But my ambitions exceed mere agency. In pursuit of those ambitions I am still prepared to offer you what you most desire. Access to Aurdwynn’s grain, to feed your people, and commerce with her valleys, to enrich your artisans. And security from the Imperial Republic of Falcrest, which desires absolute suzerainty over the world.
I will soon prepare a special trade area in the Duchy of Vultjag, where you may dispatch your traders to barter.
In exchange I ask that you help me destroy the Masquerade. My aims are as simple as yours. As proof of my good faith I offer you the return of your lost brother, Svirakir.
Make your armies and fleets ready, King of Mansions. When the time is right, I will open the way to Falcrest.
I remain,
Your only hope,
Baru Fisher, the Fairer Hand, Queen of Aurdwynn
(by acclamation)
THE ledger of secrets was missing.
Cartone said he’d attached a transcript of the dukes and duchesses’ killing secrets and it was missing.
Baru had promised Hu she’d remember the ledger. It was the last promise she’d ever made. Oh, no, no, had she accidentally used it as scrap paper? Had it been stolen? She’d put it off so long, what a damn fool, what a stupid sentiment had paralyzed her: melancholia for the early days of a conspiracy, when everything was uncertainty, and nothing the reckoning of griefs. . . .
Someone was here.
Baru sat bolt upright, searching, searching, but there was nobody—
Her right side. She was blind on her right—
And a rough forearm wrapped under her chin. And Baru had lost.
The arm bore down and cut off all her cries. Baru seized her attacker by the wrist and tried to roll the hand off, earning her one gasp of breath—she went for the dive knife on her ankle, but she’d taken it off to sleep—
Poor Iraji would probably have to die for killing her. Discarded as a patsy. Oh, he went rogue. In her death she would thus force Apparitor to reenact her murder of Tain Hu on his own concubine.
Her attacker slammed her face-first into the decking. Rolled her over to clamp both hands on her throat.
It wasn’t Iraji. It was a woman, her pupils huge with mason leaf, to see in the dark and to brace the nerves. She was Apparitor’s dear cook, Munette.
“You’re bad luck,” she grunted, “my lord’s been unhappy ever since you came aboard. Can’t leave my lord unhappy. Got to be done.”
She drew a short fish knife and tilted Baru’s head back.
Iraji came silently out of the dark and with absolute grace he gripped her head and snapped her neck.
Of course her neck didn’t really snap, you couldn’t break a person’s spine that way with just the might of your arms. But she cried out in pain, and Iraji kicked her away from Baru, raised up a foot-long iron bar, broke her arm with one stroke.
The knife fell from Munette’s hand.
Then Apparitor was there, his lantern raised, the crew roused and shouting behind him. He looked down at Munette cradling her arm on the boards, and he went the color of ash.
“Not you,” he said. “Not you. Oh, Munette, couldn’t you have let it be?”
“I’m sorry, my lord.” She cradled her broken arm, trying to hide her agony by pushing her face into the deck. “Only I didn’t like how worried you seemed with her aboard, that’s all. Oh. Oh, that’s my cutting hand you broke.”
Apparitor covered his face. “Iraji,” he said, shakily, “please put her in the stocks. I’ll—I’ll decide whether to hang her in the morning.”
Munette nodded, humming to herself, just as if Apparitor had asked her to prepare a special dish. “All right. All right.”
Baru couldn’t blame Munette. “Apparitor. Wait. She doesn’t have to die. . . .”
“Oh?” he said, dangerously. “Doesn’t she?”
What could she say? I deserved to have my throat cut? Let her live, I should be the one who dies? She could not, for she had decided to carry two nations on her back.
“What should I do?” Apparitor snarled. “What should I do? Show her mercy? I am bound to you, Agonist! If you die, they hurt Lindon!”
She betrayed Hu in that moment. She betrayed her field-general by caring, just a flicker, for the man before her.
But the betrayal remained secret from him.
“When we reach the Llosydanes,” he hissed, “I’m going to bring you before the prisoners we took from your inner circle. I’m going to show you to Tain Hu’s house. And I’m going to watch you explain what you did to her.”
