A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HER first desert, even without the anticipation of attempted negotiations with murderous and incomprehensible alien life, was intoxicating. It stretched all around the landing site in an endless wave of bone-white silica sand, unmarked by water or by vegetation save for one copse of small, wide-crowned grey-green trees near the buildings that the Teixcalaanli refinery workers had lived in before they had all died. Those buildings were white, too. Sun-bleached. Even the sky had all the color leached out of it, reducing it to a hazy blue-pallor vault.

Mahit had never been on a planet as hot as Peloa-2. She’d never thought about planets as hot as Peloa-2, certainly not as places people might actually live. Temperatures this high were on the edge of human tolerances. If there had been a heat anomaly of this intensity on Lsel Station, half of the Stationers would be preparing for emergency evacuation because of radical life support system failure. The soldiers on Weight for the Wheel had warned her and Three Seagrass before they’d all boarded the atmospheric-descent shuttle: take extra water. Drink even if you aren’t thirsty. If you’re down there for more than eight hours, take salt pills. Try to stay out of direct sunlight.

Mahit had thought they were being melodramatic, trying to tease the Information agent and the barbarian, City-born or eternally foreign: neither one the sort of people who would know how to deal with inclement environments, of course. But they weren’t teasing. The air on Peloa-2 was dry enough it sucked the moisture from her tongue in the space of a breath. The light seemed to have both weight and weightlessness all at once. She felt a pressured sort of heat, sunlight on her skin but also the air itself, so hot, making her respiration deeper, her heart slower, as if the gravity on this planet was twice as high as it truly was—and at the same time, she felt drunk. Featherlight. Like she could walk forever into the bright desert of Peloa-2 and come back unharmed.

And then the wind changed, and the smell of charnel drifted toward her and Three Seagrass and their small escort of Fleet soldiers: the dead colonists, rotting in their factory buildings. The leavings of the creatures—the people, Mahit was going to think of them as people for the duration of this encounter—that they were here to meet.

She’d never been on a planet that all of Teixcalaan had held a funeral for before, either. She suspected none of them had: not her, not Three Seagrass, not their small escort of ground-combat specialists, bristling with black-muzzled energy weapons.

She’d had no time to talk to Three Seagrass alone, hardly enough time to do more than prepare a sequence of short recordings in what they believed was the alien language. A repetition or two of hello-we’re-here and hurrah! and something they suspected might be back-the-fuck-off—since their intercepted transmission had included something that might have been that, right when the aliens had noticed Knifepoint but before they had begun to chase them. They’d also found time to locate a very large, but still portable, holoprojector programmed for graphic representation, since one could only go so far with approximately six vocabulary words, that weren’t words as much as tonal markers for feelings, anyhow.

Whatever she and Three Seagrass were going to do about what had happened between them would have to wait until this meeting was done.

“You’re the better draftsman,” Three Seagrass said, her voice a curl of smoke in the heat, wavering and distant. Mahit wondered if heat distorted sound or if she was simply experiencing a mild auditory hallucination. “If they want to talk in pictures, I’ll give you my cloudhook so that you can draw.”

“All right,” Mahit said, and then—because she didn’t want to go into this conversation raw, with nothing but work between the two of them to hold it together—and because the desert was so beautiful and horrible at once, the stretched-out shimmer of it—asked, “Are all deserts like this?”

Three Seagrass shook her head. “I’ve never been anywhere like this,” she said. “The deserts I know are—red rock, plateaus and carved-out mountains, flowers. The south continent back home. This is a sand desert. It’s—”

“It makes me want to walk out into it,” Mahit said, as a confession. As a single offering: I will try to trust you, on the very small things at least, if you try too.

“I know,” said Three Seagrass, and she really sounded as if she did. As if the desert heat pulled at her that way, too. “Guess what, Mahit? We get to. A little. The meeting site is fifteen minutes away.”

They’d picked a plateau, a flat place where the dunes drifted less and where it was possible for their escort soldiers to erect a canopy to provide some shade. Mahit had expected a piece of high-albedo tarp and some tent-poles, from what the soldiers unpacked, moving with practiced speed—but when the canopy was unfolded, and she and Three Seagrass and all their battery-powered audiovisual equipment were positioned underneath it, she saw that the underside of the tarp was patterned in silver and pink and gold-shot blue, lotuses and water lilies, a woven fabric sewn to the light-reflective plastic. A piece of the City spread out here like a traveling palace.

Yskandr murmured to her, Mahit had missed that, she realized, or Yskandr had, or—it didn’t matter which of them. Having symbolic valence encoded into the smallest action was familiar, and comforting, even if she wished it wasn’t—even if that comfort was just another sign of how Teixcalaan had reordered her mind, her sense of aesthetics.

“Did you bring this from the City?” she asked Three Seagrass, gesturing at the cloth.

“I wish I had,” said Three Seagrass, “it’s rather brilliant. No, I got it from Twenty Cicada.”

Mahit wondered when that had happened. At what point during the long night they’d spent apart, not sleeping—was she doomed to sleep deprivation every time she spent more than a day surrounded by Teixcalaanlitzlim?—had Three Seagrass been given a piece of Teixcalaanli propaganda encoded in a beautiful tapestry? Here is water, even in the desert. We are a people who bring flowers.

