There was an autoplay message rotating in holo above the work terminal he usually kept tucked away in a corner. It read, in the perfectly neat glyph-style that Twenty Cicada wrote in: Mallow, if I’m not here, water the plants and feed the star-cursed Kauraanian kitten.
She was not going to burst into tears. That was a fail-safe message, not a goodbye.
Nevertheless, she watered the plants. And when watering the plants revealed said star-cursed Kauraanian kitten, who had been sleeping in one of the plant pots like a strange void-black root vegetable—a root vegetable that yowled at her when she poured water on it by accident—she fed it, too. There were small bits of vat-meat for it, which it seemed to enjoy.
She was still feeding it—it had come to sit on her knee, and purr, and eat vat-meat from her fingers, which was unfairly cute—when her cloudhook alerted her to a priority message, sent on the command-only broadcast band. She played it, without thinking. All messages on that band needed to be heard.
This one resolved into Sixteen Moonrise, her image flooding one half of Nine Hibiscus’s vision while the other half stayed clear. She wasn’t on Weight for the Wheel any longer. She was on her own bridge, on the Parabolic Compression. Nine Hibiscus knew she should feel relieved, but she didn’t. Not in the slightest. She petted the Kauraanian kitten so it would stop yowling for meat (which only partially worked), and listened.
Yaotlek, said Sixteen Moonrise, on her distant flagship. I feel it is incumbent upon me—considering that you are my superior officer, however much we disagree with one another, and also considering that you are aware of the terrible capabilities of our enemies, both in their ships and in their bodies—to inform you that I have learned what I am sure you already know: one of your scouts has found one of the enemy’s home systems. Don’t blame your officers. They were entirely closed-mouthed. But the Twenty-Fourth Legion is just as clever as the Tenth, and when the Gravity Rose altered its trajectory and search pattern to fly home right through my legion—it became obvious that they had found what we are all looking for. I have confirmed, with my own scouts, what the Gravity Rose found.
I am preparing a strike force. I am willing, if you are willing to offer me the command, to lead it: the Parabolic Compression beside Weight for the Wheel, cutting through our enemy so that we might get close enough to burn them all out of the sky. Sanitize what might infect us; what will, undoubtedly, eat us.
I understand that you may wish to wait for your negotiators to return from their negotiation. I too, will wait. For a time.
My yaotlek, I would rather die ending this war before it leaches Teixcalaan of vitality than live through a long siege of attrition. I think you would, too. And besides, you are the hero of Kauraan: perhaps we’ll all make it through alive.
The message ended. The other half of Nine Hibiscus’s vision resolved to Twenty Cicada’s garden of a suite.
“Ah, bleeding fucking stars,” she said. The Kauraanian kitten looked at her, offended, and leapt off of her lap.
When the Emperor’s ezuazuacat sent a message on fast-courier, it went even more quickly than when the Fleet sent one. Five and a half hours, Five Agate had said. Five and a half to get the request and Eight Antidote’s list of questions to the flagship Weight for the Wheel, and then however long it took to record an answer, and five and a half hours back. She’d sent him to bed while they waited. He’d resented that, but he’d also guessed he’d deserved it: he’d gone out into the City, and had to be rescued, and there was the ever-present wondering of signal problem or incendiary device running through his head. He’d asked Five Agate if she’d heard from the Judiciary, and she’d told him to go to bed more firmly instead of answering, which either meant she hadn’t or she had and it was the bad answer. The incendiary device answer.
But Eight Antidote had gone, and slept, was glad he didn’t dream at all. He was sure he’d have dreamed of train derailments, if he had.
The message to the envoy was supposed to come back to Palace-Earth by noon the next day, but it didn’t. It didn’t come back by dinner, either, and Eight Antidote picked desultorily at his spiced livers-and-cheese in their lily-blossom wraps, even though he loved fried flowers normally. He was too nervous to eat. Everything seemed to be spinning just fractionally faster than he could keep track of. No one would tell him about the subway, and he didn’t know how to get his cloudhook to give him more useful information than what anybody could find out on the newsfeeds.
He had to stop watching the newsfeeds, after a while. Seeing the smoke come out of the subway tunnel was making him feel sick.
It wasn’t until just after sunset that Five Agate sent him an infofiche stick in the internal palace mail, asking him to come and see the answers to the questions he had asked. To see, apparently, not only Special Envoy Three Seagrass, but also Mahit Dzmare. Eight Antidote wondered if the fact that the message had both of them was a sign that Fleet Captain Sixteen Moonrise’s message of warning had been correct—Information was compromised by the Ambassador from Lsel Station. Or if Three Azimuth had been correct: Mahit Dzmare disrupted protocol and the right functioning of the world wherever she was, whether she meant to or not.
When he got to the Emperor’s suite, Five Agate was waiting for him on one of those white velvet couches. She wasn’t alone. She patted the seat beside her, which meant Eight Antidote was going to watch this holo with the Emperor Herself sitting on his left and Five Agate on his right. Five Agate’s child, Two Cartograph, who had made it very clear to Eight Antidote that he was seven years old, a whole indiction, and wasn’t going to go to bed until he wanted to, was reading a mathematics textbook, sprawled out on his belly on the Emperor’s tile floor. Eight Antidote didn’t think he’d ever done that, when his ancestor-the-Emperor had lived here. He didn’t think he’d ever been that comfortable doing it.
Five Agate asked him—or asked Her Brilliance, it was hard to tell—“Shall we hear what Three Seagrass has to say for herself?” and played the holo before she got an answer from either of them.
It wasn’t just Envoy Three Seagrass. It was her, and Mahit Dzmare right beside her.
On the holo, both of them looked very tired, and sweaty, and not happy at all. They were in a small room with metal walls and a window. The holo didn’t pick up much of the starfield that should have been outside that window, but Eight Antidote could guess what it looked like. He couldn’t see if there was anyone else there, listening to them make this recording, but from where they’d both put their eyes—Dzmare kept glancing to her left, and Three Seagrass was very deliberately not looking left at all—he thought there was probably someone. Someone who made at least Dzmare nervous.