“I’ll be glad when the Lord of Mianaai gets here,” said Lieutenant Awn to me, quietly, late one night. “I don’t think I should be handling something like this.”
And in the meantime I noticed that no one but Denz Ay went out on the water at night, and in the lower city no one sat or lay where the shutters might come down—a routine precaution during the rainy season, even though there were safeties to stop them if someone was in their way, but one that was usually ignored in the dry season.
The Lord of the Radch arrived in the middle of the day, on foot, a single one of her walking down through the upper city, no trace of her in the tracker logs, and went straight to the temple of Ikkt. She was old, gray-haired, broad shoulders slightly stooping, the almost-black skin of her face lined—which accounted for the lack of guards. The loss of one body that was more or less near death anyway would not be a large one. The use of such older bodies allowed the Lord of the Radch to walk unprotected, without any sort of entourage, when she wished, without much risk.
She wore not the jeweled coat and trousers of the Radchaai, nor the coverall or trousers and shirt a Shis’urnan Tanmind would wear, but instead the Orsian lungi, shirtless.
As soon as I saw her, I messaged Lieutenant Awn, who came as quickly as she could to the temple, and arrived while the head priest was prostrating herself in the plaza before the Lord of the Radch.
Lieutenant Awn hesitated. Most Radchaai were never in the personal presence of Anaander Mianaai in such circumstances. Of course she was always present during annexations, but the sheer number of troops compared to the number of bodies the Lord of the Radch sent made it unlikely one would run into her by chance. And any citizen can travel to one of the provincial palaces and ask for an audience—for a request, for an appeal in a legal case, for whatever reason—but in such a case, an ordinary citizen is briefed beforehand on how to conduct herself. Perhaps someone like Lieutenant Skaaiat would know how to draw Anaander Mianaai’s attention to herself without breaching propriety, but Lieutenant Awn did not.
“My lord,” Lieutenant Awn said, heart speeding with fear, and knelt.
Anaander Mianaai turned to her, eyebrow raised.
“I beg my lord’s pardon,” said Lieutenant Awn. She was slightly dizzy, either from the weight of her uniform in the heat, or from nerves. “I must speak with you.”
The eyebrow rose farther. “Lieutenant Awn,” she said, “yes?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“This evening I attend the vigil in the temple of Ikkt. I’ll speak to you in the morning.”
It took Lieutenant Awn a few moments to digest this. “My lord, a moment only. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
The Lord of the Radch tilted her head inquisitively. “I understood you had this area under control.”
“Yes, lord, it’s just…” Lieutenant Awn stopped, panicked, at a loss for words for a second. “Relations between the upper and lower city just now…” She halted again.
“Concern yourself with your own job,” said Anaander Mianaai. “And I will concern myself with mine.” She turned away from Lieutenant Awn.
A public slight. An inexplicable one—there was no reason the Lord of the Radch could not have turned aside for a few urgent words with the officer who was chief of local security. And Lieutenant Awn had done nothing to deserve such a slight. At first I thought that was the only reason for the distress I read coming from Lieutenant Awn. The matter of the guns could be communicated in the morning just as well as now, and there seemed no other difficulty. But as the Lord of the Radch had walked through the upper city, word of Anaander Mianaai’s presence had spread, as of course it would, and the residents of the upper city had come out of their houses and begun gathering on the northern edge of the Fore-Temple water to watch the Lord of the Radch, dressed like an Orsian, stand in front of the temple of Ikkt with the Divine. And listening to the mutterings of the watching Tanmind, I realized that at this particular instant the guns were only a secondary concern.