“Sit down,” said the newcomer to Three Seagrass, and gave her a push. Mahit was half out of her seat immediately, angry, gathering her breath to speak—but Three Seagrass sat down as she’d been told to. She was flushed across the face, furious, but she waved a hand at Mahit to subside, and she did.
“Ambassador,” said their visitor, “asekretim. I’m obliged to tell you that you will not be permitted to leave the Ministry building at this time.”
“Are we being arrested?” Twelve Azalea asked.
“Certainly not. You are being detained for your own safety.”
“I want,” Twelve Azalea went on, strident, and Mahit was proud of him, sickeningly so, “to speak to Minister Two Rosewood herself about this. Right now. And who are you, anyway?”
“Two Rosewood is no longer the Minister for Information,” said this person, ignoring Twelve Azalea’s request for his name or affiliation. “She has been relieved of her duties during the current crisis by the ezuazuacat Thirty Larkspur. I can convey to him your desire to speak to him, if you like. I’m sure he’ll get to you as his time allows.”
“What?” said Mahit.
“Do you have trouble with your hearing, Ambassador?”
“With my credulity,” said Mahit.
“There is nothing to be overly concerned about—”
“You have just told us we cannot leave and that the Minister has been deposed—”
“There were questions as to her loyalties,” said Thirty Larkspur’s man, and he shrugged. “Thirty Larkspur intends to keep the Empire in safe and steady hands. There are legions in our streets, Ambassador, it is very dangerous to move about just now. Sit tight. Thirty Larkspur will take care of this, and it will all blow over within the week.”
Mahit had her doubts. Mahit had more doubts than she precisely knew what to do with: a proliferation of uncertainty, a sweeping tide of being sure that she’d missed something. Thirty Larkspur was executing … what, a coup in advance of One Lightning’s coup? It was possible she was already too late to do anything to turn the annexation force away from Lsel, whether she had tradeable knowledge of impending external threat to Teixcalaan or not. At the oration contest it had been Thirty Larkspur himself—resplendent in blue and lilac, perfectly serene—who had told her that the deal was off. If he had gained control of the civil service—he who was apparently willing to dismiss Lsel the instant it wasn’t useful to his plans—
“We cannot,” said Twelve Azalea, and Mahit was very grateful to him for saying anything that would get her out of her own mind, “stay in a conference room for a week. And I still don’t know who you are. Sir.”
“I am Six Helicopter,” said the man—Mahit stared at him, and wondered when he’d learned to say his name with not only a straight face but with that degree of smugness—“and of course you won’t be spending a week in a conference room, asekretim. Ambassador. You’ll be moved to a safe and well-appointed location, just as soon as we have got one to put you in.”
“And that will be when?” Twelve Azalea went on. He had perfected a sort of incredulous, high-pitched stridency: the voice of a person who was being inconvenienced and was going to make a scene about it. Distantly, Mahit found it admirable. Strategic. She didn’t interrupt him. “By whose definition of safe? You’re implying that there is an attempted usurpation occurring as we speak!”
“The yaotlek’s little adventure will be over long before you could call this unpleasantness an usurpation,” said Six Helicopter. “I have a great deal of work to do—I’ll make sure someone brings you three more coffee. Please don’t try to leave. You will be stopped at the door—this really is a safe place right now. Don’t worry.”
And with that, he left. The door to the conference room clicked innocuously behind him. Three Seagrass promptly, and disturbingly, broke into laughter.
“Did that actually just happen?” she asked. “Did some jumped-up bureaucrat without an inch of training in protocol just tell us that the Information Ministry is under the control of the ezuazuacatlim? Because I think that was what just happened, and I am at a complete loss; do forgive me, Mahit, this is not within my fucking portfolio of plausible scenarios that I might encounter while acting as cultural liaison to a foreign ambassador.”
“If it helps,” said Mahit, “it isn’t in my portfolio of plausible scenarios I might encounter as a foreign ambassador, either.”
Three Seagrass pressed her palm over her face and exhaled, deliberate and forced. Stifled snickering still escaped from between her fingers. “… no,” she said, “I can’t imagine it would be.”
“If we can’t leave,” Twelve Azalea said, “how are we going to get the Ambassador to the Emperor? Even just across the palace grounds, even if that riot doesn’t spill over. In the best-case scenario.”
And will there still be an emperor for me to get to, once we’re there? Mahit thought, and then had to bite the inside of her cheek against a rush of grief that mostly wasn’t hers; it was Yskandr who felt that impending loss like heartbreak, not her. Not—entirely her. (And yet she remembered the pressure of Six Direction’s hands across her wrists and hoped—useless, biochemical ache in her sternum—that His Brilliance would somehow survive this insurrection, even if he wouldn’t survive much longer than it.)
But who else could she bargain with?
“What if we aren’t trying to get to His Brilliance,” she said. “What if we were trying to get the attention of someone who could get us to him?”
“From inside this conference room,” said Twelve Azalea skeptically, gesturing toward the carafe of coffee. “You know they’re monitoring our cloudhooks, and you don’t even have one—”
“Yes,” Mahit snapped, “I am still aware that I am not a citizen of Teixcalaan, I have not forgotten even once, you don’t have to remind me.”
“That wasn’t what I meant—”
Mahit exhaled hard enough that she could feel it in her surgical site. “No. But it is what you said.”
Three Seagrass had taken her hands away from her face, and the expression which was growing there was one that Mahit had seen before: it was Three Seagrass focusing inward, preparing to bend the universe around her will, because all other options were untenable. It was the expression she’d worn when they’d eaten ice cream in the park, before invading the Judiciary. The expression she’d worn in Nineteen Adze’s front office, determined to walk off physical insult and trauma.
“There are all kinds of things a person can do with a cloudhook, no matter how monitored,” she said. “Mahit—whose attention do you want?”
There was really only one answer to that question. “Her Excellency the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze,” said Mahit. “Her rank is the same as Thirty Larkspur’s, which means that she probably can walk right in here the same as he did—and I think she still likes me.”
<She liked me,> Yskandr murmured. <She liked me very much, and she let me die.>
She liked you very much, and she saved my life, Mahit thought. Let’s find out why, shall we?
“All right. Nineteen Adze, she who terrifies me even after all of the other terrifying events currently taking place,” said Three Seagrass. She’d become very cheerful, in the time between having had an idea—whatever that idea would turn out to be—and announcing it. Mahit understood that, too. The power of having any sort of plan, no matter how absurd or impossible. And weren’t all three of them rather emotionally labile, just recently? “For Her Excellency—Mahit, how do you feel about writing some very pointed poetic verse? And posting it on the open newsfeeds.”