She was wallowing. Also she was slightly drunk.
And because both of these things were true, she was not at all expecting when a very, very tall person, wearing a long dress made out of bias-cut pale grey-gold silk, put her hand on Mahit’s arm and spun her around. The room kept spinning for just a moment after Mahit stopped, and she should probably be worried about that.
The woman who had accosted her was not Teixcalaanli, not by features and certainly not by dress. Her arms were bare save for heavy silverwork cuffs, a bracelet on each wrist and one more wide band high on the left arm, and she was wearing a type of makeup Mahit wasn’t familiar with: she’d covered all of her eyelids with red and pale-gold creams, like a painting of clouds at sunset on some distant planet.
Mahit bowed over her hands, and the other person did the same—awkwardly. With great unfamiliarity.
“You’re the Lsel Ambassador!” she said brightly.
“Yes?”
“I’m Gorlaeth, the Ambassador from Dava. Come have a drink with me!”
“A drink,” said Mahit, playing for time. She couldn’t remember where Dava was. It was one of the most newly annexed planets in Teixcalaanli space, she was sure of that, but was it the one which exported silk or the one which had a famous mathematical school? This was what an imago was for. To help you remember things you needed to know that you hadn’t known you needed to know.
“Yes,” Gorlaeth said. “Do you drink? Do you have drinks on your station?”
Oh, Mahit thought, for fuck’s sake. “Yes, we have drinks. Lots of them. What kind do you like?”
“I’ve been going through the bar. Local culture, you understand. You understand!” Gorlaeth’s hand was back on Mahit’s arm, and she felt a distant kind of disgusted pity for the other woman: she’d been sent here by her government, and her government was newly a protectorate of Teixcalaan, and she was alone (like Mahit was alone—but Mahit wasn’t supposed to be alone), and being alone in Teixcalaan was like drowning in clear air.
A person might try all the drinks at a bar and call it experiencing local culture.
“How long have you been here?” Mahit asked. The same phrase Three Seagrass had used in the groundcar during her first minutes within the City. How long have you been inside the world?
Gorlaeth shrugged. “A few months. Now I’m not newest anymore—you are. You should come to our salon—several of the ambassadors from farther systems get together every other week—”
“And do what?”
“Politics,” said Gorlaeth. When she smiled, she stopped looking affable and a little lost. She had a great many small teeth, and most of them were pointed. It wasn’t a Stationer’s smile, but it wasn’t Teixcalaanli either, and Mahit felt, for one dizzying instant, the width and breadth of the galaxy—how far a jumpgate might take a person. How the people on the other side might be people, or might be something that looked like people but weren’t—
That was how a Teixcalaanlitzlim would think. She was getting very good at it, wasn’t she.
“Send me an invitation,” Mahit said. “I’m sure the politics of Dava are of interest to the politics of Lsel.”
Gorlaeth’s expression did not so much change as harden: the sharpness of her teeth sharper. Mahit wondered if it was the fashion on Dava to file them to points, or if it was an example of an endemic trait in an isolated population, like the freefall mutants. “More than you might imagine, Ambassador,” Gorlaeth said. “Our Teixcalaanli provincial governor hardly ever comes to bother us, save to invite us to events like this one. Your station might take note.”
Mahit wasn’t sure if that was a threat—come to our salons, join our little group of ambassadors, and when Teixcalaan eats you too, you’ll go down whole and unchewed—or a genuine offer of sympathy: either way, she was insulted. This woman was from Dava—she still couldn’t remember if it was significant for silk or mathematics—and here she thought she could give Mahit advice. She’d had enough of advice for one night.
When she smiled, she pulled her lips all the way back from her teeth into a grimace. “We might,” she said. “I do hope you find a new drink to try, Ambassador Gorlaeth. Goodnight.”
The room whirled again when she spun on one heel, but she thought she was still walking in a straight line. She needed to get out of here, before she met someone who could actually do her or her Station harm. She needed to be alone.
There were a multitude of doors out of the throne room of Palace-Earth. Mahit picked one at random, slipped through, and vanished herself into the machinery of the Emperor’s own stronghold.
Most of Palace-Earth was marble and gold, star-inlay and dim lights, a perpetual state of near-dawn: like the view from the station as they came around the nearest planet again, sunflare and pinpoint stars mixed. There weren’t half so many people as Mahit had expected, and almost none of them were guards or police. She didn’t see a single Sunlit with their closed gold faceplates, even though they would have gone ever so well with the decor—only a few expressionless men and women with pale grey armbands, leanly muscled and armed with shocksticks, who looked as if they were quite dangerous, or might be if challenged. No projectile weapons in Teixcalaan, even in the palace; some of spacer culture ultimately spread down to the most civilized places. She avoided any door the people with shocksticks guarded, and let herself wander otherwise unimpeded: guided only by where she wasn’t allowed to go.
She was more sober by the time she found the garden, not dizzy or faintly ill—only buzzed, shimmering-strange—and she was glad of that, both the lack of true drunkenness and the lack of total sobriety, when she realized what sort of garden it was that she had stumbled into, a tiny carved-out heart in the middle of this place. It was a room more than a garden: shaped like an enclosed bottle, a funnel that opened onto the night sky. The humid wind of the City slipped down it and was gentled as it went. The air was thick with moisture that dragged at Mahit’s lungs, and fed the plants that climbed three-quarters of the way up the garden’s walls. Deepest green and pale perfect new green, and a thousand, thousand red flowers on vines—and sipping at those flowers, tiny birds with long beaks, hardly longer than Mahit’s thumb, that floated and dived like insects would. The beat of their wings was a hum. The entire garden sang with it.
She took two steps into the garden—her feet soundless on the moss that covered the floor—and held up her hand, wonderingly. One of the tiny birds alighted on it, balanced on her fingertip, and took off again. She couldn’t even feel its weight. It had been like a ghost. It might not even have landed.
A place like this couldn’t exist on a station. It couldn’t exist on most planets. Even as she walked further into the strange dim sanctuary of it, she peered upward, trying to understand how the birds didn’t fly up the funnel and escape into the vaulted Teixcalaanli sky—it was surely warm enough out there for them, though not nearly as sweet—not so many red flowers all at once. Perhaps succor was enough to keep a whole population trapped, willingly.
Succor, and the fine mesh of a net. When she tilted her head to exactly the right angle, she could see it, strung silvery and near-invisible at the funnel’s mouth.
“Why are you here?” someone said—a high voice, thin, easy with command. Mahit stopped looking up.
It was the ninety-percent clone. Eight Antidote, the spitting image of Six Direction as he had been at age ten. The child’s long, dark hair had come unbound and hung past his shoulders, but otherwise he remained as impeccable as he’d been when he’d stood beside his progenitor while Mahit offered up her wrists. He was not tall. He was not going to be tall, unless the 10 percent of his genetics that hadn’t been spun from the Emperor’s was full of a whole lot of genetic markers for height. What he was was comfortable, here in this strange room of trapped and beautiful birds, and looking at Mahit like she was an inconvenient piece of space debris that had to be avoided while inscribing an orbit.