Three Seagrass said, clipped, “We should take a different street, Petal. This one’s got a demonstration at the end of it.”
“I live on this street.”
Mahit looked up. The missing populace was gathered in a protean mass that was spilling out of the sidewalks and into the street itself. Men, women, children-in-arms, holding placards and purple banners. Their faces were Teixcalaanli-still, unreadable, intent. Even the children weren’t loud. The hush felt more dangerous than noise would be. It felt intent.
“Those people aren’t for One Lightning,” she said. “Not unless public acclamations have gotten much quieter in the past three days.”
“A public acclamation we could walk right through,” said Three Seagrass, “as long as you were willing to pretend to like rhyming doggerel long enough to shout anything that alliterates with yaotlek—”
“This is politics, and I really thought my neighborhood wasn’t prone to this sort of thing.”
“You should know better, Petal,” Three Seagrass said, resigned. “Have you even looked at your demographics? You’ve moved into a trade sector, all these people are—”
“—are for Thirty Larkspur, they’re wearing those flower lapels,” Mahit broke in. They’d all stopped moving. The demonstration approached, slow-growing like a fungus. The people that made it up walked together, encroaching. One of the placards had a snatch of poetry on it that Mahit recognized: These things are ceaseless: star-charts, disembarkments / the curl of unborn petals holds a hollowness.
Nine Maize’s couplets, which had so upset the oration contest.
“Yes,” Three Seagrass agreed. “This neighborhood is as wealthy as it is because of outer-province trade and manufacturing, which means that they like Thirty Larkspur, who is nominally an imperial heir, and yet these people are waiting for the Sunlit to come and shut them down for being actively treasonous and demonstrating for peace against the wishes of the current Emperor.”
No more treasonous than Eight Loop had been, in her editorial, Mahit thought. She thought she’d figured out part of what was going on. Something had passed between the two imperial-associates, some deal they’d made: Eight Loop and Thirty Larkspur were bargaining.
They seemed to be working together to discredit not only One Lightning and his attempt to usurp the imperial throne by public acclamation, but also to discredit the authority of the sitting Emperor at the same time. One Lightning, in charge of this war now, and relying on it to shore up his support, was judicially suspect, according to Eight Loop’s editorial—and publicly unwanted, according to this demonstration of Thirty Larkspur’s partisans. And Six Direction? Well, he was failing, mistaken in his attempt to allow a war of annexation in a time not entirely peaceful, a time where there might be external threats, whether those were some mysterious alien or just the continued unrest in the Odile System and how it was sparking protest even here in the City—he was misunderstanding the law—and that misunderstanding was being rejected by his own populace, who didn’t want a war …
The Judiciary and Thirty Larkspur working together. Mahit could—almost—almost see the shape of what they wanted.
If she wasn’t so tired.
“Is there a back alley into your flat, Twelve Azalea?” she asked. “I have seen enough of the Sunlit today, and I think they will be here soon—”
It turned out that there was. They ran for it like they were being chased.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EZUAZUACAT THIRTY LARKSPUR TO BE MADE IMPERIAL-ASSOCIATE
In light of his continued service to His Illuminate Brilliance the Emperor Six Direction of All Teixcalaan, the ezuazuacat Thirty Larkspur will as of 09.30 on this first day of the third year of the eleventh indiction be recognized as an associate to the imperial throne, equal in rank and in authority to Imperial Associate Eight Loop and Imperial Associate Eight Antidote; may the three imperial associates grow stably together, equilateral in desire, and rule jointly if necessary.
There is no useful reason to deny Teixcalaan another ambassador, despite our uncertainty as to Yskandr Aghavn’s fate; we need a voice in the Empire, and Mr. Aghavn has not been a very communicative one even before now. I recommend that a thorough aptitude test be administered to volunteers as well as to young persons without imago-line who have particularly high scores on Teixcalaanli Imperial Examinations, and a new ambassador selected from the most compatible of them with the imago recording of Aghavn—which, I remind you, we do have, despite it being out of date.
LATER, Mahit would remember the rest of that afternoon in snatches: single moments, disconnected from one another by how time stretched and denatured itself under the pressure of exhaustion. Her first view of Twelve Azalea’s flat, the walls hung with artwork—copies of off-world oil and acrylic and ink drawings, mass-produced but of high quality—and how Twelve Azalea had looked obscurely embarrassed when she’d mentioned how nice they were, as if he hardly ever had visitors to comment on his taste. The needle-sharp heat of his shower, and how all the soap in Teixcalaan smelled of a flower she couldn’t place, peppery and foreign-shading-to-familiar. The texture of the loose trousers and shirt he’d loaned her, rough-silk and too short in every dimension, hovering halfway up her calves and her forearms. How lying down on the wide couch had felt absurd, and then gone, texture and sound blinked out to nothing.
The weight of Three Seagrass’s back, pressed to her back, stretched out beside her. Opening her eyes to a blur of motion on the holoscreen, Twelve Azalea eating some sort of noodle dish out of a plastic container with long sticks, cross-legged on a chair as he watched a sanitized version of the end of the protest going on just outside his windows, and hearing the distant crash of breaking glass, and going away again inside her own mind, just for a little while, into that dark space where Yskandr should have been.
When she woke properly it was full dark. Twelve Azalea had fallen asleep at the table next to his meal, his head folded on his arms, and the holoscreen was still going with the volume turned down: moving images casting light across his face. Mahit gingerly disentangled herself from both the couch and Three Seagrass, who looked pale and unhealthily grey even asleep (had she sufficiently recovered from the neurological strike? Mahit couldn’t imagine that she had), and crossed to the window. The street outside was quiet. The golden, blank face-shield of a Sunlit glinted from the corner of the intersection. There were at least four of them, in this quiet residential neighborhood, keeping a threatening watch.