“Would you get the asekreta a glass of water and a handkerchief,” Nineteen Adze asked the aide, “and bring all of us some brandy; I think we will need it.”
He vanished as swiftly as he’d appeared. Nineteen Adze nodded, as if confirming something to herself, and said, “If—and I do mean if, Mahit Dzmare—I am to bring you to His Brilliance in this time of absolute unrest and uncertainty, risking my own position and possibly my life to do it, you had better tell me what you are planning to tell him. In the same amount of detail. It has to be worth it, Ambassador. More worth it than an immortality machine which makes ghosts and double-persons out of your oldest friends.”
At that moment, the aide returned with a tray bearing three glasses of dark copper spirits and one of water, and Mahit had never been more glad to see alcohol in her life. She picked up the nearest glass. The spirit clung to the sides when she swirled it, a viscous oilslick shimmer.
“Please, Three Seagrass, tell me this won’t taste like violets.”
Three Seagrass, gulping water like she’d been dehydrated for hours—she had been, Mahit realized, she’d been crying and running at the same time—put her glass back down, took an appraising look at the brandy, and said, bone-dry: “That will taste like fire and blood and the smell of soil turned over in the spring after a rainstorm, if it’s what I think it is—are you trying to get us drunk, Your Excellency? I promise I don’t need much help at this point.”
“I wanted,” said Nineteen Adze, “to be civilized for a moment.” She picked up her glass, raised it in a small and silent toast. “Drink.”
Mahit drank. To living through the next twelve hours, she thought as the liquid slipped down her throat, bright and hot and rich; plasma fire and soil burning. A peculiar type of petrichor. To Lsel Station remaining Lsel Station.
<To us,> Yskandr whispered, somewhere she could barely feel. An upswelling of emotion more than a voice. <And civilization, if that is something that remains.>
Mahit put the glass down. She felt warm all through. It would work as a substitute for courage.
“All right, Your Excellency. I will tell you. But first I would very much appreciate if you would explain why you kept me alive, and not my predecessor. I need to know if I trust you because I have to—and I do trust you, but I am compelled by lack of other options—or if I might trust you because I want to.”
“Which of you is asking?” Nineteen Adze asked. She’d drunk her brandy like a shot, all of it at once.
“It’s not a good question, Nineteen Adze. I’m asking.” Mahit did not specify further.
She sighed. Folded her hands in her lap, dark against the bone-white suit. “Two reasons,” she began. “First: you—were—not Yskandr Aghavn. And what you wanted was not what he’d wanted; he wanted to give Six Direction what I can only understand, after a great deal of questioning and research and thinking, as an immortality machine—a machine that would put my friend, my lord, my Emperor in the body of a child, make him into something that was—not even human, and might do him irreparable harm. Might do all of us irreparable harm, with that child on the sun-spear throne.”
Mahit nodded. “I did not come here to trade imago-machines for my station’s freedom, no.” They were reversed; she realized quite suddenly that she was leading this interrogation. That it was an interrogation. Or a negotiation.
<They’re the same species of thing.>
“What was the second reason?” Mahit went on.
“I couldn’t do it twice,” Nineteen Adze said. “I couldn’t— watch it twice. I’m not a squeamish person, Ambassador, I’ve led my share of planetary conquests. But you were enough my friend, even if you weren’t sufficiently him to want what he wanted. And you hadn’t done anything yet worth that death. It would have been very painful.”
Mahit felt like it was she who was being exposed, carved open, all nerves hypersensitive to the air like they’d been on Five Portico’s surgery table, even though the person who was talking wasn’t her at all.
“Who sent me the flower?” she asked. Distantly, she registered that Three Seagrass had put her hand on the small of her back; a kind pressure.
“It was a gift,” said Nineteen Adze, “from the household of my fellow ezuazuacat Thirty Larkspur to my household. What I did with it was of course up to me.”
Which meant—which meant that Nineteen Adze had first decided that Mahit should die, and watched her nearly breathe in the poison of that flower, and then changed her mind while watching. Which meant that Thirty Larkspur had dared Nineteen Adze to get rid of the new Lsel Ambassador like she’d allowed the old one to be gotten rid of.
Thirty Larkspur didn’t want Yskandr dead; that had been Ten Pearl, and perhaps also Nineteen Adze. Thirty Larkspur hadn’t cared about Yskandr. Thirty Larkspur wanted Mahit dead, and thought that Nineteen Adze, who had helped dispose of one Lsel Ambassador, might do it again.
He’d decided Mahit was too dangerous to have around—he’d probably decided that anyone who could give Six Direction an imago-machine was too dangerous to have around. An imago-machine, especially as imagined by a Teixcalaanlitzlim, an immortality machine, would mean Six Direction on the throne forever. Thirty Larkspur would never be able to use this moment of political unrest to dismantle the tripartite association of imperial successors and claim the throne entirely for himself—that was what he was doing, she couldn’t interpret how he’d taken over Information in any other way—if Six Direction was still Emperor. It wouldn’t matter that some jumped-up yaotlek was trying to acclaim himself the rightful star-blessed ruler. The moment Thirty Larkspur needed would be gone, if Six Direction had access to an imago-machine.
She was abruptly astonished that they’d escaped the Information Ministry at all, and blamed that fragile success entirely on Six Helicopter being a power-drunk politician and not the sort of person who actually asked his boss what to do next.
“One last question,” said Mahit, “and then we can go on. How many people in His Brilliance’s government knew you allowed Yskandr to be killed?”
Nineteen Adze’s smile was Lsel-style, and small; a quirk of the mouth that made Mahit want to mirror it with the patterns of Yskandr’s own smiling. (They’d liked each other so much. The endocrine response activated even after confession to murder.) “Everyone who mattered,” Nineteen Adze said. “Including His Brilliance; I think he is still very angry with me, though he understands why. He always does understand why I do things.”
Mahit remembered the fever-dream of Yskandr and Nineteen Adze in bed: Yskandr saying I love him, I shouldn’t but I do, and Nineteen Adze telling him So do I.
So do I, and then I hope I still will when he’s not himself any longer. No danger of that anymore. His Brilliance would be himself. There were no more imago-machines on Teixcalaan save the one inside Mahit’s skull—and the one she’d given to an anti-imperial activist medic.
She’d think about that later. It was out of her hands.