“Your Majesty,” she says, sardonically, and bows deep and wide-armed. “I came as soon as I heard.”

“Heard what?” Baru says, in a voice made of all her voices, the declaration and the plea, the whisper and the scream.

“That you’d been made Empress, of course,” Tain Hu says, and her hobnailed boots ring on marble as she strides up to the Throne. “I do love to rescue young women. They are often effusively grateful. I saved Oathsfire’s wife from an ambush once, and when I would not take her money, she looked at me, like this, petulant and hooded, and she said, well, how shall I reward you?”

“How?”

“I told Oathsfire that she’d been lost in the woods a while after the rescue.”

“But what really happened?”

“I put her up in a cabin, shot a grizzly, and prepared it properly. We ate bear steaks and amused ourselves on the new rug.”

“You rake,” Baru complains, and then she feels motion in the ropes that bind her.

Hemp creaks. Slowly, in painful convulsive jerks, the rigging of the Throne forces Baru’s right arm to raise. A knife is necessary, the Empire decides, so a knife appears. Ah. No. It is a lobotomy pick.

“Insurrection,” Baru groans, trying not to speak, but the ropes are pulling her tongue and peeling back her lips, “can be understood as a disorder of the mind, a form of uncleanliness. The purpose of Incrastic thought is very simply to align individual behavior with the greater good of mankind. Everything we do works to this end. A hygienic person is easily aligned, because their purposes—that is, the map which connects their desires to their behaviors, to their rewards—is cleanly laid out.

“A filthy person, however, has a snarled and confusing map. They cannot directly link their desires to their behaviors, or their behaviors to their rewards. They may desire happy friends, but behave in ways that make their friends miserable, and yet their friends, trying to be kind, reward them with advice and company. They may desire sexual congress, and seek it out indiscriminately, doing so in a way that does not better the community with healthy, well-tended children.

“Because human virtue is the only god, the only sin is to detract from this virtue. Disorder and poor hygiene are therefore mortal sins. But worst of all the uncleanly are those who promote disorder, for they not only possess perverse behavioral maps, they disturb and rearrange the maps of others. The insurrectionist not only behaves sinfully, but creates sinful states. Knowing that a sinful state is complex and disordered, we understand that the treatment for insurrection is to enforce simplicity.”

Baru’s arm is made to brandish the lobotomy pick.

“Simplicity begins in the mind.”