Together they bound his hand up. Svir braided his hair, thinking quickly, quickly. “Move Helbride to the escape harbor. The navy can’t know you’re here.” Branne had come up through the Storm Corps, like the rest of Helbride’s crew, never herself a navy sailor. “I’ve got to make sure Baru gets out safely.”

“My lord, the navy knows your face. You can’t risk being caught.”

“If she doesn’t make it,” Svir said, “Itinerant will punish me, understand? He made it very clear that I was to protect his protégé. And if I fail—”

Lindon’s family would be punished first. Then Lindon himself.

And he was not Baru Cormorant, content to let his beloved die.

*   *   *

BARU read the Handbook of Various Beasts.

Gyraffe

A cultural subspecies of the giraffe, a long-necked southern mammal native to the Oriati Mbo nation of Mzilimake. According to the Farrier expedition circa After Revolution 112, the gyraffe is a platinum example of the transformation of the body by repeated behavior. This transformation echoes the origin of the human races, which diverged from the Template Race as their behaviors altered their flesh.

The gyraffe often befriends gyrfalcons, which perch upon its high head. The falcons kill the birds that eat the gyraffe’s favorite berries. Farrier & Torrinde (AR 113) suggest that the gyraffe’s affiliation for falcons developed through a Triestic coupling between its dislike for berry-eating birds and its observation that falcons kill those birds. This offers an advanced example of Torrindic heredity, in which behaviors already acquired in the hereditary particles can be linked to each other through repeated thought.

See “noocana,” the proposed substance through which memories are inherited.

“Your Excellence?”

Iraji’s call came out of her blindness, but Baru imagined him slipping sideways through her door, his thong sandals silent on the hardwood, noble brow creased with curiosity. She was unfortunately glad to see him.

“Hesychast’s ship has been sighted, my lady Excellence,” he said. “He will be here within the hour.”

“To test me.”

“I expect so, my lady.”

Baru set down the book and picked up the machine on her desk. An incryptor, Apparitor had called it, a steel apple full of gears and pins. Unique in all the world—just one built for each cryptarch. Slide a paper into the incryptor’s mouth, configure the dials, touch the trigger, and the incryptor would stamp the Imperial pole-star mark, extraordinary privilege, do as I command. Tiny numbers ringing the seal changed with each use, but like children from the same parents they could always be traced, by cryptographic principle, back to an individual incryptor.

She held the power to command the Empire here in her fist.

“I need you to fight me,” she told Iraji.

“I—your Excellence?”

“I need to be hurt.”