A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE full extent of Teixcalaanli imperial power, even reduced, even under threat from multiple angles, was a crushing onslaught of symbolism. Mahit felt it three ways: first her own longing appreciation, born out of a childhood half in love with Teixcalaan the story, Teixcalaan the empire of poets, all-conquering all-devouring all-singing beast in the garden of her imaginings; second, the echo of Yskandr-doubled, two versions who had come to live here and make themselves into people who could live here, could move in this language and speak and see nothing but Teixcalaan, and still remember Lsel as a distant and beloved home; and last, the quick intake of breath and the full-body tremor of the Teixcalaanli woman Mahit held in her arms as they both watched the theater which was meant to defuse an insurrection.

It began with the Emperor’s-eye view of the City, that shifting panorama—slowly transformed, overlaid with the flowers and spears and sun-petal-gold glow of the imperial seal, the imperial flags—not the battle flag, the peace flag, the one that hung behind the sun-spear throne. There was music. It wasn’t martial—it was old, a folk song, stringed instruments and a low flute like a woman’s voice.

“What is that?” Mahit asked Three Seagrass, and Three Seagrass sat up a little. Her arm was looped around Mahit’s waist.

“It’s—it’s an arrangement of a song from the era of the Emperor Nine Flood, right before we broke solar system—it’s old. Everyone knows it. It’s—fuck, they’re being so good with the propaganda, it makes me feel nostalgic and scared and brave and I know exactly what they’re doing.”

The images on the holoprojection resolved to the inside of a sun temple—far larger and more ornate than any Mahit had seen before, in holograph or infofiche-image: the great central chamber shaped like a belled flask, open at the top and crowned with a lens that scattered bright beams of light around the central platform and its dished bronze bowl of an altar. The entire room was jewel-clear, faceted, glimmering: translucent gold, garnet-red. The music died away, and there was Six Direction, standing just in front of the altar. They’d done brilliant work on him with makeup: he almost looked healthy. Almost, except for the shocking prominence of his cheekbones. Eight Loop was nowhere to be seen, but at his left stood Nineteen Adze, resplendent in bone-white—but it was the same bone-white suit she had been wearing when they left, complete with a smear of Five Agate’s blood on the sleeve. The ezuazuacat bloodied in service. At his right was the ninety-percent clone, Eight Antidote. His small shoulders were very straight; his face had those same high cheekbones as the Emperor, but under healthy pads of childhood flesh.

Emperor, and successor, and advisor: all in the heart of power. As an image, it was reassuring. As a beginning of a message to all Teixcalaan it was frightening: to have gathered them together like this emphasized the seriousness, the necessary conveyance of this particular message. That sun temple was at the very top of Palace-North.

Yskandr murmured to her. Which meant, if One Lightning wanted, he could blow the temple and the Emperor both to nothing, with a single command.

Every other Teixcalaanlitzlim would know that, too.

Six Direction pressed his fingertips together, and bowed over them—greeting every watcher. He did not smile: this was too serious for smiling. The camera hung about his mouth like a caress, waiting for words. When he spoke it was a relief, a tiny burst of relaxed tension, until the words began to make sense: Through our great work and careful husbandry of civilizations, pruning where necessary, encouraging the flowering of society where it is most beautiful, we have together held this empire, with my hands guiding all of yours—but now, in this moment of fragility, when new blooms are trembling on the verge of unfolding into the light of the stars, we are all endangered. Some of you know this danger in your hearts; some of you have felt it in your bodies, in the sound of soldiers’ feet, in the damage inflicted upon our City, the heart of our civilization, by our own limbs—

Mahit felt like her heart had crept so far up her throat that it rested on the back of her tongue; she was all pulse. This was not the speech she had expected. She had expected a moment of reassurance, and then a quick use of her own footage to prove that there was danger, and it came from outside, was alien forces massing on the edge of Teixcalaanli space—not this careful rhetorical construction which approached renewal as a theme, a dangerous theme for an emperor under threat from his military and his bureaucracy both.

