I don’t want a meeting, Yskandr, I want a conversation. We’re going to a bar.
Mahit still felt his laughter as an electric shimmer down her nerves, like she always had; it was only that now it shaded into the neuropathic ulnar pain when it reached her smallest fingers. She’d gotten used to it, somewhat. As much as she could manage to get used to it. As long as it didn’t spread, or turn to numbness, she’d be fine. It wasn’t an obvious tell. So very few people knew what had happened to her and Yskandr in Teixcalaan, and all of them were either—well, either her-and-Yskandr, or the entire person they sometimes managed to be, or back in Teixcalaan.
The bar she’d chosen wasn’t one she’d been to before. She hadn’t made a habit of hanging around pilots’ bars as a young person or a student; her aptitudes in spatial mathematics had ruled out pilot-imagos as feasible matches early on, and she’d never quite stopped feeling like they’d all know she wasn’t quite good enough to join them. Now that emotion felt like a vestige of another Mahit entirely, a child-Mahit with a child’s fears and desires. The Mahit she was now wanted a drink, and she wanted a drink with Dekakel Onchu, the sort of Councilor who liked to socialize with her people. And this was Onchu’s drinking establishment of choice—there were publicity holos of her coming out of it on more than one of Lsel’s internal newsfeeds.
Finding her wasn’t difficult. The publicity holos hadn’t lied. She was at the bar: a dulled chrome expanse well scratched by glasses, graffiti, the remains of the original inlaid design, diamond hatching around curved fan-shapes. Mahit thought, What sort of flower is that? Thought it in Teixcalaanli, and had Yskandr chide her with a memory; how popular this particular pattern had been in pilot-deck décor back when he’d been a teenager taking his own aptitudes right here on Lsel. Mahit paused just to the left of the doorway, let the door swing closed behind her and leave her in shadows when an actual set of pilots walked in after. Onchu wasn’t dressed like a Councilor; she was dressed like a spacer, scalp shaved to stubble, bright paint on her mouth and on the rim of her glass, deep lines around her eyes like solar rays. She wasn’t in conversation. She was drinking companionably with the man to her right, a peaceful mutual silence, and there was an open stool on her other side.
I think, Mahit said inside her mind, in the strange-echoing place where she was sometimes herself and sometimes a herself who was also Yskandr Aghavn, that I want you to say hello.
He didn’t take her body, like he had in Teixcalaan or to calm her out of useless panic in her residence pod—Yskandr slipped forward, helped her muscles remember a walk they’d never used, a center of gravity they did not have. A smile wider than Mahit’s own, and a way of leaning on one elbow when she’d arrived at the bar and sat down beside Councilor Onchu.
“Councilor,” Yskandr said—Mahit said, the space between them hardly a space, thought and action fractionally separated—“it’s been a long time. Sixteen years now?”
Onchu blinked. Blinked again, a slow narrowing and release of eyelids, an entirely evaluatory expression. “There are several people you might have been, with that sort of introduction,” she said, “but only one who would be quite as audaciously rude as to make it. Hello, Mahit Dzmare.”
Mahit smiled Yskandr’s smile. “Hello, Councilor Onchu. I hope you don’t mind if I have a drink.”
“It’s a pilots’ bar, but we don’t check your imago at the door for membership,” said Onchu. “What’s your poison?”
We are not drinking fermented fruit, ever again, and also we are on Lsel, and also I wanted you to say hello, not to play Teixcalaanlitzlim for effect—
“Vodka,” Mahit said. “Chilled, straight up.”
Onchu gestured to the bartender, a familiar hand flip, and he fetched down a chilled shot glass and a bottle of vodka so cold it poured thick and viscous. “As poisons go, I might like you,” she said.
“Only as poisons go?”
Onchu grinned, white teeth bright against the dark red stain on her lips. “The rest, I’ll see. It’s funny, Dzmare, I thought you might show up a lot earlier than now. Or else not at all.”
Mahit shrugged, the motion still more Yskandr’s than her own. “Didn’t mean to keep you waiting, Councilor.”
“I wasn’t waiting.”
