“He’s down here with us,” said Six Direction. “You will protect him, Nineteen Adze. Won’t you?”
“Of course I will. When have I not acted in your best interests, Your Brilliance?”
<When she killed me,> Yskandr whispered, and Mahit wondered if the Emperor was thinking the same thing.
“Oh, once or twice,” Six Direction said, and instead of flinching or being cowed, Nineteen Adze laughed. Mahit could abruptly imagine how they must have been when they’d first met: Nineteen Adze a young military commander, Six Direction come into the high blossoming of his power. The easy friendship that they’d struck up. The successes of their partnership.
Then the Emperor turned back to Mahit, and she felt quite small, and terribly young, and not nearly as simpatico with these two Teixcalaanlitzlim as Yskandr had been. She wouldn’t have become part of that strange triangle.
<Are you sure? It took me a decade to fall. You’ve had a week.>
No. She wasn’t sure. She merely wasn’t ready.
“So, Mahit Dzmare—if you cannot solve the most fundamental problem of good government for me, if you cannot give me eternity and stable rule—what can your news from Darj Tarats give me? What shall I do with an alien invasion on the borders of my empire, from down here while I hide from death and deposition in the heart of my palace?”
And just like that, she was being given a test. The same way she’d felt on her first day here, suddenly knowing she needed to speak Teixcalaanli, all the time, not just in her mind or between friends. She would speak Teixcalaanli now. She knew the phrasings, the shadings. She had all of Yskandr’s long history with Six Direction—all the conversations they had had, over tables and at legislative meetings and in bed—to guide her. Everything that ached—her hand, her hip, the endless, endless headache—fell away, and she thought: All right. Now.
“You can discredit One Lightning,” she said. “And you can elevate Eight Loop above Thirty Larkspur.”
“Go on.”
She was flying. “One Lightning is waging an usurpation—an attempt to be acclaimed Emperor—and has he won victories? No. Is he even trying? No, he is leaving the edges of Teixcalaan open to alien threat. A barbarian had to bring this message to you, which is a shameful failure on the part of your yaotlek, who should have known of this danger first but has put himself and his vainglorious ambition above the safety of the Empire.” She had to pause for breath. Behind her, she could feel Three Seagrass’s eyes on her, and wished that her liaison was with her, close enough to hold her hand. “And … Eight Loop warned the entire City that the annexation war—which Thirty Larkspur supports, has supported in public at your last oration contest—was of dubious legality, due to the possibility of these threats. She fulfills her role as Judiciary Minister; Thirty Larkspur is exposed as using his position of influence upon you to put you in political danger.”
She winced a bit. “It does ask you to admit that you may have been led astray by your ezuazuacat, I have to confess.”
“A small price,” Six Direction said. “I am an old man, and easily persuaded by interests foreign to me, am I not?”
<Never easily, my lord,> Yskandr said, and Mahit had to clamp her jaw shut on the words. Instead, she shrugged, spreading her hands wide. Better to not say anything. Better to make this case for Lsel Station, in Teixcalaanli words.
Six Direction looked down at Nineteen Adze. Some communication passed silently between them. She nodded. His hand came off the back of her neck and she got up to her feet, fluid and graceful for a woman in middle age who probably hadn’t slept for a day and a half at least.
“We’ll have to broadcast it,” she said. “On every feed. Imperial override; emergency message. And it will have to be you saying it, Your Brilliance—no one will believe a proxy right now. You saying it, and the Ambassador prerecorded and spliced in as appropriate.”
“As ever, Nineteen Adze, I do trust your judgment.”
Nineteen Adze’s smile was more like a flinch. Mahit suspected she was thinking of how she had allowed Yskandr to die, and doomed Six Direction at the same time. It would be like a thorn in her, a goad. Six Direction must like that, to have something to twist—
“Ambassador Dzmare,” said Nineteen Adze. “Mahit—will you record your statement from your government for us?”
If this was the plan, this was the plan. “Yes,” Mahit said, “I will. Where should I go?”
“Oh, we have everything we need right here,” said Six Direction. “Emperors have lived down here, for months. A holograph recorder is nothing.” He waved a hand toward some of his grey-uniformed attendants, and they swung into motion: some left the room, others approached Mahit and the Emperor on the couch, with some wariness.
“She looks like she’s been dragged through the riots,” said one of them. “The blood on her—I think we should keep it. It suits the gravity of what she brought you.”
“Even barbarians can make sacrifices,” said Six Direction. “We could all take note of that.”
As the attendants helped her up from the couch and led her into a room which looked identical to the imperial briefing room Mahit had seen on the newsfeeds when she’d watched the annexation war being announced from Nineteen Adze’s breakfast table, she tried very hard not to feel filthy. Corrupted. Made useful. It didn’t work.
It didn’t work, and it didn’t stop her from telling her secrets again, this time to the recording cameras, as clearly and persuasively as she could.
The Emperor and Nineteen Adze had a brief, vehement argument about where they would broadcast the announcement from—Nineteen Adze was for everyone remaining hidden underground, but Six Direction waited her out, let her say all sorts of flattering things about his welfare and fragility, and then proclaimed that he was, in fact, the Emperor of all Teixcalaan, and he would make this announcement, fearlessly, from the sun temple at the top of Palace-North, and that she would come with him and stand beside him while he did it. There was no real arguing with him. Mahit could feel the weight of his authority, even diminished and under threat—the long shadow of his eighty years of peace stretching out to shape even this moment.
After the argument was over, there was the usual administrative chaos of orchestrating a complex public appearance on no notice—a rapid twenty minutes of imperial attendants talking briskly to one another, sending messages. The Emperor and Nineteen Adze vanished under heavily armed escort. Mahit caught sight of the child, Eight Antidote, being whisked off into the chaos of that escort, and thought of how many times he might have been moved similarly: relocated at the whim of one political moment or another. He looked at her, as he went— a small, thin boy, observant, straight-backed. Mahit thought of the birds in the garden in Palace-Earth. They don’t even have to touch you, Eight Antidote had said, then. He’d been talking about the birds—she’d thought at the time—but it was true. They didn’t touch him. They moved him without laying hands on him at all.
She herself was taken into another room, smaller, more private—strewn about with infofiche and print-books, half-erased holoprojections still up on screens. A workroom. There was a couch in the middle of it, and Mahit sat down on it. Someone brought her a warm washcloth to wipe the blood and dust off her face; someone else brought her Three Seagrass, who was bemusedly holding a large cup of tea, and the two of them ended up sitting on the couch next to one another, watching the swirl of activity around them. Mahit felt unmoored, entirely cut away from the world. All her tethers gone. Even Yskandr in her mind was a banked, quiet presence.