Good sign or bad sign? Mahit asked him.
<It depends. I wonder what I did.>
Something illegal. Come on, Yskandr, give me a general sense of the possibilities here. What would you do to get yourself thrown in jail?
Mahit got the impression of Yskandr sighing at her, but also the queasy sensation of someone else’s nervousness setting off her adrenal glands. <Mm. Sedition, mostly.>
She wished she could be sure he was joking.
Surrounding the pillar of the Judiciary was a perimeter of grey-uniformed guards, clustered more closely at the door: a security checkpoint. The guards carried long, slim dark grey sticks rather than the energy weapons that the Teixcalaanli legions favored. Mahit had seen a lot of the latter on Ascension’s Red Harvest, but not these.
<Shocksticks,> Yskandr said. <Electricity-based crowd control—these were not here when I was last here. They’re anti-riot gear, or at least they are in tabloid entertainments.>
You’re fifteen years out of date, Mahit thought. A lot might have changed—
<This is the center of the palace. If they’re worried about riots at the Judiciary, something hasn’t changed, something is wrong. Now go find out what I did.>
Mahit wondered what had gone sufficiently wrong to create security theater at the door of the Judiciary, and if Yskandr had helped it go that wrong—felt prickles go up the back of her spine and down through her arms, the ulnar nerves crawling unpleasantly—and then had no time for more distressing reflection, as Three Seagrass was escorting her through. She offered up her thumbprints as well as Mahit’s, and stood with her eyes politely averted as a Teixcalaanli security guard patted chastely at the pockets of Mahit’s traveling jacket and her trousers. Her luggage was decorously placed in their custody, and she was promised that she could have it back on her way out.
Once the guard was done breaking all of Mahit’s personal space taboos, she advised Mahit to avoid wandering off without escort, as her identity was neither recorded on cloudhook nor otherwise authorized to be present within the Judiciary. Mahit raised an inquiring eyebrow at Three Seagrass.
“There were questions of speed,” Three Seagrass said, proceeding briskly through a multiplicity of irising doors into a cool, slate-floored interior, toward the elevator bank. “Your registration and permission to move about the palace complex will of course be taken care of as soon as is possible.”
Mahit said, “I’ve been in transit more than a month, and there are questions of speed?”
“We have been waiting for three months, Ambassador, since we sent for a new representative from the Station.”
<I must have done something quite spectacular,> Yskandr said. <Down below are secret courts and interrogation chambers, or so the palace rumors always went.>
The elevator chimed in fourths. “And one more hour matters, after three months?”
Three Seagrass gestured for Mahit to precede her into the elevator, which was a sort of answer, if not an informative one.
They descended.
Waiting for them below was a chamber that could have been a courtroom or an operating theater: blue-metal floor, and amphitheater-style benches arrayed around a high table on which lay some large object covered in a sheet. Floodlights. Three Teixcalaanli strangers, all broad-cheekboned and broad-shouldered, one in a red cassock, one dressed identically to Three Seagrass in the orange-and-cream of the Information Ministry, and one in a dark grey suit that reminded Mahit of nothing so much as the metal sheen of the shocksticks. They stood around the table, arguing in low, rapid voices, and blocked Mahit’s view of whatever was lying on it.
“I still would like to make my own examination, for my Ministry, before he’s returned,” said the Information Ministry courtier, annoyed.
“There’s not a single good reason to just turn him back over to them,” the Teixcalaanlitzlim in red said, with some finality. “It won’t do us any good and might spark an incident—”
Dark Grey Suit disagreed. “Contrary to the opinions of your Ministry, ixplanatl, I am entirely certain that any incident they could induce wouldn’t be more trouble than an insect bite, and as easily soothed.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, argue later,” said the one from Information, “they’re here.”
The man in red turned toward them as they entered, as if he had been anticipating their arrival. The ceiling was a low dome. Mahit thought of a bubble of gas, trapped under the earth. Then she understood the shape on the table as a corpse.
It lay under a thin sheet drawn midway up its bare torso, hands resting on its chest, fingertips touching as if it was preparing to greet some afterlife. Its cheeks were sunken and its open eyes were filmed over with a hazy blue. The same color had infiltrated its lips and nailbeds. It looked like it had been dead a long time. Perhaps … three months.
As clearly as if he had been standing next to her, Mahit heard Yskandr say <I got old,> with wondering horror. She was shaking. Her heart raced, drowning out the sound of Three Seagrass introducing her. A dizzying rush, worse than falling toward the planet, panic out of nowhere. Not her panic: Yskandr’s, her imago flooding her with her own stress hormones, enough adrenaline to taste metallic. The mouth of the corpse was slack, but she could see the smile lines at its corners, feel on her own mouth how Yskandr’s muscles would have formed them over time.
“As you see, Ambassador Dzmare,” said the man in red, whose name Mahit had completely failed to catch during the introductions, “a new ambassador was necessary. I apologize for preserving him in this fashion, but we did not want to disrespect any funereal processes which your people might prefer.”
She came closer. The corpse stayed dead, stayed still and limp and empty. <Fuck,> Yskandr said, a fizz of nauseating static. Mahit was horribly, helplessly sure she was going to throw up. <Oh, fuck, I can’t do this.>
Mahit thought (or Yskandr thought—she was having trouble keeping them apart, and this wasn’t how the integration was supposed to go, she was never supposed to be lost inside his biochemical panic response hijacking her own endocrine system) about how the only place that Yskandr existed now was inside her head. She’d considered that he was dead, when Teixcalaan had demanded a new ambassador, thought about it intellectually, planned for it, and yet—here he was—a corpse, a hollow rotting shell, and she was panicking because her imago was panicking and an emotion-spike was the easiest way to fuck up an integration that wasn’t finished, an emotion-spike would burn out all the tiny microcircuits in the machine in her mind and oh fuck he was dead and oh fuck I am dead and the blur, the nauseating blur of everything.
Yskandr, she tried, aiming for comfort and missing by a long distance.
<Get closer,> he told her, <I need to see. I’m not sure—>
He moved them before she could decide to do what he asked. It was like she’d blacked out for the space of time it took to approach the corpse, blinked and was there, and this was going so very, very awry, and she couldn’t stop it—
“We burn our dead,” she said, and didn’t know who to thank for the fact that she’d said it in the right language.
“How interesting a custom,” said the courtier in dark grey. Mahit thought he was from the Judiciary itself; this was likely to be his morgue, even if it was the man in red who was the mortician.