“You’re not wearing one of those pins but you might as well be—”
“One of my pins?” said another voice, urbane, serene. The drunk man dropped Mahit—the stone bench hurt to land on but she was glad of it anyway—and spun to see Thirty Larkspur himself, still resplendent in blue and his partial crown.
“Your Excellency,” said the man, and bowed hastily over his hands. His face had gone a shade of nauseous green that didn’t match his suit at all.
“I didn’t catch your name,” said Thirty Larkspur. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Eleven Conifer,” he said, still bent over, muffled.
“Eleven Conifer,” Thirty Larkspur repeated. “How lovely to make your acquaintance. Is there anything you needed from this young woman? She is, I’m afraid, a barbarian—I do apologize if she insulted you—”
Mahit gaped at him. Thirty Larkspur winked at her, over Eleven Conifer’s bowed head. She shut her mouth. Thirty Larkspur was dangerous—smug, and clever, and manipulative, and she understood exactly what Five Agate had meant when she said that Mahit would understand why this man had been made an ezuazuacat and then an imperial co-heir after she’d seen him work in person. He was as flexible as a holograph, bending in the light, saying different words at different angles of approach.
“Now then,” he went on, “you and I will have a discussion later, Eleven Conifer, and see if we can resolve our differences productively, now that I understand that you’re upset enough to commit a crime.”
“A crime?” Eleven Conifer asked, with a delicate sort of horror.
“Assault is a crime. But the barbarian will forgive you, won’t she? For now.”
Mahit nodded. “For now,” she said. Playing along. Waiting to see what might happen.
“Why don’t you leave her to her own devices and go back to the party, Eleven Conifer? Politics all aside, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that there’s better drink and quite a bit of dancing in there, and none at all out here.”
Eleven Conifer nodded. He looked like a man impaled on a spike, wriggling to get free. “That’s true, Your Excellency,” he said. “I’ll … do that.”
“You do that,” Thirty Larkspur said. “I’ll come by later. To make sure you’re having a good time.”
And that, Mahit thought, was a naked threat. Eleven Conifer scuttled back down the hall, and now she was alone with Thirty Larkspur. Two imperial heirs in one night, Yskandr. Did you ever do as well? Her ulnar nerves went all to sparkles again, and she wondered if that was all that was left of her imago. An echo of neuropathy.
“I think I owe you my thanks,” she said to Thirty Larkspur.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” he told her, his hands spread wide. “The man was shaking you. I would have intervened no matter who you were. Ambassador.”
“Nevertheless.”
“Of course.” He paused. “Are you lost, Ambassador? Out here in the hallways.”
Mahit summoned up a Lsel-style smile, all teeth. It managed to discomfit Thirty Larkspur enough that he didn’t smile back. “I can find my own way back, Your Excellency,” she said, lying through those teeth: “I’m not lost at all.”
To prove it, she got up off the bench, and very deliberately walked—trying not to limp where her hip hurt her—back into the roar and noise of the party, leaving the ezuazuacat behind her.
There was dancing. Mahit decided straight off that she didn’t dance, that her not dancing was part of how she was playing at uncivilization, and also that it was late enough that if she could figure out how to leave (and where she was going, when she left—back to Nineteen Adze? To her own apartments?) she would.
The dancing was in pairs, but also in interlocking groups that traded partners. It formed patterns on the floor, shifting like long chains, fractals. Star-charts, Mahit thought, and then on cue, These things are ceaseless, Nine Maize’s epigram rising to the surface of her mind.
“There you are,” said Five Agate, and Mahit turned to see Nineteen Adze’s prize assistant standing just behind her, with one of her hands on Three Seagrass’s upper back, steadying. “I’ve found your liaison, and I’ve been asked to escort you both home.”
Three Seagrass was no longer ebulliently drunk. She was grey-pale at the temples, exhausted. She’d only been out of the hospital for thirty hours, Mahit remembered, and squelched an inappropriate impulse to take her arm. Five Agate, apparently, had the both of them well in hand.
“What did you see?” Three Seagrass asked, as they made their way across the room. Not where did you go? but what did you see. Not a question which chided Mahit for running off on her own. Not quite.
“Birds,” Mahit found herself saying. “A whole garden of birds,” and then they were outside, and in a groundcar, and being shuttled back to Palace-North.
CHAPTER NINE
SERVICE RECORD LOOKUP for FIFTEEN ENGINE, ASEKRETA, PATRICIAN THIRD-CLASS (RETIRED).
[…] Retired from active Ministry post in 14.1.11 (Six Direction), taking an early pension. Request for retirement made as an alternative to the opening of an inquest into the asekreta’s unauthorized connections to local extremists on Odile and surrounding Western Arc territories. The asekreta maintained throughout the process of his retirement that his contacts on Odile were primarily social and incidentally political, and that he reported seditious and anti-imperial sentiment as expected from an Information Ministry agent. [SECTION REDACTED: SECURITY 19] […] nevertheless when offered retirement or investigation he chose retirement without further comment. Monthly reports of cloudhook activity since the asekreta’s retirement do not suggest seditious tendencies. Recommendation: continue monitoring at current intensity.
Stationer contacts with nonhumans have primarily been mediated through the auspices of neighboring polities: a salient example is the extant treaty between the Teixcalaanli Empire and the Ebrekti; as Stationer space shares no jumpgate points with Ebrekt space, the Ebrekt peace agreement with Teixcalaan has been sufficient to normalize Stationer relations with Ebrekti ships—though considerations of Stationer sovereignty in treaty-making with nonhumans continue to be brought up by subsequent Councilors for the Miners and Councilors for Heritage over the past six decades. Nevertheless, barring a nonhuman presence in Stationer space and direct contact, there is likely to be little need for a revision in policy […]
THE war came in with the newsfeeds in the morning.
When it began, Mahit was sitting opposite Three Seagrass in Nineteen Adze’s dawn-drenched front office, eating porridge with a spoon as if she and her liaison and the ezuazuacat were all some sort of peculiar family, while the array of Nineteen Adze’s infoscreens hovered over the three of them and played an endless succession of stock clips of Teixcalaanli military ships: soldiers going into them, their magnificently large gunports, the brightly painted sun-gold and blood-red insignia on their grey sides. The newsfeed commentators were effervescent and vague. There was a war; it was a war of conquest, a conquering force sent out to claim more of the vast black void of space for Teixcalaan, the vast black void and whatever bright planetary jewels might be nestled in it, all ready to be subsumed under the battle flag of the Empire. An accession war. Everyone was very excited and talking about the trade interests which would benefit most from the Empire being on a wartime footing for the first time in twenty years. Mahit hadn’t drunk enough the previous evening to be hung over, despite her efforts, but she wished she had; it would have given her an excuse to feel this queasy. Steel, she thought. Steel and shipbuilding and supply lines, and Councilor Amnardbat and Councilor Tarats might be able to renegotiate how much money Lsel got from selling molybdenum to the Empire—it could be a useful war …