A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE fan-vaulted roof of the Palace-Earth ballroom was full of streaming lights: each rib made of some translucent material that a river of gold sparks rushed through. Teardrop chandeliers hung from the apexes, like suspended starlight. The black marble of the floor had been polished to a mirror sheen. Mahit could see her own reflection in it; she looked as if she’d been set in a starfield.

So did everyone else. The room was as crowded with patricians as it was with lights, clustering and unclustering in conversational knots, one enormous Teixcalaanli organism that shifted only in configuration. At Mahit’s elbow, Three Seagrass—impeccable in her asekreta’s cream-and-flame suit, but deliberately dimmed to a functionary’s normalcy in the vastness of the room and the sparkle of its inhabitants—asked, “Ready?”

Mahit nodded. She drew her shoulders back, straightened her spine; shook out the cuffs of the grey formal jacket she wore. Nineteen Adze had had someone fetch it from her luggage that morning, and wasn’t she glad that the only state secrets she had were inside her own body and not hidden in one of her suitcases. It was drab, compared to the riot of metallics and mirrors the Teixcalaanli court displayed, but at least she looked like the Ambassador from Lsel, and not anything else. Even if she had walked over with Nineteen Adze, glittering in ice-white, and her entire entourage—even if spies and rumormongers and gossips would remember that walk and not this one down into the company of the court.

“The Ambassador Mahit Dzmare of Lsel Station!”

Three Seagrass was loud when she wanted to be. She’d planted her feet, lifted her chin, and called out Mahit’s name like she was beginning a verse of a song—one long, clear, pitched shout. Orator, Mahit thought. She did say if it wasn’t for me she’d be reading poetry tonight. There was a gratifying and intimidating stir of interest from the massed courtiers—a shifting of attention, hundreds of cloudhook-obscured eyes settling on her. She held still just long enough for them to look—long enough for a first impression. A tall, narrow person in a barbarian’s foreign-cut trousers and coat, her reddish-brown hair cropped low-grav short, her forehead high and bare. Different from the last one of her kind: female, unknown, unpredictable. Young. Smiling, for whatever reasons an ambassador might smile.

(Also, not dead. That was another difference.)

Mahit moved out of the raised central doorway and descended the stairs to the floor, Three Seagrass just in front of her and to her left, just as she’d promised she’d be. She oriented herself toward the rear-center of the ballroom, the place where she knew the Emperor would appear. She had to get there by the evening’s end; and she had to make her way across all of this glittering space without committing any social or geopolitical errors that she didn’t intend to make. Somewhere the Science Minister, Ten Pearl, was waiting to have their oh-so-public meeting. Every time Mahit thought of him now she remembered that flash of Yskandr, of the two of them arguing—talking—negotiating around the nature of the City and the City’s mind, if it had one. She kept coming back to it, how the memory had flooded her, interrupted her. She couldn’t afford to have that happen again now, in front of all of the assembled court of Teixcalaan, and she also had absolutely no idea how to prevent it.

Behind her, Nineteen Adze had framed herself in the entranceway like a pillar of white fire, and Mahit could feel the attention in the room shift. She exhaled.

She liked parties—a certain level of extroversion and sociability was a basic part of the aptitude tests that had made her compatible with Yskandr—but she was still grateful for the chance to catch her breath, to make an approach of her own choosing. To not have all those eyes on her in case something went wrong in a more visible fashion than it had done thus far.

“Where to?” asked Three Seagrass.

“Introduce me to someone who writes poetry you like,” Mahit said.

Three Seagrass laughed. “Really.”

“Yes,” Mahit said. “And if they have an official dislike of our most-esteemed ezuazuacat hostess, so much the better.”

“Literary merit and diversifying political options,” Three Seagrass said. “Got it. We are going to have fun, aren’t we?”

“I am trying not to bore you,” Mahit said dryly.

“Don’t worry. The hospital trip was sufficient to relieve me of boredom, Mahit, and this part is what I’m for.” Three Seagrass’s eyes were bright, a little glassy, like she’d drunk too much of Nineteen Adze’s stimulant tea. Mahit worried about her, and wished she had the time or energy to do something about that worry. “Come this way, I think I saw Nine Maize, and if Nine Maize is giving a new epigram tonight, Thirty Larkspur will be there to hear it. All the political diversity you could want.”

