She hoped she’d gotten the damned epithet right.
The Sunlit officer said, “One moment, Ambassador,” and turned to the others. Their faceplate-cloudhooks glowed blue and white and red under the gold-tone reflective mirror surface that hid their faces from view as they talked to one another on some private channel.
One of them came back over to her. It wasn’t the same one who had been speaking before, Mahit was nearly sure. “We will be making contact with the ezuazuacat’s office. If you would be patient.”
“I can wait,” she said. “But I would appreciate if you would also make contact with an ambulance for my liaison.” Now she remembered the word. It was good to know that years of vocabulary drill and diplomatic training would kick in when she needed them, even if she was soot-stained and covered in mostly-dried blood. Now she just had to hope that Nineteen Adze wanted her—wanted Yskandr, more truthfully, wanted whatever Yskandr had promised her—enough to claim precedence over a military commander who could control the City’s police.
It was probably best not to think about whether Nineteen Adze had been the one to arrange for the bomb. Not yet. One problem at a time.
That second Sunlit slipped back into the whole group of them. Mahit lost which one it was—she concentrated on standing quite still, on holding up Three Seagrass, on keeping her face expressionless and displeased at once by remembering how Yskandr could transform her mouth into a withering sneer of imperial-style contempt just by shifting the wideness of her eyes. She waited, and imagined she was invincible, like the First Emperor clawing her way off-planet or Three Seagrass’s beloved Eleven Lathe, philosophizing amongst aliens—and wasn’t she just. Doing that. Right here. The minutes droned on. The Sunlit conversed with each other through their faceplates. Three Seagrass made a nearly intelligible what? sound and buried her face in Mahit’s shoulder, which was almost sweet.
The first Sunlit, or an indistinguishable Sunlit from that first, made a gesture to the others. They dispersed into the remains of the crowd, talking in low voices, taking statements from the bystanders. Mahit took it as a good sign: they weren’t going to subdue her by brute force.
“An ambulance has been called,” the Sunlit said.
“I will wait until it arrives before keeping my appointment with the ezuazuacat.”
There was a pause; Mahit imagined that the Sunlit’s expression under that faceplate was quite annoyed, and felt pleased at the imagining.
“You may wait,” the officer said, “and then we will escort you to the ezuazuacat’s office ourself. It would be inappropriate for you to use public transportation at this time. Many of the subways are in fact closed, and service has been suspended in this sextant during our investigation.”
“I do appreciate the investment of your personal time,” Mahit said.
“We do not have personal time. There’s no inconvenience.”
The Sunlit use of the first-person plural was unusual and slightly disconcerting. That last “we” ought to have grammatically been an “I,” with the singular form of the possessing verb. Someone could write a linguistics paper, for girls on stations to gush over late on sleepshift—
It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t happen. The ambulance was arriving, a sleek grey bubble of a vehicle, flashing with white lights and a sharp piercing high note, repeated as a siren. It disgorged medical ixplanatlim in their scarlet tunics. None of them were Yskandr’s morgue attendant, and Mahit was glad of it. They took Three Seagrass away from her with gentle hands and were reassuring about her recovery prospects. City-strikes happened all the time, they said. More now than a few years ago. It was just neurostunning, a mistake in the wiring, a fluctuation in the numbers of the enormous algorithmic AI that ran the City’s autonomic functions.
“Are you ready to go, Ambassador?” said her Sunlit.
Mahit wished she could get a message to Nineteen Adze: something along the lines of incoming with police escort, terribly sorry, hope you enjoy political mess, if I don’t show up I’ve been disappeared, but she couldn’t quite think of how she’d manage to do it.
“I wouldn’t want to be late,” she said.
CHAPTER FIVE
Before the Teixcalaanlitzlim broke orbit in force—while we were still bound to a single resource-diminished planet, studded with what cities we were able to scrounge out of steppe and desert and salt-laden water, but nevertheless a shell we had outgrown—before the First Emperor took us into the black and found for us the paradise which would become the City—it was common practice for leaders of men and women to select from amongst their closest companions a sworn band, tied together with blood sacrifice: the best and most trustworthy friends, the most necessary compatriots, who would if necessary spill all their veins into the cup of an emperor’s hands. And these sworn companions were called the ezuazuacatlim, as they are today, when their reach extends the emperor’s will throughout the stars. The first ezuazuacat to the First Emperor was called One Granite, and her life begins as follows: she was born to the spear and the horse, and did not know the city nor the spaceport …
… the Council shall be comprised of no less than six (6) Councilors, who each receive one vote on matters of substance, with ties being broken by the Councilor for the Pilots, in recognition of that Councilor’s symbolic representation of the initial Captain-Pilot who led the stations into Bardzravand Sector. The Councilors shall be appointed in the following ways: for the Councilor for the Pilots, an election by single vote amongst active and retired pilots; for the Councilor for Hydroponics, appointment by the previous Councilor for Hydroponics, or if such a member is deceased, by their will, or if no will exists, by general popular vote amongst the people of Lsel Station; for the Councilor for Heritage, the inheritor of the previous Councilor’s imago …
NO one disappeared her.
The trip back to the palace in the passenger seat of the Sunlit’s vehicle was anticlimactic enough, after the rest of the morning, that Mahit had time to feel shaky and exhausted with spent adrenaline. She wanted very much to shut her eyes, rest her head against the lightly padded seatback, and stop thinking or reacting or trying very hard at all. If she did that, this Sunlit—and possibly every other Sunlit, she’d have to ask Twelve Azalea, or someone else who collected peculiar medical facts, about them if she ever got a chance to—would know she was doing it. So she sat very straight and watched out the window ahead of her as they rose vertically through the levels of the City. The buildings thinned, became more elaborate, more tightly strung together with bridges made of gold-shot glass and steel, until they were back in the palace complex and Mahit almost knew where she was. Not well enough to give directions, but perhaps well enough to not get entirely lost on her own.
Her Sunlit stuck to her elbow all the way through two plazas and a mess of corridors inside the largest building in Palace-North, a rose-grey semitranslucent cube that hunkered on itself like a glowing fortress and bustled with grey-suited Teixcalaanlitzlim, shading to pink or to white for symbolic reasons Mahit couldn’t entirely discern without her imago’s help. They watched her with expressions of bemused interest, which she assumed she deserved: she was still covered in Fifteen Engine’s blood. What Nineteen Adze, in her perfect whites, would think, Mahit neither knew nor particularly cared.