A Desolation Called Peace

Close enough, Mahit told him.

“How right you are, Envoy,” Nine Hibiscus said, still showing her teeth. “But you have reason to make me mistrust my Fleet Captain, do you not? You two—the spook and her pet?”

“You’re the one who asked for Information’s services,” Three Seagrass said. “Yaotlek. It’s you who commands me, just as you command the Fleet Captain.”

“And how do I know, Envoy, if the attack on the Seventeenth is due to Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise’s maneuvers—or something you and Ambassador Dzmare said, down on Peloa-2?”

“You don’t,” said Mahit. “And neither do we.”

Three Seagrass looked at her, flashfire-quick, her mouth twisted into the same amazed-wry expression she’d worn when Mahit had curled her fingers up inside her just so. Which was also the same expression she’d worn when she had watched Mahit turn the performance of barbarism directly against the Minister of Science Ten Pearl, at the very first event they’d ever been to together. That same pleasure, a twisted amazement and joy, a kind of possessive wanting. Mahit couldn’t think about how it made her feel. She didn’t have time to feel anything that strong. That—disarraying of the pattern of the world.

“The Ambassador is right,” Three Seagrass said. “I would not promise you anything I could not guarantee. It may be our fault. It may be the Twenty-Fourth Legion. It may be something else we cannot even imagine—our enemy is otherwise than any alien species I know of.”

Clipped and vicious, Nine Hibiscus said, “For what did I bring you here, then, Envoy? If you cannot make these aliens make sense.”

“For the attempt,” said Three Seagrass.

At which Two Foam, apparently done with philosophy, negotiations, and barbarians all, said, “The Chatoyant Sirocco is still waiting for an answer,” loud enough that Mahit almost flinched.

Quickly, Mahit said, “Ask the Emperor. Let this be, if it is to be, a destruction that is from the heart of Teixcalaan.”

Eight Antidote had accesses he hadn’t known he had. He’d never thought to use them. Never thought, before this morning—it was morning now, sort of, a grey morning that was going to rain at any minute, the sunrise mostly disguised—to walk through Palace-Earth and ask locked doors to open for him. To open for him because he was the imperial heir Eight Antidote, and his cloudhook was the second-strongest key in all of Teixcalaan.

Unless his accesses had been limited because he was a child. Which he was sure they were, somewhere—but he wasn’t finding the edge. He kept not finding the edge, where someone—even the City, or the imperial security AI, or a dumb-locked door that needed a physical key—would stop him. He wanted—it was awful and stupid and unfair, but he wanted someone to stop him. That would mean it wasn’t his responsibility anymore. That would mean someone else, someone grown up entirely, would be the one in charge of doing this. Of stopping a—a planetary genocide. Except: the grown-ups were in charge, and so far they weren’t stopping anything at all.

Palace-East opened up like a flower blooming. Eight Antidote walked as deep as the imperial apartments went, past the post of the Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand, past the corridor that led to his own rooms, past door after door and into the Emperor’s own suite. He was bracing himself to try the last door—the one he’d never been through, the one that would lead into Nineteen Adze’s bedroom, her private space—when a hand fell onto his shoulder and he cried out, surprised, and forgot everything about how to fight off a kidnapper, just stood still, waiting to see if he’d be punished for trespassing.

It wasn’t a kidnapper, of course. It was Her Brilliance the Emperor, all in white, bare feet soundless on the floor.

“Little spy,” she said. It was not an accusation. More like an invitation to explain himself.

“Your Brilliance,” he said, and turned around. Her hand stayed on his shoulder. He tried not to cringe or pull away. “I’m sorry for disturbing you this early.”

“No you’re not,” said Nineteen Adze. “You cut a swath through all of the palace’s security systems. You want very much to disturb me. Now, would you like to tell me why?”

Her attention felt like a gravitational field. Something that pulled a person in. “I was at the Ministry of War,” he said. He wanted to get this right, the first time. To not hesitate or hint. “I overheard the Minister and Third Undersecretary Eleven Laurel discussing using nuclear shatterbombs on an entire inhabited planetary system full of our enemies. They’re going to do it. They’re going to ask you to approve it. They’re going to ask you to tell them to kill an entire planet and poison it so nothing ever grows there again.”

“And you came to—what, to warn me?” Her face was expressionless. Eight Antidote felt completely lost. Why wasn’t she reacting? Why wasn’t she making it stop?

“Yes?” he tried. “And to tell you that—I think that the aliens, that our enemies, that maybe they’re all one mind like the Sunlit sometimes are and killing a planet of them would be—it’s so awful I can’t think about it, Your Brilliance.”

