Iscend grimaced and touched her brow. Baru interpreted that as some sort of Clarified distress: she wouldn’t signal it unless she wanted Baru to know she was in distress. She must be having trouble sorting through competing imperatives.

“It’s all right,” Baru croaked. “It’s all right to tell me. I serve the Throne. If you can help me, you help the whole Imperial Republic.”

“Fiend,” Iscend said, fondly, “you’re trying to turn me away from my master.”

“I’m on a mission for your master, remember? Hesychast needs me to find the Cancrioth. All else being equal, it’s better if I have more information, not less. What’s wrong with me?”

Iscend lowered her head to murmur, “When we tested you in the Elided Keep, we detected two separate responses to the Farrier Process.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We divided your perceptions down your centerline.” Baru remembered this. They’d put a helmet on her with a huge bladed nose, separating her vision into two hemispheres, and run Hesychast’s word-response test on each side. “We checked your disambiguation responses in each hemisphere. The Farrier Process works by creating subconscious associations which alter behavior; and indeed those associations are strongly present in you. But only if the test stimuli are presented on your left side. The right shows very different patterns of association. I believe your seizure was caused by some sort of exchange between the two minds.”

“Two minds? What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Iscend said, “that we’ve seen this condition before. In the Metademe we have induced it by cutting central areas of the brain with a length of wire. The two isolated halves of the mind diverge in opinions and habits.”

“Like those stories about the Tahari seditionist? Two personalities in one body? With separate handwriting, and separate friends, and even different names?”

“No.” Iscend had extraordinarily precise body language. She pinned that thought on a finger and pushed it aside. “That’s a peasant myth.”

“Why am I different?”

“You are exactly like everyone else. All of us contain these two selves, left and right. But they are usually kept in synchrony, like two diaries written by one woman.” She drew a perfect line down Baru’s nose. “Your injury has allowed them to diverge.”

Her blind half—wasn’t blind at all? Was there another Baru, across a mental moat, just outside her awareness?

“Which one am I?” Baru whispered.

“I don’t know,” Iscend said, in fascination. “To which one am I speaking?”

22. Baru in the Bilge

22

BARU IN THE BILGE

I HAD made Dziransi the instrument that would deliver Baru to her humiliation and much-deserved death. If I hadn’t fucked it all up aristocratically, and I was confident I hadn’t, then the dream-hammer had driven into his brain the conviction that Heingyl Ri must marry his master the Necessary King, and that Baru would be the dowry which bought the marriage.