Mahit didn’t have much time to wonder about internecine competition between the legions making up the attack force; she was a fractional step behind Three Seagrass, feeling utterly drab and barbaric in her jacket and trousers next to that spot of flame-coral and everyone else’s perfect Fleet uniforms, and the two-person high-powered welcoming committee wasn’t waiting for them to get close. They were coming to meet them in the middle of the hangar. It looked like it was the woman’s idea—she strode forward, long ship-circumnavigating strides that ate up the space—and the man shot her a look of absolute unbridled displeasure, so quickly blooming and gone again from his face that Mahit wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t imagined it. He followed after, catching up in the space of four steps.
They coincided beneath the glittering curve of a bank of those triangular fighter ships. Three Seagrass bowed to the two Fleet representatives over her fingertips, a deep but not servile greeting, and Mahit imitated it, right down to the angle. She was a barbarian, but she was also supposed to be here, wasn’t she? She was. Supposed to be surrounded by all the swarming might of the Teixcalaanli military, too huge and too complex to be seen all at once.
<Breathe,> murmured Yskandr, and Mahit did, one long breath as she straightened up.
“The envoy, and the linguist-diplomat,” said the man, that same arch tenor voice that had emerged from the comm—this must be the adjutant, the ikantlos-prime Twenty Cicada, and wasn’t that interesting, that a man who looked so very un-Teixcalaanli aside from the perfection of his uniform—unfashionably, worryingly thin, bald—this close Mahit could tell that he didn’t even have eyebrows, he’d shaved them off, and Teixcalaanlitzlim were usually so proud of their hair, wore it long and braided or long and loose—and yet, here he was, second in command of the lead flagship of a Teixcalaanli imperial war.
What sort of yaotlek has this man as her second?
<An interesting one—look at his hands, Mahit, see the tattooing on the wrists? He’s a homeostat-cultist.>
There were tattoos, just barely visible under the sleeves of his uniform. Green branching things, fractals. A what cultist?
<In a minute—pay attention, Mahit.>
The woman had not bowed. “I see that the Information Ministry has sent Nine Hibiscus one very young woman and one barbarian,” she said, ice-clear. “A fantastic showing. I’m sure the two of you will be of profound help to her.”
Twenty Cicada said, in murmured perfect formality, “The Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise of the Twenty-Fourth Legion,” and gestured, as if he was displaying her as a curiosity. “Our honored guest today.”
Sixteen Moonrise failed, with deliberation and malice aforethought, to match Twenty Cicada’s utterly polite tense usage. “Let’s get on with it, shall we, adjutant? Now you’ve got the spook and her pet all picked up, show me to what we all came here to see. The body.”
“The body?” asked Three Seagrass, as if none of this byplay mattered at all.
“The body,” Sixteen Moonrise said, “of the things you’re here to talk to. How good is Information at raising the dead?”
“It isn’t my specialty,” Three Seagrass said.
“The yaotlek is expecting all of us in the medical bay morgue,” Twenty Cicada confirmed, ignoring all insinuations of necromantic powers. “We do have a body to show you, Envoy; it doesn’t talk, but it ought to show you something. Shall we?”
Ring composition, Mahit thought, around we go. I’ve only just arrived, and it is time to see a corpse—at least it won’t be your corpse, Yskandr.
<A man can only die so often,> said Yskandr, which was hideously funny. Mahit had to work to keep her face still. It wouldn’t be useful, just now, to make the Teixcalaanlitzlim think that the barbarian talked to invisible ghosts inside her head. Invisible, blackly hilarious ghosts. That wouldn’t be useful at all.
This time there was no elevator down into the basement of the Judiciary, no knot of ixplanatlim in red huddled around a body, and no modest sheet covering the corpse. Mahit arrived in this morgue just as a medtech lifted two enormous lungs out of the splayed-open barrel of an alien rib cage and bore them off to be weighed and measured, tested for oxygenation, for cause of death, for whatever else Teixcalaanlitzlim tested alien body parts for. The rib cage, eviscerated of lungs, gaped like naked wings on either side of the alien’s long neck. Behind it, looking down at it like she could read fortunes in its hollowness, was the yaotlek. Mahit knew her by her sun-spear epaulets, but she was also quite precisely what Mahit had imagined a yaotlek to look like, if that yaotlek wasn’t the unlamented One Lightning, he of the near-usurpation three months back.
Nine Hibiscus was large and sleek, solid muscle under a generous curve of fat: all hips and smooth outcurve of belly, broad shoulders and broad chest, thighs like the steady steel T-bars that constructed station decks. She looked like someone who could never be moved. She looked like it would take months of searching for an actress who perfectly suited when some Teixcalaanli holoproduction did an epic about this war; Teixcalaanli central casting couldn’t have done better.
The first thing that came out of Mahit’s mouth, seeing her, was “That alien did not make those sounds from that throat, yaotlek,” as if she thought direct clarity would prove her usefulness beyond reproach of barbarism.
“Five points for drawing the obvious conclusion,” said Nine Hibiscus, in a smooth, attentive low alto that reminded Mahit of nothing so much as Nineteen Adze’s calm and terrifying precision. “Are you a xenobiologist, then?”
“The spook brought a pet,” said the other Fleet Captain. Sixteen Moonrise. Nine Hibiscus looked at her with what Mahit suspected was deep dislike under multiple layers of propriety and projected authority.
“I am not a xenobiologist,” Mahit said, deciding that Sixteen Moonrise’s opinions of her were unlikely to become less hostile if she answered the yaotlek’s question. “I am Mahit Dzmare, the Ambassador to Teixcalaan from Lsel Station, and Lsel Station’s diplomatic authority in this sector.”
“The Ambassador is a linguist and translator,” said Three Seagrass. “I’m the spook.” She paused, entirely for effect. “We’re here to help.”
The adjutant, Twenty Cicada, made an entirely remarkable noise, like he’d drowned a laugh and swallowed its corpse. Three Seagrass either neglected to notice or neglected to care. She went on, saying, “It is exquisite to make your acquaintance, yaotlek. I, and the Information Ministry, are grateful for the opportunity to be of service in this first-contact scenario. What a fascinating throat this alien has.”
“And yet,” said the yaotlek, “your linguist-translator-ambassador is entirely sure that it cannot have made the sounds on our transmission. However fascinating it may be. Care to explain? For my edification, and for the Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise, of course.” When she looked at Sixteen Moonrise, she smiled enough to show a tiny flash of teeth, and Mahit’s mouth went metallic and dry at the sense of threat. A Teixcalaanli general who would bare her teeth while smiling. All energy, all danger.