A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2)

by Arkady Martine

the intimate privacy of whatever internal landscape an imago and successor shared—

sometimes Mahit felt like she was sharing herself with a possessing, secretive alien.

Imago-memory wasn’t always accessible; it was associational at best, not like her own living memories.

The only transfers which worked like that were skill transfers.

Darj Tarats, Councilor for the Miners,

he who rescued us and this Station by sending me coordinates of ship-destroying aliens to feed to Teixcalaan in exchange for our freedom.

And the mirrored room that was her mind unfolded like a flower, floating in some jeweled pool in Palace-East, blue petals like drowning.

she’d had her damaged imago-machine replaced with one carrying an older version of the same imago.

What a distant, antagonistic friendship was like, conducted over interplanetary distances.

Liked being just useful enough to his patron back on Lsel to be part of his dream of a future for Teixcalaan

The drowning-blue unfolding

Simile

Yskandr not wanting to show her

Emperor Six Direction

Homosexual relations?

Triple simile

feeling down her ulnar nerves

Simile extended

Blue, in a glass. Alcohol with a faint blue tint—

Clitoria ternatea is a plant commonly known as the butterfly pea flower which is used as a natural aroma enhancer and food dye, enabling food and beverage manufacturers to produce a blue hue without using artificial ingredients. https://theillusionistgin.com/blogs/news/the-natural-ingredients-gin-distillers-use-to-create-organic-blue-gin

Nineteen Adze

Tarats had written,

you never managed to alight on why I would want such a hideous thing as imperial desire focused on our Station or on its representative.

its trust is rooted in wanting;

Question

in this way you and I will destroy it.

Simile

To draw a monstrous thing to its death was what had hooked in her

Simile extended

there was nothing of how you loved one another that was clean.

Simile

the Councilor for the Miners was using you as bait to draw Teixcalaan into the war the Empire is fighting now?

She had helped to start that war, out of desperation and need: doing exactly what Tarats had always wanted Yskandr to do,

Twelve Solar-Flare

found a jumpgate that spilled her out into this sector of space. If there had never been a historical epic written about that discovery by Pseudo-Thirteen River,

There would be no constellation of endocrine response and continuity of memory that bore a single bit of resemblance to Mahit Dzmare.

The feat of imagination that Tarats was attempting was—there was no other word for it but heroic.

We’re not free.

There’s no such fucking thing.

Palace-Earth

Eight Antidote

Minister Eight Loop

Haha

Emperor Nineteen Adze.

This was definitely true and also not very comforting at all. True things weren’t, mostly.

He needed to learn. He was already eleven,

the sun-spear throne

ixplanatlim

“Postmortem.”

the sun-spear throne,

his ancestor-the-Emperor had loved her enough to make sure she ended up on the sun-spear throne,