A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2)

by Arkady Martine

“I was involved in a riot and a succession crisis, Councilor. It was violent and difficult—

you haven’t had yourself uploaded into a new imago-machine for your successor,

What’s that all about? Question

Haha

No privacy

Yskandr Aghavn

When she smiled again, Mahit thought she understood what made the Teixcalaanlitzlim so nervous about bared teeth.

Haha

scramble the Shards.

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

They all wanted this so much. Her, too. The fire and the blood of it, something to do. A proper battle,

Alien simile

it emitted from the second of its damaged rings some dark viscous substance that fell through null-grav in strange ropes. Spit, Nine Hibiscus thought, repulsed.

Watched all the gleam of the little fighter vanish, slicked over with alien ship-saliva, a fractal net of it that stuck and clung even when the Shard pulled free of the string.

“Kill me, kill me now, it’s going to eat the ship, it’s in here with me, don’t let it touch anyone else,”

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.

Simile powerful

Twenty Cicada,

Simile extended

tlini-strings

Simile

the first successful Governor of Nakhar

incoming Minister of War, Three Azimuth,

Letters to the dead

at least you are dead—or it is simplest to think of you so now—

Yskandr,

Question: why is the emperor talking to Yskander?

How often did you wish for the convenience of narrative to bow to your whims?

KNIFEPOINT’S

Thirty Wax-Seal,

it was nothing like a language to her. It’s not got—parsable phonemes, she said.

I am not equipped to run a first-contact scenario, Nine Hibiscus thought, especially when the things being contacted spit ship-dissolving fluids at my people and don’t make understandable noises.

when I tried to slide around the far side of that dwarf sun and get eyes on what happened to our colony on Peloa-2, it shrieked at us and then that ring-ship was right there—”

Peloa-2

justice, science, information, war

Eight Antidote

sole heir to Teixcalaan entire

Question

He was down in the dirt, where silent things grew strong.

his ancestor-the-Emperor,

during the insurrection right before he died.

Six Direction

Eight Antidote wondered a lot about why.

Nice question

before his ancestor had killed himself in a sun temple for the glory of Teixcalaan.

Ninety percent was a lot of clone to be, physically.

All those holos came from some planet with grass on it, a kid with his own face a hundred years ago,

the glyph he used for the number-sign in his name,

then he was in the basement of the Ministry of War.

Eleven Laurel

Cure?”

a couple of things Eight Antidote had learned from his ancestor-the-Emperor, and a couple more from Nineteen Adze,

Eleven Laurel,

was the Undersecretary of the Third Palm,

Eleven Laurel called him Cure,

and Eight Antidote really truly loved it.