratic, she was alone, she wanted—she wanted Yskandr. Someone else to hold her up, in the center of the vast machinery of Teixcalaan.
* * *
Mahit sat on a stone bench outside the Judiciary, her head in her hands, and let Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea talk over her.
“—we can’t go back to her apartments—”
“I know you can run on stimulants and bravado for days at a time, Reed, but some of us are human—”
“I am not suggesting she isn’t, please do not insult me or her by insinuating that I don’t think she’s as much of a human being as a citizen is—”
“I’m not, for fuck’s sake. Maybe you can
’t hold yourself together with wire and tea and your vainglorious ambition, you’re slipping as much as she is—”
“Do you have a suggestion or are you just going to insult me?”
Twelve Azalea sat down on the bench beside Mahit. She didn’t look up. It was too much work to look up, or intervene. “Come back to my place,” he said heavily. “I’m in this up to my ears anyhow, I’m on every recording the City has of you two for the past six hours, I have lost even the shreds of plausible deniability. You might as well.”
A long pause. Mahit watched the sunlight track across the plaza’s tilework, making it shimmer.
“Such a noble sacrifice,” Three Seagrass said finally. Edged. A challenge.
“Maybe I want to help you,” Twelve Azalea replied. “Maybe I like you, Reed, maybe I’m your friend.”
A sigh. Mahit thought of how water shimmered too, how water and light moved the same way, if you thought about physics correctly. Ripples.
“All right,” said Three Seagrass. “All right, but if there are assassins at your flat I am giving up and applying to join the Fleet and get off-planet, for safer working conditions.”
The noise Twelve Azalea made was not quite laughter; it was too choked for that.
* * *
Twelve Azalea kept a flat farther out from the palace complex than Mahit had yet been—a forty-minute commute, he said, but not everyone who worked for the Information Ministry had such cushy perks as Reed had managed, some people had to pay rent on their salary—Mahit thought he was talking just to talk, to hear himself say the normal sorts of things a person might say.
Away from the palace and the central districts the City shifted in tone—there were more shops, smaller, an emphasis on food prepared while the customer waited or organics imported from a long way off, the other continent or off-planet, artisan-made items, everything simultaneously disposable and in imitation of some ideal. Mahit had thought they would be stared at by Teixcalaanli pedestrians: a barbarian and two asekretim, all disheveled and on their way into a residential neighborhood, but they weren’t the source of tension on these streets. The Teixcalaanlitzlim were managing that all by themselves.
At first she had thought that there simply weren’t that many people, that the population of Twelve Azalea’s neighborhood was at work, or lower than the number of dense, tall, flowerlike buildings would suggest, but the way Twelve Azalea’s expression changed from mild serenity to puzzlement to growing dread put that possibility right out. There was something wrong. The air felt charged, a psychological echo of how she’d felt right after the bomb in the restaurant. She trudged, following Twelve Azalea around corners. She couldn’t remember ever having been this tired.
Three Seagrass said, clipped, “We should take a different street, Petal. This one’s got a demonstration at the end of it.”
“I live on this street.”
Mahit looked up. The missing populace was gathered in a protean mass that was spilling out of the sidewalks and into the street itself. Men, women, children-in-arms, holding placards and purple banners. Their faces were Teixcalaanli-still, unreadable, intent. Even the children weren’t loud. The hush felt more dangerous than noise would be. It felt intent.
“Those people aren’t for One Lightning,” she said. “Not unless public acclamations have gotten much quieter in the past three days.”
“A public acclamation we could walk right through,” said Three Seagrass, “as long as you were willing to pretend to like rhyming doggerel long enough to shout anything that alliterates with yaotlek—”
“This is politics, and I really thought my neighborhood wasn’t prone to this sort of thing.”
“You should know better, Petal,” Three Seagrass said, resigned. “Have you even looked at your demographics? You’ve moved into a trade sector, all these people are—”
“—are for Thirty Larkspur, they’re wearing those flower lapels,” Mahit broke in. They’d all stopped moving. The demonstration approached, slow-growing like a fungus. The people that made it up walked together, encroaching. One of the placards had a snatch of poetry on it that Mahit recognized: These things are ceaseless: star-charts, disembarkments / the curl of unborn petals holds a hollowness.
Nine Maize’s couplets, which had so upset the oration contest.
“Yes,” Three Seagrass agreed. “This neighborhood is as wealthy as it is because of outer-province trade and manufacturing, which means that they like Thirty Larkspur, who is nominally an imperial heir, and yet these people are waiting for the Sunlit to come and shut them down for being actively treasonous and demonstrating for peace against the wishes of the current Emperor.”
No more treasonous than Eight Loop had been, in her editorial, Mahit thought. She thought she’d figured out part of what was going on. Something had passed between the two imperial-associates, some deal they’d made: Eight Loop and Thirty Larkspur were bargaining.
