“Please do it,” Baru whispered. Her eyes clamped shut. “Please, I can’t bear to look at that thing. Just do it, please, I can’t bear this anymore, oh, Hu, I’m sorry. . . .”
Silently she began to weep. I frowned at my hands and flexed away a touch of rheumatic stiffness. When she opened her eyes a fraction and saw me watching her, she snarled, “Do it, damn you!”
So I placed a lid separator over her right eye, and with some difficulty, due to the degree of irritation and swelling, began to screw her eyelids apart. She grunted with each turn of the screw. Blood on her lips where she’d bitten her tongue. Her left hand hung limp. Her right was a three-fingered fist so tight that her palm bled. Her eyes swiveled and darted erratically.
Curious. I noted that her eyes were repeating the strange behavior she had displayed when she went into seizure on Helbride. The two had come unstuck from each other, a condition called strabismus. Perhaps the dose of ergot she’d taken was still causing seizures.
Her left eye fixed wildly on the orbitoclast about to slide between eye and eye socket into her skull. Her right eye was on me, flicking back and forth steadily between my eyes, as if—
Left. Right. Left. Right.
As if—
When Svir and I had made our plan to poison Baru into seizure, I’d told him to force Baru to lateralize: to rapidly move her attention from left to right. The key would be to trick her mind into confronting its own blindness through rapid exchange between the two hemispheres.
Once we’d poisoned Baru with the vidhara-tainted vodka, Svir had used hypnosis to draw her eyes back and forth. I’d watched them follow his fingers, and then come unstuck from each other, left and right eye swiveling separately.
I thought I’d even seen her right eye . . . wink at me.
Now her right eye skipped between mine. Left. Right. Left. Lateralizing again. If she was about to go into seizure I would need to delay the lobotomy.
As an Incrastic surgeon, I of course had a duty to inspect this abnormality. My first thought was to use the dream-hammer, the entheogenic drug I’d used to implant commands in Dziransi, to open Baru’s mind like the belly of a cow. But the point of the lobotomy was to render her docile, while a dose of dream-hammer might fix her forever in this moment of fear and pain.
“Yawa,” Baru slurred. “Please . . . I can’t bear . . .”
“Hush,” I snapped, thinking quickly.
When Hesychast had diagnosed the effects of the Farrier process upon Baru, he’d used a helmet with a bladed nose to divide Baru’s visual field in half, so that each side of her perception could be tested separately. “She has hemineglect,” he’d told me, “though most of the time she is probably unaware of it. I’ve been able to induce hemineglect in experimental patients by insulting the tissues of the brain. But Baru’s case is quite unusual. Her blindness is right-sided, when almost all cases are neglect of the left. And the blindness is ipsilateral, on the same side as the wound, which, due to the brain’s cross-connection, ought never to occur. . . .”
His explanation was rational, Incrastic, and correct.
But I kept thinking of something else.
The ilykari. The students of the Virtues, who knelt around the sacred olive-oil lamp, and whispered to me, their persecutor and secret hope, all the secrets of the divided mind. The Way of Eggs. The art and mystery of cultivating the sacred eryre.
It was the purpose of the ilykari to study and practice and embody the sacred ykari virtues so totally that they became those virtues. The greatest ilykari were no longer themselves. They were Himu, and Devena, and Wydd. They had nurtured and grown new persons within themselves. These new persons were called eryre.
What if—
Before I could convince myself that the association was madness, I acted.
I unbuckled Baru’s right hand. The fist relaxed. I unbuckled her lower arm, then the upper, so she could move her whole right arm from the shoulder. Then I turned and, breaking sterile procedure, prepared a sheet of parchment on a tin writing plate.
“What are you doing? Please. I can’t stand looking at this needle. Please just—just do it.”
I slid the plate beneath her right hand, dipped a stylus in bottled ink, and snugged the stylus into her right fingers. “Can you grasp that?”
“Grasp what? I can’t—”
But her right hand had taken hold of the stylus. I guided the wet tip to the paper. “Can you write your name?”
“I can’t see.”