Yskandr said again.

Not in Teixcalaan they don’t, Mahit thought, and got electric laughter spiking up and down her ulnar nerves in response.

“It’s good,” she said to Three Seagrass. “Whether it was his idea or yours, I think it’s going to be effective, at least if they come from systems with plant life…”

She trailed off. There was something coming up the other side of the plateau.

They moved in a hunting lope, a stride that covered ground, even when the ground was the uncertain footing of sand. Their shoulders rocked forward with each step; powerful, heavily muscled. There were two. They had not come with an escort. Mahit’s first impression was of black-keratin claws on their hands, of terribly long and flexible necks that ended in muzzled heads, round ears that were faintly furred. Their skins were spotted, variegated patterns, and they towered two feet above human heads—three feet over the smaller Teixcalaanlitzlim, like Three Seagrass. They wore pale grey tactical uniforms, built for deserts, and no visible weaponry. They looked like nothing she’d ever seen. They looked like people. They looked like those claws were all the weapons they’d need.

Every opening word Mahit could think of dried up in her mouth, as if the heat had stolen not only her saliva but her speech.

Beside her, Three Seagrass straightened her shoulders and set her jaw as if she was about to speak oratory in front of the Emperor. Mahit knew the shape of her like this, the focus that meant performance, and wondered when she’d learned to recognize it so well, how she knew this about Three Seagrass and not much else. Not enough else.

“Play the hello noise, Mahit,” she said. “You’ll know when.”

And then, as if she was meeting a functionary from some other Ministry, and not a foreign creature that stood shoulders and many-toothed head above her, Three Seagrass walked to the edge of the shade canopy, barely five feet from the aliens, pressed her fingertips together, and bowed over them. Mahit reached for the control-datapad for their audio projector—hoped it would work, that it hadn’t been fried in the smothering heat, or impregnated with gumming sand. Her fingertips ghosted over the pad’s surface, summoning up the right terrible noise. She didn’t press hard. It was like holding the trigger of an energy weapon; the slightest motion was all that was necessary—

“I am Envoy Three Seagrass of the Teixcalaanli Empire,” said Three Seagrass to the aliens, one hand pressed first to her chest—I am—and then flying up in an encompassing gesture to take in the canopy behind her, laden with its woven flowers. And this is mine, this is what I represent. “I negotiate on behalf of Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze, the Edgeshine of a Knife, whose reign shatters all darkness.”

Nothing Three Seagrass was saying would be understandable to the aliens. That was what Mahit was for, right now. She pressed her fingers to the datapad, and played hello, all of the sickening static scream of it.

The aliens went very still. One of them glanced at Three Seagrass, and then pointed with its chin at the projector setup. The other one looked there, too. Mahit wished she could read anything about their body language. They hadn’t moved forward or back. Were they puzzled, intrigued, angry? It was worse than trying to understand the understated delicacy of Teixcalaanli facial expressions. Worse by a lot. She knew they were communicating, but she couldn’t tell how. Not audibly. Maybe they did communicate by scent, or by ear positioning, or something else she’d never imagined. She was a linguist at best (more like a diplomat-poet with pretensions, she’d never taken a xenolinguistics specialty, she’d had all of Teixcalaanli language to play with and back then she hadn’t thought she’d ever need anything else), and if the aliens didn’t have words to decipher …

The second one opened its mouth and made the hello noise, without any benefit of amplification or audio processing. The first alien, the one which had pointed at the audio equipment, joined it. The same noise, reverberating. On Weight for the Wheel, Mahit and Three Seagrass and all of their escorts had been stuffed full of antiemetics, the best that the medical bay could locate, and she still felt twistingly nauseated. The vibrations. The static noise of them, in her bones. It really was infrasound, with all of infrasound’s physical horrors. But all right, all right, they heard hello and they said hello back, two sharp-toothed maws wide open. Their tongues were as spotted as their skins.

Mahit looked at Three Seagrass and shrugged as if to say, Now what?

Three Seagrass caught her eyes. Held them with her own: a wild intensity, a semihysteric giddiness. Mahit remembered it from how she’d looked right after the first time someone tried to kill Mahit in front of her, back in the Ambassadorial apartment in Palace-East, so very far away. A sense of watch me—here we go.

Three Seagrass took a breath, the kind that expanded all of her narrow chest and belly: breathed not only for oratory but for something even louder. And, exhaling, began to sing.

“Within each cell is a bloom of chemical fire,” she sang, bell-clear alto, a voice for calling lost people home, a carrying voice, meant for distance. “Committed to the earth, we shall burst into a thousand flowers—as many as our breaths in life—and we shall recall our names—our names and the names of our ancestors—and in those names blood blooms also from our palms…”

It was the Teixcalaanli funeral poem. The one Mahit had heard arranged in a hundred different ways, spoken or sung—the one she’d read the first time in a textbook in a classroom on the Station, marveling at chemical fire and the idea of flowers made of blood. But she’d never heard it like this. Three Seagrass had made it sound like a war chant. A promise. You spilled our blood, and we will rise.

Also it was fucking clever. Not the alien sort of resonant vibrations, but a very human version.

Yskandr murmured.

