“You decide that as much as I.” He gave his egg a little backspin. “If you hold absolute power, everyone wants to take it from you. So you must entice supporters by granting them a piece of your power. But the more people you entice, the more thinly you are spread, and to spread is to perish.”

“Fine, fine.” She would need to learn to make allies. But never again could she let them as close as Hu. The price was so high. “Did you mean for me to pardon the duchess?”

Apparitor rolled his eyes and took a slug straight from the bottle. “Pardon her?” He gasped: a little bead of vodka sat between the ridges under his nose, quivering. “I thought you’d beg for her life. Thirdly, the Great Game. Every advisor to the Emperor, no matter their particular program of interests, shall maintain a familiarity with the Great Game—”

A game. Baru would love to play a game of intrigue, of calculation, a game that overflowed her mind and doused her heart. “What is it?”

“It is the Throne’s model of the world, honed by decades of intrigue and contest. We play it on a map, with the assistance of very large rulebooks. And when our work is finished, there will be no difference between the rules of the game and the laws of the world.”

He had put down his bottle and produced a bag of tiny figures from his pocket: he was laying them out on the map-rug with the warm egg still cupped in his off hand.

“Hesychast.” He held up a broad-shouldered brown bust. “One of us. The agents of the Throne.”

Baru knew that name. When she’d first met Apparitor she’d asked if he were Hesychast—Cairdine Farrier’s rival, the eugenicist. The one who thought her race was fit only for farming, fishing, and pleasure.

“Hesychast told me you’d beg for her reprieve,” Apparitor said. “He guaranteed it.”

“I suppose he thought my lust would control me.”

Apparitor stared at the figure with hot distaste. “He believes that the isoamorous—people like you and I—must be consumed by incredible passion. Like addicts. Why else would we persist in our obscene fascinations, when the whole world is against us?”

Baru remembered her fathers flirting on the beach, fearless and beautiful. The whole world had not been against them, no matter what the Empire said. And that was the beginning of hope: if the world had not always been as the Empire demanded, then it might not always be as the Empire demanded.

He pitched the egg overhand and it landed in the cup of wine Baru had just poured. She blinked and sputtered. “Is that a glint of conscience I detect?” he said. “A sliver of human compassion?”

“Doubtful,” Baru said, acidly. “I’m only tired. I stayed up too late with the prisoner.”

“Tormenting her with her failure?”