Whatever she and Three Seagrass were going to do about what had happened between them would have to wait until this meeting was done.
“You’re the better draftsman,” Three Seagrass said, her voice a curl of smoke in the heat, wavering and distant. Mahit wondered if heat distorted sound or if she was simply experiencing a mild auditory hallucination. “If they want to talk in pictures, I’ll give you my cloudhook so that you can draw.”
“All right,” Mahit said, and then—because she didn’t want to go into this conversation raw, with nothing but work between the two of them to hold it together—and because the desert was so beautiful and horrible at once, the stretched-out shimmer of it—asked, “Are all deserts like this?”
Three Seagrass shook her head. “I’ve never been anywhere like this,” she said. “The deserts I know are—red rock, plateaus and carved-out mountains, flowers. The south continent back home. This is a sand desert. It’s—”
“It makes me want to walk out into it,” Mahit said, as a confession. As a single offering: I will try to trust you, on the very small things at least, if you try too.
“I know,” said Three Seagrass, and she really sounded as if she did. As if the desert heat pulled at her that way, too. “Guess what, Mahit? We get to. A little. The meeting site is fifteen minutes away.”
They’d picked a plateau, a flat place where the dunes drifted less and where it was possible for their escort soldiers to erect a canopy to provide some shade. Mahit had expected a piece of high-albedo tarp and some tent-poles, from what the soldiers unpacked, moving with practiced speed—but when the canopy was unfolded, and she and Three Seagrass and all their battery-powered audiovisual equipment were positioned underneath it, she saw that the underside of the tarp was patterned in silver and pink and gold-shot blue, lotuses and water lilies, a woven fabric sewn to the light-reflective plastic. A piece of the City spread out here like a traveling palace.
<Teixcalaan does not neglect symbolism,> Yskandr murmured to her, <even in deserts.> Mahit had missed that, she realized, or Yskandr had, or—it didn’t matter which of them. Having symbolic valence encoded into the smallest action was familiar, and comforting, even if she wished it wasn’t—even if that comfort was just another sign of how Teixcalaan had reordered her mind, her sense of aesthetics.
“Did you bring this from the City?” she asked Three Seagrass, gesturing at the cloth.
“I wish I had,” said Three Seagrass, “it’s rather brilliant. No, I got it from Twenty Cicada.”
Mahit wondered when that had happened. At what point during the long night they’d spent apart, not sleeping—was she doomed to sleep deprivation every time she spent more than a day surrounded by Teixcalaanlitzlim?—had Three Seagrass been given a piece of Teixcalaanli propaganda encoded in a beautiful tapestry? Here is water, even in the desert. We are a people who bring flowers.
<You should have been a poet,> Yskandr said again. <Poets sleep more than political operatives.>
Not in Teixcalaan they don’t, Mahit thought, and got electric laughter spiking up and down her ulnar nerves in response.
“It’s good,” she said to Three Seagrass. “Whether it was his idea or yours, I think it’s going to be effective, at least if they come from systems with plant life…”
She trailed off. There was something coming up the other side of the plateau.
They moved in a hunting lope, a stride that covered ground, even when the ground was the uncertain footing of sand. Their shoulders rocked forward with each step; powerful, heavily muscled. There were two. They had not come with an escort. Mahit’s first impression was of black-keratin claws on their hands, of terribly long and flexible necks that ended in muzzled heads, round ears that were faintly furred. Their skins were spotted, variegated patterns, and they towered two feet above human heads—three feet over the smaller Teixcalaanlitzlim, like Three Seagrass. They wore pale grey tactical uniforms, built for deserts, and no visible weaponry. They looked like nothing she’d ever seen. They looked like people. They looked like those claws were all the weapons they’d need.
Every opening word Mahit could think of dried up in her mouth, as if the heat had stolen not only her saliva but her speech.
Beside her, Three Seagrass straightened her shoulders and set her jaw as if she was about to speak oratory in front of the Emperor. Mahit knew the shape of her like this, the focus that meant performance, and wondered when she’d learned to recognize it so well, how she knew this about Three Seagrass and not much else. Not enough else.
“Play the hello noise, Mahit,” she said. “You’ll know when.”
And then, as if she was meeting a functionary from some other Ministry, and not a foreign creature that stood shoulders and many-toothed head above her, Three Seagrass walked to the edge of the shade canopy, barely five feet from the aliens, pressed her fingertips together, and bowed over them. Mahit reached for the control-datapad for their audio projector—hoped it would work, that it hadn’t been fried in the smothering heat, or impregnated with gumming sand. Her fingertips ghosted over the pad’s surface, summoning up the right terrible noise. She didn’t press hard. It was like holding the trigger of an energy weapon; the slightest motion was all that was necessary—
“I am Envoy Three Seagrass of the Teixcalaanli Empire,” said Three Seagrass to the aliens, one hand pressed first to her chest—I am—and then flying up in an encompassing gesture to take in the canopy behind her, laden with its woven flowers. And this is mine, this is what I represent. “I negotiate on behalf of Her Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze, the Edgeshine of a Knife, whose reign shatters all darkness.”
Nothing Three Seagrass was saying would be understandable to the aliens. That was what Mahit was for, right now. She pressed her fingers to the datapad, and played hello, all of the sickening static scream of it.
The aliens went very still. One of them glanced at Three Seagrass, and then pointed with its chin at the projector setup. The other one looked there, too. Mahit wished she could read anything about their body language. They hadn’t moved forward or back. Were they puzzled, intrigued, angry? It was worse than trying to understand the understated delicacy of Teixcalaanli facial expressions. Worse by a lot. She knew they were communicating, but she couldn’t tell how. Not audibly. Maybe they did communicate by scent, or by ear positioning, or something else she’d never imagined. She was a linguist at best (more like a diplomat-poet with pretensions, she’d never taken a xenolinguistics specialty, she’d had all of Teixcalaanli language to play with and back then she hadn’t thought she’d ever need anything else), and if the aliens didn’t have words to decipher …
The second one opened its mouth and made the hello noise, without any benefit of amplification or audio processing. The first alien, the one which had pointed at the audio equipment, joined it. The same noise, reverberating. On Weight for the Wheel, Mahit and Three Seagrass and all of their escorts had been stuffed full of antiemetics, the best that the medical bay could locate, and she still felt twistingly nauseated. The vibrations. The static noise of them, in her bones. It really was infrasound, with all of infrasound’s physical horrors. But all right, all right, they heard hello and they said hello back, two sharp-toothed maws wide open. Their tongues were as spotted as their skins.