Wasn’t that the point?

To do as they required,

and so deceive them?

“You’re the end of history,” Cairdine Farrier whispered. His eyes glimmered in awe. “You’re the proof I needed, Baru. The foreign-born sinner taught to become a perfect citizen. He said I couldn’t do it. He said the sin was in your flesh and germ. But look at you. You policed yourself. You have the discipline. I taught it to you and you learnt.”

Behind him waves crashed against the harbor bluff, and cataracts of spray burst up into rainbow arches and collapsed.

“Baru, he’s lost, we’ve won.”

She remembered her dream on the morning of betrayal. Farrier-who-was-Itinerant behind the blank mask of the Empire. And he had said to her: when the work is complete, no one and nothing will act without our consent. “By volition” will be a synonym for “by decree.”

“Oh Himu,” she croaked. “That’s what you want of me. I’m to disprove Hesychast’s theories. I’m to ruin him and ruin his work and … and then…”

She looked at the world beneath her feet.

“And then,” Farrier said, softly, “we play the Great Game by my rules. The rules that work. For they made you, and you work perfectly.”

She managed, against the weight of the avalanche, the avalanche that was knowing she was just a single stone in his tumbling design, to ask: “How long until he comes?”

“He’ll be here within the month.” Farrier still stood against the glass, but the gravity had swung to him: he was silhouetted against the ocean and the world, with all the light behind him, and Baru stood in darkness. “First you must survive his examination. He will search you for signs of madness. You didn’t do what he expected, so your body must be broken somehow. Easier for him to believe that than to accept that he’s wrong about the causes of behavior.”

“And then?”

“Then,” he said, “you win control over the expedition. And you ensure the rewards go to us, not him.”

“What expedition?”

A wink. A smile. “Wait and see.”

*   *   *

THEY played the Great Game every day, until Baru dreamt of Oriati demographics swarming like honeybees in a continental hive. Woke to find herself tracing Ashen Sea currents on the silk sheets of her cold, lonely bed. When she was not in training (and it was training) with Farrier she drank rare whiskeys and read secret histories and tried to imagine exactly what would come next.

Expedition? What expedition? Would Farrier send her east, across the Mother of Storms? No. He needed her close.

Then where?