Three Seagrass’s friends were a mix of patricians and asekretim, some in Information Ministry cream and some in gleaming court dress that showed no particular affiliation that Mahit could decode—this was what she needed Yskandr for, even fifteen years’ worth of out-of-date fashion observation would be better than it’s all very shiny and a suspicion about anyone wearing purple flowers as a decorative motif. There were too many of them: worked in as embroidery on sashes, made of mother-of-pearl or quartz on jeweled hairpieces and lapel pins, more sophisticated versions of the one that helpful stranger in Central Nine had been wearing. They meant something. Three Seagrass wasn’t commenting on it, which didn’t tip the balance of meaning in any direction at all.

Instead she introduced Mahit formally, and Mahit bowed over her fingertips and was an extremely proper barbarian—respectful, occasionally clever, mostly quiet in the midst of the sharp chatter of ambitious young people. She could follow about half of the allusions and quotations that slipped in and out of their speech. It made her jealous in a way she recognized as childish: the dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen. Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to satisfactorily resolve it, she knew that. And yet it wormed into her every time she bit her tongue, every time she didn’t know a word or the precise connotations of a phrase.

Nine Maize turned out to be a sturdy man with a slim beard, paler than most Teixcalaanlitzlim, his eyes wide set over flat, broad cheeks. Mahit hadn’t seen many people from this ethnic group—northern, cold-weather adapted, blond—in the City. There’d been a few on the subway, and a few in Central Nine, but they were the eighth most common in the census numbers—she’d done her research before she’d arrived. People who looked like Nine Maize might have been born here on the City, or come from a planet with more cold weather and less subtropical heat—or his parents might have. Or his genetic material might have, and had latterly been selected by some City-dweller as being suitably interesting and compatible with their own, when it was time to make a child. Three Seagrass had introduced Nine Maize as patrician first-class—unfashionably pale or not, he was Teixcalaanli.

“Is it true,” Mahit asked him, “that you are reciting a new work tonight?”

“Rumors travel so quickly,” Nine Maize said, looking not so much at Mahit as at Three Seagrass, who blinked at him as if the very suggestion of her complicity made no sense to her.

“Even to foreign ambassadors,” Mahit said.

“How flattering,” Nine Maize said. “I do have a new epigram, it’s true.”

“On what subject?” said another of the patricians eagerly. “We’re due for an ekphrasis—”

“Out of fashion,” Three Seagrass said, under her breath but just loud enough to be heard. The patrician made a little show of ignoring her. Mahit tried her best not to spoil the effect by smiling like a foreigner, wide and genuinely amused. An ekphrasis—a poetic description of an object or a place—did seem to be old-fashioned. None of the Teixcalaanli poetry which had come to Lsel lately had been in that style.

Nine Maize spread his hands and shrugged. “The buildings of the City have been described by better poets than me,” he said, which Mahit suspected was a slightly more politic version of exactly what Three Seagrass had said. “Do you like poetry, Ambassador?”

Mahit nodded. “Very much,” she said. “On Lsel, the arrival of new works from the Empire is celebrated.” She wasn’t even lying—new art was celebrated, passed around through the Station’s internal network; she’d stayed up late with her friends to read new cycles of the latest imperial epics—liking Teixcalaanli poetry was just being cultured, especially when one was barely an adult and still spending all one’s time getting ready for the language aptitudes. Nevertheless she disliked Nine Maize’s acknowledging smile, the condescension in his nod: of course new works were celebrated in backwater barbarian space. For that dislike, she went on, “But I’ve never before had the honor of hearing one of your pieces, patrician. They must not be distributed off-planet.”

The way Nine Maize’s expression shifted—he couldn’t answer that insult, not from a barbarian—was perfectly satisfying.

“You’re in for a treat, then, Ambassador Dzmare,” said a new voice.

“I’m sure I am,” Mahit said automatically, and turned around.

Thirty Larkspur was unmistakable. The multistranded braids of his hair were woven through with ropes of tiny white pearls and glittering diamonds; another strand made up the band around his temples, to imitate the bottommost part of a Teixcalaanli imperial crown. He had the wide Teixcalaanli mouth and the low Teixcalaanli forehead and the deep hook of the Teixcalaanli nose: the model of an aristocrat. Pinned to his lapel was an actual fresh-plucked purple flower: a larkspur.

How obvious, Mahit thought. She should have realized. (And realizing, noticed that she felt no echo of Yskandr while looking at this man: he hadn’t known him, not during the five recorded years her imago had lived here. Thirty Larkspur was a mystery to her: she didn’t even have an emotional ghost to rely on. The dead Yskandr must have known him, but he was dead—and she was both damaged (sabotaged!) and out of date.)

Maybe she’d get to come up with her own opinion. That felt frightening, and a little exhilarating, as a possibility.

