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And each and every one of those captains has led troops down into a new system, carrying all the poison gifts she can muster: trade agreements and poetry, taxes and the promise of protection, black-muzzled energy weapons and the sweeping architecture of a new governor’s palace built around the open many-rayed heart of a sun temple. Each and every one of those captains will do it again, render one more system into a brilliantine dot on a star-chart holograph.
There may soon come a day when such a ship does not retreat, but turns the bright fire of its energy weapons on the fragile metal shell that contains thirty thousand lives, Tarats’s included, and spills them all into the killing chill of space like seeds from a smashed fruit. There is, Tarats believes, a kind of inevitability to empire unchecked.
Fuck, she thought, and heard at the same moment Yskandr say <Fuck.> The doubling wasn’t reassuring.
Mahit folded her hands across her lap and watched the poetry going by through the glass windows of the groundcar.
Mahit sat up very straight and tried to look like she was absolutely not having a possible neurological incident.
me in the interview if i'm being quite honest
“How nice for us, that everyone lies,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully. “Cultural exchange by mutually beneficial deception,” said Mahit. She lifted one shoulder in a shrug.
Allusions and references were the center of Teixcalaanli high culture, but were they supposed to be so obvious that any one of your old friends could pick up the precise citation?
“Do you sleep?” Mahit asked dryly. “Grammatically or existentially, as you prefer.”
There wasn’t much point to refusing. There was nothing safe; there were only gradations of exposure to danger.
She pulled the most formal modes of address out of the miserable culture-shocked sludge of her mind, and hoped she sounded vicious and in all of the control she wasn’t.
Three Seagrass made a nearly intelligible what? sound and buried her face in Mahit’s shoulder, which was almost sweet.
it was common practice for leaders of men and women to select from amongst their closest companions a sworn band, tied together with blood sacrifice: the best and most trustworthy friends, the most necessary compatriots, who would if necessary spill all their veins into the cup of an emperor’s hands.
And lest you worry, this is only the first time you’ve been smart; you’ve been clever quite a bit.” The distinction in vocabulary was unkind; that word for “clever” was the one meant for con artists, hucksters, an animal sort of cunning.
It would be exactly like Yskandr to have slept with a woman who called herself the Edgeshine of a Knife. That flashfire ambitious person who had been giving himself over to the new combination of him and Mahit Dzmare, a person who would say sedition, probably, when asked what he might have done wrong—it seemed the sort of thing he’d have done.
Her smile, when it came, was that edgeshine-brightness that had gotten into her epithet.
It was difficult to tell—the humor of it cut so sharply, if it was humor. A joke like that could flay a person open before they noticed the pain.
but perhaps that was part of the point of Nineteen Adze: that the glittering quick-spoken politician who made you want to toss quips back and forth with her was the same creature who could slice a conversation to ribbons and make you want to weep that she understood.
So perfectly imperial, to have messages made of light and encrypted with poetry, and require a physical object for propriety’s sake. Such a waste of resources. Time and energy and material. She could wish it didn’t delight her.
She had a very Teixcalaanli moment of being insulted at his lack of effort in allusion, and then a very personal moment of satisfaction at having successfully played the dull barbarian, trying so hard to emulate a citizen’s education and only achieving an awkward and pitiable imitation.
She hoped she could burn the corpse with full knowledge of who had killed him. It would be a strange, pale form of justice—but even if he never came back to her, she owed him that much.
But there was a point in knowing how the last person to hold all the knowledge you held had died, if only so that you could correct the mistake and keep your line alive a little longer, a little better. To stretch the continuity of memory just a bit farther, out on the edges of human space where it feathered away into the black.
Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone. Be as Teixcalaanli as you can, and be as Lsel as you can, and—oh, fuck, breathe. That too.
Mahit protested, “I was covered in Fifteen Engine’s blood. It’s not—” “You’ve spent the night with the most dangerous woman at court and you’re wearing her clothes.” Mahit pressed two fingers to the space between her eyebrows, trying not to laugh. “I swear, Three Seagrass, between your insinuations of impropriety and Twelve Azalea’s unsigned messages, I really will feel like I’m a character in Red Flowerbuds for Thirty Ribbon.”
it has tripartite spin and a sleek dark grey metallic sheen, and a sort of intelligence. Enough for hunger, at least. That the dead ships attest to: hunger and violence. What they do not attest to is an intelligence that can be spoken to or negotiated with.
Teardrop chandeliers hung from the apexes, like suspended starlight. The black marble of the floor had been polished to a mirror sheen. Mahit could see her own reflection in it; she looked as if she’d been set in a starfield.