Talking to Dekakel Onchu was like trying to fix a target on a fast-rotating ship; she looked like she was right there, but she kept showing new faces, shifting too fast. Mahit thought (flood of memory, as sharp as scent, as the taste of Teixcalaanli tea, the light in Nineteen Adze’s old offices), Be a mirror, and went on. “You sent me—well, not me. You sent several messages to the Lsel Ambassador. I regret to note that they reached the current one, not the former one.”
The expression that crossed Onchu’s face—a thinning of the mouth, one side of the lips curling up in a swift, barely visible smile, chagrin or pleasure, too fast to tell—made Mahit think of how she herself had felt, every time the world (the Empire—it was proving impossible to lose the valence of the Teixcalaanli fusion of the two words, even thinking in Stationer language)—shifted around her, reframed itself. Some new piece of information with its load of clarifying horror, slotting into place. Her upsurge of sympathy wasn’t going to be useful here, she knew, but it was real nonetheless.
Onchu drank some of her beer, a swallow neither too large nor too small, a perfectly normal movement (and oh, fuck, how had one meeting with Heritage dropped Mahit right back into the kind of vigilant observation which had kept her alive in the City and which she had been trying so diligently to unlearn enough to imagine she had really come home), and nodded. “Interesting,” she said. “From your behavior up until now, I would never have expected those went anywhere but a dead-letter office.”
“I read them,” Mahit told her. “I—at the time when I read them, I was very glad to have some external confirmation of what I myself was noticing.”
“Drink your vodka,” Onchu told her. “We’re going to take a walk.”
Good, Mahit told him, and then—because he heard everything she thought anyway, because she was never alone again, Let’s see if interested means “would like me safely dead,” as usual.
The warm prickles of imago-laughter made the vodka shot burn sharper as she took it. “Where to, Councilor?”
“Think I’ll show you around,” said Onchu. “I’m due to inspect the hangar this shift. Come along. It’ll be an education.”
Mahit had been in Lsel Station’s hangar before, but always as a passenger leaving the Station or on the yearly evacuation-safety-training days required for every Station resident. Walking into that cavernous space—cacophonous with talking, the thump and whine of maintenance machinery, the huge hum of cooling fans—next to the Councilor for the Pilots herself was a rather different experience. No one told Dekakel Onchu where to go: she walked amongst her people as if she had never quite wanted to be possessed of an office and a legislative responsibility. Mahit followed at her shoulder, feeling acutely ungrubby and uncalloused. There were so many parts of a spacecraft, and all of them were everywhere, being worked on by Stationers who understood them as intimately as Mahit understood the cadence of Teixcalaanli poetry.
“So,” said Onchu, just loud enough for Mahit to hear over the roar of the fans, “you read my letters, and you thought what?”
“That you must have had real reasons for sending a warning like that,” Mahit said. “An unauthorized communiqué, that—if it had ever reached Ambassador Aghavn—would have meant that our Station’s official ambassador was a danger to him.”
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“I knew what I had done,” said Onchu. “You don’t need to prove that you’re competent enough to figure that out.” They were walking in a slow zigzag, tracking back and forth across the hangar floor. Half of Lsel Station’s short-range transports were docked in here, being loaded or unloaded—the usual minerals and refined molybdenum, more unusual (to Mahit’s eyes, at least, and she knew she was less informed than she’d like to be on Lsel’s standard set of exports) pallets of compressed kelp, dried fish, rice … and most of those pallets were stamped with Teixcalaanli import papers. It looked very like Lsel was feeding the Teixcalaanli warships passing through Bardzravand Sector, the ones which were on the way to the war that had begun almost as soon as Mahit had come back to the Station.
The war that Councilor Tarats started, to preserve us, Mahit thought at him—and then stopped thinking, because Dekakel Onchu was watching her, watching every shift of her body language. Watching for Yskandr, or not-Yskandr. (For evidence of sabotage.) And even as she watched Mahit, she was moving amongst her people, stopping every so often to comment on a piece of work being done, or merely say hello to the pilot or maintenance engineer in question.
Some emperors are emperors of very narrow spaces, just enough to fill entirely with themselves, Mahit thought. When they were passing by a particularly noisy hull repair job, she asked as directly as she could, “What made you suspect Heritage?”
