But on this mission she dares hope for a particle of redemption and so she reaches, like a petitioner, for the name of her childhood. The Bane of Wives is again Tain Shir.

She has come to be her cousin’s rescuer.

The Elided Keep glowers in a fog of chemical smoke, brutalist architecture of battlement and monolith, striped in zebra slashes of white and gray to break up its outline, perpetually disappointed in those who dare assault it. Juris Ormsment has ordered Shir to join the assault but the admiral’s orders are of no relevance to Shir nor will she make any account of her actions to those who pretend to command her.

She is not mastered. The days of her service to the Throne or the navy or any other power died on burning Butterveldt savanna among the bones of orphans and lame dogs.

Her skiff crashes onto the beach on a breaking wave.

Go, she commands.

The marines of her detachment spill ashore in a silent leaping swarm. Like the nymphs of some redsteel crustacean grown smooth and armored on the secret metals of the deep. Dogwatch sun scorches their wools and leathers and fills their masks with sweat. The clouds have burnt away and the sky is unforgiving deep blue.

They move across the bare stone.

Tain Shir strikes out to the east, climbing toward the high promontory and the drowning-stone beneath. Her command squad follows close behind her, calling out. Mam. Mam. What are your orders, Captain Shir?

On the spine of the ridge they come upon a party of the Emperor’s apparatchiks. The spies surrender immediately, kneeling on the naked rock. They claim protocol’s protection. Do not harm us lest you violate the great law of our Republic, which says that the sword must always kneel before the pen.

Shir walks among them and thinks of the acts she abetted in the Occupation, the burning of villages and the slaughter of the refugees, the selection of men as her chattel, the Invijay horsefighters crying out to her in exaltation and worship, our god-captain, our vengeance manifest. Her old master Itinerant ordered this.

Kill them, Shir orders. They were sent here as distractions.

Her marines hesitate and the surrendered Thronesmen look up in horror as if waiting for the world to amend itself in their favor.

Shir puts a knife to their leader’s skull. A chamberlain or director. He stinks of piss but his face is brave. He says, you won’t hurt us. I am the personal chamberlain of Agonist, agent of the Throne. Touch me and you know what will be done to your family. Shir looks down at him and considers the membranes that men grow to insulate themselves from the brilliant truth.