A Desolation Called Peace

CHAPTER TWELVE

HER Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze had said to him, If you get a chance, you should try to find out what Three Azimuth thinks about the Ambassador Mahit Dzmare. Not what Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise thought of her, not what the Emperor Herself thought of her, not what his dead ancestor-the-Emperor had thought of her or her predecessor in the role of Lsel Ambassador, a man Eight Antidote primarily remembered for how often he’d been in the palace, how easily he’d become a normal, everyday presence—but what the Minister of War thought about the Lsel Ambassador, right now.

And then she’d left it up to him to decide if what the Minister of War thought was something the Emperor should disagree with. A poison flower in someone else’s hand.

It seemed like a much bigger and harder task than he was capable of. (He could get it wrong. What would happen if he got it wrong? He didn’t know, and not knowing was frightening in itself.)

But that wasn’t the first problem. The first, biggest problem was that he didn’t know how to get close to the Minister of War at all. There was no way he was going to find out what she thought by looking up official documents about Teixcalaanli-Stationer relations, and the legal status of Teixcalaanli military passage through Stationer space, which was what he’d tried first. Also, attempting to read legal documents about the difference between freight supply and personnel supply and full armaments of war, as applied to various sorts of ships with various sorts of cargo, during various situations of more or less hypothetical nature, had done very little for him but give him a headache and the conviction that when he was Emperor, he was going to pick a Judiciary Minister who liked reading this sort of stuff and would do it for him.

He was pretty sure that relations between Teixcalaan and Lsel Station were what his tutors would call normalized but fraught, though. Teixcalaanli vessels could move through Stationer space, and Teixcalaan bought a lot of Stationer-refined metals, but Stationers needed more immigration papers than Eight Antidote had previously thought existed to come live in the Empire, and Teixcalaanlitzlim couldn’t live on the Station at all. Ever.

He’d looked at the star-charts. Almost every battleship that was headed to the front was moving through Stationer space, from the jumpgate they shared with Teixcalaan to the jumpgate they didn’t. The jumpgate that had the war on the other side of it.

And none of this was going to help him unless he could figure out how to get Three Azimuth alone. Alone, and to trust him with her real opinions.

He really, really wished he was older. If he was older, he could—oh, enlist in the Fleet, or something. Be the Minister’s cadet-assistant. But there were probably a lot more Fleet cadets who were more suited to that job than he was, and less politically fraught to pick. It wouldn’t work, even if he was fourteen and of enlistable age instead of just-eleven-last-month. Also it’d be transparent. Why would Eight Antidote make himself Three Azimuth’s assistant unless he wanted something from her?

There had to be another way. A not-official way. A way of being in the right place, a place that all the camera-eyes and City-algorithms and Sunlit would think was how the world should be if he was in it, and that place needed to be where Three Azimuth was, too. Which meant that he needed to figure out what kind of places Three Azimuth spent time in, without her knowing he wanted to know.

Being a spy was difficult. Eight Antidote sighed, and got up from his desk and its many, many infofilm transparencies with legal regulations printed on them. He was really tired of sitting still. Outside his windows it was already late afternoon, and he’d done nothing with his day but homework and trying to investigate Lsel Station, and he thought if he looked at any more documents he might throw something. (If he was a kid, for real, and not himself, he guessed he would go play outside. Or something. He wasn’t really sure what a person did while playing outside if it wasn’t amalitzli, and you needed a whole team for amalitzli.)

Instead of trying to locate an imaginary amalitzli team, he stretched his arms above his head as far as he could reach and bent forward from the waist in a standing pike stretch. Put his hands on the ground and jumped his feet backward, thud, and held the plank for a whole minute until his arms burned. Calisthenics counted as homework, and they felt good, too.

He was in the middle of trying to do a one-handed push-up, a trick he’d never managed yet (puberty and its accompanying muscle development couldn’t get here soon enough, in his opinion), when he had the idea. It was like feeling his mind go click, information falling into place, like solving one of Eleven Laurel’s strategy puzzles.

A person who was as fit as Three Azimuth definitely had to do physical work to stay that way, especially if she was also the Minister of War.

