A Desolation Called Peace

by Arkady Martine

  “Don’t talk,” said Nine Hibiscus. “Don’t talk to me. Talk to them. And don’t die. This line is open, and I will send Shards for you—”

  “If I needed Shards, I’d already be dead by the time they arrived. Hush. I think they’re drawing fractals. Or—mycelium—”

  More static. And silence.

  Into that silence, Three Seagrass said, with all the vicious brightness she could summon, “See? Still talking. So I think we should wait for official word from the Emperor before you send in that strike force—because you know that the instant you attack that planetary system, he’ll die down there on Peloa. And for what, yaotlek? What sacrifice are you making?”

  Nine Hibiscus turned to her slowly—it was more threatening than a fast wheel would be. Ah, Three Seagrass thought, weight, weight for the wheel, I see, and tried not to let anyone know she wanted to have hysterics. Hysterics were for after the negotiation!

  “I’ve already sent to the Emperor for confirmation, Envoy. No need to reiterate that argument.”

  “Of course,” Three Seagrass told her, light, light, easy—and then whirled, within her triangle, to face Darj Tarats. “Tell us, Councilor,” she said, dropping a level of formality and making herself sound vicious and bored, a poet having to speak to an illiterate at court (and wasn’t this whole negotiation a sort of version of that hoary old trope? With Nine Hibiscus standing in for the Emperor and the bridge for the glittering fan-vaults of Palace-Earth—ah, but she missed the City, for the first time in a while, and intensely), “just how do you suppose that Ambassador Dzmare is responsible for your purported sudden invasion? As far as I am aware—and I have been with the Ambassador since you so kindly allowed me to borrow her from her deserved vacation at home—she has done nothing but contribute to the universal effort to minimize casualties and elucidate meaning out of meaningless conflict. What is it you said she’d failed to do? Communicate with you? Councilor, when would she have had time?”

  It was a masterful little performance, if Three Seagrass was any judge of her own rhetorical abilities. She liked elucidate meaning out of meaningless conflict—it was a good paraphrase of Eleven Lathe, and someone (perhaps only her, but someone) would appreciate the allusion.

  But Darj Tarats was depressingly unimpressed. He didn’t respond to Three Seagrass at all—he looked at her, all disdain, and turned to say another brisk phrase in Stationer to Mahit, a blur of consonants. Three Seagrass caught the few words she was sure of: “Yskandr,” and the Stationer word for “empire,” which wasn’t at all the same as the word for Teixcalaan. Mahit, the pistol still under her throat, shut her eyes—the lashes fluttered. When she opened them again, she looked different. Not quite herself. The curve of her mouth was wide. The gesture of her hand broad and lazy. Like she was possessed. Like she was—Yskandr Aghavn, probably.

  (And which one of them had had her beautiful hands all over Three Seagrass? What a completely inopportune question for her to fixate on right now! Even if the answer was likely a horrifying both. She was never going to like the idea of imago-machines, was she. Not that it’d matter, if Mahit got herself killed now—)

  Even her tone was different when she spoke. First in Stationer—there was that word for “empire” again, and another one Three Seagrass knew, “associate,” because that verb was all over import/export documents. And then in Teixcalaanli, thank every single divinity anyone had ever sacrificed blood to: Mahit saying, “I have been tasked with making aliens understandable, Councilor, and with influencing their behavior toward our Station. As you have always tasked me, haven’t you?”

  Oh, but there was a history there. Three Seagrass wanted to know it. Wanted to get her mouth around it, and her mind, and chew it up and spit it out again. If Darj Tarats had demanded that Mahit be a saboteur, what had he asked of Yskandr Aghavn, who had been the Emperor Six Direction’s favorite barbarian? How much of what he had asked had Aghavn refused? How much had Aghavn done?

  Five Thistle shoved the pistol up tighter against Mahit’s throat, and she went still again. Silent. The movement of her jaw when she swallowed was a stifled gulp. He said, “Is that not a confession of spying, yaotlek? Stealing our secrets and trying to influence our behavior.” Which was tantamount to should I shoot her now? so Three Seagrass really needed to say exactly the right thing—

  But Nine Hibiscus got there first. “One does not, Five Thistle, expect a barbarian to do anything but put her fellow barbarians first in her mind.”