“It is awful,” said Nineteen Adze. “Have you had breakfast yet? Come, sit with me a minute. I’ve got cassava and new-cheese breads—your ancestor-the-Emperor liked them. Do you, too?”

Eight Antidote did—they were one of his favorite foods, the delicious round cassava shell around the slightly melted, gooey cheese center, warm from the oven—but he couldn’t imagine eating. He was sick to his stomach. He didn’t understand anything about how Nineteen Adze was handling this. But he sat down next to her at a table by one of her enormous windows, and took a cassava bread from the platter of them that was there. He picked it apart with his fingers.

“Why aren’t you making them stop?” he asked, finally, and Nineteen Adze sighed—just a faint sound, her shoulders settling back. She bit into a cassava bread. Chewed and swallowed while Eight Antidote stared at her.

Then she said, “I’m not making them stop because I believe it’s the right idea.”

He tore another piece of dough off his bread and squished it in his fingers. “Why?” he said, plaintive, hating himself for sounding plaintive. “They’re people. Not humans, but people, I really think so, and you said it was awful to kill a planet, I just heard you.”

“I did say it was awful,” the Emperor told him. “And I believe it is. It is a terrible thing to do, and a terrible decision to make. But that’s what Emperors are for, Eight Antidote. Terrible decisions. I’d rather—oh, I’ll tell you the truth, my little spy. You’re going to have to do this yourself, eventually, so the truth is better. I’d rather have a pyrrhic victory—display just what Teixcalaan is capable of, smash a living beautiful planet full of people—and yes, they probably are people, but not the kind of people we can understand—smash it to dust and deathrain. I’d rather one act of horror than an endless war of attrition, losing our people and theirs, on and on and on. Like a suppurating wound at the edge of the Empire, forever.”

She wasn’t eating her pastry. She swallowed like her throat was as dry as Eight Antidote’s was. “Sometimes it is better to cauterize,” she said.

Nine Hibiscus hissed through her teeth. Mahit wanted to flinch, or step in front of Three Seagrass, in case the suggestion of asking the Emperor for permission to begin all-out war, all strategy over, was so deep a breach of propriety that a yaotlek would—she didn’t know. Have Three Seagrass shot. Court-martialed. Assigned to one of those glittering Shard-fighters to lead the assault.

She wished she could stop imagining worse ways for the narrative to play out. But there were so few better ones that she could see, and Yskandr was a shiver-quiet hum of pain in her wrists, all barely contained waiting that wasn’t patience as much as a preparation for some unknown last-ditch action—

But then Nine Hibiscus said “Tell Forty Oxide to return fire, but not pursue.” Two Foam nodded, a quick acknowledgment. Mahit tried to breathe in the space between the yaotlek’s sentences. She couldn’t inhale and exhale fast enough.

“Not pursue yet,” Nine Hibiscus went on. “But prepare to, on my order. And send a fast-courier to the City. I want the Emperor’s voice on this order right along with mine.” Then she looked back at Three Seagrass and said, much softer, hardly loud enough for Mahit to pick up, “I’ve always said that Information was better than the Palmers if you had to do counterintelligence outside the Fleet because Information’s prefucked—no chance of getting yourselves enamored with barbarians for the first time and forgetting what the Fleet’s for. You’re already corrupt. But I didn’t ever expect one of you to bring me a barbarian who uses Teixcalaanli imperial protocol to prove her points.”

“Ambassador Dzmare is—unique,” said Three Seagrass, and Mahit tried to decide who had insulted her, and if she should mind. She’d won, hadn’t she? Briefly. She’d—bought them time. Time for Twenty Cicada to keep talking. Time for—something other than all of Teixcalaan’s military bent to inexorable and total destruction, unnuanced, beautiful—an elimination of confusion, of incomprehension. A loss.

One of the other officers on the bridge said, “Yaotlek. A ship has come through the jumpgate—behind us—”

“An enemy ship?” asked Nine Hibiscus, and Mahit thought, ice-clear and sudden: If it is one of the enemy, coming through the Anhamemat Gate from the Stationer side, then they have already taken Lsel, and I never even knew when all my people were killed. I was here, talking to their murderers, and I never knew—

If she breathed, she’d hyperventilate. If she moved, that thought would be true, and real, and she’d have to keep breathing afterward.

“No,” said the officer, and Mahit exhaled so hard that she almost missed what he said next, lost in a sudden, imago-doubled flood of relief—a relief which vanished almost as soon as it rocked through her, leaving her shaking.

