A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  Mahit said, “You are in trouble, aren’t you. Or the Empire is. It’s a bad war.”

  “How wide,” said Three Seagrass, “is Lsel’s definition of ‘you’?” Unspoken, but entirely acknowledged: Yes, it’s a bad war. We don’t know the nature of the enemy, we’ve lost multiple resource-extraction colonies, you yourself told us how bad it will be if we let these all-devouring aliens move farther into our territory. Why would the Fleet want a diplomat, when they already have warships, if this wasn’t a bad war?

  Half of Mahit’s mouth had twisted up, a grimace, close to laughter but suppressed. “Not wide enough,” she said, and for a moment she sounded like—someone else. The way her face moved, too—not quite right. Not what Three Seagrass remembered. Three Seagrass needed to ask her about why she’d been surrounded by her own government’s highest officials. It was Mahit. She was probably up to her hairline in unpleasant and threatening politics all on her own time, if Three Seagrass knew her at all.

  (They’d really only been together a little over a week, in the City. A week wasn’t enough to know someone. But that week seemed longer. Fulcrum points usually did. There was before that week, when Three Seagrass had been an ambitious young Information agent with a habit of spending her evenings at court poetry salons, and a best friend out in the City who she’d known since they’d been cadets together; and then there was after, when she was Three Seagrass, Third Undersecretary to the Minister for Information, and her friend was dead, and she hadn’t written a poem, much less read one at court, in more than two months.)

  “Are you in trouble?” she asked Mahit.

  “When haven’t I been?” Mahit said, and sighed, and sank back into her couch, letting go of Three Seagrass’s wrist. The loss felt like a spark-gap, widened just too far for current to pass through.

  “Presumably you were an exemplary student,” Three Seagrass said.

  “All right,” Mahit agreed, “I was briefly not in trouble, while safely locked in an examination hall.”

  “And now?”

  “I would have come back to the City eventually,” Mahit said, after an excruciating pause. “I think I would have. When I thought it was the right time.”

  Three Seagrass waited for her. She thought Mahit had already arrived at her decision, but it was better if Three Seagrass didn’t push her while she made it a decision that could be spoken out loud. She’d pushed fairly hard already. Mahit might not forgive her for that, later on. If this went badly for them. Or even—especially—if it went well. Hadn’t she run off just when it seemed like the City and all of Teixcalaan had finally stopped trying to kill her and acknowledged how much it could make use of her, barbarian or not, instead? She might do it again: succeed, and then write herself out of Teixcalaan’s memory and history, make herself a ghost, exiled to her own home.

  Mahit shut her eyes, squeezed their lids shut. She pressed her fingertips to the wrinkles that drew themselves up her forehead, twin worry lines. “You’re going to have to make this very official,” she said, muffled by her own palm. “‘The Ministry of Information commands, at the order of Her Brilliance the Emperor’ sort of official. The Edgeshine of a Knife, through her envoy Three Seagrass, demands the immediate presence of the Ambassador Mahit Dzmare on the Whatever That Legion’s Flagship Is Called.”

  She had an annoyingly good grasp on exactly how Teixcalaanli communiqués were structured grammatically. It wasn’t fair that she was a barbarian. She’d have made a brilliant Information agent.

  “And while you’re at it,” Mahit went on, “please don’t break our import-export laws again? Find a way to have been here officially all along. I would like Councilor Onchu not to find reasons beyond the usual ones to hate me.”

  Three Seagrass was going to have to find out what the usual reasons were. But she’d have a while, she thought. She’d have the three-month length of her assignment, and a battlefront. That was long enough to get to know anyone, and all their secrets. Even if they were Mahit Dzmare.

  * * *

  “The Empire is going to remember the colonist-workers of Peloa-2 as Teixcalaanlitzlim who died in combat,” Twenty Cicada was saying to the assembled soldiers, standing rank on rank in the widest hangar bay of Weight for the Wheel—the only space on the ship large enough to assemble all nonemergency, nondeployed personnel. “Your participation in these mourning rites will make sure of it. You will carry the dead of Peloa-2 in your memory; you will inscribe their names on the weapons with which you will avenge them. The blood they spilled will not be drunk by the ground of their planet, but by the Empire that fed them, and feeds you too.”