“What is he doing?” she breathed.

“Keep watching,” said Three Seagrass. “Keep watching, and wait a minute. I think I know and I don’t want to be right.”

“You don’t want—”

“Hush, Mahit.”

She hushed. The Emperor kept speaking—asked for calm and for reflection. Before the dawn there is a quiet moment where we can see the approach of both distant threat and the promise of warmth, he said. Next to him Nineteen Adze’s expression had changed from even neutrality to something Mahit recognized as dawning horror—resignation—and then a schooling of herself again to stillness. Something was wrong, and Nineteen Adze had noticed it. Something was happening and Mahit didn’t understand it.

Six Direction was talking about Lsel, now—briefly, alighting on it, a mining station at the edge of Teixcalaanli space, a distant eye that speaks to us of danger observed. Her own image, then, superimposed upon the frame of Nineteen Adze, Six Direction, and Eight Antidote: Mahit Dzmare, looking very barbaric, tall and high-foreheaded and narrow-faced with her long, aquiline nose, explaining the coming invasion from an imperial briefing room. She looked exhausted. She looked honest.

whispered Yskandr. you in a court of law, on either side. You walked right down the center line.>

The face of the Emperor was behind her face; as her mouth moved, on the holograph, the Emperor’s mouth remained a constant still presence, as if he was commanding her performance by sheer force of will.

The whole image—all of them, the entire sun temple—was replaced by a familiar map: Teixcalaanli space, a grand star-chart. The last time Mahit had seen this it had been deployed to show the vectors of the annexation war which would claim Lsel and everything around it. Now those vectors were dimmed, and as she watched, the map lit up with each of the coordinate points Darj Tarats had given to her: the places where the threat was greatest, where the aliens had been spotted in their ships, festooned with weaponry. Inverse stars on that map: bright for a moment and then spreading a deep, dark, threatening red, like a pool of blood.

Mahit thought of Twelve Azalea, and was still thinking of him when the map vanished. She misunderstood what she was seeing in the sun temple for long seconds, lost in memory and connotation.

The Emperor was holding a naked blade, a knife made out of some dark, shining material, translucent grey at its sharpest edges. He’d shed his robe; it pooled around his ankles. All of his bones were visible, even through the light trousers and shirt he wore: every bit of emaciation his illness had wrought upon him rendered up for the eyes of the cameras. Eight Antidote had pressed the side of his hand to his mouth, a child’s gesture of distress—Nineteen Adze was saying something, Mahit only caught the end of it, a wisp of my lord, I—don’t—

Six Direction, speaking: Teixcalaan requires a steady, even hand—a hand star-graced, a tongue prepared, a fist that grasps the sunlight. In the face of what we are about to suffer—I who have served you since I knew what service was—I consecrate this temple and the war which is to come.

“He’s really going to,” said Three Seagrass, her voice too real, too loud, and too immediate on the couch next to Mahit. “No emperor has—not for centuries—”

I name as my immediate successor and the executor of this war of preservation the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, said Six Direction, in sinecure for the child of my genetics, Eight Antidote, until the time of his majority.

Mahit had time to think, What have I set into motion, and to feel a great onrushing spasm of grief: hers, Three Seagrass’s, Yskandr’s—

The Emperor took two steps backward, into the center of the raised altar. With my blood I sacrifice for us, he said—broadcast, unstoppable, to every Teixcalaanlitzlim in every province, on every planet in Teixcalaanli space. Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.

Her words. Mahit’s and Three Seagrass’s, the poetry they’d used as a lure to get themselves free—the poetry that was being sung in the streets—

Six Direction raised the knife, the sun glinting through it—and brought it down again. Two swift cuts, high on the inner thighs: the femoral arteries gone to fountains of red. So much blood. And somehow, in the middle of that pool, two cuts more: from wrist to elbow, and again on the other side.

The knife clattered to the metal floor of the sun temple.

