What frightens her more: just this morning she had news come to her desk from a freighter captain who had docked briefly at Lsel to refuel and take on a cargo of molybdenum, and had just enough time to discreetly inquire if there had been any reports of large, three-ringed ships moving through this sector, like they were moving—like they were massing—in the sector he had come from, three jumpgates away.
It isn’t just Lsel Station’s problem, Onchu thinks, her hand wrapped around Jirpardz’s hand, pressing it in thanks. The freighter captain hadn’t figured out how to talk to the three-ringed devouring ships either. But he was adamant that they weren’t human enough to talk to, and Onchu isn’t entirely sure anything’s not human enough to talk to.
There’s only one other Councilor she can bring this information to and have hope of keeping it secret while they decide what to do with it, and she wishes it was anyone but the one she’s got. She is going to have to speak to Darj Tarats. She needs what allies she can get, even suspicious ones.
Dekakel Onchu is not a conspiracy theorist: she is a practical, experienced woman in her sixth decade, infused with the memory of ten pilots before her, and she thinks she can manage Darj Tarats, even if he is playing games with Teixcalaan, and has been for decades. He sent the Empire an ambassador, and Aghavn had sent back—oh, an open line of trade, which had enriched Lsel—and an open line of imperial culture, flooding back through the jumpgate, which had aligned Lsel more closely with Teixcalaan than ever before. And yet, Tarats—if she gets the man alone, or tipsy and alone—has a vicious, philosophically grounded hatred of Teixcalaan. He is playing some kind of very long game, and Onchu wishes she could have nothing to do with it. But she needs an ally: the Pilots and the Miners have traditionally been allies, from the inception of the Lsel Council. Pilots, Miners, and Heritage. The representatives of the oldest imago-lines, spaceflight and resource extraction, and the representative whose purpose was to guard imago-lines and Lsel culture in general.
Lately, Heritage under Aknel Amnardbat has realigned itself. Not philosophically, Onchu thinks, walking grimly away from the medical facilities and toward her offices, taking the longest loop around the outer edge of the station, just to feel the faint play of gravitational forces against her body. Not philosophically realigned: Amnardbat is as pro-Lsel as anyone Onchu has ever met, and fierce in her defense of it; nor has she made choices of imago-assignment which are disturbing or even unusual. What Onchu has discovered about her is worse than ideological or philosophical differences.
Heritage should never attempt to damage what it is meant to preserve. Onchu believes this, and thus she has sent a warning to Yskandr Aghavn, if he is still capable of receiving warnings: What we have sent to you may be a weapon pointed at you.
But right now, while Aghavn takes his own sweet time in replying, Onchu needs someone to help her deal with what is coming through the Anhamemat Gate, and if Heritage is not to be trusted, Tarats will have to do, games with empire or not.
CHAPTER SEVEN
the heart of our stars is rotten
don’t put weight on it
solidarity with Odile!
[…] while Teixcalaanli literature and media remain a mainstay of the 15–24 age group’s entertainment preferences, this survey also reports large numbers of Lsel youth whose primary reading material is by Lsel or Stationer authors. Particular emphasis should be placed on short fiction, both prose and graphic, distributed in pamphlets or perfect-bound codexes, both of which are easily constructed by every tier’s plastifilm printer. These pamphlets and codexes are often composed by the same people who consume them as entertainment (i.e., the 15–24 age group), without the approval or intervention of the Heritage Board for Literature …
THE fan-vaulted roof of the Palace-Earth ballroom was full of streaming lights: each rib made of some translucent material that a river of gold sparks rushed through. Teardrop chandeliers hung from the apexes, like suspended starlight. The black marble of the floor had been polished to a mirror sheen. Mahit could see her own reflection in it; she looked as if she’d been set in a starfield.
So did everyone else. The room was as crowded with patricians as it was with lights, clustering and unclustering in conversational knots, one enormous Teixcalaanli organism that shifted only in configuration. At Mahit’s elbow, Three Seagrass—impeccable in her asekreta’s cream-and-flame suit, but deliberately dimmed to a functionary’s normalcy in the vastness of the room and the sparkle of its inhabitants—asked, “Ready?”
Mahit nodded. She drew her shoulders back, straightened her spine; shook out the cuffs of the grey formal jacket she wore. Nineteen Adze had had someone fetch it from her luggage that morning, and wasn’t she glad that the only state secrets she had were inside her own body and not hidden in one of her suitcases. It was drab, compared to the riot of metallics and mirrors the Teixcalaanli court displayed, but at least she looked like the Ambassador from Lsel, and not anything else. Even if she had walked over with Nineteen Adze, glittering in ice-white, and her entire entourage—even if spies and rumormongers and gossips would remember that walk and not this one down into the company of the court.
“The Ambassador Mahit Dzmare of Lsel Station!”
Three Seagrass was loud when she wanted to be. She’d planted her feet, lifted her chin, and called out Mahit’s name like she was beginning a verse of a song—one long, clear, pitched shout. Orator, Mahit thought. She did say if it wasn’t for me she’d be reading poetry tonight. There was a gratifying and intimidating stir of interest from the massed courtiers—a shifting of attention, hundreds of cloudhook-obscured eyes settling on her. She held still just long enough for them to look—long enough for a first impression. A tall, narrow person in a barbarian’s foreign-cut trousers and coat, her reddish-brown hair cropped low-grav short, her forehead high and bare. Different from the last one of her kind: female, unknown, unpredictable. Young. Smiling, for whatever reasons an ambassador might smile.
(Also, not dead. That was another difference.)
Mahit moved out of the raised central doorway and descended the stairs to the floor, Three Seagrass just in front of her and to her left, just as she’d promised she’d be. She oriented herself toward the rear-center of the ballroom, the place where she knew the Emperor would appear. She had to get there by the evening’s end; and she had to make her way across all of this glittering space without committing any social or geopolitical errors that she didn’t intend to make. Somewhere the Science Minister, Ten Pearl, was waiting to have their oh-so-public meeting. Every time Mahit thought of him now she remembered that flash of Yskandr, of the two of them arguing—talking—negotiating around the nature of the City and the City’s mind, if it had one. She kept coming back to it, how the memory had flooded her, interrupted her. She couldn’t afford to have that happen again now, in front of all of the assembled court of Teixcalaan, and she also had absolutely no idea how to prevent it.