IN the morning, Apparitor ordered Munette tied to the mast and lashed across her naked back. He said it was necessary to show that she suffer for her assault. Baru thought he was trying to spare himself the pain of hanging her by torturing her instead.
As the lash cracked and Munette howled, Baru slipped down into the ship’s bilge.
Staff Captain Shao Lune had been chained here to soak. She crouched in the ankle-deep filth. In her hands she cupped the last sputtering stub of a candle, the hot wax smearing her palms, the fire so low it must burn her. But she held it to her face and inhaled the smell.
Baru picked her way across crossbeams above the bilgewater. “What did Durance and Apparitor ask you?”
Shao Lune looked up from her ruined candle. Wax dripped between her naked fingers. “The fishmonger of Welthony,” she purred. “Come to drown another sailor?”
“I just want a little honest company. At least I know you want to kill me.”
“Nonsense.” She was an exquisitely severe person, as tightly coiled and finely composed as a braid of vipers. “We took our best shot at you. We failed.”
“And you abandoned your mutiny.”
“Of course I did. I needed an Imperial pardon.”
“Do you really think they’ll give you that pardon?”
She pinched out the candle-flame. Shadow rose up to veil her huge eyes, her fine pointed chin. Teeth glinted in her sneer. “I think,” she said, “that there’s nothing better than an Imperial pardon on your service jacket. You did something unspeakable. And the Throne found you so valuable that they forgave your crime. You know a little about that, don’t you, Baru?”
A weird thrill warmed Baru’s stomach. She was bargaining with snakes again, taking council with her enemy, and that was far better than the company of those she might accidentally come to love.
“Tell me what you told Xate Yawa.” Who Baru now suspected of stealing the ledger of rebel secrets, which meant she might be searching Baru’s past for useful crimes. “Has she asked you about me?”
“Gava girl, if you want something from me, then I know I shouldn’t give it freely.”
Gava. Navy slang for gift—from that ugly old story of an unexplored island, friendly natives, naked happy people who offered you their sons and daughters.
Baru savored warm comfortable rage. It made all the hard parts easier, and more delightful.
She crouched a few paces from Shao Lune, balanced on her toes on planks above the bilgewater. “I can better their deal.”
“Of course you can. Of course you’re not just here to work me from another angle.”
“You came over here to save yourself. Fine, I believe that. But you want your career back, don’t you? You want your navy protected.”
“How gauche. She thinks she knows me.”
“I know you wouldn’t stand for a civilian life. Planning men’s schedules and processing men’s accounts and doing all the Republic’s thinking while the men go out and act. I want to help the navy. So do you.”
“You wanted to help Ormsment ‘protect’ her tax ships, too. I was there when you had dinner on her flagship.”
“No, you weren’t. I would’ve noticed you.”
“Oh,” Shao Lune said, archly, “why’s that?”
“I remember arrogant women,” Baru purred, low in her throat, just like Tain Hu. “I like to humble them.”
“You’re the one crawling up to me in filth.”
Out of gleeful irritation Baru splashed a handful of bilgewater on the Staff Captain’s face. She spat and thrashed. “Listen,” Baru hissed, “listen, there’s worse than pirates and Parliaments to fear. If you want to save your navy and your matrons, you’d better tell me what you know. I can help you. No one else can.”
“You sound like a whore. A kneeling Souswardi whore.” Shao Lune smirked at her. “Oh, oh, listen, I can do whatever you need.”
Baru seized Lune’s chain and she whipped the iron links once, twice, up under Lune’s left armpit and around the right side of her throat. She yanked the chain tight. Shao Lune fell down with her head snapped down against her shoulder and her eyes dimmed by blood-lack.
How queasily satisfying to see the proud Staff Captain forced to kneel. Baru smiled at her. “Did Ormsment act alone?”
“I know nothing. I take and execute my orders.”
“Are there other admirals who would mutiny, given the chance?”
“I know nothing.”
“If I threatened to reveal Ormsment’s mutiny to Parliament, would the other admirals sit down and bargain with me?”
