“It’s real.”
“Nothing you’ve ever told me is real!”
“We’re really here, Abdumasi Abd. I know because I told Masako where to find you. I know because I’ve spent weeks and weeks trapped on this ship, losing my career, losing my only friend to these cancer people, and now he’s dying right next to you. That man over there is real. He’s about to detonate the ship’s magazines. We’re all going to die here. Tau’s going to die. Unless you can stop Execarne.”
“How can I stop him? How?”
“It’s easy, Abdu.” And in the grip of the drug, where the whole world changed to obey the changes in your mind, it really did seem simple. “You’re like him, aren’t you? You were both lured into an ambush. You were both cornered, and drugged, and driven halfway mad. But you made it out, Abdumasi. You made it back to Tau. So I’m going to carry you over to Execarne. And you’re going to tell him what you’d tell yourself, if you could go back to that day. That it was all going to turn out all right.”
He stared in silent fury. Aminata knew she had him.
“Please, Abdumasi Abd,” she whispered. “Tell him it’s worth surviving. Tell me what someone could’ve said to you, while your fleet was burning in Treatymont Harbor, to make you live.”
“I should be dead. I should’ve jumped into the fire. I was just too fucking—” His voice cracked. “Too scared. I didn’t want to burn.”
“You had to live. You had to live so you could be here today to save Tau.”
And Abdumasi Abd did what he had never done in all those days of torture. He gave in to her suasion. He broke.
He surrendered to the possibility of hope.
“Take me over there,” Abd grunted. “Carry me over to him. I’ll convince him Tau’s here. He’ll listen to me.”
“That’ll be enough?”
“If Tau was on my flagship, I would’ve surrendered before the battle even began. I would’ve done anything to protect them. Now carry me, damn you.”
After that point her dosage was so high that she began to lose time. The points of emotion stuck in her memory: the rest washed away.
She remembered the Womb’s voice giving them gentle instructions, telling them to put down their weapons and come out peacefully. The Morrow-men obeyed as if hypnotized: which was to say, not well. The drug had wrung the sense from them. Men clung to their weapons and whimpered at shapes in the smoke. She thought: those filter masks don’t work too well, do they?
She remembered telling Execarne: “Baru will flay you alive for this. You fucked with her trade concern.”
“No, she won’t,” Execarne said, vaguely: the datura was still taking him down, spiraling into the void below the soul. “She’s finished.”
“What?”
“Yawa’s going to lobotomize her. She told me. I didn’t tell her I was going to do this . . . not very good of me . . . she’ll be cross, quite cross . . .”
She remembered meeting the Womb in the dark and the smoke. Her hands burned with the uranium power, and in the nimbus around those hands, in the whorls of drug smoke, Aminata saw the whole scripture of the Cancrioth, every word linked, pouring out from the Brain through the timber of the ship and the sea and the world beyond.
All words were sorcery. If enough people believed in words, in a language or a treaty or an Antler Stone, then the words could change the whole world. Faster and further than fire.
“Tell me,” the Womb said, in a voice like tremor, a rumble through the whole ship’s frame, “how this happened. Is the treaty betrayed? Have we lost our way home?”
“No. No, this was a mistake. A rogue spy. You have my word as a navy officer.”
“That means nothing to me, Aminata. I want your word as an Oriati woman. A daughter of the isiSegu.”
But I’m not that, she wanted to say. I’m a navy officer. That’s who I chose to be.
She had chosen Falcrest but Falcrest had not chosen her. She had no uniform. She had no career waiting for her ashore, not with Shao Lune tuning up a court-martial. She had nothing but her body and her blood to swear upon.
“You have my word,” she said, “as a daughter of the isiSegu.”
“Then you may go free,” the Womb said.
And she produced the long, curved scabbard of a navy boarding saber. Aminata’s saber, the one she’d given to Baru in Aurdwynn. “Your sword. Baru insisted that it be returned to you.”
“I’m free to go?”
“You are free to go, Aminata.”
