Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(77)

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.