A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)

by Arkady Martine

“You are using us as bait,” says Dekakel Onchu. “A clash between Teixcalaan and these aliens will happen right on top of us—” “Not bait,” Darj Tarats replies. “I am making us something worth preserving, in our current form, to a polity which has constantly threatened to absorb us. The clash will not happen here—Teixcalaan’s fleet will go through our Anhamemat Gate, and through all the rest of the jumpgates where these ships have been showing up—and out into wherever the aliens are coming from.” Onchu imagines Tarats’s mind: he must think of Teixcalaan as a tide, a sort of thing that could wash through and pull back again, and leave the ocean the same. She’s seen an ocean once. She’s seen what a high tide does to the shoreline. Tarats does not think of tides. He thinks of weights: of pressing his thumb down as hard as he can on the scale of the galaxy, making a little indentation, a tiny shift. The sort of tiny shift that might happen if a man were to go to Teixcalaan, and love it with all his heart and mind, and seduce it as much as he himself had been seduced: and thus guide it to its death. “What do you want from this?” Onchu asks, in the quiet of her pod. “An end,” says Darj Tarats, who has grown quite old while pressing his fingers down onto the scale. “An end to empires. An immovable object to crash an impossible force upon, and break it.”