“Your people won’t be one Mbo when they learn what you’ve done. They’ll hate you for consorting with the Cancrioth. You’ll be buried in concrete, Masako!”
“Do you hear that?” Masako cocked his ear. “Listen to that. That sound won’t be buried.”
They passed a storeroom, all the flour and salt pork unbarreled and eaten. Now it was full of Cancrioth men and women, lined up in rows with poles and fishing spears, mimicking the motions of a Termite instructor. They were learning to fight.
“The monastery,” Masako said, “must become a fortress.”
“You’re going to get everyone on this ship killed, Masako,” she hissed. “You can’t fight the navy.”
“What can’t we fight? You know, when the Maia invaded us, centuries ago, the stories say that we—”
“Opened your arms and welcomed them in.” Aminata had a particular eyeroll she reserved for Oriati hagiography. “Gave them a warm hearth and a full belly and a place to lie down.”
Masako looked back at her with bright, brave eyes. “My whole life I’ve been told that story. Oriati Mbo embraced its enemies. Oriati Mbo met the Maia with gifts of silver and incense. But it wasn’t that way for my forefathers. In Segu we fought. While the thirteen kingdoms of Lonjaro married the Maia emissaries, while the two thousand Mzilimaki tribes gave the Maia bribes of gold for slabs of salt, while the Devi and the Naga pirated their fortunes from Maia fleets, it was Segu that fought the war. We held back the warlords’ ships as they made the crossing from the Camou. We sifted the conquerors out of the Maia tide, so the rest of the Mbo could drink sweet broth. And the sieve of that sifting was made from Segu’s men, Aminata. Men who were your ancestors. Women rule in Segu, yes. But make no mistake, a man still works the field, and a man still carries his assegai in the impi. Your forefathers fought. And we will fight again.”
“Fight? Is that what you call giving weapons to helpless islanders?” Aminata sneered.
“I will arm anyone willing to fight Falcrest. I will destroy anyone seduced by Falcrest’s lies. I may pity them, but I will not show mercy. The Mbo is all that matters now.” He reached out and tapped her cheek with the cold maw of his pistol. “Clear your mind. The Brain will know your thoughts. Do not exhaust her with pointless rage.”
They covered her eyes with silk and surrounded her with glaring oil lamps. She could see, through white haze, rows of pews climbing away to the ceiling. Like an amphitheater.
A shadow came. A woman’s silhouette in broken armor, too big for the body that wore it. The same woman who’d promised to snuff out all her senses, one by one, until she was just an endless sense of sickness in a void. The shadow shuffled wearily, but her voice was strong.
She asked Aminata the same question over and over, in different ways. “Can we trust Baru Cormorant?”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”
The shadow closed in on her. “You say that you are Baru’s beloved companion. And now you cannot make even a guess about her honesty?”
“Not unless I talk to her. Learn what she’s about. She confides in me, sometimes.”
A murmur from all around. The shadow of the armored woman put up a hand to silence them. “Kimbune sends us a message by uranium lamp. Baru wants us to disguise Eternal as a merchant vessel. She tells us to hide our cannon, to fly Free Navigation Commons trade flags. She guarantees our safety on the approach to Isla Cauteria. Is this message honest? Can Baru do these things?”
“I don’t fucking know!” Aminata shouted. Why were powerful women always summoning her to interpret Baru’s will? The Baru she knew was fond of books, cunning, and Miss Pristina Struct. The idea of smuggling Eternal into Falcrest’s waters for repairs was difficult, daring, and half mad, which meant it probably really was Baru’s plan. But it was also a grand criminal violation of Aminata’s duty. Isla Cauteria lay within the Caul, the sea boundary around Falcrest’s home province. To allow a plague ship over that boundary would be an abrogation of her vows.
The shadow stooped. Its voice fell to an intimate whisper. “You know this ship is maimed. You know we’re running out of water. I think we might throw ourselves on Cauteria and at least die fighting. But if Baru gives us safe harbor . . . Do you believe she can do that, Aminata? Is there a chance for all of us to live?”
If Aminata said yes, she might give the Cancrioth a chance to sneak into safe harbor and release the Kettling. If she said no, then she might as well advise them to make an open attack on the island.
And there was still that grinding, broken-bone uncertainty way down inside her, splintering every time she put weight on the thought of Baru. Tau said Baru wanted to see Falcrest destroyed. Tau had Aminata thinking that maybe Ormsment and her mutineers were right.
“Let me talk to Tau. I need to talk to Tau, and then I can answer your question. Tau will know what Baru really wants.”