Because the officer had put the incoming ship’s wide-channel broadcast on full audio, and the voice which was filling the bridge of the Weight for the Wheel belonged to Darj Tarats, Lsel Councilor for the Miners, first amongst six—and he was demanding to be brought on board to speak with Mahit herself.

Cauterize.

Eight Antidote didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to say it. How did he tell the Emperor Herself that she was wrong? How could she be this wrong? “… I don’t understand,” he managed. “You told me—you told me all those things about how my ancestor-the-Emperor wanted a Teixcalaan that could have another eighty years of peace, and you want to do this anyway? It’s—”

“Go on,” said Nineteen Adze. “Say what you think.”

“It’s a planetary genocide,” said Eight Antidote, and said it angrily, and didn’t burst into tears at all. That icy clear place beyond fear was back with him. “I don’t care if it cauterizes. If you think it would cauterize. If someone murdered my home, I would fight them forever.”

“I do think you would,” Nineteen Adze said. She wasn’t reacting to him. He didn’t know what he could say to make her stop being so calm, so already-decided. “I would have, when I was eleven. Maybe when I was twice eleven, too. But that was before I met Six Direction. We have to think beyond ourselves, and what we’d want. That’s what I learned from him. What I learned from watching him rule, and watching the end of his reign. This is an ugly decision to make, and it hurts, Eight Antidote, and I’m sorry you had to find out about it in secret. I would have preferred to have been with you, so you could ask questions and I could have explained.”

“You said. Before, in my bedroom—” He tried to remember the words. The exact words. It would have been easier if Nineteen Adze had recited a poem, but she hadn’t. She’d just told him—“… You said that Six Direction’s Teixcalaan was an empire strong enough to be at peace. How are we going to get there from—from killing a planet?”

Nineteen Adze lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and put it down again. “You’re really not like him,” she said. “Or you’re like he was when he was a child, and I never knew him as a child—he only told me stories. I’m glad you’re not, you know. I meant what I said, in your bedroom. I’d rather have a clever, annoying successor than a dullard. Even if you are in my living room trying to make me feel ashamed of killing our enemies viciously enough that they will leave us alone. Your ancestor would have done what I am doing. We did it together once. On that campaign. The one in the holo that I gave you.”

“You killed a planet?”

“A city. It—came to the same thing, little spy. There, and then, it came to the same thing.”

He could imagine it. The two of them, on their horses. The bloody spears. He wondered how you killed a city without killing the planet along with it, and whether he’d know how when he was grown. He said, “You keep saying I’m not my ancestor. I know I’m not. I’m a clone. Most people are clones! It’s not weird.”

The Emperor put her hand on Eight Antidote’s wrist. Her skin felt like skin. Warm and human, just like his. “You’re exactly you,” she said. “But—you could have been something else. And I didn’t want that for you.”

Eight Antidote was sure that he was being distracted, being led away from the horrible and certain knowledge that even now there was probably a message on an infofiche stick going toward the spaceport, on a fastest-of-fast-courier ships, jumpgate to jumpgate and only five and a half hours between here and genocide. But he couldn’t help asking. He felt like he’d choke if he didn’t ask.

He said, “What would I have been?” And waited.

Nineteen Adze closed her eyes. The lids were unpainted—she never really painted herself, Eight Antidote had always suspected that the white suits and the sun-spear throne were enough decoration for her—unpainted and thin. Every poem he knew said that Emperors never slept. Maybe it was true. Her eyes were still closed when she said, like the beginning of a story, the preamble to an epic, “Your ancestor the Emperor Six Direction loved many people in his time. Me—his crèche-sister Eight Loop, who you’re named for, who is your legal guardian now—countless others. But once he loved the Ambassador from Lsel Station.”

“Mahit Dzmare?” Eight Antidote asked, confused.

“No,” said Nineteen Adze. “Stars, no, he met her—three times, I think. Three times I know about. He loved her predecessor, little spy. Yskandr Aghavn. And I—oh, Yskandr was easy to love. Like drinking too much and not minding being drunk. Like taking a strike force over a hill and not knowing if there’s an ambush on the other side.”

“He died, though,” said Eight Antidote, and wondered if he should be offering condolences. Adults and the way adults loved had never made sense to him. What the Emperor was describing didn’t sound like love at all.

Nineteen Adze nodded. Her eyes were still closed. “Yes. He died. I helped kill him, for what that’s worth. Which was like killing a city, or a planet. There and then, it really did come to the same thing. Do you want to know why?”

