A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER EIGHT

SOMEWHERE in the middle of her third glass of the pale spirit Three Seagrass kept bringing her (Three Seagrass herself was drinking something milky-white that she called ahachotiya, which Mahit was convinced meant “spoilt burst fruit”—at least from her understanding of the roots of the unfamiliar word—and couldn’t quite figure out why it was in any way desirable to consume, let alone consume multiple instances of), Mahit found herself standing on the edge of a circle of Teixcalaanlitzlim, watching them have what she could only describe as not a poetry contest but a battle of wits conducted entirely in extemporaneous verse. It had begun as a sort of game: one of Three Seagrass’s evanescently clever friends took up the last line of Fourteen Spire’s dull and prize-winning poem, said “Let’s play, shall we?” and proceeded to use that last line as her first one, composing a quatrain that shifted the rhythm from the standard fifteen-syllable political verse form to something that was absolutely stuffed full of dactyls. And then she’d pointed her chin at another one of Three Seagrass’s friends, in challenge—and he took her last line, and apparently came up with a perfectly acceptable quatrain on his own, with no preparatory time. Mahit caught a few of his references: he was imitating the style of a poet she’d read, Thirteen Penknife, who used the same vowel-sound pattern repeated on either side of a caesura.

Imitating Thirteen Penknife seemed to be the order of the day, after that—Three Seagrass took a turn, and then another woman, and then a Teixcalaanlitzlim of a gender Mahit didn’t recognize, and then it was back to the initial challenger—who changed the game again, adding another element: now each quatrain had to start with the last line of the previous one, be in dactylic verse with a vowel-repeated caesura, and be on the subject of repairs made to City infrastructure.

Three Seagrass was annoyingly good at describing repairs to City infrastructure. She was lucid even through many glasses of ahachotiya, laughing, saying lines like the grout seal around the reflecting pool / lapped smooth and clear-white by the tongues of a thousand Teixcalaanli feet / nevertheless frays granular and impermanent / and will be spoken again, remade in the image / of one department or another / clamoring, and Mahit knew two things: first, that if she wanted to take a turn at this game, all she needed to do was step forward into the circle, and someone would challenge her, same as any other Teixcalaanlitzlim—and second, that she would fail at it completely. There was no way she could do this. She’d spent half her life studying Teixcalaanli literature and she was just barely good enough to follow this game, recognize a few of the referents. If she tried herself she’d—oh, they wouldn’t laugh. They’d be indulgent. Indulgent of the poor, ignorant barbarian playing so hard at civilization and—

Three Seagrass wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to her.

Mahit slipped back, away from the circle of clever young people, and made herself disappear into the great ballroom under the glittering starlit fan-vaults, and tried not to feel like she was going to cry. There wasn’t any point in crying over this. If she wanted to weep she should weep for Yskandr, or for how much political trouble she was in, not over being unable to describe pool grout while referencing a centuries-old poem on departmental conflict. One department or another, clamoring. She’d read that poem in one of her collections, on the Station, and thought she’d understood. She hadn’t.

The hall was still packed with inebriated courtiers; there seemed, if anything, to be more of them than before, a secondary tier of people who had come for the party now that the Emperor and his oration contest had finished—Six Direction himself was nowhere to be seen, and Mahit was glad of that. Glad, because he was hard to look at without wanting to go near. Glad, because he’d been so fragile, under all that power, and some part of her which she assumed was mostly Yskandr wanted him to be able to rest, and not waste time on entertaining this mess of shimmering Teixcalaanlitzlim. She got herself another drink (one more was not going to make a difference at this point, and she’d figured out how to avoid any of the ones that tasted of violets or milk-rotted flowers), and struck out across the floor.

Most people avoided her, or greeted her with the formality her office deserved, and that was absolutely fine. That was actually pleasant. She could do courtesy ritual, even without Yskandr’s help, and she could be personable—these were all amongst her talents, these were the talents she had been specifically selected for, possessed aptitude in, and no Lsel imago-compatibility test ever looked for fluid improvisational verse. That was just a barbarian child’s dream of a desire.

She was wallowing. Also she was slightly drunk.

And because both of these things were true, she was not at all expecting when a very, very tall person, wearing a long dress made out of bias-cut pale grey-gold silk, put her hand on Mahit’s arm and spun her around. The room kept spinning for just a moment after Mahit stopped, and she should probably be worried about that.

