“He’s really going to,” said Three Seagrass, her voice too real, too loud, and too immediate on the couch next to Mahit. “No emperor has—not for centuries—”
I name as my immediate successor and the executor of this war of preservation the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, said Six Direction, in sinecure for the child of my genetics, Eight Antidote, until the time of his majority.
Mahit had time to think, What have I set into motion, and to feel a great onrushing spasm of grief: hers, Three Seagrass’s, Yskandr’s—
The Emperor took two steps backward, into the center of the raised altar. With my blood I sacrifice for us, he said—broadcast, unstoppable, to every Teixcalaanlitzlim in every province, on every planet in Teixcalaanli space. Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.
Her words. Mahit’s and Three Seagrass’s, the poetry they’d used as a lure to get themselves free—the poetry that was being sung in the streets—
Six Direction raised the knife, the sun glinting through it—and brought it down again. Two swift cuts, high on the inner thighs: the femoral arteries gone to fountains of red. So much blood. And somehow, in the middle of that pool, two cuts more: from wrist to elbow, and again on the other side.
The knife clattered to the metal floor of the sun temple.
It did not take him long to die.
In the silence afterward, Mahit realized she had been holding Three Seagrass’s hand so hard her fingernails had cut into her palm. The only sound in the universe seemed to be the two of them, breathing. In her mind Yskandr was a vast and empty void of triumph and grief. She looked away from him. She looked at nothing at all.
On the screen: Nineteen Adze, soaked in red, her suit stained beyond recognition, had caught up the knife.
The Emperor of Teixcalaan greets you, she said. Her face was wet. Blood. Tears. Wet and grim and absolutely determined. Be calm. Order is a flower blooming at dawn, and dawn is breaking now.
There was quiet for a little while, and then there was the expected sort of chaos; all those grey-uniformed imperial guards, trying to figure out what to do. Where to go. How to get to their new Emperor and then move her to some sort of safety, considering there was still a legion-leading starship with all of its weaponry pointed at the City, in low orbit. Mahit and Three Seagrass sat in the middle of it—no one seemed to care very much about them. They weren’t doing anything. They didn’t seem to be an immediate threat to anyone.
“He set her up for it,” Three Seagrass said wonderingly. “She didn’t know until she was up there next to him. Her Brilliance. The Edgeshine of a Knife. I guess it’ll fit. Still.”
They’d reversed emotional positions, somehow. Mahit couldn’t stop crying for very long; even if it wasn’t entirely her own endocrine response, her body had decided to dissolve into the weight of grief. Yskandr wasn’t gone—she didn’t think she’d ever feel that hollow blank-space wrongness again—but both versions of him were bleak, scoured-cold landscapes, rooms without air, and Mahit kept weeping, even when she wanted to talk.
She wiped at her nose with the heel of her hand. “Of course it’ll fit,” she managed. “The office will bend around her and she’ll bend around it, too, and it’ll all be … a story. Her Brilliance, the Edgeshine of a Knife. Like it was never supposed to be any different.”
That seemed to be comforting for Three Seagrass to hear. Mahit herself felt comfortless, angry, blown open and empty: she kept remembering how much blood there had been, how Six Direction had said released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun, as if she’d written it for him.
For him, and not for her or for Lsel.
Nothing touched by empire stays clean, she thought, and tried to imagine it was Yskandr saying so when it wasn’t Yskandr at all.
It took thirty-six hours for the insurrection to be over.
Mahit watched most of it on Three Seagrass’s Information Ministry newsfeed, lying in what used to be Yskandr’s bed in her ambassadorial apartment with the other woman’s cloudhook over her eye like a permanently affixed crown. Getting up seemed both difficult and unnecessary.
One Lightning’s soldiers turned out to be more unwilling to slaughter large numbers of marching, singing Teixcalaanlitzlim than Mahit suspected he had counted on. But then he’d been expecting his opponent to be Six Direction—old, failing, his military victories a long time over, beset by an uncertain succession. Not a new-crowned emperor, sanctified by a blood sacrifice like something out of the oldest epics. Before Nineteen Adze’s emperorship was a day old the yaotlek had recalled all his troops under the cover of their protection of the City being unnecessary, and had appeared on a news program standing next to Nineteen Adze, to get on his knees and put his hands between hers and swear his loyalty.
There was no mention of the war of conquest.
“That’s the Station saved, then,” Mahit said to the ceiling. Yskandr’s garish and lovely painting of all of Lsel space as seen from Teixcalaan was the only thing that heard her, and she could take its silence as mockery.
Yskandr himself was merely a whisper, a <You did better than I. That says something for the survival of our imago-line.>
Mahit ignored him. When she paid too much attention to him she had crying fits, weeping, inconsolable, on and on until she was physically sick. It made her angry; it wasn’t even her grief. She hadn’t figured out what her grief was about, yet.
That night she dreamed of Six Direction saying her poetry, speaking her thoughts, and thought she might be getting closer.
If she’d been at home on Lsel, she suspected that the integration therapists would have an absolute field day with her and Yskandr. They’d get a scientific paper out of it. By the next morning even Yskandr found this funny—bright shimmers in her nerves, a bit of actual energy. She got up. She ate noodles and chili oil and a protein cube that tasted almost like a Lsel protein cube, but probably was made of some kind of plant. And then she lay down again, exhausted by that small effort, and watched the newsfeeds.
There was little sign of Two Lemon and the other anti-imperial activists. No bombs in restaurants. No protests. Mahit assumed they’d gone back underground, quiescent for the moment, and wondered—wondered like a person contemplating the impossibility of lifting an enormous rock to look at what grew underneath it—what Five Portico would do with the remains of her faulty imago-machine.
Thirty Larkspur’s part of the insurrection took a bit longer to wind to a close—there was a loose détente established, a series of small newsfeed reports that a new Information Minister had been appointed—a man Mahit had never heard of—and that Thirty Larkspur had himself been given some sort of advisory role on commerce.
Not one of Her Brilliance Nineteen Adze’s ezuazuacatlim. But not out of the government either.
It wasn’t Mahit’s problem.
She wanted it to be, which was part of the problem. It was so difficult to put everything down, to trust that anyone, anywhere, would in fact do their jobs. That there was any safety.
She wondered how Nineteen Adze felt about it. About the same, she suspected.
On the third day after Six Direction’s death, after Mahit had received a beautiful infofiche stick, bone-white—made from some animal—and sealed with the imperial seal, inviting her as the ranking representative of her government to attend the funeral and coronation, she decided that the absolute least she could do was get back to answering the mail. The mail which was three months and two weeks late now. There was still a bowl of it, infofiche sticks in every possible color, from utilitarian grey plastic to Nineteen Adze’s solid bone-and-gold, and—