Shao smiled. It was the vigorous, appetitive expression of a woman surprised by an unexpected delight. “Ah,” Baru said, smiling, too. “I thought so.”
She left the Staff Captain panting in the muck with her chain still coiled around her. Light-headed and dizzy, she stumbled back to the main stairs.
Gods of stone and fire. How she hated to love this work.
A golden specter waited in the lamplight by the stairs. A little to Baru’s right, so she did not at first notice the woman: her thoughts turned to hard sweat-slick flesh and long easy power, and then with a gasp she was face-to-face with the reality. Iscend Comprine in an athletic strophium and a diver’s skirtwrap, coming back above-decks from her exercises, which she conducted in the ship’s hold so the slam of the weights wouldn’t trouble sleeping sailors.
The woman’s bound chest swelled and settled. She smiled at Baru, her incredible alpine-fox cheekbones conjuring thoughts of abstract geometry and Hu’s lowered head. Baru froze: Iscend could provoke her with small signals, Iscend could read her reactions from her face, Iscend saw too much—
“I heard you,” Iscend said.
Baru swallowed. “What did you hear?”
“You offered to help Shao Lune conspire against Parliament.”
“It’s not to you to question my methods.”
“Of course not.” Iscend smiled like she couldn’t help it, and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You are a capable agent of the Republic, aren’t you? Always convincing the disloyal that you share their disloyalties. I’m glad you use your gifts.”
12
THE LLOSYDANES
By the time they sailed into the Llosydane Islands they were all dying of thirst.
It was slow, and certain, and it was the most important thirst in the world. The need for water set the tempo of trade and war on the Ashen Sea, the fear of becalming, the terror of a storm that would unmast your ship and leave you to mummify in the sun.
The spring light scoured the clipper and all aboard gained a terrible awareness of their bodies as sweaty leaky oily sacs of mucus and fat. The slim water ration left their tongues slug-swollen. A topsail girl afflicted with a fever fell from the topgallants to to her death. And as they read out her service jacket at her funeral, the watermaster marked her charts with a pin trailing a white canvas tassel.
Baru had asked Aminata about that once. Why does the navy use white for dehydration? White was the color of purity, and hygiene, and clean snow, and the sails of merchanters. Why was it also the color of death?
And Aminata had told her it was an ancient Oriati tradition. White, the color of loneliness. The opposite of living skin. Dry sand. Ash. White empty death.
Baru was in Apparitor’s cubby when the call came, trying to help him make ink, because she used so much of it. She’d failed to bring up the missing ledger of secrets: she worried that she was putting off the hunt out of fear of the secrets themselves.
“Birds! Birds on the southern horizon!” And then, a little while later, “Land! Land on the telescope!”
“Thank Wydd,” Baru moaned.
“Why,” Apparitor growled, “are you staring at my hand?”
“Death by thirst,” Baru admitted. “Your color. It reminds me of the water-tassel.”
“Oh, go on, then,” he said, with an old weariness in his voice. “First it’s the skin. Now you can mention an albino you once knew. Then you ask to touch my hair. Count my freckles! Be thorough.”
“I’ve already counted them,” Baru said, “I do it while I’m ignoring the things you say.”
“Cunt,” he muttered.
“Prick,” she countered. But she helped him crush the char for the ink. They worked a while in tense silence, crowded shoulder to shoulder.
“In Treatymont,” she said, brusquely but with sincerity, although she had not at all planned to say this, “when people talked to me about Taranoke, they would ask me how many fathers I had, and if I went naked without shame. So I know how it can be.”
He blinked at her.
THE last few hours were the worst. They had to cross south of the Llosydanes, to hide their sails from pursuers, then double back and come in to moor. It was hard sailing. Apparitor let Captain Branne and her sailing master helm the ship. He went up into the gallants and helped rig.
Baru sat in her hammock and tried to read Firestorm: Why Falcrest and Oriati Mbo Cannot Coexist, with an Expanded Epilogue on the Inevitability of a Second Armada War. The letters from Aminata, cousin Lao, and her parents waited in their guilty envelopes, still ignored.