Three Seagrass was gesturing with one hand, beckoning Mahit forward. She went, as if pulled—the heat still made her dizzy, and she wondered if the aliens felt it, or cared, and what their home planet was like climatewise—and took up the position that still felt exactly correct: Three Seagrass at her left. The two of them arrayed in front of an insolvable political problem. (The two of them, and the ghost of Twelve Azalea like an echo, an imago who would never exist. That thought was like a fishhook through her lip, a sudden and capturing pain.)

“You know the song?” Three Seagrass murmured. Mahit nodded. She knew it well enough. “Good,” said Three Seagrass. “Let’s see if we make them get sick when we make resonant sound waves, too.”

Mahit hadn’t sung with another person in years. Poetry was different. She could recite, she could declaim—but singing wasn’t something she did, by habit or inclination. It had a strange intimacy to it that she hadn’t expected. They had to breathe together. They had to pitch together. And all the while the aliens stared at them, blank and evaluating, with their killing claws peacefully at their sides. They didn’t vomit. Mahit was glad; she didn’t want to get possibly toxic alien on her skin, and she was so close to them. They smelled like—animal, and something else, a dry herbal scent she’d never smelled before.

It wasn’t a long song, the funeral poem. Mahit was still gasping after it was finished. The heat lived inside her lungs now, and her throat felt raw. She swallowed, but there was no saliva to wet her mouth with.

The left-side alien made a low, crooning noise that Mahit had never heard before. The sound was metallic, machine-liquid like a synthesizer, but clearly, clearly organic. It made her ache just behind her sternum, as if her heart was racing out of control. The right-side alien came two loping steps closer, and now she knew her heart was racing, familiar adrenaline-spike of visceral fear. She was going to faint, or scream. Three Seagrass’s shoulder brushed her shoulder. They were both shaking.

Yskandr was a balm, a clear secure place in her mind, something hers—as was the sudden rush of shivery warmth that ran through her, her imago playing games with her endocrine response again, but oh, right now she was grateful for any feeling that wasn’t externally induced.

The alien pressed one of its claws to its chest, as Three Seagrass had done. And it gestured behind itself, even though there was nothing behind it to gesture at, no canopy and no escort of soldiers. And then it made sounds. Almost reasonable sounds. Almost, Mahit thought, words. A spitting, consonant-heavy, pitched syllable sequence, but one she thought she could imitate. Even though she was going to have to sing to do it.

I should have taken lessons in holding pitch, she thought. And tried, like she’d tried the very first time she’d been in a Teixcalaanli language class, to make the unfamiliar sounds she’d heard with her own mouth.

Nine Hibiscus had never been very good at waiting. It was why she’d been a Shard pilot, back at the beginning of her service in the Fleet: Shard pilots tumbled out of warships like glittering knife-sharp glass, unhesitant, and most of the time they didn’t know they were going to be deployed until right before it happened. No delays, no effort to make herself hold still, to stay in calculating abeyance until the right moment to strike. That skill, she’d had to learn. She’d learned it well enough to be captain, then Fleet Captain, and now yaotlek—but that didn’t mean she liked it.

Down on Peloa-2, four of her people—plus an Information agent and a barbarian diplomat, but four of her people, first and foremost—were either being dismembered by aliens (worst case) or being subject to heatstroke-inducing temperatures while waiting for negotiations to proceed (best case). And she could do nothing but wait—wait, like she was waiting for her scout-ships to find some base the aliens were using, off to the left where Forty Oxide’s people were being picked off, little by little, death after death and funeral after funeral; wait, like a just-graduated cadet expecting word about their first posting in the mail—wait and watch the larger of the two three-ringed ships spin menacingly at the very limits of her visual field on the bridge. The smaller had gone into the Peloa System, just like her own shuttle had. They were experimenting with parity, as if this was a negotiation between two groups of humans and not an attempt at communicating with a species which seemed to be driven only to devour or despoil, one or the other … but which still had technological capabilities as good as or better than any Teixcalaanli warship.

Nine Hibiscus hated waiting, in situations like this. So she did exactly what she’d always done, from the time when she’d been a cadet: she made sure that there was nothing on fire on the bridge, literally or metaphorically, and likely wouldn’t be during the next two hours—and went to invade Swarm’s personal space, so that they could wait together.

On Weight for the Wheel his personal space was the adjutant’s suite, two rooms on the exact opposite side of the ship from her own: the idea being that, if some enemy weapon took out the captain in her quarters, her adjutant might survive to act in her stead. Nine Hibiscus knew the way there as well as she knew the way to any place in the galaxy. Furthermore, she had the door codes, unless Twenty Cicada had changed them again—

He hadn’t. His door opened up for her like he and she were precisely the same person, and Nine Hibiscus was hit in the sinuses with the scent of green. That very particular smell: the richness of plant life, alienated from flowers: vines and succulents and anything else Twenty Cicada could convince to grow with next to no help from water. He used his own water-ration for his garden. That, too, he’d been doing since they were cadets together. No waste; no excess. Not for her Swarm.

So said his religion, anyhow, and she suspected he’d do it anyway, even if homeostasis didn’t request it of him. That was the difficulty of Twenty Cicada: determining where the devotion to an entirely minority religious practice stopped and the person began. If there was a space between the two concepts at all.

