CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PATRICIAN THIRD-CLASS ELEVEN CONIFER DIES AFTER A SHORT ILLNESS
Patrician Third-Class Eleven Conifer, who bravely served the Imperium in the Twenty-Sixth Legion under yaotlek One Lightning, died yesterday after a short illness, according to his nearest genetic kin, forty-percent clone One Conifer, who was reached by this reporter at his place of employment at the Central Travel Authority Northeast Division. “My genetic ancestor’s death was unexpected,” said One Conifer, “and I will be undergoing a full battery of tests in order to determine if I carry the gene markers for stroke as well…”
Movement of Teixcalaanli vessels detected en route to our sector—please advise—intercept unlikely due to sheer numbers—this is at least a legion on the march—
MAHIT woke to dim light, the scratchy comfort of rough fabric under her palms and cheek, and the worst headache she had ever had in her life. Her mouth felt like a polluted desert—too dry to swallow, and tasting of filth. Her throat was raw from screaming, and her left hand was a dull throb, almost as strong as it had been right after the episode with the poison flower—and she was not dead and she was thinking in full sentences.
So far, so good.
Yskandr? she asked, warily.
Mostly, but not entirely. Her Yskandr seemed to exist in interstices and cracks—the imago-machine which had housed him was gone, but he’d been a presence as much as she had been in the fantasia of memory and image that had followed that removal. They’d inhabited the same neural architecture and endocrine system for a little over three months. It wasn’t enough time for integration—if it had been, she’d never have needed to replace him—but she could still feel him, remember his versions of Yskandr’s memories, fifteen years younger and inflected differently.
They were her memories now. Thinking about them made her feel dizzy and sick with doubled recall—this was why, she guessed, that adding a second version of the same imago, even a later recording, was such a bad idea and never done.
Hello, Yskandr, she managed, thinking past the nausea. The corners of her mouth tugged into that wide smile that was his, and she chided him, gently (they were going to have to start over on so many things and oh fuck she missed her own imago), get out of my nervous system.
Yskandr said.
It’s not the same thing, Mahit thought.
Mahit sighed, and even sighing hurt her throat. She must have screamed a lot. I know, she thought. We have each other now. We’re all there is of our line—first and second Ambassadors to Teixcalaan.
We would not be in this sort of trouble had you not gotten us into it in the first place, she said. And now I need your help. And we need to … figure out who we’re going to be. My priorities are not yours—
A flash, an emotional spike just below her sternum, of how she’d felt while talking to the Emperor.
No, she repeated. And stay out of my nervous system, I told you. You’re dead. You’re my imago, my living memory, and we are the Lsel Ambassador—
said Yskandr.
Flickers, in the interstices, of the version she knew. Nevertheless she felt invaded, heavy with the unfamiliar mental weight of someone else, someone who had more life than her, had seen more than her, who knew Teixcalaan better—she thought, helpless and sudden, of how that ninety-percent clone would feel if he ever had all of Six Direction stuffed into his ten-year-old head, and ached with sympathy.
The Yskandr-sense—heavy weight and bright rag both—backed off. That might be some kind of apology.
Mahit mustered her courage, braced for the inevitable physical consequences, and opened her eyes. The headache spiked immediately along with the light, as she’d expected it would, but she didn’t vomit and she didn’t have another convulsion or experience any immediate visual distortions. Could be worse.
She was lying on a turquoise couch, just like the other turquoise couch Five Portico owned, the one in her front room. The fabric under her cheek was upholstery fabric. Maybe Five Portico had an entire set of turquoise furniture. Maybe she’d bought them all on sale. The last time Mahit had woken up from brain surgery she’d been in the medical center on Lsel, in a sterile and soothing silver-grey room. This was … different.
Moving carefully, and feeling like every part of her body had been desiccated in vacuum, she sat up. Neither Five Portico nor Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were in visual range. That gave her a long moment to brace herself for the nauseating process of standing up and walking toward the only visible door. Her ribs felt constricted when she tried to take a full breath—oh, that was the sport bandage, still wrapped around her lower floating ribs exactly where it had been before the surgery had begun.