She bowed deeply. “Your Excellency,” she said, and then let Three Seagrass run through Thirty Larkspur’s titles for her. He had his own epithet, of course. He who drowns the world in blooms. Mahit wondered if he’d picked it.

Straightening, she said, “It’s an honor to meet a person associated to the Imperium such as yourself.”

Thirty Larkspur said, “I know, it’s the only thing anyone can think when they look at me in this getup. Trust me, Ambassador, Nine Maize’s epigrams are more interesting than a co-heir—I’m sure I’m not the only one you’ll meet tonight.”

“But you’re the first,” Mahit said. It was difficult not to flirt back with the man, no matter how actually uninterested she was in everything but what opinions Thirty Larkspur held concerning her predecessor and Lsel.

“I do have that pleasure, Ambassador. I assume I’ll have to make a decent showing of myself. Is this your liaison?”

“The asekreta Three Seagrass,” Mahit said.

“We miss you at the salons, Three Seagrass,” said Thirty Larkspur, “but I assume everyone has to work sometime.”

“Invite me when I’m off-duty,” said Three Seagrass, serene and too expressionless for Mahit to know if she was flattered or insulted or pleased, “if you can’t do without my orations.”

“Of course.” Thirty Larkspur extended his arm to Mahit. “You won’t be able to hear properly from the center of the floor, Ambassador,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to come with me and stand where the acoustics are better.”

Mahit couldn’t come up with a good reason to refuse, and there were several good reasons to say yes: further distancing herself from being seen as Nineteen Adze’s pet prisoner, a chance to ask Thirty Larkspur something about Yskandr, actually hearing the poetry itself instead of everyone’s commentary on the poetry. She put her palm on Thirty Larkspur’s proffered forearm—the blue-and-silver fabric of his jacket was stiff with metallic thread—and let him pull her away from the group, Three Seagrass at her heels. “It’s very kind of you,” she said.

“Can’t a person want to show off the best of his culture to a stranger?” Thirty Larkspur asked. “This is your first night at court properly.”

“It is.”

“The previous ambassador was such a mainstay! We miss him. But perhaps you like poetry more than he did.”

“Was my predecessor not fond of epigrams?” Mahit said lightly.

They had stopped further toward the central dais. Thirty Larkspur made a gesture that reminded her of nothing so much as Nineteen Adze dismissing an infograph, and summoned up an attendant with a tray of drinks in deep-belled glasses. Mahit bent her head over hers to smell it: violets, and alcohol, and something she thought might be ginger or another aromatic root that only grew in soil.

“I believe Ambassador Aghavn preferred epics,” said Thirty Larkspur. He raised his glass. “To his memory, and to your career, Ambassador Dzmare.”

Mahit imagined drinking and dying, poisoned, in the middle of this enormous room—drank, and was only poisoned so much as to discover that she absolutely hated the taste of violet liqueur. She swallowed and kept her face appropriately expressionless. “To his memory,” she said.

Thirty Larkspur spun his glass in his hand; the violet swirled. “I’m glad that Lsel Station has provided us with a new ambassador,” he said. “Let alone one who is genuinely interested in epigrams. But you should know, Ambassador Dzmare—the deal is off. There’s nothing I can do about it. Do trust me that I made an attempt.”

The deal is off?

What deal? Mahit pressed her lips together—surely she could express disappointment visually—buy time—everything still tasted of violets—What deal, Yskandr! And with who!—and nodded. “I appreciate your candor,” she said.

“I knew you’d be reasonable about it.”

“Could I be otherwise?” Mahit said.

Thirty Larkspur raised both of his eyebrows so that they nearly met his hairline. “Oh, I imagined all sorts of unfortunate reactions.”

“How pleasant for you that I’m not inclined to hysteria,” Mahit said, as if she was operating on autopilot. What deal, and why would Thirty Larkspur be the person to tell me it was off, and all the time just talking in proper high-register Teixcalaanli, like a glittering veneer over her distress.

“I hope I haven’t ruined your evening,” Thirty Larkspur said. “It really is going to be a wonderful epigram—Nine Maize is something special.”

“Perhaps he’ll take my mind off of it,” said Mahit.

“Fantastic. To your enjoyment of your first imperial oration contest, then.” He lifted the violet again, drank again, and Mahit imitated him. She was never going to get the taste out of her mouth.

The glimmering lights in the ribs of the vaulted ceiling dimmed to twilight and then brightened again, a flickering and rapid migration of glowing points. The loud chatter of the courtiers diminished. Mahit looked over her shoulder at Three Seagrass, who nodded reassuringly—this was expected, then—and back over at Thirty Larkspur. He put his drink down on the tray of a passing attendant and murmured, “I ought to go stand in the right part of the room, Ambassador. So good to make your acquaintance!”

