And then, from among the post-revolutionary rooftops that filled the skyline ahead, he saw a white flare climbing up into the hot blue sky, shot directly up through the oculus of the old reservoir where Parliament sat in session.
Lindon could not speak for fury. His hands worked at the rail. Something in bone or wood creaked.
“Sir?” his clerk-lieutenant asked, reminding Lindon of her existence: he fired his clerks regularly, since they were all Brilinda Vain’s spies. “What’s that flare, sir?”
“My man in Parliament. Something’s happened. Something he thinks I need to be warned of right away.”
Lindon saw it all now. The emergency summons, so they could say they’d tried to solicit his advice. The Judiciary pickets to ensure he did not make it in time. Parliament waiting with pantomimed patience while they let the audience simmer in resentment of the Empire Admiral’s tardiness.
And, finally, the vote. We’re sorry, Admiral, but we just couldn’t wait any longer. The people do not stoop for the navy’s pleasure. Rather the converse, don’t you know. . . .
“It can’t be anything new,” he whispered. Parliament absolutely couldn’t extend its powers over the navy without granting the Admiralty time on the floor. “It must be an exercise of an existing privilege, something procedural, something routine, it must be . . . what?”
If Svir were here he would’ve sniffed it out. He would’ve known a month ago. But Svir was not here.
Whatever Parliament had done today, it was the first link in the chain to purge. For more than a hundred years, the navy had viciously fought off all attempts to put a civilian ministry over them, and that gave the navy power and discretion . . . but it also meant that Parliament’s methods to control the navy had to be extreme. More than one Admiralty had ended in the basement of the Bleak House.
And Lindon was as vulnerable as he’d ever been.
The moment his barge bumped up against the fenders of the navy dock, a messenger came bursting out of the coatroom arch. “Sir!” the girl shouted. “Sir, two anonymous notes from the floor, sir!”
He tipped her double and unfolded the finer paper first. From his agent. It contained a sketch of the actions Parliament had just approved.
“What?” he breathed, frowning at the calligraphy. “What’s this?”
“May I see, sir?” his clerk offered.
“Fuck off,” he snapped, glaring at the summary. Appropriations, funds, lists of affected accounts . . . so they were fucking with the navy’s money, the slice of the tax pie paid out to the Admiralty each year . . . but that wasn’t possible. The quantities were fixed in each year’s budget, and could only be increased, never decreased, by emergency appropriation. It was written in law. The navy’s sacrosanct need to plan operations in distant seas, subject to many weeks of travel and delay, demands absolute confidence and clarity in the available budget.
Parliament couldn’t get at them that way.
Then he saw it. It was so brutally simple that he actually grunted a laugh.
“Fuck,” he said in admiration. “Fuck me.”
Parliament had finally had enough. Province Admiral Ormsment was missing from her post in Aurdwynn. There were reports of Oriati ships destroyed off the Llosydanes, including an ambassador’s clipper. Brilinda Vain’s Censorate was still hemming and hawing and refusing to declare exactly who had been behind that pirate attack on Aurdwynn. War seemed imminent, and the navy was acting unreliable.
Parliament had decided to show them the garrote. And they had done it very cleverly. They had simply converted every note granted to the navy from a payment to a recoverable outlay. The navy now owed Parliament one note, plus interest, on every note it spent.
It would probably not stand up in an impartial court. But the Judiciary was not impartial.
“Go directly back to the Admiralty,” he ordered his clerk. “Prepare an all posts bulletin for my seal and signature.”
“The message, sir?”
“Order all ships to return to port, all outfitting and refitting to cease, all navy accounts frozen. Not one note spent. Pay salaries from liquid reserves on hand, go to local banks if you have to, but do not draw from navy accounts. Do you understand?”
“Sir, you’re asking for . . . for the whole navy to return to port.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Given the situation with the Oriati, sir, especially at our southern outposts—”
“I know!” he snapped. “Go!”
