“There you are,” said Nineteen Adze. She sat down across from Mahit and poured the tea into the bowls. “Feeling better?”
“Thank you for your hospitality,” Mahit said. “I do appreciate it.”
“It’d hardly be reasonable of me to expect you to talk before you had a chance to gather yourself back together. From the news coming out of Plaza Central Nine, I imagine you’ve had a traumatic sort of morning.” She picked up her tea and sipped it. “Drink the tea, Mahit.”
“I won’t disparage your hospitality by worrying about poison or drugs.”
“Good! That saves me the time of reassuring you that there are neither, and unless Lsel has vastly changed its conception of human since Yskandr got here, it should also be entirely harmless to you physiologically.”
“We’re still just as human as you,” Mahit said, and drank. The tea was bracing, a bittersweet green flavor that persistently clung to the back of her throat.
“Twenty years is hardly long enough for significant genetic drift, I do agree. And all the other definitions are quite arbitrary, culture to culture.”
“I’m sure you’d like me to ask what Teixcalaan arbitrarily considers inhuman, now.”
Nineteen Adze tapped her index finger against the side of the tea bowl. Her rings clicked, metal on porcelain. “Ambassador,” she said, “I was a friend of your predecessor. Perhaps one of his only friends, though I do hope that wasn’t as true as I suspect. For his sake, I am offering you a conversation. But we can skip to the end, if you’d prefer to forgo the process of building a mutual edifice of common ground.” Her smile, when it came, was that edgeshine-brightness that had gotten into her epithet. “I would like to talk to Yskandr. Either stop pretending to be Mahit Dzmare, or allow him to speak.”
Quite exactly like a knife, Mahit thought.
“With all respect, ezuazuacat, I can’t do either of those things,” she said. “The first is impossible, as I am not pretending to be myself. The second is more complicated than you are suggesting.”
“Is it,” said Nineteen Adze. She pressed her lips together. “Why aren’t you him?”
“On Lsel you’d be a philosopher,” Mahit said, and promptly wished she hadn’t. Even with the formal-respectful “you” she’d used, that was a much too intimate statement in Teixcalaan—but she didn’t know another way of phrasing it which wasn’t the suggestion of selecting a model for allusion and imitation, as Three Seagrass had apparently selected Eleven Lathe.
Nineteen Adze said, “How flattering. Now explain, Mahit Dzmare—I do believe the body you wear was once called that, so it will suit me fine to call you what you like to be called—explain why you are not my friend.”
Mahit put down the bowl of tea and left her hands palm-down on the white linen of her borrowed trousers. Nineteen Adze’s grasp of imago theory was amazingly perverse: the idea that Yskandr would be walking around inside her body, with her own self pushed out or vanished or killed, and only her name remaining to her flesh? The Station didn’t waste its children like that. It was nauseating to contemplate—and reminded her far too much of that moment in the shower, where she hadn’t quite felt like her at all. Not her, and not the combined person she and Yskandr were meant to become, either. “I will,” she said, “but tell me first: was the bomb in Plaza Central Nine for me or for Yskandr?”
“I don’t think it was for either of you,” Nineteen Adze said. “At worst it was for Fifteen Engine, and that’s a conjecture I would not put weight upon. The victims of domestic terrorism are most often suffering from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A mild case of political malaise like Fifteen Engine’s links to the Odile insurrection are hardly a reason for someone to blow him up, especially as our local bomb-throwers tend to be for insurrections,” Nineteen Adze said.
Mahit bit back the question she’d meant to ask Three Seagrass, this morning—the Odile insurrection? What is going on in Odile?—thinking, almost sure, that the ezuazuacat was trying to redirect her. She wouldn’t be redirected, not yet. She could ask about Odile and the local bomb-throwers in good time; she needed to know what Nineteen Adze wanted with her before she could deal with the larger troubles of the City.
Nineteen Adze watched her, took in her silence. And went on. “Which does not answer your question about whether anyone save me knows about your Station’s imago-machines, I know.”
She was too sharp. Too old. How long had she been at court? Decades. Longer than Yskandr. And half that time at least in the perilous innermost circle of the Emperor. Clearly subtle misdirection and leading questions weren’t going to work.
Like a knife, Mahit reminded herself, and tried to be a mirror.
“What did he tell you would happen to him after he died?” she asked.
“That it would be unthinkable of Lsel to not send the next ambassador carrying his imago. That it would be—how did he put it. An unimaginable waste.”
“That sounds like Yskandr,” Mahit said dryly.
“Doesn’t it just? Arrogant man.” Nineteen Adze sipped at her tea. “You do know him, then.”
Mahit lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Less well than I’d like,” she said, which was true even if it was deceptive. “And what did he tell you the next ambassador would be like? When she got to the City, carrying his imago.”
“Young. Not completely informed. Fluent in Teixcalaanli, to an unusual degree for a barbarian. Happy to see his friends again and get back to work.”
“The term we’d use,” Mahit said, “is ‘out of date.’ The Yskandr I know is not the Yskandr you knew.”
“Is that the problem we’re having?”
Mahit exhaled, slowly. “No. It is a very small subset of the possible problems we might have had.”
“It is in fact my job to solve problems, Mahit Dzmare,” Nineteen Adze said, “but I tend to find it easier to do so when I know what they are.”
“The problem,” said Mahit, “is that I don’t trust you.”
“No, Ambassador. That is your problem. Our problem is that I am still not speaking to Yskandr Aghavn, and that, despite his apparent death, the same unrest which is an ongoing problem in my City and which surrounded him—even and unto his more distant contacts, like Fifteen Engine—has surrounded you as well.”
“I don’t know anything about other bombs, if there have been any,” Mahit said. “Or Fifteen Engine’s involvement with the sort of people who’d set them, or the sort of people who’d set them against him.” The same unrest. What had Yskandr done? Though, if she knew that, she might know who had killed him, or at least why he had died. And whether it was the sort of thing which would require retaliation in the form of multiple civilian casualties. That didn’t seem—he’d said sedition, when she asked him what he’d most likely done, before he vanished, but sedition was one thing and meaningless death another and she could not quite imagine sharing sufficient aptitudes to have an imago made from anyone who would accept casual terrorism as a reasonable side effect of political action.
“Bombs in pricey restaurants in the City’s center are an escalation, in my opinion,” said Nineteen Adze. “Other similar incidents have kept themselves to the outer provinces. Thus my conjecture that Fifteen Engine may have gotten himself involved with those sorts of people, to his detriment and eventual dismemberment.”