Then she was running up the stairs toward the weather deck, coughing in the thin drug fog. Two red raw holes where her kidneys should be. She thought maybe she was going to die soon, bleed into herself until she was done. She just wanted to get back up into the moonlight first. She wanted to make her report to Maroyad. Let her die in uniform. Let her die knowing who she was and needed to be. And let her die knowing the truth about—
Fuck you, Baru. You can’t be lobotomized. You can’t die until you explain yourself to me.
She heard Tau-indi calling out above, and the heavy tramp of marine boots. Sterilizer’s boats had come alongside to take Execarne and his Morrow-men away. Sterilizer’s marines would obey orders.
She’d saved the ship. She’d saved the peace. She was a hero. She groaned in agony and pulled herself up the steep steps on two feet and one hand, the saber tight in the other. Baru wanted her to have it. Aminata was sure she was going to give the saber back; she was only unsure which end she would lead with.
“Secure the egress!” an officer bellowed. “Make way for men coming abovedecks! Don’t shoot any Falcresti, you rat fucks! Beware the drugged, they’ve gone berserk down there!”
Two masked marines flung open the hatch at the top of the stairs.
Aminata opened her mouth to hail them, to call out her name and rank and posting. Aminata isiSegu. Brevet-Captain. RNS Ascentatic.
And saw herself as if from outside. Filthy, wild-eyed with drug, out of uniform, clambering up the stairs on two legs and an arm. A madwoman. A savage with a sword.
It would have hurt less if she hadn’t seen it coming.
“Burner!” one of the marines shouted.
And the other marine, without hesitation, shot her.
The bolt struck her straight in the breastbone, exactly where Tain Shir’s spear had landed. But she was not wearing armor now. The steel bodkin point went through her canvas shirt like fog. A broadhead or a spring razor would have punched a five-inch apple core into heart and lungs. The bodkin was meant to go through armor and when it struck her breastbone it split it like a gemstone along a clean line, pierced the fatty sweetbread-meat in her thymus below, and came to rest just above the top of her heart.
She fell back down the stairs to the landing. The saber landed pommel-first against her stomach. Her head struck the teak flooring and all the bruises left by her fight with Masako exploded. Queen’s cunt, she thought. I’ve been shot. What did she do now? She had to want to live. That was what separated marines who survived disembowelment from marines who died of a scratch. The will to live.
But her own marines had shot her. She’d called for them to save her and they’d shot her. At least it wasn’t a gut shot. But the bolt would be poisoned, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it? And her kidneys . . . there was no point struggling.
No! She wanted to live! She wanted to live!
She’d given her word as a daughter of the isiSegu. And the navy had killed her for it.
Meaningless, Tau had warned her. Senseless.
This will be a bilateral frontal lobotomy to correct recurrent epileptic seizures,” I dictated. “The patient is a twenty-two-year-old Souswardi woman—”
“Your Excellence,” Iscend whispered, “someone’s coming. The guards haven’t stopped her. I think it’s Governor Aurdwynn.”
I ducked out of the surgical tent and jerked the curtain shut, just in time to hide the grim tableau from Heingyl Ri. Tearstains made her face shine like lacquer.
“Yawa.” She stared up i
nto my mask as if it were my real face. “You killed him.”
“Oh, Heia.” I reached up to unbuckle my mask. “I wanted to tell you myself, but—”
She slapped me. The mask slammed shut on its hinges and boxed my nose. I made a sound of contempt, purely by reflex, and she slapped me again, so hard my ear crushed against the hard ceramic.
“You killed him,” she cried, “and you’re going to lie about it? After everything we did together, you decide to lie now?”
“Breathe,” I begged her, which was the Incrastic advice, and she took it as the patronizing nonsense it was.
“Why would I breathe? Why would I be calm? You murdered my husband! He was in your way so you killed him and now you want me to understand?”
There was only one thing I could do. And if she took it as a lie she would think me lost beyond all hope of redemption.
“I swear on Himu and Devena and Wydd, three virtues for one good life, that I had nothing to do with Bel’s murder. I’m glad it happened. I might have ordered it myself, in time. But I did not do this. Do you hear me? I did not kill Bel!”