“Don’t look. Just write.”
“My name’s Baru.”
“I know. But please write it for me.”
“I don’t want to sign the paper.”
“It’s not a signature. It’s blank.”
“You’re lying.”
“Baru, what does it matter now? Write your name.”
She tried to shrug, and the shrug moved her right hand, a twitch, a spasm, a curl of ink, an emphatic slash, another curl, three sloppy Aphalone characters, tuh aie noo, tuhainoo, taihn oo, taih noo, tain hu.
My name is Tain Hu.
Very odd,” Yawa said.
She touched the maniple. Adjusted something.
Triggered it.
The clockwork surgery rattled to life. The steel orbitoclast slid between the inner corner of Baru’s right eye and the eye socket, parted flesh, found the weak eggshell of the socket bone, and punched through. It was an obscene intrusion, sickening, like jamming a needle up an infected urethra, a dirty pain, the difference between pain-which-can-be-borne and hurt.
Baru screamed like a frog in a fist.
“It’s begun,” Yawa said, clinically. “The orbitoclast has extended the narrow inner needle into your brain. The maniple’s ticking through its choreography, cutting through tracts of connected tissue. I have already destroyed your ability to exert control over what you say. What you tell me now will be the truth. You have no choice.”
There was no pain beneath the surface but of course there wouldn’t be—Baru wanted to thrash and scream but if she moved even a little the orbitoclast might kill her, and suddenly, horribly, she did not want to die at all—
“Are you Tain Hu?” Yawa asked.
What? “No!”
“Do you see my hands? Imagine that each of my hands is a lock, and in your right hand you have a key. Do you see the locks? Good. I want you to reach out with your key and unlock the hand that holds the truth. Unlock the hand on your right if you are Tain Hu. Unlock the hand on your left if you are Baru Cormorant.”
Baru waved helplessly. “I can’t see on my right—”
“Wydd help me,” Yawa breathed, as if Baru had done something which astounded her. “Now the maniple has begun to cut away your control over your emotions. You will feel powerful passion. Overwhelming your discipline. Did you love Tain Hu?”
“Yes, yes, I wanted to be with her.” Baru was afraid to weep, what if her tears leaked back along the orbitoclast, poisoned her somehow, filthy grief pluming into her brain, but she no longer had any choice, could not restrain her tears or her screams. “I would never have killed her. But she insisted. She refused to live as a hostage, she would die before she broke her oaths—”
Which was odd.
If Baru was a victim of Cairdine Farrier’s ingenious process, as Tain Shir had convinced her—if she’d been taught to sacrifice all those close to her, and to protect her own isolation—then why hadn’t she thought of executing Hu until Hu herself suggested it?
That’s right, Baru. Why?
“Did you leave the letter that led Ormsment and Tain Shir to us on the Llosydanes? Answer, then point. My left hand is yes. My right hand is no.”
“Of course not!” Her right arm twitched and jumped.
“Have you been drawing Tain Shir after us? Are you collaborating with her?”
“Yawa, help me!” Baru couldn’t think—couldn’t feel—the metal was in her head, cutting, cutting—“Help me, please, I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”
>
“Why did you choose to become involved in Aurdwynn? Please answer, then point with your right hand. The hand on your left is for the ultimate benefit of Taranoke. The hand on your right is for your personal power.”
“I did it to be powerful! I did it because Farrier controls me and he needed me to prove myself!” Baru tried to lift her head and push herself onto the orbitoclast to kill herself and end it, this unbearable infected pain, this half-real rot of her heart. The straps held her down.
“You’re lying. Why did you help sabotage the rebellion in Aurdwynn? Point to your left for Taranoke. Point to the right for your own benefit.”
“Because Farrier was using me! I never had a choice! I thought it was all for Taranoke but it was all for him!” Her arm rigid and pointed, out of her control, surely some sign of the lobotomy’s effect.
“You’re lying. Who chose to kill Tain Hu? Point to the left for her. Point to the right for you.”
“I did! Because Farrier taught me to murder what I love!” And her arm still extended, pointing—
“You’re lying. Why—”
“Yawa, please!”
