Half of Mahit’s mouth had twisted up, a grimace, close to laughter but suppressed. “Not wide enough,” she said, and for a moment she sounded like—someone else. The way her face moved, too—not quite right. Not what Three Seagrass remembered. Three Seagrass needed to ask her about why she’d been surrounded by her own government’s highest officials. It was Mahit. She was probably up to her hairline in unpleasant and threatening politics all on her own time, if Three Seagrass knew her at all.
(They’d really only been together a little over a week, in the City. A week wasn’t enough to know someone. But that week seemed longer. Fulcrum points usually did. There was before that week, when Three Seagrass had been an ambitious young Information agent with a habit of spending her evenings at court poetry salons, and a best friend out in the City who she’d known since they’d been cadets together; and then there was after, when she was Three Seagrass, Third Undersecretary to the Minister for Information, and her friend was dead, and she hadn’t written a poem, much less read one at court, in more than two months.)
“Are you in trouble?” she asked Mahit.
“When haven’t I been?” Mahit said, and sighed, and sank back into her couch, letting go of Three Seagrass’s wrist. The loss felt like a spark-gap, widened just too far for current to pass through.
“Presumably you were an exemplary student,” Three Seagrass said.
“All right,” Mahit agreed, “I was briefly not in trouble, while safely locked in an examination hall.”
“And now?”
“I would have come back to the City eventually,” Mahit said, after an excruciating pause. “I think I would have. When I thought it was the right time.”
Three Seagrass waited for her. She thought Mahit had already arrived at her decision, but it was better if Three Seagrass didn’t push her while she made it a decision that could be spoken out loud. She’d pushed fairly hard already. Mahit might not forgive her for that, later on. If this went badly for them. Or even—especially—if it went well. Hadn’t she run off just when it seemed like the City and all of Teixcalaan had finally stopped trying to kill her and acknowledged how much it could make use of her, barbarian or not, instead? She might do it again: succeed, and then write herself out of Teixcalaan’s memory and history, make herself a ghost, exiled to her own home.
Mahit shut her eyes, squeezed their lids shut. She pressed her fingertips to the wrinkles that drew themselves up her forehead, twin worry lines. “You’re going to have to make this very official,” she said, muffled by her own palm. “‘The Ministry of Information commands, at the order of Her Brilliance the Emperor’ sort of official. The Edgeshine of a Knife, through her envoy Three Seagrass, demands the immediate presence of the Ambassador Mahit Dzmare on the Whatever That Legion’s Flagship Is Called.”
She had an annoyingly good grasp on exactly how Teixcalaanli communiqués were structured grammatically. It wasn’t fair that she was a barbarian. She’d have made a brilliant Information agent.
“And while you’re at it,” Mahit went on, “please don’t break our import-export laws again? Find a way to have been here officially all along. I would like Councilor Onchu not to find reasons beyond the usual ones to hate me.”
Three Seagrass was going to have to find out what the usual reasons were. But she’d have a while, she thought. She’d have the three-month length of her assignment, and a battlefront. That was long enough to get to know anyone, and all their secrets. Even if they were Mahit Dzmare.
“The Empire is going to remember the colonist-workers of Peloa-2 as Teixcalaanlitzlim who died in combat,” Twenty Cicada was saying to the assembled soldiers, standing rank on rank in the widest hangar bay of Weight for the Wheel—the only space on the ship large enough to assemble all nonemergency, nondeployed personnel. “Your participation in these mourning rites will make sure of it. You will carry the dead of Peloa-2 in your memory; you will inscribe their names on the weapons with which you will avenge them. The blood they spilled will not be drunk by the ground of their planet, but by the Empire that fed them, and feeds you too.”
It wasn’t the usual funeral oration. It couldn’t be, for many reasons: a funeral for so many dead at once could only be done via the modes Teixcalaan had developed either for commemorating space-dead, or the ones for plague victims. Nine Hibiscus was glad Twenty Cicada had gone for a variant on these citizens died in the black between the stars and we reclaim their blood sacrifice from the void, rather than the world is out of balance and illness obliterates our grief and their lives mercifully. They’d had a disagreement about which one to choose. He’d made a disturbingly convincing argument that the eviscerated bodies were plague-dead and the plague was the aliens, a plague that destroyed without meaning, like a virus that killed its hosts so fast that it killed itself, too.
Nine Hibiscus didn’t want that sort of idea spread to the rest of her soldiers, even if Twenty Cicada was usually right about how systems worked, even—especially—biological ones. Having an entire legion of frightened germophobes would cripple any direct engagement with the enemy that happened face-to-face, or face-to-mandible, or face to whatever horror they actually turned out to be. Neither did she want a bunch of overeager captains breaking out the flamethrowers and biochemical sanitizing blanket bombs. The next planet they recaptured might have survivors. She wasn’t willing to give up on that possibility. Not yet.
The Information Ministry spook couldn’t get here soon enough, for her tastes. If she was going to be able to talk to these things at all, it needed to be soon. While she still had even the slightest shred of desire to. A war of extermination, against these aliens, would have a great many Teixcalaanli casualties, more than she was willing to risk, even if the first group of them happened to be someone else’s legion and not her own people. But they would be her people. Her people, who had followed her out to this bleak edge. They deserved better than being bodies thrown into the machinery of a war in order to begin the breaking of its gears. So she had to figure out if there was anything there to talk to, anything worth what had happened to Peloa-2, what had probably happened to the other darkened systems in this sector.
“From this barren soil will grow new flowers,” Twenty Cicada said, intent and dreamy-soft, an enticement made audible throughout the entire hangar, reverberating in everyone’s cloudhook, on the overhead speakers, on the other speakers embedded in the floor, bone-conduction transmission so that a captain’s voice—or an adjutant’s voice, if one’s adjutant could have been a great orator if he hadn’t wanted to be a soldier instead, and had unorthodox religious beliefs besides—could sound inside the skull of every soldier gathered. Be felt, collectively. “They will be hard-won flowers—fragile petals well defended by your hands, with parasites beaten away, warmed by the sunlight of energy weapons.”
The parasites line was definitely Twenty Cicada having feelings about plague. About homeostasis, and balance. Even if the rest of this speech was the usual rousing entry to a collective mourning rite—all of those soldiers would be pricking their fingers for a blood-bowl by the end of the hour, the sort of bowl she could pour out on Peloa-2’s empty factory floor like a promise (and she would do it herself, better her than Sixteen Moonrise, it had to be the yaotlek who led the Fleet)—talking about parasites was entirely from Twenty Cicada’s own philosophy and religious convictions.