“Of course,” Mahit said, “go—”

He did. Three Seagrass came closer. Mahit said, “Please get me another drink?” at approximately the same moment as Three Seagrass said “What deal?”

“I don’t actually know.”

Three Seagrass looked at her with an expression that Mahit hoped wasn’t pity. “A stronger drink than that, then.”

“Also without violets?”

“In a minute,” Three Seagrass said. “You don’t want to miss this.” Very gently she took Mahit’s elbow and turned her to where the imperial dais was—

—to where the imperial dais, which she had thought was a slightly raised oval on a raked floor, was rising from the ground, unfolding. Mahit thought of the City, trapping her in Plaza Central Nine—thought of Thirty Larkspur’s epithet, the world in blooms. The throne rose on soundless hydraulic engines, an unfurling sunburst like a thicket of golden spears, a reified echo of the lights running through the ribbed vault of the ceiling. To the right of it Thirty Larkspur stood exalted in refracted illumination; to the left was a woman Mahit assumed was Eight Loop, stooped in the shoulders and balanced on a silver cane but not any less illuminated—her version of the imperial-associate partial crown glowed bright even against her silvered hair.

In the center of the sun-spear throne, revealed like a seed in a flower or the core in the heart of a burning star, Mahit got her first glimpse of the Emperor Six Direction.

She thought, He’s not imposing except by position—he was short, sunken-cheeked, the long fall of his hair more dirty steel than silver even if his eyes were sharp—and then The position is more than enough, I am being devoured by my own poetic imagination.

Six Direction was old, was small, looked fragile—brittle-boned, too thin, as if he’d been ill and was now just barely recovered. And Six Direction was in command of all this ceremony, or commanded by it—the emperor and the empire were the same, weren’t they? As close as the words for empire and world were, or nearly—and he claimed the attention of every Teixcalaanlitzlim. The exhalation of breath that sagged through the room when he lifted his hand in benediction was like a physical blow.

Smoke and mirrors and refracted light, and the weight of history in a glance—Mahit knew she was being manipulated and couldn’t find a way to stop being. At Six Direction’s side was a child who must be the ninety-percent clone. A small, serious boy with enormous black eyes.

And if that wasn’t a declaration of where the succession would eventually fall, Mahit didn’t know what was. It wasn’t going to be a true tripartite council: it was going to be a child-emperor and two regents for him to fight with. That poor child, with Thirty Larkspur and Eight Loop for co-regents. Abruptly she wondered which people in the ballroom were One Lightning’s supporters—if any of the people so prominently wearing purple larkspurs were in fact covering for a less politic choice—and, for that matter, where Ten Pearl from the Science Ministry was, and when he’d approach her.

“Are you ready to be presented to the Emperor,” Three Seagrass asked archly, “or are you going to stare for a while first?”

Mahit made a wordless noise, helplessly amused. “What did you feel like, the first time you saw the throne rise?”

“Terrified that I wasn’t good enough to be here,” Three Seagrass said. “Is it different for you?”

“I don’t think I’m terrified,” Mahit said, finding her way through how she felt as she framed the sentence, “I think I’m … angry.”

“Angry.”

“It’s so much. I can’t not feel—”

“Of course not. It’s meant to be like that. It’s the Emperor, who is more illuminate than the sun.”

“I know. But I know I know, and that’s the problem.” Mahit shrugged. “I will be very honored to meet him. No matter how I feel.”

“Come on then,” Three Seagrass said, holding on to her elbow more firmly. “It’s one of your ambassadorial duties, anyhow! You need to be formally acknowledged and invested with your post.”

There was a receiving line at the foot of the dais, but it was shorter than Mahit assumed it would be, and His Majesty Six Direction spent no more than a minute with each petitioner. When it was her turn, Three Seagrass announced her again—more quietly this time, but no less clearly—and she climbed the steps to the center of the many-petalled sun-spear throne.

A Teixcalaanlitzlim would have dropped forehead to the floor, bent over their knees in full proskynesis. Mahit knelt but did not fold—bowed only her head, stretching her hands out in front of her. Stationers didn’t bow, not to pilots nor to the governing Council, no matter how long their imago-lines were, but she and Yskandr had come up with this solution in the two months they’d spent in transit to the City. She’d seen illustrations of the pose in infofiche scans of old Teixcalaanli ceremonial manuals: it was how the alien diplomat Ebrekt First-Positioned had greeted the Teixcalaanli Emperor Two Sunspot on the bow of the ship Inscription’s Glass Key, during the official first contact between the Teixcalaan and the Ebrekti people. (Or, at least, how a Teixcalaanli artist had rendered the pose of a person whose limbs were arranged for quadrupedal locomotion.)