  How correct! (Mahit was going to hate that it was correct! Three Seagrass could cope with that later.)

  “And yet,” Three Seagrass said, quick interruption, “Ambassador Dzmare was willing to come when I asked her to, to lend her skills to our first-contact effort. To serve not only her Station but all of Teixcalaan. Nothing is ever simple, yaotlek, not with barbarians. Not with Mahit Dzmare, who brought our Emperor to her throne, and warned us of our enemy, and knows us very well—and came with me anyway.”

  As she said it, she realized she was apologizing. For the stupid thing with Mahit’s jacket. For not talking to her. For assuming she would come with her, of course she would—and not thinking that when the Empire asked, even in the person of a friend, a maybe-lover, there really was no way for a barbarian to say no and keep being the kind of barbarian the Empire thought of as a person.

  That was a nasty realization that she was going to have to think a lot more about when people stopped pointing energy weapons at each other on the bridge. Later. (She wanted there to be a later. Rather badly, at this point.)

  “And you, Councilor Tarats!” she went on, trying to talk her way toward that later. “Whatever it is that you wish Ambassador Dzmare had done already—if you continue to push us into believing that she is some sort of agent of yours, the officer will dispose of her, and what a waste that would be. Silencing a voice that speaks in your language, which we nevertheless understand.” She forced herself to laugh, light, self-deprecating. “Well. Understand a little. You have ever so many consonants, Councilor.”

  There was a little, breathless, terrifying silence. And then Nine Hibiscus said, “Let the Ambassador go, Five Thistle. For the moment. And shall we have our visitor tell us properly what it is that is happening in Parzrawantlak Sector? In detail, Councilor Tarats. And in a civilized language, if you can manage it.”

  The pistol came away. Three Seagrass could hear Mahit’s rapid, indrawn breath. She wanted to hug her. Hold her, maybe. Kiss her, definitely. But that would ruin all of the careful balance she’d just managed to spin, so all she did was look her in the eyes, directly, and smile with her teeth showing. It was possible she was getting better at it.

  * * *

  He was glad he’d thrown up in the shower, because that meant he didn’t have anything else to throw up on the subway, or on the groundcar shuttle from the last working subway station to the spaceport. The City’s investigation into the derailment wasn’t over—or there had been a bomb and the repairs weren’t done. Either way, there wasn’t a subway to Inmost Province Spaceport proper: there was the biggest groundcar Eight Antidote had ever been in, with no seats, just poles to hang on to, stuffed with grown-ups and other children and luggage. He fit right in: probably everyone thought he was someone else’s kid. A whole lot of people looked like they either had or wanted to vomit in the shuttle: it jerked when it started and stopped, and hanging on to the poles was hard, and the luggage kept rolling into the backs of everyone’s legs and knocking them off balance.

  The worst part was that he was doing this without a cloudhook. Last time he’d left Palace-Central he’d had a guide, and he’d had the City watching over him—but he needed to move fast and quiet now. He wasn’t sure whether Her Brilliance would let him keep being a spy, keep having the freedom to get in trouble and learn information he shouldn’t know. Or that someone didn’t want him to know. He’d disagreed with her to her face. And now he was in the process of countermanding her orders. If he let the City and all its camera-eyes cro
ss-reference the location of his cloudhook with what images they could capture of him—well. If the Emperor wanted to stop him, he’d be making it easy.

  So he left his cloudhook in the subway, right before he switched lines and got onto the horrible shuttle. Took it off to rub his eye—pretending he was a littler kid, an eight-year-old with their very first cloudhook, not used to wearing it—and set it on the seat next to him. When he got up and exited at the Plaza Central One stop (huge, and he was so glad he’d done this once with a cloudhook, because he’d never find his way through its seven levels of interlocking tracks alone) he left it there. Presumably it was still there, going around and around the subway, stop to stop, back and forth. And he was exposed, and free, and inside a crowd tall enough to maybe hide him from some of the City’s eyes, and he hated it. He hated it a lot.

