A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER TEN

WEARING a pair of disposable gloves, the sort Mahit would have used to handle refuse back on the Station, Seven Scale disposed of the xauitl while Mahit watched. He’d been waiting for her when she came back to the door of her room—approaching the bowl of infofiche sticks again as if nothing of the last hour had happened, the only difference being her bandaged hand and the blazing realization of what Yskandr had sold to the Empire. Hardly any visible difference.

Seven Scale put the xauitl inside a plastic bag, paused to consider, and then added the bowl itself.

“I’m not sure I know how to wash it correctly,” he said, apologetic.

“What about the infofiche sticks?” Mahit asked. “Can you wash them?” She wasn’t about to lose access to the scraps of information she’d managed to get the City to give her.

“Probably not? But if you wore gloves, you could break them open and read them before I put them through the disposal with the autoclave and the furnace.”

As opposed to the regular disposal, Mahit assumed, grimly amused. “Give me yours,” she said. “And wait outside, I’ll only be a moment.”

Seven Scale stripped the gloves off and held them out, pinched gingerly between his fingertips. “There are more in the kitchens,” he offered uncertainly.

Mahit took the contaminated ones, and then the infofiche sticks. “These are fine. I’ll be one minute. Stay.”

He stayed. It was a little terrifying; did Nineteen Adze keep him around for unquestioning obedience? (Did he, ubiquitous, carry in the flower he was now so assiduously disposing of? It’d have been simple. No one would notice Seven Scale carrying flowers. He probably did it all the time.)

Mahit closed the door on him. Carefully she put on the contaminated gloves. The latex caught on the bandage around her hand and she winced, but it was still better than how the sap had felt. The infofiche sticks broke easily in her fingers, one after the other, cracking along their wax seals. She could still exert pressure. The muscles and tendons and nerves running down her palm were undamaged. The toxin hadn’t spread that far. She assumed she had Nineteen Adze to thank for that, Nineteen Adze and her speedy intimate mercy. Her rethinking.

The stick from the Information Ministry exuded a pretty graphic announcing itself as an official communication and then presented Mahit with a single-line answer to her question: just four glyphs, and two of them were a title and a name. She’d asked who authorized the rapid arrival of an ambassador from Lsel.

Authorization given by Imperial-Associate Eight Loop.

Which—was unexpected. At the banquet, Eight Loop had been the only one of the three presumptive heirs who had entirely ignored Mahit. All Mahit knew about her was what was on newsfeeds and encomiastic biopics of the Emperor. His crèchesib, who had been the Minister for the Judiciary before her elevation. An agemate. The particular glyph she used for her name’s numerical signifier was the same as the glyph the Emperor’s ninety-percent clone was using in “Eight Antidote,” which said something about what loyalties the Emperor owed her, but not anything about why she’d want an ambassador from Lsel Station as soon as possible. Unless she knew what Yskandr had sold to the Emperor, and … had wanted it to happen, and wanted it to happen even if Yskandr was dead and she’d have to import another ambassador to accomplish it? Wanted to revoke it, by virtue of replacing Yskandr with an ambassador who had different ideas of what might be traded away to Teixcalaan, even in exchange for keeping the open maw of the Empire pointed at some other prey?

Even if Yskandr had to betray Lsel’s interests, he could have found some way to do it that wasn’t so horrifically Teixcalaanli. An imago wasn’t a re-creation of a single person. An imago of the Emperor wouldn’t be the Emperor, not entirely. Didn’t he know?

None of that explained Eight Loop’s involvement. Except that she was Judiciary Minister, and Yskandr’s corpse was in the Judiciary morgue, not any other morgue in the City—perhaps she’d arranged that …

Mahit broke open the second infofiche stick, one of the two in anonymous grey plastic. Twelve Azalea hadn’t bothered with verse this time. The message he’d sent was unsigned, simple—as if he’d composed it on a street corner and dumped the sealed infofiche stick into a public mailbox.

The message read: Have what you asked for. Might have been noticed on the way out. I can’t hold on to it. I’ll be at your suite at dawn tomorrow. Meet me there.