The woman who had accosted her was not Teixcalaanli, not by features and certainly not by dress. Her arms were bare save for heavy silverwork cuffs, a bracelet on each wrist and one more wide band high on the left arm, and she was wearing a type of makeup Mahit wasn’t familiar with: she’d covered all of her eyelids with red and pale-gold creams, like a painting of clouds at sunset on some distant planet.

Mahit bowed over her hands, and the other person did the same—awkwardly. With great unfamiliarity.

“You’re the Lsel Ambassador!” she said brightly.

“Yes?”

“I’m Gorlaeth, the Ambassador from Dava. Come have a drink with me!”

“A drink,” said Mahit, playing for time. She couldn’t remember where Dava was. It was one of the most newly annexed planets in Teixcalaanli space, she was sure of that, but was it the one which exported silk or the one which had a famous mathematical school? This was what an imago was for. To help you remember things you needed to know that you hadn’t known you needed to know.

“Yes,” Gorlaeth said. “Do you drink? Do you have drinks on your station?”

Oh, Mahit thought, for fuck’s sake. “Yes, we have drinks. Lots of them. What kind do you like?”

“I’ve been going through the bar. Local culture, you understand. You understand!” Gorlaeth’s hand was back on Mahit’s arm, and she felt a distant kind of disgusted pity for the other woman: she’d been sent here by her government, and her government was newly a protectorate of Teixcalaan, and she was alone (like Mahit was alone—but Mahit wasn’t supposed to be alone), and being alone in Teixcalaan was like drowning in clear air.

A person might try all the drinks at a bar and call it experiencing local culture.

“How long have you been here?” Mahit asked. The same phrase Three Seagrass had used in the groundcar during her first minutes within the City. How long have you been inside the world?

Gorlaeth shrugged. “A few months. Now I’m not newest anymore—you are. You should come to our salon—several of the ambassadors from farther systems get together every other week—”

“And do what?”

“Politics,” said Gorlaeth. When she smiled, she stopped looking affable and a little lost. She had a great many small teeth, and most of them were pointed. It wasn’t a Stationer’s smile, but it wasn’t Teixcalaanli either, and Mahit felt, for one dizzying instant, the width and breadth of the galaxy—how far a jumpgate might take a person. How the people on the other side might be people, or might be something that looked like people but weren’t—

That was how a Teixcalaanlitzlim would think. She was getting very good at it, wasn’t she.

“Send me an invitation,” Mahit said. “I’m sure the politics of Dava are of interest to the politics of Lsel.”

Gorlaeth’s expression did not so much change as harden: the sharpness of her teeth sharper. Mahit wondered if it was the fashion on Dava to file them to points, or if it was an example of an endemic trait in an isolated population, like the freefall mutants. “More than you might imagine, Ambassador,” Gorlaeth said. “Our Teixcalaanli provincial governor hardly ever comes to bother us, save to invite us to events like this one. Your station might take note.”

Mahit wasn’t sure if that was a threat—come to our salons, join our little group of ambassadors, and when Teixcalaan eats you too, you’ll go down whole and unchewed—or a genuine offer of sympathy: either way, she was insulted. This woman was from Dava—she still couldn’t remember if it was significant for silk or mathematics—and here she thought she could give Mahit advice. She’d had enough of advice for one night.

When she smiled, she pulled her lips all the way back from her teeth into a grimace. “We might,” she said. “I do hope you find a new drink to try, Ambassador Gorlaeth. Goodnight.”

The room whirled again when she spun on one heel, but she thought she was still walking in a straight line. She needed to get out of here, before she met someone who could actually do her or her Station harm. She needed to be alone.

There were a multitude of doors out of the throne room of Palace-Earth. Mahit picked one at random, slipped through, and vanished herself into the machinery of the Emperor’s own stronghold.

