Each and every one of them wore a white ceramic mask.
“Kyprists, of course,” Shao murmured to Baru. “They idolize our image.”
“Do we still fund the Kyprists covertly? No? Then why do they pay us service?”
“How would you hold this place together? Islands full of gava, tunks, jellyfish eaters, three cultures older than the king’s mummy? If they could see each other’s faces they’d set right back to cannibalism.”
“That’s nonsense,” Baru insisted, “they have common economic interests, they could work together to benefit from the trade—”
Shao Lune laughed. “You think like a schoolgirl.”
“Fuck you.”
“Tonight, if you’re interested,” Lune murmured, which made Baru shiver in disgust and desire.
As their whaleboat closed in, the band faltered and fell out of tune. Hurried conferences proceeded between sunken-chested Barber-General Love and his associates, and spyglasses were raised to inspect Baru’s boat. Despite three Oriati aboard, the presence of a Falcresti naval officer, a masked technocrat, and a great pile of baggage seemed to satisfy the Kyprists that this was indeed a delegation from Falcrest, and finally they launched back into “In Praise” with fervor. Baru and the enact-colonel threw ropes to the waiting stevedores and helped Tau-indi up onto the boards. Shao Lune muttered obscene things but went about pretending to be Baru’s steward: the enact-colonel was already unloading Tau’s luggage.
Baru composed herself, shoulders back, chin down, elbows out, hands in, showing her angles. “One step behind me,” she ordered Tau, and together, as the smell of cooked crab got under her tongue, they stepped up onto the pier to greet Barber-General Love’s delegation.
He was a fiftysomething man of unexpectedly pale skin, with a narrow chest, stooped shoulders, and no hair except a bristling gray mustache. “Thank you,” he said, in a firm clear voice, his hands raised and clasped, the gloves orange and silky fine. “Thank you for coming. We are so grateful.”
“Thank you for receiving us promptly, Barber-General.”
“Everything is prepared. My fellow Generals on the Storm Council have been alerted. My surgeon has a full report on the outbreak and my Superintendent of Progress has drawn up a program of raids against the Canaat rebels. As soon as your marines are ashore, we may begin.”
The poor bastard. He thought Helbride had come from Falcrest to help him destroy his enemies. “Barber-General.” Baru coolly offered her hand. “My name is Barbitu Plane, from the Ministry of Purposes. I’m sorry to hear about this Canaat rebellion.”
“They don’t know what they want.” Love shook his head. “They’re like children. Less . . . developed.”
“You understand, of course, that my first priority must be containment of your epidemic.”
“Of course.” His sweat smelled like fear. He had a very firm grip but he kept shifting his hand, searching for a better hold. “If the Canaat steal a ship, they’ll spread the disease all over. They must be crushed.”
“Certainly we must work together.” Baru opened an arm for Tau-indi, who slipped in at her side like they were walking together into a dance. “May I present Prince-Ambassador Tau-indi Bosoka, of Lonjaro Mbo.”
Barber-General Love looked at his aide-de-camp, a spectacularly competent-looking Oriati woman in a net shirt and long skirtwrap. She looked back at him and said something in el-Psubim, the old tongue that came before Kyprananoki. Baru recognized the word for war.
“I’m surprised to see you traveling together.” Love tilted his head between Baru and Tau. “Given what I’ve heard of recent, ah, actions in Aurdwynn.”
Tau took and kissed his hand. “We are on a tour of mutual solidarity.”
“Word from the Llosydanes had it the war was already underway.”
“The Llosydanes are a nervous place.” Tau laughed easily. “Barbitu and I are on a mission of joint charity, to help ease tensions after the recent unpleasantness.”
“Perhaps,” Barber-General Love said, with a flat smile, “if the Prince-Ambassador is interested in easing tensions, they could discuss the Canaat with the Oriati embassy.”
“I would love to,” Tau said, sincerely. “What should I say?”
The aide-de-camp stepped in smoothly, to say what the Barber-General, politically, should not. “The Canaat rebels have Oriati munitions and Oriati money. Strange ships come and go in the west. Are you funding them?”