He was sitting in the middle of the floor, cross-legged, a halo of holograph analyses arced around his head, transparent enough to show all the green creeping up the walls through each image. Most of them were views of ship systems she knew, instant familiarity even seen backward: the readout of energy consumption and life support systems from the entirety of Weight for the Wheel was pinned in its usual place about a foot above his forehead, so that everything else he wanted to look at could spin around it. A still point like a crown.

Also, curled in his lap like a puddle of space without stars, was one of the pets from Kauraan. It seemed to be asleep. He was petting it.

“I thought you hated them,” Nine Hibiscus said, dryly. “Was all of that complaining about ecosystem disruption for show, then?”

Twenty Cicada looked up at her, and dismissed most of his work holos with the hand that wasn’t petting the small void on his knee. “I do hate them,” he said, smiling. “But this one likes me, and what am I going to do with the things, space them? It’s not their fault they exist.”

She came to sit next to him, knee to knee. There always seemed to be more oxygen in one of Twenty Cicada’s garden rooms. (Not seemed: there was. Plant respiration. She’d checked the readouts once. It was a fractional difference, but real.) The Kauraanian pet lifted its head and opened yellow eyes. It made a noise like a badly tuned stringed instrument, stood, paced in a tight circle on Twenty Cicada’s lap, and settled down again. “I didn’t think you’d space them, Swarm,” she said. “But this is cuddling.”

“It yowls if I don’t,” Twenty Cicada said, perfectly bland, and Nine Hibiscus laughed. For a moment she felt very young: transported more than a decade back. To some ship where she’d been of use, and so had he, and she had never thought of not sleeping for the sake of her Fleet.

“Ah, well, then I assume you’ll have to keep it,” she said, and stroked its fur herself. It was very soft.

“Nothing from Peloa-2 yet?” Twenty Cicada asked, just as neutrally as he’d explained his sudden affection for the pet.

“If there was anything, I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

“I know you wouldn’t,” he said, and waved off the insinuation with a falling gesture of one hand. “Better question, yaotlek: how many hours until we go down to pick up their corpses and the doubtless ruined remains of my favorite wall hanging?”

Nine Hibiscus blinked. “Why do the envoy and the Stationer have any of your wall hangings, let alone your favorite?” The object in question was a tapestry of pink and blue-gold lotus flowers, in the highest City style. It usually hung in Twenty Cicada’s bedroom, which meant Nine Hibiscus hadn’t seen it since he’d bought it and shown it off to her. There were other, presumably less-favorite wall hangings all over his quarters: everywhere there wasn’t a plant. For someone who hardly ate and who divested his own personal self of all but the most severely correct trappings of his job and his authority—just the uniform, no hair and no skin-pigments, the essence of a Teixcalaanli Fleet officer distilled—Twenty Cicada surrounded himself with a riot of color and aesthetic luxury. He’d explained it once: it was one of those balances that the homeostasis-worshippers could practice. Excess and asceticism at once.

“I thought the envoy would need something lush to stand in all that desert with. If she doesn’t get herself eviscerated before the enemy has time to notice symbolism.”

“… If the enemy is capable of noticing symbolism,” Nine Hibiscus muttered.

Twenty Cicada shrugged. “I’m sure they have some. But I doubt they care for ours.”

“Why give the envoy your flower tapestry, then? If you’re just expecting us to go down and retrieve partial envoys and partial tapestries in another three hours.”

“Three hours. Longer than I’d wait, yaotlek, but you’re the one who gets to make decisions.” There was something in his expression, in the shape of that phrase, that made Nine Hibiscus want to wince. Yes—she was the one who made decisions, and she didn’t much like it when her adjutant disagreed with them, especially when he went along with her anyway. When he placed so very much weight on his trust in her.

“There are other luxuries on our ship we could have given the envoy that weren’t your favorite tapestry, Swarm,” she said. “If you wanted to set her up to use symbolic valence provided she could get these aliens to recognize what a flower is.”

He scratched the Kauraanian pet behind its ears. It emitted a purr like a very small starship engine. “I could have,” he said, “but why would I send anyone out on one of your missions, Mallow, without the sharpest knives and the most beautiful examples of our culture I have to give? If we are trying to talk to these—things—then we’re trying. Entirely.”

Which was precisely what made her want to flinch. He didn’t want to talk to them, or even make the attempt to, but she had set their course and here he was devoting their resources to that course, no matter what sacrifices were required. She wanted to apologize, but that wasn’t something she did. It undermined both that trust and the authority it gave her. Instead she nodded. “If we go down there to fetch the envoy and our people back and there’s nothing but rent tapestry pieces and entrails, I will give you an absurd service bonus next time we’re on leave in the Western Arc and you can go buy a larger one, with more thread count.”

“In such a situation, if we survive long enough to go on leave, yaotlek, I’d quite appreciate it.”

“Your confidence is overwhelming.”

Twenty Cicada cast his eyes up toward the ceiling, which had been well colonized by a creeping net of green, laden with tiny white flowers. “You’ve seen their firepower,” he said. “And we both know ours. This is going to be a very bad, very long war, and while the prospect is the furthest thing from what I’d wish for, I don’t think you or I will be the last set of yaotlek-and-adjutant to lead it.”

“We haven’t died yet,” she said. “Despite the best efforts of a great many people.”

