In the bar she ordered thick noodles in soup with chili oil and shreds of smoked beef, on the basis that it would be a long time before she could have proper in-City food again. She amused herself by drawing her route on one of her cloudhook’s graphics vector programs: to that nearby jumpgate on the Flower Weave, and then to three more jumpgates by whoever was fastest at each stop, doing a complex end run around the two months of sublight travel that getting to Lsel usually took. She would come out the wrong gate, when she got there, and have to convince whoever was piloting her ride to take her to the Station. The wrong gate—which Mahit had called the far gate—would be much closer to Lsel than the usual gated approach to Stationer space, from territories properly controlled by Teixcalaan. The far gate was outside the Empire, and she’d have to switch to non-Teixcalaanli vessels to access it at all, especially from the non-Teixcalaanli side. That side of the Amhamemat Gate was in territory nominally controlled by the Verashk-Talay Confederation, who had an absurd habit of electing their leaders by popular vote. Or at least Three Seagrass thought it was. Verashk-Talay space wasn’t mapped very well, and the Anhamemat Gate also led to places where incomprehensible aliens were making trouble for the Fleet’s newest yaotlek, trouble bad enough to call Information for help rather than stick with the Third Palm’s military-intelligence services …
“Good evening, Three Seagrass,” said someone behind her, and she dropped her fork with a clatter and turned around.
“You might consider reducing the intensity of your startle reflexes, with where you’re going,” said Five Agate, once Nineteen Adze’s prize student and chief aide, and now one of her ezuazuacatlim, the Emperor’s sworn band of loyal servants. She hadn’t changed her style of dressing with her elevation in status. She was still in white, like all of Nineteen Adze’s people had been, in imitation of their mistress’s former signature style.
“Your Excellency,” Three Seagrass said, in the highest level of formality she could muster with noodles in her mouth.
“Chew your food,” Five Agate told her, and Three Seagrass suspected that she used exactly the same tone when addressing her small son, Two Cartograph; absently parental. Three Seagrass had met the kid once, during the insurrection three months ago. He was very healthy and clever for someone who had been born from a uterus, on purpose. She chewed her food. Swallowed.
“What can I do for you, Your Excellency?”
“Her Brilliance has a question for you.”
Her first reaction was an entirely terrifying spike of But if I go to Palace-Earth, I’ll miss my ride, an absurd thought: her Emperor wanted to talk to her and she was concerned with her own somewhat-unauthorized exit from all the responsibilities that same Emperor had been gracious enough to grant her? There was something wrong with her for even experiencing the emotion. Best to pretend she hadn’t.
“Of course,” she said, and waved for the nearest waiter. “Let me settle the bill and then—”
“No need,” Five Agate said. “I can ask it, and you can finish your meal.”
“Please.”
“The Emperor would like to know your opinion of Eleven Laurel.”
Three Seagrass blinked, and tried to summon up her mental inventory of people named Eleven Laurel who the Emperor would want to know her opinion of—rejected out of hand the asekreta trainee serving as an office assistant on the eighth floor of the Ministry, and also the poet-orator who had died when Three Seagrass was thirteen and convulsed the capital in an ecstasy of internal rhyme for months—and was left with the Third Undersecretary to the Minister of War. Who she technically shared rank with, though that also seemed hilarious; Eleven Laurel was a war hero, and she was … herself. So far.
“Of the Third Palm?” she asked, just to make sure. (Of course the Third Palm; the passed-over military spymaster. The one the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus was for some reason avoiding, preferring to go through Information for her diplomats.)
“If Nineteen Adze wanted your literary opinions, she’d send a better messenger than me,” Five Agate said, dust-dry. “I hate that poet. Yes, the Undersecretary. Do you know him?”
“… I’ve met him,” Three Seagrass said. “We haven’t ever spoken personally. Do you—or Her Brilliance—want my professional opinion of him? The Information Ministry’s opinion? Because if you do, I really can’t have this conversation in a spaceport bar.”
Five Agate shook her head, a dismissal—not a professional query, then. “Would you swear on the sacrifice of your blood that you’re telling the truth, Envoy? You’ve never spoken to Eleven Laurel personally.”
A professional query would have been less disturbing. This was a darker thing: that an ezuazuacat would ask her for her blood in a sacrifice bowl as a promise that she didn’t have some prior relationship with the Third Undersecretary of War made Three Seagrass feel as if she’d fallen, vertiginous, back three months in time. Back to when all of Teixcalaan was convulsed in succession-crisis and almost-civil-war, death and blood, and she’d watched the old Emperor die on full broadcast, poured out in a sun temple like a spilled glass of water, red everywhere. The noodles she’d eaten felt leaden in her stomach.
“I would swear,” she said. “Here, or wherever you and Her Brilliance would like. I don’t know him, I’ve never spoken to him personally.” She held out her hand, palm up. No scars there, not yet. She’d never sworn an oath large enough to scar. Even the one she’d sworn two months ago, with Mahit and Nineteen Adze, had healed to invisibility. The body didn’t care about the size of the promise, only the size of the cut.
“No need,” said Five Agate. “Your promise is enough. Do be careful out there on the front lines, Three Seagrass. Her Brilliance thinks well of you, and it’s frustrating for the rest of us when she loses someone she likes.”
“How frightening,” Three Seagrass said, before she could stop herself. “I’m honored?”
“Go catch your ship,” said Five Agate. “The Flower Weave, yes? You’ve got twenty minutes. I’d run for it. Don’t worry about the check. It’s on the government.”
They must have been watching her the whole time, ever since she’d answered the yaotlek’s request. The City’s camera-eyes, Nineteen Adze’s favorite tools. They always had been, and now that she was Emperor, she’d have every access—the algorithms and the machinery, the Sunlit Three Seagrass had passed coming into the spaceport, who shared a kind of access to the algorithms that Three Seagrass never wanted to think about too closely. Every eye of them the same—and every eye opening to the Emperor Herself. It almost felt benevolent. Almost. If Three Seagrass worked at feeling like she was being protected, not seen.
And had the Emperor wondered, seeing her impulsive decision, if she’d somehow—been suborned by Eleven Laurel? What a complex idea. She’d have to think about it on the trip. She’d have time. Not much, but maybe enough. The Ministry of War was one of the barely-patched-up parts of government—still reeling from the former Minister Nine Propulsion’s ever-so-convenient early retirement. Three Seagrass had immediately understood that move as being a way for Nine Propulsion to get out of the City with her reputation intact, before she could be dismissed by a new Emperor who knew she’d supported an insurrectionist general when push came to shove—
—and most of the War Undersecretaries had turned over with her, replaced by the new Minister’s people … except for Eleven Laurel. Perhaps it was as simple as that.