It was strange, the things which could make you trust someone: Mahit felt profoundly grateful to Five Portico for not having done more to her than she’d asked for. Only the requested violation, thank you: she still had the letter from Darj Tarats, and now, with Yskandr’s help, she could read it.
If the others were outside that door, waiting for her to wake up—probably wondering if she’d wake up—this might be the best time to decrypt it, while she was alone.
As alone as she was ever going to be again.
And then you vanished on me, Mahit told him. All right. Show me how to read this, if you can.
She lifted her shirt and unwound the wrapping. The communiqué was wrinkled from how she must have rolled on it, curved to the shape of her ribs, but still whole and still entirely readable with her own book cipher, except for the encrypted section at the bottom. It says you have the encryption key. Or you did, fifteen years ago.
Yskandr told her, and she knew he felt the wash of relief that spilled over her as strongly as she did.
Show me, said Mahit.
Yskandr did.
Sharing skill with an imago felt like discovering an unexpected and enormous talent; like she had sat down to do the Station’s orbital calculations and suddenly realized she had been studying mathematics for decades, all the correct formulas and the experience to use them arrayed at her fingertips; or being asked to dance in zero-g, and automatically knowing how her body should feel, how to move in space. The cipher was mathematical—which must have been Darj Tarats’s preference, as Mahit was aware that Yskandr had had to learn to do the matrix algebra which formed the basis of generating the one-time decryption key. She was glad she wasn’t learning it, just feeling it unfold inside her like a blooming flower.
Mahit laughed a little, gingerly—laughing hurt her throat and her head. She reached up to touch the back of her neck. There was a bandage there, covering the surgical site. By touch she guessed the wound was as long as her thumb, and tried to imagine what the scar would look like. Then, still careful, she pushed herself up to her feet and tottered toward anything that might contain a writing implement. Five Portico was just anti-establishment enough that she might have actual pens on her desk, not just holographic infofiche-manipulators.
There weren’t pens, but there was a drafting pencil resting on top of a bunch of mechanical sketches. Mahit didn’t flip through them—Five Portico hadn’t removed her shirt, she wasn’t going to look through her papers—but even a cursory glance at the top sketch was enough for her to recognize it as a schematic for a prosthetic hand.
And why would a person have to come all the way out here for a prosthesis?
She wished she could tell whether he was being dryly sarcastic or expressing a genuinely held opinion—but that wasn’t new. That confusion was inherent to every Yskandr, from the first moment she’d had him in her head, back on Lsel.
Here’s a pencil, she thought at him. Teach me how to read what Tarats wants me to do about having an annexation force pointed at our station.
They—she, she with Yskandr’s prior knowledge flooding her, opening unexpected windows in her mind—decrypted the message, letter by letter, through the sequential matrix transform that Yskandr had memorized twenty years ago, on his way into Teixcalaan: how he’d spent those long weeks in transit. She caught a flash of memory, a spinning scrap—Yskandr on his first night in her (his) ambassadorial apartment, burning the piece of paper Tarats had handed him, that he’d learned from.
Mahit was working so hard on the process of decryption that she hardly paid attention to the contents of the message until the entire thing existed in plaintext. It wasn’t long. She’d known that, before this entire terrible adventure—it couldn’t be long, there weren’t enough characters, there wouldn’t be the sort of elaborate instructions that she wanted. No one would tell her how to get out of what was happening. There would only be advice.
What advice there was terrified her.
Demand re-route of annexation force; claim certain provable knowledge of new-discovered nonhumans plotting invasion at points as given below; withhold coordinates until confirmation given.
She felt a little like Yskandr was the only thing holding her up. Her head ached viciously. Yes, she thought. I know all of Pseudo-Thirteen River, I can memorize a coordinate string.
How?
Mahit stared at the coordinate string for a full minute—set it to rhythm and meter in her head, held it like she’d hold a poem. And then she tore the strip of paper she’d written the plaintext on off the original communiqué and stuffed it in her mouth, thinking the whole time: We eat the best parts of our dead. Whose ashes am I consuming now?