Most of Palace-Earth was marble and gold, star-inlay and dim lights, a perpetual state of near-dawn: like the view from the station as they came around the nearest planet again, sunflare and pinpoint stars mixed. There weren’t half so many people as Mahit had expected, and almost none of them were guards or police. She didn’t see a single Sunlit with their closed gold faceplates, even though they would have gone ever so well with the decor—only a few expressionless men and women with pale grey armbands, leanly muscled and armed with shocksticks, who looked as if they were quite dangerous, or might be if challenged. No projectile weapons in Teixcalaan, even in the palace; some of spacer culture ultimately spread down to the most civilized places. She avoided any door the people with shocksticks guarded, and let herself wander otherwise unimpeded: guided only by where she wasn’t allowed to go.

She was more sober by the time she found the garden, not dizzy or faintly ill—only buzzed, shimmering-strange—and she was glad of that, both the lack of true drunkenness and the lack of total sobriety, when she realized what sort of garden it was that she had stumbled into, a tiny carved-out heart in the middle of this place. It was a room more than a garden: shaped like an enclosed bottle, a funnel that opened onto the night sky. The humid wind of the City slipped down it and was gentled as it went. The air was thick with moisture that dragged at Mahit’s lungs, and fed the plants that climbed three-quarters of the way up the garden’s walls. Deepest green and pale perfect new green, and a thousand, thousand red flowers on vines—and sipping at those flowers, tiny birds with long beaks, hardly longer than Mahit’s thumb, that floated and dived like insects would. The beat of their wings was a hum. The entire garden sang with it.

She took two steps into the garden—her feet soundless on the moss that covered the floor—and held up her hand, wonderingly. One of the tiny birds alighted on it, balanced on her fingertip, and took off again. She couldn’t even feel its weight. It had been like a ghost. It might not even have landed.

A place like this couldn’t exist on a station. It couldn’t exist on most planets. Even as she walked further into the strange dim sanctuary of it, she peered upward, trying to understand how the birds didn’t fly up the funnel and escape into the vaulted Teixcalaanli sky—it was surely warm enough out there for them, though not nearly as sweet—not so many red flowers all at once. Perhaps succor was enough to keep a whole population trapped, willingly.

Succor, and the fine mesh of a net. When she tilted her head to exactly the right angle, she could see it, strung silvery and near-invisible at the funnel’s mouth.

“Why are you here?” someone said—a high voice, thin, easy with command. Mahit stopped looking up.

It was the ninety-percent clone. Eight Antidote, the spitting image of Six Direction as he had been at age ten. The child’s long, dark hair had come unbound and hung past his shoulders, but otherwise he remained as impeccable as he’d been when he’d stood beside his progenitor while Mahit offered up her wrists. He was not tall. He was not going to be tall, unless the 10 percent of his genetics that hadn’t been spun from the Emperor’s was full of a whole lot of genetic markers for height. What he was was comfortable, here in this strange room of trapped and beautiful birds, and looking at Mahit like she was an inconvenient piece of space debris that had to be avoided while inscribing an orbit.

“You’re the new Ambassador from Lsel Station. Why are you here, and not at the party?”

For a child of ten he was distressingly direct. Mahit thought of Two Cartograph, Five Agate’s little Map, with his orbital mechanics at age six. Children learned what they were expected to know. She had. At ten on Lsel she’d known how to patch a hull breach, how to calculate an incoming ship’s trajectory, where her nearest escape pods were and how to use them in an emergency. She’d known, too, how to write her own name in Teixcalaanli glyphs, to recite a few poems; how to lie awake in her tiny safe pod of a room and dream of being a poet like Nine Orchid, having adventures on faraway planets. She wondered what this child dreamed of.

“My lord,” she said to him. “I wanted to see more of the palace. Forgive me if I’ve intruded.”

“The ambassadors from Lsel are curious,” said Eight Antidote, like it was the opening line of an epigram.

“I suppose we are. Is this—do you come here often? All of the little birds are very beautiful.”

“The huitzahuitlim.”

“Is that what they’re called?”

“The ones here are called that. Out where they come from they have a different name. But these are palace-hummers. Lsel doesn’t have birds.”

“No,” said Mahit slowly. This child had known Yskandr. And Yskandr had filled his mind with some vision of what Lsel Station was like. “We don’t. We don’t have many animals at all.”

“I’d like to see a place like that,” Eight Antidote said.

She was missing some vital piece of information. (She was certain she was never supposed to have encountered this child, not alone, not informally.) “You could,” she said. “You’re a very powerful young person, and if you still want to, when you are of age, Lsel Station would be honored to host you.”

