They were both laughing, in the holo. Like they shared a secret. Nineteen Adze had a long stick with a metal point on the end in her hand, and there was blood dripping down it, and blood on her forehead in the shape of the Emperor’s fingers, like he’d dipped them in an enemy and pressed them there. It was the same spearpoint on that stick that Eight Antidote was holding now. He was absolutely sure.
“Why are you showing me this?” he asked.
The Emperor didn’t smile. She came to the edge of the bed and sat down on it instead. Her weight hardly disturbed it. For the first time, Eight Antidote thought of her as narrow. Unfashionably tall, but in the full imperial regalia, she always seemed broad-shouldered, strong—but here she was, featherlight, like a ghost in the moonshine from the window. “Because I loved your ancestor, Eight Antidote. I would have died for him, in his service. See us there? I don’t know anything of the next thirty years there. Not what I would do, or what he would do, or what he’d ask of me. But I already knew that I believed in his Teixcalaan. In an empire strong enough to be at peace, if only we could build that strength high enough. And we did. We did, for decades. Built it and held it.”
“It didn’t last,” Eight Antidote said. He couldn’t look at her while he said that, only at the tiny hologram-Emperor, unstained with sheets of his own sacrificed blood. Thirty years away from that blood, and still Eight Antidote could almost see it, how it would look. It would get all over the horse.
“Nothing does,” Nineteen Adze told him, which was awfuclass="underline" especially because she said it with such flat, resigned finality. A true thing, from the land of being a grown-up. From the land of being Emperor. “But I still believe in that Teixcalaan. When Six Direction made me Emperor in the sun temple, he entrusted that Teixcalaan to me. And to you, after me.”
“I’m eleven,” said Eight Antidote, as if he could make her go away by saying it. He held on to the metal memory-spear so hard his knuckles were white. The tiny hologram wavered. Stabilized.
“You’re eleven, little spy,” Nineteen Adze agreed, and sighed. “You’re eleven, and you’re not Six Direction, no matter what your face looks like. I made sure you didn’t have to be.” Her mouth twisted. “Sometimes I’m amazed that Six Direction handed me Teixcalaan after I made sure of that. After what I did to make sure of it. But I know you’re not him, Eight Antidote. I know that quite definitively.”
He wanted to ask her, What did you do? What did you do to make you look like that, when you say so? What might have happened to me if you hadn’t? He couldn’t find his voice.
“Which is why we won’t be friends the way your ancestor and I were friends,” she went on. “And you are eleven. But you’re involved already. A kid who finds his way into the Ministry of War and extracts a promise from Three Azimuth is a politician even if he’s a kid. You know that.”
“I know,” Eight Antidote said, very quietly. “I’m sorry I went.”
“Oh, blood and stars, don’t be,” said Nineteen Adze, brisk. “I’d rather have a clever, annoying, interesting successor than a dullard or a bore. How else are we going to build your ancestor’s Teixcalaan?”
She was using the collective plural. Like they were equals. Like they were grown adults and she trusted him. It probably wasn’t true, but he didn’t know why she’d say it if she was lying to him or keeping him from knowing something he was too young to know.
He asked, “Aren’t we at war, Your Brilliance? How can we have Six Direction’s empire of peace if we’re fighting these aliens?”
“We can’t,” Nineteen Adze agreed. “So we’re going to have to win, or we’re going to have to change the parameters of the conflict.”
“Three Azimuth’s projections make winning look—”
“Unlikely, yes. I’ve heard. In detail. Here’s what I want you to do for me, little spy. Little successor. You hold on to this spearhead, and you look at it when you aren’t sure what your Emperor wants for you. You remember what I’ve said tonight. And you go into the Ministry of War, and find out for me what is happening there. Find out why Eleven Laurel is so interested in you. Find out if Three Azimuth means to win this war or if she wants to maintain a permanent state of conflict. Be you, exactly as you have been—but pay attention.”
Eight Antidote felt like his tongue had gone numb, and his fingers. His heart was thrumming. He didn’t know why Three Azimuth wouldn’t want to win a war. Wasn’t that what Ministers of War were for, winning Teixcalaan’s battles? But he managed to nod—how could he not nod?—and clutched the spearhead to his chest.
“Good,” said the Emperor. “Now go back to sleep. You are only eleven. You get to sleep for a while yet.” She reached out, touched his cheek with cool fingertips. A kind, small touch. And then she got up and left. The door to his rooms irised shut behind her with the faintest of clicks.
Eight Antidote didn’t sleep at all. He watched the dawn come up instead, glittering through the hologram, making his dead ancestor look transfigured, sunlit, like a god.
After Peloa-2, there were funeral orations every few hours. Nine Hibiscus kept the old tradition of a Fleetwide broadcast on a seldom-used frequency, a recitation of the names of the dead. When the Tenth Legion wasn’t in active combat, it sang its way through a thousand years of previous casualties, cycling every week and a half from the most recent fallen soldier in the Legion to the very first Teixcalaanlitzlim who had died wearing this uniform. Nine Hibiscus couldn’t forget his name, or the low tone it was sung on during the litany—Two Cholla. A spear-name, all cactus needles, a name that would have sounded very fine with captain or ikantlos in front of it. Two Cholla had died a thousand years ago, at seventeen, before any titles or ranks could accrue around his name. There were a lot of names that came after his.
During active combat, the funeral frequency stopped playing its endless loop of memory and broadcast actual funeral orations, however small and paltry they ended up being. A snatch of song, the sound of blood falling into a bowl, and on to the next.
They were happening so fast because something about what Sixteen Moonrise had done on Peloa-2 had woken up the aliens and set them to full alert. They hadn’t entirely engaged the Fleet yet. They were still testing the edges. The edges were mostly Sixteen Moonrise’s people, the Twenty-Fourth, and a few of Forty Oxide’s Seventeenth Legion who had been positioned on the far left of the Fleet’s current arrangement. The enemy liked the left flank. Nine Hibiscus was beginning to think that somewhere beyond the blackout communication silence, in the dark places between this sector’s thin stars, there was a base, or at least a large collection of ships, that she couldn’t see. Somewhere to the left of Weight for the Wheel.
She’d expected consequences for retaking Peloa-2. It had been a statement: We are here, this planet and these people were ours and are ours again; Peloa is inside the world. Peloa is Teixcalaan. Fuck off. Of course there would be consequences. But somehow she hadn’t been mentally prepared for the enemy—bloody stars, but she needed a better name for them than “the enemy” or “the aliens,” the Information Ministry diplomat couldn’t get here fast enough to tell her what they called themselves—deciding that attrition was the better part of valor.