BARU and Apparitor stared at the two older men like they’d just taken off their faces.

“Their versions of us?” Apparitor repeated.

Baru could’ve leapt up screaming. The realization struck like a thunderbolt. “You wanted me to draw them out! That was part of why you wanted the civil war in Aurdwynn, wasn’t it? Not just to draw out the Stakhieczi. You were after these Oriati cryptarchs, too.”

Hesychast stared into reflected infinities in his wine. “Whoever they are, they must be immortal. How could a civilization last so long without a steady hand at the helm?”

“I must credit Hesychast here with the beginning of the hunt.” Farrier chimed his knife against his wine flute. “Send in our colleague, please!”

Baru shot him a curious glance. He smiled. “You see, for several decades now Hesychast has had an agent seeking out this Oriati master-caste in the most unlikely place. She ought to be along shortly, with her companion.…”

“Oh no,” Apparitor breathed.

He looked at Baru with utter dread.

First came the rattle of chains. Then a snarl filtered through pores of steel.

Iraji chimed the door and cried, “Her Excellence Durance, advisor to Its Imperial Majesty, the Emperor! And her companion, whose name has been stricken!”

A man in bloodied linens and a thick leather straightjacket stumbled into the room. Wild-eyed. Shaved to the raw scalp. His face obscured by a steel muzzle that clawed all the way round his head.

He saw Baru, and shrieked, and whether he lunged at her or only fell she couldn’t tell: he went down to his knees, hard, on the stone.

She knew him. She had sat with him in Vultjag’s larder, stealing all the cheese.

Behind him came his sister.

Her brown face and burning eyes seemed adrift in the angular cantilevered mass of a quarantine gown. Veils of cotton and silk. Oiled bolts ready to receive a filtered plague mask, to clamp it tight against the seals. A wearable prison.

“Your Excellences,” said the Jurispotence Xate Yawa, exalted to the Imperial Throne. “I’ve come to make my report on the Cancrioth.”

9. … and Durance

9

… AND DURANCE

OH, for pity’s fucking sake. I’d let Baru out of my sight for half a year and she’d gone and broken herself.

When your job requires you to hand down verdicts of guilty, guilty, and most profoundly guilty you soon learn to spot the ways people break. Some will rush your pulpit and fail to kill you; some will bolt for the windows and end up in the suicide nets. And some will just sit there in the defendant’s theater, thinking.

Baru was one of those.