A Memory Called Empire

CHAPTER TWO

THE ambassadorial suite was as full of Yskandr as Mahit felt empty of him: like she had been turned inside out, surrounded by the things of her imago rather than suffused with his memory. The suite had been aired out before Mahit arrived—or at least she hoped it had, and assumed it had by virtue of the open windows and the antiseptic scent of cleaning fluid that the air coming in through those windows and blowing their draperies back hadn’t managed to dispel—but it was nevertheless very much a place someone had lived in, and for a long time.

Yskandr-the-man had liked the color blue, and expensive-looking furniture in some dark sheeny metal. The industrial lines of the workdesk and low couch would’ve made anyone who grew up on a station or a ship, unplaneted, feel right at home, but the floor was covered in silky deep-piled rugs run through with patterns. Mahit thought—gleeful fleeting desire—of going barefoot at home for the sheer physical pleasure of it, and thought again about how imago-successors matched even on aesthetic preferences with their predecessors. Yskandr had liked being barefoot on woven fiber; apparently she did, too, despite having never before had the opportunity.

Beyond the suite’s inner door was a sleeping chamber. Yskandr had hung a metalwork mosaic of the Teixcalaanli star-chart for Stationer space on the ceiling over his bed like an advertisement. Sleep here and you’ll be sleeping with the resources of this entire sector!

It was such a beautiful piece of work that it almost didn’t seem gauche. Almost.

On the bedside table was a small pile of codex-books and plastic infofilm sheets, neatly squared. Mahit doubted Yskandr was the type to line up the edges of his bedtime reading material, as she certainly wasn’t. It would be easier if he were here to ask, and what was she supposed to do if he didn’t come back? If that horrible spike of emotion had burnt out the connections between her imago-machine and her brainstem, before she and Yskandr had ever had a chance to fully become one person? If they’d had longer, the machine wouldn’t matter—she’d be Yskandr, or Yskandr would be her, or they’d be a new, more complete thing called Mahit Dzmare which knew what Yskandr Aghavn had known, intimately, muscle memory and compiled skill and instinct and his voice and hers in a blend—how it should be, a new link in the imago-line. But now? What was she supposed to do? Write home for repair instructions? Go home, and leave all this work undone, including understanding why he’d died? At least she wasn’t going to have language problems without his help—she dreamed in Teixcalaanli half the time; had dreamed of the City often enough—but reaching for the place where she’d felt the weight of him since he’d been joined to her made her feel that dizzying, horrible falling sensation again. She sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the squared-off edges of the codexes until she was sure she wasn’t going to faint. Whoever had cleaned the rooms had arranged them, which implied that anything obviously incriminating had been removed.

She was already thinking about incriminating.

Of course she was thinking incriminating. Assume deception, she told herself. Assume foul play and double meanings. Choked on the air. Allergies, or breathing something too rarefied. Politics, always. This was the City. Every person here had a cloudhook whispering a story into their eyes. Intrigue and triple-crosses and she’d spent her childhood reading those same stories and telling them herself—oh pale imitation, talking in perfect meter to the blank dumb metal of station walls, and hadn’t that made her a popular and cheerful childhood companion—not that it mattered.

Think like a Teixcalaanlitzlim.

Incriminating information would have been removed or made innocuous.

Or Yskandr had hidden it, if he’d known what was about to happen to him, or suspected. If he was smart. (The imago was smart; but the imago was out of date. A man might change in fifteen years.)

Mahit wondered what she’d be like, if she lived that long in this place. Especially without the imago—more important than out of date, the imago was gone. Unless he came back (of course he’d come back, this was a minor flicker, an error, she’d wake up tomorrow and he’d be here) she was going to have to think about sabotage right along with incriminating. Something had gone wrong with her imago-machine—either sabotage or mechanical failure. Or personal failure to integrate. It could be her own fault. Her own psychology, rejecting his. She shuddered. Her hands still felt prickly and strange.