She had to chew to get the paper to go down, and chewing hurt the surgical site. She did it anyway. It was something to do, while she considered her options.
Who was she supposed to demand this of? The Emperor?
You’re biased, Yskandr.
Maybe he was. Maybe what she should do was exactly what Yskandr would have done if he wasn’t dead, and march into Palace-Earth with these coordinates on her tongue like a string of pearls to trade for peace.
When she finally made her way into the front room of Five Portico’s apartment—giving the surgery door a wide berth—both Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were sitting, side by side like children in a waiting room, on the other turquoise couch, and Five Portico was nowhere to be seen. Three Seagrass was on her feet the instant Mahit came through the door. She ran to her and threw her arms around Mahit in a tight hug that broke every personal-space taboo held by Lsel or Teixcalaan. Mahit could feel the racing of her heart through the wall of her ribs.
“You’re alive!” Three Seagrass said, and then “—oh fuck did I hurt you?” before letting Mahit go with nearly the same degree of force as she’d embraced her. “Are you—you?”
“… yes, not any more than I hurt already, and that still depends on the Teixcalaanli definition of you, Three Seagrass,” Mahit told her. Smiling also hurt the surgical site, but not as much as chewing.
“And you can talk,” Three Seagrass went on. Mahit wanted to stroke her hair back behind her ears; she hadn’t put it back up in its queue since they’d run away from the Judiciary officials, not even during the time between when Mahit had gone into the surgery and now—whenever now was, Mahit wasn’t sure of the hour—and with it loose Three Seagrass looked devastatingly young.
“I think I retained most of my higher faculties,” she said to her, as neutral-Teixcalaanli as possible.
Three Seagrass blinked several times, and then laughed.
“I’m glad,” said Twelve Azalea from the couch. “But did it … work?”
“Yes,” Mahit said, out loud and internally at once. “At least it worked enough. I decrypted the message.”
“What does it feel like?” Twelve Azalea asked, just as Three Seagrass said, “Good. Given that, what would you like to do next?”
Mahit would have liked to sit down, if she had a preference. Possibly to sleep until everything was over, and there was a new emperor, and the universe returned to normal. If she slept that long she would probably be dead. Sitting down, though, that she could do, at least for a moment. She made her way to the couch, Three Seagrass at her elbow—keeping a decorous foot of distance now, which Mahit vaguely regretted—and sat.
“I need,” she said, “to get back to Palace-Earth and speak with His Brilliance Six Direction.”
“Must have been some message,” Twelve Azalea said.
Mahit very gingerly put her head in her hands. “An annexation force is headed for my home, the Empire is on the verge of civil war, and I requested immediate guidance from my superiors in government, did you expect a neutral statement of affirmation?”
“I’m not an idiot,” said Twelve Azalea. “I got you here, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Mahit said. “Forgive me. I’ve been mostly unconscious for … I don’t know how long, what time is it?”
Three Seagrass patted her lightly on the back, once. “Eleven hours. It’s around one in the morning.”
No wonder Mahit felt this ill. She’d been under anesthetic for a long while. “How much of that was surgery? And where is Five Portico? I’d like to thank her, I think.”
“She went … out,” Twelve Azalea said, “about an hour back; but you were only in the surgical suite for three, maybe four hours.”
“We weren’t entirely sure you’d wake,” Three Seagrass said, all too evenly. Mahit could hear the remnants of distress in her voice, and she wondered again about how badly hurt Three Seagrass had been, when she’d been hospitalized after the City’s electric-strike. “Five Portico was the opposite of reassuring.”
“I don’t think I was being very reassuring myself,” Mahit said. “Is there … could I have some water?” Her throat was still dry enough to hurt when she talked, and she didn’t expect to stop talking as long as Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea were awake to talk back to her.
“Of course,” said Twelve Azalea, “there’s got to be a kitchen in this apartment somewhere.” He levered himself off the couch, with the effort of someone who had been sitting in the same place for a very long time—Mahit felt a little guilty, but not much—and disappeared around a corner.
