Three Azimuth’s face was very still. “My dear Undersecretary,” she said, “I assume you are talking about the early retirement of my predecessor Nine Propulsion.”
Eight Antidote was suddenly aware of how much older Eleven Laurel was than Three Azimuth. He wondered how many Ministers of War he’d served, and if the number was big enough to keep him from even being concerned when the current Minister … implied he wasn’t loyal to her? Was that what was being said here? He felt like he was watching a conversation that had been going on for a long time, long before this meeting.
Eleven Laurel exhaled on a resigned sigh, all of the deep wrinkles in his face settling deeper. “Minister, it is not Nine Propulsion who concerns me—I hope she enjoys her retirement, of course, but she isn’t Minister now, is she?—it is how much our Emperor trusts us here in War, now that she is gone and the yaotlek One Lightning has been sent off in disgrace. And how much Her Brilliance trusts creatures like Dzmare, or Information envoys, or anyone but her Fleet, on Fleet business. That’s all, Minister.”
“That’s never all,” Three Azimuth said, and Eight Antidote, trying to think through what Eleven Laurel had just said—did Nineteen Adze really not trust War? while War was defending all Teixcalaan from incredibly dangerous aliens?—practiced keeping his face as still as he could, as serene as a grown-up, calm as someone who wasn’t trying to put all these pieces together.
The Emperor had sent him to spy on War, though. Hadn’t she. Maybe that meant Eleven Laurel was right. He didn’t know how he felt about that. Didn’t know at all, except that part of how he felt was scared.
The message they came up with was eleven seconds long, and made up of four sounds spliced from the intercepted recording, repeated twice over. As far as Mahit could understand, and based on the best of her ability to communicate in sound waves that made her nauseated, it said something like approach-danger—contact-initiated—hurrah-we-win, in sequence, and then—using their newfound unpleasant knowledge about how the alien noises increased in potency when they were layered on top of each other—played contact-initiated from two opposite directions at once, and then added hurrah-we-win on top of that. Then it repeated again from the start. She wasn’t sure that what she and Three Seagrass were saying was come talk to us in person, it’ll work out great, but she also wasn’t not sure, and that was—well, it was the best they were going to do with this limited data set. Perhaps the message would get them more noises to work with, even if it didn’t get them a live alien negotiator.
They’d finished it, and the instant it was done, all of the fragile peace between them shattered like a glass dropped on the floor. Three Seagrass was sullen and silent and uncomprehending, and Mahit was exhausted. She had never wanted to have that fight—
<That’s not true,> said Yskandr inside her mind, where his voice was almost exactly like hers, like her own thoughts were being operated by an external force, coming to the top of her mind with alien suddenness. <You’ve been wanting to have that fight since the oration contest at Six Direction’s banquet, when you saw how effortless being Teixcalaanli was for her. Poetry competitions and all her glittering friends, and how much she likes aliens. You wanted to have it. You were just hoping you wouldn’t have to.>
She hated when he sounded like he knew everything, like twenty years of extra experience and sleeping with the Emperor of all Teixcalaan—both current and former versions thereof—made him an expert on how she felt. But then, he was inside her endocrine system. He knew how she felt, because he felt it the same—and they were getting closer all the time. More integrated.
Her hands hurt, that sparkling ulnar nerve pain. Her head hurt, too, like she’d been trying not to cry for a long time.
I want her to see how she hurts me, she said, in the privacy of her own mind, while Three Seagrass put their message on a fresh infofiche stick and sealed it with her wax sealing kit, the flame-orange wax the same color as her perfect, infuriating uniform. I want her to—notice, when she does, without being told.
<She’s a Teixcalaanlitzlim, Mahit. They don’t. Not unless you tell them, over and over, and even then … >
A slide, sense-memory and longing, the strange mirrored room of their shared mind reflecting a shard of time: the shape of Nineteen Adze’s shoulder blades, delineated in the palest light of early morning in Palace-East. How Yskandr had felt a terrifying, sweet tenderness—felt it on some morning not too long before Nineteen Adze had let him, with her full knowledge and acquiescence, be murdered. Let him asphyxiate under the watchful eyes of Ten Pearl, Minister of Science. And yet the sense-memory remained, even through death and botched imago-surgery. Mahit looked at Three Seagrass and felt an echo of that tenderness, an echo of that betrayal.
She’s not going to kill me to save her Emperor from corruption, she thought, pointedly.
<I wouldn’t underestimate her,> Yskandr murmured. <Not if I were in your place.>
You are in my place.
<She likes Mahit Dzmare, not Yskandr Aghavn. If she likes any part of us at all, after what we’ve said to her.>
“I’m going to present this to the yaotlek,” Three Seagrass said, light and chilly, and tucked the infofiche stick into the inner jacket pocket of her uniform. “I’ll make sure to point out that it’s more than half your work. Thank you.”
As if they’d never been anything but brief colleagues working on a difficult problem. Mahit felt as if she had broken the world, and hated herself for feeling that way—Three Seagrass, asekreta and patrician first-class, Third Undersecretary to the Minister for Information, special envoy to the Fleet … she wasn’t the world. Mahit had done fine without her on Lsel, had missed her only as much as she’d missed Teixcalaan, which was enormously and with aching frustration.
<The world, the Empire,> Yskandr whispered, that single word in Teixcalaanli.
The right order of things, Mahit whispered back, which was just another shading of pronunciation. That was what felt broken. How she had wanted the world to be.
“I assume,” she found herself saying, “that if it works and they do respond, you’ll let me know.”
Three Seagrass looked at her, a glancing, miserable expression, and dropped her eyes again. “Of course,” she said, too fast. “And I’ll— When they respond, I want you to hear it.”
It almost sounded like I want you to help me. It would have been better, Mahit thought, if she’d actually said that. But Mahit hadn’t particularly left her any room to do so, had she. She’d said, When you know why I had to come with you, then we can talk. And she hadn’t meant, When you figure out the political situation on Lsel Station, she’d meant—