“This is the asekreta Three Seagrass,” Mahit began, and Three Seagrass found herself utterly, peculiarly delighted to be introduced. It was like they’d reversed roles, liaison and barbarian inverted, and hadn’t they just, she was on Mahit’s planet—station—now, wasn’t she? “Patrician first-class, Third Undersecretary to the Teixcalaanli Minister for Information. My former cultural liaison.”
“Most interesting job I’ll ever have, being your cultural liaison,” Three Seagrass added, thinking, Except perhaps this one I’m doing now. She bowed over her fingertips at the strange barbarians. “You have my advantage; Mahit, if you would be so kind as to introduce your—companions?”
Diplomacy was a lovely refuge. There were rituals for it, and none of them involved being arrested. Usually.
Mahit’s expression had gone from faintly ill to a mix of chagrin and pleasure. She was so expressive. All Stationers seemed to be: the other two that Mahit had come in with looked positively scheming, observant and attentive and not displeased so much as—anticipatory.
Mahit said, “You are quite honored, Three Seagrass; these are two members of our governing Council. Darj Tarats, the Councilor for the Miners”—she gestured to the old thin man to her right—“and Dekakel Onchu, the Councilor for the Pilots. I believe you are Councilor Onchu’s problem, as you’re in her hangar. Illegally.”
Three Seagrass asked, with as much apology as she could muster, “Councilors. Do you understand Teixcalaanli?” (Really, she needed to learn Stationer properly, more than the amateur level of vocabulary she currently had, even if Mahit’s language had noises in it that a civilized tongue disliked.)
The hawk-faced woman, Onchu, nodded. Just once. She hadn’t said a word yet. She didn’t need to; everything about her demanded Three Seagrass justify herself posthaste or be ejected out the nearest airlock, of which there were two in direct line of sight.
“My deepest apologies for the unorthodox method of my arrival,” Three Seagrass went on, “but I needed to come to Lsel Station with absolute speed, and there was no way to circumvent the sublight travel time aside from traveling through the Anhamemat Gate instead of the usual one. I do understand that I may have inadvertently violated the treaties between our two peoples by not announcing my intentions, but trust me, I am not here in secret or for purposes that would damage our relations further.”
Councilor Onchu’s eyebrows were as expressive as the rest of her. They’d climbed nearly to where her hairline would have been if she hadn’t shaved her head bald. “What are you here for, then?” she asked. Her Teixcalaanli was more than passable. “What requires absolute speed? And why were we not informed of a situation that would cause you to choose this method of coming into our territory, Undersecretary?”
Some things had been easier when she was simply an asekreta. People seemed to expect Undersecretaries of any variety to have staff, and press releases over the newsfeeds, and probably to file their intersystem travel plans ahead of time.
“I need,” said Three Seagrass, figuring that clarity was the simpler part of valor, “to borrow the Ambassador.” She gestured at Mahit, who had gone Teixcalaanli-still around the eyes. “She is still the Ambassador, is she not?”
Once he’d sealed the door to his bedroom shut behind him, Eight Antidote could pretend that he had some privacy. He knew better: there were two camera-eyes in here that he was aware of, and another one in the bathroom, discreetly pointed at the window rather than either the shower or the toilet. (That one was to look for intruders and people who might want to kidnap an imperial heir, not for watching the imperial heir wash himself. He hoped. Even so, he’d always showered with his back to the window and his genitals facing the corner of the shower stall.) But shutting the door made him feel alone.
Eight Antidote told his holoprojector to cue up an episode of Dawn with Encroaching Clouds. It was a serial drama with an absolutely enormous costume budget and a set that was partially built out of a real historical warship, a museum piece from four hundred years ago, the same time as when the story took place. There’d been special permission from the War Ministry for using it, during the filming. The current episode he was watching was from the fifth season of six. The fifth season was called Sunlight Dissolves Tendrils of Haze, and it was the part of the story where the Emperor Two Sunspot—having faced down the first-contact negotiation with the Ebrekti and returned through the jumpgate she’d fled through, only to reencounter on the other side her former ezuazuacat, the attempted usurper Eleven Cloud—began a yearlong campaign of attrition against the usurper’s legionary ships. It was Eight Antidote’s favorite part, or at least it had been before the whole insurrection and usurpation last year. Now it was harder to watch, but it made him—feel nervous, and excited, and interested, and a little awful.
Which was how he felt anyway, after talking to the Emperor herself about Nine Hibiscus on Kauraan and the new war, so it worked out.
Eleven Cloud, or the actress playing her, was in the middle of having her Fleet Captains reaffirm their vows of loyalty to her and their acclamation of her as Emperor. Which of course meant she couldn’t just surrender to Two Sunspot, even though they’d grown up together and loved each other. It was a very dramatic episode, with flashback sections where Eleven Cloud and Two Sunspot were in bed together in Palace-Earth, before everything went wrong between them. The sex was pretty graphic. Eight Antidote knew that kids his age probably weren’t supposed to watch Dawn with Encroaching Clouds, there was a no-sex-and-less-blood version of the story of Two Sunspot and Eleven Cloud called Glass Key, which was labeled as appropriate for crèche-school use, but the writing in it was awful.
Also Eight Antidote had never had any restrictions on his media accesses. He’d watched a lot of people have sex on holoproj. It seemed messy and also made people do stupid things afterward.
Probably the yaotlek Nine Hibiscus hadn’t gotten stuck with leading an unwinnable war because of sex, though. It looked more like politics to Eight Antidote, and everyone had politics, even if only some people had sex. He kept thinking about what the Emperor had said: that Nine Hibiscus might be good enough to stay alive. Which was so different from what Eleven Laurel seemed to want him to think—that there was something so dangerous about her, and her people’s loyalty to her, that it was better if she died nobly.
Well, if she died nobly, nothing like what happened to Eleven Cloud could happen to her, and to Teixcalaan through her. Her loyal legions couldn’t convince her to become Emperor if she wasn’t there to convince.
It seemed like such a waste to him, though. To let someone who could come up with how to find a victory on Kauraan just—die, because of what might happen. Not everything was like it had been four hundred years ago. Nineteen Adze didn’t even know Nine Hibiscus, not really, Eight Antidote didn’t think they’d met more than one time in person.
Not everything was like a holodrama, though, either. Even if the holodrama was a visual version of a novel that was a version of an epic poem that still got sung at concerts in the palace. Some things were new, and also recent. Like the former yaotlek One Lightning, and his loyalist legions, and how Eight Antidote’s ancestor-the-Emperor had died. Maybe that was part of the answer. Not letting anyone who had a chance of being like One Lightning close enough to know, or like, or even stick around long enough to think maybe they should be Emperor instead of Nineteen Adze.