Our? Mahit thought, startled—and didn’t ask. Watched.
Nineteen Adze’s servants reappeared as if they’d merely been waiting for a signal; one clearing away the tea service, another—the same one who had brought Mahit to the shower, Five Agate—surrounding herself with her own arc of holographs. Returning to the work, now that her boss was finished with extracting the sensitive information from the hostage. Nineteen Adze said, “Summarize it, Five Agate, and get me the Sunlit’s reports on the survivor interviews,” and Five Agate made an elegantly abbreviated version of one of the gestures for acquiescence.
“Mahit,” Nineteen Adze went on, just as if she was one of her servants—her apprentices, perhaps, that was better, more accurate—“what did you intend to ask Fifteen Engine about? Your meeting with him was the most public he’d been since he retired. He moved out of the palace and practically vanished into the outer boroughs. He looked like he was living quietly, even if he was dissatisfied with the direction in which His Brilliance the Emperor was taking us.”
That must be what she’d meant, earlier, when she’d talked about Odile—Fifteen Engine being unsatisfied with how the Odile insurrection, whatever it was, was being handled. Mahit said, “I intended to ask him about how Yskandr died.”
“Anaphylaxis due to allergies.”
“Really,” Mahit said.
“Suspicion will certainly serve you well at court,” Nineteen Adze said, perfectly straight-faced. Behind her busy screens, Five Agate might have snickered.
“We’ve been so direct with each other so far,” Mahit said, daring a little. “I had to make an attempt.”
Nineteen Adze flicked her wrist, vanishing one set of holographs and calling up another. “I don’t know the precise physiological process that killed him. The ixplanatl’s report said allergies.”
“For someone with your illustrious career at this court, Your Excellency, I would have assumed you’d be more suspicious.”
Nineteen Adze laughed. “I do like you, Ambassador. I think Yskandr would also have.”
That hurt to think about, in a way Mahit hadn’t expected. A sort of loss she hadn’t thought to expect, to go along with missing the Yskandr she did know. Not every link in an imago-sequence knew their predecessor personally, but it was always considered a sort of honor if one had—if a person had been chosen, not just come up all green on the aptitude tests and the practical exams. She’d thought that she didn’t care: she was going to be an ambassador, she was significant and necessary, and of course it’d never be personal for her, hardly anyone came back to Lsel from Teixcalaan, and all her aptitudes had been aimed at getting her to the City even before she knew whose imago she’d receive or if she’d even earn one at all.
But all the same, she wished she could have met the Yskandr who had been embodied here, whose corpse she had been presented with. And she missed home, missed planetrise above the Station, and being clever and ambitious and not responsible yet, talking to Shrja Torel and her other friends in the ninth-tier station bars, imagining what they might do and not actually having to do it.
All she said was, “We are carefully selected for compatibility with our predecessors, yes.”
“Did Fifteen Engine like you, then?” Nineteen Adze asked. “If you’re that compatible.” Mahit thought she might be amused, or that interest was close enough to amusement for her that the two had become essentially indistinguishable.
“No,” she said. “I asked too many questions, while simultaneously failing to be the person he worked with twenty years ago, before he retired. Did you like Fifteen Engine?”
“He was secretive, combative, and deeply connected to several patrician families that have little taste for me. During his tenure in Information he was often a thorn pricking my thumb. I was glad he retired, though I found it suspicious and still do—but he’d been quiet after his retirement. On the surface, at least. I will attend his memorial out of respect for a good opponent, an erstwhile drinking companion, and a former friend of my friend, the former Lsel Ambassador.”
She paused, and looked directly at Mahit, expressionless, like a dark glass wall. Her cloudhook glowed in her eye. “Does that count for like, on Lsel?”
“Close enough,” said Mahit. Of course Yskandr would be sufficiently charming to collect friends both assigned and attracted, and keep both kinds even when they weren’t to each other’s taste. “Who benefits from Fifteen Engine’s death, ezuazuacat?”
“Anyone who didn’t want you to know Yskandr’s old friends,” Nineteen Adze said, calling up a fresh infograph and annotating it with rapid small shifts of her fingertips, forming a list of word-glyphs in the surface of the air. “But more likely: anyone who wants people who quietly speak out against imperial methods of quelling insurrection to stop thus speaking. Or someone attempting to foment public fear, of which there is a great deal lately, much encouraged by incidents like this one and the anti-imperial activists who claim responsibility for them. So who benefits—what an interesting way of phrasing it, Mahit. Add half the ezuazuacatlim, particularly Thirty Larkspur, who’d like to shut down any trade which doesn’t come from a system where his family has an economic interest, and will take xenophobia as a happy excuse to do so, and xenophobia is easily stoked when Teixcalaanlitzlim get exploded while at lunch … oh, and you. If you wanted to eliminate your predecessor’s allies in order to take a radically new position on Teixcalaan–Lsel diplomatic relations.”
“I didn’t set that bomb,” said Mahit, trying to remember Odile and Thirty Larkspur, trying to remember public fear—commit them to memory now, so that later she could hold the whole puzzle up in her mind, spin it, look for how it fit together.
“Did I say I thought you did, Mahit?” said Nineteen Adze, and there was that weight of her attention again, the intimation of sympathetic total intimacy. Mahit imagined her and Yskandr in bed, a flash of possible-memory that might just have been desire. Skin on skin. Something more than a political friendship. (Would it matter, if they had? Mahit had no intention of—not that she wouldn’t, Nineteen Adze was—)
“If I might interrupt, Your Excellency,” Five Agate broke in, to Mahit’s considerable relief. “But you should look at the feeds from Plaza Central Seven.”
Nineteen Adze lifted both eyebrows. “Shove them over here, then,” she said. Five Agate did, with a broad sweep of her palm that caught the trailing edge of one of her infographs and sent it sailing over to Nineteen Adze’s workspace. Nineteen Adze caught it through a combination of hand and eye gestures, positioned it, expanded its borders until it hung like a window in midair. Mahit stepped closer, standing at Nineteen Adze’s left elbow like Five Agate stood at her right.
Plaza Central Seven, rendered in transparency from some high-up camera—planted by Nineteen Adze’s agents? By the Emperor? The Sunlit? Or did the City itself watch itself?—looked much like Plaza Central Nine, if less grand by an order of magnitude. It had the same spread-petal shape that Mahit now knew could unfold into barrier walls; it was lined with shops and restaurants and what she suspected was either a government building or a public theater, from its size and from the statues arrayed in front of it. It was also full of Teixcalaanlitzlim.