“Your luggage is processed and yours again,” said Three Seagrass, coming through the irised door of Yskandr’s bedroom. Mahit sat up very straight and tried to look like she was absolutely not having a possible neurological incident. “Not a single bit of contraband. You are a very dull barbarian so far.”

“Were you expecting excitement?” Mahit asked.

“You’re my very first barbarian,” Three Seagrass said. “I am expecting everything.”

“Surely you’ve met noncitizens before. This is the Jewel of the World.”

“Meeting is not the same as liaising-for. You’re my noncitizen, Ambassador. I open doors for you.”

The verb form she used was just archaic enough to be idiomatic. Mahit risked sounding less fluent than she hoped she was and said, “Door-opening seems beneath the responsibilities I’d expect of a patrician second-class.”

Three Seagrass’s smile was sharper than most Teixcalaanli expressions; it reached her eyes. “You don’t have a cloudhook. You can’t open some doors, Ambassador. The City doesn’t know you’re real. Besides, without me, how will you decrypt your mail?”

Mahit raised an eyebrow. “My mail is encrypted?”

“And three months late in being answered.”

“That,” said Mahit, standing up and walking out of the bedroom—this door knew her, at least—“is Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn’s mail, not mine.”

Three Seagrass trailed behind her. “There isn’t a difference. Ambassador Dzmare, Ambassador Aghavn,” she said, tilting one hand back and forth. “It’s the Ambassador’s mail.”

There was less of a difference than even Three Seagrass knew. Or would be, if the imago would ever come back. Mahit was, she realized, pissed off at him, besides being worried about mechanical failure. All he’d done was panic at seeing himself dead, run her through an adrenaline crisis, and give her the strangest headache of her life, and now she was alone with all of the unanswered mail his fifteen-years-more-Teixcalaanli self had abandoned via being almost-certainly-murdered, and a cultural liaison with a sense of humor.

“And it’s encrypted.”

“Of course. It wouldn’t be very respectful to not encrypt an ambassador’s mail.” Three Seagrass retrieved a bowl brimming with infofiche sticks, little rectangles of wood or metal or plastic surrounding circuitry, each one elaborately decorated with its sender’s personal iconography. She fished out a fistful, holding them between her fingers like her knuckles had sprouted claws. “What would you like to start with?”

“If the mail is addressed to me, I ought to read it myself,” said Mahit.

“Legally, I’m an absolute equivalent,” Three Seagrass said, pleasantly enough.

Pleasantness wasn’t sufficient. Just because Mahit wanted an ally—wanted Three Seagrass to be helpful and useful and not an immediate threat, considering the woman had to live in the next room and open doors for however long she’d been assigned to mind Mahit, considering that Mahit was beginning to realize how trapped she was going to be in the City, considering that she was not real to that City’s panopticon eyes—just because Mahit wanted wasn’t enough to make Three Seagrass an actual extension of Mahit’s will, no matter what she said she was.

“Perhaps by Teixcalaanli law,” Mahit said. “By Stationer law, you are nothing of the kind.”

“Ambassador, I hope you aren’t assuming I’m not trustworthy enough to guide you through the court.”

Mahit shrugged, spreading her hands wide. “What happened to my predecessor’s cultural liaison?” she asked.

If Three Seagrass was disturbed by the question, the disturbance didn’t reach her face. Impassive, she said, “He was reassigned after his two years of service were up. I believe he is no longer in the palace complex at all.”

“What was his name?” Mahit asked. If Yskandr was with her she would have known, those two years of service would have been his first two years in the City, well within the five years that the imago remembered.

“Fifteen Engine, I think,” said Three Seagrass, easily enough—and Mahit had to clutch at the edge of Yskandr’s desk, hang on to it, flooded with a complex of emotion out of nowhere: fondness and frustration, the echo of a face wearing a cloudhook set in a bronze frame that filled up his entire left eye socket from cheekbone to browbone. Fifteen Engine, as Yskandr the imago remembered him. Memory-flash, memory-swarm, and Mahit reached for the imago, thought Yskandr? And got nothing.

