She could hope for advice, though she wasn’t sure what use advice even would be. She’d already disobeyed her only real directive when she’d admitted the existence of the imago-machines; she wasn’t sure if further directives would be any more sustainable. But she’d like to feel a little less alone. To hear any voice from Lsel. Any voice which wasn’t the stern and strange warning of Onchu of the Pilots, telling dead Yskandr to beware sabotage. That message hadn’t been for Mahit anyway. The warning of the weapon wasn’t for the weapon to hear.
This was why there were imago-lines for diplomats. So no one would be alone.
Yskandr, please. If you’re there at all—
Static, like electric prickles down her arms. The ulnar nerves through the elbow to her smallest fingers. But the imago was just as silent as he’d been since that first hour in the morgue.
No time for cascading neurological disaster either. She’d think about it later. She’d fix it later, somehow. Now Mahit summoned up her own infograph halo and, standing at the opposite end of the office from Three Seagrass, began to compose two messages to the Council on Lsel. She composed them at the same time. They looked like the same message—and how she wished she could show off what she was doing to Three Seagrass, so busily arranging meetings on her behalf. Three Seagrass would understand ciphering a second message inside the first, and she’d admire it.
It wasn’t a good cipher. It wasn’t even a poetic cipher that would require a Teixcalaanli asekreta to fashionably decode. It was a book substitution cipher. Mahit had worked it out when she was a teenager, bored and playing at being Teixcalaanli: a master of intrigues and byzantine plots, a person who encrypted everything, and she’d used a Teixcalaanli glyph dictionary as her key. The most common one, Imperial Glyphbook Standard, the one which was distributed Empire-wide—and beyond the official borders of Teixcalaan—to teach barbarians and children to read. It had all the useful words, after alclass="underline" “to hide,” and “to betray,” and so very many interlocking words for “civilization.” She’d picked Standard to make her cipher out of simply because it was the most likely to be present in any location. Not even Teixcalaanlitzlim could possibly remember every glyph in their ideographic writing system. There was a copy in Nineteen Adze’s library, and it was the work of only a few minutes for Mahit to go fetch it.
Yskandr had laughed inside her skull when she’d suggested her old cipher to the Council as a method for hidden communication; had laughed more when they’d agreed. The ciphering process required that she write in Stationer, which had a thirty-seven-letter alphabet, and that the receiving decoder knew to look at the first letter of each Stationer word for the page number in IGS; the second letter for the line number; the first glyph in that table for the meaning. It wasn’t meant to be a hyper-secure code; just enough encryption to get messages through. A little cover. A shield.
The message she wrote in Stationer she expected to be read, first by Nineteen Adze, then by the Imperial Censor Office, and perhaps even by the captain of the ship that would take it toward Lsel. It contained no more information than the newsfeeds had; instead, it recapitulated them exactly, along with—Mahit thought—a relatively reasonable note of distress and concern.
That extra distress and concern gave her enough words to encode the hidden message, an ungrammatical sequence of Teixcalaanli nouns and verbs: PRIORITY. Former ambassador compromised—movement (self, on foot, round-trip) restricted—memory bad—sovereignty threatened—request Council guidance.
Even as Mahit was enclosing the double message in an infofiche stick she doubted guidance would reach her in time for it to matter. But she had asked. And she had provided warning. Even if it was clear from any examination of the fleet’s vectors that they were headed toward Lsel space, it was possible that no broadcasts of the fleet vectors would be sent out toward Lsel anyhow—why would the Empire warn their prey?
She tucked the stick into the silver basket marked for outgoing mail on its table to the left of the office’s door, where it sat innocuous with all the others aside from its red-wax marker for urgency, and the red-and-black sticky tab for off-planet communication. Soon Seven Scale would appear on his rounds through the office and bear it away into the City, through the labyrinth of the Censor Office and out.
“Three Seagrass,” Mahit said, turning back and thinking of the similar basket back in the ambassadorial apartments, certainly overflowing now with angry messages on their pretty sticks, “is there any useful way I can get access to the work I’m supposed to be doing? The infofiche messages?”
“Huh,” said Three Seagrass. She considered it. “Maybe part of it. How do you feel about breaking a very minor law?”
“What kind of minor law?” Mahit asked.
“The kind a Teixcalaanlitzlim breaks the first time when she’s about nine years old. Using someone else’s cloudhook.”
“I am sure,” Mahit said dryly, “that it gets more complicated when the person doing the using is not a citizen.”
Three Seagrass reached up to the side of her head and lifted her cloudhook from over her eye. “Absolutely,” she said, “but that just means you shouldn’t get caught. Come over here.”
Mahit came close. “We’re being recorded,” she said, even though she knew Three Seagrass was well aware.
“Bend down, you barbarians are unreasonably tall.”
Mahit bent—thought suddenly and vividly of kneeling in front of the Emperor—and then Three Seagrass was settling the cloudhook over her eye. Half her vision went to data, an endless stream of it that resolved into a list of queries and requests. The interface was surprisingly intuitive: the cloudhook recalibrated to Mahit’s own tiny eye movements rapidly, and the structure of the files was a version of the electronic version of her own office, just seen through Three Seagrass’s accesses. It was a very small amount of cover, but it was cover. If she used Three Seagrass’s cloudhook to access her own files, Nineteen Adze wouldn’t be able to see that she’d gone in at all. Only that she was wearing her liaison’s cloudhook.
“The lower-level requests to the Ambassador’s office—visa queries, that sort of thing—are all things you could be telling me to do,” Three Seagrass said, “if I wasn’t having a fight on your behalf with three protocol officers and a queue system.” Her fingers were warm on Mahit’s temples. “If you want to do work while I sort out when you get to speak with the Emperor Himself, there’s your list.”
“Thanks,” Mahit said. She straightened. “You don’t need it?” She gestured at the cloudhook. Half her vision was gone, like she’d had a hemispheric brain injury that had replaced her eye with a to-do list.
“Not for an hour or so. Be useful, Ambassador.”
Mahit thought she sounded—fond. Indulgent, even.
It was going to hurt so much if she had to stop pretending Three Seagrass was possessed of no agenda but her own ambition and a mild affection for barbarians.
The list of queries to the Ambassadorial Office of Lsel Station was approximately half requests to have a visa renewed and half somewhat offensive public interest queries as to “how Stationers conduct their daily lives, particularly with regard to holiday celebrations or other days of local excitement!” Mahit would have been irritated by all of them had they not been a perfectly distracting way of spending the time. As it was, answering tabloid journalists and distressed commercial traders was quite soothing. It took her nearly an hour to notice that there was one particular sort of business query that she had received absolutely none of: no one had written to ask her what she wanted done with Yskandr’s body, still nestled in the basement of the Judiciary morgue. It had been more than half a week since ixplanatl Four Lever had asked her what she wanted done with it, and yet no one had followed up—not even an undersecretary.