It did not take him long to die.

In the silence afterward, Mahit realized she had been holding Three Seagrass’s hand so hard her fingernails had cut into her palm. The only sound in the universe seemed to be the two of them, breathing. In her mind Yskandr was a vast and empty void of triumph and grief. She looked away from him. She looked at nothing at all.

On the screen: Nineteen Adze, soaked in red, her suit stained beyond recognition, had caught up the knife.

The Emperor of Teixcalaan greets you, she said. Her face was wet. Blood. Tears. Wet and grim and absolutely determined. Be calm. Order is a flower blooming at dawn, and dawn is breaking now.

There was quiet for a little while, and then there was the expected sort of chaos; all those grey-uniformed imperial guards, trying to figure out what to do. Where to go. How to get to their new Emperor and then move her to some sort of safety, considering there was still a legion-leading starship with all of its weaponry pointed at the City, in low orbit. Mahit and Three Seagrass sat in the middle of it—no one seemed to care very much about them. They weren’t doing anything. They didn’t seem to be an immediate threat to anyone.

“He set her up for it,” Three Seagrass said wonderingly. “She didn’t know until she was up there next to him. Her Brilliance. The Edgeshine of a Knife. I guess it’ll fit. Still.”

They’d reversed emotional positions, somehow. Mahit couldn’t stop crying for very long; even if it wasn’t entirely her own endocrine response, her body had decided to dissolve into the weight of grief. Yskandr wasn’t gone—she didn’t think she’d ever feel that hollow blank-space wrongness again—but both versions of him were bleak, scoured-cold landscapes, rooms without air, and Mahit kept weeping, even when she wanted to talk.

She wiped at her nose with the heel of her hand. “Of course it’ll fit,” she managed. “The office will bend around her and she’ll bend around it, too, and it’ll all be … a story. Her Brilliance, the Edgeshine of a Knife. Like it was never supposed to be any different.”

That seemed to be comforting for Three Seagrass to hear. Mahit herself felt comfortless, angry, blown open and empty: she kept remembering how much blood there had been, how Six Direction had said released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun, as if she’d written it for him.

For him, and not for her or for Lsel.

Nothing touched by empire stays clean, she thought, and tried to imagine it was Yskandr saying so when it wasn’t Yskandr at all.

It took thirty-six hours for the insurrection to be over.

Mahit watched most of it on Three Seagrass’s Information Ministry newsfeed, lying in what used to be Yskandr’s bed in her ambassadorial apartment with the other woman’s cloudhook over her eye like a permanently affixed crown. Getting up seemed both difficult and unnecessary.

One Lightning’s soldiers turned out to be more unwilling to slaughter large numbers of marching, singing Teixcalaanlitzlim than Mahit suspected he had counted on. But then he’d been expecting his opponent to be Six Direction—old, failing, his military victories a long time over, beset by an uncertain succession. Not a new-crowned emperor, sanctified by a blood sacrifice like something out of the oldest epics. Before Nineteen Adze’s emperorship was a day old the yaotlek had recalled all his troops under the cover of their protection of the City being unnecessary, and had appeared on a news program standing next to Nineteen Adze, to get on his knees and put his hands between hers and swear his loyalty.

There was no mention of the war of conquest.

“That’s the Station saved, then,” Mahit said to the ceiling. Yskandr’s garish and lovely painting of all of Lsel space as seen from Teixcalaan was the only thing that heard her, and she could take its silence as mockery.

Yskandr himself was merely a whisper, a

Mahit ignored him. When she paid too much attention to him she had crying fits, weeping, inconsolable, on and on until she was physically sick. It made her angry; it wasn’t even her grief. She hadn’t figured out what her grief was about, yet.

That night she dreamed of Six Direction saying her poetry, speaking her thoughts, and thought she might be getting closer.