And the War Ministry had a gymnasium with much more equipment than the one in Palace-Earth. Including a shooting range. And Eight Antidote really had been meaning to practice his targeting, like Eleven Laurel had told him to. He was behind on that, now that he was thinking about strategy so much. It would be very easy to run into the Minister there, he bet.

He was so pleased with himself that he didn’t mind at all when his push-up attempt failed spectacularly and dumped him on his face.

Three Seagrass had never been debriefed by an officer of the Teixcalaanli Fleet before, let alone a yaotlek. It was extremely novel. It was also much less frightening than being debriefed by an ezuazuacat who was less than six hours away from becoming Emperor. After Nineteen Adze, almost everyone paled in comparison, no matter how much this particular yaotlek looked like she’d walked straight out of a holodrama casting call for yaotlekim.

Almost everyone. She’d been absolutely terrified of the aliens. If they counted as people, they beat Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze for intimidation hands down.

She was going to remember those claws for a long time. The claws and the teeth and how very close they had come to her skin. Everything else about Peloa-2 was blurring into a haze of heat exhaustion and mental overwork. They’d talked to the aliens, though. She and Mahit had. They had managed it. Even if they hadn’t done a damn thing to stop or slow down the war, they’d done it, and Three Seagrass was going to fly on that for as long as she could. She felt delicious. And hysterical. And absolutely delighted to be standing in front of Nine Hibiscus, Mahit at her side, explaining what they had done and how.

It helped that she’d been given several large glasses of water, and had remembered to drink them in slow sips so she didn’t bring them right back up again. She’d had to remind Mahit about that. Deserts weren’t something that Stationers trained their diplomats for. Which wasn’t surprising. (What had been surprising was Mahit’s hand on her back, in the sun and the sand, the sheer comfort of being touched and acknowledged, the opening up of possibility: perhaps she hadn’t fucked everything up between them irrevocably after all!… Perhaps. But even perhaps felt shimmering, gorgeously amazing. Like everything did right now.)

They’d been scooped off the shuttle with enormous, near-secretive haste. She’d caught a brief glimpse of Twenty Cicada in the enormous hangar bay, and expected him to show up to the briefing, to reclaim his tapestry, if nothing else—she’d folded it up ever so carefully and shaken out the sand first—but he hadn’t. It was only the yaotlek, and the comms officer Two Foam. No adjutant and no accusatory and disparaging supernumerary Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, either. Interesting. When Three Seagrass was less dehydrated and less exhilarated, she would examine the political situation on Weight for the Wheel with the attention it obviously deserved. Later! Neither dehydration nor exhilaration made for decent analytic capabilities. The Information Ministry taught cadets a whole list of altered states not to be in while evaluating a situation, and Three Seagrass did try to remember her training.

The water she’d drunk made her able to talk. Even sing one of the absurd pitched-consonant words that they’d picked up from the aliens in demonstration for the yaotlek, though Mahit was so much better at making those noises that Three Seagrass had begun to plan a scheme in which she taught her how to have some halfway-decent breath and pitch control, pass on the lessons she’d had as a crèche-kid in how to project from the diaphragm when orating. But no amount of water got her and Mahit past the very simple, very structural problem that was threaded through their magnificent success: they had twenty words, and not a single one of them was much use to ask, Please hand over your war criminals who murdered our colonists, and also cease from contemplating attacking any of our systems closer to the heart of the Empire. In exchange, we will try really hard not to point our very large energy weapons at your spaceships.

They were going to need a lot more meetings to get to that point. If it was possible to get to that point. Three Seagrass wasn’t half the linguist Mahit was, and she still knew that they’d been speaking—singing, rather—some kind of sketch of a language. Less of a sketch than the tone marker vibrations, but still a sketch.

“… no pronouns?” asked Two Foam, the comms officer, who was also clearly more of a linguist than Three Seagrass. She and Mahit had been talking about grammar for the last five minutes, and Three Seagrass was both enjoying Mahit’s easy comfort in explaining, her command of technical Teixcalaanli vocabulary effortless, and enjoying the opportunity to exchange blood-and-sunlight-these-scientists-can-you-even-believe glances with the yaotlek herself. She’d need Nine Hibiscus to keep liking them—to like them at all, possibly, she hadn’t had time to figure out how the yaotlek figured in the spread of happy that Information was here to Sixteen Moonrise—if they were going to get a chance to keep talking to the aliens. Or to make the right kind of decision to stop talking.