Three Seagrass was staring at her. She wondered what she looked like. Pale, probably, and distracted.

“I would like to speak to him. Fifteen Engine.”

“I assure you,” said Three Seagrass, “I have extensive experience and really unusually excellent scores on all the necessary aptitudes for working with noncitizens. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

“Asekreta—”

“Please call me Three Seagrass, Ambassador. I’m your liaison.”

“Three Seagrass,” said Mahit, trying very hard not to raise her voice, “I would like to ask your predecessor about how my predecessor conducted his business here, and perhaps also about the circumstances of his extremely untimely, and based on the quantity of this mail, inconvenient death.”

“Ah,” said Three Seagrass.

“Yes.”

“His death was quite, as you say, inconvenient, but entirely accidental.”

“I’m sure, but he was my predecessor,” Mahit said, knowing that if Three Seagrass was as Teixcalaanli as she seemed, a request to know the intimate details of the person who had held one’s own position in society would be culturally compelling, like asking to know about a prospective imago would be on Lsel Station. “And I would like to speak to someone who knew him as well as we are going to get to know one another.” She tried to remember the muscle memory of the precise degree to which Yskandr had widened her eyes in a Teixcalaanli-style smile, and imitated it by feel.

“Ambassador, I have every sympathy with your current—predicament,” said Three Seagrass, “and I’ll have a message sent to Fifteen Engine, wherever he might be now, along with the rest of the answered mail.”

“… which I can’t answer myself, because it is encrypted.”

“Yes! But I can decrypt nearly any of the standard forms, and most of the nonstandard ones.”

“You still haven’t explained why my mail is encrypted in a fashion I can’t decrypt.”

“Well,” said Three Seagrass, “I don’t at all mean to be disparaging. I’m sure that on your station you are an extremely educated person. But in the City, encryption is usually based in poetic cipher, and we certainly don’t expect noncitizens to have to learn that. And an ambassador’s mail is encrypted for the sake of showing off that an ambassador is an intelligent person, well-acquainted with courts and court poetry—it’s customary. It’s not a real cipher, it’s a game.”

“We do have poetry out on Lsel, you know.”

“I know,” said Three Seagrass, with such sympathy that Mahit wanted to shake her, “but here, look at this one.” She held up a scarlet lacquered infofiche stick, its two parts held closed with a round gold wax seal embossed with the stylized image of the City—the Teixcalaanli imperial symbol. “It’s definitely for you, it’s dated today.” She cracked the seal and the infofiche spilled into the air between them, a stream of holographic word-shapes in Teixcalaanli script that Mahit felt like she ought to be able to understand. She’d been reading imperial literature since she was a child.

Three Seagrass touched her cloudhook and said, “I bet you could decrypt this kind by hand, actually—do you know political verse?”

“Fifteen-syllable iambic couplets with a caesura between syllable eight and syllable nine,” said Mahit, realizing only as she spoke that she sounded more like a candidate in an oral exam than a knowledgeable subject of Teixcalaan, but having no idea how to stop sounding so. “It’s easy.”

“Yes! So, the cipher for most communication at court is a straight transposition, with the opening four couplets of whoever’s written the best encomiastic poem—that’s praise poetry, which I’m sure you do know if you can count syllables and caesuras—from last season. It’s been Two Calendar’s ‘Reclamation Song’ for months now. I can get you a copy, if you really want to decrypt your own mail.”

“I would certainly like to hear what the City thinks is the best encomiastic poetry going,” Mahit said.

Three Seagrass snorted. “You’re great. You could have been born here, with that attitude.”

Mahit did not feel complimented. “What does it say?” she asked.

Three Seagrass narrowed her eyes—her pupils tracked to the left and up in tiny jerks, micromuscular instructions to her cloudhook—and peered intently at the infofiche. “Formal invitation to the Emperor’s own salon and oration contest, hosted within a presentational diplomatic banquet, in three days. I’ll assume you want to go?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, if you want to insult all your predecessor’s contacts and establish that Lsel Station is hostile to imperial interests, not coming to dinner is a wonderful start.”

