They took the subway out of the palace complex. Three Seagrass led Mahit down four levels and across a plaza swirling with lower-level functionaries in pale cream with no red patrician shading on their suits—tlaxlauim, Three Seagrass explained, accountants, they travel in swarms—before descending into the station she claimed would take them out of the palace complex and into the City itself. Someone had plastered the walls of the subway entrance with what looked to Mahit like political posters: the Teixcalaanli battle flag, a fan of spears against a starry backdrop, rendered in lurid red and with its spears turned into part of a graffiti-style glyph that Mahit had to peer at to decipher. It might have been the word for “rot,” but she wasn’t sure. “Rot” had fewer lines than six.
“Those’ll be taken down by the time we get back,” Three Seagrass said, plucking at Mahit’s sleeve to redirect her down the stairs. “Someone will call for maintenance. Again.”
“Not your favorite … political party?” Mahit guessed.
“I,” said Three Seagrass, “am an impartial observer from the Ministry of Information, and have no opinions at all about the sort of people who like putting up anti-imperial propaganda posters in public spaces and then don’t bother to participate in local government or apply to take the examinations and join the civil service.”
“Is there a lot of that going around?”
“There’s always a lot of that going around; it’s only the posters that change,” said Three Seagrass. “These ones aren’t holographic, which is sort of a pleasant difference—not walking through them.” At the bottom of the staircase was a sleek train platform, its walls decorated—where there weren’t more posters—with mosaic-tile images of roses in a hundred colors, shading white to gold to shocking pink.
“This is Palace-East Station,” Three Seagrass explained. “There are six stations in the palace complex—six for the cardinal points of the compass, except flat.” She gestured at the subway’s map, where the palace complex appeared as a six-pointed star. “It’s more symbolic than practical, considering that you get off at Palace-Earth for the imperial apartments and cosmology says it ought to be Palace-Sky.”
“What’s at Palace-Sky?” Mahit asked. The train carriage, when it came, was as spartan and clean-lined as the spaceport had been, full of Teixcalaanlitzlim in white. Most of them looked like the Teixcalaanlitzlim in paintings and photographs—brown and short with wide cheekbones and broad chests—but there were people from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds, all kinds of planetary systems. She even thought she’d spotted a freefall mutant, all long limbs and codominant pallor and red hair and exoskeleton to hold him upright under gravity. But all of the subway riders were dressed the same, save for the colors on their cream sleeves that indicated what branch of the civil service they belonged to. All employees of the palace, of the City. All Teixcalaanli, more so than she’d ever be, no matter how much poetry she memorized. She held on to a metal pole as the train began to move, at first hurtling through a dark tunnel and then emerging into the open air of an elevated track. The City swept by through the windows, buildings blurring.
“Archives, the Ministry of War, and the Imperial Censor Office,” said Three Seagrass, answering her earlier question.
“That’s not wrong, cosmologically.”
“What an opinion you have of what we send out into the universe,” Three Seagrass said.
“Literature, conquest, and things that are forbidden. Isn’t that accurate?”
The doors hissed open; half the Teixcalaanlitzlim exited. The ones who got on in their place were more colorfully dressed; some were children. The smallest children stared at Mahit unabashed, and their minders—parents or clonesibs or crèche caretakers, it was hard to tell—did little to redirect their attention. They all stood well back from Mahit and Three Seagrass, despite the crowdedness of the carriage, and Mahit wondered about touch-taboo, about xenophobia. When Yskandr had been here—when imago-Yskandr had been here, so, fifteen years ago—there hadn’t been obvious avoidance of physical interaction with foreigners, and it wasn’t in any of the cultural context she knew for Teixcalaan.
Changes in comfort levels with strangers were indicative of insecurity; she knew that from the very basic training in psychological response that all Lsel citizens had as part of their aptitude testing. Something had changed in the City, and she didn’t know what.
“We took the Palace-East line and we’re headed to Plaza Central Nine,” Three Seagrass said, shrugging, as if that was an answer to what Mahit had asked, and pointed out the interlocking subterranean lines on the carriage’s wall map. The subway laced through the City like ice crystals on a pane of glass: a fractal merging of multiple lines, an impossible complexity. And yet the Teixcalaanlitzlim used it with impunity and ease; there had been a precisely calibrated countdown clock on the platform, saying when their train would arrive, and that countdown clock had been correct.
Plaza Central Nine had more people than Mahit had ever seen in one place. Every time she thought she understood the scale of the Jewel of the World she realized she was wrong. There were no points of useful comparison with Lsel. Lsel—the largest of the ten stations—could support at most thirty thousand lives. There were a quarter that many Teixcalaanlitzlim moving through this singular plaza, uncontrolled, unguided by corridor-lines or shifting gravitational field strength, going wherever they wished. If there was an organizing principle to their movement it was something out of fluid dynamics, which had never been Mahit’s area of educational expertise.
Three Seagrass was an exemplary guide. She hovered at Mahit’s left elbow, close enough that no curious Teixcalaanli could take it into their heads to approach the barbarian foreigner with inopportune questions, but far enough to preserve a modicum of Mahit’s personal space. She pointed out architectural features and points of historical interest, falling automatically into polysyllabic couplets when she wasn’t paying enough attention not to. Mahit envied her that effortless fluidity of referents.
In the center of the plaza the bright steel and gold and glass of the buildings peeled outward like the petals of a flower, revealing a burst of bright blue atmospheric sky. Mahit made Three Seagrass pause in the direct center so she could tilt her whole upper spine back and look at it. The vault of it, dizzying—endless—it seemed to spin. She was the center of the world and—
—her hand bleeding bright red into the gold sun of the ritual bowl (his, not her, Yskandr’s hand), the sky shaped like this, a vault glimmering with so many stars as he looked up at it through the petal-explosion roof of a sun temple, and through the sting and the dizzy whirl of the sky he said, “We’re sworn to a purpose, now, you and I—your blood and mine—”
Mahit blinked, hard, and the flash was gone. Her spine hurt from the bending, so she straightened up. Three Seagrass was smiling at her.
“You’re sunstruck,” she said.
(imago-struck)
“I ought to take you to a temple and have a divine throw gold and blood at you. Haven’t you ever been on a planet?”
Mahit swallowed. Her throat was dry, and she could still smell the coppery blood from ago, a scent afterimage. “The sky was never this color on any planet I’ve visited,” she managed. “Don’t we have a meeting to get to? Side trips to religious officials will surely make us late.”