Stars, she just needed allies out here in the middle of the Fleet. Any allies she could get. Three Seagrass liked being in foreign environments—what Information-trained person didn’t—but she was exquisitely aware that she didn’t know the rules here, the shape of the relationships between ship and ship and their commanders and soldiers. No civilian would. (And yet it was still easier than dealing with the aliens—)

“… the larger difficulty is that there’s no time in the language we’re acquiring,” Mahit was saying. “No tenses. No causality; I’m not sure there’s a way to ask a question, let alone offer multiple options or convey consequences. It’s as if they were talking to us like we were very young.”

“Maybe they think we are,” said Nine Hibiscus. “Or that you two are. Possibly they send their young to negotiate with hazardous foreigners.”

“What, because they think younger members of the species are more expendable?” Three Seagrass asked. It was a very interesting idea. Except it didn’t make sense with how First and Second had looked. “If so, then their adults must be very large. The two that came down to the desert were—oh, as big or bigger than the one you were autopsying, yaotlek.”

“So either all their soldiers are neonates…” Two Foam began, consideringly.

“… or they have another language we still can’t hear,” Mahit finished for her. “An impenetrable language.”

Three Seagrass didn’t think Mahit knew that she’d quoted Eleven Lathe’s Asymptote/Fragmentation just then. As far as she was aware, Mahit still had never read Three Seagrass’s favorite poet-diplomat, who had lived six years amongst the Ebrekti and come back still human, his tongue loosened and made strange, his poetry full of images Three Seagrass had never quite been able to comprehend. The motion of a swift is an impenetrable language, he’d written, attempting to describe the shifting, protean hierarchies of how the Ebrekti moved and ran, their predatory herds, the physicality of their social behavior. It was so strange to hear Mahit say the same words and not know—she was almost sure she didn’t know—the deep resonance of them. The echo of Teixcalaan’s history with what could not be understood, what was too alien to stay with long. Eleven Lathe had come home, after his long exile. And written, after he was home, in language worth remembering.

“If their language is impenetrable,” said Nine Hibiscus, serene in command, serene in instruction, “then go around it.”

Mahit opened her mouth, probably to explain all of the ways that that command would be next to impossible to achieve—and she wouldn’t be wrong—but it was the wrong thing to say, and Three Seagrass knew that order was as good as permission to keep trying to talk with the aliens—so she opened her mouth, too, and said, “Of course, yaotlek. We’ll be back on Peloa-2 in nine hours for the next rendezvous,” and bowed so deeply over her fingertips that her queue of braided hair brushed the floor.

“See to it that you are,” the yaotlek said—and then, softer, went on. “Sleep first, if you can. If you both keel over of heatstroke or exhaustion, Twenty Cicada will write up the most irate report he is capable of, and I will be honor-bound to read all of it.”

She waved one of her wide-palmed, well-fleshed hands in dismissal. Three Seagrass had to stop herself from grinning, all Stationer-like, and scaring the comms officer. They’d get their next diplomatic meeting. And they’d get some time now, before it. Time where—if she and Mahit didn’t have another stupid, horrible, miserable fight—the two of them could think through the politics of what they were trying to do.

And whether or not it matched the politics of what Mahit’s Station wanted her to do—

But if Three Seagrass brought that up, they would absolutely have another fight. Or—have another iteration of the same fight. No. Better to think of Mahit Dzmare quoting Eleven Lathe as if his words belonged in her clever mouth.

It wasn’t that Three Seagrass was unaware that she was allowing herself to not acquire information about her associate’s loyalties and plans, information that might be vital, all for the sake of her own emotional peace. Really. She was extremely aware. But possibly being aware would be enough in and of itself: if she knew she was missing information, her analysis of the situation could account for its lack. She’d always managed that before. She just had to imagine Lsel Station’s influence on Mahit as a kind of negative space that still had gravity. Diplomatic dark matter.

Her metaphors were getting more extraplanetary every hour she spent on a Fleet ship. That might be a good sign for her poetry, or just exactly the opposite. Cliché wouldn’t help her, even if it was scenically appropriate cliché.