Ah, Devena help me,” Yawa gasped. And suddenly she was unscrewing the orbitoclast, removing it from the shaft it had dug into Baru’s eye socket, retracting the eyelid separators, undoing the restraints, cupping her wounded face. “Baru, Baru, are you there? Can you hear me?”
Baru rolled over and gagged onto the floor. There was nothing left to come up. The ergot had purged her. She lay there panting and weeping, wracked by shudders of terror. She hadn’t pissed herself, but only because her panic had fisted her whole body up.
“How much did you cut?” she whispered. “How much of me is gone?”
“Nothing.”
Baru looked up into the old woman’s brown skin and shining blue eyes. “I felt it, Yawa. You lobotomized me. . . .”
“I drilled through the bone but never pierced the dura mater. It never went in. There’s some risk of meningitis, but your eye should plug the hole.”
“But I felt honest—you cut me—you made me tell the truth—”
“It’s a judicial trick. You tell the prisoner she’s been drugged to tell the truth, and she fools herself into believing it.”
“But if I told the truth . . .” Baru wished wholly to die. “If I told the truth, Yawa, then I really am just Farrier’s puppet . . . I confessed it. . . .”
Yawa’s gloves cupped her cheeks. Stroked away the tears of pain. “No. You said one thing and pointed to another.”
“What?”
“Your right arm. It answered me honestly.” Cold leather gloves whispered across her face. Tender. That was the word for it. Yawa was touching her tenderly. “Your arm said you’d done it all for Taranoke, and for Tain Hu.”
“But I was just . . . just thrashing about . . .”
“That’s what you thought,” Yawa said, “because your mind needs a way to explain what the eryre is doing.”
“The what?”
“The eryre. That’s what the ilykari call it. A living model of another mind, a second consciousness in the same brain. I always thought it was really a bit of ecclesiastical power-mongering, you know, a trick to win more votes, I have three eryre in me, so I ought to get four tickets in the bed lottery . . . anyway”—she laughed shortly, the sound of a woman very carefully holding her feelings in check—“in Aphalone it’s called a tulpa. Have you heard of tulpa?”
“No. Yawa, I don’t understand. . . .”
Yawa put a straw up to Baru’s lips. Without pausing to consider poison or drug, Baru sucked at the reed.
“The way you’d explain it,” Yawa said, watching her drink with a grandmotherly eye, “is that the two halves of your mind have become separated, and the right half now believes it is Tain Hu. It is a tulpa of her. Hesychast’s tests at the Elided Keep detected the division.”
“I’m . . . I’m two people now?”
“It’s not so strange, Baru. It doesn’t work like the rag novels, the barristers with two personalities who prosecute and defend. Everyone has these two interior selves. But ordinarily—”
“They’re kept in synchrony.” Baru remembered Iscend’s explanation. “Like two diaries written by the same person.”
“That’s right. But your right side has been split from you by the wound you suffered at Sieroch. She shares your body and your memories. She is as much you as you. But she calls herself Tain Hu. And she acts in the ways you imagine Tain Hu would act.”
“Why?” Baru demanded. Not only did Cairdine Farrier have some kind of hold inside her head, but now there was civil strife in her brain? “What possible purpose . . . why did I do this to myself?”
“I must tell you,” Yawa said, with a crease in her voice, laughter folded up behind a surgeon’s control, “that in all my years studying pugilists and people who’ve fallen off horses, I’ve never met anyone who used a condition like this to hide her own plans from herself. Did you know that you wrote a letter to Tain Shir, to lead her after us on the Llosydanes?”
“What?”
“Tau-indi told us that someone left a letter on Eddyn islet, addressed to Ormsment. A letter to lead Tain Shir to you. What else did you do without realizing it?”
Baru tried to push herself inside her head, into the blindness, to find this illusion of Tain Hu smiling back at her. “Yawa, you said . . . that the split mind was how I’d explain it. What would you say?”
She made a little it’s nothing gesture. “You won’t believe me.”
“After what you just did to me, don’t you dare start prevaricating.”
