<Both. But look.>
The alien they had been calling Second opened its maw and echoed the same noise. The whole world was a resonant chamber. Mahit needed to not vomit. Not until the aliens had left—
They didn’t turn their backs on her and Three Seagrass as they went. They loped backward, seemingly as comfortable with that direction of locomotion as they had been with coming forward. Mahit wondered about their hip joints. Wondered if they could move sideways, if they could slide, imagined the disconcerting rapidity of that sort of travel. Thought, dizzyingly, of how their ships winked in and out of the void, there and then not-there, secret and revealed.
And then they were gone, disappeared over the crux of the dune. Whether or not they’d come back—whether or not she and Three Seagrass had accomplished anything aside from learning a few words in a pidgin language without tenses—was entirely unclear.
Three Seagrass vomited first, before Mahit could turn off the holo and the audioplay. Vomited and went down on her knees with dry heaves afterward. Mahit dropped the controls and found herself, operating on complete instinct, all arguments and irrevocable conflicts between them rendered profoundly unimportant, crouched protectively next to her in the sand and in the hot silence. Her hand came to rest on Three Seagrass’s spine, gentle and steadying, until the physical convulsion was over.
“… That could have gone much worse,” said Three Seagrass, when she could. She straightened up. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. And didn’t try to get away from Mahit’s touch, not at all. “Look, Mahit—nobody died, not even slightly.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Minister Three Azimuth, I have taken the opportunity to review precisely how you accomplished the pacification of Nakhar System, and I begin to see in detail why you are so unfortunately called “the butcher of the Nakharese mind” by the sort of people who resort to petty doggerel. Your accomplishments are impressive in both their efficacy and the precision of their cruelty. I have preserved recordings for later consultation, if necessary.
When you traveled with him, my dear, when you were young and did all those great deeds in the dirt by his side, how did you breathe from being near him? How did you hold on to yourself? If you’ve a bit of advice for a barbarian, entranced, you know I’d appreciate it. I’ll buy the drinks.
HER Brilliance the Emperor Nineteen Adze had said to him, If you get a chance, you should try to find out what Three Azimuth thinks about the Ambassador Mahit Dzmare. Not what Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise thought of her, not what the Emperor Herself thought of her, not what his dead ancestor-the-Emperor had thought of her or her predecessor in the role of Lsel Ambassador, a man Eight Antidote primarily remembered for how often he’d been in the palace, how easily he’d become a normal, everyday presence—but what the Minister of War thought about the Lsel Ambassador, right now.
And then she’d left it up to him to decide if what the Minister of War thought was something the Emperor should disagree with. A poison flower in someone else’s hand.
It seemed like a much bigger and harder task than he was capable of. (He could get it wrong. What would happen if he got it wrong? He didn’t know, and not knowing was frightening in itself.)
But that wasn’t the first problem. The first, biggest problem was that he didn’t know how to get close to the Minister of War at all. There was no way he was going to find out what she thought by looking up official documents about Teixcalaanli-Stationer relations, and the legal status of Teixcalaanli military passage through Stationer space, which was what he’d tried first. Also, attempting to read legal documents about the difference between freight supply and personnel supply and full armaments of war, as applied to various sorts of ships with various sorts of cargo, during various situations of more or less hypothetical nature, had done very little for him but give him a headache and the conviction that when he was Emperor, he was going to pick a Judiciary Minister who liked reading this sort of stuff and would do it for him.
He was pretty sure that relations between Teixcalaan and Lsel Station were what his tutors would call normalized but fraught, though. Teixcalaanli vessels could move through Stationer space, and Teixcalaan bought a lot of Stationer-refined metals, but Stationers needed more immigration papers than Eight Antidote had previously thought existed to come live in the Empire, and Teixcalaanlitzlim couldn’t live on the Station at all. Ever.
He’d looked at the star-charts. Almost every battleship that was headed to the front was moving through Stationer space, from the jumpgate they shared with Teixcalaan to the jumpgate they didn’t. The jumpgate that had the war on the other side of it.
And none of this was going to help him unless he could figure out how to get Three Azimuth alone. Alone, and to trust him with her real opinions.
He really, really wished he was older. If he was older, he could—oh, enlist in the Fleet, or something. Be the Minister’s cadet-assistant. But there were probably a lot more Fleet cadets who were more suited to that job than he was, and less politically fraught to pick. It wouldn’t work, even if he was fourteen and of enlistable age instead of just-eleven-last-month. Also it’d be transparent. Why would Eight Antidote make himself Three Azimuth’s assistant unless he wanted something from her?
There had to be another way. A not-official way. A way of being in the right place, a place that all the camera-eyes and City-algorithms and Sunlit would think was how the world should be if he was in it, and that place needed to be where Three Azimuth was, too. Which meant that he needed to figure out what kind of places Three Azimuth spent time in, without her knowing he wanted to know.
Being a spy was difficult. Eight Antidote sighed, and got up from his desk and its many, many infofilm transparencies with legal regulations printed on them. He was really tired of sitting still. Outside his windows it was already late afternoon, and he’d done nothing with his day but homework and trying to investigate Lsel Station, and he thought if he looked at any more documents he might throw something. (If he was a kid, for real, and not himself, he guessed he would go play outside. Or something. He wasn’t really sure what a person did while playing outside if it wasn’t amalitzli, and you needed a whole team for amalitzli.)
Instead of trying to locate an imaginary amalitzli team, he stretched his arms above his head as far as he could reach and bent forward from the waist in a standing pike stretch. Put his hands on the ground and jumped his feet backward, thud, and held the plank for a whole minute until his arms burned. Calisthenics counted as homework, and they felt good, too.