After she’d sent the envoy and her politically complicated companion away—after that, and before she had a real chance to think about what they had brought her (half a negotiation and a lot of unanswered questions, not anything solid enough to put weight on), Nine Hibiscus took stock of the bridge of Weight for the Wheel, and the Fleet beyond it. She was not in a position she liked.

Six legions. A single yaotlek’s six, far too few to fight a war with no current goals but attrition and jumpgate defense, no enemy strongholds to overwhelm. Two of those legions—the Seventeenth under Forty Oxide and the Twenty-Fourth under Sixteen Moonrise—already weakened with guerrilla-warfare casualties, ships lost at their edges to the marauding three-ringed enemy vessels. Three of those legions (the aforementioned two and the Sixth under Two Canal) chafing at her authority, being driven by politics originating somewhere in the Ministry of War, politics Nine Hibiscus couldn’t see clearly from where she was. One Information agent, who was effective but possibly compromised, and one linguist-ambassador, who was certainly a barbarian with barbarian desires, even if they coincided with the Fleet’s at this particular moment.

Supply lines stretched over too many jumpgates.

A funeral for an entire planet.

An enemy that might, or might not, be open to negotiation. That might, or might not, understand the concept of negotiation.

And a visiting Fleet Captain, that selfsame Sixteen Moonrise of too-many-recently-killed-in-action-soldiers and undermining-Nine-Hibiscus’s-authority as well as the Twenty-Fourth Legion, who was haunting her flagship like a rogue AI haunts a comms system.

Not in a position she liked at all. At least her people here on the bridge were still hers, and doing their jobs exactly as they were supposed to.

Eighteen Chisel, the navigation officer, had come up to stand next to her. He was almost as broad as she was: a barrel of a man, with a gut that looked soft and was nothing of the kind. The sort of soldier who was built for endurance, and who had somehow ended up being the most competent celestial mechanic she had ever encountered even after he’d spent the first fifteen years of his service as ground operations infantry. (He’d had the navigation aptitudes down pat, he’d told her once, over drinks in the officer’s mess. He’d just wanted to feel the weight of soldiering first, before he spent all his time staring into the stars.) She turned to him, a fractional motion, a gesture—go on, report.

“Yaotlek,” he murmured. Low. This wasn’t for everyone, then. This was something he wanted to tell her quietly, so she’d have a chance to react. To decide how to react. She nodded to him to go on.

“One of the scout-ships—the Gravity Rose, with Captain Eighty-Four Twilight in command—is reporting on narrowcast that they’ve found something. Something that looks like a home base for these things we’re fighting.”

Nine Hibiscus’s heart thudded against her chest wall like she was being rocked by cannon fire. “Planet, station, or just a really big ship?” she asked, equally soft. “And where?”

“Planet,” said Eighteen Chisel. “Planet and one satellite, both inhabited. Lots of civilian traffic, like a proper system would have. Eighty-Four Twilight didn’t give me much detail, just that the ships are definitely in the same style, but not military. Or don’t look it. The place is—out, far out. Past where Fleet Captain Forty Oxide’s stationed the Seventeenth. But that’s why the angle of attack they’re using is coming from that direction.” His smile was tight, wired, glittering-sharp. “I think we have them, yaotlek. I think if we could get Five Thistle over there with the number of nuclear scatterbombs in our hangar bay … well, we could blow them out of their sky, at least in that system. Send a message.”

“If we can get there without them seeing us,” Nine Hibiscus said. The scatterbombs would do exactly what Eighteen Chisel was imagining. They would, yes, blow anyone out of their sky. And then they’d poison that sky, and the planets below it. The scatterbombs were deathrain. A last resort. Almost never used where people lived—because after them, people didn’t live there anymore. She’d only used a scatterbomb barrage once, and that had been against another ship, safe in the blackness of space. The idea of using them on the aliens was—

She liked it too much, was what. Liked it too much, too fast. Such a simple solution. So much easier than the rest of the situation she’d been detailing for herself.

“Tell Eighty-Four Twilight to get the Gravity Rose out of there,” she said. “Quiet and quick. Make sure she knows I don’t want to let the enemy know we know where they are. I want to make the most of this, Eighteen Chisel. Plan it right. Keep it quiet here, too. For now.”

He nodded again and went back to his console. Satisfied. Anticipatory. (And wasn’t she the same? Anticipatory? Eager?)