Iraji came silently into the armory and sat down in his hammock. Baru glared at him. He pretended not to notice. He’d shed all his diffidence and submission, and that irritated Baru; for too long she’d been used to thinking of him as Apparitor’s weapon, not a person. When you fight a man you fight him. You do not expect the blade in his hand to come alive, slither about, and start cracking jokes.
Iraji kicked back in the hammock, sighed, and then (very ostentatiously) produced a great leatherbound volume with a creaking spine entitled Firestorm: Why Falcrest and Oriati Mbo Cannot etc. etc., New Definitive Edition.
Baru boggled for a minute, and then rolled onto her side. “That book,” she said, “that’s a newer edition, isn’t it?”
Iraji licked his finger, opened to the middle of the book, and began humming as he read. “I’ll be done in a little,” he said, which was either a lie or a boast. “My lady.”
She’d opened a conversation now, and couldn’t avoid saying what she had to say. “Thank you for protecting me,” she said, roughly. “I’m in your debt.”
“I don’t want to hold any of your debt, your Excellence,” Iraji said, “that has turned out very poorly for very many.”
That hurt a little. Hurt was good, though.
“I have an idea,” Iraji said, brightly. His eyes shone over the top of his book. “It’s just come to me now!”
“Do you?”
He beat his knuckles on his book. “I’ve thought of a way to hold back the mutineers.”
“Do share.”
“You should take foreign diplomats aboard. Invite them to use Helbride as a shuttle, as we’re a very fast ship.”
“You think Ormsment will respect diplomatic privilege?”
“I do.” He touched the title of the book. Firestorm. “It’s one thing for her to get herself killed with a mutiny. But if she breaks diplomatic seal, the Oriati will hit back, and then her whole navy suffers. . . .”
Baru chewed on her tongue. “You want us to pirate an Oriati diplomatic ship.”
“Oh no, we won’t have to use force, not at all! My people—” Baru could have shuddered at the way Iraji said it, for she knew that tone, my people. Tinged with mockery, lest it be thought he loved his home too much. “My people are kind, and they’d be eager to aid
us.”
“What do you mean ‘your people’? You mean the entire Oriati Mbo with its four great federations and hundred-odd nations, they’re all kind people?”
“Well put, my lady”—he bowed his head—“but one thing unites them all. Mbo means a thing that is whole because it is connected. To be Oriati, in the classical sense, is to live a life bound by trim, the art of connectedness. Trim will oblige them to help you.”
Vaguely Baru remembered trim as a sort of spiritual ethics. Aminata had been very skeptical of it, and so Baru had been, too. “Fine. What makes you think we could even find an Oriati diplomatic ship? We’re in northern waters, as far as you can get from their home. . . .”
“We are at the edge of war, my lady. Diplomats will be sailing to Falcrest, and the trade winds carry them past Aurdwynn.” He hid his head in the book for a moment, and Baru sniffed a hidden truth, the same secret she’d smelled on Apparitor.
“I’ll trouble your lord about the idea,” she said, and settled back to her own reading.
“Perhaps you should go to the bowsprit at sundown,” Iraji suggested, “with a bottle of his special whiskey and two cups. He’d like the company.”
“After he flogged his favorite cook for me? I doubt he’d like mine—”
“He would like the company,” Iraji repeated, almost, but not quite, snapping.
He wanted Baru to cheer Apparitor up.
It hadn’t occurred to her that she had any power to do so.
THE dinner bells called the day shift down. Baru went up to the deck and climbed out onto the bowsprit, where a fan of ropes converged on Helbride’s hummingbird prow. Apparitor sat out there, straddling the steep bowsprit, kicking his legs like a boy on a horse.
“Hello.” Baru chimed a tin cup against the bottle of whiskey she’d stolen. “Drink with me?”
“Mm,” Svir grunted, but he patted the bowsprit by his side.
They sat together on the bowsprit, two wary feet from each other. She said, recklessly, “How did you meet him?”
“Hm?” Apparitor glanced over, one coil of his hair pressed between his lips, like an idle child. “Ah. You mean my man.”
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