“What?” said Three Seagrass, at the same time as Mahit found herself struggling to keep her mouth shut around a Stationer expletive.
“How so?” she asked. Perhaps Yskandr had replaced a failing hip joint. That would be innocuous and explicable, and more easily noticeable than the implant nestled at the base of his skull that had first given him his own imago and then had recorded an imprint of his knowledge and self and memory—the imago-imprint, which was meant to be passed on down the line.
“His brain is full of metal,” Twelve Azalea said, denying her even that brief moment of hope.
“Shrapnel?” Three Seagrass inquired.
“There were no wounds. Trust me, wounds would have been noticed by the morgue attendant. A full-body scan on the imager is much more complete. I can’t think why it hadn’t been done previously—perhaps it was just so obvious that the Ambassador had died of anaphylaxis—”
“I am interested in your immediate assumption that shrapnel is a possibility,” said Mahit quickly, trying to steer the conversation away from its most dangerous aspects. It would help if she knew what, if anything, Yskandr had exposed about the imago process—but she couldn’t even ask her version of him, and how was that version to know what his … continuation? His continuation, that would do—what he had done in the time which had elapsed between them?
“The City is occasionally hostile,” said Three Seagrass.
“There are accidents,” added Twelve Azalea. “More lately. A person mis-operates their cloudhook, the City overreacts…”
“It isn’t a problem you’ll ever need to deal with,” Three Seagrass said, with a blithe reassurance that Mahit did not believe at all.
“Did my predecessor have a cloudhook?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” said Three Seagrass. “He’d have to have been granted permission to use one from His Majesty, Six Direction, himself. Noncitizens don’t have them—it’s a right, having a connection to the City; it comes with being Teixcalaanli.”
It came with being Teixcalaanli, and having one opened doors, and also, apparently, brought a person into a certain sphere of heightened risk. Mahit wondered just how well the cloudhooks tracked Teixcalaanli citizens as they moved around, and who exactly kept track of that information.
“What the former Ambassador has got, cloudhook or not,” Twelve Azalea interrupted, “is a very large quantity of mysterious metal in his brainstem, and I thought perhaps you, Ambassador, would like to know, before someone tries to install some in yours.”
“Cheerful as always, Petal.”
“Who else knows about this?” Mahit asked.
Twelve Azalea said, “I haven’t told anyone,” and folded his hands demurely in the long sleeves of his jacket. Mahit could hear the “yet” implicit in that statement, and wondered what this person wanted from her.
“Why did you tell me? The Ambassador might have had all sorts of implants—an epileptic pacemaker, for instance—those are common, if epilepsy develops late in life,” she said, deploying the standard lie about an imago-machine to someone who wasn’t from Lsel. “I assume you have them here in a civilization as great as Teixcalaan. You could have looked up the Ambassador’s medical records and found out, without going to all this trouble.”
“Would you believe me if I said I wanted to see what you’d do? Your predecessor was—mm. Quite a political man, for an ambassador. I am curious to see if all Lsel people are.”
“I’m not Yskandr,” Mahit said, and felt, as she said it, acutely ashamed—she should have been more Yskandr. If they’d had time to integrate—if he hadn’t disappeared inside her head. “‘Political’ varies. Does the ixplanatl know, you think?”
Twelve Azalea smiled enough to show his teeth. “He didn’t mention it to you. Or to me. But he is a ixplanatl of the Medical College of the Science Ministry—who is to say what he thinks is important?”
“I want,” said Mahit, standing up, “to see this for myself.”
Twelve Azalea looked up at her, delighted. “Oh. You are political after all.”
CHAPTER THREE
Within each cell is a bloom of chemical fire
[DECEASED’S NAME] committed to the [earth/sun]
shall burst into a thousand flowers, as many as their breaths in life
and we shall recall their name
their name and the name of their ancestor(s)
and in those names the people gathered here
let blood bloom also from their palms, and cast
this chemical fire as well into the [earth/sun] …
[static]—repeat, lost all attitudinal control—I’m tumbling—unknown energy weapon, I have fire in the cockpit [garbled] [garbled] [expletive] black—black ships, they’re fast, they’re holes in the [expletive] void—no stars—there’s [garbled] can’t—[expletive] more of them [sound of scream for 0.5 seconds followed by roaring sound, presumed explosive decompression, for 1.8 seconds before loss of signal]
THIS time, Mahit approached the Judiciary complex on foot, Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea walking in an ever-shifting pattern around her. She felt like a hostage, or someone who was worried about political assassination, both of which were too close to accurate for her to be particularly sanguine. Besides, she was on her way to break into a morgue. Or help someone with legitimate access to the morgue bring people without that access inside. Either way. She was being political.
She wished she had better instructions from the Stationer Council as to just how she should be political. The majority of her instructions, after find out what happened to Yskandr Aghavn, were on the order of do a good job, advocate for our citizens, try to keep the Teixcalaanli from annexing us if the subject arises. She’d gotten the impression that about half the Council—particularly Aknel Amnardbat, the Councilor for Heritage, which tended to take diplomacy and cultural preservation within its purview—had been hoping she’d like Teixcalaanli culture just enough to enjoy her assignment and dislike it sufficiently to discourage further cultural interpenetration into Stationer art and literature. The other half of the Council, led by Councilor Tarats for the Miners and Councilor Onchu for the Pilots (what Mahit thought of as the practical half of Lsel’s six-person governing board, and so much for Aknel Amnardbat’s hopes for her, really) had harped on keep the Empire from annexing us and also continue to make sure we are the prime source of molybdenum, tungsten, and osmium—not to mention information and travel access to the Anhamemat Gate. Was “my predecessor has been murdered and I suspect I am involving myself in an under-table investigation in order to protect Stationer technology” a case of “try to keep the Teixcalaanli from annexing us”? Yskandr would have known. Or at least have had a strident opinion.