And then she thought again of Sixteen Moonrise, somewhere in the bowels of her ship, wandering and watching with an agenda of her own, and decided that some things, some things—well, some things even other Fleet Captains didn’t need to know about until their yaotlek decided they needed to know. She wanted Sixteen Moonrise off Weight for the Wheel. Now. So that she would have time to plan at all.

The Minister of War was extremely good at push-ups. Also handstand balances, lunges, punching a bag of sand, and running very fast without getting out of breath. Eight Antidote had watched her do these things in sequence three times now from his perch on the balcony level of the Outreaching Palms’ training gymnasium, and was beginning to despair about the prospects of his own physical fitness.

When the Minister rounded the corner of the track again, moving away from him in even, quick strides, her cheeks flushed red and the scar of her ear flushed redder, Eight Antidote sighed and headed down to intercept her. Not by running, of course. Even if he could keep up with her—and he wasn’t unfit, his genetics were pretty good for basic athleticism, it was just that mostly he never ran anywhere—he didn’t want to talk to her while panting. It seemed undignified. Also embarrassing. And he really didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of Three Azimuth, to a degree which was unexpectedly overwhelming. So instead he took himself over to the mats where she’d been doing the calisthenic portion of her training cycle and began, gamely and not without a certain dizzy thrill, to try to figure out a handstand balance himself.

He could do a handstand. If he sort of—threw himself forward onto his hands and kicked up, and squeezed his core muscles together very hard so he didn’t overbalance. But he’d never done a balance, going from kneeling on the ground, palms flat to the padded matting, and unfolding into the air. It was much harder. He was sure he was missing some vital instruction. He kept getting partially up and then collapsing, or tipping over. But that was the point. Of course he was missing vital instruction. That was what Three Azimuth was going to give him.

“Kid,” she said, and he tried very hard not to startle, and only succeeded in falling out of his latest attempt onto his back with a thump. The Minister of War was staring down at him, her breathing fast but regular from her run, an expression of complete amusement on her face. Eight Antidote refused to cringe. He wanted her to be interested in him. Amusement was a sort of interest, right? And it was funny that he kept falling over. (He was blushing anyway, which was dumb of him.)

“Good morning, Minister,” he said, from his prone position. “I think I’m not very good at balances.”

She sat down beside him, a graceful fold to crossed legs. Her eyebrows had climbed halfway up her forehead. “… You’re quite spectacularly bad at them, in fact,” she said. “Why are you trying to do push-handstands when you’re too young to have even started the Fleet training regimen?”

“I saw you do them,” said Eight Antidote, and sat up—it was too embarrassing to be flat, he couldn’t handle that and keep talking—“and I can do a normal handstand fine, so…”

Now she did laugh. He thought it was kind laughter. He hoped it was. (It was so inconvenient and awful that he liked the Minister of War and wanted her to like him too.) “So you thought you’d try, with your little arms. You are a dangerously ambitious child, Your Excellency. I’m sure you know that.”

Eight Antidote made his face as still as possible and said, “I have been told so. Though not in such direct terms before just now.”

“Stars,” said Three Azimuth. “I don’t know how they raise children in the palace, but they’ve done a number on you. All right. What do you want with push-handstands, aside from trying something you don’t know how to do?”

“To learn how to do something I don’t know how to do,” Eight Antidote said. “You do them. You’re the Minister of War. They must be useful.”

Three Azimuth sputtered with snickering, a delighted and uncontrolled noise. (Maybe that meant he was getting somewhere?) She said, “Not everything I do is useful, kid. The office does not confer usefulness on my morning gymnasium routine.”

“What does?” he asked.

She paused. Thought about it. (Let him see that she was thinking about it.) “It keeps me strong and agile, even at this desk job. And I know it well enough that I can do it without thinking too much, so it’s easy to maintain. That’s why it’s useful to me. Here. Come on, let me show you one of the things you’re doing wrong. Start again, hands on the mat.”

He started again. Hands flat on the mat, his legs tucked under him, balanced on the balls of his feet. Three Azimuth made a considering sound. And then she touched him—her hands over his hands, pressing his fingers apart and his palms into the mat. His mouth went dry. “Make your hands stars,” she said. “All the points spread out, and stars have heavy gravity pull, right? That gravity sinks your palms into the mat. Press. And then bend your elbows—good—lean forward—and put your knees on your elbows.”

