Mahit put her face in her numb hands, numb elbows on the table, and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes. The last thing she wanted to do was cry. She didn’t have time to cry. She had to think about why Sixteen Moonrise—a Fleet Captain, out of place, drifting through a flagship not her own, sneaking into the rooms of Information agents and barbarian ambassadors—would have wanted to challenge her, test her motivations, warn her—if it was a warning and not a threat—of how little the Fleet wanted to talk to these aliens. How much they wanted to kill them instead. How inconsequential the desires of Information agents, barbarian ambassadors, and even yaotlekim might be against the long weight of habitual violence that was the Teixcalaanli legions.
When she exhaled, hard through her nose, trying to expel all the spent air from her lungs and start again, her jacket rustled—like it was full of paper
(like the jacket she’d worn in the City had been full of ciphertext instructions for how best to start this war and prevent Lsel from being devoured by Teixcalaan)
(it had crackled the same way)
—and she reached into her inner jacket pocket and came up with The Perilous Frontier! A graphic story exactly the size of a political pamphlet. She’d forgotten she’d bought it.
<You forgot to take it out of your jacket, that’s even more distracted than I forgot I bought it.>
Aknel Amnardbat was very distracting, Mahit told Yskandr. At the time. And then, finding herself hoping for a distraction that was neither tears nor Aknel Amnardbat, she opened it and began to read.
Graphic stories had never been of particular interest to Mahit as a literary form—they’d always seemed unnecessarily hybrid, not quite holoproj, not quite still art, not quite prose. And as a child—all right, as an adult as well, and continuously—most of what she read when she had time to read for pleasure was in Teixcalaanli. The Perilous Frontier! was in Stationer. Drawn by Stationers, and written by Stationers, for Stationers. How old had the kid at the kiosk been who sold it to her? Seventeen at most. Mahit hadn’t been any good at being seventeen. She wouldn’t have known what to do with an artist collective writing graphic stories if one had been tossed at her head, when she was seventeen.
Reading it—Volume One of an as-yet-incomplete cycle of at least ten—felt more like an anthropological exercise than anything else. The protagonist, Captain Cameron, a pilot from a long imago-line of pilots, was on the first spread in the midst of getting into nasty trouble trying to fly through an asteroid cluster, apparently aiming for an abandoned mine and some other character trapped in it. Mahit didn’t know if she was supposed to know what was going on, or if there was some sort of Volume Zero she’d missed. Yskandr was no help: graphic stories hadn’t been youth-culture fashion when he’d been young at all. Mahit found herself grasping for the background, the referentiality and citation, that she’d expect in a Teixcalaanli text, even an unfamiliar one—and didn’t find it.
<It figures,> Yskandr told her—all the older Yskandr, amused, world-weary, faintly intrigued, <that the one thing we’d have to read would be Stationer-native art written by teenagers who haven’t taken the aptitudes yet. Go on. Turn the page. I want to see what happens next.>
What happened next was Captain Cameron dodged an ice-comet, flew in close to an asteroid large enough to have an atmosphere of its own, practically a planetoid, and searched grimly through the snow that atmosphere was producing for a person named Esharakir Lrut and the secret archive of ancient Lsel documents that she had apparently hidden in said abandoned mine. Lrut was drawn thin, attenuated, an exaggerated version of how someone might look if they were much younger than their imago, and also had eaten nothing but protein cakes for months. It was impressive art. Mahit couldn’t imagine sitting still for long enough to draw all of this, in ink, by hand—and make it look so evocative, without any colors at all.
Esharakir Lrut had been hiding documents to preserve them in their original forms. Cameron was there to rescue her, or the documents—and the majority of the middle of the story was Lrut arguing that yes, she would come back, and with the documents, but that Cameron had to promise to support her versions rather than the official, Heritage-sanctioned ones, when they got back to the Station. Otherwise she wasn’t going anywhere at all. She’d stay in a mine, on an asteroid, in the snow, and wait for someone else to agree to defend the memory of Lsel.
<This is amazingly subversive,> Yskandr said to Mahit. <Anti-Heritage by way of being more Heritage than Heritage. And teenagers wrote this?>
Wrote and drew, Mahit thought. I guess there’s a reason it’s the same size as a political pamphlet, after all.
<Perhaps we’re not the only ones who have reasons to dislike Aknel Amnardbat.>
I haven’t been home long enough to know why artist kids would be angry—
And even if Mahit had, she wouldn’t have ever been friends with these people, who made art out of ink and paper, about Stationer memory, Stationer art, Stationer politics. She’d always spent her time with the other Teixcalaan-obsessed students. Writing poetry. Imagining the City. The Perilous Frontier! was as alien to her as—oh, not quite as alien as the beings that had made the sickening noises she and Three Seagrass had been trying to work with, but almost. Or felt that way, at least.
<Good thing you didn’t give her your jacket,> Yskandr said. <This would be hard to read with the pages stuck together with vomit.>
Mahit winced, and shut the book. I don’t want to talk about Three Seagrass.
<Or think about her, but you keep doing it.>
Mahit pictured Three Seagrass reading The Perilous Frontier! all despite herself, and wished her imago was less right about what she thought, and how it made her feel. But he felt it too. More and more all the time.
CHAPTER TEN
[begin security code APOLUNE] Wreath: other hands here than those of the Emperor are at work: the information I coded Hyacinth is only half of what I suspect. Watch for patterns, like you taught me. There are barbarian minds shaping Teixcalaanli policy, and we don’t know what processes they have set in motion. Such things are outside our capacity to easily grasp. The story squirms away and takes incomprehensible forms. Prepare our Minister for rapid and decisive action. I will maintain contact. I remain, as ever, your Ascent. [end security code APOLUNE]
Here’s a question for you, Tarats: how many other imago-lines might our esteemed colleague have compromised? Are we prepared to suffer a plague of Dzmares, right now, while Teixcalaan fights a war of your making over our heads and we wait to see if the Dzmare we are plagued with is of any use at all? Tell me that. And if you can reassure me that I can requisition a new set of pilot imago-lines to replace the ones I am losing, day by day, without worrying about their integrity—well, then, I imagine I’ll owe you a drink.