A Memory Called Empire Read online

  “And Thirty Larkspur would want an imago-machine? Enough to blackmail a courtier. Well. I wouldn’t put it past him.” Three Seagrass’s expression went strange—distant, a little rueful. “Your imago-machines are a problem, Mahit.”

  “Not for us,” Mahit said. Only for Teixcalaan, who wants them this badly. Or wants them to not exist this badly.

  “No,” said Three Seagrass. She left off standing by the corpse and came back over to Mahit, offering her a hand up off the floor. “I think they are a problem for you, too—or at least you have a problem, having told any of us about them.”

  Mahit took her hand, even though she was so much taller than Three Seagrass that the offered leverage wasn’t much help. “I didn’t,” she said, getting to her feet. “Tell you, that is. Yskandr did, and the Yskandr who did is a man I have never met.”

  “What is it like?”

  “What is what like?”

  “Not being one person.”

  It was such a naked question—more straightforward than anyone had been with Mahit in her entire time on this planet—that it took her by surprise; she was still standing there, trying to figure out what sort of answer was even possible, her fingers twined up with Three Seagrass’s, when the door chimed plaintively in that uncomfortable dissonant chord.

  “More assassins?” Three Seagrass said, over-bright.

  “Twelve Azalea, I hope,” said Mahit. “Go open it?”

  Three Seagrass did. She stood sharply to the side of the door while she told it to open, as if being simply out of line-of-sight would preserve her from whatever was waiting to enter. But when the door irised open it was only Twelve Azalea after all. Mahit watched him take in the scene: purple-faced corpse on the rug, dawn light coming in through the windows, Mahit and Three Seagrass themselves standing about like children who had accidentally broken a priceless art object.

  Teixcalaanli expressionlessness could, apparently, withstand the revelation of recent murder. Perhaps it helped that Twelve Azalea looked like he’d had an equally distressing night. His Information Ministry suit was waterstained, the orange cuffs gone stiff and spotted. There was dirt smeared across one of his cheeks and most of his hair had come undone from its queue.

  “You look terrible, Petal,” said Three Seagrass.

  “There is a dead man on your rug, Reed; how I look is not important.”

  “It’s my rug, actually,” said Mahit. “Now would you come in so we can close the door?”

  When the door was safely locked behind him—the three of them closed in with the dead man, a small secret to go along with all of Mahit’s enormous other ones—Twelve Azalea reached into his jacket and produced a bundle of cloth. It looked like one of the sheets from the morgue, folded into a neat packet. He held it out to Mahit.

  “You owe me, Ambassador,” he said. “I have spent six hours being stalked, and then another three hiding in the bottom of a half-drained garden. This entire business was very entertaining while we were exchanging coded messages, but it is markedly less entertaining now. Not to mention the fact that you’ve come up with another corpse while I wasn’t paying attention—has anyone called for the Sunlit, are you just going to stand here?”

  “Petal, we were going to,” Three Seagrass said, which was news to Mahit.

  She unfolded the cloth. In the center was the small steel-and-ceramide net of Yskandr’s imago-machine. It had been excised very carefully with a scalpel, she thought: the feathered fractal edges of the net, where the machine interpenetrated with neurons, were delineated quite far, and then sharply cut off when the edge of the blade had become too unwieldy to keep going on a microscopic level. But Twelve Azalea hadn’t known how to decouple the fractal net—the portion of the machine which was like a shell, an interface—from the central core, which contained Yskandr. That was, she thought, still intact, unharmed by even the most delicate of scalpels. The machine might still be usable. (For what? To record someone else? Or to try to reach that Yskandr, the dead Ambassador? Whatever was left of him. She wondered, and decided to not mention the idea to anyone yet.)

  Mahit took the machine from the sheet Twelve Azalea had disguised it in—it was no longer than the last joint of her thumb—and slipped it into the inside pocket of her jacket.