What? Eight Antidote thought, utterly confused, and then tried anyway—hopping, his ass in the air, trying to land his knees onto his bent elbows.

He missed. The momentum took him into a forward roll, which at least let him come up to sitting and not flop over again.

“Sorry,” he said to the Minister of War.

She shook her head. “Hilarious, but not bad for a first try. Next time, one knee and then the other. And hold that balance before you try pushing up to a handstand. Got it?”

He nodded. He didn’t get it, but he thought he could probably figure it out—

“Now. What else do you want, kid, besides free lessons in strength exercises? You’ve been up in the balcony for my whole workout.”

Really, he needed to learn how not to blush. But it was so hard, when he got caught. And when it was Three Azimuth that caught him. He’d really thought he’d been quiet, unobserved, careful, and yet—

“I wanted to ask you about the Lsel Ambassador,” he blurted out, not knowing what else to do or how to talk to this woman at all. “Um. I met her once. And I don’t—I wanted to know what you thought of her, because I’m not sure, and at that meeting—thank you for allowing me to be there, Minister, I meant to say—”

She’d gone quite still, like a bird about to dive, prey-seeking. He shut his mouth. Swallowed against the dryness there.

The Minister ran a hand through her own hair, pushing it back in slick black strands from her forehead. “Did Eleven Laurel tell you to ask me that?”

“No,” Eight Antidote said. Not Eleven Laurel. The Emperor, the Edgeshine of a Knife.

“Are you lying to me, Your Excellency?”

He shook his head, a fast harsh motion.

“Be sure you don’t lie to me. I’ll find out, Your Excellency. I’ll find out eventually.” Her voice was slow, serene, utterly determined. He felt hypnotized. Terrified. “Tell me, now: did Eleven Laurel put you up to this little scheme?”

“I swear,” Eight Antidote said, “he didn’t.” He wasn’t sure what he’d do if Three Azimuth asked him who had put him up to it. He wasn’t sure she’d believe a lie, wasn’t sure if telling the truth would be the beginning of an unfolding disaster like what had happened with the last Minister of War, Nine Propulsion, during the—insurrection—that had ended his ancestor-the-Emperor’s reign. Who wasn’t Minister of War any longer. Who had sided—probably, Eight Antidote wasn’t sure, everything about three months ago was confusing and he’d been ten then, not eleven, and hadn’t been told a lot of information—with the yaotlek One Lightning in his usurpation bid. Which was probably why the Emperor Herself had brought in someone from very far away, like Three Azimuth. Her external graft. But—he was spying on the Minister, for the Emperor. Would letting Three Azimuth know that Nineteen Adze had sent him here somehow start a new civil war? He could see ways it might. Ways that the strategy table which was the City and the palace might shift to land in that hideous outcome. If Three Azimuth had been brought in to be loyal and now she thought the Emperor didn’t trust her, she might do anything. Anything at all.

But Three Azimuth didn’t ask him who sent you? She’d only wanted to know whether it had been Eleven Laurel. Who was supposed to be her subordinate. She wanted to know if Eleven Laurel was using Eight Antidote to find out things from her—

Abruptly he wondered if Eleven Laurel had already found out things about her that she didn’t want him to know. She’d called him my spymaster. Spies didn’t just gather information. Spies sometimes held it over people’s heads, to get them to do what they wanted.

Three Azimuth seemed to have decided he wasn’t lying to her while he was thinking. She said, “All right. I think Ambassador Dzmare is one of those people who destabilize whatever situation they find themselves in, Eight Antidote. This is my professional opinion. I’m giving it to you so that you begin to learn what these people look like. What they behave like. Are you listening?”

He nodded. Kept quiet.

“You’ll meet them all over Teixcalaan, as you get older,” she went on. “Here in the palace, in the City, on whatever ship you serve on, if you join the Fleet. On every planet and at the heart of every disaster. There’s always at least one. These people can have the best of intentions or the worst. They may be clever or remarkably stupid, barbarian or citizen … but what they always, always are, Your Excellency, are people who put themselves and their desires before the needs of Teixcalaan. Who haven’t any sense of real loyalty. They shift and change.”