Mahit leaned in quite close, close enough that she could feel the warm pulse of Three Seagrass’s breath on her face, and smiled with all her teeth, as barbaric as possible. Mahit watched her try to stay still and not flinch back; spotted the moment when she succeeded, rationalized what was happening.

“Three Seagrass,” Mahit said then, “how about we assume that I’m not an idiot.”

“We could do that,” Three Seagrass said. “Do your people invade personal space as a reprimand on a regular basis?”

“When necessary,” Mahit said. “And in exchange I will assume you’re not involved in an obvious attempt at diplomatic sabotage.”

“That seems like a fair trade.”

“So I’m accepting His Imperial Majesty’s gracious invitation. Send the message and I’ll sign it. And then we need to get through the rest of this backlog of infofiche.”

The backlog took the rest of the afternoon and stretched on into the evening. Most of it was the usual sort of communication for a minor but still politically significant ambassadorial office—information requests from the chancellery and from universities concerning the habits, economics, and tourist opportunities available at Lsel, protocol queries. Repatriation requests from Stationers who had been living in Teixcalaanli space and wanted to stop—Mahit signed those—and a smaller batch of entrance queries, which she approved and sent onward to one of the imperial offices concerned with “barbarian entry visas.” An unexpectedly high number of half-authorized safe-passage-through-Stationer-space visas for Teixcalaanli military transport—all of them stamped with Yskandr’s personal seal, but few of them actually signed by him. The half-authorized copies didn’t mean anything: they weren’t done. It was as if Yskandr had been interrupted in the process of officially allowing half a legion’s worth of Teixcalaanli ships into Lsel territory. Mahit spared a moment to wonder at the sheer number of them, and why they hadn’t all been sealed and signed at the same time, and set them aside for a quieter moment of contemplation. She wasn’t prepared to send Teixcalaanli warships through her Station’s sector without doing some research as to why they wanted to move in such quantity, no matter what Yskandr had been doing when he died.

None of the requests were for Ascension’s Red Harvest. Someone other than Yskandr must have approved that ship’s journey to pick her up. But then Yskandr had already been dead by the time that request needed to be processed. Mahit felt mildly ill. Someone had sent that ship—she should find out who—

But Three Seagrass handed her the next infofiche stick, which turned out to be a thoroughly distracting mess concerning import fees on a shipping manifest that would have taken half an hour to sort out had it been answered when it was originally asked, back when Yskandr had been alive. It took nearly three times that long for Mahit to solve, considering one of the parties had left the planet—that was the Stationer—and another had married into citizenship and changed his name during the lag time. Mahit made Three Seagrass hunt down the new-made Teixcalaanlitzlim under his new name and issue him a formal summons to the Judicial Department of Interstellar Trade Licensing.

“Just make sure he shows up to pay the import fees on the cargo he bought from one of my Station’s citizens, whatever his name is,” Mahit told her.

The name the man had chosen, it turned out, was Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle, a revelation that produced in both Mahit and Three Seagrass a kind of stunned silence.

“No one would actually name a child that,” Three Seagrass complained after a moment. “He has no taste. Even if his parent or his crèche was from a low-temperature planet with a lot of tundra in need of all-terrain vehicles.”

Mahit wrinkled her eyebrows in sudden puzzlement, remembering—vividly—the part of her early language training on Lsel when her entire class had been encouraged to make up Teixcalaanli names to call themselves while they were learning to speak. She’d picked Nine Orchid, because the heroine of her then-favorite Teixcalaanli novel, about the adventures of the crèchemate of the future Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare, had been called Five Orchid. It had felt very Teixcalaanli, picking a name based on one’s favorite book. She’d thought the names the other children had chosen were much less successful, at the time, and had felt very superior. Now, in the center of Teixcalaanli space, the entire episode seemed not only appropriative but absurd. Nevertheless, she asked Three Seagrass, “Just how do you Teixcalaanlitzlim name yourselves?”