  “I thought,” she said, “that we should wait for you to come and bring me the illegally acquired machinery I asked you to desecrate my predecessor’s corpse for, first. Before we called anyone.” If Three Seagrass was going to lie to her friend about calling the police, Mahit could help. It was probably easiest. It might even be easiest to call the Sunlit, to report the … incident—it was still a dizzying sort of horror to call it murder, to remember the feeling of Eleven Conifer turning into a corpse on top of her—report it exactly as it had happened. A man broke into the Ambassador’s apartments; they struggled; in the struggle the man was killed by his own weapon.

  “Well, you have it now,” Twelve Azalea was saying, “and you can keep it—I was followed from the instant I left the Judiciary morgue, Ambassador. By the Judiciary’s own investigatory agents—the fucking Mist were after me, grey-suit ghosts. I thought I lost them when I spent an hour in a water feature, but maybe I didn’t—or maybe my message was intercepted, when I wrote to tell you I’d meet you here. Someone with very good intelligence has been keeping an eye on your predecessor’s body, and I had to use a public terminal to write my infofiche stick and send it.”

  It could have been Nineteen Adze. Mahit remembered how quickly she had arrived in the morgue, just hours after Mahit had suggested burning Yskandr’s body in a proper Stationer funeral. But it could have just as easily been a multitude of other actors, most especially Eight Loop, if there was some kind of special Judiciary police force that was chasing Twelve Azalea. That was the problem with this entire mess—too many people interested in Yskandr. Too many more people interested in Mahit: she’d done that deliberately, she’d made herself an object of attention, in hopes of finding out who had murdered her predecessor, and now she couldn’t get away from it even if she tried.

  Even if she’d done nothing but stay in her apartment and do the work she’d come here to do, people would have been too interested: Eight Loop had summoned a new Lsel ambassador deliberately. There wouldn’t have been a possibility of neutrality, no matter what she did.

  “Are they still following you?” she asked.

  Twelve Azalea sighed. “I don’t know. Practical espionage is not my rubric.”

  “Only impractical,” Three Seagrass said. Twelve Azalea rolled his eyes at her, and she shrugged expressively, which seemed to reassure him.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” said Mahit. “If someone tries to kill you, as well as someone trying to kill me.”

  “Assassins and stalkers,” Twelve Azalea said. “Just what I needed. If I was a more judicious sort of man, Ambassador, I would not only call the Sunlit but imply that you’d blackmailed me into committing … oh, there’s got to be a crime for stealing from the dead. Is there a crime for that, Reed?”

  “Plagiarism,” said Three Seagrass, “but it’d be a stretch in the courts.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “It is, Petal, but only because it’s awful.”

  Mahit envied them the facility of friendship. It would be so much easier …

  Easier wasn’t what she had. What she had was Yskandr’s imago-machine, a corpse, and the Emperor’s offer hanging above her like a weight: turn over the imago technology, turn aside the fleet heading for Lsel, and betray to Teixcalaan everything that her Station had spent fourteen generations preserving. She thought of her younger brother, abruptly, imagined him denied whatever imago his aptitudes might have spelled for him to receive, imagined him taken away from the Station and raised on a Teixcalaanli planet—he was nine, he was too young to know anything but the romance of the idea—not that she was doing much better.

  Why did you say yes, Yskandr? she asked: intimate-you, Stationer language, quiet in the hollow places
inside her mind where she ought to have had his voice, the voice of the person they were meant to be becoming, all of his knowledge and all of her perspective.

  Yskandr told her, bell-clear,

  Prickles down all the nerves in her arms, up from the soles of her feet. Like the dead man had gotten her with his poison needle after all. Mahit sat down, hard, on the couch. If Yskandr was actually back—maybe all it took was life-threatening amounts of adrenaline to hook up whatever had gone wrong between them. That made no sense physiologically but it was the only thing she could think of.