She twisted there in front of me, breathing in hitches. And then the fury went out of her like pus from a wound. She believed. She knew I would never take the ykari in vain, and now it was even worse. Because if it was not my fault, then it was either—
“Baru.” She bit the word off so hard I heard her teeth click. “She’s done this.”
“No.”
“She has, she’s murdered Bel, she hates him and she wants me—”
“Heia,” I sighed, “look in here.”
I showed her the arrangement inside the cabin.
Heia gaped at me. “But she was your . . . she was like me, your student. . . .”
“No,” I said. “She wasn’t like you. I would never do this to you.”
And I watched poor Haradel Heia, Ri-daughter of the Stag Duke, understand that what had happened to her husband was her own fault. She’d kept her father’s guard in her employ. Three of them had tried to murder her. Still she’d kept her father’s guard close. And one of them, tormented by an omen of stag and catamount, had killed her husband.
“Oh, Devena,” she moaned. And she was out the door before I could even offer comfort.
I closed my eyes. She would survive it. She would do her duty. I knew she could do it, because she could do anything I could do.
I fastened my mask and went back into the surgical tent. Iscend Comprine waited with her instruments. She would prepare the maniple to perform the cuts, so Hesychast would know there had been no error or deception. I would supply the telescoping orbitoclast I favored for its precision.
“If you killed him,” I warned her, “don’t tell me.”
“Your Excellence,” she said, “I do not know what you mean. Shall we begin again?”
This will be a bilateral frontal lobotomy to correct recurrent epileptic seizures,” I dictated. “The patient is a twenty-two-year-old Souswardi woman with a history of Oriati emotional disease, hemineglect complicated by epilepsy, and self-managed tribadism. The patient holds an Imperial-grade savant mark in abstract reasoning and self-discipline, and a polestar mark earned by paramount service to the Throne. It is my sincere hope that after a period of recovery, the patient will recover the full use of these distinctions.”
Iscend recorded my words in her memory house. As Clarified she was considered a faultless witness in Imperial court.
“Begin,” I ordered.
“Commencing left frontal insertion.” She turned the handle that drove the orbitoclast into the bone behind Baru’s left eye. I had brought my sarcophagus in from Helbride, a full-body conditioning tool which held Baru so securely that not even her toes could move. A light tsusenshan anesthetic kept her from struggling. That was against lobotomy protocol, which required a conscious patient, but after thousands of trials on prisoners I thought I could be allowed some deviation in the name of keeping Baru still. An error as small as a hair would be catastrophic.
I did not intend to err today.
“Depth,” Iscend said, as the orbitoclast pierced Baru’s eye socket and entered her brain. “Ready for cuts.”
I made one last inspection of the maniple. Then, with Iscend watching every move, I extended the telescoped inner needle to its full length within Baru’s brain.
“Ready?” I asked Iscend.
She nodded. “Ready.”
“Commencing left frontal lobotomy.”
I triggered the maniple to begin its sequence of cuts. By pivoting the stylus around its point of entry, the device would cut certain connections in Baru’s brain. The first cut was a dramatic sweep upward, against the bones of the orbital roof.
I watched the maniple do exactly that: and then all the rest of the careful, subtle intercisions I had programmed. I was completely confident.
“Movements complete?” I asked Iscend.
“Movements complete,” she verified. “I saw the maniple perform the correct series of motions.”
“Withdraw the orbitoclast.”
She extracted the stylus from Baru’s eye socket. Her eyeball settled back into position, sealing the wounded bone away from the world.
But when the orbitoclast emerged, slick with blood and fluid, I saw that it had snapped off during the maniple’s movements. Only the T-shaped base and the larger bone-piercing needle remained. The telescoped inner needle was still lodged inside Baru’s brain.
“Shit,” I sighed, and then, wearily, “gaios, don’t transcribe that.”
“I shan’t transcribe that,” Iscend said.
“Well, it’s sterile. It’ll keep in there. No sense fishing around and risking damage.”
I fixed a second orbitoclast and prepared to perform the same operation on Baru’s right eye. “Commencing right frontal insertion.”