That had been four hundred years ago out on the edge of known space, after Inscription’s Glass Key had leapt through a new jumpgate unexpectedly, while Two Sunspot was fleeing the usurper Eleven Cloud (Two Sunspot had eventually beaten her and her legions back, and remained Emperor—there were several novels about it, and Mahit had read them all). The Ebrekti had been good neighbors ever since: quiet, keeping to their side of the one gate that connected their space and Teixcalaan. She and Yskandr had calculated what it would say, to bow like this—a respectful statement of distance from the Empire.

Yskandr had told her that he’d chosen the same pose himself, when he was presented to Six Direction.

Only now, with her hands stretched out, supplicant but straight-spined, did Mahit wonder if she was repeating a mistake, making all of Lsel inhuman by virtue of one symbolic allusion—

The Emperor closed his hands around her wrists and lightly pulled her to her feet.

She was still two steps below the throne, which made her his equal in height. His fingers wrapped around the bones of her wrists were shocking, unexpected. They were hot. The man was burning with fever, and yet Mahit would never have known if he hadn’t touched her. He was wearing some kind of citrus and woodsmoke perfume. He looked straight at her, straight through her—Mahit found herself smiling, helplessly, fighting back a rush of familiarity that wasn’t hers. She thought for a moment it was the beginning of another memory-flash, her failing imago-machine spinning her out of time, back to Yskandr—but no, no, this was all endocrine response.

Sense memory was one of the strongest carryovers down an imago-line. Scents. Sound, sometimes—music could cue memory—but scent and taste were the least narrative, the most encapsulated kinds of memory, the most easily shifted from one person to the next down the line. Perhaps Yskandr was—was less gone than she’d thought, she could hope for that, through the dizzy strangeness of someone else’s neurochemical mirroring.

“Your Majesty,” she said. “Lsel Station greets you.”

“Teixcalaan greets you, Mahit Dzmare,” said the Emperor. Like he meant it, like he was glad to see her—

What the fuck had Yskandr done here?

“And invests you with your diplomatic office,” Six Direction went on. “We are gratified by the choice of ambassador, and express our wishes for your service to us to be to our mutual benefit.”

He was still holding her wrists. There was a thick scar on his palm, pressed against her skin, and she thought vividly of that first memory-flash, of Yskandr slicing his own palm open to swear an oath, and wondered how many oaths an emperor swore with blood over the course of his life. The hot pressure of his hands was intense, and she was still caught in the rush of oxytocin happiness that didn’t belong to her and wouldn’t she just like to interrogate Yskandr as to what exactly he’d meant to the Emperor of all Teixcalaan? Somehow she managed to nod, to thank Six Direction with correct formality, to bow and back down the steps of the dais without tripping.

“I need to sit down,” she said to Three Seagrass.

“Not yet you don’t,” Three Seagrass told her, not without sympathy. “Ten Pearl is headed straight for us. Are you going to faint?”

“Do people faint after audiences often?”

“It’s more a thing in daytime dramas that come over the newsfeeds, but the strangest things end up being repeatable—”

Mahit said, “I’m not going to faint, Three Seagrass.”

Three Seagrass actually took her hand and squeezed it. “Excellent! You’re really doing fine.”

Mahit wasn’t exactly sure of that, but she could damn well pretend to be for the length of some political theater. She squeezed Three Seagrass’s fingers back, and let them go. Walked a little farther away from the dais, into an open space in the glitter of the crowd. She could feel the focus of the room shift around her—from the Emperor on the dais, sitting back now and murmuring something to his tiny clone, audiences over, to where the barbarian ambassador had put herself right under the lights in an open space, a public declaration that something important was about to happen and maybe they should watch.

Ten Pearl, for an ixplanatl—and surely the Science Minister was a scientist, and not just an appointed bureaucrat—had enough theatricality in him to know that Mahit had taken his offer of a public meeting and accepted the gambit. This was as public as was available in Palace-Earth. He had to know it. The next five minutes would be all over the newsfeeds in the morning, right next to holographs of Mahit with her wrists in the Emperor’s hands, and he came striding up to meet her in a swirl of deep-red coattails, a bony man with a scientist’s hunched shoulders. He was older than he’d been in the memory-flash—more stooped—but he still wore a ring on each finger: thin bands of mother-of-pearl, stoneless. For his name—ostentatious, but in a self-deprecating sort of way. Mahit admired it. As Yskandr had admired it, the same rueful appreciation of a joke. Whether the feeling was genuine to Mahit she honestly didn’t know.

