Nothing was as simple as that.
“Thank you,” she said to Five Agate. “For the warning. And covering the bill.”
Then she ran for it before anyone else could stop her.
CHAPTER FOUR
Teixcalaan, once we were in the First Emperor’s hands and flying out into the black, learning jumpgates as we went, carrying with us our seeds of civilization like sacrifice-blood welling from the palms of those first planet-breakers—once the Empire was the Empire, extending throughout the universe from jumpgate to jumpgate? Our Emperors were soldiers, and still are, but an empire that holds a galaxy-net of stars in its teeth learns also to speak our poetry in a thousand languages. A soldier-emperor might be a soldier on the field of negotiation, and numbered thus amongst our greatest yaotlekim. For in the latter centuries, those that draw close to this present time, Teixcalaan rules as much through words as through deeds. So it was with the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare, whose life began in the City, second crèche-child of her ancestor, the Emperor One Lapis’s beloved advisor Twelve Sunrise …
[…] having considered the latest status report on the state of the Station’s evacuation procedures, including the level of community training on rapid lifeboat deployment, supply lines, and the capacity of the mining outposts to shelter refugees, I suggest that we consider what I would previously have dismissed as fearmongering: if we are displaced permanently, how would we rebuild a Station of this size before we ran out of resources to support thirty thousand in diaspora? And where would we build, if we are fleeing a conflict? The following memo begins to outline our deficiencies …
ALL right, Mahit said to her imago, a direct query like gritting her teeth inside her mind, what don’t I know about Darj Tarats that I need to know?
She’d retreated to her residence pod from the hangar bay. It was quiet in here, curved and soothing-smooth, and in the intimate privacy of whatever internal landscape an imago and successor shared—she thought of it as a room sometimes, a room with unexpected mirrors—she discovered without much regret that this conversation was easier to have in Teixcalaanli.
Not that it was easy to have. Yskandr was chimerical, slippery; an imago wasn’t really a separate person, but sometimes, sometimes Mahit felt like she was sharing herself with a possessing, secretive alien. Right now even the direct question didn’t do her much good: there was no answering Yskandr-voice, no sense of partnership, just a flicker of visual memory (hands on a table, grey-brown, the veins prominent right up to the knuckle, and the reflection of stars through a Station window) which dissolved if she tried to look at it closely. Imago-memory wasn’t always accessible; it was associational at best, not like her own living memories. She couldn’t reach back into what Yskandr remembered and pull up Darj Tarats like a holofilm. The only transfers which worked like that were skill transfers. Language, decorum. How she could do partial differential equations now, because Yskandr had known how. Partial differential equations, and matrix algebra, and ciphers based in both.
But if he didn’t want to help her—and oh, every time he went silent she was afraid, so desperately afraid of being alone and broken again, it was a horrible worm at the core of her, how afraid she was that it had never been sabotage at all, that she was merely broken, merely somehow corrosive to her imago, never suitable, not a rightful inheritor for any memory—
<Oh, stop it,> Yskandr said, and Mahit exhaled all of the breath in her chest, folding over herself.
You could stop scaring me, also.
<Unlikely, given the circumstances, our history, and the continued unorthodox nature of our link in the imago-chain. Not to mention Darj Tarats.>
Mahit was not going to let him bait her into enjoying herself, taking pleasure in the wry and vicious cast of his humor (What did you do, Yskandr? Oh, sedition, probably, fragment-memory, her first hour on Teixcalaanli soil, when she’d only had the edges of how wrong being the Lsel Ambassador could go), not when she really, really needed him to stop fucking around and give her what information he had.
Get on with it, Yskandr. Darj Tarats, Councilor for the Miners, he who rescued us and this Station by sending me coordinates of ship-destroying aliens to feed to Teixcalaan in exchange for our freedom. Your patron, according to absolutely everyone, including you. Spill. Or at least let me see.
<You know it doesn’t—we don’t—work like that.>
I know. Let me see.
And the mirrored room that was her mind unfolded like a flower, floating in some jeweled pool in Palace-East, blue petals like drowning.
Not a cohesive string of memory—not the being-Yskandr she’d experienced in flashes, under sedation and a laser-knife, when she’d had her damaged imago-machine replaced with one carrying an older version of the same imago. Not narrative at all, but a way of seeing. A way of knowing a man for a long time. What a distant, antagonistic friendship was like, conducted over interplanetary distances. They’d written letters, Yskandr Aghavn and Darj Tarats had—back and forth for twenty years, in the same cipher Tarats had used to send her the coordinates of the alien incursion. A long time to talk into the dark at someone you didn’t like—
<I liked him. Sometimes.>
Yskandr had liked him at the moment of receiving a new letter, liked him in the anticipation of being challenged and surprised and having to figure out how to push back, keep what he himself intended in Teixcalaan unobserved. Liked, too, the brazenness of Darj Tarats’s own planning, the equality-in-revolutionary-thought he’d found in that long, slow epistolary. Liked being just useful enough to his patron back on Lsel to be part of his dream of a future for Teixcalaan as well as Yskandr’s own—
Mahit still wasn’t getting to the heart of it. The elision, the blank. The drowning-blue unfolding that felt like terror and incomprehensibility and was probably just Yskandr not wanting to show her what Darj Tarats’s imagined future was, like he hadn’t wanted to show her how he’d loved the Emperor Six Direction with his mind and his body and eventually his loyalty to Lsel. All of that, all of him, given over. She leaned—a kind of internal pressure, like trying to remember the cadence of a poem, the stroke order of a glyph she’d only seen once, the specific word in Teixcalaanli for ibis, that long-legged bird that dipped its narrow feet through the pools of Palace-East, disturbing the lotuses, that same blue—
The spike of feeling down her ulnar nerves wasn’t numbness or electric fire but actual pain. Idiopathic, she thought, biting back a hurt little noise, idiopathic and psychosomatic, and it’s probably just going to get worse, every time something goes wrong with us. Yskandr—