Her hands felt like lumps that burned, fingerless, as if pain had rendered them invisible, insensible.
Blue, in a glass. Alcohol with a faint blue tint—<Gin,> Yskandr supplied, distant, <the blue is from a peaflower in the distillate, Nineteen Adze introduced me to it.>—and earliest-morning light, near-dawn glowing through the glass, the color falling onto one of Tarats’s ciphered letters. Yskandr in his (their) apartment in the City. The sensation of being struck without being struck physically, an emotional blow, the world (the Empire) suddenly destabilized, and Yskandr had dropped the glass, spilled blue everywhere, blue and sharp glass shards and the smell of juniper rising in a sickening perfume.
You know I pushed for you to be Ambassador because I knew you’d make Teixcalaan need you, trust you, love you and through you, us, Tarats had written, but perhaps you never managed to alight on why I would want such a hideous thing as imperial desire focused on our Station or on its representative. But what better way to draw a monstrous thing to its death than to use its functions against itself? Teixcalaan wants; its trust is rooted in wanting; it is in this way you and I will destroy it.
The words were too clear to be organic memory—they were grooved in, words that Yskandr had repeated and reread, thought about so often that they’d become part of his internal narrative. Whether they were Tarats’s actual words almost didn’t matter. They were the story that Yskandr had told himself, remembered being true; they were scent-linked, color-linked, and they were her memory now too, as much true for her as they were for her imago, live memory carried over on sense and image.
Very carefully, like tonguing a wound, Mahit let herself wonder which part of those words had been what made Yskandr recoil away from them and drop his glass of gin. To draw a monstrous thing to its death was what had hooked in her like a barb in her lip, a phrase that might tear.
<That,> Yskandr said, a flicker of thought, so close to her own that it was more like confirmation than anything foreign or disparate. <That, and its trust is rooted in wanting—I knew what I was doing, with Six Direction, but to hear it so bluntly put …>
To hear that there was nothing of how you loved one another that was clean.
<A man pretends,> Yskandr murmured. <A barbarian pretends that civilization might grow in the small hours of the night, between two people.>
Mahit imagined it, civilization—humanity—blooming like tiny flowers, caught between mouths in the dark, lips that kissed and talked and built. It was a gorgeous phrase, in Teixcalaanli. You might have been a poet, if you hadn’t died—
<No. You might have, had I not been the Ambassador before you.>
That stung. She smeared tears out of her eyes (and when had she started crying?) with the back of one numb, painful hand. It felt like using a mitten. It also hurt less than it had before, which was some bare comfort. She tried to breathe slowly, an even flow of oxygen.
Did you know? she asked, after a long while. Did you at least suspect, that the Councilor for the Miners was using you as bait to draw Teixcalaan into the war the Empire is fighting now? You, and the whole Station right along with you?
Mahit didn’t get a straight answer; she got the emotional equivalent of a flinch, a squirming sense of avoidance, of needing to think of something else. Got that, and took it for yes, and also for and I wished I hadn’t understood. The silence in her pod felt hollow, oppressively bleak. She had helped to start that war, out of desperation and need: doing exactly what Tarats had always wanted Yskandr to do, what he’d always refused. Squirming guilt rose up in her stomach. No wonder Yskandr hadn’t wanted to share this with her. No wonder her hands hurt so badly.
Resigned, from a very long distance away: <He wanted—wants, I assume—for us to be free. Us Stationers. That was always the center of him. Trying to come up with some way we would end up free, as if Twelve Solar-Flare had never found us at all.>
Mahit tried to imagine it herself: Lsel Station, if the Teixcalaanli Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare had never found a jumpgate that spilled her out into this sector of space. If there had never been a historical epic written about that discovery by Pseudo-Thirteen River, if Mahit had never learned that epic in language classes and quoted it to imperial subjects to prove her erudition. She failed entirely. She wouldn’t exist. There would be no constellation of endocrine response and continuity of memory that bore a single bit of resemblance to Mahit Dzmare. The feat of imagination that Tarats was attempting was—there was no other word for it but heroic.
Like something out of a Teixcalaanli epic poem. That heroic.
Mahit laughed, a raw sound that ended in a bubbling, weepy cough, choking on her own ridiculous fluids. She couldn’t do it at all. She thought in Teixcalaanli, in imperial-style metaphor and overdetermination. She’d had this whole conversation in their language.
Deliberately, she thought in Stationer, We’re not free.
And in the same language, Yskandr agreed: <There’s no such fucking thing.>
Inside Palace-Earth there were three kinds of ways to be seen. There was the normal way, where Eight Antidote was in a place with other people and they looked at him with their eyes or their cloudhooks. He was good at avoiding the normal way, if he wanted to. It helped that he’d never lived anywhere else, and most of Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze’s staff had come over from Palace-East and were still getting lost in corridors even two months later. It also helped that he was small, and had a tunic and trousers in soft grey that eyes slid off of, in addition to all the bright gold and red and grey things that stuffed his wardrobe otherwise. He managed not being seen all the time.
But there were two other ways, and he hadn’t figured out how to disappear from them yet at all. There were the City-eyes, its cameras and locational tracking and the collective link of the Sunlit to crosscheck any errors, how the Emperor always knew exactly where he’d gone. Eight Antidote had checked his clothes for a tracking bug once, and found absolutely nothing, and felt pretty stupid afterward: locational tracking was algorithmic. He’d learned that from one of his tutors, one of the ones Minister Eight Loop sent him from the Judiciary, like an economist was the kind of present a kid would want. The City mapped him based on capturing his image and the location of his cloudhook, and predicted where he’d been when he’d dropped out of view for a minute, and it was really accurate. He’d done the math, for that same tutor. Most of it. Some of it was too hard still, kinds of equations he’d never seen.
The third way was the trickiest. The third way was being seen because of asking questions. Having someone—some adult, usually—see inside his head. And the person who was most dangerous to ask questions of (well, most likely to use those questions to figure out what Eight Antidote was thinking without him ever saying anything out loud) was the Emperor Nineteen Adze. It figured that she was definitely the person he needed to ask about the Kauraan campaign. Everybody else wouldn’t tell him the truth, or would tell him something that sounded true and was slanted away from it, like a tree growing out of the side of a building where it didn’t belong. A tree that looked like you could put your weight on its branches and swing, but if you tried, the whole wall would come down along with you and the tree instead.