“… And Dzmare is one of them?” he managed to ask.

“You think about it. She comes here, she upsets the whole sugar-crystal-fragile peace between the Ministries, shows up in newsfeeds, writes a poem or two, and gets her patron made Emperor—not that Her Brilliance was a poor choice, Her Brilliance was a perfect choice, and I’d swear to that in a sun temple with blood from both wrists at once—and then she goes away again. But here she is, popping up on a battlefield, and immediately I have one Fleet Captain sending secret reports about a possible breach in the loyalties of another Fleet Captain? Of a yaotlek, no less? That Dzmare is a disruptive person. Whether she means to be or not.”

Eight Antidote said, without quite knowing why he said it, “How did you learn to recognize her? People—like her. I met her in the garden, when she was here—she liked the palace-hummers. She was drunk, I think. And sad.”

Three Azimuth nodded. “She might very well have been. Both drunk and sad. She was a barbarian at court. She doesn’t seem like a person who bears Teixcalaan ill will, not directly. It’s all right, kid, that you didn’t think about her this way. I only do because it’s been my job, for a long time, to notice those people and the situations they create.”

“Is that what the Minister of War is for?”

“Stars, no. The Minister of War is for making sure Teixcalaan’s military supremacy continues without end or interruption. Finding disruptive persons was what I did when I was the military governor of Nakhar System.”

Nakhar System, which Eight Antidote knew hadn’t rebelled even once while Three Azimuth had been its governor. Nakhar System, which usually rebelled every seven years or so, and always had, before Three Azimuth arrived.

Before Three Azimuth had noticed the disruptive people, and had made sure they couldn’t be disruptive any longer.

Mahit remembered this sensation—the feeling of being swept along from moment to moment in a bright haze of exhaustion, bravado, and culture shock: it was how she’d ended up feeling every time she’d been immersed entirely in Teixcalaan. It was as pervasive on a Fleet warship as it had been in the imperial palace, and as intoxicating; as if there was a contaminant in Teixcalaanli air as pervasive and mind-altering as the heat of Peloa-2. She felt like she was flying. Untethered. She had just negotiated, as much as it was possible to describe what she had done as negotiating, given the limitations of language, with incomprehensible beings—

yaotlek?> Yskandr murmured. He was flying, too—all glitter-shot laughter, the ghost of her sabotaged imago clearer in the blend of the three of them than he’d been in days.

Both, Mahit told him, as the door to the assigned quarters she shared with Three Seagrass hissed shut behind the two of them. Right now she was still vibrating, still gloriously triumphant and terrified at once. But alone in this room with her former cultural liaison, her partner-in-negotiation, who understood nothing and everything about her—she could see the approaching drop. The point where there would no longer be anything she had to do, and the silence and stillness of exhaustion would come down on her like the sudden hand of gravity.

Three Seagrass said, loud in the hush of a room where the only noises were the churning of Weight for the Wheel’s air-purification systems, “Thank you.”

Which wasn’t what Mahit had expected at all.

“For what?” she asked, turning toward her. Three Seagrass was still grey through the cheeks, hollow-eyed, all tension and suppressed giddy hysteria. Heatstruck and half drunk on success.

“You sang their own sounds back to them,” Three Seagrass said. “I wouldn’t have thought of it. Not that way. Not that fast. And look what we did. Think of it, Mahit. No human beings but us right here have ever spoken that language, ever before today. Just us.”

Am I human, then? Mahit thought, bitter-sharp, and shoved the question away, unwanted. Couldn’t she enjoy this? Couldn’t she feel the same victory that Three Seagrass was feeling?

Yskandr said. Or she said, to herself. She wasn’t sure. It was hard to tell, when she wanted so much to be allowed to keep being immersed in the bright spinning perfection of accomplishment, to stave off the inevitable crash a little longer …

“I still think we’re just picking up some kind of pidgin—they talk to each other, and we’re not hearing it—” She didn’t even know why she wasn’t agreeing with Three Seagrass. Why she had to keep qualifying their work. They weren’t in front of the yaotlek now. She didn’t need to justify a further round of negotiations, or report honestly on her failures, or—

“Mahit,” said Three Seagrass, quite intently.