The second anonymous note came on cheap paper, in a very level, very large hand. The kind of writing you might practice if you needed to scrawl messages on heavy seas.
Lindon,
I’ve secured an investment from the Tuning-Spear Concern that will keep First Fleet operating through end of year. To be repaid out of our prize shares. Someone has to be ready when the war begins, after all.
Good luck panhandling for funds, sir,
PAAC
“You venomous cunt,” he said, with the most profound respect.
Ahanna Croftare, Province Admiral First Fleet, had taken her ships quite unofficially private.
Act Two
the plague
The Locks in Her Hands
It was about fucking time I was back in charge.
For a few dreadful hours I thought I’d lost everything. By the time Faham’s Morrow-men found the Cancrioth ship, Baru was already aboard, doing her master’s work, winning the contest. But Iraji had taken the nightshade and gone aboard, and the Cancrioth had exchanged him for Baru. It had worked. Yes, the poor boy might be dead, if the esere bean antidote I’d sent after him failed. But I had a lot of dead boys on my conscience already and I could tolerate one more.
And if my niece Tain Shir had died in the black waters of the fjord, then . . . perhaps that was for the best, wasn’t it? She was mad. And if my brother Olake ever met his daughter again, she would only drive him deeper into his own madness.
At last, after four years of her selfish and self-satisfied interference, I could be rid of Baru Cormorant.
I climbed up the lava tube whistling “O Lonely Lads of Aurdwynn” with my lobotomy tools clinking on my gown and dreams of Olake’s forgiveness buoying my thoughts. I might visit him on my way north, and show him what I’d done with Baru. See, brother, see? Baru, tell Olake the truth. Tell him how you betrayed him, and how I’ve avenged that betrayal.
Tell him how you betrayed Tain Hu, and how I’ve made you pay.
More men than my brother wanted to avenge themselves on Baru, of course. One of them was the King of the Stakhieczi Necessity, the cold assembly of mountain clans about to invade my homeland. The Necessary King had asked Baru to be his queen. She’d strung him along just long enough to betray him.
I would give him Baru as dowry, for ritual scalping in his court.
Then he would wed my chosen queen, and together Aurdwynn and the Stakhieczi would drive Falcrest away forever, and then I would see the King destroyed and the people left in power. Neither my master Hesychast nor the Necessary King knew my true purpose. It had not even been possible to tell poor Olake. But he would see what I’d achieved, in the end. Freedom for Aurdwynn. Forever.
You see, Olake? See how I kept the faith?
“Stop whistling!” Baru shouted from up ahead. “I’m trying to count!”
The pungent little weasel. I’d left her conscious for the lobotomy; there was no other way to be sure that each cut had the intended effect. She’d been straitjacketed and laced into a surgical plate, the sort used to bind sailors who’d fallen out of the masts and struck their heads. Under the dawn light she struck me as rather lovely, in a brooding, self-absorbed sort of way.
You would not know, looking at her, that she was a drunken monster addicted to the suffering of others.
But you would know, probably, that she was difficult.
She tried to turn her head. The right side of her face had swollen up where she’d struck it in a fall. She seemed to be recovering from er
got; what a remarkable sign of her character that the Cancrioth had tried to poison her after just a few hours of her company.
“What are you counting?” I asked her. Best to establish the clarity of her thought before I began the operation.
“Birds.”
I tried to look up through the skylight, but the damn quarantine gown strained my neck too much. I removed the mask and set it aside; that was technically against sterile protocol, but I couldn’t afford any discomfort during such a delicate surgery. I set out small glasses of alcohol and used a wheel-action sparkfire lighter to sterilize my tools. I’d lost a patient to meningitis once because I hadn’t sterilized correctly. A horrible waste: he was a barrister who serially mishandled the estates of widows in order to plunder their property. After the lobotomy I had hoped to make him suffer a while as a menial. One takes what pleasures one can in this work, in the One Trade which is the life of lies.
