“She threw a dart at me first, mam.”

“A dart?”

“Yes, mam,” Gerewho said, holding up a discarded meat skewer, “bounced it off my shoulder.”

Shao Lune wanted them to rescue her. Which suggested Baru had her here as a prisoner, right? Maybe even a hostage? A way to control Ormsment? If Aminata could get Shao Lune out, she could be the key to the whole situation. But that would mean exposing herself to Baru.

Beware Baru Cormorant, Calcanish had said.

She will not betray you, Aminata’s heart said.

Duty is what you do even when you have no reason to do it, the navy said.

Aminata put a hand on her flare pistol.

26. The Black Emmenia

26

THE BLACK EMMENIA

THERE had been a moment in the battle at Sieroch when Baru understood everything.

An arrow pierced a shield and Baru saw the forces that conspired to kill the man beneath. Not merely the velocity of the arrow and the thickness of the shield; not merely the man’s discipline, to keep his shield fixed in place as his brother died beside him; but, also, the lines of causality that crushed down upon this instant and forced it into the pierced-eyeball shape of itself.

She saw the mines that yielded the ore that went to the steel furnaces and then to the smith and the fletcher to make the arrowhead. She saw the old-growth trees cut down for shepherding pasture so that the people could sell wool in the new markets, the old trees replaced by softer younger wood, that softer wood made into the shield.

She saw the ancient collision of Stakhieczi desperate for farmland and Maia desperate for grazing land and the warrior traditions produced by those wars and sustained in the villages by centuries of raiding, traditions which taught the man how to hold his shield in the phalanx, and how to brace against arrows, and how to keep his position and his stance as his brother retched in the mud with an arrow up his armpit.

She saw a man’s life calculated by the thrashing manypartite engine whose eternal components were enigmatic and half-glimpsed like the limbs of behemoth kraken surfacing in fog and whose outputs were nothing other than changes in the design of the machine itself: changes that were people, for the machine was of man and yet no man within it could discern its entire shape.

She saw everything. Master these forces and she would be the master of all creation.

Now, as she crossed the courtyard to greet the traitor-admiral, flanked by viper-faced Shao Lune and golden glorious Tau-indi Bosoka and the imperturbable enact-colonel, Baru again felt the inevitability of the forces that converged here.