A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2)

by Arkady Martine

This book is for all the exiles: the displaced, the refugee, the stateless; the abandoned and the abandoner; those made desolate and those cast free.

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles—this they name empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

“It is a terrible thing, to lose a citizen to Teixcalaan,” Amnardbat said. “To worry that there is something in the Empire that steals our best.

a swarm of single-pilot small craft, all weaponry and navigation, short-range and absolutely deadly.

go, go, go. Go now, and if you die, you die star-brilliant.

Nine Hibiscus hesitated. She had done many things she’d regretted, as a pilot and a captain and as Fleet Captain of the Tenth Teixcalaanli Legion—uncountable things, she was a soldier, it was the nature of being what she was to commit small atrocities, like it was the nature of stars to emit radiation that burned and poisoned as much as it gave warmth and life. But she’d never ordered her ship to fire on her own people. Never once yet.

and of course your reputation precedes you, like an earthquake precedes a city-drowning wave; the tremors of your arrival are already setting the Ministry to vibration as if we were all made of tlini-strings and you were the bow.

as many roots in the ground as blooms into the sky / daylight servants of the empire gather palace flowers / justice, science, information, war / but the roots that feed us are invisible and strong.

don’t trust anyone who makes you feel good without knowing why they want you to feel that way.

“That’s right. She didn’t get permission, she just decided, and none of her people asked a single question about it.” The blankness of the cartograph table felt abruptly heavy, threatening. “Where is she now?” Eight Antidote asked. “What happened to her after Kauraan?” “Oh, we made her yaotlek,” Eleven Laurel said, as if this was something that happened every day, “and sent her out to die bravely for Teixcalaan and Her Brilliance the Emperor as quickly as possible.”

Sometimes people like that could talk to barbarians so well that the barbarians forgot they were Teixcalaanlitzlim until it was too late for the barbarians. Fourteen Spike was for barbarians. Not aliens. Not something that not only wasn’t civilized but wasn’t even human.

Some emperors are emperors of very narrow spaces, just enough to fill entirely with themselves,

“I am very small,” Three Seagrass said, delightedly. “I squish. Put me in between the boxes of hearts, I’ll do just fine.”

The body didn’t care about the size of the promise, only the size of the cut.

she discovered without much regret that this conversation was easier to have in Teixcalaanli.

She thought in Teixcalaanli, in imperial-style metaphor and overdetermination. She’d had this whole conversation in their language. Deliberately, she thought in Stationer, We’re not free. And in the same language, Yskandr agreed: <There’s no such fucking thing.>

Everybody else wouldn’t tell him the truth, or would tell him something that sounded true and was slanted away from it, like a tree growing out of the side of a building where it didn’t belong. A tree that looked like you could put your weight on its branches and swing, but if you tried, the whole wall would come down along with you and the tree instead.

“Yes,” she said. “But not because I thought she was too dangerous to keep alive, little spy. Because I thought she might just be dangerous enough to stay alive.”

But nothing made is lost, in the singing we: all bodies that are not persons or have ceased to be persons are reclaimed, used again, broken down into components, consumed as appropriate.

all bodies are meat, and each body’s meat and genetics and experience create skill. To consider the uses of meat in this way is to invite the consideration of grief. All bodies senesce, or are damaged beyond repair, and are no longer a voice harmonizing; to know loss of voices is to know grief, to know lack, to cease from singing and to lament.

They are not persons. They think language. But they react as if they were persons. A single pattern, repeated: but only in how they fly their starflyers, their understanding of vector and thrust. In all other ways they are not persons, they do not hear the singing of we, they are sustenance and skill alone. Save for that pattern. Save for piloting.

It is the minds of a people that have to stay free. Bodies die, or suffer, or are imprisoned. Memory lasts.

Even graveyards could be haunted by the things that made graves.

How easy it was to begin to think like these enemies. And in thinking like them, to begin to hate them quite personally.

It looked more like politics to Eight Antidote, and everyone had politics, even if only some people had sex.

They deserved better than being bodies thrown into the machinery of a war in order to begin the breaking of its gears.

“From this barren soil will grow new flowers,”

“They will be hard-won flowers—fragile petals well defended by your hands, with parasites beaten away, warmed by the sunlight of energy weapons.”

off of the local not-quite-imperial, definitely-an-independent-republic-we-swear mining station.

But half the kiosks had glyphs in understandable language right alongside the squiggles of Stationer alphabetics. Very artistic glyphs, more decoration than communication, and she was pretty sure the kiosk selling bottled beverages didn’t mean to have their Teixcalaanli sign read HERE IS PORKS! unless she had severely misunderstood both the nature of bottled beverages and Station animal husbandry capabilities. Also the plural was terribly formed. It was probably meant to say HERE ARE RICH-UMAMI-FLAVORS. The glyphs were close enough that someone could confuse them, she guessed. Unsweet bottled beverages, then.

How hungry was Lsel for trade with the Empire? Mahit had always been so adamant about preserving their independence …