The last stick was the one with the off-world communication sticky tab. The one which might be another secret message, a warning for a man who was already dead. A rumor of distant conflicts, tremors on Lsel that would have existed no matter what sort of madness the succession crisis of the Teixcalaanli Imperium might cause—or might already be causing. Mahit found herself afraid to open it, and inside that fear, did so all at once: cracking the stick hard enough that it nearly tore the plastic film, printed in familiar alphabetic letters, that was cradled inside.

This message was shorter than the previous one had been, and dated forty-eight Teixcalaanli hours later: 230.3.11. Still long before she’d arrived in the City, but after she’d left Lsel on Ascension’s Red Harvest. It was titled “For Ambassador Aghavn from Dekakel Onchu, Councilor for the Pilots.” Mahit felt strange, reading it. Like she was eavesdropping, a child snuck unsupervised into a meeting she oughtn’t to have overheard.

This message will be delivered if there was no response to previous communication. The Councilor for the Pilots hopes that you are well and repeats her warning: Tarats for the Miners and Amnardbat for Heritage have sent a replacement for you to the Empire, at the Empire’s request. If the replacement is loyal to Tarats then she may be trustable; if she is not, or if she is obviously a victim or an engineer of sabotage, the Pilots suggest that you look to Heritage for the source of opposition and—though it gives me no pleasure to refer to it as such—enemy action.

Be careful. I am unable to discern the precise nature of the sabotage if it exists, but I suspect Heritage has made use of her access to the imago-machines.

Destroy this communication.

It was short, and it was worse than the previous one. Mahit wished she could find some way to talk to Councilor Onchu—to tell her that her messages weren’t falling into a blank and silent void, that Yskandr was dead but his successor was listening. But Onchu wouldn’t want to hear it, from her. If she was sabotaged. If she was an unwitting, unwilling agent of Aknel Amnardbat, not just politically supported by her but … if she’d … if she’d damaged her imago-machine, somehow …

But she couldn’t yet understand why Heritage would do that. What it’d be for. And she’d thought that really, she had been Amnardbat’s choice of successors for Yskandr, so maybe it wasn’t really sabotage, maybe she was just—fulfilling some function that Amnardbat wanted to accomplish within Teixcalaan.

But if the malfunctioning of her imago wasn’t sabotage, she was damaged, and it was her own fault. So which one of the options was really worse?

Suddenly she needed very much to meet Twelve Azalea and reclaim the dead Yskandr’s imago-machine. Even if everything else went wrong, Lsel was annexed, she was thrown into a cell in the Judiciary—if she could get hold of it, she could at least keep that secret, hold it in stead, salvage what was left of her predecessor. That might be a kind of penance, if she truly was broken, and the Yskandr she was supposed to have was gone for good.

Mahit burned the plastic sheet, and wiped all the sticks—they were designed to be easily erased—before opening the door of her room again. Seven Scale was still standing in the hallway, holding his garbage bag, as if he hadn’t moved at all in the ten minutes she’d been reading. It was unsettling. Even an expressionless proper Teixcalaanlitzlim wasn’t as expressionless and submissive as Seven Scale could be. If she didn’t know better, Mahit could think he was an automaton. Even an artificial intelligence had more immediately apparent volition.

“Here,” she said, holding out the emptied sticks. “I’m finished with these.”

He held out the bag. “The gloves too,” he said. “I am awfully sorry about your hand.”

“It’s fine,” said Mahit. “The ezuazuacat fixed it.” If Seven Scale had been the person who had left the xauitl for her, he’d know that his mistress had prevented it from killing her—but there was no change in his expression. He merely nodded, serene, as if Nineteen Adze administered first aid as a matter of course. Maybe she did.

“Is there anything else?” he asked.

I need to escape this very pleasant and very life-threatening prison of an office complex before dawn, in order to receive an illegal machine looted from the corpse of my predecessor. Can you help me with that?

“No, thank you,” Mahit said.

Seven Scale nodded. “Good night, Ambassador,” he said, and disappeared down the hall. Mahit watched him go. When he’d turned the corner she retreated back into her office. The door hissed gently shut behind her. She stared mutely at the window-side couch with its folded blanket, thought of lying down and closing her eyes and banishing all of Teixcalaan. Thought also again of going out the window and attempting to escape through the gardens. It was a two-story drop. She’d probably break an ankle, to go along with her bandaged hand and the bruises on her hip from when the restaurant had fallen on her.

