Ancillary Justice (30 page)

In the nineteen years since then, I had learned eleven languages and 713 songs. I had found ways to conceal what I was—even, I was fairly sure, from the Lord of the Radch herself. I had worked as a cook, a janitor, a pilot. I had settled on a plan of action. I had joined a religious order, and made a great deal of money. In all that time I only killed a dozen people.

By the time I woke the next morning, the impulse to tell Seivarden anything had passed, and she seemed to have forgotten her questions. Except one. “So where next?” She asked it
casually, sitting on the bench by my bed, leaning against the wall, as though she were only idly curious about the answer.

When she heard, maybe she’d decide she liked it better on her own. “Omaugh Palace.”

She frowned, just slightly. “That a new one?”

“Not particularly.” It had been built seven hundred years ago. “But after Garsedd, yes.” My right ankle began to tingle and itch, a sure sign the corrective was finished. “You left Radchaai space unauthorized. And you sold your armor to do it.”

“Extraordinary circumstances,” she said, still leaning back. “I’ll appeal.”

“That’ll get you a delay, at any rate.” Any citizen who wanted to see the Lord of the Radch could apply to do so, though the farther one was from a provincial palace, the more complicated, expensive, and time-consuming the journey would be. Sometimes applications were turned down, when the distance was great and the cause was judged hopeless or frivolous—and the petitioner was unable to pay her own way. But Anaander Mianaai was the final appeal for nearly any matter, and this case was certainly not routine. And she would be right there on the station. “You’ll wait months for an audience.”

Seivarden gestured her lack of concern. “What are you going to do there?”

Try to kill Anaander Mianaai.
But I couldn’t say that. “See the sights. Buy some souvenirs. Maybe try to meet the Lord of the Radch.”

She lifted an eyebrow. Then she looked at my pack. She knew about the gun, and of course she understood how dangerous it was. She still thought I was an agent of the Radch. “Undercover the whole way? And when you hand that”—she
shrugged toward my pack—“over to the Lord of the Radch, then what?”

“I don’t know.” I closed my eyes. I could see no further than arriving at Omaugh Palace, had not even the remotest shadow of an idea of what to do after that, how I might get close enough to Anaander Mianaai to use the gun.

No. That wasn’t true. The beginning of a plan had this moment suggested itself to me, but it was horribly impractical, relying as it did on Seivarden’s discretion and support.

She had constructed her own idea of what I was doing and why I would return to the Radch playing a foreign tourist. Why I would report directly to Anaander Mianaai instead of a Special Missions officer. I could use that.

“I’m coming with you,” Seivarden said, and as though she had guessed my thoughts she added, “You can come to my appeal and speak on my behalf.”

I didn’t trust myself to answer. Pins and needles traveled up my right leg, started in my hands, arms, and shoulders, and my left leg. A slight ache began in my right hip. Something hadn’t healed quite right.

“It’s not as if I don’t already know what’s going on,” Seivarden said.

“So when you steal from me, breaking your legs won’t be enough. I’ll have to kill you.” My eyes still closed, I couldn’t see her reaction to that. She might well take it as a joke.

“I won’t,” she answered. “You’ll see.”

I spent several more days in Therrod recovering sufficiently that the doctor would approve my leaving. All that time, and afterward all the way up the ribbon, Seivarden was polite and deferential.

It worried me. I had stashed money and belongings at the
top of the Nilt ribbon, and would have to retrieve them before we left. Everything was packaged, so I could do that without Seivarden seeing much more than a couple of boxes, but I had no illusions she wouldn’t try to open them first chance she got.

At least I had money again. And maybe that was the solution to the problem.

I took a room on the ribbon station, left Seivarden there with instructions to wait, and went to recover my possessions. When I returned she was sitting on the single bed—no linens or blankets, that was conventionally extra here—fidgeting. One knee bouncing, rubbing her upper arms with her bare hands—I had sold our heavy outer coats, and the gloves, at the foot of the ribbon. She stilled when I came in, and looked expectantly at me, but said nothing.

I tossed into her lap a bag that made a tumbling clicking sound as it landed.

Seivarden gave it one frowning look, and then turned her gaze to me, not moving to touch the bag or claim it in any way. “What’s this?”