  Then static. Cutoff. The sensation was like having her own brain provide an electrical short. And for all she tried to reach him, Yskandr was as gone now as he had been before he’d spoken, and Mahit was dizzy with the sensation of falling into a hole in her mind, the endless drop that was the gap between her and where her imago should be.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  THE GAME’S STILL ON!

  Come see THE LABYRINTH of Belltown take on the South-Central VOLCANOES in the most hotly anticipated amalitzli match of the season! No subway closures can stop our players! Tickets still available via cloudhook or at the North Tlachtli Court Stadium. Come out for a good time!

  —flyer advertising handball game, printed 249.3.11-6D and distributed throughout Inmost Province, Belltown, South-Central, and Poplar provinces

  * * *

  […] it has been another five years since you last returned to Lsel Station; not only would the Councilor for Heritage very much like to preserve and update to the current state your imago-line for future generations, I myself would like to hear from your own mouth the state of affairs in Teixcalaan; you’ve become admirably close-mouthed in the last half decade, Yskandr, and I can’t complain about your continued successes in the job I chose you for, but indulge my curiosity—come home to us, for a little while […]

  —message received by Ambassador Yskandr Aghavn from Darj Tarats, Councilor for the Miners (087.1.10-6D, Teixcalaanli reckoning)

  THE Sunlit arrived quite quickly once they had been summoned: three of them in their identical golden helmets, faceless and efficient. Three Seagrass had done the summoning, setting up some communion between her cloudhook and the door’s alarm system and then executing a credible impression of tremulous, infuriated surprise—an 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.

  She could also be tired because she’d been awake for nearly thirty-two hours. Sleep was an unimaginable territory, reserved for people who didn’t have dead bodies in their apartments. At least she was unlikely to get herself arrested. The Sunlit seemed collectively distracted, or else they simply believed her: she’d come back to her apartment and been set upon by the dead man, and in the ensuing struggle he had been killed by his own weapon. No, Mahit had never seen a weapon like the thick needle before. No, she didn’t know how the man had gotten in. No, she didn’t know who had sent him, but in this time of unrest, there were surely a multitude of possibilities.

  She hadn’t lied once. And yet they were trusting her.

  Yskandr was gone again, but gone differently; all through the questioning Mahit’s palms and the soles of her feet had been alive with prickles, as if her extremities had been rendered out of flesh and into shimmering electric fire—not quite numbness. The same feeling she’d been having right before the flashes of imago-memory, but continuous now, and without the accompanying visions. Peripheral nerve damage, except she hadn’t damaged anything. Unless the imago-machine in the base of her skull was damaging her right now as she answered questions in Teixcalaanli, expressionless, calm. The place Yskandr should be felt like a hollow bubble, a missing tooth. A cavity she could tongue inside her mind. If she pressed too hard on it the sweeping vertigo came back. She tried to stop doing it. Fainting right now wouldn’t help at all.

  “Patrician first-class Twelve Azalea,” said one of the Sunlit, turning toward him like a gyre on ball bearings, machine-smooth, “what brings you to Ambassador Dzmare’s apartments so early in the morning?”

  Ah. Perhaps they hadn’t believed her after all; perhaps they were being subtle. They’d use Twelve Azalea to crack open her story like the vacuum seal on a seed-skiff, and bleed all the protecting atmosphere away.

  “The Ambassador asked to meet with me,” said Twelve Azalea, and that was not going to help at all.

  “I did,” Mahit interjected. “I was looking forward to a meeting over breakfast with Twelve Azalea to discuss…” She cast around for something they could be discussing that was not suspicious in any way. There wasn’t much. “… requests made to the Information Ministry by Lsel citizens during the period within which there was no acting ambassador.” There.

  If a golden face-shield could express all the skepticism of a raised eyebrow, this one was. “That sounds like an extremely urgent matter, that must be addressed before business hours.”

