Iraji held her. The curtains behind him parted—Iscend and Xate Yawa rushed in—Baru stared at them in awe, dumbstruck by the symmetrical wholeness of them, the leftness and the rightness, joined together.

“You idiot,” Yawa said, “you fool, you gave her too much.”

A seizure. She was having a seizure. She’d been poisoned. Yawa had gone to Apparitor and made a deal, let’s make her have a seizure, and then we can threaten her with medical internment. Seizures were cause for lobotomy, weren’t they?

Oh, Hu. What’s gone so wrong with me?

“Hello,” the Empire said.

*   *   *

“HELLO,” the room says. Everyone else is gone and Apparitor’s cabin is staring at her. Why has she never noticed that the room is made of eyes? Eyes in the whorled woodgrain, eyes in the flare of the lamplight, eyes with thick shadowy lashes peering between the books. Eyes in the charts, and their pupils are islands, their irises are currents and storm-tracks. Everything made of eyes.

“Hello yourself,” Baru breathes, and she realizes that at last she is speaking directly with the Empire Itself. The fabric of causality which binds all choices back to the Imperial Will: the swarming summation of all those whose lives are bound up in Falcrest, whether in prosperity, or misery, or defiance.

When the Empire’s work is done, resistance will be indistinguishable from service. There will be a map of cause and effect, and all causes will lead to one effect. Falcrest’s triumph.

Baru looks down and sees herself gowned in taut canvas. Ropes and eyelets draw the canvas shroud tight against her body—no, look at those bloodstains spreading against the fabric. The canvas isn’t drawn tight over her skin. The canvas has actually replaced her skin. It feels like sail. She is full of wind.

Hundreds of ropes bind her to the stone and steel of the Imperial Throne.

She is the Emperor Itself.

She can feel the lobotomy pick in her brain. She can feel the ghost of its presence. It has emptied her of will, so that she might become a perfect vessel for the design of the Empire.

“This,” the Empire tells her, “is your destiny. Allow me to be more precise. This is the destiny you chose when you accepted Cairdine Farrier’s patronage.”

She sits on the Throne: she posesses ultimate power.

She is lobotomized and bound: she has no power at all. She is an emblem and an instrument of hidden forces.

Then Tain Hu cuts her way out of the Empire’s eyeball.

Her sword tip pierces the pupil of a woodgrain whorl. Ink jets: the eye screams in the only way an eye can scream, by widening, and Hu slices her way free from within. She wears her leather tabard with its mailed shoulders, her riding jodhpurs, and her long black hair bound up tight above her hawkish nose.