“Domestic terrorism is perceived threat,” Three Seagrass said.
“So are rumors of impending war,” said Nineteen Adze.
Three Seagrass nodded. “The situation in Odile—the troop movements lately—everyone knows someone in the fleet, and everyone in the fleet knows the fleet is mobilizing.”
“Even so,” Mahit interjected, thinking again Odile, thinking the Empire is less stable than it seems, “I didn’t know you held One Lightning’s shouting partisans in such high esteem—they can’t force the yaotlek to begin a war, just wish he’d already had one to celebrate.” When Nineteen Adze nodded to her, acknowledging the point, she was savagely pleased—pleased, and then angry at herself for being pleased. Nineteen Adze was using her; was using the both of them to think through the politics aloud. They weren’t her retinue.
They were her guests. Her hostages. And how many stories, in Teixcalaanli literature, described the fate of children traded to one court or another before the Empire, one system to another within the Empire, hostages and guests both, made Teixcalaanli enough and then discarded when it was politically expedient. Enough that Mahit should stop trying to impress the ezuazuacat. There wasn’t a point. There was the narrative which said she was being used—
Three Seagrass had no such qualms. “A blood death in a temple was how we used to ensure the success of a war, Mahit,” she said. “One death from every regiment, hand-selected by the yaotlek. No one does it anymore. Not for hundreds of years. It’s terribly selfish, for one citizen to take away the responsibility of calling on the favor of the stars from everyone else.”
“Selfish” wasn’t how Mahit would have described it. She’d say “barbaric,” if she was speaking a language where that would be an intelligible sequence of words to describe a Teixcalaanli religious practice.
“What I’d like to know,” she said, “is where the war will be, considering those troop movements that Three Seagrass mentioned.” Some of those troop movements were detailed in those unsigned-but-sealed documents that had been in her initial pile of infofiche: requests to move Teixcalaanli warships through the Lsel jumpgates, on the way to somewhere.
“You’re not alone in wondering,” said Nineteen Adze. “His Brilliance has been remarkably closemouthed about his current thinking on that matter.” She looked pointedly at Three Seagrass, as if she was a synecdoche for all of the secrets held by the Information Ministry, and might have an opinion.
“Your Excellency, even if I knew where His Brilliance had decided Teixcalaan was next looking to expand, I couldn’t say. I’m an asekreta.”
Nineteen Adze spread her hands wide, one palm-up, one palm-down, like a set of scales. “But the Empire expands. First principles, asekreta, not to mention evidence. So there is a where.”
“There is always a where, Your Excellency.”
A where and a why now. Mahit thought she knew the why now—the uncertainty around Six Direction’s succession. Three equal associated-heirs, each with their own agenda—and one a child who was too young to have an agenda—was no stable mode of government. Something would have to bend; Thirty Larkspur or Eight Loop would emerge with the chief share of authority, or declare themselves regent for the ninety-percent clone, or—
Or One Lightning would declare himself Emperor by right of conquest and public acclamation.
(And somewhere in the midst of it, Yskandr had tried to intervene—she knew him too well to think he could have left this alone. She was turning it over and over, like tumbling a stone inside her mouth, and Yskandr was more political than she was. More political and more dead. The inheritor of an imago-line was supposed to learn from her predecessor’s mistakes.)
“Perhaps we’ll find out at the banquet tomorrow,” Mahit said.
“We’ll find out something,” Three Seagrass replied, with some of that same brittle delight Mahit had heard in her voice earlier. “And as long as I don’t actually get you blown up this time—”
Nineteen Adze laughed. “Of course you both are attending.”
“Yes, Your Excellency,” said Three Seagrass. “The Ambassador was invited. And I wouldn’t miss one.”
“Certainly not. Are you presenting a composition?”
“My work is in no way the equal of someone like Two Calendar,” Three Seagrass said, theatrically self-deprecating in her comparison to the poet whose work was providing the mail decryption cipher this month, “and more importantly I’m not at the banquet as an orator, but as Mahit’s cultural liaison.”
“The sacrifices work asks of us,” said Nineteen Adze. Mahit couldn’t tell if she was joking.
“Will we see you there?” Three Seagrass inquired.
“Naturally. You both can join me on the walk to Palace-Earth tomorrow evening.”
When Mahit, envisioning the political statement that entering the banquet in Nineteen Adze’s company would make, opened her mouth to protest, Nineteen Adze gestured to cut her off and said, “Ambassador, the City is quite disturbed. I have plenty of guest space. Did you really think you would be leaving?”
INTERLUDE
AGAIN, the vast reach of space: the void and the pinpoint brilliantine stars. Ignore the map; leave it behind. No maps are adequate for what has happened here, at the Anhamemat Gate in Lsel Station’s sector of space. Surrounding the discontinuity which marks the existence of the jumpgate—that small stretch of unseeable space, the place the eye and the instrumentation glance off of—there is wreckage. Some ships have died here, along with their pilots. Some ships have been killed here.
The thing which has killed them is vast, and shaped like a wheel within a wheel within a wheel; it has tripartite spin and a sleek dark grey metallic sheen, and a sort of intelligence. Enough for hunger, at least. That the dead ships attest to: hunger and violence. What they do not attest to is an intelligence that can be spoken to or negotiated with. Not yet. As of yet, what Lsel Station has learned from the predator beyond the Anhamemat Gate is how to run. The last ship to see it has made it all the way back to the Station, and not led it after them, either: if it hunts, it does not chase prey back to the den. It has some other purpose for the ships it kills with such impunity.
Dekakel Onchu, Councilor for the Pilots, sits in the medical facility across from the pilot who has seen that hunting thing: he is being very thoroughly examined by a doctor, but he has the wherewithal to tell Onchu exactly what he saw, three times. She makes him repeat it three times. She will need to remember every word. She will remember also the drawn horror in her man’s face, how the shadows under his eyes have spread in deep pools. She knew this man—Pilot Jirpardz—before he was himself; she knew also the imago he carried, a brave woman named Vardza Ndun. Vardza Ndun, who had trained Onchu herself, before she died and gave her memories to the imago-line that Jirpardz inherited. Onchu is having trouble imagining anyone even partially made up of Vardza Ndun being this frightened, and that frightens her. (It frightens as well Onchu’s own imago, long-absorbed into an echo-flicker of warmth and a voice she thinks of as her better self, her better reflexes—the man who taught her not to fly but to soar through space, who knew his ship like he knew his own body, and who gave to her that skill. Now she feels him like a spasm, an ache of upset in her gut: gravity’s wrong, something is out of phase.)