“Where is it that you have been called away to so urgently?” asked Aknel Amnardbat, mild and colorless as distilled water.
“I am afraid, Councilor Amnardbat,” said Three Seagrass in Teixcalaanli, “that it is my duty to reclaim the services of the Ambassador from Lsel Station to Teixcalaan.” The language felt wrong to Mahit for the first time in a long time. Out of context. Three Seagrass, in bright flame-orange, Teixcalaanlitzlim-perfect, was like a cut poisonous flower in the center of the hangar. Something beautiful and dangerous that shouldn’t be where it was, that would die and in its dying take what was nearby with it.
Amnardbat glanced from Three Seagrass to Mahit to the waiting shuttle, its doors open, her eyebrows raised and her mouth pursed like she’d tasted citrus-flavoring powder straight from the packet. And then she let go of Three Seagrass’s arm.
I wonder if there’ll be bruises, Mahit thought.
<You might get a chance to find out if you don’t make any sudden movements,> Yskandr whispered, and there was something utterly filthy in how he said it that made Mahit want to hide from the inside of her own mind. Had that inflection been hers or his? Both? How hard was it going to be to tell, going forward?
Amnardbat did not speak in Teixcalaanli, even though Mahit knew she could use the language perfectly well. But she must also have known that Three Seagrass couldn’t understand much Stationer at all. “Is that so, Dzmare? Are you headed back to the Empire, despite owing your home the repository of your memory?”
Mahit winced. “I’m—we’re—going to the war, not the City. Councilor.” That plural. She should watch her plurals. She’d meant her and Three Seagrass, surely.
Yskandr, a flicker of the younger, damaged version, less prurient, more vicious: <We is an appropriate singular for us.>
Mahit wished both of them would let her think, and also wished she hadn’t wished it. She’d wanted him back so badly, when he’d been gone.
Amnardbat looked her over, and looked Onchu next to her over, too. There was a vast judgment in that gaze, and a sense of utter disregard: Well, if you want. What use are you, anyway. Mahit was projecting. Almost certainly. Assigning narrative where there wasn’t any. She didn’t seem to be able to stop. She hadn’t been able to stop since the City. But then Amnardbat said, still in Stationer, “There are so many easier ways to commit suicide, Dzmare, than going to someone else’s war.”
Mahit didn’t think that barb was pointed at her at all. It was for Onchu, and maybe for Darj Tarats through Onchu: someone else’s war. A waste of Lsel’s resources, again, at the mercy of Teixcalaanli whims.
If you hadn’t threatened me, I wouldn’t be going. I didn’t mean to leave Lsel. I just came home. I came home, Councilor.
Thought was cheap. “I expect to be back, alive,” Mahit said. “Anything else, Councilor?”
Now, surely, would come the security personnel, or Onchu would step in, or Three Seagrass would stop looking like she could suddenly develop telepathy and tell Mahit what to do if she glared with sufficient expression.
“Oh, go on, then,” said Aknel Amnardbat, easy as anything, and waved a hand at the shuttle. “Enjoy yourself, while you’ve got breath for it.” She gave Three Seagrass a pat on the shoulder—Three Seagrass visibly flinched. “Onchu? A word, while the Teixcalaanlitzlim and her … charge … get out of our controlled space?”
“Of course, Councilor,” said Onchu smoothly. “Good luck, Mahit. And good luck to you as well, Envoy.”
Onchu, at least, had bothered to revert to Teixcalaanli when directly addressing Three Seagrass. She also had the wherewithal to immediately walk away from where she and Mahit had been standing, drawing Amnardbat along with her in her wake: these little things—a Teixcalaanlitzlim, a broken Ambassador—all of that was not important when one Councilor of Lsel was having a conversation with another. It was blunt. Blunt and skillful. Mahit could imagine growing into a woman like that, if she lived so long—
The open door of the shuttle looked like a dark mouth. Mahit picked up her luggage—less than she’d taken to the City, by far—and walked into it, Three Seagrass just behind her to the left, snapping back into place like a detached limb suddenly remade. As if they had never stopped being Ambassador and liaison, barbarian and opener-of-doors. As if everything hadn’t changed.
Eight Antidote woke up with the Emperor standing in the frame of his bedroom window, moonlight thick behind her. She glowed like a dream-apparition, a ghost, dressed in the white she’d worn before she’d been made Emperor. Eight Antidote wondered if he’d awoken a year ago, if the entire world he’d fallen into after his ancestor-the-Emperor killed himself would dissolve into dreamsmoke, fade to nothing. Maybe he was ten years old. Maybe all that would happen today was that he’d go see the palace-hummers in their garden, and recite poetry for his tutor, and avoid whoever the other child who had been provided for him to socialize with was. And forget—
Nineteen Adze was watching him. The world as it was refused to slip away into half-recalled snatches. He was eleven, and sole imperial heir, and yesterday he’d convinced the Minister of War to show him how to be a commander.
“I have something I want to show you,” said Nineteen Adze. The weight of her eyes was very heavy. She was paying all of her attention to him right now, and he was in bed without a shirt on. Abruptly he was embarrassed, and pulled the sheet up to his chest as he sat up.
“… Your Brilliance?” he said, trying not to sound like he’d been asleep just a minute ago. Or too much like a kid.
She came away from the window, a shadow separating. She had something in one hand. A sharp something, metal. Eight Antidote couldn’t understand the shape of it. Maybe it was a knife. Maybe she was going to stab him and keep the sun-spear throne for herself and her heirs, whoever they would be, forever. Could he stop her? Eleven Laurel had taught him basic grappling, and he knew how to use an energy pistol, but he didn’t have an energy pistol, and Nineteen Adze outweighed him twice over and also he was lying down and she was standing up, so she had all the advantages she’d need—
It wasn’t a knife. Not exactly.
It was shaped like an arrowhead, like something Eight Antidote had seen in historical holos about pre-spaceflight humans and how they killed each other. But it was big. Big as a palm, and made of a dark brassy metal. The moonlight caught the edge of it. It looked rusted. It wasn’t rusted. It was stained. Blood, old enough it should have flaked off. Nineteen Adze held it out to him. “Go on,” she said. “Take it.”
He did. It was heavy. It had been coated with some kind of thin clear lacquer, which kept the blood on. A memory, then. The tip of a spear, like the points of the sun-spear throne. Down the center of it was a raised part, like a spine, and when he ran his thumb over that ridge, he could feel indentations. He pressed down on the deepest one. A thin panel of the metal spine slid soundlessly back, and inside was—a hologram. Like the entire object was a giant infofiche stick, and he’d just broken it open.
It was an image. Very small, without any glyph annotations. But Eight Antidote could recognize it clearly. There was his ancestor-the-Emperor, middle-aged, strong, with his hair unbound and reaching almost to his hips, sitting on a four-legged animal (a horse, he remembered, that’s a horse, or else a camel, but I think it’s a horse). And next to him, on another horse, was Nineteen Adze in the uniform of a soldier in the Third Legion, no rank marks at all. Eight Antidote wasn’t that good at judging ages, but he thought she might have been twenty. At most.