“What?”

“Why was Ormsment promoted to Province Admiral Aurdwynn this winter? In the middle of a rebellion, and just in time to mutiny and come after me?”

“The world’s a big deck of cards, Baru.” He paused to drain his whiskey. “Sometimes you just get a bad hand. It’s not all conspiracy.”

“What if it is?” Imagine, for a moment, that everything is a conspiracy. Imagine that all really does proceed as the Throne desires it. “What if someone needed this mutiny to happen? And they sent Ahanna Croftare on to be Province Admiral Falcrest, where she’s in place to threaten your Lindon.…”

Pieces on the Great Game board, moving themselves … and across the board there were two figures: a great porcelain mask, smiling, and a face with horns for its eyes.…

“What if it’s all been arranged for us?” she said. “This whole board? The navy ready to mutiny, the Oriati ready for war, and we’re like the match tossed into the oil?”

“Then,” Apparitor said, “we’re pawns too, you and I.”

“You, maybe. Not me.”

He laughed at her. “You know the best class of pawn? I don’t even have to say it, do I? But you’re one of them.”

The Llosydanes towered ahead. Down from the heights came the wail of a long horn blown in greeting.

*   *   *

“I HATE this place,” Apparitor grumbled. “I always feel the whole thing’s going to crack and come toppling down.”

Once, probably, there had been a single Llosydane Island, as tall and proud as Taranoke. But the ages had done their work. The surf had battered the rock, the rock had begun to crack, the sea had rushed into the cracks, and in whittling time the island had been divided into fifteen fat rocky pylons that stood above the crashing rivers of surf and foam. Waves struck the cliffs and broke skyward in rainbow-frothed plumes, burst out through vents and blowholes, drifted downwind as lovely vapor. In some places the pylons were visibly thinner at the base.

“I like heights,” Baru told Apparitor, smugly.

“The Llosydane Islands,” Yawa recited, apparently from memory. “A federated cultural preserve sustained entirely by the sale of dates to foreign concerns, which pays for the import of food and finished goods.”

“Wait a minute,” Baru said, as, behind them, Captain Branne argued fiercely with the Sydani pilot over docking fees. “What’s a cultural preserve?”

“They’re allowed to maintain their own ways.”

Baru could have spit in outrage. An island under the Imperial Republic’s control, and they’d just been allowed to keep their own culture? That wasn’t fair! They should’ve been acculturated and digested like Taranoke—oh, Baru, what are you thinking?

“There’s nothing here to use. No timber, no workforce, no good harbor. So Falcrest decided to preserve them for study.” Yawa took Baru’s hand and pointed. “Do you see those mills in the tide? The ones that turn those wheels of flags? Those are worship engines. The Sydani worship the ykari virtues, just as in Aurdwynn.”