  The infofiche stick with his replacement order was tucked inside his shirt, where he couldn’t lose it or drop it or have it fall out. It was a sharp rectangular pressure, pushing into his belly every time some adult jostled him in the groundcar shuttle. When the shuttle’s doors finally opened and everyone inside flowed out into Inmost Province Spaceport, Eight Antidote tried not to stay still, not to stop walking. If he stopped, he’d probably turn around. He didn’t want to be here. The spaceport was so loud, and the subway entrances were still roped off, and he had to walk by a whole squadron of Sunlit and not look to see if their featureless gold helmet-faces had all turned to look at him, recognize him, tell the whole City and the Emperor what he was about to do.

  (Maybe tell whoever it was who had derailed the subway to try again. That was a horrible idea, and he wanted to never have thought of it.)

  Tulip Terminal to Nasturtium Terminal. At least he remembered the way. He felt like he was a tiny starship projected over a strategy cartograph table, moving on a designed trajectory set by someone else, someone who might have been him back in the palace but was a wholly different person than the scared kid he was right now.

  The Information Ministry kiosk in Nasturtium Terminal was exactly where it had been, and there were still two Information Ministry officials inside it, looking bored. Eight Antidote fished his infofiche out of his shirt, rubbed it to polished gleaming on his trouser leg, and then—trying to look like an Imperial errand runner, out of breath because he’d come here as fast as he could, not because he was scared to pieces—came up to them.

  “Excuse me, asekretim,” he said. “I have an Imperial order that needs to go into the jumpgate mail on fastest-courier override.”

  One of the two raised her eyebrows. “You do?” she asked.

  Eight Antidote summoned all the righteous rage of a kid with a job who didn’t get believed because he was a kid, and squared his shoulders. He put the stick on the kiosk with a click. “Yes, I do,” he said. “From Palace-Earth. That’s the Emperor’s own infofiche stick, and it’s sealed with an imperial seal. You can look it up. Don’t you have a reference library of seals?”

  “… We do,” said the asekreta, but she was still saying it like she didn’t believe him. “And I’m happy to look up this one—but you do know that fraudulent use of an Imperial seal is a very big crime, right? I don’t have to look this up, if you don’t want me to.”

  Abruptly Eight Antidote wanted to laugh. She thought he was doing this for a prank! It was amazing. She clearly had no idea who he was. Maybe she had never seen a close-up picture of him. Maybe he looked older now than the last pictures. Maybe kiosk workers were just really stupid. It was incredibly frustrating—but amazing. He repeated himself: “You can look it up, asekreta. This needs to be on the next courier, all overrides, as fast as possible.”

  “Scan this, would you, Thirty-One Twilight?” said the asekreta he’d been talking to, and handed his infofiche stick to her coworker. “Let’s find out about it. Make sure it goes to the right place.”

  Watching the stick disappear into the kiosk made another wave of nausea creep up through Eight Antidote’s chest. He really hoped he didn’t throw up again. It would ruin everything right now—

  “The kid’s right,” said Thirty-One Twilight. “This is Her Brilliance’s own private-use infofiche stick, and it’s sealed correctly. Hey, kid—why did they send you with this?”

  Eight Antidote had already come up with an answer to that. He’d figured he’d need it. “Because I run the fastest,” he said, and smiled, wide-eyed and smug. “And I was on duty this morning, and everyone is really busy in Palace-Earth, what with the war. I said I could come deliver this, and no one with a grown-up job would have to waste half a day on the shuttle since the subway’s still down and it takes forever to get here.”

  It was a good answer. The asekretim seemed to like it, at least—or Thirty-One Twilight did. The other one still seemed dubious. “Who’s the addressee?” she asked.

  But Eight Antidote knew this part, too. The addressee was encoded in the message, inside the infofiche stick itself. And he—if he was an errand runner, someone not important—wouldn’t know what was under that seal. “I’m not sure, asekreta,” he said. “It’s above what I’m supposed to know about, I think. The imperial staff just said fastest courier, and it is going to the Fleet out on the front lines of the war. The rest is supposed to be inside.”

  That seemed to be enough. Maybe. The asekreta didn’t give him back the stick, at least. Instead she said, “It’s five and a half hours from point of origin to destination. You go tell that to your supervisor, all right? That’s the absolute fastest we can go.”

