A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)

by Arkady Martine

There was nothing safe; there were only gradations of exposure to danger. She felt deliriously unmoored, and that was before any cyanide exposure. The porridge was faintly bitter, rich and delicious. She licked the last of it off the back of her spoon when she was done.

She’d never quite thought about how barbaric—still a terrible little thrill, to apply that word in Teixcalaan to the language’s own speakers—Teixcalaanli modes of succession really were.

Thought again of the City as an algorithm: considered, for the first time clearly, that no algorithm was innocent of its designers. It couldn’t be. There was an originating purpose for an algorithm, however distant in its past—a reason some human person made it, even if it had evolved and folded in on itself and transformed.

“Are you Yskandr, or are you Mahit?” Three Seagrass asked, and that did seem to be the crux of it: Was she Yskandr, without him? Was there even such a thing as Mahit Dzmare, in the context of a Teixcalaanli city, a Teixcalaanli language, Teixcalaanli politics infecting her all through, like an imago she wasn’t suited for, tendrils of memory and experience growing into her like the infiltrates of some fast-growing fungus.

They knew what lines not to cross, the two of them; knew them and kept them, and what Mahit was asking for was going to blur every single one. And yet they both seemed to be willing.

She hadn’t thought. She’d been behaving like— —oh, like a Teixcalaanli noble, perhaps. Fuck it. “You can have the machine you remove,” she said. “And you can do with it whatever you like, as long as whatever you like is not handing it over to a member of the Science Ministry or the Emperor Himself.”

Now, sitting with her head bent next to Three Seagrass’s, adjusting scansion and carefully selecting which classical allusions to foreground, she thought: Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.

Empire was empire—the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died.