She was still trying to come up with a feasible plan that would get her back to Palace-East by dawn when someone knocked at the door. It was past midnight—the City’s two moons had both risen, tiny distant disks in the sky outside the window. Mahit had thought that everyone else was long asleep.

“Who is it?” she called.

“It’s Three Seagrass. Open the door, Mahit, I have good news!”

Mahit could not imagine what could qualify as good news that would also necessitate the news being delivered at this hour. As she got up to open the door, she imagined Three Seagrass standing surrounded by a small cohort of Sunlit, ready to arrest her; or accompanied by Ten Pearl, ready to kill her. All sorts of possible betrayals.

But it was only Three Seagrass on the other side of the door, hollow-eyed and exhausted and sparkling like she’d never stopped drinking coffee. Or something stronger. Maybe she hadn’t.

She ducked under Mahit’s arm without asking if she could come in, and waved the door shut herself.

“So you wanted a private audience with His Illuminate Majesty, right?”

“… yes?” Mahit said dubiously.

“Do you have anything better to wear? Though I guess this is clandestine and we probably shouldn’t treat it like an actual formal audience. Still. Something! But only if you’ve got it, we don’t have much time.”

“Why does the Emperor want to talk to me in the middle of the night?”

“I am not omniscient, so I can’t answer you exactly,” Three Seagrass said smugly, “but I am the sort of person who spends fourteen hours wading through bureaucrats and patricians third-, second-, and first-class so that eventually I have a personal conversation with the Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand, and he says that His Illuminate Majesty is, in fact, very interested in meeting with the Lsel Ambassador, and understands the need for both haste and discretion and would we please go now.”

“I’m going to assume this is both unusual and has the absolute force of imperial command,” Mahit said. Just a few hours previously she would never have thought that a meeting with the Teixcalaanli Emperor would feel most like an opportunity for escape. But if she could manage to slip away into the City before coming back to Nineteen Adze’s offices, meet with Twelve Azalea, and then return before anyone really knew she was gone … She’d have to let Three Seagrass in on it. It wouldn’t work, otherwise. (And also she wasn’t sure she could find her way back to Palace-East without her.)

“Yes and yes,” Three Seagrass said. “Nineteen Adze already knows—I think she’s going to escort us in. There’s a level of misdirection I’m not sure who’s responsible for, Mahit—if we are being brought into the palace as if we’re an ezuazuacat’s entourage, as cover—”

“Of course we accept the invitation,” Mahit said, cutting her off. “Even if it’s secret—maybe especially because it’s secret—”

“Were you trained for intrigue? On Lsel.” Three Seagrass was smiling as she said it, but Mahit was equally certain she meant it, and as a gentle barb.

“Just wait until I explain what we’re going to do after we see His Illuminate Majesty,” she said. “Then you’ll really think I was taught deception along with languages and protocol.”

The imperial chambers reminded Mahit more of Nineteen Adze’s office complex than the starry brilliance of the oration-contest ballroom: they were a warren of white marble shot through with gold veins, patterned like ruined—or fantastical—cityscapes under lightning-arc skies. Nineteen Adze knew them well enough to smile and exchange pleasantries with most of the people they passed; she practically matched the marbling where her jacket wasn’t an even brighter, even colder white. Mahit and Three Seagrass ghosted in her wake. If Nineteen Adze had opinions about the Emperor’s request to meet Mahit in private she hadn’t shared them. She’d only tugged her boots on over bare feet, looked Mahit over as if she was evaluating her suitability in an entirely new fashion—there was a naked intimacy in that evaluation that Mahit thought originated somewhere between when she’d had the impulse to reach out for Nineteen Adze in the bathroom and when she’d rejected that impulse—and then whisked them away into the depths of Palace-Earth.

It was like climbing down into the heart of the world: chambers opening like the valves between atria and shutting tight again behind them as they passed through. Even after midnight the innermost parts of the palace pulsed with a headlong rushing; the soft tramping of slippered feet, the whisk of some patrician’s suit around a corner. Distant low voices. Mahit wondered if the Emperor slept. Maybe he slept in snatches. Up every three hours to do another hour of work, read another night’s worth of reports from all of vast Teixcalaan.

The Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand met the three of them in an antechamber whose walls had deepened from marble to antiqued gold tapestry. He was short—as short as Three Seagrass, who barely came up to Mahit’s shoulder—with a thin face and a fashionably low hairline. He and Nineteen Adze raised their eyebrows at each other, like partners sitting down on opposite sides of a familiar game board.

“So you are keeping her in your offices,” he said.

“Make sure to give her back once His Brilliance is done with her, Twenty-Nine Bridge,” Nineteen Adze said, and waved Mahit forward before she could form any polite protests as to having come here by her own designs and with her own liaison.

Three Seagrass said, perfectly metrical, “The honor of meeting you in person, Twenty-Nine Bridge, is like stumbling upon a fresh spring in the mountains,” which had to be an allusion if not an outright quotation.

Twenty-Nine Bridge laughed like he’d been given a present. “Come sit with me, asekreta, while your Ambassador has her meeting. You must tell me how you managed to defeat all of my sub-secretaries in only one day.”

“Careful,” said Nineteen Adze, “that one is sneaky.”

“Are you actually warning me of something?” asked Twenty-Nine Bridge. His eyebrows touched his hairline when he raised them. “What under starlight did this child manage to do to you?”

“You’ll find out,” Nineteen Adze said, smug as a cat. Then she turned to Mahit, tapping her on the wrist, right above the bandage she’d wrapped there.

“You don’t have to do all of what he asks,” she said, and spun on her heel to sweep out of the room before Mahit could try to determine whether that “he” had meant the Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand or Six Direction Himself.

“I appreciate your help in arranging this meeting,” Mahit said to Twenty-Nine Bridge, trying to take some control of the proceedings. “And I hope we are not keeping you from your rest.”

He spread all his fingers apart by his sides, a Teixcalaanli gesture that Mahit read as nonchalance. “It isn’t the first time. Not for a Lsel ambassador and certainly not for me. Go in, Ambassador Dzmare. He’s blocked out an entire half hour for you.”

Of course Yskandr had been here before her. Promising eternal life and continuity of memory. Mahit found herself wishing, for what might have been the first time in her life, that she didn’t know Yskandr so well. That she didn’t see quite so clearly how he might have made the choices he’d made. But imago-recipients were chosen for psychological compatibility with their predecessors, and she and Yskandr—if only they’d had enough time!—at the beginning of their partnership had been so very fluid. She did understand.

But she was alone, and that was Yskandr’s fault. Both of him: the dead man and the vanished imago. His fault, even if there had been sabotage from Lsel. Mahit bowed from the chest and left Twenty-Nine Bridge to entertain (or be interrogated by) Three Seagrass, and went through the last door between herself and the Emperor Six Direction.

Only as she blinked against the change in ambient light—the antechamber had been dimmed for the hour, but the Emperor’s receiving room was ablaze under full-spectrum dawnlamps—did she remember the intensity of her imago-inflected limbic system reaction to the Emperor at the oration-contest banquet. She felt shimmering with nerves, like she was about to meet an examination committee or a secret lover, and here was another reason to wish that she didn’t know Yskandr, didn’t have the afterimages of his neurochemical memory echoing through hers.

The Emperor was sitting on a couch, like a person. Like an old man still awake in the small hours of the morning, his shoulders more stooped than they’d been at the banquet, his face drawn and sharp. His skin was greyish and translucent. Mahit wondered just how ill he was—and in what way, whether it was one of the waves of minor illnesses that marked old age or something that was deeper, worse, a cancer or an organ system failure. From the look of him she suspected the latter. The dawnlamps were probably for keeping him awake— full-spectrum light could do that to a person if they were sensitive—but they surrounded him with a mandorla of sunlight that Mahit thought was deliberately reminiscent of the sun-spear imperial throne.

“Ambassador Dzmare,” he said, and beckoned her closer with two fingers.

“Your Imperial Majesty.” She considered dropping to her knees, genuflecting, letting the Emperor wrap his hot hands around her outstretched wrists again. Wanted it, and in the wanting found reason enough to discard the impulse. Instead she squared her shoulders and asked, “May I sit down?”

