“Councilor,” she said, trying to let everyone know he was present. All of the Teixcalaanlitzlim on the bridge turned to look at him, and at her—all except Nine Hibiscus. She had better things to think about, clearly.
“Dzmare,” he said to her, and approached. She found that she was standing up, as if she was going to back away—found that her hand was still in Three Seagrass’s hand and saw Tarats’s eyes go to that link, a diving glance that seemed to fundamentally satisfy him; his mouth curved into a brittle and vicious smile. In their own language, he said, “I see, now, what you have been doing. Why you were so willing to go with this woman—she offered you more than just a respite from Aknel Amnardbat and her covetousness of your imago-machine, didn’t she? Something nicer.”
<Let me,> Yskandr said—and Mahit did. She was too angry to do anything but acquiesce. It felt like falling away into herself; her center of gravity shifted, the angle of her head changed. But fractionally. Less than before. They were closer together now. The trick of slipping in and out of Yskandr Aghavn or Mahit Dzmare wouldn’t work, eventually. They’d be past it.
“And how many times,” she said—Yskandr said, the faint drawl to his voice, the flattened Stationer consonants that came from utter confidence and too long speaking Teixcalaanli—“did you tell my predecessor that the seduction of empire could go both ways?”
Oh, she hoped no one else on this ship spoke enough Stationer to notice her playing games with Tarats—throwing all that long epistolary history between him and Yskandr back at him, to see if he’d flinch—and making herself seem like a spy with no loyalties to anyone at all, not Lsel and not Teixcalaan, while she did it. (She hoped Three Seagrass knew as little Stationer as she claimed to. That was the core of it. She didn’t want to break whatever it was that they had managed to salvage between them. Not for Darj Tarats.)
“Look where it got him,” spat Tarats, and gestured at Mahit as if she was the affront to all his sensibilities. “Look where it’s getting you.”
“And where is that?” Yskandr said, with her mouth. “Where exactly are we, that you are not? Dependent on the actions of Teixcalaan to save or destroy us—how has anything changed?”
She’d never had the continuation of an argument that she’d not been present for, before. Her hands ached, prickled. Burned. Careful, she thought, but she didn’t exactly want him to be careful. Didn’t want, herself, to be careful. Only to win. She wished she knew what winning would look like—
“All of your line,” said Tarats, vicious, “have no core of loyalty to rely on—if one of you ever did, the rest of the line would expose it to vacuum and wither it. Perhaps Amnardbat had the right idea after all.”
Mahit—her, not Yskandr, Yskandr was a glimmer of horror and fascination—lifted her burning, insensible hand to slap him across the face.
Shard-sight was a cacophony; it was the chaos and movement and noise of Inmost Province Spaceport magnified by orders of magnitude, and Eight Antidote barely felt like he existed in the huge flow of it. The single point of him—where he was, his body, his life and what he knew—he kept losing track. He died again, caught in someone’s firefight with a spinning ship, a burst of savage triumph as that pilot threw themselves into the enemy, becoming a spear, a piece of shrapnel caught in the heart of those whirling rings, an explosion. It hurt. It hurt every time.
And he kept saying, Please. Listen to me. I need you to stop that message. One of you has it—one of you is carrying it through a jumpgate, one of you is about to carry it—and it’s worse. It’s worse than this. It’s false and wrong and I am the heir to Teixcalaan and I am telling you if you let that message reach the battlefront all of this death will be a prelude—
It wasn’t words, exactly. It was feeling. Thinking at, or through, the whirl of eyes.
And at last, coming back to him: a singular voice, a person, his Shard on direct vector toward a jumpgate discontinuity, far (Still far! Still perhaps far enough!) from the dying of his fellow pilots. A voice unused to hesitance, and hesitant now, asking him, If you’re Eight Antidote, if you’re that kid from the holovids and the newsfeeds, if you’re the kid who was covered in our Emperor’s blood when he died for us, then promise me you mean it. Promise me that if I lose this message, the way we are dying will stop.
A silence, in the kaleidoscope. Another scream, stifled; Eight Antidote couldn’t think of where his eyes were, or what eyes really were, if they did not feel everything at once. A waiting silence.
I promise, he said, meaning it, and not knowing if his promise was a lie.
Tarats’s cheek was a stinging red where Mahit had slapped it. He lunged for her, a forward motion that seemed to be all teeth, his hands still restrained at the wrist. She darted backward, and Three Seagrass—amazed and horrified and utterly delighted, all at once, which was pretty much how Mahit doing anything made her feel, really—stepped in front of her. The Councilor from Lsel towered over her by a foot and a half. His chest was very narrow. Three Seagrass was narrow herself, but she was also a good forty years younger than Darj Tarats, and she figured if she had to, she could probably knock him over. It would be an enormous diplomatic faux pas, but what wasn’t, currently? Everything about this bridge right now was a complete mess. All protocol dissolved! There wasn’t an iota of Information Ministry training that covered tripartite negotiations from the bridge of a Fleet flagship, where one of the negotiating parties wasn’t even human and one of the others wasn’t Teixcalaanli, and none of the parties were Information agents except the negotiator. She should write a procedure manual.
If she lived long enough to be that bored.
Tarats backed off. Ah, so he was willing to attack Mahit, but not some Teixcalaanlitzlim. That was useful to know.
“Yaotlek,” said Two Foam—the comms officer sounded agonized, having to interrupt her commander again, especially while she was still talking to Twenty Cicada down on Peloa-2. Three Seagrass turned to see what had caught Two Foam’s attention now, and was entirely surprised by the person who had entered the bridge: a soldier with the bright pointed triangle of a Shard pilot on his sleeve, who was openly weeping.
She’d wept, of course. In public, even. And been embarrassed and horrified by it, or else felt entirely appropriate, because she’d been in mourning. But she’d never once wept like this man was weeping, endlessly and continuously, and come to report to her superior while she was doing it.
Nine Hibiscus turned to see the soldier, and Three Seagrass watched her face go grey under the space-kissed bronze of her cheeks. “Hold on,” she said, still to Twenty Cicada. “Don’t do anything while I’m not paying attention, Swarm, that’s an order—Pilot. Pilot, what’s your name? What’s wrong?”
She came toward him, and he turned his face up to her like he was a flower planted too deep in the shade, reaching for sunlight. “Shard Pilot Fifteen Calcite, yaotlek,” he said, without ceasing to cry. It seemed to be something that was happening to him, an autonomic process which did not deter him from attempting to report to his superior. The degree of loyalty Nine Hibiscus commanded was intense. Radiant.