“… That’s a stupid question, Your Brilliance.”

She laughed. The sound was fragile and strange. “Of course it is. I set you up for it. But you do want to know, don’t you?”

“Yes.” He did. He also didn’t, but he felt like being surprised with it later would be worse.

“Because on Lsel Station, where Yskandr and Mahit both come from—there is a technology that they use to put the mind of one’s predecessor inside the mind of the successor. To—share, Mahit said. To have memory live forever. And Yskandr loved your ancestor-the-Emperor. I don’t know, little spy, if a barbarian like Yskandr could believe in Six Direction’s Teixcalaan, but he believed in Six Direction, and when your ancestor was old, and dying slowly, Yskandr offered him one of those machines. Imago-machines, they call them. A way to record himself, and put himself inside a new body, like a ghost. And have eighty times eighty years of peace.”

There was a rock in his stomach, and he hadn’t even eaten his cassava and cheese. “It’d need to be a close body, wouldn’t it?” he said. His voice sounded thin. Babyish. He couldn’t care. “A clone, if he could get one.”

“Yes,” said Nineteen Adze. “A clone would work very well. You’re quite like him. Except in all the ways you’re not.”

He swallowed, dry-mouthed, and almost choked. “What would I have been like?”

The Emperor had stopped looking at whatever was on the inside of her eyelids, and was looking at him instead. He wanted to squirm away. She said, “I don’t know. Not you. Not Six Direction, either. Something—untenable. Untenable to me. To Teixcalaan.”

And yet it was tenable to her to kill a whole planet to maybe stop a war. Eight Antidote didn’t understand. He didn’t want to understand. He was glad he wasn’t some ghost, some half-thing, his ancestor and himself wrapped up together, because he was himself, and he didn’t want to understand how Nineteen Adze could kill her friend to save a kid and kill a planet to maybe do nothing but kill a planet.

“I’m not him,” he said. “I’m not Six Direction.”

“You aren’t,” Nineteen Adze said. “You are the imperial heir Eight Antidote. Nothing more and nothing less.”

“You let me be myself,” he said. Making sure.

“I—gave you the opportunity, when it would have been taken away, yes.”

“Then I am myself, and I think you’re wrong, Your Brilliance, you’re wrong to go along with Three Azimuth’s idea, this isn’t my Teixcalaan. The one you’re building.”

And somehow he found that he could stand up, and turn his back on his Emperor, and walk straight-spined right out of her suite, leaving his uneaten breakfast behind him.

“Fire on that ship,” said Nine Hibiscus, with the brittle determination that accompanied making an unwise choice that nevertheless felt better than making no choice at all. She knew this kind of thinking. She’d thought she’d grown out of it, long before she’d been a Fleet Captain, let alone a yaotlek. It was the sort of thinking that obliterated possibilities, unbalanced worlds. Twenty Cicada would be disappointed.

Twenty Cicada wasn’t here.

“Don’t,” Mahit Dzmare said, her face twisted in some incomprehensible expression. Grief or anger or another barbarian emotion that made no sense. “Yaotlek, please, don’t. He is—that’s Darj Tarats, he’s one sixth of our government, please.”

Such a simple request. She should deny it. Everything Sixteen Moonrise had warned her about—the compromising of Information by Lsel agents, the infiltration of Stationer concerns into what should have remained Fleet business—all of that was apparently true, by virtue of the presence of this barbarian in his little ship, demanding Ambassador Dzmare. And yet here was that selfsame Ambassador Dzmare, begging for his life, for the life of some member of her government.

“Hold,” Nine Hibiscus said to Five Thistle, whose hands were already finished targeting the small skiff containing this Darj Tarats. “Why shouldn’t I fire, Ambassador? That ship wouldn’t be the first Stationer vessel caught in the crossfire of this war.”

The Ambassador probably hadn’t known that. She flinched. Everything was so visible on her face, so clear. And yet her expression wasn’t anything that Nine Hibiscus was sure she recognized.

“He asked to speak to me,” said Dzmare. “I am—duty-bound to defend him, to preserve the life of my fellow citizen—”

“Also it’s rude,” said the envoy Three Seagrass, perfectly bland. “To fire on someone who announced himself as friendly.”

Nine Hibiscus wanted so badly for her to be wrong. For the both of them to be wrong. To be the sort of Fleet Captain who wouldn’t care if they were wrong.

But she wasn’t.

“Bring him on board,” she said to Five Thistle, instead. “On board and to me. In restraints. I don’t trust this timing, Envoy. Ambassador. I don’t trust it at all.”