“Ambassador,” Ten Pearl said. “Congratulations on your investiture.”

Mahit bowed over her fingertips. “Much appreciated,” she said, a full level of formality lower than she ought to have kept to at court. But she’d planned to play the wide-eyed foreigner at this meeting and she was going to go through with it, even if she was still buzzing with imago-induced neurochemicals—the oxytocin rush from meeting the Emperor, the echo of Yskandr’s conversation with this man fifteen years ago. The subway. The City as a mind, an algorithm that watched where everyone was, and ran seamlessly in response.

“I’m terribly sorry for the unfortunate incident that befell your predecessor,” Ten Pearl went on. “I feel personally responsible; I ought to have inquired after his biological sensitivities.”

His biological sensitivities! What a way to phrase it. Mahit hoped fervently she was not about to dissolve into hysterical giggling; it would wreck the play for the newsfeeds. “I’m sure there was nothing you could have done about it,” she said, managing to stay straight-faced. “Lsel Station bears no enmity toward the Science Ministry, of course.” Even a barbarian would know enmity; it was a rote diplomatic phrase. It was what you had before you started a war.

“You’re quite understanding,” Ten Pearl said. “A credit to your government. They’ve certainly made a solid choice with you.”

“I hope so,” Mahit said. Fawning, wide-eyed, a credulous provincial. Not a political threat. Not at all, not even with how the Emperor had greeted her. Of course it wouldn’t hold up for long—Ten Pearl was the only one she was playing this particular game with—but this was the game for the newsfeeds, and it might give her some cover. A few days. A week, before someone tried to kill her like they’d killed Yskandr, who had clearly been quite dangerous.

She hadn’t really thought of it like that before. That she was buying time.

It knocked the remains of the neurochemical high right back down to baseline.

“Ambassador Aghavn did not leave very many notes,” she went on, shrugging as if to say what can be done about the errors of the dead, “but I would of course like to continue to explore whatever projects he was working on with the Science Ministry.” A quick breath, and then she let her face fall into the pattern of Yskandr’s expressions, the familiar-unfamiliar stretch of wider muscles, deeper-set eyes, and said: “Automated systems—without error and without conflict—such algorithms have certainly persisted.”

Ten Pearl looked at her a fraction too long—had she been too obvious, leaving bait for a more private meeting than this? Using what Yskandr had said, so long ago—but it had felt correct—and then Ten Pearl nodded, saying, “Perhaps we can resurrect a little of what Ambassador Aghavn wanted to achieve, between the two of us—he was so interested in our automated systems, and how they might be applied on your station. I’m sure you are as well. Have your liaison arrange a time and place. I’m sure we can fit you in sometime this week.”

Resurrect was a terrible choice of word. “Of course,” Mahit said. She bowed again. “I hope for many future accomplishments for both of us.”

“Naturally you do,” said Ten Pearl. He stepped closer, a fraction past the norms of Teixcalaanli personal space, into that precise zone of closeness that Mahit was most comfortable with: how friends stood on Lsel, where there wasn’t enough space to be standoffish. “Do be careful, Ambassador,” he said.

“Of what?” Mahit asked. She wouldn’t break the illusion of incompetence.

“You’re already attracting a thousand eyes, just like Aghavn did.” Ten Pearl’s smile was perfectly Teixcalaanli, mostly in the cheeks and in a widening of the eyes, but Mahit could tell it was a show regardless. “Look around. And think of the eyes of that automated system you and your predecessor so admire.”

“Oh,” said Mahit. “Well. We are in front of the imperial throne.”

“Ambassador,” said Three Seagrass, materializing at Mahit’s side, “I recall you wanted to watch the oration contest. It is about to begin. Perhaps Minister Ten Pearl would also like to hear the newest compositions from our court’s poets?”

She’d spoken very slowly and clearly, as if she didn’t know that Mahit could understand Teixcalaanli at full speed. Mahit could have picked her up and spun her around in gratitude for understanding and participating, without instruction. Was this how she’d been supposed to feel all this time, if Yskandr had remained with her? How an imago should make their successor feel: two people accomplishing one goal, without needing to consult. Perfect synchronicity.

