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the word for “world” and the word for “the City” were the same, as was the word for “empire.” It was impossible to specify, especially in the high imperial dialect. One had to note the context.
a collapse between narrative and perception,
“We do not have personal time. There’s no inconvenience.” The Sunlit use of the first-person plural was unusual and slightly disconcerting. That last “we” ought to have grammatically been an “I,” with the singular form of the possessing verb.
He who drowns the world in blooms.
How much of Lsel did he want to take? Take and devour and transform into something that wasn’t Lsel at all, but Teixcalaan. If he wasn’t the Emperor, she might have slapped him. If he wasn’t the Emperor, she might have laughed and asked what, exactly, the Teixcalaanli theory of mind involved. How wide is the concept of you?
The word he’d used for “world” was the word for “city.” The one that derived from the verb for “correct action.”
six weeks, by the Teixcalaanli reckoning the Station has come to use, was using even before Amnardbat was born, it is by such small degrees that a culture is devoured, she had not ever known to notice that a “week” bore no resemblance to the rotation of Lsel, facing and unfacing again its sun—some
You are as corrupt as an arsonist, as an imago-line that would shatter the shell of the station with a bomb. You are worse than both of those, Yskandr Aghavn: you want to invite Teixcalaan in. You speak poetry and you send back reams of literature, and more of our children every year take the aptitudes for the Empire and leave us. Leave us bereft of who they might have been. You are a corrosive poison, and a righteous person would crush this machine under her foot.
some fungal infiltrate,
“Just once,” Mahit said, with a sort of desperate and useless frustration, “I’d like you to imagine I might do something because it’s what a person does.”
Who would censor kids just learning to be servants of empire?
in this quadrant lies Lsel Station, an insignificant independent territory which has, unbeknownst to the population of Teixcalaan, been providing Thirty Larkspur with illegal and immoral technology for neurological enhancements. I can only imagine that the annexation of this station would cut off his secret supply, and thus he feels compelled to coopt the noble impulses of the people we both serve and stir up unrest!”
They didn’t look like Teixcalaanlitzlim, Mahit thought. Drifting thought, absurd, disconnected. They looked like people. Just like people. Tearing each other apart.
Nothing empire touches remains itself,
he will be a synecdoche