Tau’s golden throat kinked with tension. They looked quickly at Baru, signaling confusion. “I’ll look into it at once, I promise. I don’t want war here, Governor. No embassy of the Mbo’s should ever want war.”
“The sudden bankruptcy of the rebels would certainly restore my faith in the Mbo’s goodwill.” The Barber-General signaled to his aide-de-camp, who snapped her fingers at a portly majordomo overseeing the baggage.
“Ah—that reminds me.” Baru dropped her voice, as much to hide her own nerves as to protect her confidence. “I’m tracking an exile from Aurdwynn. One Unuxekome Ra. Do you know her?”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s a Maia woman, former aristocrat, exiled during the insurrection in 922—”
“I know that.” Governor Love wore the marks and medals of an Incrastic citizen on a thin collar, all rendered, in capable miniature, with fine paint and scrimshawed pearl. They stared at Baru as if in echo of his dismay. “Of course I know of her. How could I not know the leader of our enemy? The war-leader of the Canaat revolt?”
WHERE am I?” Iraji leapt upright in the bed. “Baru, what’s happened?”
She shushed him with a hand on his hot cheek. “We’re on a houseboat. Moored off Loveport, one of the kypra islands. Tau is here.”
“Helbride—Svir—are they all right?”
“Everyone’s fine.” Baru had tried to lay out an outfit he might like, and draw a warm bath from the solar tank. She was really quite nervous whether he’d like that outfit. “I snuck you off Helbride.”
She watched him uncurl his hands and relax his calves. “Why,” he said, when he was firmly in control of himself. “Why did you take me?”
“I knew Svir wouldn’t let you go.”
“I didn’t ask to go.” He threw off the thin cotton sheets and rose magnificently. Baru had no sexual response to him but his poise and grace were monumentally striking. She’d undressed him to sleep off his faint, in private, out of respect for whatever modesty he had, which was not apparently very much.
“I need your help,” Baru said. That was as specific as she dared be. “About . . . the matter you confessed to me.”
He splashed water from the bath on his face. “You know he’ll come for me.”
“Not once he realizes what we’re doing.”
“What are we doing?”
“Completing our mission,” Baru said, and waited, breathless, for him to faint.
He swayed, sighed, inhaled sharply. “I can’t do what you want.”
They had to discuss it elliptically, lest his conditioning trigger again. Baru sat on the bed and smoothed out the sheets. “It would be enough,” she said, “if you accompanied me while I trailed my coat.”
“What good would it do? I’ll just look like any other Oriati boy.”
“Not if you say the words.”
“The words—” The bathtub rattled and sloshed in his grip. “The words. Yes.”
He slipped into the tub like a gymnast, arms pommelled on the handles, feet pointed. Wordlessly Baru offered him soap and a razor. He went to work. Baru was fascinated to see him shaving his pubic hair down. “Is that safe?”
“Svir likes it.”
“How odd.”
“If I want to go back to Helbride, will you let me?”
“You’ll have to sit in a quarantine boat for a while.”
“But you won’t stop me.”
Baru considered the point of her pen. She had the urge to whirl and snatch Iraji’s razor from his hands, to throw it out the window
into the sea, where it couldn’t hurt him: where he couldn’t hurt himself. She shut her eyes. She wanted very badly to weep for him.
“I wouldn’t stop you,” she said.
“Thank you.”
Baru knew she had weaknesses as a thinker. She was arrogant, self-centered, and blind to what she disdained. But she believed that she really was a savant, in the Incrastic sense: gifted with particular insights, sudden knife-tip revelations, stabbed up from her subconscious. Often enough her deductions struck the truth. Not often enough to be perfectly reliable; not often enough to trust without danger.
But enough, now, to help Iraji tell a little more of his story. “May I ask some questions?”
“I’ll put my feet up,” he said, and did. His face subsided into a little moon in the bath. “It keeps me from fainting, sometimes. You’ll save me if I—but of course you will.”
“Of course I will. So. Ah.” She picked at the seams of the sheet. “You left them as a child?”