  It wasn’t the usual funeral oration. It couldn’t be, for many reasons: a funeral for so many dead at once could only be done via the modes Teixcalaan had developed either for commemorating space-dead, or the ones for plague victims. Nine Hibiscus was glad Twenty Cicada had gone for a variant on these citizens died in the black between the stars and we reclaim their blood sacrifice from the void, rather than the world is out of balance and illness obliterates our grief and their lives mercifully. They’d had a disagreement about which one to choose. He’d made a disturbingly convincing argument that the eviscerated bodies were plague-dead and the plague was the aliens, a plague that destroyed without meaning, like a virus that killed its hosts so fast that it killed itself, too.

  Nine Hibiscus didn’t want that sort of idea spread to the rest of her soldiers, even if Twenty Cicada was usually right about how systems worked, even—especially—biological ones. Having an entire legion of frightened germophobes would cripple any direct engagement with the enemy that happened face-to-face, or face-to-mandible, or face to whatever horror they actually turned out to be. Neither did she want a bunch of overeager captains breaking out the flamethrowers and biochemical sanitizing blanket bombs. The next planet they recaptured might have survivors. She wasn’t willing to give up on that possibility. Not yet.

  The Information Ministry spook couldn’t get here soon enough, for her tastes. If she was going to be able to talk to these things at all, it needed to be soon. While she still had even the slightest shred of desire to. A war of extermination, against these aliens, would have a great many Teixcalaanli casualties, more than she was willing to risk, even if the first group of them happened to be someone else’s legion and not her own people. But they would be her people. Her people, who had followed her out to this bleak edge. They deserved better than being bodies thrown into the machinery of a war in order to begin the breaking of its gears. So she had to figure out if there was anything there to talk to, anything worth what had happened to Peloa-2, what had probably happened to the other darkened systems in this sector.

  “From this barren soil will grow new flowers,” Twenty Cicada said, intent and dreamy-soft, an enticement made audible throughout the entire hangar, reverberating in everyone’s cloudhook, on the overhead speakers, on the other speakers embedded in the floor, bone-conduction transmission so that a captain’s voice—or an adjutant’s voice, if one’s adjutant could have been a great orator if he hadn’t wanted to be a soldier instead, and had unorthodox religious beliefs besides—could sound inside the skull of every soldier gathered. Be felt, collectively. “They will be hard-won flowers—fragile petals well defended by your hands, with parasites beaten away, warmed by the sunlight of energy weapons.”

  The parasites line was definitely Twenty Cicada having feelings about plague. About homeostasis, and balance. Even if the rest of this speech was the usual rousing entry to a collective mourning rite—all of those soldiers would be pricking their fingers for a blood-bowl by the end of the hour, the sort of bowl she could pour out on Peloa-2’s empty factory floor like a promise (and she would do it herself, better her than Sixteen Moonrise, it had to be the yaotlek who led the Fleet)—talking about parasites was entirely from Twenty Cicada’s own philosophy and religious convictions.

  Nine Hibiscus trusted him more than anyone else in the entire galaxy, and she still didn’t understand why h
e didn’t follow the usual Teixcalaanli religion. Spend time in a sun temple and bleed for luck like anyone else. He’d always kept to the religion of his home planet instead—the homeostat-cult, in crude parlance, even though his home planet had been inside the Empire for generations. Her ikantlos-prime fasted and shaved his head and filled his personal chamber with a thousand growing-green plants, and kept the logistical flow of her ship (and her legion, and her Fleet) running in perfect systematic balance. A person’s religion was their own business, Nine Hibiscus had always thought, but—

  Parasites.

  It probably wouldn’t matter. Most of these soldiers wouldn’t even register the valences. They hadn’t seen Peloa-2. They hadn’t seen the alien ship-spit eat up one of their own Shard pilots—except for the other Shard pilots who had shared her death. Felt her death, all the way down to the last merciful conflagration. They would know. She wondered how this oration was landing with them. The new technology made Shard pilots even closer to one another than they’d been when she was one of them, and they’d been close then—the closeness of people who were willing to die in starfire brilliance, as easy as breathing.