“Ten thousand shen,” I said. It was the most commonly negotiable currency in this region, in easily transportable (and spent) chits. Ten thousand would buy a lot, here. It would buy passage to another system with enough left over to binge for several weeks.

“Is that a lot?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes widened, just slightly, and for half a second I saw calculation in her expression.

Time for me to be direct. “The room is paid up for the next ten days. After that—” I gestured at the bag on her lap. “That should last you a while. Longer if you’re truly serious
about staying off kef.” But that look, when she’d realized she had access to money, made me fairly certain she wasn’t. Not really.

For six seconds Seivarden looked down at the bag in her lap. “No.” She picked the bag up gingerly, between her thumb and forefinger, as though it were a dead rat, and dropped it on the floor. “I’m coming with you.”

I didn’t answer, only looked at her. Silence stretched out.

Finally she looked away, crossed her arms. “Isn’t there any tea?”

“Not the sort you’re used to.”

“I don’t care.”

Well. I didn’t want to leave her here alone with my money and possessions. “Come on, then.”

We left the room, found a shop on the main corridor that sold things for flavoring hot water. Seivarden sniffed one of the blends on offer. Wrinkled her nose. “This is
tea
?”

The shop’s proprietor watched us from the corner of her vision, not wanting to seem to watch us. “I told you it wasn’t the sort you were used to. You said you didn’t care.”

She thought about that a moment. To my utter surprise, instead of arguing, or complaining further about the unsatisfactory nature of the tea in question, she said, calmly, “What do you recommend?”

I gestured my uncertainty. “I’m not in the habit of drinking tea.”

“Not in the…” She stared at me. “Oh. Don’t they drink tea in the Gerentate?”

“Not the way you people do.” And of course tea was for officers. For humans. Ancillaries drank water. Tea was an extra, unnecessary expense. A luxury. So I had never developed the habit. I turned to the proprietor, a Nilter, short and
pale and fat, in shirtsleeves though the temperature here was a constant four C and Seivarden and I both still wore our inner coats. “Which of these has caffeine in it?”

She answered, pleasantly enough, and became pleasanter when I bought not only 250 grams each of two kinds of tea but also a flask with two cups, and two bottles, along with water to fill them.

Seivarden carried the whole lot back to our lodging, walking alongside me saying nothing. In the room she laid our purchases on the bed, sat down beside them, and picked up the flask, puzzling over the unfamiliar design.

I could have showed her how it worked, but decided not to. Instead I opened my newly claimed luggage and dug out a thick golden disk three centimeters larger in diameter than the one I had carried with me, and a small, shallow bowl of hammered gold, eight centimeters in diameter. I closed the trunk, set the bowl on it, and triggered the image in the disk.

Seivarden looked up to watch it unfold into a wide, flat flower in mother-of-pearl, a woman standing in its center. She wore a knee-length robe of the same iridescent white, inlaid with gold and silver. In one hand she held a human skull, itself inlaid with jewels, red and blue and yellow, and in the other hand a knife.

“That’s like the other one,” Seivarden said, sounding mildly interested. “But it doesn’t look so much like you.”

“True,” I answered, and sat cross-legged before the trunk.

“Is that a Gerentate god?”

“It’s one I met, traveling.”

Seivarden made a breathy, noncommittal noise. “What’s its name?”

I spoke the long string of syllables, which left Seivarden nonplussed. “It means
She Who Sprang from the Lily
. She is
the creator of the universe.” This would make her Amaat, in Radchaai terms.

“Ah,” said Seivarden, in a tone I knew meant she’d made that equation, made the strange god familiar and brought it safely within her mental framework. “And the other one?”

“A saint.”

“What a remarkable thing, that she should resemble you so much.”

“Yes. Although she’s not the saint. The head she’s holding is.”

Seivarden blinked, frowned. It was very un-Radchaai. “Still.”

Nothing was just a coincidence, not for Radchaai. Such odd chances could—and did—send Radchaai on pilgrimages, motivate them to worship particular gods, change entrenched habits. They were direct messages from Amaat. “I’m going to pray now,” I said.