She’d spoken very slowly and clearly, as if she didn’t know that Mahit could understand Teixcalaanli at full speed. Mahit could have picked her up and spun her around in gratitude for understanding and participating, without instruction. Was this how she’d been supposed to feel all this time, if Yskandr had remained with her? How an imago should make their successor feel: two people accomplishing one goal, without needing to consult. Perfect synchronicity.
“I thought you said you needed to sit down and rest, not that you needed to play at uncivilization with the Science Minister,” Three Seagrass hissed, but her eyes were glittering-bright. “Did you have fun?” Mahit said, realizing as she said it that she wasn’t as done with the neurochemical imago-effect as she’d thought—she still felt sparkling, giddily pleased. She hadn’t exactly felt that way during the conversation with Ten Pearl, but now, with Three Seagrass hanging on her arm—
“If I was a suspicious person…” Three Seagrass began. “You are a suspicious person, you work for the Information Ministry,” Mahit said. Three Seagrass composed herself into a picture of innocence, which didn’t have any reassuring effects at all. “If I was a suspicious person,” she said again,
That message hadn’t been for Mahit anyway. The warning of the weapon wasn’t for the weapon to hear.
Mahit thought she sounded—fond. Indulgent, even. It was going to hurt so much if she had to stop pretending Three Seagrass was possessed of no agenda but her own ambition and a mild affection for barbarians.
She assumed she had Nineteen Adze to thank for that, Nineteen Adze and her speedy intimate mercy. Her rethinking.
He leaned forward. The light around him was warm where it spilled onto her shins and knees, as if his fever was mobile, could touch her.
emotion which Mahit suspected was fairly close to how she actually felt, just expressed, for a purpose. Whatever vast reservoir of emotions Three Seagrass might possess seemed only to be expressed for purpose, or outgassed in vivid bright hysteria. The kind of control she had over herself made Mahit tired to think about.
For the first time she wondered what it would be like if she was like this forever; if she was damaged in an unfixable way. If everything she would ever touch again would be dim electric fire, and not sensation.
That bureaucracy parted for Three Seagrass like over-irradiated plastic, rotten-soft under pressure. There was something wrong with it; they were moving too easily up the great needle-spear of the Judiciary.
When it wasn’t confined properly to epics and songs, empire claimed by acclamation was a brutal process that cared not at all for the places and peoples who had to succumb to make that acclamation plausible.
“But they’re not real ciphers either, Three Seagrass. I mean—they’re not real encryption. Substitution ciphers are trivial to break with a decent AI and knowing what the key is. Glyphbook or poem.” “I know,” she said. “They’re not encryption, they’re art, and you’d be good at them.”
She was going to try it, wasn’t she. She’d already decided, without even realizing she’d come to the conclusion; she was going to try it because she was alone, and because it needed to be done, and because she wanted to be whole,
Patriotism seemed to derive quite easily from extremity.
Paranoia was a very understandable response when a multitude of people were, in fact, out to get you. They’d taught that in the psychology classes on Lsel, and Mahit had less and less reason to disbelieve it.
In her clean Information Ministry suit, she looked like a very fine, very precise edged weapon, and Mahit was not in fact sure what she would do without her.
“I’d vastly prefer it if we came out of this one without declaring war, allegiance, or getting you kidnapped by Ten Pearl’s best ixplanatlim for experiments on your brain,” Three Seagrass said. “I can promise you a lack of declarations of war,” Mahit told her, looking up at the silver-steel bloom of the Science Ministry, its pearl-inlaid relief decorations showing the tracks of subatomic particles, the shapes of proteins. “I don’t have that authority.”
“Not arrested yet,” she murmured again. Three Seagrass’s expression was caught somewhere between laughter and what looked like a desperate desire to tell Mahit to hush. “Not yet,” she said. Mahit grinned at her. Hysteria was catching.
At least a human empire only eats a person from the heart outward.
Abruptly and sickeningly, Mahit was aware in a way she never wanted to have been aware of the movement of air currents on the internal structure of her cervical vertebrae, a sickeningly intimate caress that transmuted into a cascade of nerve impulse, fingertips and toetips lighting up with shimmering pressure that flipped over, the shunt of some massive switch, to sudden pain. Why wasn’t she unconscious? What was Five Portico doing to her?
He feels not just old but ancient, a decaying conglomeration of choices made in extremis—in extremis and out of passion, a terrifying combination—but extremis and devotion would be worse, and might be truer—
Seduction’s a matter of poetry. Of a story he wants to be true.
A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness. Two minds, together, each contain a vast map of past and present, a vaster projected map of futures—and two minds, together, however close, however entwined, have their own cartography, alien to one another.
was to prepare for an alliance wherein the one empire, as human as the Stationers but more hungry, might be cajoled into throwing itself open-jawed into the maw of an empire vaster and more strange, when the time came. That such an empire might be devoured there, just as it has devoured so much and for so long.
