“Meeting is not the same as liaising-for. You’re my noncitizen, Ambassador. I open doors for you.”
The verb form she used was just archaic enough to be idiomatic. Mahit risked sounding less fluent than she hoped she was and said, “Door-opening seems beneath the responsibilities I’d expect of a patrician second-class.”
Three Seagrass’s smile was sharper than most Teixcalaanli expressions; it reached her eyes. “You don’t have a cloudhook. You can’t open some doors, Ambassador. The City doesn’t know you’re real. Besides, without me, how will you decrypt your mail?”
Mahit raised an eyebrow. “My mail is encrypted?”
“And three months late in being answered.”
“That,” said Mahit, standing up and walking out of the bedroom—this door knew her, at least—“is Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn’s mail, not mine.”
Three Seagrass trailed behind her. “There isn’t a difference. Ambassador Dzmare, Ambassador Aghavn,” she said, tilting one hand back and forth. “It’s the Ambassador’s mail.”
There was less of a difference than even Three Seagrass knew. Or would be, if the imago would ever come back. Mahit was, she realized, pissed off at him, besides being worried about mechanical failure. All he’d done was panic at seeing himself dead, run her through an adrenaline crisis, and give her the strangest headache of her life, and now she was alone with all of the unanswered mail his fifteen-years-more-Teixcalaanli self had abandoned via being almost-certainly-murdered, and a cultural liaison with a sense of humor.
“And it’s encrypted.”
“Of course. It wouldn’t be very respectful to not encrypt an ambassador’s mail.” Three Seagrass retrieved a bowl brimming with infofiche sticks, little rectangles of wood or metal or plastic surrounding circuitry, each one elaborately decorated with its sender’s personal iconography. She fished out a fistful, holding them between her fingers like her knuckles had sprouted claws. “What would you like to start with?”
“If the mail is addressed to me, I ought to read it myself,” said Mahit.
“Legally, I’m an absolute equivalent,” Three Seagrass said, pleasantly enough.
Pleasantness wasn’t sufficient. Just because Mahit wanted an ally—wanted Three Seagrass to be helpful and useful and not an immediate threat, considering the woman had to live in the next room and open doors for however long she’d been assigned to mind Mahit, considering that Mahit was beginning to realize how trapped she was going to be in the City, considering that she was not real to that City’s panopticon eyes—just because Mahit wanted wasn’t enough to make Three Seagrass an actual extension of Mahit’s will, no matter what she said she was.
“Perhaps by Teixcalaanli law,” Mahit said. “By Stationer law, you are nothing of the kind.”
“Ambassador, I hope you aren’t assuming I’m not trustworthy enough to guide you through the court.”
Mahit shrugged, spreading her hands wide. “What happened to my predecessor’s cultural liaison?” she asked.
If Three Seagrass was disturbed by the question, the disturbance didn’t reach her face. Impassive, she said, “He was reassigned after his two years of service were up. I believe he is no longer in the palace complex at all.”
“What was his name?” Mahit asked. If Yskandr was with her she would have known, those two years of service would have been his first two years in the City, well within the five years that the imago remembered.
“Fifteen Engine, I think,” said Three Seagrass, easily enough—and Mahit had to clutch at the edge of Yskandr’s desk, hang on to it, flooded with a complex of emotion out of nowhere: fondness and frustration, the echo of a face wearing a cloudhook set in a bronze frame that filled up his entire left eye socket from cheekbone to browbone. Fifteen Engine, as Yskandr the imago remembered him. Memory-flash, memory-swarm, and Mahit reached for the imago, thought Yskandr? And got nothing.
Three Seagrass was staring at her. She wondered what she looked like. Pale, probably, and distracted.
“I would like to speak to him. Fifteen Engine.”
“I assure you,” said Three Seagrass, “I have extensive experience and really unusually excellent scores on all the necessary aptitudes for working with noncitizens. I’m sure we’ll be fine.”
“Asekreta—”
“Please call me Three Seagrass, Ambassador. I’m your liaison.”
“Three Seagrass,” said Mahit, trying very hard not to raise her voice, “I would like to ask your predecessor about how my predecessor conducted his business here, and perhaps also about the circumstances of his extremely untimely, and based on the quantity of this mail, inconvenient death.”
“Ah,” said Three Seagrass.
“Yes.”
“His death was quite, as you say, inconvenient, but entirely accidental.”
“I’m sure, but he was my predecessor,” Mahit said, knowing that if Three Seagrass was as Teixcalaanli as she seemed, a request to know the intimate details of the person who had held one’s own position in society would be culturally compelling, like asking to know about a prospective imago would be on Lsel Station. “And I would like to speak to someone who knew him as well as we are going to get to know one another.” She tried to remember the muscle memory of the precise degree to which Yskandr had widened her eyes in a Teixcalaanli-style smile, and imitated it by feel.
“Ambassador, I have every sympathy with your current—predicament,” said Three Seagrass, “and I’ll have a message sent to Fifteen Engine, wherever he might be now, along with the rest of the answered mail.”
“… which I can’t answer myself, because it is encrypted.”
“Yes! But I can decrypt nearly any of the standard forms, and most of the nonstandard ones.”
“You still haven’t explained why my mail is encrypted in a fashion I can’t decrypt.”
“Well,” said Three Seagrass, “I don’t at all mean to be disparaging. I’m sure that on your station you are an extremely educated person. But in the City, encryption is usually based in poetic cipher, and we certainly don’t expect noncitizens to have to learn that. And an ambassador’s mail is encrypted for the sake of showing off that an ambassador is an intelligent person, well-acquainted with courts and court poetry—it’s customary. It’s not a real cipher, it’s a game.”
“We do have poetry out on Lsel, you know.”
“I know,” said Three Seagrass, with such sympathy that Mahit wanted to shake her, “but here, look at this one.” She held up a scarlet lacquered infofiche stick, its two parts held closed with a round gold wax seal embossed with the stylized image of the City—the Teixcalaanli imperial symbol. “It’s definitely for you, it’s dated today.” She cracked the seal and the infofiche spilled into the air between them, a stream of holographic word-shapes in Teixcalaanli script that Mahit felt like she ought to be able to understand. She’d been reading imperial literature since she was a child.
Three Seagrass touched her cloudhook and said, “I bet you could decrypt this kind by hand, actually—do you know political verse?”
“Fifteen-syllable iambic couplets with a caesura between syllable eight and syllable nine,” said Mahit, realizing only as she spoke that she sounded more like a candidate in an oral exam than a knowledgeable subject of Teixcalaan, but having no idea how to stop sounding so. “It’s easy.”
“Yes! So, the cipher for most communication at court is a straight transposition, with the opening four couplets of whoever’s written the best encomiastic poem—that’s praise poetry, which I’m sure you do know if you can count syllables and caesuras—from last season. It’s been Two Calendar’s ‘Reclamation Song’ for months now. I can get you a copy, if you really want to decrypt your own mail.”