He’d been in the tunnels tens of times, even before the Emperor—not the current Emperor, but his ancestor-the-Emperor, it was important also to clarify these things in his mind—had whisked him into them during the insurrection right before he died. He’d been in the tunnels enough to be beginning to know them, their secret ways, their listening-posts and open spy-eyes. His ancestor-the-Emperor had shown him, and had let him … go into them.
It was one of the only things Six Direction had let him do, like it was a prize, a passcode between the two of them, an indulgence. Eight Antidote wondered a lot about why. He’d wondered that even before his ancestor had killed himself in a sun temple for the glory of Teixcalaan.
Here the tunnel narrowed, dipped left—it smelled of petrichor, rain and the underneath parts of flowers. Eight Antidote trailed his fingers against the wall where it was damp with condensation, and imagined a small Six Direction, just his own eleven-years-old size, walking around under the palace, exactly like this. He wouldn’t have needed to duck through the narrow parts either, not when he was eleven. If there were physical differences between Eight Antidote and his ancestor, he didn’t know about them yet. Ninety percent was a lot of clone to be, physically. Also he’d seen holos.
But Six Direction hadn’t grown up in the palace, had he. All those holos came from some planet with grass on it, a kid with his own face a hundred years ago, green-grey plants up to his narrow chest. Six Direction’d never been down here at all, until later.
After the narrow part there were some stairs, a long climb in the dim. He knew the way now, even lightless; in the past few weeks he’d come up these stairs seven times. Today was eight. He was too old to believe in numerical luck anymore, but eights felt right even so: eight times for luck particular to him. (Particular to him and to everyone else who shared the glyph he used for the number-sign in his name, so also lucky for the Minister of the Judiciary, who was technically his legal parent since she’d adopted him, and also tens of thousands of other kids, and this was why he didn’t believe in numerical luck anymore, not since he’d thought about it properly.) There was a door in the ceiling, at the end of these stairs. Eight Antidote knocked on it, and it opened up for him, and then he was in the basement of the Ministry of War.
Eleven Laurel was waiting for him there. He was tall, and the carved planes of his face were very dark, with deep wrinkles around the eyes and the mouth. He was wearing a Ministry of War uniform, which wasn’t the same thing as a legionary uniform, but almost was: not a suit like every other ministry, but breeches and a gunmetal-grey jacket that came down to the middle of his thighs and buttoned double-breasted with small flat gold buttons. He never seemed to mind sitting in the Ministry basement dust, waiting for Eight Antidote to show up. He just stood, brushed the dust off his pants unceremoniously, and said, “And how are you this afternoon, Cure?”
There were a couple of things Eight Antidote had learned from his ancestor-the-Emperor, and a couple more from Nineteen Adze, who was Emperor now and had promised to take care of him even if it killed her. The biggest one was probably don’t trust anyone who makes you feel good without knowing why they want you to feel that way.
But Eleven Laurel, who in addition to waiting for him in basements once a week, and teaching him how to run a cartograph strategy table and shoot an energy-pulse pistol, was the Undersecretary of the Third Palm, one of six undersecretaries who only answered to the Minister of War—Eleven Laurel called him Cure, not Your Excellency or Imperial Associate Eight Antidote or anything else, and Eight Antidote really truly loved it. At least, he thought, he knew he loved it. Which had to help. He loved it, Eleven Laurel definitely wanted him to, and this might be a bad thing. But right now, right now it wasn’t. Right now he widened his eyes in a grin, and scrambled out of the hole in the floor, and said, “I solved it, you know. Last week’s exercise. The one about Kauraan System.”
“Did you,” Eleven Laurel said. “All right. Show me what you think the Fleet Captain at Kauraan did to win that battle, and what it tells you about her. We can go to the cartograph straight off.”
It bothered Eight Antidote, a faint kind of upset like a hum off in one corner of his mind, that Eleven Laurel, a man who had served in twenty campaigns and seen more blood- and star-drenched planets than he could easily imagine, spent an afternoon once a week entertaining an eleven-year-old kid who had snuck in through the basement. There were extenuating circumstances, of course: the obvious one being that Eight Antidote was likely to be Emperor of all Teixcalaan at some point, much more likely to be so than before Six Direction had sacrificed himself and named a sole successor in the process. The Third Undersecretary to the Minister of War, who might see himself Minister in that hypothetical future, would have a lot of reasons to amuse that kid.
Also it wasn’t like where they were was a secret. On the way to the cartograph room—one of a whole lot of them, the Ministry of War was a tactician’s garden, Nineteen Adze had said that to him and it stuck in his head—Eight Antidote and Eleven Laurel passed in full view of at least ten soldiers, four administrative staff, one floor cleaner, and five City-eye cameras that Eight Antidote could spot. (That probably meant there were five more he hadn’t spotted on this route.) He wasn’t escaping. He wasn’t doing anything secret, and neither was Eleven Laurel.
Nineteen Adze—Her Brilliance, the Emperor—had said the Ministry of War is a tactician’s garden right after Eight Antidote had come back from his first trip through the tunnels. She’d come into his rooms, alone, and showed him the holograph-recording the City had made of him, moving through the Ministry like a bright bird in a net of eyes. He’d asked her if she’d prefer he not go, and she had said that line about tacticians and gardens and told him to do precisely what he liked, and left again.
Sometimes Eight Antidote wondered if anyone would ever trust him enough to not show him that they were watching him all the time.
The cartograph room made him happy anyway, happy enough to shove the whole mess of why away for a little while: Eleven Laurel called up Kauraan System with a few sweeps of his hands, last week’s exercise displayed in slow-rotating lights hung in the middle of the air. Every ship in the Fleet had one of these tables, for solving problems before they happened. The problem here: How did the Fleet Captain at Kauraan use only one ship to quell an uprising before it could spread past the southern tip of one continent? And the constraints: Less than five thousand Kauraani casualties, less than two hundred Teixcalaanli ones; she didn’t call for help; she had no unusual weaponry not in the standard manifest for a ship of that size; she was outnumbered forty-to-one; and the Kauraani rebels had seized the spaceport and were using Teixcalaanli ships against her. Solve it.