The Emperor met her eyes, as if he was evaluating just who was behind them, and did not let her look away. Mahit thought, Yskandr, if there ever was a time for you to start talking to me …
Imagined him saying, <Hello, Six Direction,> dry and archly removed and suffused with recognition. She knew the precise tone he’d use.
Didn’t say it.
The Emperor asked, “When we discussed the Western Arc families, and what to do about their demands for exclusive trade, what was your opinion?”
Mahit had no idea what Yskandr had thought. Her Yskandr had met the Emperor socially, but had never been so highly regarded as to discuss policy with him. “That was before my time,” she said, evading.
She was still being observed. Evaluated. The Emperor’s eyes were such a dark brown they were nearly black—his cloudhook a stripped-down net of near-invisible glass—she wanted to knot her hands together in her lap, to stop them from having a chance of shaking. It would hurt too much, if she did.
“Yskandr,” said the Emperor, and for a moment Mahit was not sure if she was being addressed or if he was talking about her predecessor, “made many arguments and offered any number of things, trying to sway me away from expansion. It was fascinating, to see a mind so fluent in our language try so hard to convince us to act contrary to all the millennia of our success. We spent hours in this room, Mahit Dzmare.”
“An honor for my predecessor,” Mahit murmured.
“Do you think so?”
“It would be one for me.” She wasn’t even lying.
“So the commonality goes that far. Or perhaps you are merely being ambassadorial.”
“Does it matter, Your Brilliance, which one?”
Six Direction, when he smiled, smiled like a man from Lsel had shown him how: wrinkled cheeks drawn up, teeth visible. A learned motion, but one which felt shockingly familiar, even after just four days seeing only Teixcalaanli expressions. “You,” the Emperor declared, “are as slippery as Yskandr was.”
Mahit shrugged, deliberately. She wondered if the few sunlamps which surrounded her were responding to her motion, too.
He leaned forward. The light around him was warm where it spilled onto her shins and knees, as if his fever was mobile, could touch her. “It doesn’t work, Mahit,” he said. “Philosophy and policy are conditional—multiple, reactive. What would be true for Teixcalaan, touching Lsel, is simultaneously untrue for Teixcalaan touching some other border state, or Teixcalaan in its refined form here in the City. Empires have many faces.”
“What doesn’t work?”
“Asking us to make exceptions,” he said. “Yskandr did try. He was very good at trying.”
“But you told him yes,” Mahit said, protesting.
“I did,” said Six Direction. “And if you will pay what he promised, I’ll tell you the same.”
Mahit needed to hear him say it. To be sure; to get out of the endless loops of her conjecture. “What did Yskandr promise you?”
“The schematics to Lsel’s imago-machines,” the Emperor said, quite easily, like he was discussing the prices for electrical power, “and several for immediate Teixcalaanli use. In exchange for which I would guarantee the independent sovereignty of Lsel Station for as long as my dynasty holds the Empire. I thought it was a rather clever bargain, on his part.”
It was in fact clever. For as long as his dynasty holds the Empire. A series of imago-emperors would be one single dynasty—one single man, endlessly repeated, if Six Direction really thought that the imago process was iterative instead of compilatory—and thus Lsel technology bought Lsel independence. In perpetuity. And Six Direction would escape the illness which was killing him, and live again in a body unmarked by age.
Yskandr, Mahit thought, reaching, you must have been so self-satisfied when you came up with the terms.
“Perhaps,” Six Direction went on, “you’d like to add some of your Lsel psychological therapists. I suspect their contributions to Teixcalaanli theories of mind might be quite fascinating.”
How much of Lsel did he want to take? Take and devour and transform into something that wasn’t Lsel at all, but Teixcalaan. If he wasn’t the Emperor, she might have slapped him.
If he wasn’t the Emperor, she might have laughed and asked what, exactly, the Teixcalaanli theory of mind involved. How wide is the concept of you?
But he was the Emperor—grammatically and existentially—and he thought of all fourteen generations of Lsel imago lines as something that could contribute to Teixcalaan.
The Empire, the world. The same word, benefiting equally.
She hadn’t said anything for too long. Her head was full of the trajectories of all those Teixcalaanli military transports, rattling against how furious she was, how suddenly, miserably trapped she felt. Against the sick pain-pulse in her damaged hand, beating in time with her heart.
“It took Yskandr years to come to such a decision, Your Brilliance,” she managed. “Allow me more than one evening of the honor of your company before I make mine.”
“You would like to come back, then.”
Of course she would. She was sitting in private audience with the Emperor of all Teixcalaan, and he was a challenge, and he took her seriously, and he’d taken her predecessor seriously, and how could she not want this? Even through the misery, she wanted it.
What she said was, “If you would have me, Your Brilliance. My predecessor was clearly—of interest to you. I might be, as well. And you do me considerable favor, to talk so clearly.”
“Clarity,” said Six Direction, still smiling that very Lsel smile, the one that made her want to grin back at him, conspiratorial, “is not a rhetorical virtue. But it is very useful, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” In a particular sense, this was the clearest conversation Mahit had had since she came to the City. She took a steadying breath—set her shoulders, trying to neither echo Yskandr’s body language nor mirror the Emperor’s—and took the offered conversational bait. “With your gracious permission to continue to fail at rhetoric, Your Brilliance: What made you want our imago-machines? Most people who aren’t Stationers find imago-lines quite … inexplicable. Inexplicable at best.”
Six Direction closed his eyes and opened them again: a long, slow blink. “How old are you, Mahit?”
“Twenty-six, by Teixcalaanli annual time.”
“Teixcalaan has seen eighty years of peace. Three of your lives, stacked up, since the last time one part of the world tried to destroy the rest of it.”
There were border skirmishes reported every week. There’d been an outright rebellion put down on the Odile System just a few days back. Teixcalaan was not peaceful. But Mahit thought she understood the difference Six Direction was so fixated on: those were skirmishes that brought war to outside the universe, to uncivilized places. The word he’d used for “world” was the word for “city.” The one that derived from the verb for “correct action.”
“It is a long time,” she admitted.
“It must continue,” said the Emperor Six Direction. “I cannot allow us to falter now. Eighty years of peace should be the beginning, not a lost age when we were more humane, more caring, more just. Do you see?”
Mahit saw. It was simple and wrong and terrible: it was fear, of leaving the world unguided by a true and knowing hand.