Wind whistled through the lava tube. The skylight made the tunnel into a gigantic flute, Himu’s pipe, as if the virtue of energy were here, dancing and singing of summer.
“Yawa,” Baru said.
Monsters can be charming, when they know you’re watching. They have a magnetism about them. In Aurdwynn there was a mania around the execution of killers, an industry of erotica, marriage proposals, falsified interviews, and cheap plays.
But at the moment of conviction that mask always came off, all the pyrite gilding and the thin charm stripped away. You saw, then, that they were hideous and incurable. That they had believed they were a divinity, a power abhuman and archonic, immune to judgment. A rictus of rage and negation, an expression chilling in its dissimilitude to all other emotions. You would not ever mistake it for grief or fear. I had never been able to describe that face to anyone. The opposite of charisma, maybe. The antithesis of a preacher’s faith-hot rant.
I looked down at Baru and waited for her mask to slip like that.
“Yawa, will it hurt?”
“A little.”
“Don’t lie to me, please.”
“It’ll hurt where the tool goes in. But the brain feels nothing as it’s cut. I always liked the irony of that.” I didn’t know why I’d added that. Baru wouldn’t care.
“What will I feel like, afterward?”
“It depends on what I cut. We can be very precise, these days.” How many thousands and thousands of lobotomies had been carried out, since that long-ago day when Lapetiare ordered the royal children gentled to spare them grief? I had conducted many myself, working on the minds of condemned prisoners to test the effect of certain incisions. We had, by massive repetition, charted the specific and local functions of the brain.
“What will you cut, Yawa?” She was so calm. I’d expected bargaining. I’d brushed a little residual mason powder from inside her nose, mingled with seawater and blood, but by now the artificial arrogance of the drug should be gone.
“The cuts will be in your prefrontal areas.” I showed her the orbitoclast, the sharp stylus that would penetrate into her brain and destroy the targets. Mine were of a custom telescoping design, with a base a tenth of an inch wide to penetrate the sphenoid bone, and a narrower needle that could be extended to cut the brain tissue within. “This goes in above your eye. First one side, then the other. The brain has two distinct—”
“Two sides. Two hemispheres. Iscend told me that.”
Iscend had vanished alongside Tain Shir, which was almost too convenient to believe. The Clarified woman had been growing erratic. I was secretly afraid that she’d begun to deduce my true plans, that the conflict between her conditioned loyalty to me and her deeper loyalty to the Republic was driving her to error.
I touched Baru’s brow, tracing the cartography of her cortex. Her skin was fiercely, feverishly hot. “I’ll make cuts to render you docile, suggestible, and childlike. The cuts themselves are performed by this device.” I showed her the clockwork maniple, the socket where it fastened to the base of the orbitoclast, the bearings that would hold it steady above her eye. “It’s been wound, like a clock, to carry out a certain set of motions. Very precise. Very scientific.”
“And I won’t think at all, afterward?”
“You’ll be happy like a child.”
“Are children happy? I don’t remember.”
This poor girl. Farrier had claimed her early. She’d never had a chance. “We’ll feed you and comfort you. It’ll be enough for you.”
“Good,” Baru said, softly. “Will I remember hurting?”
“I don’t know.”
“You can lie to me now, if you want.”
I unfolded the maniple’s tripod. The rising sun flashed off the struts. “I think there’s been enough lying. From both of us.” She had wasted Tain Hu and I would never forgive her for it.
“Will you send me to the Necessary King?”
“Yes.” The brave man Dziransi was already on his way to prepare the ground, with my commands implanted as visions through the sacred dream-hammer drug. I was quite proud of that maneuver. I’d never liked Stakhi men very much.
“What will I buy for you?”
“The Necessary King’s hand in marriage to Governor Heingyl Ri. Their son will rule the Stakhieczi Mansions and Aurdwynn together, and oversee their unification.”
“And what will happen to me?”
“He’ll hang you upside down before his court and bleed you from your scalp. To demonstrate that his power to avenge insult reaches across the world.”