Onchu snorted. “Because it wasn’t Tarats, and the others on the Council had neither access nor motive. Who else but the person who has control over all of our memories, whose responsibility is keeping us safe and cohesive?”
“Culturally safe,” Mahit said.
“Amnardbat is a patriot,” said Dekakel Onchu, who had flown ships in combat for the sake of Lsel Station, who Mahit thought would have given her life for her fellow pilots, and thus for the Station as a whole. She waited to see if the Councilor had anything more to add. In the silence between them the sound of metal banging on metal filled the whole world.
“And so am I, it turns out,” Onchu went on, with an infinitesimal shrug of one shoulder. “Heritage should not be making such unilateral decisions about diplomacy. We’re a council of six, and Miners breaks the ties, not Heritage.”
“What did Councilor Amnardbat do to me?” Mahit asked, and let herself be as miserably upset about the question as she wanted. Which was a great deal.
“Ah,” said Onchu, “then she did succeed,” and Mahit had to stop herself from breaking into snickering, helpless and horrified—Onchu hadn’t even been sure, she’d guessed at the sabotage, and thought it was worth warning the dead Yskandr about regardless.
“Someone did,” she managed, just on the edge of that hysteria. “Quite effectively, really. I thought it was my fault—neurological failure, there are cases where an imago doesn’t take—”
“You’re not alone,” Onchu said. “You don’t move like Mahit Dzmare when I first met her.”
No. No, she didn’t. She’d shown that off very pointedly in the bar, and was probably showing it still—she herself didn’t exactly know how she moved. If she ever moved like the person she’d been when she had been alone. “Some of the damage turned out to be reversible,” she said, which wasn’t not true. It just wasn’t very much of what was true.
“In less complex circumstances, I’d be sending you over to medical to have that very thoroughly investigated, for the purposes of possibly reproducing the reclamation of function,” Onchu said. “I hate losing imago-lines to neuro damage, and pilots—well. Lots of ways to get hit on the head. It’d be good to have a way of reestablishing a line that did manage to come back from an incident—I lose enough people as it is, lately.”
“In less complex circumstances,” Mahit replied, so dry that her tongue felt withered in her mouth, “there wouldn’t be anything to investigate, would there.”
Onchu laughed, soundless under the whine of a metal-cutter saw; laughed, and waved a half salute to the man operating it, who grinned back at her, signed all good, and went back to his work. “We suffer under complexity, Dzmare. So tell me. What made you finally decide to get off your ass and come down to the hangar?”
In six days I’m fucked sideways seemed too much like a confession. Like an appeal for sanctuary. She’d tried that on Teixcalaan, and look where it had gotten her: home, except never home again.
Mahit ignored him. Yskandr—she, too, but mostly Yskandr—had a history of sleeping with emperors. Sleeping next to emperors, or proto-emperors, anyway, while they went their sleepless rounds of work. A thoroughly distracting history. And even if Onchu was worried about losing too many pilot-lines, too many deaths out in the black where Tarats’s alien threat hunkered; Mahit couldn’t trust Pilots to keep her safe through the revelation of her doubled imago any more than she could trust Heritage.
No one can know.
Not now, Yskandr.
“Heritage got off its ass,” she said to Onchu. “Thought I should do the same. Now, how about you tell me what you thought you were trying to accomplish by warning Aghavn about me?”
Onchu pressed her lips together, dark red line like a cut beading blood. “Patriotism,” she said, again. “Ask your imago—if that’s still something you can do, if you’ve got more than muscle memory—about Darj Tarats and his philosophy of empire, and then, if you have more questions … I drink in that bar every seventh shift. Come on by.”
Darj Tarats? Mahit asked, internal query …
… and what she got back was
* * *
A formal meal on Weight for the Wheel was a precise affair, a protocol dance, a prescribed sequence of events from the entrance of the commanding officer to the final libation poured out for the Emperor, a few drops of alcohol substituting for blood in this latter fallen age—not that Nine Hibiscus was the sort of Fleet Captain who would rather bleed into a bowl for propriety rather than give up her last swallow of peat liquor. This was a very small formal meal: four settings around a table in a conference room hastily made grand with Tenth Legion banners and the black-and-gold starburst-cloisonné plates that matched their banner colors. Nine Hibiscus herself wore exactly what she’d been wearing while listening to the hideous alien noises, which was her regular uniform with its new rank stars at the collar: not just her Fleet Captain’s four, but the spear-arc collar tabs of a yaotlek, like the top of the imperial throne cut off and turned sideways.