“I wouldn’t want to distract the Ambassador,” said Ten Pearl. “Go on.” He waved a hand at where Nine Maize and a cluster of other courtiers had begun to assemble, off to the left of the dais. Mahit expressed her gratitude to him again—tripped deliberately over the pronunciation of the most formal thanks, even though she knew she was pushing her luck, but it was so satisfying to see him try to figure out if she was lying. And how she was lying.

When she and Three Seagrass were safely out of his earshot, she leaned down and murmured, “I thought that went well.”

“I thought you said you needed to sit down and rest, not that you needed to play at uncivilization with the Science Minister,” Three Seagrass hissed, but her eyes were glittering-bright.

“Did you have fun?” Mahit said, realizing as she said it that she wasn’t as done with the neurochemical imago-effect as she’d thought—she still felt sparkling, giddily pleased. She hadn’t exactly felt that way during the conversation with Ten Pearl, but now, with Three Seagrass hanging on her arm—

“Yes, I had fun! Are you going to be like this all the time? He isn’t a fool, Mahit, he’ll have you figured out by the time I set up that meeting.”

“It’s not for him,” Mahit said. “It’s for the audience. The court and the newsfeeds.”

Three Seagrass shook her head. “No other job is ever going to be this interesting, is it?” she said. “I promised I’d get you a drink. Come on. They’re about to start.”

Somewhere in the middle of the second oration, an acrostic ode that simultaneously spelled out the name of the poet’s hypothetical lost beloved via the opening letters of each line and told a heart-wrenching story of his self-sacrifice to save his shipmates from a vacuum breach, Mahit had the sudden realization that she was standing in the Teixcalaanli court, hearing a Teixcalaanli poetry contest, while holding an alcoholic drink and accompanied by a witty Teixcalaanli friend.

Everything she had ever wanted when she was fifteen. Right here.

She thought it should probably have made her feel happy, instead of abruptly unreal. Disconnected—depersonalized. Like she was happening to someone else.

The orations were good. Some of them were better than good—driving rhythms over clever internal rhyme, or an orator whose delivery of that particular Teixcalaanli style of half-sung, half-spoken rapid-fire chant was exceptionally fluid. Exquisite imagery washed over Mahit in waves, and she felt nothing. Nothing aside from wishing that she could have copies of every poem written down, confined to glyphs that she could read on her own someplace quiet and silent and still. If she could just read the poems—speak them in her own voice, try out the rhythms and the cadences, find how they moved on her tongue—surely she’d feel the power of them. She always had before.

She drank from her glass. Three Seagrass had brought her some spirit distilled from a grain she didn’t know. It was the pale gold color of all the swarming lights, and burned going down her throat.

Nine Maize’s oration, when it came, was the epigram Three Seagrass had promised it would be. He’d hardly begun—only took his place, cleared his throat, and recited a three-line stanza:

Every skyport harbor overflows

Citizens carry armfuls of imported flowers.

These things are ceaseless: star-charts, disembarkments

when he hesitated just long enough to signal a shift, a caesura. Mahit felt the entire room catch on his held breath. No matter how little she had liked him, she saw why he was the toast of the court’s literati: what charisma he had was amplified the instant he spoke in verse. It was what he was made for. On Lsel he’d have been a candidate for an imago-line of poets, if Lsel had had such a thing.

“The curl of unborn petals holds a hollowness,” said Nine Maize.

Then he sat down again.

There was no release of tension. The sense of unease remained, floating like a miasma. The next orator came forward in the midst of the awkward silence, the scrape of her shoes on the floor audible. She fumbled the first line of her own composition and had to begin again.

Mahit turned to Three Seagrass, questioning.

“Politics,” murmured Three Seagrass. “That was … a critique. In several ways. I really thought Thirty Larkspur had Nine Maize under his thumb, but people can be so surprising.”

“I’d think it was most critical of Eight Antidote?” Mahit said. “The child. Unborn petals…”

“Yes,” Three Seagrass said, her eyebrows knit together, “but Thirty Larkspur’s the heir who is most responsible for increasing importation of in-Empire goods to the City. It’s why he has money—he’s bringing it in from the Western Arc systems, that’s where his family is from. And there’s that suggestion of corruption for every citizen carrying a flower … every import being somehow poisoned … as if Thirty Larkspur’s wealth is as bad as importing objects from outside Teixcalaan entirely.”

Politics by means of literary analysis. Were there aptitudes that tested for that, or was it something a Teixcalaanlitzlim would learn through intense exposure? Mahit could imagine Three Seagrass as a child, deciphering the political messages in The Buildings with her school peers at lunch. It wasn’t difficult to picture.

