I’d realized the truth in that fetid cave beneath Moem, as Tain Shir hacked off Baru’s fingers. My mad niece was right. There was nothing on this ashen earth that Baru would ever value above her own power. Not her parents, nor her lovers, nor her home, nor her very selfhood. Give Baru a choice between honest death and terrible enduring life and she would choose to endure: even as some hideous Cancrioth implant, a knot of blackened cracked flesh festering in the skull of another woman.

That was the difference between us: why she had to be removed, and I had to go on. There were things I knew I wouldn’t sacrifice but Baru had no limit. She’d shown me that herself. She could kill Tain Hu and I couldn’t abandon my brother. She spent people to achieve her power, and then, in a disgusting aristocratic loop of self-justification, she claimed those people who’d died for her as reason to go on spending: how can I stop, lest I betray those who gave everything for me?

She’d killed Tain Hu to grant herself a universal license. A sacrifice that would justify any future atrocity. That was why she always appealed to Hu’s faith in her, and wielded that faith as a bludgeon against me. Dead Hu could never repudiate or abandon her.

Dead Hu was now Baru’s line of unlimited ethical credit.

“I won’t leave it to chance,” I decided. “Baru can’t be given any more opportunities to trick her way free. I’ll do the lobotomy as soon as we have her.”

“You’re going to go ashore with us?”

“I will. We’ll let our woman tail Baru when she makes her move.” I was not afraid of Kyprananoke. A strange violent city frightened me less than a ship alone on the sea. “Your agents will bring the necessary apparatus when we seize her. Then I’ll conduct the surgery. Then she disappears. No one else needs to know.”

“Not even Tau?” He clenched up like a fist around a fear much deeper than I had ever seen in him, a fear beyond Parliaments or kidnappings. I had seen its like only in the faces of ilykari who felt they’d lost their way toward the virtue. It was a very nearly eschatological terror, a fear of world’s ending. And his eyes flicked, again, to el-Tsunuqba in the distance. Seeing my bafflement he said, as if this explained everything, “I hate lying to Tau.”

“Then don’t lie. Tell Tau she had to be stopped.”

I had another reason to move against Baru now. If I could only show her to Shir, maybe Shir would, in all her madness, recognize that I had avenged Tain Hu.

Maybe I could bring Shir home to her father.

Perhaps then Olake could forgive her, and me.

“It’s a shame.” Execarne sighed, and settled his cigar again. “She had a fascinatingly disfigured mind.”

*   *   *