Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(22)

She slumped down onto the bench beside where she’d sloppily left her coat. “I want tea.”

“There’s no tea here.” I set the instrument aside. “There’s milk.” More specifically, there was fermented bov milk, which the people here thinned with water and drank warm. The smell—and taste—was reminiscent of sweaty boots. And too much of it would likely make Seivarden slightly sick.

“What sort of place doesn’t have tea?” she demanded, but leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and put her forehead on her wrists, her bare hands palm-up, fingers outstretched.

“This sort of place,” I answered. “Why were you taking kef?”

“You wouldn’t understand.” Tears dropped into her lap.

“Try me.” I picked up the instrument again, picked out a tune.

After six seconds of silent weeping, Seivarden said, “She said it would make everything clearer.”

“The kef would?” No answer. “What would be clearer?”

“I know that song,” she said, her face still resting on her wrists. I realized it was very likely the only way she would recognize me, and changed to a different tune. In one region of Valskaay, singing was a refined pastime, local choral associations the center of social activity. That annexation had brought me a great deal of the sort of music I had liked best, when I had had more than one voice. I chose one of those. Seivarden wouldn’t know it. Valskaay had been both before and after her time.

“She said,” Seivarden said finally, lifting her face from her hands, “that emotions clouded perception. That the clearest sight was pure reason, undistorted by feeling.”

“That’s not true.” I’d had a week with this instrument and very little else to do. I managed two lines at once.

“It seemed true at first. It was wonderful at first. It all went away. But then it would wear off, and things would be the same. Only worse. And then after a while it was like not feeling felt bad. I don’t know. I can’t describe it. But if I took more that went away.”

“And coming down got less and less endurable.” I’d heard the story a few times, in the past twenty years.

“Oh, Amaat’s grace,” she moaned. “I want to die.”

“Why don’t you?” I changed to another song. My heart is a fish, hiding in the water-grass. In the green, in the green…

She looked at me as though I were a rock that had just spoken.

“You lost your ship,” I said. “You were frozen for a thousand years. You wake up to find the Radch has changed—no more invasions, a humiliating treaty with the Presger, your house has lost financial and social status. No one knows you or remembers you, or cares whether you live or die. It’s not what you were used to, not what you were expecting out of your life, is it?”

It took three puzzled seconds for the fact to dawn. “You know who I am.”

“Of course I know who you are. You told me,” I lied.

She blinked, tearily, trying, I supposed, to remember if she had or not. But her memories were, of course, incomplete.

“Go to sleep,” I said, and laid my fingers across the strings, silencing them.

“I want to leave,” she protested, not moving, still slumped on the bench, elbows on her knees. “Why can’t I leave?”

“I have business here,” I told her.

She curled her lip and scoffed. She was right, of course, waiting here was foolish. After so many years, so much planning and effort, I had failed.

Still. “Go back to bed.” Bed was the pallet of cushions and blankets beside the bench, where she sat. She looked at me, half-sneering still, and contemptuous, and slid down to the floor and lay, pulled a blanket over herself. She wouldn’t sleep at first, I was sure. She would be trying to think of some way to leave, to overpower me or convince me to do what she wanted. Any such planning would be useless until she knew what she wanted, of course, but I didn’t say that.

Within the hour her muscles slackened and her breathing slowed. Had she still been my lieutenant I would have known for certain she slept, known what stage of sleep she was in, known whether or not she dreamed. Now I could only see externals.

Still wary, I sat on the floor, leaning against another bench, and pulled a blanket up over my legs. As I had done every time I’d slept here, I opened my inner coat and put my hand on my gun, leaned back, and closed my eyes.


Two hours later a faint sound woke me. I lay unmoving, my hand still on my gun. The faint sound repeated itself, slightly louder—the second door closing. I opened my eyes, just the slightest bit. Seivarden lay too quiet on her pallet—surely she had heard the sound as well.

Through my eyelashes I saw a person in outdoor clothes. Just under two meters tall, thin under the bulk of the double coat, skin iron-gray. When she pushed back her hood I saw her hair was the same. She was certainly not a Nilter.

She stood, watching me and Seivarden, for seven seconds, and then quietly stepped to where I lay, and bent to pull my pack toward her with one hand. In the other she held a gun, pointed steadily at me, though she seemed not to know I was awake.

The lock baffled her for a few moments, and then she pulled a tool out of her pocket, which she used to bypass the lock quite a bit more quickly than I had anticipated. Her gun still trained on me, and glancing occasionally at still-motionless Seivarden, she emptied the pack.