She catches all the light in the room and bends it around herself.
That didn’t feel like Mahit’s own observation. It had floated up in her mind the way an imago-borne skill would, like knowing how to gesture like a Teixcalaanlitzlim or do multivariable calculus—perfectly natural and perfectly alien to Mahit’s own experiences. She wondered if Yskandr had known this woman and was again angry that he wasn’t here to ask. That he’d absented himself when she needed him, left nothing but these shreds of thought, brief impressions.
Three Seagrass stepped forward and lifted her hands in precise formal greeting, her fingertips just touching, and bowed deeply.
The newcomer did not bother to return the gesture. “How unexpected,” she said. “Here I thought I’d be the only one coming to visit the dead at this hour of night.” She did not seem perturbed.
“May I present the new Ambassador from Lsel Station, Mahit Dzmare,” Three Seagrass said, using the highest formal construction of the phrase, as if they were all standing in the Emperor’s receiving hall instead of a sub-basement of the Judiciary.
“My condolences on the loss of your predecessor, Mahit,” said the woman in white with perfect sincerity.
No one else in the City had called Mahit by her given name without considerable prompting. She felt suddenly exposed.
“Her Excellency, the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze,” Three Seagrass went on, and then murmured, “whose gracious presence illuminates the room like the edgeshine of a knife,” one fifteen-syllable-long participial phrase in Teixcalaanli, as if the woman in white came with her own premade poetic epithet. Perhaps she did. The ezuazuacatlim were the Emperor’s sworn confidantes, his closest advisors and table companions. Millennia ago, when the Teixcalaanli had been planetbound, the ezuazuacatlim had also been his personal war band. It was, according to the histories available on Lsel, a less violent title in recent centuries.
Mahit was not so sure of “less violent,” considering the epithet. She bowed. “I am grateful for Your Excellency’s sympathies,” she said, during the process of bending from the waist and getting upright again, and then pulled herself straight, imagined herself as someone who could loom, perhaps even loom over unfashionably tall Teixcalaanlitzlim with dangerous titles, and asked, “What brings a person of your responsibilities to, as you said, visit the dead?”
“I liked him,” said Nineteen Adze, “and I heard you were going to burn him.”
She came closer. Mahit found herself standing elbow to elbow with her, looking down at the corpse. Nineteen Adze straightened out Yskandr’s head from how it had been turned and pushed back his hair from his forehead with gentle and familiar hands. Her signet ring glinted on her thumb.
“You’ve come to say good-bye,” Mahit said, implying the doubt she genuinely felt. An ezuazuacat did not need to sneak around like a common ambassador and her miscreant asekretim companions, not to look at a corpse. She had some other reason. Something had shifted for her when Mahit had arrived, or when Mahit had informed the ixplanatl that Yskandr’s body should be burnt. She had expected that the presence of a new ambassador would certainly set off some political maneuvering—she wasn’t an idiot—but she hadn’t thought the ripples of disturbance would reach as high as the Emperor’s inner circle. Yskandr, she thought, what were you trying to do here?
“Never good-bye,” Nineteen Adze said. She looked at Mahit sidelong, a brief gap of smiling white visible between her lips. “How impolite, to imagine a permanent farewell for such a distinctive person, let alone a friend.”
Were her hands, so careful on the corpse’s flesh, looking for that same imago-machine Twelve Azalea had noticed? She could be implying that she knew all about the imago process; perhaps she imagined she was even talking to Yskandr, inside Mahit’s body. Too bad for the ezuazuacat that he wasn’t hearing her; too bad for Mahit, too.
“You’ve certainly picked an unusual hour for it,” Mahit said, as neutrally as she could manage.
“Certainly no more unusual than you. And with such fascinating company.”
“I assure Your Excellency,” Twelve Azalea broke in, “that—”
“—that I have brought my cultural liaison and her fellow asekreta here to be witnesses in a Lsel ritual of personal mourning,” Mahit said.
“You have?” said Nineteen Adze. Behind her, Three Seagrass gave Mahit a look which clearly expressed, despite fundamental cultural differences in habitual facial expressions, a chagrined admiration of her nerve.
“I have,” Mahit said.
“How does it work?” Nineteen Adze inquired, in the most formal and delicately polite mode Mahit had ever heard someone use out loud.
Perhaps when Mahit received a fifteen-syllable poetic epithet of her own it would involve following through on initial poor ideas. “It’s a vigil,” she said, inventing as she went. “The successor attends the body of her predecessor for a full half rotation of the station—nine of your hours—in order to commit to memory the features of the person she will become, before those features are rendered to ash. Two witnesses to the vigil are required, which is why I have brought along Three Seagrass and Twelve Azalea. After the vigil the successor consumes whatever of the burnt remains she desires to keep.” As imaginary rituals went, it wasn’t a bad one. Mahit might even have liked to have such a ceremony done as part of the integration process with an imago. If she ever went back to Lsel she might even suggest it. Not that it would have made a difference for her.
“Wouldn’t a holograph do just as well?” Nineteen Adze inquired. “Not to disparage your culture’s habitus. I am merely curious.”
Mahit just bet she was. “The physicality of the actual corpse adds verisimilitude,” she said.
Twelve Azalea made a small, choked noise. “Verisimilitude,” he repeated.
Mahit nodded with solemnity. Apparently she was trusting the asekretim after all, or at least trusting them to not break character. Her heart was racing. Nineteen Adze glanced with undisguised delight between her and Three Seagrass, who looked entirely composed aside from the wideness of her eyes. Mahit was sure that the entire invention was about to come crashing down around her. At least she was already inside the Judiciary; if the ezuazuacat decided to arrest her, there wasn’t all that far to go.
“Yskandr never mentioned such a thing,” Nineteen Adze said, “but he was always reticent about death on Lsel.”
“It’s usually much more private than this,” said Mahit, which was only partially a lie. Death was private except for where it was the beginning of the most intimate contact two people could have.
Nineteen Adze pulled the covering sheet midway up the corpse’s chest, smoothed it once, and stepped away. “You’re so little like him,” she said. “Perhaps the same sense of humor, but that’s all. I’m surprised.”
“Are you?”
“Very.”
“Not all Teixcalaanli are the same, either.”