INTERLUDE
The Mansion Hussacht
The sight of home took Svirakir’s breath away.
“Atmospheric pressure,” he panted. “You get up this high and—the air’s thinner. But it doesn’t—bother me. I’m bred—for it.”
His guide watched him through sheepskin and furs, a halo of fuzz around sunburnt skin and pale eyes. The wisp of hide below her chin gave her a goatlike mien. “You should rest.”
“No, no,” he pretended to pant, “let’s keep going.” He was certain she was walking him into a trap, and he did not want to be late for it. The panting was to convince her that he was weak, and, despite the long estoc sword on his left hip and the arming sword on his right, entirely defenseless.
He’d hired his goat-chinned guide in Duchy Vultjag, where he’d found Tain Hu’s people not merely surviving the Stakhieczi conquest but thriving off it. It was the futures contracts that had done it. Vultjag had secured its grain in advance, and the Radascine Combine merchants in the south had, despite the invasion and the edicts against sending food north, honored that contract: either they delivered to Vultjag at the agreed-upon price, or they had to sell at cut rate to the provincial government. It was worth the cost of smuggling the grain, especially if there would not be a grain market in a year.
Vultjag was, therefore, the only duchy in the north with a supply of grain. While the rest of the north paid obscene premiums for the leavings of ransacked granaries, Tain Hu’s people were grinding more flour than they could eat. So they sold their surplus to those who had too much gold and not enough bread.
The Stakhieczi invaders had quickly learned that they could not take the bread by force. Mansion Chechniada, the Avalanche House, had sent fighters to seize the Vultjag granaries—and been bloodied so badly in jagisczion forest ambush that they ended up paying weregild just to get their column out of the woods alive. The Stakhieczi trained for close tunnel fighting and open-field war against cavalry. Both required close formations, iron discipline, and very little woodscraft. They had no answer to swift, harrying rangers except to burn the villages and kill the people—and that would cost them the granaries, too.
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So those same rangers were now doing very well as hired scouts and hunting guides for the invaders. Svir had made it known in Vultjag that he needed a guide into the mountains, and waited for one of the pathfinders to approach him.
Goat Face had come.
Now he dawdled in the shadow of the col, studying the two peaks, this home he’d missed with all his heart and hoped to never see again. The clean stone, the clear air, the sheer space of it all. There was Camich Swiet on the left, the Sugar Peak, named for the shining snowpack on its summit. It held no actual sugar: a treasure rarer than salt and more precious than platinum.
And Karakys on the right, where he had spent so many sunny days playing on the freeze-dry terraces, or building luges for fatally swift sleds. Eagles soared here, high above the green line where the last trees grew. A round-faced fox had been dogging their trail, which was an omen of procht, the Stakhi word for things which come of thinking. Procht might intimate a well-timed hunting foray or a clever new climbing route. It might also mean treachery afoot. Svir wasn’t hunting for condor eggs or scouting out a place to abseil, so he expected this fox was an omen of treachery.
Treacherously beautiful. That was a good word for the Wintercrests. In High Stakhieczi that was one word, muticzi. The same word used for a false thaw. “Treacherous summer.”
“Bring me home,” he told Goat Face.
They zagged their way upslope, as if intending to crest the col and then turn right, up the length of the ridge toward Karakys. The boulder field was exactly as he remembered it. He stooped to look for a place where he’d cut his name: but cold had cracked the stone.
“Up here,” Goat Face called, “quickly, now, or you’ll burn raw red. The sun is fiercer here. Come!”
Svir crested the col. And gasped in awe. He had a perfect view of the erbajaste, the dry lake bed between the two mountains. The clay shimmered flat and cracked as human skin. The great flocks of orange flamingos had gone away. He’d chased those stupid promenading birds as a boy, with Pirilong at his side. Later they’d been lovers—he and Pirilong, not he and the flamingos—in the summer fields north of the lake, where they could explore each other without his brother or Pirilong’s disapproving parents trying to make them reform. You’re too old for this, Svir, you need to find a woman with a womb. . . .
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