“People, yes,” Twenty Cicada said, correcting her. “If it was people in those solvent-spitting ring-ships, I’d be negotiating with you for just how large my service bonus should be. But they’re not people. Perhaps the envoy can turn them into people, but she’s just one Information agent, and she is very young. As is her Stationer companion. You know who that is, don’t you?”

“Mahit Dzmare. The one who was on the newsfeeds when One Lightning was pulling that incredibly stupid stunt at the end of the last Emperor’s reign. I know.”

“Good,” said Twenty Cicada. “Because Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise definitely knows who she is, and if I have her dead to rights—and I almost always do—she’ll find a way to use Mahit Dzmare, or what she represents, against you.”

Nine Hibiscus hummed through her teeth. “You think Sixteen Moonrise is that aggressively opposed to my leadership?”

Twenty Cicada shook his head, blinked to have his cloudhook call up a holoimage of Weight for the Wheel as a flattened schematic map. There was a tracery in electrum-silver threaded through a very large number of the decks. “She’s been haunting us,” he said. “I’ve tracked her. I don’t think it’s exactly that the Fleet Captain of the Twenty-Fourth is opposed to you, Nine Hibiscus. I think someone in the Ministry is. And she’s a very effective agent for their purposes. She knows as much about the aliens as we do, for example. As much as anyone save the envoy and Dzmare. And if she wasn’t trying to find out more, she would have gone back to the Parabolic Compression half a day ago.”

“So she’s a spy?”

“So she’s a spy whose eyes should be trained outward and which have been turned inward by someone else’s hand,” Twenty Cicada said. Which was gnomic, even for him. But Nine Hibiscus thought she got what he was gesturing at. Sixteen Moonrise had, after all, spent the first five years of her recorded Fleet career as a political officer on the same Parabolic Compression she captained now. And political officers were placed on the orders of the Undersecretary for the Third Palm—the Ministry of War’s internal intelligence service.

“You think she’s still Third Palm. Not just served there as a cadet.”

Twenty Cicada smiled, one corner of his mouth twisting. “I think that the Third of the Six Outreaching Palms would like to snatch you back into a more controllable orbit than the one you’re on, and that Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise is as good a pulling-hook as any.”

“Swarm, she isn’t my type.”

He snorted. “No, you like them with more flesh and more masculinity, I’m well aware. Not that kind of hook. The kind that keeps you distracted enough from our real enemy out there that you make mistakes. And we can’t afford mistakes. Not in this war. Not if we don’t want to learn how to sing funerals for a great many more planets than Peloa-2.”

“Consider me warned,” Nine Hibiscus said. “And get her off my ship, would you?”

“I can try—” Twenty Cicada began, and then both his cloudhook and Nine Hibiscus’s went off with a sharp chime: priority message. Something had come back from Peloa-2 after all.

Of course, he had to wait. Emperors were busy all the time; this was the nature of Emperors, his ancestor had been exactly the same. Eight Antidote only ever had seen him at events or late in the evenings or once, memorably, at dawn, when he showed up to Eight Antidote’s bedroom and took his hand and they went walking in the gardens, like they were parent and child instead of ancestor and ninety-percent clone. He’d been very small then. His ancestor-the-Emperor had plucked a nasturtium and woven it into Eight Antidote’s hair, a red one, and then when he’d said he liked it, a yellow one and an orange one, and he’d worn them until they rotted and he had to be washed.

That was a long time ago, even for someone who was only eleven.

It was almost midnight by the time Nineteen Adze was available to see him, and at that hour, she wanted to see him in her own suite. She’d sent an infofiche-stick message to say so, one of the clean white ones that no one else used but her, waiting in the mail slot outside Eight Antidote’s room like he was a grown person who got mail. He broke the seal open, and the holo glyphs that spilled out were simple and inviting: Come by, if you’re still awake. And then her signature glyph, the same one which was on the infofiche seal. No titles.

Well, they were sort of family. And also she’d shown up inside his bedroom without even asking, so just signing a message Nineteen Adze wasn’t that weird. (It was weird. It was one of those small things that made Eight Antidote wonder when a person stopped being a child entirely, and started being something else.) He put the opened infofiche stick into the drawer of his desk, so he could look at it again later, if he wanted to. If he wanted to think about how simple and clear and friendly that message had been, later.

The Emperor’s suite was where his ancestor had lived, and the Emperor before him, and a whole lot of other Emperors also, but that didn’t mean it looked the same as it had six months ago. His ancestor-the-Emperor had liked lots of small, beautiful objects, and bright colors, blue and teal and red, and there had been a plush woven rug on the floor of the front sitting room, with lotus-flower patterns woven in by hand, a gift from the Western Arc families. Nineteen Adze was different. Nineteen Adze liked books. Codex-books, not just infofiche; books and also stones, slices of rock that you could see the light through. She’d lined the walls with cases for them. That lotus-woven rug was hanging on one of the walls instead of being on the floor, so you just saw the bare tiled flagstones, the marble and its patterns that looked like imaginary cities. The floor had been here as long as Palace-Earth had.

The Emperor Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze, She Whose Gracious Presence Illuminates the Room Like the Edgeshine of a Knife, was sitting on a couch, reading one of her books. She looked up when Eight Antidote came in, and patted the arm of the identical couch catty-corner to hers. “Come sit,” she said. “I’m sorry to keep you up this late, but it was the only time we could talk with relatively low chances of emergency interruption.”

