This reason first. No empire needs a camarilla of secret conspirators. Parliament, the Ministries, the Admiralty, and the Judiciary—these organs are enough to keep the blood pumping.

We are not a government. We are not the eyes, or the ears, or the mind of the Republic. We are parasites. And if we ever cease to benefit that host, the Republic will expunge us. Understand this, my inheritor! If Aurdwynn’s first habit is rebellion, then Falcrest’s first love is revolution. Falcrest, oh Falcrest, she will lobotomize her rulers and rise up crying out from the Suettaring hilltops:

We demand a better form of tyranny!

It will be up to you to devise that better form.

For the more we feed our host Republic, the hungrier it seems to grow.

In our grand successes over the past century we have invented a monster called a middle class. Our predecessors pillaged the Ashen Sea, and now the people are accustomed to receiving that pillage. And they are accustomed to their innocence. If they learn what we do on distant shores to secure their safety and prosperity, I am certain they would hang us all. Not for the crime of what we did, mind! But for the crime of allowing them to know.

Once I told a man in Commsweal Square that in our foreign provinces we still force women into reparatory marriages or sterility. He laughed! Not us, he told me, not us: those things happen elsewhere, they happened once, but not in our Republic today.

We cryptarchs have one godlike power. We have maps. We know how to change the idea of safer childbirth in a distant province into the fact of a hundred thousand red-cheeked survivors. Can you explain to me how your desire to walk across the room becomes the motion of your limbs? No, you cannot.

My power over the empire is clearer and more true than my power over my own body.

I believe that the fate of the entire human species balances on this brief century. We live in a narrow and closing doorway, and the forces of discord and disaster close in on us. Again and again the great empires of the past have been struck down.

We must step forward, lest we be caught on the threshold and dragged back to ruin. You, too, will be held to account for your contribution to the great and final work, which is our quest for a theory of perfect rule: a means by which the Imperial Republic of Falcrest may be rendered causally closed, so that the sprout of every seed and the turn of every cyclone occurs in accordance with our predictions, and therefore in accordance with our decrees. Thus we may at last achieve the state of ruling without acting, a self-governing world.

Welcome to the project.

Kindest regards,

The late Honesty Kabrir

Elisiant

“Is he real?” she asked Iraji.