He’d never get any better at hiding his thoughts when he talked without practicing. This was definitely true and also not very comforting at all. True things weren’t, mostly. Still, it helped to think about: even if the Emperor knew why he was asking her questions, he’d learn what gave him away, and next time he’d do better. He needed to learn. He was already eleven, and some of the cadets in the Ministry of War were only fourteen and had real responsibilities; that was just three years away, and he wasn’t a cadet, he was the heir to the Empire. He might not have three years to get ready.
The Emperor was in the Great Hall, as usual for midafternoon: she took public meetings and petitions, like Six Direction had before her, and sometimes she gave pronouncements, and once or twice a week Eight Antidote came to sit by the sun-spear throne and listen, on the Emperor’s request. Watch, she’d said. Watch who comes to ask for help, and who doesn’t. Today wasn’t one of his scheduled days. Today he slipped into the Great Hall, quiet in his grey clothes and his soft shoes, the only thing that didn’t gleam, that wasn’t patterned. The Emperor was wearing gold and white, layers of suiting, the points of her lapels echoing the points of the throne, and she was talking to some ixplanatlim wearing poppy-red, the color of doctors and medical scientists. The verse in the children’s song about the kinds of Palace employees went red for blood and for the ease of pain and had a tune that Eight Antidote wished was either less memorable or less cheerful. He wondered what the Emperor wanted to talk to medical people about, or what they had to say to her.
She was young. Not like his ancestor-the-Emperor, who had been dying, and talked to medical ixplanatlim all the time. She shouldn’t need them. Not for a long time yet.
He crept closer. The City-eyes had spotted him, of course, but he wasn’t trying to fool them right now; he just wanted to be quiet. He kept his back to the wall and shifted sideways between the fan-arch ribs of the roof where they met the ground. Sank down on his heels and sat cross-legged there, in a shadow. Grey like a shadow, a darker spot on the tiled floor, not really here—just here to listen.
“—find out,” Nineteen Adze was saying. “I don’t want your supposition that this woman died in a shop fire in Belltown Two because she was carrying an incendiary device and it went off prematurely. I want your certainty, and I want to know who she was. If it was her device, or if she was carrying it for someone else, or if it wasn’t an incendiary at all but some poor unfortunate in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The ixplanatlim didn’t look happy—they glanced at each other, like they were all trying to get out of being the person who had to say something to the Emperor she didn’t want to hear. Finally, one of them—a woman, her ash-brown hair in a triple queue down her spine, dull against the bright red of her uniform—took a step forward. “We wouldn’t have come without completing the investigation,” she said, “if the dead woman hadn’t had one of those anti-imperial posters pasted over what was left of her face, the ones that were all over the City before the recent—um. Difficulties. Your Brilliance.”
Eight Antidote could tell when Nineteen Adze was paying attention because she wanted to, instead of because she had to. She made all the air go out of a room, even a room as big as this one. Her fingers tapped on one of the arms of the throne, one-two-three-four-five, and then stilled again. “A defaced battle flag poster?” she asked.
The ixplanatl dragged her eyes off the Emperor’s hand and back to her face. She nodded. “Plastered to her face with the same glue they’d use to stick it to a wall.”
“Postmortem.”
“Yes, Your Brilliance. Someone else stuck it to her corpse. Before any investigation personnel arrived.”
“And there’s no visual record of this mysterious corpse defacer.”
“The fire took out the nearest City-eye, and—”
Nineteen Adze waved a hand, cutting her off. “Go to the Judiciary with this. The corpse, too—any further autopsy should be run out of their facilities,” she said. “You’ll have an appointment with the Minister of the Judiciary by the time you walk over there. Tell Eight Loop what you just told me. And Teixcalaan does appreciate your concern, and your expertise.”
When people left the vicinity of the sun-spear throne, it was like watching starships try to break orbit—an effort. Eight Antidote had never felt that, that pull. It was probably because he belonged here, and they didn’t.
“You can come out of the shadows now, Eight Antidote,” said the Emperor, and Eight Antidote sighed.
It would be so nice if Nineteen Adze were less good at noticing. But that would make her a less good Emperor, too, according to every poem he knew: Emperors saw the whole of Teixcalaan, all at once, so why wouldn’t they see one eleven-year-old kid in a corner? He got up and came over to the throne, thinking, When I’m Emperor, will I see too? and then deciding not to worry about that right this minute. It wasn’t the question he wanted to ask.
Neither was “Did someone get murdered?” but that was what came out of his mouth first off.
“Unfortunately people get murdered all the time,” said the Emperor, which was condescending—Eight Antidote knew that; he wasn’t a baby.
“Most murders don’t have three medical examiners talking to the Emperor about them,” he said.
“True,” that Emperor told him, her eyes wide-smiling, and Eight Antidote didn’t trust her, really, didn’t know her, really, but his ancestor-the-Emperor had loved her enough to make sure she ended up on the sun-spear throne, and that was something to remember when her smiling at him made him feel seen in the way that he wanted to be seen. “Come sit, little spy, since you’ve been listening already.” She patted the wide arm of the throne.
Little spy wasn’t half as nice as Cure, but it was more honest. Eight Antidote perched on the throne arm, like a palace-hummer alighting, comfortable—it was more than wide enough for him—but poised to leave at any moment. When he was sitting there, he looked at Her Brilliance and waited, keeping his face as expressionless as he could manage.
“… You look so much like him, it’s almost reassuring that you spend half your time hiding in shadows,” said the Emperor, and Eight Antidote felt a rush of satisfaction at having made her react to him. He knew he looked like Six Direction. Knew that he’d only look more like his dead ancestor the older he got, and if he tilted his head just a little to the right, and lifted his chin and his eyebrows—
—Nineteen Adze pulled back from him a good inch before she caught herself doing it. Interesting.
“My ancestor-the-Emperor would have had a difficult time not being seen,” he said. “You do, too. It is a very large throne.”
“It is a very large empire, little spy,” said Nineteen Adze, and sank back into that throne. Eight Antidote wondered if it was comfortable if your legs were long enough; it certainly wasn’t comfortable when your legs were eleven-year-old size, like his. He’d tried it out. But Nineteen Adze looked so very much like she belonged in it: the corona of spearpoints like a crown behind her, metal-grey and gold. Like Six Direction had looked. Like a pilot embedded in a ship …
“I wanted to ask you something,” he said, and knew that he was going to give away what Eleven Laurel in the Ministry of War was teaching him, if he asked his question. It wouldn’t be his secret training anymore, it would be—oh, like everything else. Just part of being him, being him inside the palace. Inside his life.