Will I be bound?
<You’ll find out, won’t you.>
“Bring the bowl,” Mahit said, and with a wave of Nineteen Adze’s hand it was done. A little brass bowl, and a short steel knife that Mahit could imagine Nineteen Adze using all too easily. A claw of a thing. Three Seagrass took it by its handle and pressed her forefinger to the edge, cutting deep so that the blood welled quickly, dripping into the bowl. It was harder for Mahit to do; her fingers shook on the knife’s handle, but the edge was microscopic and slit her finger open with next to no pressure and hardly any sting. Nineteen Adze was last. Their blood mingled, all the same shade of red.
In the oldest version of this custom, Mahit knew, they would all drink the contents of the bowl. So much for Teixcalaanli squeamishness about the consumption of the revered dead. They ate people who were still alive.
“May His Brilliance Six Direction reign until he no longer breathes,” said Nineteen Adze, and Mahit and Three Seagrass echoed her.
Nothing happened. Somehow Mahit had expected something would; that blood sacrifice would be magic, or sanctified, or—
<Or like it is in the poems,> Yskandr finished, and she was forced to agree.
There was a little breath of silence. Then Nineteen Adze stood up, holding her bleeding finger safely away from the fabric of her suit, and said, “We’ll get some bandages, and then, Ambassador, asekreta, I believe we will go see the Emperor.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
I carry exile in my heart. It animates my poetry and my politics; I will never be free of it, having lived outside of Teixcalaan for so long. I will always be measuring the distance between myself and a person who remained in the heart of the world; between the person I would have been had I stayed and the person I have become under the pressure of the frontier. When the Seventeenth Legion came through the jumpgate in bright star-snatching ships and filled up the Ebrekti sky with the shapes of my home, I was at first afraid. A profound discontinuity. To know fear in the shape of one’s own face.
What, my dear, is worth preserving? Your joy in work? Mine in discovery?
THEY were keeping the Emperor in a bunker under Palace-North. It took forty-five minutes to walk there, Mahit and Three Seagrass and Nineteen Adze and one of the aides—the young man, Forty-Five Sunset. They went through tunnels, avoiding the curfew, the roving bands of Sunlit. The entire palace complex was riddled with them, deep under the ground. At her left, Three Seagrass murmured, “The rumors are that the palace sinks as many roots into the ground as it does blooms into the sky; we daylight servants of the Empire see only the flowers—justice, science, information, war—and the roots which feed us are invisible but strong.” Mahit liked hearing her talk. It was how they’d started this, barbarian and liaison, Three Seagrass decoding Teixcalaan for her. She liked it, and at the same time she knew that Three Seagrass was doing it to keep herself calm.
Nineteen Adze moved them through checkpoints, guarded first by the shimmering AI-walls of the City—opened by Nineteen Adze’s cloudhook—and then by ever-increasing numbers of Teixcalaanlitzlim, dressed very simply in grey tunics and trousers with armbands bearing the imperial crest on their left arms. Mahit was reminded of the Judiciary forces who had been chasing Twelve Azalea, and thought of Eight Loop, who was Six Direction’s crèchesib, who might have given him a secret personal guard of Judiciary-trained people. They all had shocksticks. Some of them—more, as they went deeper—had projectile weapons, and one woman carried what Mahit would swear was a laser which should have been mounted on the prow of a small warship. None of them wore the full-face cloudhooks of the Sunlit.
The innermost guards wore no cloudhooks at all, and they took the cloudhook Nineteen Adze was wearing from her. She gave it over easily.
One Lightning’s infiltration of the City’s AI-algorithm—One Lightning, working through War—must have gone very deep, to have the Emperor guarded only by people who would be guaranteed free of any influence of it: left as naked and abandoned by the vast flow of Teixcalaanli literature and history and culture and moment-to-moment news as Mahit had been naked and abandoned when she had lost contact with her imago.
Nineteen Adze spoke to some of them; others simply nodded to her. Mahit wondered how many times she’d come this way before—whether she was new to this level of disaster and threat, or if there had been other times in the long history of her service to Six Direction that he had been forced to hide down here in the strange heart of the Empire.
<I never knew about it,> said Yskandr.
He might have slept with you, but you weren’t his, Mahit told him.
<I didn’t want to be anyone’s. I loved him. That’s different.>
How can you love an emperor like you’d love a person, Yskandr? Unspoken: How could I? Would I?
She never had. That was all Yskandr. She’d met the Emperor twice, once in public and once in private—and been impressed, had felt the echoes of Yskandr’s familiarity all through her nerves and limbic system, but that wasn’t her.
Maybe it was them, though, the combination of her and both Yskandrs, integrating together—and that might be a problem. She wanted to stay as objective as she could.
Beyond the last door and the last guards was a small room, by imperial standards, flooded with sunlamp light—the whole ceiling was made of full-spectrum lamps. It was warm, like basking in solar radiation on a viewport couch was warm, and bright enough that Mahit thought no one in here would ever sleep again. More grey-uniformed guards stood in the corners, and one of them stepped forward to take Three Seagrass’s elbow and gently separate her from Mahit and Nineteen Adze. She left willingly.
Six Direction himself sat in the center of the room on a divan, dressed in resplendent red-purple and gold, and while at home in Palace-Earth he had borne a halo of sunlamps, here in the deep places under the City he was surrounded by a scintillating fortification of information holographs, a migraine aura composed entirely of reports. He looked terrible. His skin had gone to a grey-brown crepe, translucent purple under the eyes, and while the smile he turned on Nineteen Adze—and then on Mahit herself—was brilliant and sharp enough to make her heart flip over in her chest, she was scared for him. Viscerally.
<He wasn’t this bad when I died,> Yskandr said to her.
I don’t think the past three months have done anyone any favors, including His Brilliance. Dying men die faster when they aren’t allowed to rest.
<Emperors don’t sleep.>
“Your Brilliance,” said Nineteen Adze, “I’ve brought you trouble again.”
“So you have,” said the Emperor. “Come sit beside me once more, Mahit, and let us see if we get any farther than we did in our last conversation.”
Mahit went, drawn forward by invisible strings: desire, hers and not-hers. Obedience to imperial authority. All the effort and sacrifice she had put into making this meeting possible. She sat, becoming part of the fortification-aura of information. Just one more piece of data surrounding Six Direction. There were visible bruises, this close up, on the Emperor’s wrists, over the veins; inelastic skin and thin-walled vasculature insulted by what must have been countless injections. She wondered what was keeping him alive.