“Will I be treated with dignity?”
The question pricked at me. In my youth I’d wished, now and then, for certain men and women to be violated. I hated those thoughts now. How couldn’t you hate them, after a life like mine? Overseeing the eugenic courts, wielding the Imperial Republic’s power to legislate womb and testes. In a horrible bureaucratic way, I was a rapist myself. Hadn’t I enforced the reparatory marriages? Hadn’t I made women bear children they didn’t want? But at least I could blame the Masquerade for those laws. With my hand in the machine I could arrange for kind spouses, grant abortions and adoptions, spare the women who would not survive motherhood.
“You’ll be treated with honor,” I said, “until he kills you.”
“I’m glad,” Baru said. Her eyes had settled very far away. “It’s strange. I’ve never worried about that before. It’s always been something that happens to other women. . . .”
“An easy assumption to make,” I said, “when you’re raised in an elite school.”
Baru frowned up at me. That same stupid impetuous frown she’d aimed at me in meetings of the Governing Factors, when she thought she knew better than I. “Yawa, don’t you know what the schools do to the unhygienic?”
“The Charitable Service runs the schools.” I stayed away from them. Far too much reminder of lost Shir in those places. “A bit of behavioral shaping, I suppose?”
“Not on Taranoke. On Taranoke, if the children didn’t seem interested in hygienic sex, there was a teacher of the appropriate sex who would masturbate them.”
“Oh.”
“It was rape, Yawa. It was the institutionally condoned rape of children.”
I no longer wanted to look at her: not because this surprised me, but because it didn’t. My own Judiciary in Aurdwynn had done as much, and worse.
I used a fluid level to adjust the tripod’s legs, compensating for the slight slope of the lava tube. Then I clamped the maniple box into the tripod’s surgical arm and moved that arm into position over Baru’s right eye. The maniple had frightened me, at first, when I’d feared it would take the privilege of surgery away from me. In Incrasticism the surgeon had an inviolable right to dictate everything that happened within an operating theater. But now, with older hands, I was glad for the maniple’s clockwork precision.
“Yawa.”
“Yes?”
“What if the Stakhieczi invade? What if your marriage isn’t enough to stop them? Vultjag would be conquered first. . . .”
�
�We’ll open trade with the Mansions. The Stakhieczi will become addicted to our crops. Once their population grows, they’ll depend on us for food, and political unity will follow. In time”—I took a breath, realized I wanted to hurt her, to reveal to her that I was the better woman, allowed myself to do it—“that unity will drive the Masquerade from our home.”
Baru smiled wistfully. “That’s good. Ra said you’d be good for Aurdwynn.”
“Unuxekome Ra?” The stab of panic came and passed. One’s heart does not settle with age, nor one’s gut. But the mind learns to ride them gently. “What did she tell you?”
“That you’d sworn in secret to save Aurdwynn from the Masquerade. She remembered when you were a girl, putting up posters. . . .”
Oh Wydd protect me. I thought my twin was the only one who remembered those days.
Baru’s eyes sought mine. “Is it true? You did it all for Aurdwynn?”
I nodded. Just the slightest and most deniable nod. I wanted her to know that her cruel ambition, her total abandonment of her own home, had been defeated by my own secret loyalty.
“I’m glad,” Baru moaned. “Oh, Hu. I am so glad. You’ll do better than I would’ve, I’m sure. And Taranoke . . . maybe, somehow, someday, for Taranoke . . .”
She was an exquisite actor, of course. She must have been, to fool Hu so long. It puzzled me that she wasn’t breaking character.
I clamped the sterilized steel orbitoclast into the maniple. Once it had entered her skull it would need to be moved very carefully: the slightest error could sever the wrong portion of the forebrain and kill her. There was also the risk of breaking the instrument. I preferred needle-thin orbitoclasts, for precision in the cut. There was a risk they would snap when swiveled, especially if they had been notched or scratched near the base, but I always tested them carefully before use.
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