With one hand Seivarden made a gesture of acknowledgment. I unfolded a small knife, pricked my thumb, and bled into the gold bowl. I didn’t look to see Seivarden’s reaction—no Radchaai god took blood, and I hadn’t troubled to wash my hands first. It was guaranteed to lift Radchaai eyebrows, to register as foreign and even primitive.

But Seivarden didn’t say anything. She sat silent for thirty-one seconds as I intoned the first of the 322 names of the Hundred of White Lily, and then she turned her attention to the flask, and making tea.

Seivarden had said she’d lasted six months at her last attempt to quit kef. It took seven months to reach a station with a Radchaai consulate. Approaching the first leg of the journey, I had told the purser in Seivarden’s hearing that I wanted
passage for myself and my servant. She hadn’t reacted, that I could see. Perhaps she hadn’t understood. But I had expected a more or less angry recrimination in private when she discovered her status, and she never mentioned it. And from then on I woke to find tea already made and waiting for me.

She also ruined two shirts attempting to launder them, leaving me with one for an entire month until we docked at the next station. The ship’s captain—she was Ki, tall and covered in ritual scars—let fall in an oblique, circuitous way that she and all her crew thought I’d taken Seivarden on as a charity case. Which wasn’t far from the truth. I didn’t contest it. But Seivarden improved, and three months later, on the next ship, a fellow passenger tried to hire her away from me.

Which wasn’t to say she had suddenly become a different person, or entirely deferential. Some days she spoke irritably to me, for no reason I could see, or spent hours curled in her bunk, her face to the wall, rising only for her self-imposed duties. The first few times I spoke to her when she was in that mood I only received silence in reply, so after that I left her alone.

The Radchaai consulate was staffed by the Translators Office, and the consular agent’s spotless white uniform—including pristine white gloves—argued she either had a servant or spent a good deal of her free time attempting to appear as though she did. The tasteful—and expensive-looking—jeweled strands wound in her hair, and the names on the memorial pins that glittered everywhere on the white jacket, as well as the faint disdain in her voice when she spoke to me, argued
servant
. Though likely only one—this was an out-of-the-way posting.

“As a visiting noncitizen your legal rights are restricted.”
It was clearly a rote speech. “You must deposit at minimum the equivalent of—” Fingers twitched as she checked the exchange rate. “Five hundred shen per week of your visit, per person. If your lodging, food, and any extra purchases, fines, or damages exceed the amount on deposit and you cannot pay the balance, you will be legally obligated to take an assignment until your debt is paid. As a noncitizen your right to appeal any judgment or assignment is limited. Do you still wish to enter Radch space?”

“I do,” I said, and laid two million-shen chits on the slim desk between us.

Her disdain vanished. She sat slightly straighter and offered me tea, gesturing slightly, fingers twitching again as she communicated with someone else—her servant, it turned out, who, with a slightly harried air, brought tea in an elaborately enameled flask, and bowls to match.

While the servant poured, I brought out my forged Gerentate credentials and placed those on the desk as well.

“You must also provide identification for your servant, honored,” said the consular agent, now all politeness.

“My servant is a Radchaai citizen,” I answered, smiling slightly. Meaning to take the edge off what was going to be an awkward moment. “But she’s lost her identification and her travel permits.”

The consular agent froze, attempting to process that.

“The honored Breq,” said Seivarden, standing behind me, in antique, effortlessly elegant Radchaai, “has been generous enough to employ me and pay my passage home.”

This didn’t resolve the consular agent’s astonished paralysis quite as effectively as Seivarden perhaps had wished. That accent didn’t belong on anyone’s servant, let alone a
noncitizen’s. And she hadn’t offered Seivarden a seat, or tea, thinking her too insignificant for such courtesies.

“Surely you can take genetic information,” I suggested.

“Yes, of course,” answered the consular agent, with a sunny smile. “Though your visa application will almost certainly come through before Citizen…”

“Seivarden,” I supplied.

“… before Citizen Seivarden’s travel permits are reissued. Depending on where she departed from and where her records are.”

“Of course,” I answered, and sipped my tea. “That’s only to be expected.”

As we left, Seivarden said to me, in an undertone, “What a snob. Was that real tea?”