Ten Pearl interlaced his hands. All his rings glinted, even under this bland fluorescent lighting. “Are you concerned you might make a similar mistake, Ambassador?” he asked. “Your predecessor ate something unpleasant, that’s all. Unfortunate. Our conversation was on very different topics than his eating habits. I’m sure you could avoid consuming such things, if you were careful.”
Mahit smiled, with all her teeth. Barbarian. But persistent. “No one will be specific as to what he ate,” she said. “It’s a fascinating omission.”
“Ambassador,” Ten Pearl said, the word drawn out slow, like he was coaxing her. “Have you perhaps considered that there is a reason for that omission? There are all sorts of other subjects we could profitably spend our time on right now. Perhaps we might discuss hydroponic nutrition factors, compared between small and large populations? We have so much to learn from each other, Lsel and Teixcalaan.”
It was inconvenient, Mahit thought, being furious. It dulled the edges of her vocabulary. And yet, here she was. Just as furious as she’d been in Eight Loop’s office.
She looked him straight in the face. “Ten Pearl, I’d like to know why my predecessor died under your care.” It wasn’t quite an accusation. (It was an accusation, just not a direct one.) Three Seagrass had put her hand on Mahit’s knee, warning and warm.
Ten Pearl sighed, a little resigned exhalation as if he was preparing to do something unpleasant and necessary, like disposing of rotten food. “Ambassador Aghavn’s activities and proposals were unsuitable; he implied, over an entirely civilized meal in which he was given multiple opportunities to renege, that he was prepared at any moment to flood the Teixcalaanli markets with technology which would upset the functioning of our very society, and that he seemed to have suborned or influenced our Glorious and Brilliant Imperial Majesty—it was my responsibility, as Minister for Science, to deal with the threat he represented.”
“So you killed him,” Three Seagrass said, fascinated.
Ten Pearl regarded Three Seagrass evenly. “Given the current situation,” he said with an encompassing little gesture toward Mahit, as if to include and circumscribe her in the general state of Teixcalaanli diplomatic affairs, and then to dismiss her with them, “I see little reason to deny that, while he was dying, I did not intervene medically. If Ambassador Dzmare would like to bring that up during an inquiry into medical malpractice, I am sure she could begin such an inquiry at the Judiciary.”
Had her influence fallen so far, in two days of unrest in the City and the government, that Ten Pearl could not only blithely admit to disposing of his political opponent—“did not intervene medically” was for Three Seagrass’s legalistic ears and nothing else, Mahit knew what he meant when he said it—but also be assured that Mahit had no pull with anyone at court who would be willing to punish him for doing so? Clearly Ten Pearl believed that the Science Ministry was beyond the reproach of whoever was going to inherit the imperial throne—
—and just as clearly, he believed that Six Direction was no longer, without Yskandr Aghavn and his promised technology, willing to defend Lsel Station, or any of its citizens. And thus he had no use for Mahit, if she wasn’t going to try to flood the market with immortality machines—no use except the use he’d have for any ambassador from a small satellite-state on the edges of Teixcalaan.
The deal, as Thirty Larkspur had said at the oration contest, meaning—as she hadn’t understood then—the deal between the Emperor and Yskandr, is off.
She managed to keep her voice even, her vocabulary pristine, and launched a test satellite into the orbit of the conversation: “I wouldn’t begin at the Judiciary, Minister; I’d begin with the Emperor’s own ezuazuacatlim, if I needed advice. I’ve found such safety there.”
“Have you?” Ten Pearl said. “I am glad; that’s a change.”
“Is it?” Mahit asked, and waited for it: she was beginning to suspect that Ten Pearl wanted to talk, wanted to make her feel powerless with his talking. Three Seagrass’s fingers were going to bruise her thigh, they were gripping so hard.
“Your vaunted hostess, Her Excellency Nineteen Adze, stood by precisely as I did,” Ten Pearl said. “At that dinner I may have defended the interests of my ministry, and thereby all of the Empire, but she let me do it.”
Mahit felt an icy clarity. She remembered Nineteen Adze saying he was my friend to her over tea—remembered the visceral, neurochemical familiarity of Mahit’s reaction to her, how what of her was Yskandr wanted to be near her and have a good time and feel challenged and safe at once—remembered how Nineteen Adze had watched her in the hallway of her office complex, watched her pick up the poison flower, bend her head to it as if to breathe. She could have so easily remained in the archway, still and silent in her white suit, and not intervening at all.
But she had. She had, for whatever reason, saved Mahit’s life. Even if she had not saved Yskandr’s.
“I do appreciate the warning,” Mahit managed to say. She was lying through her teeth. She could lie a little more. She aimed for tremulous, confused, upset. (She was upset.) “There have been certain unpleasant incidents—a flower given to me with toxic effects—do you think—”
“I,” Ten Pearl said, cutting her off, “am not about to be framed for floral assassination. I am a modern man, and the Science Ministry is not merely botanical.”
“We were not about to suggest,” said Three Seagrass, “that the Science Ministry was merely botanical.”
The resulting pause dragged on endlessly, and Mahit wondered which of the three of them was going to break first, either into shouting or into hysterical laughter.
“Is there anything you would like to suggest, Ambassador? Considering that I have not sent anyone with a flower to do away with you,” Ten Pearl said at last.
“You’ve made my position quite clear,” Mahit told him. “I’ll be in touch when things have calmed down, if we do end up having something to say to one another. Hydroponics. I’ll remember that.”
In the aftermath of their summary exit from the Science Ministry, Three Seagrass took Mahit to a restaurant. Mahit let her do it with only a token protest—Last time we tried this there was an act of domestic terrorism—and got Last time I made reservations; no one knows where we are, we’ll be fine as a response. It was nice to sit in the dim cavernous space, tucked in close to the wall of a booth, and have strangers bring her and Three Seagrass food.
She only thought about being poisoned briefly, when her soup arrived, and decided she didn’t care just this moment.
“Really, I thought you did very well,” Three Seagrass said, carving off a thin piece of meat from her meal, which seemed to be a side of an entire animal. Mahit was horribly tempted by the smell of it, and a little horrified at the same time: that had too much blood in it to have been grown in a laboratory. That had been a living thing, which breathed, and now Three Seagrass was eating it.