  It was almost over. Twenty Cicada had reached the part of the rite which everyone knew: the call and response eulogy-poem that had closed almost all funerals since the time of the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare, when it had been written for her dead ezuazuacat Two Amaranth.

  “Within each cell is a bloom of chemical fire,” Twenty Cicada began, and by the time he’d finished the syllables of the line, half the soldiers were saying it along with him, a massed voice that made Nine Hibiscus ache with how much she loved them, loved all of them, loved the hungry and clever beast they made together, they her claws and her lungs and her eyes, and she their guiding mind.

  “All of Peloa-2, committed to the earth,” Twenty Cicada said, slurring the scansion to make it fit, “shall burst into a thousand flowers—”

  “As many as their breaths in life,” Nine Hibiscus said, joining in. Her mouth knew the shapes of these words. How many times had she said them? How many lives had she commemorated in this way?

  Enough. Enough to feel ancient, standing here with all of her soldiers looking up at her on the bridge, to feel heavy in the weight of all their regard.

  “And we shall recall their names!”

  All the soldiers together: “Their names and the names of their ancestors!”

  “And in those names, the people gathered here let blood bloom also from their palms,” called Twenty Cicada, and the soldiers with the copper bowls and carbon-steel sacrifice knives began to move up and down their assigned rows. “And shall cast this chemical fire as well into the earth, to join them—”

  The bowl and knife came to Nine Hibiscus’s left. She sliced the pad of her left thumb open, right through the scar from the last time she’d given funereal blood, after Kauraan. She healed fast. It was a good quality in a Fleet Captain.

  It was probably an even better one in a yaotlek.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  … the problem (one of the problems) with Third Palmers is that they hate Information enough to cover their tracks on public networks. The Undersecretary Eleven Laurel was a good soldier, but the last time I fought with him we were both twenty years younger, and he’s immured himself in the Ministry of War for longer than I’ve even been on-City. Which makes him institutional memory, especially now that I’ve relocated Nine Propulsion. You know the parameters, Five Agate—get me a dossier before he finishes educating Six Direction’s heir and decides he’d like to be Minister of War, would you?

  —private cloudhook communication, Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze, Emperor of All Teixcalaan, to the ezuazuacat Five Agate, undated, encrypted

  * * *

  HOLOPROJ SHOW! THIRD SHIFT THROUGH FIFTH SHIFT ON THE PARABOLIC COMPRESSION DECK TWO TONIGHT, AND SIMULCAST TO ANYONE CLOSE ENOUGH TO TUNE IN! SHOWING THE LATEST EPISODES OF ASPHODEL DROWNING (YES THE NEW ONES! SEASON FIVE! WE MEAN IT! DON’T ASK WHERE WE GOT THEM!)

  THANK THE GLORIOUS TWENTY-FOURTH LEGION FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT WHILE WE ALL WAIT AROUND WITH OUR THUMBS UP OUR ASSES

  —signage posted on multiple decks of the Parabolic Compression and other Fleet ships in the Sixth, Twenty-Fourth, and Fortieth Legions

  THE Jasmine Throat, a Succor-class Teixcalaanli supply ship, had begun its journey out of Teixcalaanli space a good three weeks before Three Seagrass had, headed for the war with a bellyful of flash-dried cured meats, energy-pulse chargers sized variously for hand weapons all the way up to Shard cannons, apricots and squash blossoms to rehydrate or chew dried on long deployments, and gallons and gallons of medical-grade plasma suspension fluid. Your standard complement of we don’t know what this war is going to be like, but you’ll probably need to eat, and shoot people, and patch up your wounded. The Jasmine Throat had filed a travel plan, and obtained a transit visa for the sector of space that Lsel Station was in, and was, right on schedule, passing by the Station on its way to the Anhamemat Gate and nastier regions beyond.

  Three Seagrass, who had put back on her special-envoy uniform with considerable relief the moment she was alone enough to dig it out of her luggage and strip off the jumpsuit, hailed it as it came into hailing range.