“Critical of everyone save Eight Loop, then,” she said.

“She only survives pillory by overt omission,” Three Seagrass said. “I think it’s deeper than just which heir is best, Mahit. Why else would Nine Maize make such a dangerous choice in topics?”

Mahit thought of the fundamental assumption of Teixcalaanli society: that collapse between world and Empire and City—and how if there was such a collapse, importation was uneasy, foreign was dangerous, even if that importation was just from a distant part of the Empire. And barbarians like herself oughtn’t be able to conceptualize why a poem about the perilous corruption of some other planet’s flowers might be, in fact, designed to make a Teixcalaanlitzlim nervous.

But if a system was no longer foreign—if the world was large enough, the Empire large enough, to encompass and subsume all that was barbaric about that world—well, it wasn’t barbaric anymore. It wasn’t threatening anymore. If Nine Maize was pointing out the threat of importation, he was calling for—or at least suggesting—that Teixcalaan act to normalize that threat. To civilize it. And Teixcalaan had always civilized—had always made something Teixcalaanli—with force. Force, like a war. Nine Maize wasn’t really talking to Thirty Larkspur; Nine Maize was shoring up whatever political factions were preparing for war. All those troop movements. One Lightning, with his legions and his shouting partisans—but also Six Direction, setting the fleet into the kind of readiness that had marked his early reign, when he’d been a star-conquering emperor himself.

“Where are One Lightning’s supporters tonight, Three Seagrass?” she asked. “They’re who that poem was for. For anyone who is interested in a stronger, more centralized, less importation-focused Teixcalaan.”

“He’s a populist and this is court, it’s not fashionable. But I’m sure—oh,” Three Seagrass said. “Oh. Well. We were looking for the war.”

“A war very soon,” Mahit said, uneasily thrilled with discovery. “An annexation. A conquest war. For the purpose of making places less foreign.”

Three Seagrass reached over and plucked Mahit’s glass of alcohol out of her hand, took a large sip, and returned it. “We haven’t had an annexation war since before I was born.”

“I know,” said Mahit, “we do have history on the stations. We were enjoying Teixcalaan being a quiescent neighboring predator—”

“You make us sound like a mindless animal.”

“Not mindless,” Mahit said. It was as close as she could bring herself to an apology. “Never that.”

“But an animal.”

“You do devour. Isn’t that what we’re talking about? A war of annexation.”

“It’s not—devour would be if we were xenophobes or genocides, if we didn’t bring new territories into the Empire.”

Into the world. Shift the pronunciation of the verb, and Three Seagrass could have been saying if we didn’t make new territories real, but Mahit knew what she meant: all the ways that being part of Teixcalaan gave a planet or a station prosperity. Economic, cultural—take a Teixcalaanli name, be a citizen. Speak poetry.

“Let’s not argue, Three Seagrass,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

Three Seagrass pressed her lips together. “We’re going to argue. I want to understand what you think. It’s my job. But we can argue later. The Emperor is going to announce the contest winner soon, look.”

The orations were finished. Mahit had missed the last few entirely. None of them had disturbed the room the way Nine Maize had. Now the Emperor stood up, his ezuazuacatlim flanking him—had they conferred, chosen a winner together? She doubted that they could so quickly come to a conclusion, not when the group of them included Thirty Larkspur, two Teixcalaanlitzlim Mahit hadn’t met, and Nineteen Adze, resplendent still in white. Quite nearly a relief to look at, in all of the gleaming lights.

Six Direction gestured, pointing out a poet who had made absolutely no impression on Mahit. She looked as surprised by her honor as the rest of the crowd, which hesitated on the verge of the expected acclamatory cheering as if they weren’t certain of what had happened either.

“Who is that?” Mahit whispered to Three Seagrass.

“Fourteen Spire,” Three Seagrass said. “She’s exquisitely dull in her basic competence and always has been. She’s never won anything before.”

Nine Maize’s face was impassive. Mahit couldn’t tell if he was pleased to be so obviously snubbed or angry about it; whether he’d meant to ruin the evening so firmly. Fourteen Spire prostrated herself before the Emperor and received a blown-glass flower as her prize. Got up again. The assembled courtiers managed to shout her name, and Mahit joined in—it would have been stranger not to.

“Are you going to finish the drink?” asked Three Seagrass when the noise had died away.

“Yes. Why?”

“Because I am going to have to talk about Fourteen Spire’s use of assonance for the rest of the evening, and you’re going to have to listen, and we should both be slightly more inebriated.”

“Oh,” said Mahit. “When you put it like that.”