She felt despair. How could she be anything except what he had designed?

But other hands had touched her. And closer to her heart.

Baru put on a smiling mask for him. “You’ll be all right?”

“Oh, I can talk my way out of anything.” He grinned at her and tossed off a little salute. And then he leapt up with a young man’s vigor and went out through the serving-door.

Baru fell down beside Yawa and Apparitor. “I think we’re on our own.”

Yawa raised her mask and fastened it to the seals of her gown. Valves and mechanisms clicked and ratched. She exhaled, slowly, a sound like early frost on cracking wheat.

“They’ll both escape,” she said. “Will our marines fight?”

“I doubt it,” Apparitor said, sourly. “You can only trust the navy to love the navy.”

“We can’t go overland.” Yawa would know: how many times had she cordoned off a target site before the grab? “The sentries will put up rockets the instant they see us.”

“Apparitor, do you have a way out?” Baru hissed.

“There’s an underground river that drains into the east marsh. We can reach Helbride from there.” Apparitor scooped up the boy Iraji in his arms. “Assuming whoever compromised us didn’t give away the escape routes, too.”

“Who was it?” Baru asked.

“I suspect,” Yawa said, softly, “that it may have been my niece.”

“Your niece?” Apparitor straightened so swiftly he almost dropped poor Iraji. “That’s impossible.”

Yawa shrugged. The buttresses and veils of the quarantine gown clicked like mantis legs. “Perhaps she came back after all.”

*   *   *

FOR the second time in her life the Bane of Wives rows up this cold harbor toward the gray and brooding bulk of the Elided Keep. Red-masked marines swarm the battlements. Smoke billows above the walls. Ormsment’s ships discharge another volley of rockets to flush the Thronesmen from their catacombs and low halls.

All futile. They will not take their quarry. The cryptarchs will flee through a hidden way.

Tain Shir knows their intentions in the way that an exterminator anticipates the flight of crawling things. She knows these arachnid underlords of a nation that worships paper and glass and the hot-sterile implements of surgery. She will intercept them and arrest them in their flight and when some of them claim their rights as technocrats she will explain to them that they have mistaken the terms of their detention.

The marines in her skiff call her Captain Tain. She has not answered to this old name for nigh on fifteen years and in these recent months when she lived deep in the blood-hot jungle and stalked the innocent across contested ground it seemed to her that never again would she know herself by any name at all. Her sign would be the glistening smile her machete cut on the throats of boy-soldiers. I am this, this mortal act.