Guests were seated first, and thus Nine Hibiscus and Twenty Cicada came into the room to find Sixteen Moonrise and her adjutant, the ikantlos-prime Twelve Fusion, already seated poised over their empty plates, waiting like scavenger birds. She’d never met Sixteen Moonrise in person before, only over holo—the Twenty-Fourth Legion and her own Tenth had never been posted in the same sector of space before this particular campaign. Sixteen Moonrise was tall, and her skin and hair were the same suite of colors, like she’d been stamped from a die: the color of the moon if the moon was a coin. Pale face, long and straight pale hair, electrum-sheeny, left—for this official, ceremonious meeting—loose of the queue she usually kept it in. She was younger than Nine Hibiscus by a half indiction, according to her official record. Those three and a half years meant they’d never known each other as cadets. She looked serene and hungry at once.
“The yaotlek Nine Hibiscus, Fleet Captain of the Tenth Teixcalaanli Legion,” murmured the soldier acting as steward, and both Sixteen Moonrise and her second bowed over their fingertips, deep inclinations.
“Welcome aboard the Weight for the Wheel,” Nine Hibiscus said.
“We are welcome indeed,” Sixteen Moonrise replied, the rote and required response, “your hospitality is as boundless as the stars, yaotlek, and as light-giving.”
Nine Hibiscus sat. The table was small enough that all four of them were practically
brushing elbows, save for Twenty Cicada, who was too skinny to brush elbows with anyone. The soldier at the door gestured fractionally, and another one of her people came in with real bread—every ship had some flour and yeast, for the particular rituals of hospitality that required their products—and the palest distilled wheat spirit, so alcoholic just inhaling it felt like being drunk: starshine, the Emperor’s drink. Every ship had that, too. (Some more than others. Nine Hibiscus kept Weight for the Wheel well stocked.)
When she’d planned this meal—a strategy dinner, a transparent I-know-you-know-I-know ruse for Sixteen Moonrise to chew on along with her bread—Nine Hibiscus had meant to start with that letter demanding an explanation for the long delay in engagement with the enemy. Start with that, with her knowing about it before it had even officially arrived; cut Sixteen Moonrise’s little political maneuver down at the knees and leave it to bleed out. But since then she’d been listening to aliens. Since then she’d seen their spit eat up one of her own.
“Fleet Captain,” she began. Sixteen Moonrise inclined her head a fraction. “About an hour ago, while you were in transit, we engaged the enemy forces for the first time.”
There was an expression there, but not much of an interpretable one. Twelve Fusion was more obvious: he put his glass of starshine down on the table with a sharp click. “And you’re having us for dinner?” he asked. “Why aren’t you on the bridge?”
“Because you’re my guests, and my Fleet Captains—particularly the eager ones—are my best tools in the campaign that is about to begin in earnest,” Nine Hibiscus snapped. There, that was the I-know-what-you-did portion of the meeting gestured at. If she moved fast enough, she wouldn’t need to expand into a full dressing-down. Sixteen Moonrise was a Fleet Captain, and Nine Hibiscus was going to need the full complement of the Twenty-Fourth Legion—she could have used a triple six of legions, not just a yaotlek’s standard complement of one six, if she was being brutally honest with herself about the situation at hand. Unknown numbers of aliens, a force strong enough to silence whole planets, and here she was with only one six of legions—but she’d been outnumbered before. She’d been outnumbered on Kauraan, and Kauraan had won her this posting, for whatever good it would do her. “And besides,” she finished, ripping a chunk of bread off her roll with her teeth, “the enemy that dared engage us has been neutralized entirely. We aren’t in an active combat situation, Twelve Fusion. Do you think I’d have let you risk yourself and your Fleet Captain coming aboard during one?”
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