“Numbers are for luck, or the qualities you want your child to have, or fashion. ‘Three’ is perennially popular, all the low numbers are; Threes are supposed to be stable and innovative, like a triangle. Doesn’t fall over, can reach pinnacles of thought, that sort of thing. This person picking ‘Thirty-Six’ is just trying to look new-money City-dweller, it’s a little silly but not that bad. The bad part is ‘All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle.’ I mean. Blood and sunlight, it’s technically permissible, that’s an inanimate object or a piece of architecture, but it’s so … nice names are plants and flowers and natural phenomena. And not so many syllables.”

This was the most animated Mahit had seen Three Seagrass be so far, and it was really making it difficult for Mahit not to like her. She was funny. Thirty-Six All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle was funnier.

“When I was learning the language,” she said, deciding all at once to share, to offer something back for this little bit of cultural exchange—if they were going to work together they should work together—“we had to pretend to have Teixcalaanli-style names, and one of my classmates—the kind of person who scores perfectly on exams and has a terrible accent—called himself 2e Asteroid. The irrational number. He thought he was being clever.”

Three Seagrass contemplated this, and then snickered. “He was,” she said. “That’s hilarious.”

“Really?”

“Enormously. It’s like turning your whole persona into a self-deprecating joke. I’d buy a novel written by a Two-E Asteroid, it’d probably be satire.”

Mahit laughed. “The person in question wasn’t subtle enough for satire,” she said. “He was a dreadful classmate.”

“He sounds it,” Three Seagrass agreed, “but he’s accidentally subtle, which is even better.” And then she handed over the next infofiche stick, and began to decrypt the next problem Mahit needed to solve.

The whole afternoon was—work. Work Mahit was good at, work she had been trained to do, even if the forms of it were obscure and Teixcalaanli and required Three Seagrass’s decryption skills. At sunset Three Seagrass ordered them both small bowls of a spiced meat in dumpling wrappers, covered in a creamy semi-fermented sauce laced with red oil, assuring Mahit that it was extremely unlikely that she would be allergic to anything in the meal.

“It’s ixhui,” she explained. “We feed it to babies!”

“If I die, no one will answer the mail for three more months, and then where will you be,” Mahit said, stabbing a dumpling with the two-pronged fork the meal had come with. It burst when she bit into it, tangy and warm. The red oil was finely spiced, just hot enough to linger on her tongue and make her wonder about neurotoxic effects before it faded to pleasantness. She was abruptly starving. She hadn’t eaten since the cruiser.

It was somewhat gratifying to see Three Seagrass devour her own bowl of ixhui with a similar level of enthusiasm. Mahit waved the fork at her. “This is too good for babies,” she said.

Three Seagrass widened her eyes in a Teixcalaanli version of a grin. “Work food. Anything that’s too delicious to eat slow.”

“And then you get back to the job faster?”

“You’re getting the idea.”

Mahit tilted her head to the side. “You’re the sort of person who works all the time, aren’t you.”

“It’s in the job description, Ambassador.”

“Call me Mahit, please,” Mahit said, “and surely there are cultural liaisons less helpful.”

Three Seagrass nearly looked pleased. “Oh, lots. But cultural liaison’s my assignment. Asekreta’s the job.”

Intelligence, protocol, secrets—and oratory. If all the literature about the City Mahit had ever read hadn’t lied to her. “And that job is?”

“Politics,” said Three Seagrass.

A close enough correspondence to the literature. “Why don’t you tell me about these military transport visas, then?” Mahit started, just as the door to the suite chimed in a chord that made Mahit wince but seemed not to strike Three Seagrass as lacking any euphony.