They seemed to be working together to discredit not only One Lightning and his attempt to usurp the imperial throne by public acclamation, but also to discredit the authority of the sitting Emperor at the same time. One Lightning, in charge of this war now, and relying on it to shore up his support, was judicially suspect, according to Eight Loop’s editorial—and publicly unwanted, according to this demonstration of Thirty Larkspur’s partisans. And Six Direction? Well, he was failing, mistaken in his attempt to allow a war of annexation in a time not entirely peaceful, a time where there might be external threats, whether those were some mysterious alien or just the continued unrest in the Odile System and how it was sparking protest even here in the City—he was misunderstanding the law—and that misunderstanding was being rejected by his own populace, who didn’t want a war …
The Judiciary and Thirty Larkspur working together. Mahit could—almost—almost see the shape of what they wanted.
If she wasn’t so tired.
“Is there a back alley into your flat, Twelve Azalea?” she asked. “I have seen enough of the Sunlit today, and I think they will be here soon—”
It turned out that there was. They ran for it like they were being chased.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
EZUAZUACAT THIRTY LARKSPUR TO BE MADE IMPERIAL-ASSOCIATE
In light of his continued service to His Illuminate Brilliance the Emperor Six Direction of All Teixcalaan, the ezuazuacat Thirty Larkspur will as of 09.30 on this first day of the third year of the eleventh indiction be recognized as an associate to the imperial throne, equal in rank and in authority to Imperial Associate Eight Loop and Imperial Associate Eight Antidote; may the three imperial associates grow stably together, equilateral in desire, and rule jointly if necessary.
—Imperial Proclamation, posted in Plaza Central Seven subway station, defaced with red spray paint (non-holographic) reading ONE LIGHTNING in the center of a loosely drawn Teixcalaanli war flag; confiscated by Sunlit patrol on 249.3.11, to be destroyed
* * *
There is no useful reason to deny Teixcalaan another ambassador, despite our uncertainty as to Yskandr Aghavn’s fate; we need a voice in the Empire, and Mr. Aghavn has not been a very communicative one even before now. I recommend that a thorough aptitude test be administered to volunteers as well as to young persons without imago-line who have particularly high scores on Teixcalaanli Imperial Examinations, and a new ambassador selected from the most compatible of them with the imago recording of Aghavn—which, I remind you, we do have, despite it being out of date.
—internal memo from Amnardbat of Heritage to the remainder of the Lsel Council, public records
LATER, Mahit would remember the rest of that afternoon in snatches: single moments, disconnected from one another by how time stretched and denatured itself under the pressure of exhaustion. Her first view of Twelve Azalea’s flat, the walls hung with artwork—copies of off-world oil and acrylic and ink drawings, mass-produced but of high quality—and how Twelve Azalea had looked obscurely embarrassed when she’d mentioned how nice t
hey were, as if he hardly ever had visitors to comment on his taste. The needle-sharp heat of his shower, and how all the soap in Teixcalaan smelled of a flower she couldn’t place, peppery and foreign-shading-to-familiar. The texture of the loose trousers and shirt he’d loaned her, rough-silk and too short in every dimension, hovering halfway up her calves and her forearms. How lying down on the wide couch had felt absurd, and then gone, texture and sound blinked out to nothing.
The weight of Three Seagrass’s back, pressed to her back, stretched out beside her. Opening her eyes to a blur of motion on the holoscreen, Twelve Azalea eating some sort of noodle dish out of a plastic container with long sticks, cross-legged on a chair as he watched a sanitized version of the end of the protest going on just outside his windows, and hearing the distant crash of breaking glass, and going away again inside her own mind, just for a little while, into that dark space where Yskandr should have been.
When she woke properly it was full dark. Twelve Azalea had fallen asleep at the table next to his meal, his head folded on his arms, and the holoscreen was still going with the volume turned down: moving images casting light across his face. Mahit gingerly disentangled herself from both the couch and Three Seagrass, who looked pale and unhealthily grey even asleep (had she sufficiently recovered from the neurological strike? Mahit couldn’t imagine that she had), and crossed to the window. The street outside was quiet. The golden, blank face-shield of a Sunlit glinted from the corner of the intersection. There were at least four of them, in this quiet residential neighborhood, keeping a threatening watch.
Bombs in a restaurant. Demonstrations. And now riots. If the Sunlit really were under One Lightning’s control, their presence here was a sign of how much the yaotlek was trying to present himself as the only possible force for order in a rapidly intensifying climate of social distress and anxiety. Mahit thought it was smart positioning. She’d think it was even smarter if One Lightning didn’t need to head up a war of conquest to prove his imperial bona fides. Still, the repeated attempts of the Sunlit to get her to surrender, not to the Emperor or to the City, but to One Lightning, reflected a deeper wound in Six Direction’s ability to control Teixcalaan than she’d expected. How much had he already lost?
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