“Delightful,” Mahit said. “Gossip.”
“Not that,” said Three Seagrass. “That’s fine. It’s probably good for your—brand. Look at the headline, that’s what I wanted you to see.”
IMPERIAL ASSOCIATE EIGHT LOOP ISSUES STATEMENT ON LEGALITY OF ANNEXATION WAR, the headline-glyphs spelled.
“Huh,” Mahit said. “Give me that? I wouldn’t expect public dissent from that direction—”
Twelve Azalea handed it over. Mahit kept reading: Eight Loop’s statement was short, impenetrably layered in references to Teixcalaanli precedent, and composed in unrhymed political verse, which she ought to have expected, considering the woman was head of the Judiciary—but after staring at it for a long moment she thought she understood what Eight Loop was getting at.
While going to war was entirely at the Emperor’s discretion (of course it was), a war of expansion was legally required to be conducted beginning in an atmosphere of perfect serenity, which was—if Mahit was reading the Teixcalaanli legalese correctly— a time in which there were no actual threats to Teixcalaan to be faced before the fleet could go off conquering. “What threat is she implying exists?” Mahit asked. “And why would she suggest that Six Direction is not competent to run this war, now? Didn’t they grow up together?” Weren’t they allies?
Three Seagrass shrugged, but she looked like she’d been given a present: a puzzle to solve. “She isn’t exactly saying there’s a direct threat to the integrity of the Empire, though there’s always some sort of rumor that this is the year some alien species or other is actually going to invade human space. She’s just saying that His Brilliance didn’t prove there wasn’t a threat. It’s not quite a condemnation of his inaction, more like a suggestion that he’s missed something important that he should have thought of. Like he’s not fit to rule anymore, if he can’t remember things like this…”
“I don’t like it,” Twelve Azalea added. “It’s sneaky.”
It was sneaky. “She sent for me,” Mahit said. “As a further point of data. It was Eight Loop who got a new Lsel ambassador here as soon as Yskandr was dead.”
“Was murdered; it’s all right, we know,” Three Seagrass said.
“Was murdered,” Mahit agreed. “But either way, she sent for me, and now she is doing this, and I want to see her in person.”
Three Seagrass clapped her hands together. “Well,” she said. “We don’t have anywhere else to be until your appointment at the Science Ministry, and that’s tomorrow. Since we can’t go back to your apartments, and I don’t imagine you want to call up the ezuazuacat for help again…”
“Not without a better reason than wanting a shower and an actual bed,” Mahit said. “I might get to that point by this evening.”
“Then we might as well walk straight into Eight Loop’s offices.”
“We’ve napped in a garden and now we’re invading the Judiciary?” Twelve Azalea asked, plaintive.
“You can go home, Petal,” Three Seagrass said. It had much the same attitude as Eight Loop’s little insinuation: You could go home, but you’d be letting down the side.
Twelve Azalea got up, brushing off his much-abused suit. “Oh no. I want to see this. Even if the Mist do ask me questions about what I was doing sneaking around in the morgue. And they might not even know it was me.”
They made quite a picture, Mahit suspected: two Information Ministry functionaries and one barbarian, all wrinkled and grass-stained; one with a long tear up the sleeve of her jacket from struggling with Eleven Conifer’s awful needle (that would be her) and one looking as if he had hidden in a water feature—which he had (Twelve Azalea); only Three Seagrass seemed to wear her disarray as if it was the height of court fashion. Nevertheless they received little direct opposition on their way into the Judiciary: the doors still opened to Twelve Azalea’s cloudhook, which implied that even if he was being stalked by some sort of Judiciary-specific investigatory force, they hadn’t forbidden him from being here, and the functionaries within the Ministry kept a quiet sort of watch on them as Three Seagrass walked them through the layers of bureaucracy separating Eight Loop from the sort of annoyance that came in off the street.
That bureaucracy parted for Three Seagrass like over-irradiated plastic, rotten-soft under pressure. There was something wrong with it; they were moving too easily up the great needle-spear of the Judiciary.
Mahit thought about mentioning her growing sense that she was following Three Seagrass into a trap. But if she mentioned it perhaps that trap would close around them, needle-teeth like a thousand Judiciaries pointed inward …
Eight Loop could have been waiting for her all along. (Nineteen Adze had suggested as much, when she’d insinuated that Mahit should find out who had sent for her in the first place. But she couldn’t afford to use Nineteen Adze’s judgment in place of her own.)
An elevator took them up the last few floors to Eight Loop’s own offices: a tiny red-crystal seedpod of a chamber, semi-translucent. Inside of it the air felt hushed, charged. Mahit found herself staring at how the light fell on Three Seagrass’s face, turning it from warm brown to a ruddy color as if she’d been dipped in blood.
“This is too easy,” she said.
Three Seagrass tipped her head back, rolled her shoulders. “I know.”
“And yet we are in this elevator—”
“I could make Petal press the emergency stop, but it’s a bit late to have second thoughts, Mahit.”
“Clearly Eight Loop wants us to have this meeting,” Twelve Azalea said. “As we also want to have this meeting, I am not seeing the reason for your distress.”
“Eventually,” Three Seagrass said, dry and distant and a little regretful, “you might have to do something someone else wants, Mahit.”
The part of her that was cued onto Teixcalaanli double meanings, allusion and reference and hidden motives—that part of her which, if she was being honest, was why she was a good politician, why her aptitudes had spelled for diplomacy and negotiation and came up green, green, green with Yskandr’s—that vicious part suggested that it was entirely possible that Three Seagrass had been working for Eight Loop this whole time. If she was so insistent on Mahit keeping this meeting …
And would it change anything?
It should. It didn’t. It was too late, anyway. The elevator doors opened.
Eight Loop’s office was nothing like Nineteen Adze’s white-quartz serenity of a workroom: despite being at the very top of the Judiciary tower, it felt tightly enclosed, almost claustrophobic. The pentagonal walls were lined with infofiche and codex-books, overlapping and stacked double on the shelves. The windows—and there were windows centered in each of those faceted walls—were drawn over with heavy cloth blinds. Daylight crept out from under them and advanced only an inch. In the middle of the room Eight Loop herself sat like the central core of an AI, a slow-beating heart nestled in information-bearing cables: an old woman behind her desk, transparent holoscreens in a vast arc above her. They were all inward-facing: the images on them backward, pointed toward Eight Loop’s eyes and not Mahit’s, feeding her a dozen views, Cityscape and dense-glyphed documentation and what Mahit thought was a star-chart rendered in two-dimensional flats.