“Yes,” the Iraji-moon said. “I was afraid of the . . . I was afraid of them. So I walked into a Masquerade school.”
“You knew they’d follow you. So you sought protection. You went where they couldn’t ever find you.”
“They love me,” Iraji whispered. “They need me.”
“Why?”
“Because I was meant to inherit one of the Lines.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean they would have taken a cut—” He faltered, sank a little below the water, tried again. “A cut from my mother’s immortata, and they would have implanted that cut in me. And it would grow in me. Ayamma. I was consecrated for that purpose. A ut li-en.”
“Her immortata?”
“Her tumor.”
Gods of stone and fire. The “immortata” must indeed be a transmissible cancer, passed from person to person, just like dogface, the cancer which dogs gave each other by biting. This was the inoculation Hesychast sought, the means of splicing behavior from body to body.
But the name, immortata—
Baru fell forward on one hand, thunderstruck. Could it truly grant immortality, as she had imagined? Could you put not just disciplines and behaviors but yourself, your mind and memory, into a tumor grown of brain-flesh? Could you then cut a piece of that tumor free and regrow yourself in another body? Was that how it was done?
Could you actually live forever?
“Will it help Svir if I be your bait?” Iraji whispered.
Baru howled against the armor of her heart. Would it help Svir? Would it? Not if she told Yawa, this man would be the perfect dowry for his brother, send him in my place. Not if she wanted to unite the Stakhieczi and the secret power of the Cancrioth against Falcrest. Svir would be beyond all help then.
Iraji didn’t believe Baru was only a callous calculating husk of a woman with no purpose but her own betterment. Baru just wished he could convince her of it, too.
“I don’t know,” she said, with terribly difficulty. “I—can only promise that it’ll help me.”
“It will help him,” Iraji said. Baru looked up in shock at his tone. He had gathered his knees to his chin: the razor’s wooden handle bobbed in the suds before him, the blade depending downward into the foam. He ought to keep it dry, Baru thought. “It will help Svir survive.”
“What?”
“They know he’s here. And they won’t let him leave unless he has something they cherish.”
The Cancrioth. He meant the Cancrioth. “They’re here? Iraji, you know they’re here?”
“Of course they are,” he said. “Who do you think sank Cheetah?”
“A navy ship. A ship with cannon, for false-flag attacks. . . .”
“That’s not what the Prince Bosoka thinks.”
“Tau’s superstitious. . . .”
“The power of my people isn’t superstition. I think they unleashed the Kettling here. I think they need to test how it behaves . . . and to warn Falcrest they possess it.”
“The Cancrioth released the plague?”
But Iraji had thought of something else. “Baru,” he whispered, “if the Prince Bosoka learns what I am . . .”
She went to kneel by his tub. “They’ll be kind. They’re generous, they understand. They know, already, that you met the Cancrioth.”
“No. No.” He gripped his skull like a boy with meningitis, curled up in wrack. “They don’t know I am Cancrioth. Cancrioth aren’t people. They’re wounds in the mbo, and they have to be stitched up.”
“Yes. The wounds have to be stitched shut. The Prince will try to befriend and care for you, to sew you back into trim. As they tried to befriend me.”
“No. Not me. The old power is in me, the uranium light . . . I’ll be bound up. They’ll stitch me shut. Every hole. Mouth and nose and eyes and ears and ass and prick. Shut.”
“Out of superstition? No, Iraji, no, nothing so cruel. . . .”
“Superstition? Superstition?” A hysterical crack in his voice. “What if I’m full of cancer? What if it leaked out of my body, somehow, into the aquifers, and the children drank it, the children who get sick so easily, and they all woke up one day chanting ayamma, ayamma, a ut li-en, it grows in us! They’ll bury me in concrete, Baru, they’ll bury me alive in wet concrete!”
Baru thought for a moment, but in her heart she already knew the answer. She couldn’t bear to expose Iraji to more danger. Not even to find the Cancrioth. Tain Hu had consented to the danger of rebellion, yes. But Iraji had never wanted anything but his happiness with Svir.
“Can you draw?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, warily. “Svir taught me. Why?”