“… Yes?”

“Hush.” She stepped close, close enough that Mahit was abruptly aware of the shape of her body, the space she took up in the air, the scent of her dried sweat. And then her hands were in Mahit’s hair, pulling her down in an arc to be kissed.

Mahit thought she made a sound—some noise that was a strangled word, half expressed—but Three Seagrass’s mouth was warm and open under hers, and she kissed like she meant it, not an offer or a question but a claim; all desire, not the coming-together of exhaustion and grief that their first and only prior kiss had been, deep under the City, waiting for Six Direction to die in a sun temple, sanctified in front of all of Teixcalaan. This was—

Her hands had found Three Seagrass’s shoulder blades, the curve of her waist, the ridge of her hipbone that fit exactly into Mahit’s palm. The precise way that Nineteen Adze’s larger hipbone had fit into Yskandr’s larger palm—the doubling was intense, almost violent, a surge of desire like a pulse or a punch between her thighs. Distantly, she wondered if sex would be different now that she had an imago with male-bodied memories—decided it didn’t matter, it was going to be good—and in deciding, realized that she’d already committed to whatever this was going to be. That she wasn’t offering or asking either, but saying yes. (Like Yskandr had said yes, first to the Emperor and then to Nineteen Adze—and look where that had gotten him—but oh—and it didn’t matter that they hadn’t talked about their argument, it didn’t matter at all, she wanted to never think of anything again, except for desire, except for triumph, except for being wanted—)

Distant, as desire-choked as she felt:

Yskandr was probably right, and Mahit didn’t care.

Three Seagrass broke the kiss with a slow sucking bite to Mahit’s lower lip, and Mahit caught her breath on a whine, all unintentional.

“I was going to ask if you actually liked people of my gender and sex,” Three Seagrass said, breathless, “but I don’t think I need to.”

Mahit shook her head. Her mouth was as dry as it had been on Peloa. She could feel her heartbeat between her legs, racing-hot.

“Good,” Three Seagrass said, and kissed her again—swarmed up against her, small breasts pressed into Mahit’s own, a thigh insinuated between her thighs. Mahit rocked against her, shifted, aligned her pelvis to shove her own hipbone against the seam of Three Seagrass’s trousers. Three Seagrass gasped and bit Mahit’s collarbone. She was hot through the fabric and Mahit was viciously, delightedly sure that when she got her hand between her legs she’d find her dripping wet.

“—Do you always get like this after you’ve won something?” she asked, and Three Seagrass bit her again, and laughed, and pushed against her hip in steady motions.

“Only when I’ve won something with someone like you,” she said.

Almost, Mahit asked, Only barbarians, then? Only sufficiently alien partners? Almost, but it was better—easier—to kiss her again, to feel the expanding, dizzying memory of Yskandr kissing someone as much smaller than him as Three Seagrass was to her, the Emperor who had opened up under his mouth like Three Seagrass was opening under hers—to feel that doubling and willingly allow it in. (Six Direction’s hair had been longer, and grey-silver, but the texture when Mahit wound her fingers into Three Seagrass’s queue and disarrayed it was completely the same.)

“Come on,” she said, when the kiss dissolved from lack of available oxygen, “come on, I’m not going to fuck you standing up—”

“That bed’s tiny.” One of Three Seagrass’s hands had gotten under her shirt, cupped her breast, teased expertly and distractingly at the nipple. “There’s a perfectly good floor right here…”

“I’m not that kind of barbarian,” Mahit said, and found herself laughing, too, and pulling away long enough to squirm out of her jacket, pull her shirt over her head. The air of their quarters on bare skin raised shivery gooseflesh down her arms, over her ribs. The air, and Three Seagrass’s eyes on her.

“You’re not,” Three Seagrass said, dark and intent, “but I am.”

And then she had dropped to her knees in front of Mahit, fluid and easy motion. She pressed her open mouth between Mahit’s legs. Wet heat through fabric, her tongue already mobile and seeking—Mahit thought, Blood and starlight, said, “Fuck, yes, please,” didn’t care that she’d cursed in Teixcalaanli, that she was only thinking in Teixcalaanli, that she and Yskandr were both explosively, devastatingly lost—sank a hand into Three Seagrass’s hair and pulled her in, tight.