From the depths of the throne, Nineteen Adze said, “I’ll try to answer.”
“Why wouldn’t you be able to?”
“Ask,” said the Emperor. “Find out.”
Eight Antidote sighed, shoving air through his nose, curving in on himself until his elbows were on his knees, his chin in his hands, still perched on the throne arm. “Why did you pick Fleet Captain Nine Hibiscus to be yaotlek, Your Brilliance?”
“What a fascinating question. Are you thinking of spending time in the Fleet?”
He might have been. He hadn’t thought about it out loud, inside his head, where it could turn into a real desire, something he could ask for and not get. But—maybe. He’d be good at it. He could solve the cartograph puzzles Eleven Laurel set him, even the hard ones.
“I’m too young,” he said.
“In all likelihood that will change,” said Nineteen Adze, which she seemed to think was funny and Eight Antidote wasn’t very sure about. “What interests you about Nine Hibiscus, then?”
He could lie.
But then he wouldn’t get the answer to his question.
“Undersecretary Eleven Laurel says you sent her out to die for Teixcalaan. As fast as possible.”
Nineteen Adze made a noise, a click of her tongue against her teeth, considering. “Honestly,” she said, “I’d prefer she didn’t die very fast at all, if she has to die for us.”
That wasn’t really an answer. He tried again.
“Is it because of Kauraan? That you picked her?” Another secret given away. Eleven Laurel probably wouldn’t like him anymore, wouldn’t tell him anything important if he was just going to go tattle to the Emperor Herself.
The Emperor was leaning up out of the throne and putting her hand on Eight Antidote’s shoulder, a warm weight. There were calluses on it. He knew the stories about her, how she’d been a soldier, how she’d met his ancestor-the-Emperor on a ground campaign, where they fought with shocksticks and projectiles. On a planet, in the dirt.
“Yes,” she said. “But not because I thought she was too dangerous to keep alive, little spy. Because I thought she might just be dangerous enough to stay alive.”
By the time Three Seagrass reached her sixth commandeered passenger berth (six different ships taking her through six different jumpgates, and none of them very nice to ride in), she’d packed up her special-envoy suits in favor of an expensive, difficult-to-wear jumpsuit-overall in some black wool crepe that made her look like she had a great deal of money and a vastly different cultural background than the one she’d actually got. It exposed most of her sternum when she wasn’t wearing its matching jacket, and its matching jacket had eight zippers. She’d bought it at her fifth stopover, on Esker-1, a planet on the Western Arc she’d never been to before: full of rich import-export families, the sort that Thirty Larkspur, lately demoted to Special Advisor on Trade from the heights of attempted insurrection, had come from. Esker-1 produced trade, and also choral singing, which Three Seagrass found inexplicably overwhelming to listen to. The choral singing, not the trade. Trade was easy. It let her buy terrible wealthy-importer-family-scion jumpsuits and catch a ship off-planet that was headed someplace a member of the Information Ministry in good standing oughtn’t be, unless she was on assignment.
Esker-1 was in a system situated squarely between three jumpgates: two full of traffic, in and out of Teixcalaanli space, and one that dumped you out near a backwater planetary system that was contested territory when some emperor bothered to contest it, but was otherwise content to be loosely attached to the Verashk-Talay Confederation … and was four days sublight travel from the back end of the Anhamemat Gate, or what Three Seagrass was almost entirely sure was the back end of the Anhamemat Gate. It was that backwater where Three Seagrass had gotten to, and she felt, vertiginously, like she really had exited the properly ordered and expected universe.
That might be the number of jumpgates she’d been through in three days. She’d never crossed this many in this short a time, and she kept thinking about those debunked tabloid newsfeed articles from half an indiction back—the ones that said too much jumpgate travel would scramble your genetics and possibly give you cancers.
It also might be that while she’d been off-City—had even done her mandatory stint on a distant border post, like any good asekreta cadet who wanted all the best marks on her work history before graduation—Three Seagrass had never once yet been outside of Teixcalaan entirely. Outside the world. In the places that were—otherwise. Where the stars rose and set by different rules, and no one bowed over their pressed fingertips to say hello, and too many people smiled like Mahit had: all teeth.
The ridiculous jumpsuit helped. It let her pretend she was the sort of person who would like being here, in a dingy resource-poor spaceport full of barbarians, looking for the right ride off this shithole. Not deeper into Verashk-Talay space—thank fuck, she was terrible at their languages, she’d taken the mandatory six-month class as a cadet and forgotten everything about it as soon as she’d passed the exam. She’d been on the political specialist track, not the negotiator-with-not-currently-hostile-enough-to-bother-with governments track. Her current and regretful capacity to communicate in either Verashk or Talay was limited to asking for the location of a washroom and ordering one large beer, please, the sort of phrase that bored cadets yelled at each other gleefully in hallways.
Right now she had ordered one large beer, please, and was trying to convince a cargo-barge engineer to shove her in along with whatever she was shipping to Stationer space. Whatever it was had to be somewhat circumspect, since this barge was headed through that back-end jumpgate she was pretty sure would spit her out right next to Lsel Station. The same jumpgate the aliens had come through, according to Mahit’s intelligence. Three Seagrass wondered if this engineer was worried about alien attacks, or being caught in a war zone. Probably not—but fear of aliens could certainly be why Three Seagrass had only been able to find this one ship headed where she needed to go.
“I don’t care what it is you have in the crates,” she said in Teixcalaanli. “I want on your ship, that’s all.”
The engineer was stony-faced. Not politely neutral like a Teixcalaanlitzlim, but aggressively flat. “The shipping manifest is for cargo only,” she said, shaping the syllables with deliberate care. “Cargo only. Not persons from Esker-1.”
I’m not from Esker-1, Three Seagrass thought, with a tiny internal cascade of despair. I’m from the Ministry of Information. None of this would help her. It would make things worse. If this engineer didn’t want a wealthy trader from the Western Arc on her barge, she definitely wouldn’t want an Information Ministry agent.
“Where I am from is not important,” she tried. “It is where I am going that matters.”
“There are other barges. Go buy them beers.”
There were other barges. None of them were trying this route, the skip into Stationer territory through the back end. It had taken her hours to track down this one.
“Your barge is fastest and most direct.” Three Seagrass tried a Stationer smile, with teeth. It didn’t do much; the engineer remained unmoved. “Really, I have no idea what is in your crates, and I don’t want to know. I want you to take me through the Anhamemat Gate.”