She and Three Seagrass were alone. The silence between them felt strange, charged again like it had been in the restaurant: until Three Seagrass asked, quietly, “Are you still you? I … can I talk to him? Is that a possible thing?”
“I’m me,” Mahit said. “I’ve got continuity of memory and continuity of endocrine response, so I’m as me as I am going to get. It’s not—a second person, inside me. It’s me, with adjustments.”
We are talking to her, Yskandr.
“All right,” Three Seagrass said. “I think the entire process is terrifying, Mahit, and I also think you ought to know that, but I intend to treat you exactly as I did before, until you behave differently.”
Mahit suspected Three Seagrass was trying to say, I trust you still, and not quite managing to get there. She smiled at her, Lsel-smile, even though it hurt, and got a wide-eyed Teixcalaanli smile back.
Before she could say anything else, there was a commotion of voices from the direction Twelve Azalea had gone—Five Portico, returning, and with company.
“Who is he? Five Portico, you didn’t say you had clients.” A woman’s voice, pointed.
“He’s not the client, Two Lemon, he’s the client’s contact. Come in, he’s not the only one.”
“This is not the time for clients,” said Two Lemon, “the yaotlek’s just landed a military force at the port—” and then the whole lot of them poured into the room where Mahit was sitting. There were five, mixed in genders and in age; none of them wore cloudhooks. (None of them wanted to be watched by the City and its algorithmic heart.) Twelve Azalea, water glass clutched in one hand, was swept along in the middle of them.
“That’s a barbarian,” said one of the newcomers.
“A foreigner,” another one said, as if making a weary correction he’d made a hundred times.
“Foreigner, barbarian, I don’t care,” said Two Lemon— a plump woman with a straight spine and steel-grey hair in a perfect queue—“what’s next to her is a spy. Five Portico, why is there Information Ministry here?”
Three Seagrass had become very still, poised and frozen at once. Mahit wondered if they needed to run. She wasn’t sure she could.
“She came with the barbarian, and when the barbarian arrived,” said Five Portico, and no one bothered to correct her on the use of the word, “they had an interesting problem and were willing to pay for it to be solved. Two Lemon, you know very well that I deal with who I want to deal with.”
“You could have warned us before we came to your house,” said one of Two Lemon’s companions, the one who was so interested in foreigners, “to have an emergency planning meeting for actions tomorrow—”
Two Lemon affixed him with a flat stare. “Not in front of the spy.”
“I am not a spy,” said Three Seagrass, faintly indignant, “and I do not care what you are planning, or who you are. My assignment in the Ministry has nothing to do with any of you.”
“Oh, but you are a spy, asekreta,” Five Portico said, “though I think you might get better, with proper treatment.”
“Is that a threat?”
Mahit put her hand on Three Seagrass’s arm. “The asekreta is here with me,” she said, “and I claim her for Lsel Station. She is my responsibility.”
Yes, and they don’t know that.
Two Lemon peered at Mahit down the slope of her nose. “You’re the Lsel Ambassador, aren’t you.”
“I am.”
“The newsfeeds from the Judiciary do not like you,” Two Lemon said, with very grudging admiration.
“I wouldn’t know,” Mahit told her, “I was unconscious most of the day. Ask Five Portico.” Under her hand, Three Seagrass trembled faintly, all adrenaline.
Five Portico snickered, and shrugged when Two Lemon looked at her. “The Ambassador isn’t wrong.”
“Is she going to die if she isn’t under medical supervision?” Two Lemon asked.
Mahit thought this was a very good question, and that she’d like to know the answer herself, and had to clamp down on the urge to giggle inappropriately.
“Eventually,” said Five Portico. “But not because of anything I did.”
“I want her out of here, Five Portico, and her Information Ministry with her,” Two Lemon went on. A brief, pleased murmur emerged from her companions, and was shut down with a glance. “We have actual work to do.”
