Ancillary Justice (17 page)

The medic, speaking to herself and not to me, though I stood three meters away from her, said, “Throat cut, obviously, but she was also poisoned.” And then, with disgust and contempt, “A child of their own house. These people aren’t civilized.”

Our one small attendant left, a gift from the Lord of the Radch clutched in one hand—a pin in the shape of a four-petaled flower, each petal holding an enameled image of one of the four Emanations. Anywhere else, a Radchaai who received one would treasure it, and wear it nearly constantly, a badge of having served in the temple with the Lord of the Radch herself. This child would probably toss it in a box and forget about it. When she was out of sight (of Lieutenant Awn and the Lord of the Radch, if not of me) Anaander Mianaai turned to Lieutenant Awn and said, “Aren’t those weeds?”

A wave of embarrassment overcame Lieutenant Awn,
mixed a moment later with disappointment, and an intense anger I had never seen in her before. “Not to the children, my lord.” She was unable to keep the edge out of her voice completely.

Anaander Mianaai’s expression didn’t change. “This icon, and this set of omens. They’re your personal property, I think. Where are the ones that belong to the temple?”

“Begging my lord’s pardon,” Lieutenant Awn said, though I knew at this point she meant to do no such thing, and the fact was audible in her tone. “I used the funds for their purchase to supplement the term-end gifts for the temple attendants.” She had also used her own money for the same purpose, but she didn’t say that.

“I’m sending you back to
Justice of Toren
,” said the Lord of the Radch. “Your replacement will be here tomorrow.”

Shame. A fresh flare of anger. And despair. “Yes, my lord.”

There wasn’t much to pack. I could be ready to move in less than an hour. I spent the rest of the day delivering gifts to our temple attendants, who were all home. School had been canceled, and hardly anyone came out onto the streets. “Lieutenant Awn doesn’t know,” I told each one, “if the new lieutenant will make different appointments, or if she’ll give the year-end gifts without your having served a whole year. You should come to the house anyway, her first morning.” The adults in each house eyed me silently, not inviting me in, and each time I laid the gift—not the usual pair of gloves, which didn’t yet matter much here, but a brightly colored and patterned skirt, and a small box of tamarind sweets. Fresh fruit was customary, but there was no time to obtain any. I left each small stack of gifts in the street, on the edge of the house, and no one moved to take them, or spoke any word to me.

The Divine spent an hour or two behind screens in the temple residence, and then emerged looking entirely unrested, and went into the temple, where she conferred with the junior priests. The bodies had been cleared away. I had offered to clean the blood, not knowing if my doing so would be permissible, but the priests had declined my assistance. “Some of us,” said the Divine to me, still staring at the area of floor where the dead had lain, “had forgotten what you are. Now they are reminded.”

“I don’t think
you
forgot, Divine,” I said.

“No.” She was silent for two seconds. “Is the lieutenant going to see me before she leaves?”

“Possibly not, Divine,” I said. I was at that moment doing what I could to encourage Lieutenant Awn to sleep, something she badly needed to do but was finding difficult.

“It’s probably better if she doesn’t,” the head priest said, bitterly. She looked at me then. “It’s unreasonable of me. I know it is. What else could she have done? It’s easy for me to say—and I say it—that she could have chosen otherwise.”

“She could have, Divine,” I acknowledged.

“What is it you Radchaai say?” I wasn’t Radchaai, but I didn’t correct her, and she continued. “Justice, propriety, and benefit, isn’t it? Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.”

“Yes, Divine.”

“Was that just?” Her voice trembled, for just an instant, and I could hear she was on the edge of tears. “Was it proper?”

“I don’t know, Divine.”

“More to the point, who benefited?”

“No one, Divine, so far as I can see.”

“No one? Really? Come, One Esk, don’t play the fool with
me.” That look of betrayal on Jen Shinnan’s face, plainly directed at Anaander Mianaai, had been obvious to everyone there.

Still, I couldn’t see what the Lord of the Radch had stood to gain from those deaths. “They would have killed you, Divine,” I said. “You, and anyone else they found undefended. Lieutenant Awn did what she could to prevent bloodshed last night. It wasn’t her fault she failed.”

“It was.” Her back was still to me. “God forgive her for it. God forbid that I may ever be faced with such a choice.” She made an invocatory gesture. “And you? What would you have done, if the lieutenant had refused, and the Lord of the Radch ordered you to shoot her? Could you have? I thought that armor of yours was impenetrable.”