When Eight Antidote laughed, he did not sound ten years old. He sounded fey, and bitter, and smart, and Mahit wanted … something, some emotion she couldn’t place. A vestige of maternal instinct. A desire to hold this kid, who knew birds and who had been left alone in the palace without friend or minder. (There was certainly a minder somewhere. Perhaps the City itself, the perfect algorithm, was watching them both.)

“Maybe I’ll ask,” he said. “I could ask.”

“You could,” Mahit said, again.

Eight Antidote shrugged. “Did you know,” he said, “if you dip your fingers in the flowers the huitzahuitlim will drink the nectar right off your hand? They have long tongues. They don’t even have to touch you to do it.”

“I didn’t,” Mahit said.

“You should leave,” Eight Antidote said. “You’re not at all where you’re supposed to be.”

She nodded. “I suppose I’m not,” she said. “Good night, my lord.”

Turning her back on him felt dangerous, even if he was ten. (Perhaps because he was ten, and so used to having people turn their backs on him that it was a thing he could order.) Mahit thought about that all the way down the hall, retreating away from the garden and its inhabitants.

They don’t even have to touch you to do it.

Some kind person, thinking of courtiers and officials on their feet for hours inside the maze of this place, had installed a series of low benches along one of the corridors nearer to the great ballroom and its sun-spear throne. Most of them were occupied, but Mahit found one in a corner that was entirely empty, and sank onto the cool marble. Her hip ached still. She wasn’t in the slightest bit drunk anymore, and she was—exhausted, more than anything else, and every time she closed her eyes she thought of Eight Antidote in his garden with his birds.

Does he miss you, Yskandr? she thought, and again the silence inside her mind was an unfillable gap, a hole she could fall into. She leaned against the wall behind her, and tried to breathe evenly. The voices of the crowd inside the ballroom were audible a good thirty feet away, a dim laughing roar. What did you tell him about our Station?

She hardly noticed when a man sat down on the bench beside her—didn’t open her eyes until he patted her lightly on the shoulder, and she startled upright. It was a Teixcalaanlitzlim (of course it was, what else was there), unremarkable: not from a ministry she could identify by uniform, just a man in early middle age in a multilayered dark green suit covered in tiny embroidered dark green starbursts, with a face she was absolutely sure she’d never remember.

“—what?” she asked.

“You,” said the man, with an air of great satisfaction, “are not wearing one of those horrible little pins.”

Mahit felt her eyebrows knit together, and schooled her face into Teixcalaanli-appropriate expressionlessness. “The larkspur pins?” she guessed. “No. I’m not.”

“Fucking buy you a fucking drink, for that,” the man said. Mahit could smell the alcohol coming off of him in waves. “Not enough people here like you.”

“Are there not,” Mahit said warily. She wanted to get up, but this drunken stranger had wrapped his hand around her wrist and was holding on.

“Not nearly enough. Say—were you in the Fleet, you look like you’re the sort of woman who’s been in the Fleet—”

“I’ve never served,” Mahit said. “Not that way—”

“You should,” he said. “Best ten years I ever gave the Empire, and they’d like a tall woman like you, doesn’t matter there if you’re not City-bred, no one will care as long as you follow your yaotlek and’ll die for your siblings-in-arms—”

“What company did you serve under?” Mahit managed.

“The glorious and everlasting Eighteenth Legion, under the starshine-blessed One Lightning,” he said, and Mahit realized she was being given a recruiting speech. A recruiting speech for the people who stood in the street shouting One Lightning’s name, wanting to unseat the ruling emperor by pure acclamation, by the sound of their joined voices crying out that the attention and favor of the ever-burning stars had turned, and settled on a new person.

“What battles did One Lightning win?” she asked, thinking that she could use this drunkard to try to understand some of the mentality, to find the logic behind the acclamations.

“The fuck kind of question is that,” the man said, apparently deeply offended by her failure to immediately fall over herself in praise of One Lightning, and got up. His hand was still on her arm, gripping very tightly. “You’re—fuck you, how dare you—”

No logic, Mahit thought dimly, just emotion and loyalty, exacerbated by alcohol. He shook her, and her teeth clicked against each other inside her skull. She couldn’t decide if shouting I’m not even one of you! would make him back off or inflame him more, tried, “I didn’t mean—”

“You’re not wearing one of those pins but you might as well be—”

“One of my pins?” said another voice, urbane, serene. The drunk man dropped Mahit—the stone bench hurt to land on but she was glad of it anyway—and spun to see Thirty Larkspur himself, still resplendent in blue and his partial crown.