If she’d been at home on Lsel, she suspected that the integration therapists would have an absolute field day with her and Yskandr. They’d get a scientific paper out of it. By the next morning even Yskandr found this funny—bright shimmers in her nerves, a bit of actual energy. She got up. She ate noodles and chili oil and a protein cube that tasted almost like a Lsel protein cube, but probably was made of some kind of plant. And then she lay down again, exhausted by that small effort, and watched the newsfeeds.

There was little sign of Two Lemon and the other anti-imperial activists. No bombs in restaurants. No protests. Mahit assumed they’d gone back underground, quiescent for the moment, and wondered—wondered like a person contemplating the impossibility of lifting an enormous rock to look at what grew underneath it—what Five Portico would do with the remains of her faulty imago-machine.

Thirty Larkspur’s part of the insurrection took a bit longer to wind to a close—there was a loose détente established, a series of small newsfeed reports that a new Information Minister had been appointed—a man Mahit had never heard of—and that Thirty Larkspur had himself been given some sort of advisory role on commerce.

Not one of Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze’s ezuazuacatlim. But not out of the government either.

It wasn’t Mahit’s problem.

She wanted it to be, which was part of the problem. It was so difficult to put everything down, to trust that anyone, anywhere, would in fact do their jobs. That there was any safety.

She wondered how Nineteen Adze felt about it. About the same, she suspected.

On the third day after Six Direction’s death, after Mahit had received a beautiful infofiche stick, bone-white—made from some animal—and sealed with the imperial seal, inviting her as the ranking representative of her government to attend the funeral and coronation, she decided that the absolute least she could do was get back to answering the mail. The mail which was three months and two weeks late now. There was still a bowl of it, infofiche sticks in every possible color, from utilitarian grey plastic to Nineteen Adze’s solid bone-and-gold, and—

And she’d come here to serve Lsel Station, and its people who had come to live in Teixcalaan. Who had just lived through an insurrection and a change in emperorship, too, and probably wanted their permits permitted, and their visas approved.

She sent Three Seagrass a message on one of the utilitarian grey sticks: You left your spare cloudhook here. Also I could use some help with the mail. She didn’t really need help—Yskandr knew how to do all of this, and so she did too—but they hadn’t talked. Since.

Four hours later Three Seagrass showed up with the sunlight slanting through the windows, looking evanescently thin and grey-pale at the temples and around the eyes, but just as impeccable as she’d been when she met Mahit coming off the seed-skiff: every corner of her suit pressed, orange flames creeping up the sleeves. Information Ministry again, undisgraced.

“—hi,” she said.

“Hi,” said Mahit, and abruptly remembered nothing but how Three Seagrass had felt in her arms, and suspected she’d blushed scarlet. “—thanks for coming.”

The air between them felt fragile; more so when Three Seagrass sat down next to her, and shrugged, and quite clearly didn’t know what to say.

They’d done better with poetry. They’d done better with politics. Fuck, they’d done better with kissing, and that had been a mad reaching-out for comfort. Mahit wanted to do it again; wanted, and immediately thought better of it. They’d been watching the end of an imperial reign, then. Now it was just the two of them, and the slow, outgoing tide of aftermath, and Mahit couldn’t quite imagine how to begin such a thing.

“I half thought you’d have gotten yourself made Minister for Information,” Mahit said, light, light enough to be joking, “and wouldn’t have any time for me.”

Some of the tension went out of Three Seagrass’s shoulders. “Her Brilliance offered me Second Undersecretary to the Minister, actually,” she said, “but I’m still your cultural liaison, if you want.”

Mahit thought about it—thought about it while she took Three Seagrass’s hand in her hand, and laced their fingers together, and said thank you with all the honorific particles she could remember tacked onto the end, so that it became both enormously sincere and utterly hilarious, all at once. Thought about working with Three Seagrass, here in this apartment that had been Yskandr’s, and finding her way toward being—what? Something Nineteen Adze, Her Brilliance on the sun-spear throne, might need? (That would be a way to begin, with Three Seagrass, too.)

Yskandr said.