“Eleven Laurel,” said the Minister, nodding welcome and then looked right at him and said, “Your Excellency Eight Antidote. Thank you both for coming. I’m going to play a transmission from Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise now. It came in on fast courier a few hours ago, priority communication.”
Eight Antidote was profoundly grateful that the room lights dimmed when the transmission started, so no one could see that he was blushing, his cheeks hot, just from being addressed directly by Three Azimuth with his entire formal title. It was embarrassing and ridiculous. Lots of people called him Your Excellency, and he didn’t usually blush at all.
In holo, Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise of the Twenty-Fourth Legion looked like a statue in a plaza, visible only from the waist up in full three-sixty-degree reproduction and hovering above the table. She bowed over her fingers—or she had, about six hours ago. Six and a half. It took at least that long for a transmission to cross all the jumpgates between the battlefront and the City, even on fastest courier and being bounced across sectors by the strongest repeater stations. Wherever she was, six hours ago, had been dim and metal-walled. Some ship. She was alone.
“A message for Minister Three Azimuth,” she said. “Priority. Security code Hyacinth.” She was speaking softly, just loud enough that her recorder could catch each syllable but not loud enough for anyone to overhear her. Eight Antidote had never heard of security code Hyacinth before. He glanced at the faces of the adults around the table; they showed no obvious surprise or consternation, only attentiveness.
“The Fleet has obtained the corpse of one of our enemies and conducted an autopsy on the alien. A formal report of the autopsy will arrive from yaotlek Nine Hibiscus’s medical team in due course, I’m sure, and I am equally sure that it will be accurate but brief. I myself observed the conclusion of the autopsy. The aliens are mammalian, likely to be scavengers, and carnivorous or omnivorous based on their dentition. More significantly, however, the yaotlek invited a special envoy from the Ministry of Information to be present at the autopsy as well. The envoy brought with her a foreign national from Lsel Station. I have enclosed a visual image of the Stationer. It is my belief that Lsel Station may be attempting to exert diplomatic influence over the decisions of yaotlek Nine Hibiscus via the person of the Information envoy, whom Nine Hibiscus has commanded to initiate first-contact protocols. The Palms should be aware of the possibility that Information may contain compromised individuals, or that the Stationers may be infringing on Teixcalaanli sovereignty. In sending this message I perform my duty as a sworn officer of the Fleet. May Teixcalaan and the Emperor endure a thousand thousand years. End security code Hyacinth.”
The holo ended, and Sixteen Moonrise vanished as if she’d never been. The lights came back up. Minister Three Azimuth sat back in her chair, her fingers laced together in front of her chest. She did not look like someone who had just been told that there was a foreign diplomat conspiring with a rogue Information agent running loose around the battlefield of a thus-far-unwinnable war. Eight Antidote would like to look that confident someday. And she was small, not much taller than him, and yet she appeared every inch the master of all six Palms, the encompasser of the Empire’s military mind. She blinked behind her cloudhook, and a two-dimensional image of a tallish woman in a foreign-cut jacket and trousers, high-cheekboned and curly-haired, replaced the holo of Sixteen Moonrise above the table. The image was fuzzy at the edges, the angle strange. Eight Antidote thought it had been pulled off a security camera. But he knew that face. He’d seen that face splashed across newsfeeds over and over after Six Direction died. He’d seen it close up, too: in one of the garden rooms in Palace-Earth, the huitzahuitlim garden, where he went to watch the hummer-birds sip nectar and fly only as far as their invisible netting allowed them. She’d spoken to him then.
“So,” Three Azimuth said. “What do we think of the former Ambassador from Lsel Station, Mahit Dzmare? She, if you recall, of the heartfelt plea that we notice the alien threat, the one broadcast right before the Emperor Six Direction’s death. The one who gave us the direction of our war. Since that esteemed individual is who has just shown up on Weight for the Wheel.”
In the garden, surrounded by the buzzing red-and-gold wings of the tiniest birds in Teixcalaan, Dzmare had made him a strange offer. She’d said to him, You’re a very powerful young person, and if you still want to, when you are of age, Lsel Station would be honored to host you. And he’d known better, right then, as he knew better right now, than to say yes: she’d been lost, and drunk, and sad, and still trying to find an angle of influence. So he’d shown her how to get the huitzahuitlim to drink nectar from her palm, and then sent her away.
He wondered what she’d learned from that night. And what had driven her first away from Teixcalaan and then out to the battlefront itself.
Eight Antidote sat up straight, and paid attention. This conversation was one he’d have to bring back to Her Brilliance the Emperor. Even little spies have secrets, he thought to himself, and was surprised by the degree of his own satisfaction at the idea.
The Ministry of War didn’t like Mahit Dzmare, it turned out. Or at least—some of them didn’t. She was a barbarian, that was just true, and Second Undersecretary Seven Aster (who was new—as new as Minister Three Azimuth, as new as the Emperor Herself) mostly seemed to dislike her because she was a barbarian and was out on a battlefront unsupervised, while possibly having diplomatic authority. That didn’t seem to be Dzmare’s fault, though. She couldn’t help being a barbarian, or that the Information envoy had brought her along—unless she’d somehow made the envoy take her?
The last Ambassador from Lsel Station, Yskandr Aghavn, had seemed like the sort of person who made people do things they never expected. Eight Antidote hadn’t known him, except for knowing the shape of his face and how much his ancestor-the-Emperor had enjoyed his companionship. Aghavn either hadn’t liked kids that much or had better things to do than talk to one. But he’d been in the palace all the time. He’d been friends with everyone. Until he’d died.
Maybe all Lsel Ambassadors were like that.
Eight Antidote was still considering whether being good at making people act in ways they usually wouldn’t would be helpful or unhelpful on a battlefront when Eleven Laurel said, “Minister, my chief concern with Dzmare has nothing to do with her barbarian origins—it is to do with her effects on situations around her. Her destabilizing effects.”
“Go on,” said Minister Three Azimuth. “As you keep reminding me, Undersecretary, you were here when Dzmare was involved with the unfortunate circumstances surrounding our Emperor’s ascension to the throne, and I was not. Is there something specific about her activities then that you think is indicative?”
“You were very busy on Nakhar, I’m sure you didn’t have time to notice these small things,” said Eleven Laurel, which seemed to Eight Antidote like an innocuous statement that really didn’t deserve Three Azimuth’s quick displeased expression. She had been on Nakhar, and military governors were busy by nature, almost as busy as emperors. “Dzmare—and the forces that she either allied herself with or who found her useful—ignores all protocols. She ignores all history—she, like Aghavn before her, just slides blithely in and does what she believes is necessary, and if the institutions of our Empire are disregarded, our processes dissolved or lost—what is it to her?”