“Your Excellency,” said the man, and bowed hastily over his hands. His face had gone a shade of nauseous green that didn’t match his suit at all.

“I didn’t catch your name,” said Thirty Larkspur. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“Eleven Conifer,” he said, still bent over, muffled.

“Eleven Conifer,” Thirty Larkspur repeated. “How lovely to make your acquaintance. Is there anything you needed from this young woman? She is, I’m afraid, a barbarian—I do apologize if she insulted you—”

Mahit gaped at him. Thirty Larkspur winked at her, over Eleven Conifer’s bowed head. She shut her mouth. Thirty Larkspur was dangerous—smug, and clever, and manipulative, and she understood exactly what Five Agate had meant when she said that Mahit would understand why this man had been made an ezuazuacat and then an imperial co-heir after she’d seen him work in person. He was as flexible as a holograph, bending in the light, saying different words at different angles of approach.

“Now then,” he went on, “you and I will have a discussion later, Eleven Conifer, and see if we can resolve our differences productively, now that I understand that you’re upset enough to commit a crime.”

“A crime?” Eleven Conifer asked, with a delicate sort of horror.

“Assault is a crime. But the barbarian will forgive you, won’t she? For now.”

Mahit nodded. “For now,” she said. Playing along. Waiting to see what might happen.

“Why don’t you leave her to her own devices and go back to the party, Eleven Conifer? Politics all aside, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that there’s better drink and quite a bit of dancing in there, and none at all out here.”

Eleven Conifer nodded. He looked like a man impaled on a spike, wriggling to get free. “That’s true, Your Excellency,” he said. “I’ll … do that.”

“You do that,” Thirty Larkspur said. “I’ll come by later. To make sure you’re having a good time.”

And that, Mahit thought, was a naked threat. Eleven Conifer scuttled back down the hall, and now she was alone with Thirty Larkspur. Two imperial heirs in one night, Yskandr. Did you ever do as well? Her ulnar nerves went all to sparkles again, and she wondered if that was all that was left of her imago. An echo of neuropathy.

“I think I owe you my thanks,” she said to Thirty Larkspur.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” he told her, his hands spread wide. “The man was shaking you. I would have intervened no matter who you were. Ambassador.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Of course.” He paused. “Are you lost, Ambassador? Out here in the hallways.”

Mahit summoned up a Lsel-style smile, all teeth. It managed to discomfit Thirty Larkspur enough that he didn’t smile back. “I can find my own way back, Your Excellency,” she said, lying through those teeth: “I’m not lost at all.”

To prove it, she got up off the bench, and very deliberately walked—trying not to limp where her hip hurt her—back into the roar and noise of the party, leaving the ezuazuacat behind her.

There was dancing. Mahit decided straight off that she didn’t dance, that her not dancing was part of how she was playing at uncivilization, and also that it was late enough that if she could figure out how to leave (and where she was going, when she left—back to Nineteen Adze? To her own apartments?) she would.

The dancing was in pairs, but also in interlocking groups that traded partners. It formed patterns on the floor, shifting like long chains, fractals. Star-charts, Mahit thought, and then on cue, These things are ceaseless, Nine Maize’s epigram rising to the surface of her mind.

“There you are,” said Five Agate, and Mahit turned to see Nineteen Adze’s prize assistant standing just behind her, with one of her hands on Three Seagrass’s upper back, steadying. “I’ve found your liaison, and I’ve been asked to escort you both home.”

Three Seagrass was no longer ebulliently drunk. She was grey-pale at the temples, exhausted. She’d only been out of the hospital for thirty hours, Mahit remembered, and squelched an inappropriate impulse to take her arm. Five Agate, apparently, had the both of them well in hand.

“What did you see?” Three Seagrass asked, as they made their way across the room. Not where did you go? but what did you see. Not a question which chided Mahit for running off on her own. Not quite.

“Birds,” Mahit found herself saying. “A whole garden of birds,” and then they were outside, and in a groundcar, and being shuttled back to Palace-North.