She was still trying to come up with a feasible plan that would get her back to Palace-East by dawn when someone knocked at the door. It was past midnight—the City’s two moons had both risen, tiny distant disks in the sky outside the window. Mahit had thought that everyone else was long asleep.
“Who is it?” she called.
“It’s Three Seagrass. Open the door, Mahit, I have good news!”
Mahit could not imagine what could qualify as good news that would also necessitate the news being delivered at this hour. As she got up to open the door, she imagined Three Seagrass standing surrounded by a small cohort of Sunlit, ready to arrest her; or accompanied by Ten Pearl, ready to kill her. All sorts of possible betrayals.
But it was only Three Seagrass on the other side of the door, hollow-eyed and exhausted and sparkling like she’d never stopped drinking coffee. Or something stronger. Maybe she hadn’t.
She ducked under Mahit’s arm without asking if she could come in, and waved the door shut herself.
“So you wanted a private audience with His Illuminate Majesty, right?”
“… yes?” Mahit said dubiously.
“Do you have anything better to wear? Though I guess this is clandestine and we probably shouldn’t treat it like an actual formal audience. Still. Something! But only if you’ve got it, we don’t have much time.”
“Why does the Emperor want to talk to me in the middle of the night?”
“I am not omniscient, so I can’t answer you exactly,” Three Seagrass said smugly, “but I am the sort of person who spends fourteen hours wading through bureaucrats and patricians third-, second-, and first-class so that eventually I have a personal conversation with the Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand, and he says that His Illuminate Majesty is, in fact, very interested in meeting with the Lsel Ambassador, and understands the need for both haste and discretion and would we please go now.”
“I’m going to assume this is both unusual and has the absolute force of imperial command,” Mahit said. Just a few hours previously she would never have thought that a meeting with the Teixcalaanli Emperor would feel most like an opportunity for escape. But if she could manage to slip away into the City before coming back to Nineteen Adze’s offices, meet with Twelve Azalea, and then return before anyone really knew she was gone … She’d have to let Three Seagrass in on it. It wouldn’t work, otherwise. (And also she wasn’t sure she could find her way back to Palace-East without her.)
“Yes and yes,” Three Seagrass said. “Nineteen Adze already knows—I think she’s going to escort us in. There’s a level of misdirection I’m not sure who’s responsible for, Mahit—if we are being brought into the palace as if we’re an ezuazuacat’s entourage, as cover—”
“Of course we accept the invitation,” Mahit said, cutting her off. “Even if it’s secret—maybe especially because it’s secret—”
“Were you trained for intrigue? On Lsel.” Three Seagrass was smiling as she said it, but Mahit was equally certain she meant it, and as a gentle barb.
“Just wait until I explain what we’re going to do after we see His Illuminate Majesty,” she said. “Then you’ll really think I was taught deception along with languages and protocol.”
The imperial chambers reminded Mahit more of Nineteen Adze’s office complex than the starry brilliance of the oration-contest ballroom: they were a warren of white marble shot through with gold veins, patterned like ruined—or fantastical—cityscapes under lightning-arc skies. Nineteen Adze knew them well enough to smile and exchange pleasantries with most of the people they passed; she practically matched the marbling where her jacket wasn’t an even brighter, even colder white. Mahit and Three Seagrass ghosted in her wake. If Nineteen Adze had opinions about the Emperor’s request to meet Mahit in private she hadn’t shared them. She’d only tugged her boots on over bare feet, looked Mahit over as if she was evaluating her suitability in an entirely new fashion—there was a naked intimacy in that evaluation that Mahit thought originated somewhere between when she’d had the impulse to reach out for Nineteen Adze in the bathroom and when she’d rejected that impulse—and then whisked them away into the depths of Palace-Earth.
It was like climbing down into the heart of the world: chambers opening like the valves between atria and shutting tight again behind them as they passed through. Even after midnight the innermost parts of the palace pulsed with a headlong rushing; the soft tramping of slippered feet, the whisk of some patrician’s suit around a corner. Distant low voices. Mahit wondered if the Emperor slept. Maybe he slept in snatches. Up every three hours to do another hour of work, read another night’s worth of reports from all of vast Teixcalaan.
The Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand met the three of them in an antechamber whose walls had deepened from marble to antiqued gold tapestry. He was short—as short as Three Seagrass, who barely came up to Mahit’s shoulder—with a thin face and a fashionably low hairline. He and Nineteen Adze raised their eyebrows at each other, like partners sitting down on opposite sides of a familiar game board.
“So you are keeping her in your offices,” he said.
“Make sure to give her back once His Brilliance is done with her, Twenty-Nine Bridge,” Nineteen Adze said, and waved Mahit forward before she could form any polite protests as to having come here by her own designs and with her own liaison.
Three Seagrass said, perfectly metrical, “The honor of meeting you in person, Twenty-Nine Bridge, is like stumbling upon a fresh spring in the mountains,” which had to be an allusion if not an outright quotation.
Twenty-Nine Bridge laughed like he’d been given a present. “Come sit with me, asekreta, while your Ambassador has her meeting. You must tell me how you managed to defeat all of my sub-secretaries in only one day.”
“Careful,” said Nineteen Adze, “that one is sneaky.”
“Are you actually warning me of something?” asked Twenty-Nine Bridge. His eyebrows touched his hairline when he raised them. “What under starlight did this child manage to do to you?”
“You’ll find out,” Nineteen Adze said, smug as a cat. Then she turned to Mahit, tapping her on the wrist, right above the bandage she’d wrapped there.
“You don’t have to do all of what he asks,” she said, and spun on her heel to sweep out of the room before Mahit could try to determine whether that “he” had meant the Keeper of the Imperial Inkstand or Six Direction Himself.
“I appreciate your help in arranging this meeting,” Mahit said to Twenty-Nine Bridge, trying to take some control of the proceedings. “And I hope we are not keeping you from your rest.”
He spread all his fingers apart by his sides, a Teixcalaanli gesture that Mahit read as nonchalance. “It isn’t the first time. Not for a Lsel ambassador and certainly not for me. Go in, Ambassador Dzmare. He’s blocked out an entire half hour for you.”
Of course Yskandr had been here before her. Promising eternal life and continuity of memory. Mahit found herself wishing, for what might have been the first time in her life, that she didn’t know Yskandr so well. That she didn’t see quite so clearly how he might have made the choices he’d made. But imago-recipients were chosen for psychological compatibility with their predecessors, and she and Yskandr—if only they’d had enough time!—at the beginning of their partnership had been so very fluid. She did understand.