Eight Antidote sat. The couches were upholstered in bone-white velvet, with tufted backs, the indentations set with grey-and-gold disks. He always worried he’d spill something on one of them. “It’s all right, Your Brilliance,” he said. “I know emperors don’t sleep. I should get some practice while I can.”

She didn’t smile. He wished she had. Instead she put her book down on the glass end table between the two couches—it was something Eight Antidote had never read, by someone named Eleven Lathe—and looked him over, eyes still narrow and neutral. There was a tiny line between her eyebrows which wasn’t always there.

“What would you like to tell me?” she asked, which wasn’t at all the question he’d expected. It meant he had to choose.

He could start with Eleven Laurel in the garden. That would be telling the Emperor that War and Information—or at least parts of War and Information—really didn’t like each other. But she probably knew that already, and also it would mean revealing how he felt about Eleven Laurel threatening him—and he didn’t want to start with that. Not with the Emperor. It would sound like he was complaining, and asking her to fix it, and he didn’t want Nineteen Adze fixing his problems.

He opened his mouth, and what came out was, “The Ambassador Mahit Dzmare is on yaotlek Nine Hibiscus’s flagship.”

Nineteen Adze clicked her tongue against her teeth. “… How did you learn that?” she asked.

“The special envoy from the Information Ministry brought her there,” he said. That wasn’t exactly an answer. It turned out it was very hard to be a spy, when it came time to tell the secrets you’d learned. It turned out you really, really wanted to keep them for yourself. But at least the fact that Dzmare had been brought along by an Information agent seemed like the sort of additional information he really ought to share.

“Of course she did,” said Nineteen Adze, and Eight Antidote couldn’t decipher her expression at all. Whatever it was, it wasn’t surprise. “What else do you know about the envoy?”

At the strategy meeting in War, no one had liked the envoy, but he wasn’t sure whose dislike was real and whose was inter-Ministry rivalry. There had been a lot of inter-Ministry rivalry, especially between the people who were left over from Nine Propulsion’s administration (like Eleven Laurel and the Fifth Palm undersecretary, the man who controlled armaments and research) and people who had come in with Three Azimuth, or at least at the same time she had, and were still learning their jobs and deciding where their loyalties would go. So he didn’t know anything about the envoy, not for real. Except—

“The Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise doesn’t trust her,” he said. “Doesn’t trust her maybe because of Mahit Dzmare, but maybe because she just doesn’t.”

“Sixteen Moonrise of the Twenty-Fourth. Did you know, little spy, that she used to be one of Eleven Laurel’s students, too?”

Eight Antidote shook his head. (Of course Eleven Laurel had had students before him; there was no reason to feel jealous of some grown-up faraway Fleet Captain. But he did: squirmingly jealous and a little ashamed. Was that how the Emperor thought of him, now? As Eleven Laurel’s student? Did he want her to think of him that way? Even if Eleven Laurel had threatened him, made him wonder if the Sunlit would protect him, made him wonder if Nineteen Adze didn’t trust her own Minister of War?)

“She was,” Nineteen Adze went on. “A good one. The Third Palm was sad to lose her to command, I believe. Mm. Tell me how you discovered this dislike you mentioned, and then I think I ought to send you to bed. It’s going on for moonset. Have you been sending messages to the Fleet yourself, and hearing back?”

“I’m not that enterprising,” said Eight Antidote, and liked how saying that made Nineteen Adze’s eyes crinkle up at the corners, like she was laughing, silent and appreciative.

“Not yet you aren’t. Go on.”

He tried to remind himself that the Emperor had sent him into the Ministry of War, that she already knew what he was doing there, that he wasn’t betraying anyone’s secrets except possibly Sixteen Moonrise’s, and certainly none of his own. But it was still hard to start. Hard enough that Nineteen Adze tapped her fingertips on the couch arm, once, a little patter of impatience that made Eight Antidote want to apologize for everything, and then resent her for being able to do that to him. It wasn’t fair that he had a child’s emotions, a child’s endocrine system and sympathetic nerves, and that children reacted to authority figures in very predictable ways he had studied with his tutors. It wasn’t fair at all.

Finally, he said, “She sent a priority message—fast, the kind that overrides the jumpgate mail protocols, I think it came through on a Fleet courier—from the Fleet to Minister Three Azimuth. And in that message—the Minister played it for all of the Palms and their staff, and me, I guess—the Fleet Captain pointed out that all the, um. What happened two months ago—” (They hadn’t talked about it. He didn’t want to, not really, it was easier to just call it what happened and be done, instead of saying when my ancestor made you Emperor and died on live newsfeed for the sake of Teixcalaan.) “That Mahit Dzmare was involved in that, and now she was out on the battlefront, and that this was probably not good at all, and Information was involved.”

“Oh, little spy,” said Nineteen Adze, “you are very good at what I asked you to do, aren’t you.”

He wasn’t sure that was a compliment. “Do you think she’s right?” he asked. “The Fleet Captain. I only met the Ambassador once, so I can’t tell.”

