The message inside was not a spill of Teixcalaanli ideographs rendered in holographic light. Coiled into the stick was a machine-printed slip of semitransparent plastic, and when Mahit pulled it free and spread it out to read, the characters on it were alphabetic: her own alphabet. This message had come from Lsel Station.
And it was not addressed to her. Nor was it addressed to The Ambassador from Lsel to Teixcalaan. It was addressed to Yskandr Aghavn, and dated 227.3.11—the two hundred twenty-seventh day of the third year of the eleventh indiction of the Emperor Six Direction. About three weeks ago.
For Ambassador Aghavn from Dekakel Onchu, Councilor for the Pilots, it began.
If you are receiving this message you have personally queried your electronic database since the request for a new ambassador was delivered to Lsel Station. This message serves as a double warning, from those who would still be your allies on the station which was once your cradle and your home: firstly, someone is trying to replace you at the imperial court. Secondly, your replacement may have been sabotaged; she bears an early imago-recording of you which neither the Councilor for the Pilots nor the Councilor for Hydroponics was able to verify the condition of before integration. She was sponsored by Heritage—and by Miners. Be wary. Onchu for the Pilots suspects Amnardbat for Heritage is behind sabotage if same exists and originates on Lsel. Destroy this communication. Further communication may follow if possible.
The message must have been triggered when she’d accessed the Lsel Ambassador’s electronic database the night before, composing her messages.
Mahit read it twice. Three times, to memorize it—automatic habit, born out of years of knowing how to study Teixcalaanli texts, knowing how to pack a collection of phrases and words into her mind, like a heat-compressed diamond of meaning. If sabotage exists and originates on Lsel. Unable to verify the condition. Your cradle and your home—
She found herself thinking—thinking to not think, thinking to let herself feel and exist through the shock and the distress. Practicalities like a veil over the way her stomach twisted, the way she automatically reached for the comfort of the imago that should have been in her mind and wasn’t, and got that dizzy vertigo again for her trouble. Thought that she was going to have to burn Yskandr’s corpse soon. While she thought she tore the plastic sheet into small pieces, and melted them with the handheld lighter she’d used to melt the sealing wax for the infofiche sticks. She hoped she could burn the corpse with full knowledge of who had killed him. It would be a strange, pale form of justice—but even if he never came back to her, she owed him that much. Most successors knew how their imago-predecessors had died: age, or accident, or illness, any of the thousand small ways a station could kill a person. You couldn’t exact justice on a cancer or a failed airlock. There wasn’t any point. But there was a point in knowing how the last person to hold all the knowledge you held had died, if only so that you could correct the mistake and keep your line alive a little longer, a little better. To stretch the continuity of memory just a bit farther, out on the edges of human space where it feathered away into the black.
Mahit folded the quilt evenly at the foot of the couch she’d slept on, dressed—awkward and in pain when she had to lift her leg higher than the height of the opposite calf—again in the same white borrowed trousers and blouse as yesterday, and considered when she’d begun to feel so strongly about Lsel ethical philosophy. Since her imago had abandoned her, probably. If she was being poetic about it. Since she had come unmoored from one of those long, long lines of memory.
She and her predecessor were never supposed to be enemies. And yet she could still hear Onchu’s message (and when had it been sent? How long had it been waiting for Yskandr—dead Yskandr—to read it, and take care?) echoing like the best poetry: if sabotage exists and originates on Lsel—if she was without her imago because of some sabotage engendered by Aknel Amnardbat—but hadn’t Amnardbat wanted her to be the new ambassador? Hadn’t Amnardbat pushed for her, wanted her presence on Teixcalaan, insisted that she be granted the out-of-date imago of Yskandr to help her? Why would she do that, if she meant for Mahit to lose that imago, to be alone in the Empire, to be cut off from everything? Had she been sent to do harm to Yskandr, or to correct his policies? Or neither one?
It hurt, how much she didn’t know. How alone she was. Hearing a voice from home should have made her feel comforted, even if it was the acerbic voice of the Councilor for the Pilots, but instead Mahit found herself sitting back on the edge of the couch, her head in her hands, still dizzy. The absence of Yskandr in her mind felt like a hole in the world. And now—now she couldn’t trust herself, her own motives—
Be a mirror, she told herself again. Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone. Be as Teixcalaanli as you can, and be as Lsel as you can, and—oh, fuck, breathe. That too.
She breathed. Slowly the dizziness passed off. The sun had just barely risen above the level of the windowsill. Her stomach growled. She was still here. She knew a little less (about what she was meant to do, as Ambassador to Teixcalaan) and a little more (about what might have been done to her, and why, and from where) than she had before she’d read Onchu’s message. She would compensate.
Mahit left the infofiche sticks on which she’d written her replies in the outgoing basket and padded barefoot out into the warren of Nineteen Adze’s office complex. Most of the doors were shut to her—blank panels that wouldn’t budge for any cloudhookless gesture. If only she had Three Seagrass to open doors, she thought, and was bleakly amused at the difference a single day made in how she felt about that necessity. Fifteen minutes of wandering showed her the front office she’d seen yesterday, still empty of everything but dawnlight, all the infographs quiescent. She passed it by, turned left down a new corridor, and waded deeper into unfamiliar territory. Somewhere in this complex—it must be a floor of the building at least—Nineteen Adze slept. Mahit imagined her denned like a giant hunting cat, the sort that was too large to have retractable claws. Her sides rising and falling in huge, even breaths; eyes slit open even asleep.
Oh, but Mahit hadn’t come to the City to be a poet.
(Why had she come—and under whose control—no. Not now.)
She hadn’t come to the City to be trapped inside the home of an ezuazuacat, either, but here she was.
The corridor ended, opening up through a wide archway into a room that must have been on the opposite side of the building from the front office, judging by the dimmer, softer diffusion of morning light. It was clearly a library: all the walls lined with codex-books and infofiche where they weren’t hung with star-charts. On a broad couch in the center, Five Agate sat with her legs folded under her, lotus-fashion. Above her knee she spun a brightly colored holograph of the City’s local solar system, the orbits marked out in glowing-gold arcs and each planet labeled in glyphs Mahit could read from across the room—and standing in front of the holograph, his small hands busy pulling the planets apart and watching them snap back to their appropriate gravitational wells, was a child who couldn’t be more than six.