Three Seagrass went to the door and punched in a code on the wall-keypad next to it. Mahit watched her fingers and tried to internalize as much of the sequence as possible. Surely she would be able to operate the door codes to her own suite. (Unless she was more of a prisoner than she thought. How narrow were the City’s definitions of real people who could move through it? She wished she could ask Yskandr.) The wall-keypad, satisfied, projected an image of the face of the person waiting outside, his name and string of titles floating above his head in blocky gold-limned glyphs. Young, broad-cheeked, bronze skin, a thick dark hairline over the short forehead all the imperial art seemed to prefer. Mahit recognized him from the mortuary viewing hall. Twelve Azalea, Indistinguishable Courtier Number Three, except for how looking at him gave Mahit the impression of being in the presence of some other culture’s impeccably observed standard of masculine beauty. She felt a little peculiar about her lack of response. He was like an art object. Twelve Azalea, patrician first-class, Three Seagrass had said, which meant she knew him by name at least, and possibly by something closer to reputation.

“I haven’t any idea what he wants,” Three Seagrass said, which did suggest that reputation was somewhat of a factor.

Mahit said, “Let him in.”

Three Seagrass pressed her thumb to the wall-keypad firmly (what if it was fingerprint-locked? But surely the Teixcalaanli wouldn’t use technology that primitive) and the door admitted Twelve Azalea in a sweep of orange sleeves and cream lapels. Mahit braced herself for the full sequence of greeting protocols without any help from Yskandr (she was supposed to not have to worry about these things), but had only begun to introduce herself when Twelve Azalea said, “I came to your suite, we really don’t have to bother,” brushed past Three Seagrass, leaving an affectionate kiss on her temple and a look of profound annoyance on her face, and sat down on the divan.

“Ambassador Dzmare,” he said, “welcome to the Jewel of the World. A pleasure.”

Three Seagrass settled next to him, wide-eyed, the corners of her mouth visibly tilted up. “I thought we weren’t doing formalities, Petal,” she said.

“Lacking formalities hasn’t robbed me of being polite, Reed,” Twelve Azalea said, and then turned a large, un-Teixcalaanli smile on Mahit. It made him appear slightly unhinged. “I hope she hasn’t been too rude to you, Ambassador.”

“Petal, must you,” Three Seagrass said.

They had pet names for one another. It was … cute, and simultaneously hilarious and embarrassing. “Not rude at all,” Mahit said, earning her a theatrically grateful look from Three Seagrass. “Welcome to the diplomatic territory of Lsel Station. How might I help you, other than letting you renew your acquaintance with my liaison?”

Twelve Azalea took on an expression of concern, which Mahit suspected was a thin veil over a more unsavory—and more honest—excited interest. It was inconvenient in the utmost that every single Teixcalaanlitzlim was going to assume she was as astute as an airlock door, recognizing only the surface images of people: uniforms, and expressions of concern. She wondered how long it would take before anyone at all would take her seriously.

“I have some worrisome information,” said Twelve Azalea, “concerning the corpse of your predecessor.”

Well. Perhaps seriously began now. (And perhaps she’d been right to immediately assume Yskandr could not have died by accident; it wasn’t like him. And it wasn’t like the City, to be so straightforward.)

“Is there a problem with his body?”

“Possibly?” said Twelve Azalea, gesturing as if to suggest that there was certainly a problem and it was a matter of determining its exact nature.

“As if you’d get involved in my business for just possibly, Petal,” Three Seagrass said.

“I would suggest that the body of my predecessor is my business,” Mahit said.

“We covered this, Mahit,” Three Seagrass said briskly. “Legal equivalency—”

“But not moral or ethical equivalency,” said Mahit, “especially involving a Lsel citizen, as my predecessor certainly was. What is the problem?”

“After ixplanatl Four Lever left the operating theater I stayed a little while with the corpse, and availed myself of the theater’s imaging equipment,” Twelve Azalea said. “My current assignment within the Information Ministry—I have been working with noncitizens on their medical and accessibility needs while they are visiting us here—has made me quite curious about the physiologies of noncitizens—some are quite different from human people! Not that I’m implying Lsel Station isn’t human, Ambassador, nothing of the kind. But I am insatiably curious, you can ask Reed, she’s known me since we were cadet asekretim together.”

