But she was alone, and that was Yskandr’s fault. Both of him: the dead man and the vanished imago. His fault, even if there had been sabotage from Lsel. Mahit bowed from the chest and left Twenty-Nine Bridge to entertain (or be interrogated by) Three Seagrass, and went through the last door between herself and the Emperor Six Direction.
Only as she blinked against the change in ambient light—the antechamber had been dimmed for the hour, but the Emperor’s receiving room was ablaze under full-spectrum dawnlamps—did she remember the intensity of her imago-inflected limbic system reaction to the Emperor at the oration-contest banquet. She felt shimmering with nerves, like she was about to meet an examination committee or a secret lover, and here was another reason to wish that she didn’t know Yskandr, didn’t have the afterimages of his neurochemical memory echoing through hers.
The Emperor was sitting on a couch, like a person. Like an old man still awake in the small hours of the morning, his shoulders more stooped than they’d been at the banquet, his face drawn and sharp. His skin was greyish and translucent. Mahit wondered just how ill he was—and in what way, whether it was one of the waves of minor illnesses that marked old age or something that was deeper, worse, a cancer or an organ system failure. From the look of him she suspected the latter. The dawnlamps were probably for keeping him awake— full-spectrum light could do that to a person if they were sensitive—but they surrounded him with a mandorla of sunlight that Mahit thought was deliberately reminiscent of the sun-spear imperial throne.
“Ambassador Dzmare,” he said, and beckoned her closer with two fingers.
“Your Imperial Majesty.” She considered dropping to her knees, genuflecting, letting the Emperor wrap his hot hands around her outstretched wrists again. Wanted it, and in the wanting found reason enough to discard the impulse. Instead she squared her shoulders and asked, “May I sit down?”
“Sit,” Six Direction said. “You and Yskandr are both too tall to look at properly, standing up.”
“I’m not him,” Mahit said. She sat in a chair pulled up next to the couch. Some of the dawnlamps, noticing the presence of another breathing person in the room, obligingly rotated to shine on her.
“My ezuazuacat told me you’d say that.”
“I’m not lying, Your Majesty.”
“No. You’re not. Yskandr wouldn’t have needed to be escorted past the bureaucrats.”
Brazenly, as a panacea against feeling poised on the verge of drowning, Mahit said: “Forgive me. It must be difficult, meeting your friend’s successor. On Lsel, there’s more support for the transition down the imago-line.”
“Is there,” said the Emperor. It was less of a question than an invitation.
Mahit wasn’t ignorant of how information-gathering worked. She knew she was injured, exhausted, immersed in a culture-shocked numbness that she couldn’t see the edges of, and talking to a man who controlled a quarter of the galaxy, whether or not he was dying by inches; she’d like to crack open like an egg and leak out words. How much of that was good interrogation technique and how much of that was limbic-system echo of trust wasn’t even a useful question.
“We have a long tradition of psychological therapy,” she said, and stopped, hard, like biting down. One sentence at a time.
The Emperor laughed, more easily than she’d expected. “I imagine you need it,” he said.
“Is that based on your impressions of Yskandr or of me?”
“On my impressions of human beings, of which you and Yskandr are only one interesting set of outliers.”
Mahit took the hit, smiling—too wide, close to the feeling of Yskandr’s smile—and spreading her fingertips apart in that same Teixcalaanli gesture that Twenty-Nine Bridge had used. “And yet there is no comparative tradition in Teixcalaan.”
“Ah, Ambassador Dzmare—you have only been with us for four days. It is possible you’ve missed something.”
A great many things, Mahit was sure. “I would be fascinated to hear about Teixcalaanli methods of coping with psychological distress, Your Brilliance,” she said.
“I do think you would be. But that isn’t why you asked so insistently for this meeting.”
“No.”
“No. Go on then,” said Six Direction. He laced his fingers together. The knuckles were age-swollen, deeply lined. “Make your case for where else I should send my armies.”
“How are you so sure that’s what I came here to ask?”
“Ah,” he said. “It is what Yskandr asked me for. Are you so different, then? To care more for some other cause than your station.”
“Was that the only thing he asked you for?”
“Of course not. That’s just what I said yes to.”
“And will you say yes to me, if I ask?”
Six Direction looked her over, with a patience that felt infinite—didn’t they only have a half hour, couldn’t she get away, the muscles in her side where the falling wall had bruised her ached with holding so still, and she could feel her heartbeat pulsing in the wounds on her hand—and then he shrugged. The motion was almost lost in the complexity of the lapels of his jacket. “I wonder if you are a failure-state or a warning,” he said. “It would be useful to know before I answer you. If you are able to say.”
He must have meant was she a failure of the imago process. Was the fact that she wasn’t Yskandr on purpose or a mistake. And if it was a mistake, was it a purposeful mistake—did the Emperor know about the sabotage? He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have, if he’d asked if she was a failure or a warning. Mahit imagined, abruptly, Six Direction’s expression on the unlined child’s face of Eight Antidote. The same patient calculation. The child was a ninety-percent clone; his face would grow into this face, given muscle memory. The idea was repulsive. A child couldn’t stand up to an imago. He’d drown in the older memory; a child hardly had a self to hold on to yet. That was probably what Six Direction wanted.
“If I were a failure-state,” Mahit said, “here to show you the uncertainty of imago-transfer, I certainly wouldn’t tell you that I was.”
And if I am a warning, I don’t even know it. She shied away from the concept—she couldn’t think through it, here, and even the edges of the idea, flavored with Onchu’s secret messages to the dead, made her furious. That Lsel would have sent her, flawed, to prove some sort of point to Six Direction, a rebuke, a broken thing—but she couldn’t be furious. Not now. She was alone with the Emperor.
He was asking, “Would you demonstrate it, instead?”
“I imagine I wouldn’t have a choice,” Mahit said. “So it’s really up to you to decide, Your Illuminate Brilliance, exactly what I am.”
“Perhaps I will continue to see what you’ll do.” When he shrugged, the sunlamps orbiting his shoulders moved with his motion, as if he and they were some cohesive machine, a system much larger than a man that responded to a man’s will. “Tell me one thing, Ambassador Dzmare, before we return to negotiations and answers. Do you carry Yskandr’s imago, or are you someone else’s memory altogether?”
“I’m Mahit Dzmare,” Mahit said, which felt quite like lying by omission, a small betrayal of Lsel, so she went on: “And I’ve never carried any imago but Yskandr Aghavn.”