Nineteen Adze hesitated—the first time, Eight Antidote thought, that he’d ever seen her hesitate and not do so deliberately, for effect. “To be perfectly clear with you,” she said, at last, “I haven’t decided. And I’m not sure what I think matters as much as what Three Azimuth does. If you get a chance, you should try to find out.”

He had to tell her, now. Or—ask her, if he didn’t want to tell her about what Eleven Laurel had said in the garden. He at least had to ask. (Asking was a way of not telling a secret. That was a useful thing to know.)

“Your Brilliance,” he said, very careful, trying to frame the question right, “do you think Minister Three Azimuth would disagree with you?”

The Emperor looked at him, long enough for one slow eyeblink. He swallowed. His mouth was dry. She asked, “On the matter of Mahit Dzmare, or in general?”

She was treating him like his questions mattered. He tried not to feel either nervous or grateful, and felt both things anyway. Took a breath, and in breathing decided he was going to tell her about what Eleven Laurel had insinuated. Not that he had threatened him. Just that he’d … threatened Minister Three Azimuth, who could probably take care of herself. “In general,” he said. “Because—in that meeting, when we heard the recording, Eleven Laurel kept talking about the old Minister of War. Nine Propulsion. And how she’d retired. And about how you might not trust the new Minister, either.”

“Did he now,” said Nineteen Adze.

Guilt was a squirming uncomfortable feeling in Eight Antidote’s stomach. Eleven Laurel was his teacher, and here he was—doing this. He nodded, though. He couldn’t lie. Not right after he’d told the truth, anyway.

“The technician’s garden of the War Ministry grows all sorts of flowers, little spy,” the Emperor said to him. “But especially the sort that poisons. That’s what a weapon is, Eight Antidote. A poison flower. Whether it’s dangerous or not depends on who is holding it.”

“I don’t understand,” Eight Antidote said, just as guilty, and now embarrassed for not being able to decipher the allusion. “Not without knowing who the poison flower is supposed to be.”

Nineteen Adze laughed, which made him feel worse. “All of them,” she said. “But gardens need outside grafts, sometimes, to keep them healthy. Ask your biology tutors about that, if you have time while you’re finding out what Three Azimuth thinks about Mahit Dzmare.”

The outside graft had to be Three Azimuth. Maybe that meant Nineteen Adze did trust her. Or—thought that she’d be good for War, which wasn’t the same thing at all—

He nodded. “I’ll try,” he said, because he guessed he was the Emperor’s spy before he was anything else except the Emperor’s heir. And he could figure out the rest later. He wasn’t stupid. He read all kinds of poems. He’d find one with poison flowers, and figure it out.

By the time Mahit’s voice had gone completely—a heat-struck rasp, wrung out from attempts at singing and the strangling moistureless air—she and Three Seagrass and the alien, who they were calling Second (as opposed to its somewhat taller and much quieter companion, First) had a mutual vocabulary of approximately twenty words. Most of them were nouns, or things like nouns. Nouns were easy. One pointed at an object, and said its name, and then the alien said its name for the object, and thus they’d acquired energy pistol (or at least “weapon”), shoe, water, sand, and what was either flower or picture or shade, depending on whether Second understood representational objects, and to what degree.

They also had some verbs, but none of them made much sense. There was drink, or what Mahit hoped was drink, but could have been consume, internalize, or even perform an action on command—Second used the pitch-growl sound of that word when it wanted her or Three Seagrass to repeat what it was saying. Maybe drink was for both water and for concepts. To take in. Their other verbs were not much clearer: something which might have been fly, land, or pilot a spacecraft, and something else which was probably stop. Though that sound wasn’t necessarily a verb. It could have been just the negation sound, no and zero and not that. Or a threat: don’t continue, or harm will come to you. Second had raised its claws to them twice. Once when Three Seagrass had stepped quite close to it, and offered an open palm—Mahit had thought of poison, of contact poison, of all the ways Teixcalaan could seep through the skin—only to be met with bared teeth, that noise, and claws at her throat that made her skitter backward, pale as glass. And the other time, when one of their soldier escorts had come out from under the shade of the tapestry to bring them more water. Both First and Second had made the no sound, then, and followed it with a resonant scream that made that soldier gag and drop the precious water to spill in the sand.

Mahit wished that she could convey the concept of waste, seeing that dark puddle vanish, drunk up by Peloa-2’s silica dust. But she couldn’t even get close. The aliens had watched the water disappear, too, but they didn’t react to it in any way she could understand, any way she could hook onto, emotionally or linguistically. Was their whole planet desert? Were they used to loss? Did they even have the concept of loss?

The other problem was that as far as either she or Three Seagrass was able to tell, they weren’t learning a language. They were learning a pidgin. There was no alteration in form, pitch, or volume of any of the words they’d put together when they were used in different contexts. None of the verbs related to objects. None of the verbs had tenses, or referred to the future or the past, completed or uncompleted actions. They were all pinpoints, unrelated to everything surrounding them. Even more frustratingly, they had not in the slightest been able to establish the concept of names. Of selves, at all. No pronouns, no name signs, nothing. No I.

Mahit thought, with exhausted irony, And how wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of “you”?—that question she’d asked Three Seagrass so very many times in the City. No way to ask it here. If these aliens had a concept of you, it was entirely opaque.

