It was a masterful little performance, if Three Seagrass was any judge of her own rhetorical abilities. She liked elucidate meaning out of meaningless conflict—it was a good paraphrase of Eleven Lathe, and someone (perhaps only her, but someone) would appreciate the allusion.
But Darj Tarats was depressingly unimpressed. He didn’t respond to Three Seagrass at all—he looked at her, all disdain, and turned to say another brisk phrase in Stationer to Mahit, a blur of consonants. Three Seagrass caught the few words she was sure of: “Yskandr,” and the Stationer word for “empire,” which wasn’t at all the same as the word for Teixcalaan. Mahit, the pistol still under her throat, shut her eyes—the lashes fluttered. When she opened them again, she looked different. Not quite herself. The curve of her mouth was wide. The gesture of her hand broad and lazy. Like she was possessed. Like she was—Yskandr Aghavn, probably.
(And which one of them had had her beautiful hands all over Three Seagrass? What a completely inopportune question for her to fixate on right now! Even if the answer was likely a horrifying both. She was never going to like the idea of imago-machines, was she. Not that it’d matter, if Mahit got herself killed now—)
Even her tone was different when she spoke. First in Stationer—there was that word for “empire” again, and another one Three Seagrass knew, “associate,” because that verb was all over import/export documents. And then in Teixcalaanli, thank every single divinity anyone had ever sacrificed blood to: Mahit saying, “I have been tasked with making aliens understandable, Councilor, and with influencing their behavior toward our Station. As you have always tasked me, haven’t you?”
Oh, but there was a history there. Three Seagrass wanted to know it. Wanted to get her mouth around it, and her mind, and chew it up and spit it out again. If Darj Tarats had demanded that Mahit be a saboteur, what had he asked of Yskandr Aghavn, who had been the Emperor Six Direction’s favorite barbarian? How much of what he had asked had Aghavn refused? How much had Aghavn done?
Five Thistle shoved the pistol up tighter against Mahit’s throat, and she went still again. Silent. The movement of her jaw when she swallowed was a stifled gulp. He said, “Is that not a confession of spying, yaotlek? Stealing our secrets and trying to influence our behavior.” Which was tantamount to should I shoot her now? so Three Seagrass really needed to say exactly the right thing—
But Nine Hibiscus got there first. “One does not, Five Thistle, expect a barbarian to do anything but put her fellow barbarians first in her mind.”
How correct! (Mahit was going to hate that it was correct! Three Seagrass could cope with that later.)
“And yet,” Three Seagrass said, quick interruption, “Ambassador Dzmare was willing to come when I asked her to, to lend her skills to our first-contact effort. To serve not only her Station but all of Teixcalaan. Nothing is ever simple, yaotlek, not with barbarians. Not with Mahit Dzmare, who brought our Emperor to her throne, and warned us of our enemy, and knows us very well—and came with me anyway.”
As she said it, she realized she was apologizing. For the stupid thing with Mahit’s jacket. For not talking to her. For assuming she would come with her, of course she would—and not thinking that when the Empire asked, even in the person of a friend, a maybe-lover, there really was no way for a barbarian to say no and keep being the kind of barbarian the Empire thought of as a person.
That was a nasty realization that she was going to have to think a lot more about when people stopped pointing energy weapons at each other on the bridge. Later. (She wanted there to be a later. Rather badly, at this point.)
“And you, Councilor Tarats!” she went on, trying to talk her way toward that later. “Whatever it is that you wish Ambassador Dzmare had done already—if you continue to push us into believing that she is some sort of agent of yours, the officer will dispose of her, and what a waste that would be. Silencing a voice that speaks in your language, which we nevertheless understand.” She forced herself to laugh, light, self-deprecating. “Well. Understand a little. You have ever so many consonants, Councilor.”
There was a little, breathless, terrifying silence. And then Nine Hibiscus said, “Let the Ambassador go, Five Thistle. For the moment. And shall we have our visitor tell us properly what it is that is happening in Parzrawantlak Sector? In detail, Councilor Tarats. And in a civilized language, if you can manage it.”
The pistol came away. Three Seagrass could hear Mahit’s rapid, indrawn breath. She wanted to hug her. Hold her, maybe. Kiss her, definitely. But that would ruin all of the careful balance she’d just managed to spin, so all she did was look her in the eyes, directly, and smile with her teeth showing. It was possible she was getting better at it.
He was glad he’d thrown up in the shower, because that meant he didn’t have anything else to throw up on the subway, or on the groundcar shuttle from the last working subway station to the spaceport. The City’s investigation into the derailment wasn’t over—or there had been a bomb and the repairs weren’t done. Either way, there wasn’t a subway to Inmost Province Spaceport proper: there was the biggest groundcar Eight Antidote had ever been in, with no seats, just poles to hang on to, stuffed with grown-ups and other children and luggage. He fit right in: probably everyone thought he was someone else’s kid. A whole lot of people looked like they either had or wanted to vomit in the shuttle: it jerked when it started and stopped, and hanging on to the poles was hard, and the luggage kept rolling into the backs of everyone’s legs and knocking them off balance.
The worst part was that he was doing this without a cloudhook. Last time he’d left Palace-Central he’d had a guide, and he’d had the City watching over him—but he needed to move fast and quiet now. He wasn’t sure whether Her Brilliance would let him keep being a spy, keep having the freedom to get in trouble and learn information he shouldn’t know. Or that someone didn’t want him to know. He’d disagreed with her to her face. And now he was in the process of countermanding her orders. If he let the City and all its camera-eyes cross-reference the location of his cloudhook with what images they could capture of him—well. If the Emperor wanted to stop him, he’d be making it easy.
So he left his cloudhook in the subway, right before he switched lines and got onto the horrible shuttle. Took it off to rub his eye—pretending he was a littler kid, an eight-year-old with their very first cloudhook, not used to wearing it—and set it on the seat next to him. When he got up and exited at the Plaza Central One stop (huge, and he was so glad he’d done this once with a cloudhook, because he’d never find his way through its seven levels of interlocking tracks alone) he left it there. Presumably it was still there, going around and around the subway, stop to stop, back and forth. And he was exposed, and free, and inside a crowd tall enough to maybe hide him from some of the City’s eyes, and he hated it. He hated it a lot.