She knew, thinking it, that she was trying to talk herself out of the unstable, shifting-gravity nausea. The certain knowledge that this could not be a useful war, not for Lsel—not with Teixcalaan as it was.
When the newsfeeds had switched from local tabloid updates to the cheery pomp and circumstance of impending military action—it seemed to be a genre, something that Teixcalaanli broadcasters simply knew how to do—one of Nineteen Adze’s assistants had appeared at her side with a glass press full of what Mahit recognized by scent as fresh-ground coffee, and spirited away the bowls of tea.
Coffee, a stronger stimulant than tea. Everyone was on a wartime footing, weren’t they.
“This is not a very informative war,” said Three Seagrass pointedly, when the newsfeeds had looped around again to the beginning, the opening of the ships, the marching troops in gold and grey, the phatic commentary of the newsfeed hosts.
Nineteen Adze handed her a tiny cup of the coffee, as if that was an answer. “Wait for it,” she said. “Take the breathing room while you can, asekreta, there’ll be little enough of it to go around very shortly.”
“And who,” Three Seagrass asked, imitating with uncanny precision the headlong breathlessness of the commentators, “do you think will be our commander, Your Excellency? Since you have the enormous honor of being an ezuazuacat, and ever so close to the decisions at the heart of the Empire!”
Nineteen Adze, entirely serene, said, “Mahit, your liaison is an actress and an interrogator. What rare luck you’re having.”
Mahit had no idea what to say to that. Three Seagrass was slightly colored through the cheeks, which might imply it had been a compliment. “She’s much less straightforward than I am,” Mahit said. “I will just ask you who you think will be named commander, and whether it really will be One Lightning and not some other yaotlek.”
“It will be,” Nineteen Adze said. “You could make double your wager on it, if you weren’t so conveniently trapped in my apartments, safely away from the corruption of public betting.”
Somehow they had reached a state where Nineteen Adze was joking about keeping Mahit prisoner, and Mahit actually found it funny. She wasn’t sure there was any sense in which she could take this development as a good thing, aside from how it was— nice, pleasant, to not be waiting for imminent death while she ate breakfast. Five Agate had collected her and Three Seagrass at the end of the banquet, and escorted them back into Nineteen Adze’s office complex as if there hadn’t been any other possible exit: perfectly implacable, all decisions already made. It was a terrible concession to have gone back with her, Mahit knew that it was, but it would have been worse to have refused in public—and where would she have gone that was safe, then? After so deliberately getting rid of what allies she had, who would trust her?
And also: Nineteen Adze was publicly tied to her, and to Lsel, as much as she was tied to Nineteen Adze.
Mahit licked the back of her spoon. “The salary my station pays me is entirely adequate without recourse to public betting,” she said.
“And you had Ten Pearl thinking you were an ignoramus,” Nineteen Adze said, amused. “Adequate without recourse to. You’re worse than Yskandr was.”
“How so?”
“Yskandr, when I met him—he was perhaps a year, two years older than you? And already a fixture at court by the time I got back from my last military tour of duty and Six Direction made me ezuazuacat. Yskandr liked Teixcalaan. But you, Ambassador Dzmare, if you weren’t an ambassador you’d apply for citizenship.”
Mahit didn’t flinch; she was proud of herself for not flinching, for saying, “The Minister for Science would never approve such an application,” for taking up another spoonful of porridge. Proud also for how Three Seagrass and Nineteen Adze both laughed. Their laughter covered how she wanted to squirm, wanted to be grateful for being not a barbarian enough that citizenship would have been a possibility and hating herself for wanting to be grateful, all at once.
When the newsfeeds changed over to the starburst glyph of Palace-Sky’s internal news service, she was relieved. It would be difficult for Nineteen Adze to interrogate her about her loyalties when all three of them were watching an official announcement. The starburst resolved into Six Direction himself, flanked by a group of Teixcalaanlitzlim that Mahit supposed were the yaotlekim, all of the generals who were on-planet and available for publicity. They bristled and gleamed like a thicket of razor-sharp reeds; in the middle of them Six Direction looked old.
The announcement the Emperor read off his cloudhook was short, a tiny and precise rhetorical detonation: Like a flower turns to the sun or a person takes in oxygen, he said, Teixcalaan reaches again toward the stars—Mahit watched Nineteen Adze’s face, her narrowed eyes, the tension in the corners of her mouth. Admiration, she thought, and something in the same region as fear, but not insult. She had probably vetted this speech, or even been consulted on it. (And how long had she known? Since yesterday at the banquet? Since long before then, when she had been pretending to Mahit and Three Seagrass that she was as ignorant of where the war would be as they were?)
We move toward Parzrawantlak Sector, said Six Direction, his face suddenly overlaid with the star-chart of Teixcalaanli space. The City, a golden planet, hovered between his eyes; then the chart shifted, demonstrating the vectors the fleet would take, the points at which they would converge into an unstoppable spearpoint of ships.
Mahit knew those stars. She knew the sector name, too—but she knew it in Stationer, not filtered through Teixcalaanli consonants. Bardzravand, “the high plateau,” the sector of space that all the Stationers had settled in their long-ago scattering. She’d always seen the vectors on the newsfeed’s star-chart inverted, though, looked at them from the other side: an in-drawing line that had called her since she was a child. Yskandr had hung the same vectored chart above his bed back in the ambassadorial suite: Lsel looking at the Empire.
Of course it wasn’t Lsel that Teixcalaan wanted, though they’d be pleased enough to finally have it: Lsel Station, and all the other tiny stations, were merely in the way of that onrushing tide of ships. Beyond them was alien territory, populated by Ebrekti and species even more foreign, or undiscovered by humanity; beyond them as well were planets to terraform or colonize, resources to extract. The jaws of the Empire opening up again, akimbo, bloody-toothed—the endless self-justifying desire that was Teixcalaan, and Teixcalaanli ways of thinking of the universe. The Empire, the world. One and the same. And if they were not yet so: make them so, for this is the right and correct will of the stars.