“She will,” answered the medic, behind me. “You shouldn’t be out of bed.”
She was right. Just dressing, even with Seivarden’s assistance, had left me shaking with exhaustion. I had come down the corridor on sheer determination. Now I felt turning my head to answer the medic would take more strength than I had.
“You just grew a new pair of lungs,” continued the medic. “Among other things. You’re not going to be walking around for a few days. At the very least.” Daos Ceit breathed shallowly and regularly, looking so much like the tiny child I’d known I wondered for a moment that I hadn’t recognized her as soon as I’d seen her.
“You need the space,” I said, and then that clicked together with another bit of information. “You could have left me in suspension until you weren’t so busy.”
“The Lord of the Radch said she needed you, citizen. She wanted you up as soon as possible.” Faintly aggrieved, I thought. The medics, not unreasonably, would have prioritized patients differently. And she hadn’t argued when I’d said she needed the space.
“You should go back to bed,” said Seivarden. Solid Seivarden, the only thing between me and utter collapse just now. I shouldn’t have gotten up.
“No.”
“She gets like this,” said Seivarden, her voice apologetic.
“So I see.”
“Let’s go back to the room.” Seivarden sounded extremely patient and calm. It was a moment before I realized she was talking to me. “You can get some rest. We can deal with the Lord of the Radch when you’re good and ready.”
“No,” I repeated. “Let’s go.”
With Seivarden’s support I made it out of Medical, into a lift, and then what seemed to be an endless length of corridor, and then, suddenly, a tremendous open space, the ground stretching away covered with glittering shards of colored glass that crunched and ground under my few steps.
“The fight spilled over into the temple,” Seivarden said, without my asking.
The main concourse, that’s where I was. And all this broken glass, what was left of that room full of funeral offerings. Only a few people were out, mostly picking through the shards, looking, I supposed, for any large pieces that might be restored. Light-brown-jacketed Security looked on.
“Communications were restored within a day or so, I think,” Seivarden continued, guiding me around patches of glass, toward the entrance to the palace proper. “And then people started figuring out what was going on. And picking sides. After a while you couldn’t not pick a side. Not really. For a bit we were afraid the military ships might attack each other, but there were only two on the other side, and they went for the gates instead, and left the system.”
“Civilian casualties?” I asked.
“There always are.” We crossed the last few meters of glass-strewn concourse and entered the palace proper. An official stood there, her uniform jacket grimy, stained dark on one sleeve. “Door one,” she said, barely looking at us. Sounding exhausted.
Door one led to a lawn. On three sides, a vista of hills and trees, and above, a blue sky streaked with pearly clouds. The fourth side was beige wall, the grass gouged and torn at its base. A plain but thickly padded green chair sat a few meters in front of me. Not for me, surely, but I didn’t much care. “I need to sit down.”
“Yes,” said Seivarden, and walked me there, and lowered me into it. I closed my eyes, just for a moment.
A child was speaking, a high, piping voice. “The Presger had approached me before Garsedd,” said the child. “The translators they sent had been grown from what they’d taken off human ships, of course, but they’d been raised and taught by the Presger and I might as well have been talking to aliens. They’re better now, but they’re still unsettling company.”
“Begging my lord’s pardon.” Seivarden. “Why did you refuse them?”
“I was already planning to destroy them,” said the child. Anaander Mianaai. “I had begun to marshal the resources I thought I’d need. I thought they’d gotten wind of my plans and were frightened enough to want to make peace. I thought they were showing weakness.” She laughed, bitter and regretful, odd to hear in such a young voice. But Anaander Mianaai was hardly young.
I opened my eyes. Seivarden knelt beside my chair. A child of about five or six sat cross-legged on the grass in front of me, dressed all in black, a pastry in one hand, and the contents of my luggage spread around her. “You’re awake.”
“You got icing on my icons,” I accused.
“They’re beautiful.” She picked up the disk of the smaller one, triggered it. The image sprang forth, jeweled and enameled, the knife in its third hand glittering in the false sunlight. “This is you, isn’t it.”
“Yes.”
“The Itran Tetrarchy! Is that where you found the gun?”
“No. It’s where I got my money.”
Anaander Mianaai frankly stared in astonishment. “They let you leave with that much money?”