  “I’ll tell him,” said Eight Antidote, and tried not to giggle hysterically: his supervisor already knew, because he was his own supervisor. “Thank you! The Empire thanks you, also!”

  He thought he’d managed it—he’d done it, his order would be on its way out to the Fleet—but he knew he couldn’t stay to watch the Information Ministry workers send it. That’d be suspicious. Fraudulent, even. He wondered if he was committing mail fraud. He didn’t think so. He had every right to give this order.

  It was only what he was going to do next that was almost certainly illegal. No one was supposed to be inside a Shard except a Shard pilot, after all.

  * * *

  The Councilor from Lsel Station did not fit neatly into Nine Hibiscus’s more-private just-off-the-bridge conference room: he sat at the table there like a twisted metal stake driven hard into rich ground. Tall and thin, with a high forehead marked with an old man’s thinning curls. His hands were gnarled, arthritis-bulging where he rested them on the table, and still in restraints. His cheekbones looked as if they might be gnarled as well, with how the skin hung from them, dripping off their sharp and narrow points. He was the Lsel Station Councilor for the Miners, so presumably once he’d been hale enough to work ore out of an asteroid. Or perhaps he’d always been a shift boss. A man born to give orders to lesser men. Here on Weight for the Wheel, Nine Hibiscus found him to be an aberration and a discontinuity: but human. And thus something she could talk to, especially since he spoke language, as well as Stationer.

  She sat down across from him, which was the sort of respect he deserved. He was a member of a foreign government. She could do him some courtesy while she interrogated him. And interrogating him would distract her from how strange Twenty Cicada’s voice had sounded—from the hot-spark afterimages of Shard deaths, which seemed to live right behind her eyes now, even though she hadn’t dipped into Shard-sight for more than a day—from the accelerating curve of Sixteen Moonrise’s slow, barely plausibly deniable attack vector.

  From how she wasn’t sure if she wanted to stop Sixteen Moonrise at all, whatever Emperor Nineteen Adze’s opinion of the matter turned out to be.

  “Councilor Tarats,” she said. “The Fleet extends its apologies for briefly identifying your vessel as an enemy ship, and is pleased that no harm came to you in the resolution of that misapprehension. Welcome to the Weight for the Wheel.”

  “How very like a Teixcalaanlitzlim, to say I am welcome and have me chained,” sa
id the Councilor.

  “How very like a barbarian,” Nine Hibiscus said, before she could think better of it—she missed Twenty Cicada, she missed him terribly, it was much harder to be both the voice of reason and the instrument of threat, with only one person talking—“to take a welcome as a chance to demonstrate ingratitude. I am the yaotlek of this Fleet, Councilor. I rule here as the outreached hand of our Illuminate Emperor, with all Her power deferred to me within my sphere. And I, who could be waiting for actionable communication from my soldiers on the bridge of this ship, am taking the time to ask you to tell me what you know of the advances of our enemy toward your Station. For your sake and that of your people, as well as for us here on this ship, I suggest you begin to give me what we both need to know.”

  “What should a yaotlek of the Fleet want with knowing that all her ships and weapons have done nothing but allow her enemy to slip behind her and pour through the jumpgate she guards?” asked the Councilor. His Teixcalaanli was stilted, assembled from parts, full of older forms of verbs—and quite correct, even so. Nine Hibiscus wondered how often this Councilor had talked to his Ambassadors, and how deeply. And in which language.

  “To know how many and how fast, Councilor,” she said, “and whether it is worth our effort to send a legion or two to defend your Station, or simply brace behind the next jumpgate and wait to see if your thirty thousand lives are enough to sate the enemy on. For that, a yaotlek of the Fleet would want with knowing.” It pleased her to use his own strange constructions; she could see on his mobile, expressive, confusing barbarian face that he didn’t like it when she did. Perhaps he thought she considered him a fool.

  That she did not. She considered him a snake, and she was debating whether Mahit Dzmare was another of the same sort, or merely a person who had been bitten by a snake. Tarats looked at her unblinking, and then began with, “How many? Enough that we have scrambled all our pilots, which we have not done in seven generations; how fast? Perhaps you would like to tell us poor barbarian Stationers how to see the invisible, and then I could tell you.”