“The Lord of the Radch can force our armor down.” But the code Anaander Mianaai would have had to transmit to force down Lieutenant Awn’s armor—or mine, or any other Radchaai soldier’s—would have to have been delivered over communications that had been blocked at the time. Still. “Speculating about such things does no good, Divine,” I said. “It didn’t happen.”

The head priest turned, and looked intently at me. “You didn’t answer the question.”

It wasn’t an easy question for me to answer. I had been in pieces, and at the time only one segment had even known that such a thing was possible, that for an instant Lieutenant Awn’s life had hung, uncertain, on the outcome of that moment. I wasn’t entirely sure that segment wouldn’t have turned its gun on Anaander Mianaai instead.

It probably wouldn’t have. “Divine, I am not a person.” If I had shot the Lord of the Radch nothing would have changed, I was sure, except that not only would Lieutenant Awn still
be dead, I would be destroyed, Two Esk would take my place, or a new One Esk would be built with segments from
Justice of Toren
’s holds. The ship’s AI might find itself in some difficulty, though more likely my action would be blamed on my being cut off. “People often think they would have made the noblest choice, but when they find themselves actually in such a situation, they discover matters aren’t quite so simple.”

“As I said—God forbid. I will comfort myself with the delusion that you would have shot the Mianaai bastard first.”

“Divine!” I cautioned. She could say nothing in my hearing that might not eventually reach the ears of the Lord of the Radch.

“Let her hear. Tell her yourself!
She
instigated what happened last night. Whether the target was us, or the Tanmind, or Lieutenant Awn, I don’t know. I have my suspicions which. I’m not a fool.”

“Divine,” I said. “Whoever instigated last night’s events, I don’t think things happened the way they wished. I think they wanted open warfare between the upper and lower cities, though I don’t understand why. And I think that was prevented when Denz Ay told Lieutenant Awn about the guns.”

“I think as you do,” said the head priest. “And I think Jen Shinnan knew more, and that was why she died.”

“I’m sorry your temple was desecrated, Divine,” I said. I wasn’t particularly sorry Jen Shinnan was dead, but I didn’t say so.

The Divine turned away from me again. “I’m sure you have a lot to do, getting ready to leave. Lieutenant Awn needn’t trouble herself calling on me. You can give her my farewells yourself.” She walked away from me, not waiting for any acknowledgment.

Lieutenant Skaaiat arrived for supper, with a bottle of arrack and two Seven Issas. “Your relief won’t even reach Kould Ves until midday,” she said, breaking the seal on the bottle. Meanwhile the Seven Issas stood stiff and uncomfortable on the ground floor. They had arrived just before I’d restored communications. They’d seen the dead in the temple of Ikkt, had guessed without being told what had happened. And they had only been out of the holds for the last two years. They hadn’t seen the annexation itself.

All of Ors, upper and lower, was similarly quiet, similarly tense. When people left their houses they avoided looking at me or speaking to me. Mostly they only went out to visit the temple, where the priests led prayers for the dead. A few Tanmind even came down from the upper city, and stood quietly at the edges of the small crowd. I kept myself in the shadows, not wanting to distract or distress any further.

“Tell me you didn’t almost refuse,” said Lieutenant Skaaiat, in the house on the upper floor, with Lieutenant Awn, behind screens. They sat on fungal-smelling cushions, facing each other. “I know you, Awn, I swear when I heard what Seven Issa saw when they got to the temple I was afraid I’d hear next that you were dead. Tell me you didn’t.”

“I didn’t,” said Lieutenant Awn, miserable and guilty. Her voice bitter. “You can see I didn’t.”

“I can’t see that. Not at all.” Lieutenant Skaaiat poured a hefty slug of liquor into the cup I held out, and I handed it to Lieutenant Awn. “Neither can One Esk, or it wouldn’t be so silent this evening.” She looked at the nearest segment. “Did the Lord of the Radch forbid you to sing?”

“No, Lieutenant.” I hadn’t wanted to disturb Anaander
Mianaai, when she was here, or interrupt what sleep Lieutenant Awn could get. And anyway, I hadn’t much felt like it.