“Insatiably curious and often in large amounts of trouble, especially if it involves interesting forensics or peculiar medical practices,” Three Seagrass said. Mahit could see the lines of tension in her jaw, the sharpening angle of her mouth. “Get to the point. Did Two Rosewood send you to check up on me?”

“As if I’d run errands, Reed, even for the Minister for Information. The point is that I stayed behind and examined the corpse of the Ambassador’s predecessor. And that corpse is not entirely organic.”

“What?” said Three Seagrass, at the same time as Mahit found herself struggling to keep her mouth shut around a Stationer expletive.

“How so?” she asked. Perhaps Yskandr had replaced a failing hip joint. That would be innocuous and explicable, and more easily noticeable than the implant nestled at the base of his skull that had first given him his own imago and then had recorded an imprint of his knowledge and self and memory—the imago-imprint, which was meant to be passed on down the line.

“His brain is full of metal,” Twelve Azalea said, denying her even that brief moment of hope.

“Shrapnel?” Three Seagrass inquired.

“There were no wounds. Trust me, wounds would have been noticed by the morgue attendant. A full-body scan on the imager is much more complete. I can’t think why it hadn’t been done previously—perhaps it was just so obvious that the Ambassador had died of anaphylaxis—”

“I am interested in your immediate assumption that shrapnel is a possibility,” said Mahit quickly, trying to steer the conversation away from its most dangerous aspects. It would help if she knew what, if anything, Yskandr had exposed about the imago process—but she couldn’t even ask her version of him, and how was that version to know what his … continuation? His continuation, that would do—what he had done in the time which had elapsed between them?

“The City is occasionally hostile,” said Three Seagrass.

“There are accidents,” added Twelve Azalea. “More lately. A person mis-operates their cloudhook, the City overreacts…”

“It isn’t a problem you’ll ever need to deal with,” Three Seagrass said, with a blithe reassurance that Mahit did not believe at all.

“Did my predecessor have a cloudhook?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” said Three Seagrass. “He’d have to have been granted permission to use one from His Majesty, Six Direction, himself. Noncitizens don’t have them—it’s a right, having a connection to the City; it comes with being Teixcalaanli.”

It came with being Teixcalaanli, and having one opened doors, and also, apparently, brought a person into a certain sphere of heightened risk. Mahit wondered just how well the cloudhooks tracked Teixcalaanli citizens as they moved around, and who exactly kept track of that information.

“What the former Ambassador has got, cloudhook or not,” Twelve Azalea interrupted, “is a very large quantity of mysterious metal in his brainstem, and I thought perhaps you, Ambassador, would like to know, before someone tries to install some in yours.”

“Cheerful as always, Petal.”

“Who else knows about this?” Mahit asked.

Twelve Azalea said, “I haven’t told anyone,” and folded his hands demurely in the long sleeves of his jacket. Mahit could hear the “yet” implicit in that statement, and wondered what this person wanted from her.

“Why did you tell me? The Ambassador might have had all sorts of implants—an epileptic pacemaker, for instance—those are common, if epilepsy develops late in life,” she said, deploying the standard lie about an imago-machine to someone who wasn’t from Lsel. “I assume you have them here in a civilization as great as Teixcalaan. You could have looked up the Ambassador’s medical records and found out, without going to all this trouble.”

“Would you believe me if I said I wanted to see what you’d do? Your predecessor was—mm. Quite a political man, for an ambassador. I am curious to see if all Lsel people are.”

“I’m not Yskandr,” Mahit said, and felt, as she said it, acutely ashamed—she should have been more Yskandr. If they’d had time to integrate—if he hadn’t disappeared inside her head. “‘Political’ varies. Does the ixplanatl know, you think?”

Twelve Azalea smiled enough to show his teeth. “He didn’t mention it to you. Or to me. But he is a ixplanatl of the Medical College of the Science Ministry—who is to say what he thinks is important?”

“I want,” said Mahit, standing up, “to see this for myself.”

Twelve Azalea looked up at her, delighted. “Oh. You are political after all.”