So do I, thought Mahit. Though I wish … I wish I knew more about the work being done here. And whether these are the same people who set bombs in restaurants and in theaters, or if they have other methods—are these the people for whom the City is not the City?
If we get through this, I will remember Two Lemon, though I suspect that’s the last thing she wants from me.
“We’ll leave,” Mahit said, cutting off further speculation. “I do wish you luck. With whatever actions you are planning.” She got to her feet, and didn’t even stagger. She might make it back to the train station before she fell over, if someone would actually give her water, instead of standing there with the glass like Twelve Azalea was doing, helpless in the middle of the group of … whatever they were. Resistance leaders. (Resistance to what? To the Empire, to Six Direction specifically? Were they the people who put up the posters in the subway stations in support of the Odile System’s breakaway attempt, or were they concerned with some policy choice that Mahit had no idea about and never would? To the presence of One Lightning, or any yaotlek, on the City’s soil?)
“I’d go fast,” said Five Portico, “One Lightning has legions in the streets already.”
Three Seagrass cursed, a sharp single word that Mahit had never heard her use before. Then she said, “All right, thank you. Come on,” and stood to leave, taking Mahit’s elbow as she did.
“Give me five minutes with my client,” Five Portico said pointedly. “I try to make sure of my work, and last I saw her she was quite thoroughly unconscious.”
Mahit nodded. “In private,” she said. “Five minutes in private.” Gently she detached Three Seagrass from her arm, and walked—trying not to stagger or shake or reveal anything of how sick her headache was making her feel—back into the room where she’d woken up.
Five Portico followed her, and shut the door behind them. “That bad, mm?” she asked. “You don’t want your friends to know?”
“It could be worse,” said Mahit. “I seem to have most of my neurological function intact. I want to know what you found. On the old machine. Was it damaged?”
“A few of the nanocircuits were blown out,” Five Portico said. “On first glance. They looked weak to begin with. It’s a very fragile thing—just touching the circuits could have introduced a short. I’d have to take it apart to know more. A process I am very much looking forward to.”
“That’s interesting,” Mahit managed. It was … something. Maybe sabotage. Or maybe just mechanical failure.
“Very. Now let me look at you.”
Mahit stood still, and let Five Portico peer thoughtfully at the surgical site; followed her directions through a basic neurological examination, no different from the ones she’d had on Lsel. It took less than five minutes. Closer to three.
“I’d tell you to rest, but there’s no point,” Five Portico said when she was finished. “Go get out of my house. Thank you for the fascinating experience.”
“Not every day you operate on barbarians?”
“Not every day a barbarian leaves me with barbarian technology.”
A short while later the three of them were huddled in the shadow of Five Portico’s building, exiled from even that limited safety. Mahit leaned on Three Seagrass, and wished she’d gotten to actually drink the water before they’d left. Her throat ached with dryness. Belltown Six in the small hours between midnight and dawn was simultaneously silent and raucous: the distant sounds of shrieky laughter, breaking glass—a shout, quickly muffled—drifted over the buildings, but the street they stood on was entirely empty, and lit only by the faint neon tracery of the building numbers, written in a glyph font that even Mahit found old-fashioned. New fifty years ago, and not vintage yet.
“When, Petal,” Three Seagrass asked, her voice a narrow, tight murmur, “were you going to tell us that your unlicensed ixplanatl was involved with anti-imperial activists?”
Twelve Azalea had no expression on his face; an insistent, deliberate blankness. A hurt. “She’s an unlicensed ixplanatl in Belltown Six. I don’t know why you thought she wouldn’t be. You’re Information Ministry, Reed, act like it.”
“I am acting like it,” Three Seagrass spat. “I’m questioning the connections of and influences on my own dear friend, is what I’m doing—”
“Stop it,” Mahit said. Talking hurt. Talking was going to hurt more, every time she did it, unless she could keep quiet for a while. “Tear each other to pieces somewhere else, sometime else. How are we going to get back to the palace?”
In the pause after her question, she could hear nothing but the two sets of breathing next to her, and how they blurred into each other.
Then Three Seagrass said, “We can’t take the train; there won’t be trains until the morning. The commuter lines don’t run at this hour.”