Worst, though—worst was how First and Second communicated, obviously communicated, and used absolutely no sounds to do so. Not the resonant vibrations and not these pidgin syllables. Soundless and perfect accord. Whatever language they were learning, it wasn’t the language the aliens spoke.

And whatever language it was, Mahit couldn’t do it any longer. She couldn’t make sounds in Teixcalaanli, let alone sing; she thought that if she tried again, even with water poured down her throat, she might faint.

Yskandr murmured to her, sharp instruction like a stone in her mouth to suck on even though there was no moisture. It gave her enough presence of mind to turn away from Second—not turn her back on it, no, never, the idea was atavistically horrible—but to turn away, and reach to touch Three Seagrass’s shoulder, and rasp, “We’re going to have to come back. It’s too hot. I can’t think, and if I can’t think, I can’t think fast enough to keep them from deciding we’re evisceratable—I know that isn’t a word—”

Three Seagrass nodded. She was flushed and grey at once, and not sweating as much as she should have—Mahit tried to remember the symptoms of incipient heat exhaustion and figured being unable to remember them was a symptom in and of itself. “They don’t look terribly well either,” she said, hardly audible. Her voice went in and out like an unturned radio channel, as hoarse as Mahit’s was. “This planet is bad for everyone except—except sand.”

“We’re not done,” Mahit said. “We don’t know anything yet.”

“A meeting is not a negotiation if it is singular,” said Three Seagrass, which was obviously a quotation from some Teixcalaanli text that Mahit had never read—it was a perfect fifteen-syllable line with a caesura in the middle. An Information Ministry instruction manual, maybe. Those would probably be in political verse.

“… Yes,” she said, “but we need to convince them of that.”

Three Seagrass grimly straightened her shoulders in agreement, and turned to face Second again, who looked—exhausted. Possibly. It was hard to tell; Second’s white-and-grey-spotted skin didn’t show bloodflow or sweat. There was nothing to read. But Mahit thought its head hung lower on the great curve of its neck, and she was sure its round, faintly furred ears were pulled back against its skull in some sort of distress.

Years of oration had given Three Seagrass some natural advantages over Mahit on maintaining volume and pitch even when her voice was a wreck. She sang fly/pilot-a-spaceship/land and pointed at herself, Mahit, and their escorts—made a collective gesture like gathering all of them into her cupped palm—and then pointed up. Sang no/stop. Mahit hoped it was no/stop, and not back the fuck off. Because otherwise they’d said something like we’re never leaving and neither are you.

Second looked at her for a very long, very still moment. Mahit thought about how some animals looked carefully at prey before striking; the lizards that lived in the City, plant-eating and enormous, who tilted their eyes just like Second was tilting its eyes at Three Seagrass—and then lunged. (Mahit had never seen one herself, only holorecordings; they were kept out of the palace grounds and she had hardly had time to go exploring, she’d hardly had time for anything—the very idea of the water-rich air on the Jewel of the World seemed impossible now, a place where lizards could grow to such size on plants alone—)

Yskandr told her.

She bit her tongue, deliberately and hard. It helped. Second hadn’t lunged and eaten Three Seagrass after all. It was backing off. So was First; they moved in their terrible and perfect silent communication.

“Quick,” Three Seagrass rasped. “The holoprojector—play the sequence where we leave and come back.”

Mahit caught up the controls again. Her hands felt very distant from the rest of her. She could wish for neuropathy, neuropathy was better than dissociation—

fucking recording.>

She cued the visual. Two little alien silhouettes and two little human silhouettes, retreating away from the image of Peloa-2 back to their respective ships … and then a pause, while the planet rotated a quarter-turn (Peloa rotated slowly, it would still be day when they came back, the killing sun would still be here), followed by the same aliens and the same humans coming back down again.

While it was playing, Mahit added the resonant-scream noise of victory-hurrah! over it. Do this, and we all benefit. Listening to it was like suddenly drowning in nausea. The antiemetics were wearing off. Or she was just not all right. Or both.

The alien they had been calling Second opened its maw and echoed the same noise. The whole world was a resonant chamber. Mahit needed to not vomit. Not until the aliens had left—

They didn’t turn their backs on her and Three Seagrass as they went. They loped backward, seemingly as comfortable with that direction of locomotion as they had been with coming forward. Mahit wondered about their hip joints. Wondered if they could move sideways, if they could slide, imagined the disconcerting rapidity of that sort of travel. Thought, dizzyingly, of how their ships winked in and out of the void, there and then not-there, secret and revealed.

And then they were gone, disappeared over the crux of the dune. Whether or not they’d come back—whether or not she and Three Seagrass had accomplished anything aside from learning a few words in a pidgin language without tenses—was entirely unclear.

Three Seagrass vomited first, before Mahit could turn off the holo and the audioplay. Vomited and went down on her knees with dry heaves afterward. Mahit dropped the controls and found herself, operating on complete instinct, all arguments and irrevocable conflicts between them rendered profoundly unimportant, crouched protectively next to her in the sand and in the hot silence. Her hand came to rest on Three Seagrass’s spine, gentle and steadying, until the physical convulsion was over.

“… That could have gone much worse,” said Three Seagrass, when she could. She straightened up. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. And didn’t try to get away from Mahit’s touch, not at all. “Look, Mahit—nobody died, not even slightly.”