She coughed uncomfortably, and then laughed. “The students of the ykari, who I admire and seek to emulate even if I cannot be one myself, would say that you have an eryre. A second soul.”
Baru, whose right eye was swelling like it had been punched, could not bear to raise her eyebrows. But her skepticism came across.
“Don’t look that way,” Yawa said, “you asked. To us a soul is not a great ineffable mystery. People are, after all, not very mysterious. A soul is simply the text of a person’s inner law, and a mind is the act of reading that law into the world. Through study and meditation you can read another soul’s law and copy it into yourself until it comes alive, so that you now have two books of law, two selves, two souls. Himu, Devena, and Wydd all studied and practiced their virtues so completely that they became those virtues. That’s why we emulate them.”
“But I haven’t studied the ykari. I haven’t meditated on a virtue . . . I just swear by them, very often, I take their names in vain. . . .”
“No, child. Your obsession was with a woman. Through study and obsession you have built inside yourself the soul of Tain Hu.”
Baru giggled. The giggle jarred her swollen eye and she cringed and giggled more. “She’s in my name,” she said, and the giggle became a laugh.
“Child?”
“She’s in my name! She’s been waiting for me!”
Yawa frowned at her blood-slick orbitoclast. “I wonder if I did more damage than I meant.”
“Don’t you hear it?” Baru cried, laughing wildly now, her head shaking, her poor wounded face throbbing. “Don’t you hear it, Yawa, she’s always been there, she’s in my name!”
“Oh,” Yawa said, with wonder, “oh,” and then they were laughing together, Yawa’s dry cough echoing down the lava tube to haunt the ruined mountain, mingled with the wet sobbing gasps of the two women in one, the left and the right, the agony and relief and red-raw hope she felt, herself, together, Baru and Hu, Barhu.
A STORY ABOUT ASH 8
Federation Year 912:
23 Years Earlier
Upon Prince Hill, by Lake Jaro
in Lonjaro Mbo
Kindalana’s father was going to die.
The machete wound made a ragged curve down his neck, along his clavicle, where it opened a thick flap of flesh at the top of his left arm. The meat was marbled like beef. He might have survived it,
except that it was a wound delivered by a man without trim, a Cancrioth worshipper, and so the principles of ruin were in it. It was going to fester and Padrigan was going to die.
Tau stared at the hole in Padrigan. This wound, this butchered body. How often did you think about your arm? About your neck? About their strength, the way they moved when you ran or wrote? And about the small, constant feeling of their presence? Not often enough. Not until they were broken.
Kindalana washed her father’s wound, bound it up with clean linen, and gave him cranebliss and frog sweat so he could dream with the principles of the house. Abdumasi and Tau-indi waited out in the honey yard for news, Tau-indi wishing dearly for their mother, who had run off thin-lipped to Jaro with her sentries to learn why there had been no forewarning of the attack. Certain harborside officials, Tau expected, were about to lose their livelihoods.
Kindalana came out with her chains and jewels undone, blood on her hands, and tear-tracks through the paint around her eyes. “He might live,” she said. “If the wound doesn’t rot.”
They held each other in silence. Blood got on all of them.
“The wound is here,” Tau-indi said, touching their left clavicle. They didn’t want to say it, but it had to be said.
Kindalana touched her own left clavicle, where Tau had painted one of the golden Segu stripes on her. “I know.”
We called a power, her eyes said, and we paid a price.
Abdumasi looked between them with his jaw stuck out. “Can I help?” he said. “Is this something a merchant can help with?”
“No,” Kindalana said, as Tau-indi, softly, said, “Yes, of course you can, you already saved us with your soldiers, you saved Cosgrad and Farrier. You’re a hero.”
Abdumasi gave Kinda a ha-take-that stab of his chin. “That’s me, savior of the noble principles!” But there was a brightness in his eyes, a glare like sun on fired earth, which Tau at the time attributed (not unfairly) to the shock of seeing such violence. Only years later would they remember the serene march of the burning sorcerer, and realize that Abdumasi craved that same strength: to go untouched by pain.
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