  The captain of the Jasmine Throat was ixplanatl Six Capsaicin, who did not sound nearly as surprised as Three Seagrass had expected him to be when hailed by an Information Ministry special envoy and asked for a pickup shuttle off of the local not-quite-imperial, definitely-an-independent-republic-we-swear mining station. Probably he had stranger things happen to him all the time—he was a captain and had managed to earn ixplanatl rank, which meant he’d written some kind of scientific thesis in addition to qualifying himself to fly a military supply ship. A person like that surely had had more inconvenient adventures than this one. He had simply checked Three Seagrass’s identity glyph against his cloudhook, determined she was in fact herself and was supposed to be headed to Weight for the Wheel on assignment. Then she’d sent him Mahit’s assignment: the Lsel Ambassador to Teixcalaan, who had graciously volunteered to contribute her skills to the war effort, considering the proximity of her home culture to the front, also needed to be transported there posthaste. Three Seagrass had made the language very official. She hadn’t needed to; Six Capsaicin shrugged, said, “What’s one more warm body for twenty hours, we’ve got the oxygen and she can’t eat that much, Stationers have standard bodily chemistries,” and informed Three Seagrass that a transport shuttle would be arriving for her and her companion in three and three-quarters hours.

  It would be very useful if Mahit would come back by then.

  They’d arrived at their—agreement, or decision, inside the fungible rent-an-office, and then Mahit had said that she had some loose ends to tie up, which was entirely transparent: she had to go use Three Seagrass’s offer to get herself out of whatever political tangle she’d been in the middle of. Two Councilors out of—Three Seagrass consulted her cloudhook’s onboard storage memory, pulling up the dossier on Lsel Station’s government—only six. A full one-third of the government right there in the hangar, chummily having some sort of problem on either side of Mahit Dzmare.

  So it made sense that she’d need the time. Even if waiting for her was nerve-racking.

  Waiting also left Three Seagrass at loose ends, in a place she’d never been, and what she wanted more than just about anything else, right now, was to go wandering and get to know it. She’d promised not to leave the deck with the hangar bay, and she planned to keep that promise, but—oh, it was likely a good two miles of a loop around, and full of all sorts of sights. And when would she have the opportunity to see Mahit’s home again? Probably never. It’d be a waste not to go sightseeing. It wasn’t even sightseeing! It was reconnaissance. She was designed for reconnaissance; she was Information Ministry.

  She climbed out of the office-pod and arbitrarily decided to turn left down the corridor. Her cloudhook was next to useless here, aside from comm
unicating with Teixcalaanli vessels that might be inside this sector of space. Once she’d gone through a jumpgate into a sector without a Teixcalaanli repeater station network, it couldn’t talk to the City or to much else; cloudhook technology didn’t cross jumpgates. Nothing crossed a jumpgate unless it went through a jumpgate, physically. All she had was onboard storage, her own documents, and a scaled-down, nonupdating version of the Information Ministry intranet, which entirely lacked a map of the inside of Lsel Station. (If she was really doing reconnaissance, she should turn on her cloudhook’s geomapping function while she walked around, but she hadn’t come here to be a spy. It seemed vastly impolite.)

  The corridors on Lsel were wide enough to walk four abreast, and floored in metal polished by many feet to a comfortable matte sheen. The first strange thing about walking inside them was that there was sunlight. Sunlight everywhere. She’d always imagined that a station would be a closed metal box, all artificial lighting and no plants to speak of, nothing that grew. But Lsel’s corridors—or at least this outer loop—had well-designed plastisteel window ports, and outside was the lovely spangled starfield, and a genuine small and cheerful sun with a pleasant white-gold light. It was moving quite quickly, that light—the station’s rotational period certainly wasn’t going to be anything like a day, more like four sunrises and sunsets in a usual human-length cycle. Three Seagrass could imagine enjoying that. All those sunrises.

  The second strange thing was the people. Stationers were tall, and Stationers were very, very good at ignoring one another, and even at ignoring small Teixcalaanlitzlim in bright coral-orange uniforms. They didn’t make much eye contact, and they slipped out of each other’s way even in the more-crowded parts of the corridors with practiced ease. Three Seagrass imagined that it was a side effect of living in such a small space; they acted like they were Inmost Province City-dwellers, happy and comfortable with being crowded, and yet she knew very well that there were only thirty thousand of them on the whole Station.