Dekakel doesn’t let herself be shocked. That imago-line. Aghavn and Dzmare. Twisting whatever it touches. No wonder Amnardbat had sabotaged Mahit Dzmare: she’d wanted to kill the whole line, and that line was only one imago-machine strong, if you didn’t count Tsagkel Ambak, and Dekakel doesn’t—she wasn’t an ambassador, she was a negotiator, and a long-gone one. Aghavn’s reticence in returning to Lsel had made sure of that. Sabotage, and let the Empire deal with the wrecked remains of an ambassador; it’d probably kill her its own self.
“And if she’d stayed on-Station? What would you have done with her then?”
“Why does Pilots care what Heritage does with an imago-line? You are out of your jurisdiction, Councilor Onchu.”
“Pilots always cares what Heritage does,” Dekakel snaps, “since Heritage holds our imago-lines as well as everyone else’s—tell me, Aknel, that you aren’t making unilateral decisions about line corruption and suitability, tell me that true, and I will walk out of here and leave you be.”
“I’m the Councilor for Heritage,” says Aknel Amnardbat. “My mandate is to preserve Lsel Station. Are you questioning that mandate, or my adherence to it?”
“That wasn’t no.”
Amnardbat looks at her, and deliberately, slowly, and with intent—shrugs. “Someone, Councilor, needs to make decisions that preserve not only our lives, and our sovereignty, but our sense of ourselves as ourselves. That’s what Heritage is for. That’s what I’m doing.”
“And if Dzmare were to come back?” Dekakel isn’t sure why she asked that; she’s fairly certain that Mahit Dzmare is going to die at war, along with a great many Teixcalaanlitzlim.
“Then I’d want to carve that machine out of her skull, Dekakel, and space it, and see if there was anything left of her worth keeping on-Station if she woke up. Poor woman. I do take a little of the blame—had I given her another imago rather than Aghavn’s, perhaps her xenophilic obsession could have been ameliorated.”
“Why didn’t you, then?”
Amnardbat sighs, put-upon. “Someone needed to be a sacrifice to the Empire, and her aptitudes really were outrageously green for Aghavn’s imago. Might as well be her. And it gets them both off our decks, Councilor.”
Chilled, Dekakel asks one last question: “Is there any other line you’ve done this to?”
“Is there a line you’d recommend?”
Dekakel will remember the easiness with which Aknel Amnardbat answered her for a very long time; the easiness, and the way she abruptly knew she couldn’t trust any imago-line that this woman had touched to be unaltered. How clearly she saw what Amnardbat was, in that moment: a person who so loved Lsel Station that she’d replaced her ethical responsibilities with the appalling brightness of that love, and didn’t care what she burned out to preserve it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Industrial Employment Opportunity SILICA-2318A—Temporary Relocation—Hardship Bonus Pay—Four-Month Rotations. An opportunity for glassworkers, manufactory employees with management experience, and natural resource specialists (particularly those Teixcalaanlitzlim with extraction and/or arid-landscape experience) is available for imperial citizens willing to relocate to the Peloa System for at least four months. Hardship bonus pay conditions derive from planetary temperature extremes, but Peloa-2 has no indigenous predators or known disease vectors. Contraindications: asthma, reactive airway disorder, heat sensitivity, prior episode of sunstroke …
And am I made to die? / To lay this body down / to let my trembling mem’ry fly / into a mind unknown?
Our home in deepest shade / well-caught by pilots’ knots / the brilliant regions of the dead / where nothing is forgot!
Soon as from flesh I go / what will become of me? / eternal memory bestowed / will now my portion be.
And woken by the Station, bound, / I from my body rise / and see my successor glory-crowned / within our star-flamed skies!
HER first desert, even without the anticipation of attempted negotiations with murderous and incomprehensible alien life, was intoxicating. It stretched all around the landing site in an endless wave of bone-white silica sand, unmarked by water or by vegetation save for one copse of small, wide-crowned grey-green trees near the buildings that the Teixcalaanli refinery workers had lived in before they had all died. Those buildings were white, too. Sun-bleached. Even the sky had all the color leached out of it, reducing it to a hazy blue-pallor vault.
Mahit had never been on a planet as hot as Peloa-2. She’d never thought about planets as hot as Peloa-2, certainly not as places people might actually live. Temperatures this high were on the edge of human tolerances. If there had been a heat anomaly of this intensity on Lsel Station, half of the Stationers would be preparing for emergency evacuation because of radical life support system failure. The soldiers on Weight for the Wheel had warned her and Three Seagrass before they’d all boarded the atmospheric-descent shuttle: take extra water. Drink even if you aren’t thirsty. If you’re down there for more than eight hours, take salt pills. Try to stay out of direct sunlight.
Mahit had thought they were being melodramatic, trying to tease the Information agent and the barbarian, City-born or eternally foreign: neither one the sort of people who would know how to deal with inclement environments, of course. But they weren’t teasing. The air on Peloa-2 was dry enough it sucked the moisture from her tongue in the space of a breath. The light seemed to have both weight and weightlessness all at once. She felt a pressured sort of heat, sunlight on her skin but also the air itself, so hot, making her respiration deeper, her heart slower, as if the gravity on this planet was twice as high as it truly was—and at the same time, she felt drunk. Featherlight. Like she could walk forever into the bright desert of Peloa-2 and come back unharmed.
And then the wind changed, and the smell of charnel drifted toward her and Three Seagrass and their small escort of Fleet soldiers: the dead colonists, rotting in their factory buildings. The leavings of the creatures—the people, Mahit was going to think of them as people for the duration of this encounter—that they were here to meet.
She’d never been on a planet that all of Teixcalaan had held a funeral for before, either. She suspected none of them had: not her, not Three Seagrass, not their small escort of ground-combat specialists, bristling with black-muzzled energy weapons.
She’d had no time to talk to Three Seagrass alone, hardly enough time to do more than prepare a sequence of short recordings in what they believed was the alien language. A repetition or two of hello-we’re-here and hurrah! and something they suspected might be back-the-fuck-off—since their intercepted transmission had included something that might have been that, right when the aliens had noticed Knifepoint but before they had begun to chase them. They’d also found time to locate a very large, but still portable, holoprojector programmed for graphic representation, since one could only go so far with approximately six vocabulary words, that weren’t words as much as tonal markers for feelings, anyhow.