“Sit,” Six Direction said. “You and Yskandr are both too tall to look at properly, standing up.”

“I’m not him,” Mahit said. She sat in a chair pulled up next to the couch. Some of the dawnlamps, noticing the presence of another breathing person in the room, obligingly rotated to shine on her.

“My ezuazuacat told me you’d say that.”

“I’m not lying, Your Majesty.”

“No. You’re not. Yskandr wouldn’t have needed to be escorted past the bureaucrats.”

Brazenly, as a panacea against feeling poised on the verge of drowning, Mahit said: “Forgive me. It must be difficult, meeting your friend’s successor. On Lsel, there’s more support for the transition down the imago-line.”

“Is there,” said the Emperor. It was less of a question than an invitation.

Mahit wasn’t ignorant of how information-gathering worked. She knew she was injured, exhausted, immersed in a culture-shocked numbness that she couldn’t see the edges of, and talking to a man who controlled a quarter of the galaxy, whether or not he was dying by inches; she’d like to crack open like an egg and leak out words. How much of that was good interrogation technique and how much of that was limbic-system echo of trust wasn’t even a useful question.

“We have a long tradition of psychological therapy,” she said, and stopped, hard, like biting down. One sentence at a time.

The Emperor laughed, more easily than she’d expected. “I imagine you need it,” he said.

“Is that based on your impressions of Yskandr or of me?”

“On my impressions of human beings, of which you and Yskandr are only one interesting set of outliers.”

Mahit took the hit, smiling—too wide, close to the feeling of Yskandr’s smile—and spreading her fingertips apart in that same Teixcalaanli gesture that Twenty-Nine Bridge had used. “And yet there is no comparative tradition in Teixcalaan.”

“Ah, Ambassador Dzmare—you have only been with us for four days. It is possible you’ve missed something.”

A great many things, Mahit was sure. “I would be fascinated to hear about Teixcalaanli methods of coping with psychological distress, Your Brilliance,” she said.

“I do think you would be. But that isn’t why you asked so insistently for this meeting.”

“No.”

“No. Go on then,” said Six Direction. He laced his fingers together. The knuckles were age-swollen, deeply lined. “Make your case for where else I should send my armies.”

“How are you so sure that’s what I came here to ask?”

“Ah,” he said. “It is what Yskandr asked me for. Are you so different, then? To care more for some other cause than your station.”

“Was that the only thing he asked you for?”

“Of course not. That’s just what I said yes to.”

“And will you say yes to me, if I ask?”

Six Direction looked her over, with a patience that felt infinite—didn’t they only have a half hour, couldn’t she get away, the muscles in her side where the falling wall had bruised her ached with holding so still, and she could feel her heartbeat pulsing in the wounds on her hand—and then he shrugged. The motion was almost lost in the complexity of the lapels of his jacket. “I wonder if you are a failure-state or a warning,” he said. “It would be useful to know before I answer you. If you are able to say.”

He must have meant was she a failure of the imago process. Was the fact that she wasn’t Yskandr on purpose or a mistake. And if it was a mistake, was it a purposeful mistake—did the Emperor know about the sabotage? He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have, if he’d asked if she was a failure or a warning. Mahit imagined, abruptly, Six Direction’s expression on the unlined child’s face of Eight Antidote. The same patient calculation. The child was a ninety-percent clone; his face would grow into this face, given muscle memory. The idea was repulsive. A child couldn’t stand up to an imago. He’d drown in the older memory; a child hardly had a self to hold on to yet. That was probably what Six Direction wanted.

“If I were a failure-state,” Mahit said, “here to show you the uncertainty of imago-transfer, I certainly wouldn’t tell you that I was.”

And if I am a warning, I don’t even know it. She shied away from the concept—she couldn’t think through it, here, and even the edges of the idea, flavored with Onchu’s secret messages to the dead, made her furious. That Lsel would have sent her, flawed, to prove some sort of point to Six Direction, a rebuke, a broken thing—but she couldn’t be furious. Not now. She was alone with the Emperor.

He was asking, “Would you demonstrate it, instead?”

“I imagine I wouldn’t have a choice,” Mahit said. “So it’s really up to you to decide, Your Illuminate Brilliance, exactly what I am.”

