Mahit closed the door on him. Carefully she put on the contaminated gloves. The latex caught on the bandage around her hand and she winced, but it was still better than how the sap had felt. The infofiche sticks broke easily in her fingers, one after the other, cracking along their wax seals. She could still exert pressure. The muscles and tendons and nerves running down her palm were undamaged. The toxin hadn’t spread that far. She assumed she had Nineteen Adze to thank for that, Nineteen Adze and her speedy intimate mercy. Her rethinking.
The stick from the Information Ministry exuded a pretty graphic announcing itself as an official communication and then presented Mahit with a single-line answer to her question: just four glyphs, and two of them were a title and a name. She’d asked who authorized the rapid arrival of an ambassador from Lsel.
Authorization given by Imperial-Associate Eight Loop.
Which—was unexpected. At the banquet, Eight Loop had been the only one of the three presumptive heirs who had entirely ignored Mahit. All Mahit knew about her was what was on newsfeeds and encomiastic biopics of the Emperor. His crèchesib, who had been the Minister for the Judiciary before her elevation. An agemate. The particular glyph she used for her name’s numerical signifier was the same as the glyph the Emperor’s ninety-percent clone was using in “Eight Antidote,” which said something about what loyalties the Emperor owed her, but not anything about why she’d want an ambassador from Lsel Station as soon as possible. Unless she knew what Yskandr had sold to the Emperor, and … had wanted it to happen, and wanted it to happen even if Yskandr was dead and she’d have to import another ambassador to accomplish it? Wanted to revoke it, by virtue of replacing Yskandr with an ambassador who had different ideas of what might be traded away to Teixcalaan, even in exchange for keeping the open maw of the Empire pointed at some other prey?
Even if Yskandr had to betray Lsel’s interests, he could have found some way to do it that wasn’t so horrifically Teixcalaanli. An imago wasn’t a re-creation of a single person. An imago of the Emperor wouldn’t be the Emperor, not entirely. Didn’t he know?
None of that explained Eight Loop’s involvement. Except that she was Judiciary Minister, and Yskandr’s corpse was in the Judiciary morgue, not any other morgue in the City—perhaps she’d arranged that …
Mahit broke open the second infofiche stick, one of the two in anonymous grey plastic. Twelve Azalea hadn’t bothered with verse this time. The message he’d sent was unsigned, simple—as if he’d composed it on a street corner and dumped the sealed infofiche stick into a public mailbox.
The message read: Have what you asked for. Might have been noticed on the way out. I can’t hold on to it. I’ll be at your suite at dawn tomorrow. Meet me there.
The last stick was the one with the off-world communication sticky tab. The one which might be another secret message, a warning for a man who was already dead. A rumor of distant conflicts, tremors on Lsel that would have existed no matter what sort of madness the succession crisis of the Teixcalaanli Imperium might cause—or might already be causing. Mahit found herself afraid to open it, and inside that fear, did so all at once: cracking the stick hard enough that it nearly tore the plastic film, printed in familiar alphabetic letters, that was cradled inside.
This message was shorter than the previous one had been, and dated forty-eight Teixcalaanli hours later: 230.3.11. Still long before she’d arrived in the City, but after she’d left Lsel on Ascension’s Red Harvest. It was titled “For Ambassador Aghavn from Dekakel Onchu, Councilor for the Pilots.” Mahit felt strange, reading it. Like she was eavesdropping, a child snuck unsupervised into a meeting she oughtn’t to have overheard.
This message will be delivered if there was no response to previous communication. The Councilor for the Pilots hopes that you are well and repeats her warning: Tarats for the Miners and Amnardbat for Heritage have sent a replacement for you to the Empire, at the Empire’s request. If the replacement is loyal to Tarats then she may be trustable; if she is not, or if she is obviously a victim or an engineer of sabotage, the Pilots suggest that you look to Heritage for the source of opposition and—though it gives me no pleasure to refer to it as such—enemy action.
Be careful. I am unable to discern the precise nature of the sabotage if it exists, but I suspect Heritage has made use of her access to the imago-machines.
Destroy this communication.
It was short, and it was worse than the previous one. Mahit wished she could find some way to talk to Councilor Onchu—to tell her that her messages weren’t falling into a blank and silent void, that Yskandr was dead but his successor was listening. But Onchu wouldn’t want to hear it, from her. If she was sabotaged. If she was an unwitting, unwilling agent of Aknel Amnardbat, not just politically supported by her but … if she’d … if she’d damaged her imago-machine, somehow …
But she couldn’t yet understand why Heritage would do that. What it’d be for. And she’d thought that really, she had been Amnardbat’s choice of successors for Yskandr, so maybe it wasn’t really sabotage, maybe she was just—fulfilling some function that Amnardbat wanted to accomplish within Teixcalaan.
But if the malfunctioning of her imago wasn’t sabotage, she was damaged, and it was her own fault. So which one of the options was really worse?
Suddenly she needed very much to meet Twelve Azalea and reclaim the dead Yskandr’s imago-machine. Even if everything else went wrong, Lsel was annexed, she was thrown into a cell in the Judiciary—if she could get hold of it, she could at least keep that secret, hold it in stead, salvage what was left of her predecessor. That might be a kind of penance, if she truly was broken, and the Yskandr she was supposed to have was gone for good.
Mahit burned the plastic sheet, and wiped all the sticks—they were designed to be easily erased—before opening the door of her room again. Seven Scale was still standing in the hallway, holding his garbage bag, as if he hadn’t moved at all in the ten minutes she’d been reading. It was unsettling. Even an expressionless proper Teixcalaanlitzlim wasn’t as expressionless and submissive as Seven Scale could be. If she didn’t know better, Mahit could think he was an automaton. Even an artificial intelligence had more immediately apparent volition.
“Here,” she said, holding out the emptied sticks. “I’m finished with these.”
He held out the bag. “The gloves too,” he said. “I am awfully sorry about your hand.”
“It’s fine,” said Mahit. “The ezuazuacat fixed it.” If Seven Scale had been the person who had left the xauitl for her, he’d know that his mistress had prevented it from killing her—but there was no change in his expression. He merely nodded, serene, as if Nineteen Adze administered first aid as a matter of course. Maybe she did.
“Is there anything else?” he asked.
I need to escape this very pleasant and very life-threatening prison of an office complex before dawn, in order to receive an illegal machine looted from the corpse of my predecessor. Can you help me with that?
“No, thank you,” Mahit said.
Seven Scale nodded. “Good night, Ambassador,” he said, and disappeared down the hall. Mahit watched him go. When he’d turned the corner she retreated back into her office. The door hissed gently shut behind her. She stared mutely at the window-side couch with its folded blanket, thought of lying down and closing her eyes and banishing all of Teixcalaan. Thought also again of going out the window and attempting to escape through the gardens. It was a two-story drop. She’d probably break an ankle, to go along with her bandaged hand and the bruises on her hip from when the restaurant had fallen on her.