“And if One Lightning is actually landing troops off the carriers at the port, there won’t be trains at all by morning,” Twelve Azalea added.
Mahit nodded. “There. Look at you both being useful.” She sounded exactly like Yskandr would have. Whether that was a problem or not wasn’t something she felt particularly capable of dealing with at the moment. “If we can’t get back the same way we got out, what else can we do? Can we walk?”
“In a strictly technical sense, we can,” said Twelve Azalea, “though it would take a whole day to get back to the Central provinces.”
“We can,” Three Seagrass said, correcting him. “Mahit, on the contrary, is like as not to fall over before we have been walking an hour.”
Mahit had to admit to herself that this was true. “My state of health notwithstanding,” she said, “a whole day is too long. I need to see the Emperor tonight. Before dawn, if we can figure out a way.” She was shivering. She didn’t know when that had started. It wasn’t cold, exactly—and she had her jacket—she drew her arms tightly around her chest.
Three Seagrass exhaled, slowly, a hiss through her teeth. “I have an idea,” she said, “but Petal will not like it.”
“Tell me first,” said Twelve Azalea, “before you make more judgments about what I will and will not like.”
“I call our superiors at the Information Ministry, and I inform them that we are stranded whilst engaged in recognizance on those anti-imperial activists, and request a pickup and retrieval,” she said. “If you like, I can call them from somewhere not near this address. As a courtesy toward Five Portico not killing my Ambassador.”
“You’re right,” Twelve Azalea said, “I don’t like it. You’re burning my contacts.”
I don’t have many allies, Yskandr.
Not enough. But I’m one of them.
“We’re standing on the street,” Mahit said. “I would rather be picked up by the Information Ministry than either wait for Twelve Azalea’s Judiciary stalkers to find us again or try to make our way back inside the Inmost Province during an attempted military coup.”
Three Seagrass winced. “It’s not a coup yet. Though it might be by the morning—I don’t know how this happened so fast.”
“Come on, then,” Mahit told them both. “Let’s walk to the train station, and call from there.”
The walk was bad. There were more people on the street, even in the dark; gathering on corners, talking in low voices. Once she thought she saw a brandished knife, a curved and ugly thing, shown off between a group of young men in shirts emblazoned with that graffiti-art of the Teixcalaanli battle flag defaced. They were laughing. She put her head down and watched Three Seagrass’s heels move step by step and kept walking. By the time they reached the station, Mahit’s headache felt large enough to devour small spacecraft that had flown too close to its center of mass. She sat on one of the benches outside of the locked doors and drew her knees up to her chest, resting her forehead on them. The pressure helped, a little—it distracted, while Three Seagrass made her call, murmuring subvocalizations into her cloudhook.
Twelve Azalea sat next to her, and didn’t touch her, and she wanted—oh, she wanted the easy comfort of Three Seagrass’s attention, and that was the most useless desire she’d had in hours. Days, even.
Three Seagrass finished her call, said, “Someone will be here in fifteen minutes,” and sat on Mahit’s other side. And didn’t touch her either. Mahit kept breathing. The headache backed off a little, enough for her to raise her head when she heard the sound of the approaching groundcar’s engine, and to not have the world spin too badly.
It was a very standard groundcar: black, not ostentatious. The person who got out of it was a young man in Information Ministry suiting, orange cuffs and all; he bowed over his fingertips, and asked, “Asekreta? Are these all your companions?”
“Yes,” said Three Seagrass, “this is all of us.”
“Please get in. We’ll have you back in the City proper before you know it.”
It all seemed far too easy. Mahit suspected it was; and she also knew she couldn’t do much else but allow it to happen. The backseat of the groundcar was blissfully dark, and smelled of cleaning products and upholstery. The three of them fit in it thigh to thigh, and Three Seagrass patted Mahit’s knee, just once, as they began to drive away; and that small, kind touch she took with her into helpless and exhausted sleep, lulled by the motion of the wheels.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
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Книжный Бот
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
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Фантастика
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