“Perhaps I will continue to see what you’ll do.” When he shrugged, the sunlamps orbiting his shoulders moved with his motion, as if he and they were some cohesive machine, a system much larger than a man that responded to a man’s will. “Tell me one thing, Ambassador Dzmare, before we return to negotiations and answers. Do you carry Yskandr’s imago, or are you someone else’s memory altogether?”

“I’m Mahit Dzmare,” Mahit said, which felt quite like lying by omission, a small betrayal of Lsel, so she went on: “And I’ve never carried any imago but Yskandr Aghavn.”

The Emperor met her eyes, as if he was evaluating just who was behind them, and did not let her look away. Mahit thought, Yskandr, if there ever was a time for you to start talking to me …

Imagined him saying, dry and archly removed and suffused with recognition. She knew the precise tone he’d use.

Didn’t say it.

The Emperor asked, “When we discussed the Western Arc families, and what to do about their demands for exclusive trade, what was your opinion?”

Mahit had no idea what Yskandr had thought. Her Yskandr had met the Emperor socially, but had never been so highly regarded as to discuss policy with him. “That was before my time,” she said, evading.

She was still being observed. Evaluated. The Emperor’s eyes were such a dark brown they were nearly black—his cloudhook a stripped-down net of near-invisible glass—she wanted to knot her hands together in her lap, to stop them from having a chance of shaking. It would hurt too much, if she did.

“Yskandr,” said the Emperor, and for a moment Mahit was not sure if she was being addressed or if he was talking about her predecessor, “made many arguments and offered any number of things, trying to sway me away from expansion. It was fascinating, to see a mind so fluent in our language try so hard to convince us to act contrary to all the millennia of our success. We spent hours in this room, Mahit Dzmare.”

“An honor for my predecessor,” Mahit murmured.

“Do you think so?”

“It would be one for me.” She wasn’t even lying.

“So the commonality goes that far. Or perhaps you are merely being ambassadorial.”

“Does it matter, Your Brilliance, which one?”

Six Direction, when he smiled, smiled like a man from Lsel had shown him how: wrinkled cheeks drawn up, teeth visible. A learned motion, but one which felt shockingly familiar, even after just four days seeing only Teixcalaanli expressions. “You,” the Emperor declared, “are as slippery as Yskandr was.”

Mahit shrugged, deliberately. She wondered if the few sunlamps which surrounded her were responding to her motion, too.

He leaned forward. The light around him was warm where it spilled onto her shins and knees, as if his fever was mobile, could touch her. “It doesn’t work, Mahit,” he said. “Philosophy and policy are conditional—multiple, reactive. What would be true for Teixcalaan, touching Lsel, is simultaneously untrue for Teixcalaan touching some other border state, or Teixcalaan in its refined form here in the City. Empires have many faces.”

“What doesn’t work?”

“Asking us to make exceptions,” he said. “Yskandr did try. He was very good at trying.”

“But you told him yes,” Mahit said, protesting.

“I did,” said Six Direction. “And if you will pay what he promised, I’ll tell you the same.”

Mahit needed to hear him say it. To be sure; to get out of the endless loops of her conjecture. “What did Yskandr promise you?”

“The schematics to Lsel’s imago-machines,” the Emperor said, quite easily, like he was discussing the prices for electrical power, “and several for immediate Teixcalaanli use. In exchange for which I would guarantee the independent sovereignty of Lsel Station for as long as my dynasty holds the Empire. I thought it was a rather clever bargain, on his part.”

It was in fact clever. For as long as his dynasty holds the Empire. A series of imago-emperors would be one single dynasty—one single man, endlessly repeated, if Six Direction really thought that the imago process was iterative instead of compilatory—and thus Lsel technology bought Lsel independence. In perpetuity. And Six Direction would escape the illness which was killing him, and live again in a body unmarked by age.

Yskandr, Mahit thought, reaching, you must have been so self-satisfied when you came up with the terms.

“Perhaps,” Six Direction went on, “you’d like to add some of your Lsel psychological therapists. I suspect their contributions to Teixcalaanli theories of mind might be quite fascinating.”