TAU arranged a reception at the Oriati embassy, where they would begin their search for Unuxekome Ra by consulting the embassy’s intelligence resources.
But the embassy was also very beautiful, Tau said, and worth visiting just to see. It stood on a busy pavereef named Hara-Vijay, a peculiarity of the kypra, shallow coral rings filled with concrete and rubble and built up into artificial lagoons. The embassy stood on pilings in warm blue water.
The name was a peculiarity, too—Hara-Vijay meant “wheat scout” in the Invijay dialect of Urun—and Tau explained, frankly and apologetically, that this name was the relic of a mania, some decades ago, for the performances of a Lonjaro griot who’d romanticized the Invijay horse-tribes in her work. “We would rename it if we could, but the Kyprananoki have taken to the name, there being few Invijay here to complain.”
“Why would they complain?”
“Wheat scouts are sacred. No one likes their sacred names used thoughtlessly.”
Baru rolled her eyes. “Are you sure you aren’t romanticizing the ‘sacred traditions’ of these ‘foreign tribes’?” She didn’t believe the Invijay were all born on horseback to a life of raiding, as Falcrest seemed to think, but nor was she ready to accept the Oriati narrative of the Invijay as peaceful matriarchal irrigationists corrupted by Falcrest’s machinations. Probably the Invijay were complicated and everchanging, with a history full of grandeur and shame. Like everyone else.
“I’ve lived with them. Wheat right is very real. The hara-vijay are responsible for tending the plants of the Butterveldt. They can commandeer raiding parties to kill foreign farmers who disrupt the growth, or call war on tribes who threaten the commons.”
“You lived with the Invijay?” Baru blinked at the little Prince in surprise. “Out on horseback? Why?”
“We sent a mission to try to understand why the Invijay had turned against us.”
“Why?”
“Tain Shir,” Tau said.
“Oh.”
“Quite. Are you ready? You look very nice.”
For the reception Baru had selected a shimmering green silk sherwani and matching gloves, over a blue undercoat and loose blue trousers. Over her polestar mask she had fixed a green-glazed cover from her wardrobe, with a jade inset at the forehead. Her boots were practical, steel-tipped. Tau wore a hip-hugging green khanga a
nd full dermoregalia, nostrils chained to ears, throat scaled in silver over the bright green uranium-stars of Lonjaro Mbo. They were beautiful.
“I think I am,” Baru admitted, having run out of things to fuss over.
“You think you’re very nice?”
“No,” she laughed, “I think I’m ready. But you look beautiful, Tau.”
“Thank you!”
She settled her steel folio on her hip. She was also carrying the picture Iraji had made her, and the words that burned in her mind. But she would not admit those to Tau. “You’ll let me know when you’ve contacted the shadow ambassador?”
Tau grinned at her. “I’ll let you know after we’ve exchanged our signals. So you don’t spy them.”
The Oriati kept a proper ambassador for the business of trust, and a shadow ambassador for the work of espionage. The shadow ambassador would discreetly escort Tau and Baru to a private place, where they would share what they knew of the Kyprists, the Canaat, and the plague. Baru had needled Tau about this distinction—wasn’t Tau both ambassador and spymaster?—and Tau had replied, quite earnestly, that their espionage work was always conducted in the name of peace, and therefore did no harm to their trim.
“Baru,” Tau said, taking her hand. The pleasant citric tang of their soap. “Why did you really bring the boy? Beyond your charming efforts to believe in trim?”
“Eh?” Baru pretended to be distracted by the silver scales on Tau’s long arched throat. “Oh. He’s a hostage. So Apparitor doesn’t trouble me while I work.”
“While we look for this woman who might have seen Abdumasi Abd.”
“Quite.” Not precisely a lie. “We’ll go to Unuxekome Ra and ask her when she last saw him. Where he was going. Where he kept his records, and his contacts. Whatever we can learn.”
“It’s very kind of you to hope for his survival, when everyone else thinks he’s dead.” Tau kissed the back of their hand in gratitude, and placed it, gently, on Baru’s shoulder. “But what you learn here could pin the attack on Oriati Mbo. You could make a case for war.”
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