The orations were good. Some of them were better than good—driving rhythms over clever internal rhyme, or an orator whose delivery of that particular Teixcalaanli style of half-sung, half-spoken rapid-fire chant was exceptionally fluid. Exquisite imagery washed over Mahit in waves, and she felt nothing. Nothing aside from wishing that she could have copies of every poem written down, confined to glyphs that she could read on her own someplace quiet and silent and still. If she could just read the poems—speak them in her own voice, try out the rhythms and the cadences, find how they moved on her tongue—surely she’d feel the power of them. She always had before.
She drank from her glass. Three Seagrass had brought her some spirit distilled from a grain she didn’t know. It was the pale gold color of all the swarming lights, and burned going down her throat.
Nine Maize’s oration, when it came, was the epigram Three Seagrass had promised it would be. He’d hardly begun—only took his place, cleared his throat, and recited a three-line stanza:
Every skyport harbor overflows
Citizens carry armfuls of imported flowers.
These things are ceaseless: star-charts, disembarkments
when he hesitated just long enough to signal a shift, a caesura. Mahit felt the entire room catch on his held breath. No matter how little she had liked him, she saw why he was the toast of the court’s literati: what charisma he had was amplified the instant he spoke in verse. It was what he was made for. On Lsel he’d have been a candidate for an imago-line of poets, if Lsel had had such a thing.
“The curl of unborn petals holds a hollowness,” said Nine Maize.
Then he sat down again.
There was no release of tension. The sense of unease remained, floating like a miasma. The next orator came forward in the midst of the awkward silence, the scrape of her shoes on the floor audible. She fumbled the first line of her own composition and had to begin again.
Mahit turned to Three Seagrass, questioning.
“Politics,” murmured Three Seagrass. “That was … a critique. In several ways. I really thought Thirty Larkspur had Nine Maize under his thumb, but people can be so surprising.”
“I’d think it was most critical of Eight Antidote?” Mahit said. “The child. Unborn petals…”
“Yes,” Three Seagrass said, her eyebrows knit together, “but Thirty Larkspur’s the heir who is most responsible for increasing importation of in-Empire goods to the City. It’s why he has money—he’s bringing it in from the Western Arc systems, that’s where his family is from. And there’s that suggestion of corruption for every citizen carrying a flower … every import being somehow poisoned … as if Thirty Larkspur’s wealth is as bad as importing objects from outside Teixcalaan entirely.”
Politics by means of literary analysis. Were there aptitudes that tested for that, or was it something a Teixcalaanlitzlim would learn through intense exposure? Mahit could imagine Three Seagrass as a child, deciphering the political messages in The Buildings with her school peers at lunch. It wasn’t difficult to picture.
“Critical of everyone save Eight Loop, then,” she said.
“She only survives pillory by overt omission,” Three Seagrass said. “I think it’s deeper than just which heir is best, Mahit. Why else would Nine Maize make such a dangerous choice in topics?”
Mahit thought of the fundamental assumption of Teixcalaanli society: that collapse between world and Empire and City—and how if there was such a collapse, importation was uneasy, foreign was dangerous, even if that importation was just from a distant part of the Empire. And barbarians like herself oughtn’t be able to conceptualize why a poem about the perilous corruption of some other planet’s flowers might be, in fact, designed to make a Teixcalaanlitzlim nervous.
But if a system was no longer foreign—if the world was large enough, the Empire large enough, to encompass and subsume all that was barbaric about that world—well, it wasn’t barbaric anymore. It wasn’t threatening anymore. If Nine Maize was pointing out the threat of importation, he was calling for—or at least suggesting—that Teixcalaan act to normalize that threat. To civilize it. And Teixcalaan had always civilized—had always made something Teixcalaanli—with force. Force, like a war. Nine Maize wasn’t really talking to Thirty Larkspur; Nine Maize was shoring up whatever political factions were preparing for war. All those troop movements. One Lightning, with his legions and his shouting partisans—but also Six Direction, setting the fleet into the kind of readiness that had marked his early reign, when he’d been a star-conquering emperor himself.
“Where are One Lightning’s supporters tonight, Three Seagrass?” she asked. “They’re who that poem was for. For anyone who is interested in a stronger, more centralized, less importation-focused Teixcalaan.”
“He’s a populist and this is court, it’s not fashionable. But I’m sure—oh,” Three Seagrass said. “Oh. Well. We were looking for the war.”
“A war very soon,” Mahit said, uneasily thrilled with discovery. “An annexation. A conquest war. For the purpose of making places less foreign.”
Three Seagrass reached over and plucked Mahit’s glass of alcohol out of her hand, took a large sip, and returned it. “We haven’t had an annexation war since before I was born.”
“I know,” said Mahit, “we do have history on the stations. We were enjoying Teixcalaan being a quiescent neighboring predator—”
“You make us sound like a mindless animal.”
“Not mindless,” Mahit said. It was as close as she could bring herself to an apology. “Never that.”
“But an animal.”
“You do devour. Isn’t that what we’re talking about? A war of annexation.”
“It’s not—devour would be if we were xenophobes or genocides, if we didn’t bring new territories into the Empire.”
Into the world. Shift the pronunciation of the verb, and Three Seagrass could have been saying if we didn’t make new territories real, but Mahit knew what she meant: all the ways that being part of Teixcalaan gave a planet or a station prosperity. Economic, cultural—take a Teixcalaanli name, be a citizen. Speak poetry.
“Let’s not argue, Three Seagrass,” she said. “I don’t want to.”
Three Seagrass pressed her lips together. “We’re going to argue. I want to understand what you think. It’s my job. But we can argue later. The Emperor is going to announce the contest winner soon, look.”
The orations were finished. Mahit had missed the last few entirely. None of them had disturbed the room the way Nine Maize had. Now the Emperor stood up, his ezuazuacatlim flanking him—had they conferred, chosen a winner together? She doubted that they could so quickly come to a conclusion, not when the group of them included Thirty Larkspur, two Teixcalaanlitzlim Mahit hadn’t met, and Nineteen Adze, resplendent still in white. Quite nearly a relief to look at, in all of the gleaming lights.
Six Direction gestured, pointing out a poet who had made absolutely no impression on Mahit. She looked as surprised by her honor as the rest of the crowd, which hesitated on the verge of the expected acclamatory cheering as if they weren’t certain of what had happened either.