“Tell me,” I said at last. “What you do know. What’s been going on. What you’ve heard, suspect, anything.”
The Hosts had come back. Two days of silence, and then they had been at the Embassy, a troupe of heavy presences swaying across a landing pod. “At least forty of them,” he said. “Christ knows how they fit into their vessel. They were asking for me and Ez.”
The way he told it, the Ariekei had barely responded to Ambassadors’ questions and greetings. They demanded, repeatedly and with strange rudeness, to speak to EzRa.
“I trained for this,” Ra said. “I’ve studied them, I’ve studied Language. You saw the first group meet us at the party? That wasn’t normal, was it? I knew it wasn’t. This was the same, only more. They were... agitated. Talking nonsense. I was there already, but then Ez came in and then they recognised us. Started saying: ‘Please, good evening Ambassador EzRa, please, please, yes.’ Like that.
“Some of the others—like your friends CalVin—tried to get in our way. Telling us no. We’d said too much.” He shook his head. “And the Hosts are edging closer and closer. We’ve got nowhere to go, and they’re huge. It’s feeling... So we just... raised our voices and spoke Language. Ez and I. We said good evening. Told them it was an honour. And when we did—”
When they spoke the same thing happened as had before, but this time to a larger little multitude. I might have been able to track down footage or trid of the occurrence—there must have been vespcams there—but Ra told me and I could easily imagine it. The crowd of Hosts stiffening; some staggering; maybe tumbling in carapace piles. Sounds, the double-calls of Ariekene distress, becoming something unfamiliar, counterpoints. Were they swooning? Their noises went up and down in complex relation to EzRa’s voice. “We tried to keep going,” Ra said. “To keep talking. But in the end Ez just petered out. So I did too.” When they did, the Host in front rebudded open its eyes and craned them backwards at its companions, without turning its body, and said to them: “I told you.”
The Ariekei had staggered in the wood-walled stateroom, with the concrete of Embassytown beyond, and the sky dusted with birds in their air-cage. The Ambassadors and Staff were left standing half to attention and bewildered.
We thought of Ariekei in terms of stuff from an antique world—we looked at our Hosts and saw insect-horse-coral-fan things. Those were chimeras of our own baggage. There they were, the Hosts, humming polyphonically in reveries that were utterly their own.
“They left. Some Ambassadors were trying to stop them but short of actually getting in their way, what could they do? They were shouting at them to stay, to talk. EdGar and LoGan were screaming, JoaQuin and AgNes were... trying to be more persuasive. But the Hosts just marched back out. Me and Ez were saying what should we do, and CalVin and ArnOld were saying we’d done quite enough.” He held his head in his hands. “Now not even MagDa’ll talk to us. I haven’t seen them for days. Don’t you want to know what’s going on?”
“Of course,” I said. “Don’t be absurd.”
“There was a lot of shouting.”
“Who’s Oratees?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”
“CalVin and HenRy mentioned them,” I said. Simmon’s half-heard insight. “I think they might be who to find. I thought you might know...”
“You mean Oratees, or CalVin, or HenRy might be who to find?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “... Yes.” I shrugged, Yes, why not?
“I thought you could help,” he said. “People have a lot of faith in your abilities.”
“Did they tell you I can floak?” I said. “I wish I’d never told them that fucking word. They think I can do anything now. Except they don’t, really: they just want the opportunity to say ‘floak’.”
“They’re talking to the exots.” Ra said. “The Ambassadors have to let the Kedis and the others know something’s happening. They were obviously hoping they’d have things under control, but...” My doorbell sounded again. “Wait,” he said, but I was already up and out of the room.
I opened my door to constables and Security officers. Some were men younger than me, looking shy.
“Ms. Benner Cho?” one said. “Sorry to disturb you. I believe, uh, is Ra here?” He stumbled over the lack of honorific.
“Avice, where is he?”
I knew that voice. “MagDa?” I said. I’d not seen them behind the escort.
The Ambassador pushed their way to the front. “We need to talk to them.” “Urgently.”
“Hello.” It was Ra, come up behind me. I didn’t turn.
“Ra.” I thought they’d be furious, but Mag and Da looked just relieved to see him. Emotional. “There you are.” “You have to come back.”
“You need protective custody, sir,” an officer said. MagDa seemed exasperated by that, in fact, but they didn’t interrupt. “For your safety. Until we’ve got things under control. Please come with us.”
Ra stood up tall. The officer met his eye. Ra nodded to me, after a moment, and let them take him. I nodded back. I was vaguely disappointed in him.
When they led him away they didn’t lock his hands together. They walked respectfully beside him, like what they said they were, a protective corps. It was a sort of courtesy, I suppose, though I don’t think anyone with a passing understanding of Embassytown politics wouldn’t have known he was more or less under arrest. I watched him go, to join Ez, and perhaps Wyatt, in what I was sure would be scrupulously well-kept rooms, locked and guarded from the outside.
Formerly, 6
IN ITS RELIGIOUS LAWS Embassytown was a cutting from Bremen. There was no established church, but as with many smaller colonies, its founders had included a reasonable minority of faithful. The Church of God Pharotekton was as close as we came to an official congregation. Its lighthouse towers jutted through Embassytown roofs, their beacons spinning, rotating spokes of light at night.
There were other congregations: tiny synagogues; temples; mosques; churches, mustering a few score regulars. A handful of ultra-orthodox in each tradition stood firm against ungodly innovations, attempting to maintain religious calendars based on Bremen’s thirty-seven-hour days, or according to insane nostalgia on the supposed days and seasons of Terre.
Like the Hosts, the Kedis of Embassytown had no gods: according to their professed faith the souls of their ancestors and of their unborn were united in a never-ending jealous war against them, the living, but they mostly displayed a far less bleak and embattled outlook than that theology would suggest. There were religious Shur’asi, but only dissidents: most were atheist, perhaps because apart from through accident, they didn’t die and were very rarely born.
Embassytowners were free not to believe. I wasn’t used to thinking about evil.
BEEHIVE'S NAME was 
, we gleaned from its conversations with other Hosts. I told CalVin, mangling the name with my monovoice, saying the Cut and Turn one after the other. “Can you find out when it’s competing at another Festival of Lies?” I said. “It’s a loyal fan of mine, and I’d like to... return the favour.”
“You want to go...” “... to another festival?”
“Yeah. Me and another couple of the similes.” It had occurred as a whim, mere curiosity about my observer, but having thought of it I could not let the idea go. When I’d mooted it to Hasser and a couple of the others, they’d been enthusiastic. “Do you think we could do that? Think you could get us in again?” It had been a while since we’d been summoned to any Languagefests, and though I was alone among them in being more intrigued by the lying than by my own deployment, the other Cravateers would hardly say no to any entry.