“Not exactly,” said Three Seagrass. “More an observation from experience—whoever inscribes the history has an agenda and that agenda’s usually half dramatics. I mean, Pseudo-Thirteen River, everyone in that is desperately upset about mistaken identities and communication delay, but if you read Five Diadem instead on the very same expansion campaign, she wants you to think about supply lines because her patron was the Minister for the Economy—”
“We don’t have Five Diadem on Lsel. Is that actually her name?”
“If your name was Five Hat, and you lived during the golden age of epic historiography, where everyone else was getting feted at court and taken out on campaigns as eyewitnesses, you would publish under a loose pseudonym too, Mahit.”
Three Seagrass was so earnestly serious that Mahit found herself laughing, short sharp bursts of it that hurt her chest. It was possible she was hysterical. It was extremely possible, and a problem. It still took her half a minute to catch her breath. Three Seagrass squeezed her fingers, gently, and she exhaled hard through her teeth.
When she could manage it, Mahit asked, “Do you know why a man who accosted me at the Emperor’s oration-contest banquet might have tried just now to kill me?”
“Is that who he is?” Three Seagrass said, and let go of Mahit’s fingers. “Do you remember his name?” She got to her feet, and approached the corpse with her hands clasped primly behind her back, as if she was afraid to touch it accidentally. She peered at it, crouching. The panels of her jacket pooled on the floor, like the just-unfurled wings of a new insect.
“Conifer,” Mahit said, “I think—Eleven Conifer. But I wasn’t sober. Neither was he.”
“Tell me how you met him,” Three Seagrass said. With the tip of her shoe, she nudged the dead man’s head, tilting it up so she could see his face.
“He was looking for anyone Thirty Larkspur didn’t already own,” Mahit said. “And then I insulted him. And he tried to … grab me? Hurt me. And then Thirty Larkspur himself called him off—”
“You shouldn’t go places without me,” Three Seagrass said, but she didn’t sound reproving. “So he knows you. At least a little. Enough to dislike you. Now, he’s not anyone I know, and he’s not wearing anyone’s colors or favors—not that an assassin would, no matter what people do in poetry or histories—”
“You do think assassin, then.”
She straightened up. “Do you have other ideas?”
Mahit shrugged. “Kidnapper, thief—someone who wanted to intercept this meeting, except I can’t think of who would know—”
“Except me,” Three Seagrass said, only a little bit wry. “And Twelve Azalea, who asked to meet you here.”
“Three Seagrass, if I begin by assuming you are trying to kill me, I—”
She waved one of her hands, a falling gesture of dismissal. “Assume I’m not. Didn’t we agree on that, the first day you were here? I’m not trying to sabotage you, and you’re not an idiot. Killing you counts as sabotage.”
That conversation—in this same room!—felt like it had been months ago, though Mahit was entirely aware it had been only four days. Five, now that the sun was beginning to rise.
“Not you, then,” she said, “for simplicity’s sake. Which leaves Twelve Azalea and … anyone who intercepted his message before it got to me. He did say he was being followed.”
“A person who can intercept a message on infofiche would either have to be right there when he sent it, or else Information Ministry, to unseal the stick and seal it up again.”
“Information Ministry is still you or Twelve Azalea, Three Seagrass.”
Three Seagrass looked at her for a long moment, and sighed. “There are a lot of asekretim. Some of us probably work for whoever it is that wanted Yskandr dead, or you dead, or wants Twelve Azalea dead—”
“What if it’s not interception?” Mahit asked, cutting her off. “Before he—before I—from what he said, he said you weren’t supposed to fight back, I think he meant to threaten me, get me to give him something. I don’t think he wanted to kill me at all. I think he wanted what Twelve Azalea has, the imago-machine, and I think he wanted me to hand it over. Maybe he was sent.”
“Who would send him?”
Mahit thought of saying One Lightning, but that would assume that everyone knew about the imago-machines, everyone in Teixcalaan, not just everyone in the palace; One Lightning was up in a flagship somewhere in Teixcalaanli space—when would he have heard?
Instead she said, “Thirty Larkspur? If he exploited what Eleven Conifer did to me. He was very deliberate about pointing out that what he’d done was assault, and that he’d be talking to him later…”
“And Thirty Larkspur would want an imago-machine? Enough to blackmail a courtier. Well. I wouldn’t put it past him.” Three Seagrass’s expression went strange—distant, a little rueful. “Your imago-machines are a problem, Mahit.”
“Not for us,” Mahit said. Only for Teixcalaan, who wants them this badly. Or wants them to not exist this badly.
“No,” said Three Seagrass. She left off standing by the corpse and came back over to Mahit, offering her a hand up off the floor. “I think they are a problem for you, too—or at least you have a problem, having told any of us about them.”
Mahit took her hand, even though she was so much taller than Three Seagrass that the offered leverage wasn’t much help. “I didn’t,” she said, getting to her feet. “Tell you, that is. Yskandr did, and the Yskandr who did is a man I have never met.”
“What is it like?”
“What is what like?”
“Not being one person.”
It was such a naked question—more straightforward than anyone had been with Mahit in her entire time on this planet—that it took her by surprise; she was still standing there, trying to figure out what sort of answer was even possible, her fingers twined up with Three Seagrass’s, when the door chimed plaintively in that uncomfortable dissonant chord.
“More assassins?” Three Seagrass said, over-bright.
“Twelve Azalea, I hope,” said Mahit. “Go open it?”
Three Seagrass did. She stood sharply to the side of the door while she told it to open, as if being simply out of line-of-sight would preserve her from whatever was waiting to enter. But when the door irised open it was only Twelve Azalea after all. Mahit watched him take in the scene: purple-faced corpse on the rug, dawn light coming in through the windows, Mahit and Three Seagrass themselves standing about like children who had accidentally broken a priceless art object.
Teixcalaanli expressionlessness could, apparently, withstand the revelation of recent murder. Perhaps it helped that Twelve Azalea looked like he’d had an equally distressing night. His Information Ministry suit was waterstained, the orange cuffs gone stiff and spotted. There was dirt smeared across one of his cheeks and most of his hair had come undone from its queue.
“You look terrible, Petal,” said Three Seagrass.
“There is a dead man on your rug, Reed; how I look is not important.”
“It’s my rug, actually,” said Mahit. “Now would you come in so we can close the door?”
When the door was safely locked behind him—the three of them closed in with the dead man, a small secret to go along with all of Mahit’s enormous other ones—Twelve Azalea reached into his jacket and produced a bundle of cloth. It looked like one of the sheets from the morgue, folded into a neat packet. He held it out to Mahit.