Smoke and mirrors and refracted light, and the weight of history in a glance—Mahit knew she was being manipulated and couldn’t find a way to stop being. At Six Direction’s side was a child who must be the ninety-percent clone. A small, serious boy with enormous black eyes.
And if that wasn’t a declaration of where the succession would eventually fall, Mahit didn’t know what was. It wasn’t going to be a true tripartite counciclass="underline" it was going to be a child-emperor and two regents for him to fight with. That poor child, with Thirty Larkspur and Eight Loop for co-regents. Abruptly she wondered which people in the ballroom were One Lightning’s supporters—if any of the people so prominently wearing purple larkspurs were in fact covering for a less politic choice—and, for that matter, where Ten Pearl from the Science Ministry was, and when he’d approach her.
“Are you ready to be presented to the Emperor,” Three Seagrass asked archly, “or are you going to stare for a while first?”
Mahit made a wordless noise, helplessly amused. “What did you feel like, the first time you saw the throne rise?”
“Terrified that I wasn’t good enough to be here,” Three Seagrass said. “Is it different for you?”
“I don’t think I’m terrified,” Mahit said, finding her way through how she felt as she framed the sentence, “I think I’m … angry.”
“Angry.”
“It’s so much. I can’t not feel—”
“Of course not. It’s meant to be like that. It’s the Emperor, who is more illuminate than the sun.”
“I know. But I know I know, and that’s the problem.” Mahit shrugged. “I will be very honored to meet him. No matter how I feel.”
“Come on then,” Three Seagrass said, holding on to her elbow more firmly. “It’s one of your ambassadorial duties, anyhow! You need to be formally acknowledged and invested with your post.”
There was a receiving line at the foot of the dais, but it was shorter than Mahit assumed it would be, and His Majesty Six Direction spent no more than a minute with each petitioner. When it was her turn, Three Seagrass announced her again—more quietly this time, but no less clearly—and she climbed the steps to the center of the many-petalled sun-spear throne.
A Teixcalaanlitzlim would have dropped forehead to the floor, bent over their knees in full proskynesis. Mahit knelt but did not fold—bowed only her head, stretching her hands out in front of her. Stationers didn’t bow, not to pilots nor to the governing Council, no matter how long their imago-lines were, but she and Yskandr had come up with this solution in the two months they’d spent in transit to the City. She’d seen illustrations of the pose in infofiche scans of old Teixcalaanli ceremonial manuals: it was how the alien diplomat Ebrekt First-Positioned had greeted the Teixcalaanli Emperor Two Sunspot on the bow of the ship Inscription’s Glass Key, during the official first contact between the Teixcalaan and the Ebrekti people. (Or, at least, how a Teixcalaanli artist had rendered the pose of a person whose limbs were arranged for quadrupedal locomotion.)
That had been four hundred years ago out on the edge of known space, after Inscription’s Glass Key had leapt through a new jumpgate unexpectedly, while Two Sunspot was fleeing the usurper Eleven Cloud (Two Sunspot had eventually beaten her and her legions back, and remained Emperor—there were several novels about it, and Mahit had read them all). The Ebrekti had been good neighbors ever since: quiet, keeping to their side of the one gate that connected their space and Teixcalaan. She and Yskandr had calculated what it would say, to bow like this—a respectful statement of distance from the Empire.
Yskandr had told her that he’d chosen the same pose himself, when he was presented to Six Direction.
Only now, with her hands stretched out, supplicant but straight-spined, did Mahit wonder if she was repeating a mistake, making all of Lsel inhuman by virtue of one symbolic allusion—
The Emperor closed his hands around her wrists and lightly pulled her to her feet.
She was still two steps below the throne, which made her his equal in height. His fingers wrapped around the bones of her wrists were shocking, unexpected. They were hot. The man was burning with fever, and yet Mahit would never have known if he hadn’t touched her. He was wearing some kind of citrus and woodsmoke perfume. He looked straight at her, straight through her—Mahit found herself smiling, helplessly, fighting back a rush of familiarity that wasn’t hers. She thought for a moment it was the beginning of another memory-flash, her failing imago-machine spinning her out of time, back to Yskandr—but no, no, this was all endocrine response.
Sense memory was one of the strongest carryovers down an imago-line. Scents. Sound, sometimes—music could cue memory—but scent and taste were the least narrative, the most encapsulated kinds of memory, the most easily shifted from one person to the next down the line. Perhaps Yskandr was—was less gone than she’d thought, she could hope for that, through the dizzy strangeness of someone else’s neurochemical mirroring.
“Your Majesty,” she said. “Lsel Station greets you.”
“Teixcalaan greets you, Mahit Dzmare,” said the Emperor. Like he meant it, like he was glad to see her—
What the fuck had Yskandr done here?
“And invests you with your diplomatic office,” Six Direction went on. “We are gratified by the choice of ambassador, and express our wishes for your service to us to be to our mutual benefit.”
He was still holding her wrists. There was a thick scar on his palm, pressed against her skin, and she thought vividly of that first memory-flash, of Yskandr slicing his own palm open to swear an oath, and wondered how many oaths an emperor swore with blood over the course of his life. The hot pressure of his hands was intense, and she was still caught in the rush of oxytocin happiness that didn’t belong to her and wouldn’t she just like to interrogate Yskandr as to what exactly he’d meant to the Emperor of all Teixcalaan? Somehow she managed to nod, to thank Six Direction with correct formality, to bow and back down the steps of the dais without tripping.
“I need to sit down,” she said to Three Seagrass.
“Not yet you don’t,” Three Seagrass told her, not without sympathy. “Ten Pearl is headed straight for us. Are you going to faint?”
“Do people faint after audiences often?”
“It’s more a thing in daytime dramas that come over the newsfeeds, but the strangest things end up being repeatable—”
Mahit said, “I’m not going to faint, Three Seagrass.”
Three Seagrass actually took her hand and squeezed it. “Excellent! You’re really doing fine.”
Mahit wasn’t exactly sure of that, but she could damn well pretend to be for the length of some political theater. She squeezed Three Seagrass’s fingers back, and let them go. Walked a little farther away from the dais, into an open space in the glitter of the crowd. She could feel the focus of the room shift around her—from the Emperor on the dais, sitting back now and murmuring something to his tiny clone, audiences over, to where the barbarian ambassador had put herself right under the lights in an open space, a public declaration that something important was about to happen and maybe they should watch.
Ten Pearl, for an ixplanatl—and surely the Science Minister was a scientist, and not just an appointed bureaucrat—had enough theatricality in him to know that Mahit had taken his offer of a public meeting and accepted the gambit. This was as public as was available in Palace-Earth. He had to know it. The next five minutes would be all over the newsfeeds in the morning, right next to holographs of Mahit with her wrists in the Emperor’s hands, and he came striding up to meet her in a swirl of deep-red coattails, a bony man with a scientist’s hunched shoulders. He was older than he’d been in the memory-flash—more stooped—but he still wore a ring on each finger: thin bands of mother-of-pearl, stoneless. For his name—ostentatious, but in a self-deprecating sort of way. Mahit admired it. As Yskandr had admired it, the same rueful appreciation of a joke. Whether the feeling was genuine to Mahit she honestly didn’t know.