Lieutenant Skaaiat made a frustrated sound and turned back to Lieutenant Awn. “If you’d refused, nothing would have changed, except you’d be dead too. You did what you had to do, and the idiots… Hyr’s cock, those
idiots
. They should have known better.”

Lieutenant Awn stared at the cup in her hand, not moving.

“I
know
you, Awn. If you’re going to do something that crazy, save it for when it’ll make a difference.”

“Like
Mercy of Sarrse
One Amaat One?” She was talking about events at Ime, about the soldier who had refused her order, led that mutiny five years before.

“She made a difference, at least. Listen, Awn, you and I both know something was going on. You and I both know that what happened last night doesn’t make sense unless…” She stopped.

Lieutenant Awn set her cup of arrack down, hard. Liquor sloshed over the lip of the cup. “Unless what? How does it make sense?”

“Here.” Lieutenant Skaaiat picked up the cup and pressed it into Lieutenant Awn’s hand. “Drink this. And I’ll explain. At least as much as makes sense to me.

“You know how annexations work. I mean, yes, they work by sheer, undeniable force, but after. After the executions and the transportations and once all the last bits of idiots who think they can fight back are cleaned up. Once all that’s done, we fit whoever’s left into Radchaai society—they form up into houses, and take clientage, and in a generation or two they’re as Radchaai as anybody. And mostly that happens because we go to the top of the local hierarchy—there pretty
much always is one—and offer them all sorts of benefits in exchange for behaving like citizens, offer them clientage contracts, which allows them to offer contracts to whoever is below them, and before you know it the whole local setup is tied into Radchaai society, with minimal disruption.”

Lieutenant Awn made an impatient gesture. She already knew this. “What does that have to do with—”

“You fucked that up.”

“I…”

“What you did
worked
. And the local Tanmind were going to have to swallow that. Fair enough. If I’d done what you did—gone straight to the Orsian priest, set up house in the lower city instead of using the police station and jail already built in the upper city, set about making alliances with lower city authorities and ignoring—”

“I didn’t
ignore
anyone!” Lieutenant Awn protested.

Lieutenant Skaaiat waved her protest away. “And ignoring what anyone else would have seen as the natural local hierarchy. Your house can’t afford to offer clientage to anyone here.
Yet.
Neither you nor I can make any contracts with anyone.
For now.
We had to exempt ourselves from our houses’ contracts and take clientage directly from Anaander Mianaai, while we serve. But we still have those family connections, and those families can use connections we make now, even if we can’t. And we can certainly use them when we retire. Getting your feet on the ground during an annexation is the one sure way to increase your house’s financial and social standing.

“Which is fine until the wrong person does it. We tell ourselves that everything is the way Amaat wants it to be, that everything that is, is because of God. So if we’re wealthy and respected, that’s how things
should
be. The aptitudes prove that it’s all just, that everyone gets what they deserve, and
when the right people test into the right careers, that just goes to show how right it all is.”

“I’m not the right people.” Lieutenant Awn set down her empty cup, and Lieutenant Skaaiat refilled it.

“You’re only one of thousands, but you’re a noticeable one, to someone. And this annexation is different, it’s the last one. Last chance to grab property, to make connections on the sort of scale the upper houses have always been accustomed to. They don’t like to see any of those last chances go to houses like yours. And to make it worse, your subverting the local hierarchy—”

“I
used
the local hierarchy!”

“Lieutenants,” I cautioned. Lieutenant Awn’s outburst had been loud enough to be heard in the street, if anyone had been on the street this evening.

“If the Tanmind were running things here, that was as things must be in Amaat’s mind. Right?”

“But they…” Lieutenant Awn stopped. I wasn’t sure what she had been about to say. Perhaps that they had imposed their authority over Ors relatively recently. Perhaps that they were, in Ors, a numerical minority and Lieutenant Awn’s goal had been to reach the largest number of people she could.

“Careful,” warned Lieutenant Skaaiat, though Lieutenant Awn hadn’t needed the warning. Any Radchaai soldier knew not to speak without thinking. “If you hadn’t found those weapons, someone would have had an excuse not only to toss you out of Ors, but to come down hard on the Orsians and favor the upper city. Restoring the universe to its proper order. And then, of course, anyone inclined could have used the incident as an example of how soft we’ve gotten. If we’d stuck to so-called impartial aptitudes testing, if we’d executed more people, if we still made ancillaries…”