And she’d come here to serve Lsel Station, and its people who had come to live in Teixcalaan. Who had just lived through an insurrection and a change in emperorship, too, and probably wanted their permits permitted, and their visas approved.
She sent Three Seagrass a message on one of the utilitarian grey sticks: You left your spare cloudhook here. Also I could use some help with the mail. She didn’t really need help—Yskandr knew how to do all of this, and so she did too—but they hadn’t talked. Since.
Four hours later Three Seagrass showed up with the sunlight slanting through the windows, looking evanescently thin and grey-pale at the temples and around the eyes, but just as impeccable as she’d been when she met Mahit coming off the seed-skiff: every corner of her suit pressed, orange flames creeping up the sleeves. Information Ministry again, undisgraced.
“—hi,” she said.
“Hi,” said Mahit, and abruptly remembered nothing but how Three Seagrass had felt in her arms, and suspected she’d blushed scarlet. “—thanks for coming.”
The air between them felt fragile; more so when Three Seagrass sat down next to her, and shrugged, and quite clearly didn’t know what to say.
They’d done better with poetry. They’d done better with politics. Fuck, they’d done better with kissing, and that had been a mad reaching-out for comfort. Mahit wanted to do it again; wanted, and immediately thought better of it. They’d been watching the end of an imperial reign, then. Now it was just the two of them, and the slow, outgoing tide of aftermath, and Mahit couldn’t quite imagine how to begin such a thing.
“I half thought you’d have gotten yourself made Minister for Information,” Mahit said, light, light enough to be joking, “and wouldn’t have any time for me.”
Some of the tension went out of Three Seagrass’s shoulders. “Her Brilliance offered me Second Undersecretary to the Minister, actually,” she said, “but I’m still your cultural liaison, if you want.”
Mahit thought about it—thought about it while she took Three Seagrass’s hand in her hand, and laced their fingers together, and said thank you with all the honorific particles she could remember tacked onto the end, so that it became both enormously sincere and utterly hilarious, all at once. Thought about working with Three Seagrass, here in this apartment that had been Yskandr’s, and finding her way toward being—what? Something Nineteen Adze, Her Brilliance on the sun-spear throne, might need? (That would be a way to begin, with Three Seagrass, too.)
<I had twenty years before it killed me,> Yskandr said. <You might get longer.>
She might. And then she remembered Three Seagrass saying If you were one of us, I would want you just the same, and felt an echo of that encompassing anger—she wouldn’t be Teixcalaanli, even if she stayed, even if she did everything Yskandr had done. She wouldn’t be a creature that could play, like Three Seagrass played, with language and poetry at oration contests. And she’d never stop knowing it.
“I think,” Mahit said, right out loud, once Three Seagrass had stopped laughing and had let Mahit touch her cheek, very gently and just once, “that you should be Second Undersecretary to the Minister for Information. You’re too interesting for this job, Three Seagrass. You should do what you planned to do when you got it, which is use me as a stepping-stone toward vainglorious ambition. And get back to being a poet.”
“What are you going to do without me?” Three Seagrass asked. She did not protest more than that.
“I’ll think of something,” said Mahit.
AFTERMATH
A PERSON could glut themselves on a surfeit of beauty, it turned out, especially if that beauty was enlivened by collective grief and deep xenophilia: the coronation of the Emperor Nineteen Adze, She Who Gleams Like the Edgeshine of a Knife, Her Brilliance, Lord of all Teixcalaan—Mahit mostly remembered it as a sequence of overwhelming snapshots. The procession that wound its way through the City, reflected and replayed on every screen. A hundred thousand Sunlit marching, kneeling at the Emperor’s white-slippered feet, rising, moving on. The algorithm readjusted, or merely accepting Nineteen Adze as the rightful ruler of the Empire. The City itself lit up gold and red and a deep, rich purple, blooming, blooming. The interment of the exsanguinated body of Six Direction, buried in the earth to rot. Encomia upon encomia; new poets on every corner. The massing of soldiers—young Teixcalaanlitzlim volunteering for the coming war against the aliens, over and over and over. Singing, sometimes, as they went.
There were two new songs that went I am a spear in the hands of the sun. One was elegiac and beautiful and a choir sang it at the moment the great imperial crown was placed on Nineteen Adze’s head. The other one was bawdy and obscene and relied on a pun in Teixcalaanli that Mahit would have understood if she’d been studying the language only one year: anyone could understand how spear could be interpreted in a multitude of ways.
Mahit learned that song. It was hard not to.
The way Nineteen Adze’s face never changed, not during the interment and not when they put the crown on her—that Mahit learned, too. It was hard not to.
Once the City had exhaled enough ceremony, and felt more like an exhausted runner, leaning out of breath, trying to adjust to the deep ache in its lungs, small funerals bloomed like fungi after rain: there were more and more announcements each day, some arriving by infofiche and some by public newsfeed. Three hundred and four Teixcalaanli had been killed during the insurrection, according to the official reports; Mahit suspected that number was too small by an order of magnitude.
She wore her best mourning-black, black for the void between the stars, Lsel-style—not red for blood given, like a Teixcalaanlitzlim—when she went to Twelve Azalea’s. There wasn’t a body. He’d donated it to the medical college, which was so like him that it hurt. There was only a cenotaph, with the lovely glyph of his signature on it, placed in a wall inside the Information Ministry alongside hundreds of others: every one of them an asekreta who had died in service to the Ministry.
She saw Three Seagrass there, and heard her read a poem for Twelve Azalea: a stark, bleak thing, vicious in its grief. An epitaph for worlds ripped out of the sky, for unfairness. For all the senseless deaths. It was beautiful, and Mahit felt … guilt, when she thought of all the senseless deaths that were still waiting. All those Teixcalaanlitzlim, singing as they signed up for the legions.
All those planets they would touch, and devour.
She had Yskandr’s corpse burned—so simple, at the last, to send a request to Judiciary, signed and sealed on infofiche, addressed to ixplanatl Four Lever, Medical Examiner. The ashes were waiting for her in her apartments that evening. A box the size of her hand, full of bones and half-mummified flesh, all rendered to dust.