It was like they were two links in an imago-chain—but both embodied at once. The idea made Mahit squirm. (But wasn’t she herself a thing that was wrong, by all the standards she had learned on Lsel Station about what was the right and the wrong way to be a link in a long line of live memory?)
Communicating by rebus and song-snatch was slow and agonizing in the heat. They were circling around the idea of—it wasn’t anything so concrete as cease-fire. Maybe something more like managed retreat. If Mahit could only figure out why these creatures did what they did, she could get closer to asking them to do it somewhere else. Somewhere far away from Lsel Station (… and Teixcalaan, and oh, Darj Tarats was probably going to give her to Aknel Amnardbat on a platter). But she couldn’t get to why. She didn’t have any abstract concepts to work with, at all, except—
Carefully, when it was her turn to begin the next—sentence, phrase, communication unit—Mahit drew the outline of a human being. The outline of a human being, with its guts spilled out in spirals of light. And above it, the outline of an alien, the long neck, the carnivore’s claws.
Three Seagrass said, hurriedly, “I don’t think this is a good idea, Mahit!” but Mahit had her mouth open already, and the shape of the sung-spat noise on her tongue was the pidgin word for stop. For no, or cease, or stay away.
Don’t kill us.
There was a heatstruck silence.
Third lifted a claw—its hands were so delicate under those claws, and Mahit thought they were retractable, that they’d fold back for precision work—and did not rip Mahit open. Nor did it sing anything back to her. Instead it drew another human outline next to the eviscerated one. And another. And another. And another. As if to say, But you can make more of you.
How wide, after all, could the concept of “you” stretch?
Could it be as wide as a species?
On her other side, Twenty Cicada—his bald head gold-gone-angry-pink in the sun, his cheeks a sallow grey, heat-drained—sighed softly. “All right,” he said. “Enough of this.”
“What?” Mahit began, confused. But he had already produced his box of fungi, his box of maybe-poison, and held it out for both Third and Fourth to see. Held it like a prize, or like a challenge.
He pointed to the box. The alien eyes fixed on it like it had the gravitational pull of a black hole. And then he pointed to what Mahit had drawn. The dead human, torn up, wrecked. He shook the cube. The whitish fungus inside, dried to nothing now, rattled. The sound was too loud. (Were there no insects on Peloa-2? Was there really nothing here but silica sand and sunlight?)
The soundless communication passed between Third and Fourth, that impenetrable language again. They opened their mouths and sang, together, a bone-rattling noise, a wave of nausea. Mahit recognized something of the sound pattern she and Three Seagrass had identified as victory. But shifted. Made otherwise. She was so lost. She couldn’t talk to these things—these people, they were people, she had to keep thinking of them as people even as she tried not to vomit up everything in her stomach—without language. If she was a poet
(you should have been Teixcalaanli, what a poet you would have made)
a poet like Three Seagrass, then all of the vast weight of Teixcalaan had sent the wrong sort of storytellers here. What good was poetry now?
One of the escorts was talking to Three Seagrass, rapid and hushed. In Teixcalaanli, and for one terrifying moment, Mahit didn’t know language at all—all syllables were useless sounds.
<Breathe,> said Yskandr, in her mind, like he had before. But this time he said it in Stationer, the language she’d drunk in with her first breaths of oxygen, and it snapped meaning back into place for her. Sounds had meaning. Words were symbols. She could think in language again.
Three Seagrass touched her, her fingers on the underside of Mahit’s wrist. “We have to leave,” she said, and Mahit had to work to parse it. To hear words in Teixcalaanli that weren’t all narrative, all implication. We have to become absent, we have to excise ourselves from here.
“What?” she managed, again, useless interrogative particle.
“Her Brilliance. The Emperor. Nineteen Adze, She wants us to send her a message. Both of us. Now. On Weight for the Wheel. The courier’s waiting.”
“We can’t,” Mahit said. “We’re—they’re not—”
Behind her, Third and Fourth were approaching Twenty Cicada. Circling him. He stood perfectly still, holding his box of fungal death. Perfectly calm. Mahit wondered if that was what being a homeostat-cultist meant. Not minding being about to die via enormous predatory enemies.
A claw tapped the box, once. The click of keratin on plastic.
<Nineteen Adze wouldn’t ask for us if she didn’t need us,> Yskandr said inside Mahit’s mind, and with that came all of his certainty that Nineteen Adze was worth the absurd, agonizing, death-inducing amount of trouble she’d gotten him into, back when he was alive. All of his certainty that he’d loved her, and that it didn’t matter in the end, and he’d loved her even so.
“Go on,” said Twenty Cicada, strange and distant. “Take the shuttle and our escorts. I’ll be all right here, I think.”
“What are you going to do?” Mahit said.
“I’m going to bring them back a little piece of their dead,” said Twenty Cicada, still not moving at all. “And then see if they understand anything about why I did. Go.”
Third was drawing in the light again. A fractal shape, like the fungus. A shape that it laid over the image Mahit had made of an eviscerated human body.
“I don’t know what’s right,” said Three Seagrass. “But Nineteen Adze sent me here—or at least she didn’t stop me, and—she’s the Emperor.”
And Yskandr echoed: <She’s the Emperor. And this adjutant can take care of himself here. Even if he can’t sing.>
“Don’t—die?” Mahit said, uselessly. She didn’t even like Twenty Cicada.
“Everyone dies eventually,” Twenty Cicada said, Fourth’s maw inches from his face.
Mahit thought, Everyone dies, except memory—and then turned to follow Three Seagrass back to the shuttle, and the Fleet, and Teixcalaan, waiting.
They’d left Twenty Cicada down in the desert with the enemy. Nine Hibiscus hated it, hated it viscerally, and she couldn’t exactly argue with the decision. Especially since the envoy and Dzmare (the spook and her pet, and oh, sometimes she’d really like to excise all of Sixteen Moonrise’s turns of phrase from her mind) had brought back with them the sworn promise that it had been Swarm himself who demanded to stay.
It was so exactly like him she believed it. It was precisely the same kind of deliberate use of the self in possible sacrifice as he’d done behind the sealed doors of the medbay, waiting to see if he’d die of breathing fungal spores.
She hated it anyway. She could wish her adjutant—her dearest friend, her longest friend—was less interested in keeping the whole world—the whole empire, the universe—in balance and more interested in selfishly saving his own skin. For her sake, if nothing else.
While the envoy and Dzmare went to answer their urgent imperial communiqué, supervised by Two Foam, Nine Hibiscus took an hour of leave from the bridge. (She was owed nine, but who needed nine hours of sleep?) She didn’t go back to her quarters. She went to Twenty Cicada’s, straightaway, and—he still hadn’t changed the password, of course. The door let her in.