“Funny.” Baru looked at her wrist. “I don’t see any chains on mine.” Then she thought of something she’d said to Tain Hu once: the Masquerade rules them, but it has not yet made them want to be ruled, the chains are not yet invisible, and nearly shouted in fright.

“I tell the Jurispotence this and that. What I know about Ormsment. What I expect her to do.” Shao Lune’s uniform hung from an overhead beam. In her cotton workshirt and rough canvas trousers she looked like a gutter mucker, but she lounged on her hard-earned carpentry with the poise of a schoolyard tyrant. Lamplight conjured faint implications through the cloth. She was not, without the uniform, quite as sleek and slim and minimal as she liked to appear. “I could tell her about you, couldn’t I?”

“What would you possibly tell Xate Yawa about me.”

“Still want to bargain with my admirals? Conduct a little military adjustment of Parliament? Yawa would love to learn about that.”

Baru would indeed very much like to arrange a military coup in Falcrest, right about the same moment she coaxed the Stakhi and Oriati to invade Falcrest. One convulsive cataclysm to break the mask off the world’s face.

“You know,” Shao Lune said, and what an eloquent sneer she had, “I think gava women don’t understand the scale of the world. I think you believe Parliament’s just like a few dirty elders huddled in a cave.”

Baru picked up a length of Shao Lune’s chain. The woman flinched. Baru grinned at her: she remembered last time. Baru slipped her hand under her shirt and, very slowly, extracted a wooden bottle of fern shampoo. “Would you like some soap?”

The staff captain’s wide eyes narrowed with contempt. “Please. I have dignity.”

“Where?” Baru peered around. “You’ve hidden it so well.”

“You knock-kneed gava virgin. You think you’re someone?”

Baru seized the captain’s chain and took out her general frustration by yanking Shao Lune back to her beam. A few circuits of the chain had Shao pinned with her arms at her sides. Baru’s maimed right hand complained. Baru flexed it and savored the reminder of pain.

Shao panted with the effort of her resistance. Out of her uniform she seemed somehow spiritually disheveled, her eyes too large and expressive, her mouth too cruel: as if deprived of necessary constraints, bindings that kept her merely human.

Baru whispered in her ear. “Tell me how to stop Ormsment.”

“Blow up her ship.”

“You know we can’t fight.”

“I’m just a simple navy officer. I only understand fire.”