“East,” he said, catching Baru’s attention with his finger, and pointing east, into her blind right, then west, then east again. A ring glinted on his pointing finger. Quite hypnotic. “East into the unknown. To escape the end of the world.”

“The unknown…” Baru inhaled, long and slow, staring at the map. The unknown was on her blind side: she couldn’t see it, she could only see the known world, the Ashen Sea. Her mind caressed the shapes of money implied by the map. During the Armada War, Falcrest had chewed the fertile northeastern corner off Lonjaro Mbo, and the Tide Column, too, which controlled the trade between the Ashen Sea and the Mothercoast.

Now Oriati Mbo had more people than it could feed, and its ships could no longer move food as freely … they had to go to war, or starve.…

East. West. East. West. Apparitor’s finger ticked back and forth.

“Look,” he said, “look at this.”

Left. Right. Left. Right. Great rings of light began to shine around the reflections on Apparitor’s glossy hair, and the lamps above.

Baru shook her head in confusion and—

She heard a crackle of undead sound, like a fist pushing up through shallow earth. She smelled salt. Tain Hu cried out hoarsely as she wrapped her own death-chains around her and battled the tide. The frigate birds drummed. On Apparitor’s shelves the stacks of rag novels glistened in the lamplight, Antibirth at Convent Clair, Nab Banadab and the Madness of Men, The Death Ship, impossible truths from behind the moon’s silver mask she would wish she’d never known.

“The map,” she choked, having trouble with her tongue. “I can see the whole map…”

Oh fuck oh joy she could see! She could see her whole world again, left and right, Apparitor’s entire face, Iraji’s two arms opened to catch her as she tottered. She had the other half of her world back!

Baru looked right, into the place that had been missing.

And there before her was the Emperor. Bound to the ropes and rigging of the Throne. Lifting one gloved finger to point at her. And with his motion the apparatus of Empire creaked and bent, stirring the people and the ships, sending waves of coin and laundry bleach crashing up on distant shores to toss dead crab and pus-bloody corpses onto beaches of soap and ash—

“WHAT IS MY WILL?” the Emperor asked. “TELL ME MY WILL. ARE YOU THE ONE WHO THINKS MY THOUGHTS?

“WILL YOU NOW BECOME ME?”

He reached out to her and pulled on the cord that bound them, a cord that ran from his face like a slithering umbilical across the world until it fastened itself on Baru’s right eyeball. Like a strangler vine, it sent tendrils around her eye, inside her mind, fastened to eyelets drilled into the back of her skull.

Baru heard herself roar and rattle. Her jaw clenched.