Quickly, Mahit said, “Ask the Emperor. Let this be, if it is to be, a destruction that is from the heart of Teixcalaan.”
Eight Antidote had accesses he hadn’t known he had. He’d never thought to use them. Never thought, before this morning—it was morning now, sort of, a grey morning that was going to rain at any minute, the sunrise mostly disguised—to walk through Palace-Earth and ask locked doors to open for him. To open for him because he was the imperial heir Eight Antidote, and his cloudhook was the second-strongest key in all of Teixcalaan.
Unless his accesses had been limited because he was a child. Which he was sure they were, somewhere—but he wasn’t finding the edge. He kept not finding the edge, where someone—even the City, or the imperial security AI, or a dumb-locked door that needed a physical key—would stop him. He wanted—it was awful and stupid and unfair, but he wanted someone to stop him. That would mean it wasn’t his responsibility anymore. That would mean someone else, someone grown up entirely, would be the one in charge of doing this. Of stopping a—a planetary genocide. Except: the grown-ups were in charge, and so far they weren’t stopping anything at all.
Palace-East opened up like a flower blooming. Eight Antidote walked as deep as the imperial apartments went, past the post of the Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand, past the corridor that led to his own rooms, past door after door and into the Emperor’s own suite. He was bracing himself to try the last door—the one he’d never been through, the one that would lead into Nineteen Adze’s bedroom, her private space—when a hand fell onto his shoulder and he cried out, surprised, and forgot everything about how to fight off a kidnapper, just stood still, waiting to see if he’d be punished for trespassing.
It wasn’t a kidnapper, of course. It was Her Brilliance the Emperor, all in white, bare feet soundless on the floor.
“Little spy,” she said. It was not an accusation. More like an invitation to explain himself.
“Your Brilliance,” he said, and turned around. Her hand stayed on his shoulder. He tried not to cringe or pull away. “I’m sorry for disturbing you this early.”
“No you’re not,” said Nineteen Adze. “You cut a swath through all of the palace’s security systems. You want very much to disturb me. Now, would you like to tell me why?”
Her attention felt like a gravitational field. Something that pulled a person in. “I was at the Ministry of War,” he said. He wanted to get this right, the first time. To not hesitate or hint. “I overheard the Minister and Third Undersecretary Eleven Laurel discussing using nuclear shatterbombs on an entire inhabited planetary system full of our enemies. They’re going to do it. They’re going to ask you to approve it. They’re going to ask you to tell them to kill an entire planet and poison it so nothing ever grows there again.”
“And you came to—what, to warn me?” Her face was expressionless. Eight Antidote felt completely lost. Why wasn’t she reacting? Why wasn’t she making it stop?
“Yes?” he tried. “And to tell you that—I think that the aliens, that our enemies, that maybe they’re all one mind like the Sunlit sometimes are and killing a planet of them would be—it’s so awful I can’t think about it, Your Brilliance.”
“It is awful,” said Nineteen Adze. “Have you had breakfast yet? Come, sit with me a minute. I’ve got cassava and new-cheese breads—your ancestor-the-Emperor liked them. Do you, too?”
Eight Antidote did—they were one of his favorite foods, the delicious round cassava shell around the slightly melted, gooey cheese center, warm from the oven—but he couldn’t imagine eating. He was sick to his stomach. He didn’t understand anything about how Nineteen Adze was handling this. But he sat down next to her at a table by one of her enormous windows, and took a cassava bread from the platter of them that was there. He picked it apart with his fingers.
“Why aren’t you making them stop?” he asked, finally, and Nineteen Adze sighed—just a faint sound, her shoulders settling back. She bit into a cassava bread. Chewed and swallowed while Eight Antidote stared at her.
Then she said, “I’m not making them stop because I believe it’s the right idea.”
He tore another piece of dough off his bread and squished it in his fingers. “Why?” he said, plaintive, hating himself for sounding plaintive. “They’re people. Not humans, but people, I really think so, and you said it was awful to kill a planet, I just heard you.”
“I did say it was awful,” the Emperor told him. “And I believe it is. It is a terrible thing to do, and a terrible decision to make. But that’s what Emperors are for, Eight Antidote. Terrible decisions. I’d rather—oh, I’ll tell you the truth, my little spy. You’re going to have to do this yourself, eventually, so the truth is better. I’d rather have a pyrrhic victory—display just what Teixcalaan is capable of, smash a living beautiful planet full of people—and yes, they probably are people, but not the kind of people we can understand—smash it to dust and deathrain. I’d rather one act of horror than an endless war of attrition, losing our people and theirs, on and on and on. Like a suppurating wound at the edge of the Empire, forever.”
She wasn’t eating her pastry. She swallowed like her throat was as dry as Eight Antidote’s was. “Sometimes it is better to cauterize,” she said.
Nine Hibiscus hissed through her teeth. Mahit wanted to flinch, or step in front of Three Seagrass, in case the suggestion of asking the Emperor for permission to begin all-out war, all strategy over, was so deep a breach of propriety that a yaotlek would—she didn’t know. Have Three Seagrass shot. Court-martialed. Assigned to one of those glittering Shard-fighters to lead the assault.
She wished she could stop imagining worse ways for the narrative to play out. But there were so few better ones that she could see, and Yskandr was a shiver-quiet hum of pain in her wrists, all barely contained waiting that wasn’t patience as much as a preparation for some unknown last-ditch action—
But then Nine Hibiscus said “Tell Forty Oxide to return fire, but not pursue.” Two Foam nodded, a quick acknowledgment. Mahit tried to breathe in the space between the yaotlek’s sentences. She couldn’t inhale and exhale fast enough.
“Not pursue yet,” Nine Hibiscus went on. “But prepare to, on my order. And send a fast-courier to the City. I want the Emperor’s voice on this order right along with mine.” Then she looked back at Three Seagrass and said, much softer, hardly loud enough for Mahit to pick up, “I’ve always said that Information was better than the Palmers if you had to do counterintelligence outside the Fleet because Information’s prefucked—no chance of getting yourselves enamored with barbarians for the first time and forgetting what the Fleet’s for. You’re already corrupt. But I didn’t ever expect one of you to bring me a barbarian who uses Teixcalaanli imperial protocol to prove her points.”
“Ambassador Dzmare is—unique,” said Three Seagrass, and Mahit tried to decide who had insulted her, and if she should mind. She’d won, hadn’t she? Briefly. She’d—bought them time. Time for Twenty Cicada to keep talking. Time for—something other than all of Teixcalaan’s military bent to inexorable and total destruction, unnuanced, beautiful—an elimination of confusion, of incomprehension. A loss.
<A loss for whom?> Yskandr murmured. Mahit wasn’t sure, or couldn’t tell him, or he already knew. (A loss for her. For the spaces of language that let a person like her imagine Teixcalaan and still be a Stationer. The idea that there might be something other than Teixcalaan, when one said the word for world.)