How much of Lsel did he want to take? Take and devour and transform into something that wasn’t Lsel at all, but Teixcalaan. If he wasn’t the Emperor, she might have slapped him.

If he wasn’t the Emperor, she might have laughed and asked what, exactly, the Teixcalaanli theory of mind involved. How wide is the concept of you?

But he was the Emperor—grammatically and existentially—and he thought of all fourteen generations of Lsel imago lines as something that could contribute to Teixcalaan.

The Empire, the world. The same word, benefiting equally.

She hadn’t said anything for too long. Her head was full of the trajectories of all those Teixcalaanli military transports, rattling against how furious she was, how suddenly, miserably trapped she felt. Against the sick pain-pulse in her damaged hand, beating in time with her heart.

“It took Yskandr years to come to such a decision, Your Brilliance,” she managed. “Allow me more than one evening of the honor of your company before I make mine.”

“You would like to come back, then.”

Of course she would. She was sitting in private audience with the Emperor of all Teixcalaan, and he was a challenge, and he took her seriously, and he’d taken her predecessor seriously, and how could she not want this? Even through the misery, she wanted it.

What she said was, “If you would have me, Your Brilliance. My predecessor was clearly—of interest to you. I might be, as well. And you do me considerable favor, to talk so clearly.”

“Clarity,” said Six Direction, still smiling that very Lsel smile, the one that made her want to grin back at him, conspiratorial, “is not a rhetorical virtue. But it is very useful, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” In a particular sense, this was the clearest conversation Mahit had had since she came to the City. She took a steadying breath—set her shoulders, trying to neither echo Yskandr’s body language nor mirror the Emperor’s—and took the offered conversational bait. “With your gracious permission to continue to fail at rhetoric, Your Brilliance: What made you want our imago-machines? Most people who aren’t Stationers find imago-lines quite … inexplicable. Inexplicable at best.”

Six Direction closed his eyes and opened them again: a long, slow blink. “How old are you, Mahit?”

“Twenty-six, by Teixcalaanli annual time.”

“Teixcalaan has seen eighty years of peace. Three of your lives, stacked up, since the last time one part of the world tried to destroy the rest of it.”

There were border skirmishes reported every week. There’d been an outright rebellion put down on the Odile System just a few days back. Teixcalaan was not peaceful. But Mahit thought she understood the difference Six Direction was so fixated on: those were skirmishes that brought war to outside the universe, to uncivilized places. The word he’d used for “world” was the word for “city.” The one that derived from the verb for “correct action.”

“It is a long time,” she admitted.

“It must continue,” said the Emperor Six Direction. “I cannot allow us to falter now. Eighty years of peace should be the beginning, not a lost age when we were more humane, more caring, more just. Do you see?”

Mahit saw. It was simple and wrong and terrible: it was fear, of leaving the world unguided by a true and knowing hand.

“You have seen my successors,” Six Direction went on. “Imagine with me, Ambassador Dzmare, the truly exceptional civil war we might have under their care.”

The external chambers of Palace-Earth were empty of everyone but Three Seagrass, who staggered to her feet when the irising inner doors spat Mahit back out again.

“Were you asleep?” Mahit asked, wishing she could nap on a couch, even for ten minutes.

Three Seagrass shrugged. Under the dim gold lights of the antechamber her brown skin looked grey. “Did you get what you wanted?”

Mahit had no idea how to answer that. She was buzzing, shimmering, full up with poison secrets. What Yskandr had sold. Why Six Direction would do anything to remain himself, and Emperor. Nothing she could easily explain.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Before anyone notices we’ve misplaced ourselves.”

Three Seagrass made a considering noise, hummed between her teeth. Mahit walked right by her, out of the antechamber door. The last thing she wanted to do was to explain herself. Not now.

If she stopped to think.

She was doing nothing but thinking.

Three Seagrass came up behind her, at her left shoulder, a perfect shadow, just like she’d been at the oration contest.

“Nineteen Adze left a message,” she said, just before they exited the Emperor’s chambers. “She said to tell you that she wasn’t going to stop you from doing anything ill-advised. That she wasn’t going to stop you at all.”

Mahit shivered, knowing she’d been cut loose, and felt pathetically grateful to both Nineteen Adze and Three Seagrass anyhow.