  “Both the patrician and I have very busy schedules. Breakfast suited us. Or it did, before I was set upon by the intruder,” Mahit said pointedly. She felt as if she was about to vibrate out of her skin. Neurological fire and the effervescent distant shivering of sleep deprivation. She smiled, Stationer-style, and wondered if the Sunlit had flinched under the shield. All her teeth were exposed. Like a skeleton.

  One of the other Sunlit asked silkily, “What happened to your suit, Twelve Azalea? You seem to have encountered a water feature.”

  Mahit had seen Teixcalaanlitzlim blush before, but never someone employ it as masterfully as Twelve Azalea did then: a spreading embarrassed dull red under the smooth brown of his cheeks. “It’s very … I’ve been a little worried, what with the demonstrations … I tripped,” he said. “I fell in a garden, like I was drunk; and it was too late to go home, I’d have missed my appointment…”

  “Are you quite all right?” the Sunlit inquired.

  “Aside from the injury to my dignity—”

  “Of course.”

  Three Seagrass, curled in the corner of the couch with her feet drawn up under her, said, “Will you be removing the body? It is quite hard to look at.” She still sounded tremulous and barely controlled; Mahit wondered if she had slept, aside from the brief moment when she’d found her napping outside the Emperor’s audience chamber. Probably not.

  One week since she’d arrived in the City, and hadn’t she been quite the agent of destruction. For Three Seagrass at least. (For Fifteen Engine—Yskandr—) She wanted to do something. Push something until it broke in her favor, for once.

  “This is the second time in a week we have been in personal danger,” Mahit said. “After the bombing, and the general condition of your City in preparation for the war…” She sighed, deliberate. So distasteful, political unrest. “I thought it would be best to have a meeting in my own apartments rather than anywhere we would have the misfortune of being disturbed, and yet this has happened.”

  All three Sunlit looked at her. She stared back at their blank false faces, jaw set.

  “We would like to remind the Ambassador,” they said—all three at once, a strange choir, and were they the City, were they the same AI that ran the walls and the lights and the doors, were they subsumed in the Science Ministry’s algorithm too—“that the yaotlek One Lightning did offer his personal protection to you. And you declined.”

  “Are you insinuating that this unpleasantness would not have happened if the Ambassador had agreed?” Three Seagrass broke in. “Because that is a fascinating conjecture, coming from the Empire’s very own police.”

  They rotated, a slick, frictionless shift, to focus on Three Seagrass. She lifted her eyebrows, widened her eye
s to show the whites—daring them to do something about her.

  “There are procedures,” said one of them, perfectly even, “for making formal accusations of that nature, asekreta Three Seagrass. Would you like to avail yourself of them? We are at your service, as we are at the service of any of the Empire’s citizens.”

  That was, Mahit thought, a threat of its own; less direct but not even a little less predatory.

  “Perhaps I will make an appointment at the Judiciary,” Three Seagrass said. Her expression changed not a bit. “Are we done here? Will you be removing this unfortunate man from the Ambassador’s rug?”

  “It is an active crime scene,” the Sunlit said. “The entire apartment complex. We suggest that the Ambassador make arrangements for alternative accommodations during our investigation. We are sure, given this morning’s newsfeeds, that she has many options.”

  Mahit glanced at Twelve Azalea over the Sunlit’s shoulder—he was the only one of them who might have seen a newsfeed this morning—but he just shrugged. She didn’t know what she had missed. Maybe it was merely an exposé on the Lsel Ambassador’s unseemly attachment to the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze.

  “When can I expect to have access to my own suite again?” she inquired. Still trying for polite, if pointed: they were all on edge now, she and her liaison and the Sunlit.

  One of the Sunlit shrugged, a remarkably expressive motion. Some neurological ghost of Yskandr flickered through the large muscles in Mahit’s own shoulders—he’d shrugged like that—that kind of shrug was performative, insouciant, done more with the outer arms (was he here or was he not, she wished she had even the slightest true idea).

  “When we are done investigating,” said the Sunlit. “You are of course free to go. We understand the accidental nature of the man’s demise.”