The shadow raised her arms through quivering fatigue.
“The prisoner wants Tau-indi Bosoka’s counsel.” The flat shadow shape of the woman, transforming as it turned. “But Tau-indi has broken. Their strength is exhausted. Do you see the weakness of the Mbo? Do you see what becomes of their mightiest Federal Prince when they are tipped out of the cradle of trim? Falcrest has no trim. The war to come will have no trim. The Oriati people need a new covenant. The time for gentle words and kind neighbors is done; the time for Princes with open doors is done. Who would let a thief and a murderer into his house? Who would welcome a tyrant with bread and water? The Princes would, and leave their people desolate. Let us raise a different lamp for the people to follow, out of the burnt place, into new life!”
There was a great murmur of assent, a storm’s first wind through trees. Aminata realized that the interrogation had only been theater: you did not ask questions before your followers, except to demonstrate that you already had the answers.
“Baru is ours,” the Brain cried. “Baru is bound to me by the power of Incrisiath. She will give us water, and harbor, and safe passage. Then she will use her own flesh to carry our weapon into Falcrest’s heart, to finish what we began on Kyprananoke, to save our people and our souls from the faceless power on its faceless throne. A ut li-en! Am amar!”
Aminata wanted to laugh. It was ridiculous. It was superstitious nonsense, it was nothing to be afraid of! There was no magic, no spell on Baru to bind her!
Aminata wanted to scream. Some part of her knew it was all true.
“A ut li-en!” the crowd roared, that whispered sacrament becoming a war chant. “Am amar! Am amar!”
Aminata felt herself trapped within a chrysalis, drifting in the thick fluid of something becoming something else.
Huge, gentle hands lifted Aminata and led her from the amphitheater. “I have not forgotten your request,” the giant man whispered. “I will take you to the Prince.”
There was no living spirit, no intestinal complication of space, which made Eternal such a maze. It was just simple math—a ship’s internal volume grew faster than its linear dimensions. Eternal was tremendously long, terribly wide, ridiculously tall, and therefore unfathomably vast.
That was what Aminata told herself to keep the fear at bay.
Her captor Innibarish was the biggest man she’d ever met. Not big like an able sailor or a bearish muscleman, but big like he’d been laid out on a different scale, overplanned by some mason-addled draftsman, stuffed past capacity with muscle. Aminata felt like he might burst if someone laid a nail on his abdomen. The cells of muscle there were the size of her fists, and probably harder.
“Where are we going?” she asked him, just to defy Masako. “Where’s your master keep Tau?”
“Don’t use that word, please,” he said, in a pleasant voice as big as a forge exhaust. “It stinks of slavery.”
“I thought you people were slavers.”
His face was ordinary-sized: when he smiled it seemed too small and too far away. “We change, too, Miss Aminata. Please, this way.”
She sa
w things she had never imagined. A room where old men and women in cassocks tended a city of copper pipes which pumped water according to the settings of corroded valves. A chamber with a recessed floor, where scorpions wandered in mazes of wood. A compartment where pots of colored sand had spilled and mingled, bright green and deepest blue, like the scales of two snakes. And everywhere a fireless light shone down from stripes and signs of greenish paint, marking the combings of hatches, the lips of steps. . . .
“Do you believe in magic?” she asked her guide.
“I was made out of magic.” He showed her the massiveness of his arm, showed her how he could turn his wrist, his elbow, his shoulder, all nimble as you please. “I could hardly disbelieve in myself.”
“Huh.” Aminata was an idiot with men, and therefore said the first thing that came to mind: “You must get a lot of tall chasers.”
“I am not interested in carnal things.” He shrugged. “My father had thousands of lovers. He was famous for it. But he was very lonely in the end.”
“He’s dead? I’m sorry.”
“All those who carry Elelemi the Giant die young.”
“Oh.” What a waste, she thought, and then reprimanded herself for disrespect. “Does your, uh . . . your tumor. Did it come from your father?”
“Yes. It was cut from him and passed to me before he died. The immortata prefers the flesh it knows.”
Aminata twitched like a hooked fish. “That’s why you wanted Iraji back so badly?”
“His mother carried Undionash, the Spine. It is a dangerous Line to host. It can kill when it is implanted, or when it grows. We hope he will inherit his mother’s agreement with Undionash.”
“You answer a lot of questions.”
He smiled. “I have never had to lie before.”
They came up a companionway, steep and narrow and clearly torment on Innibarish’s neck, out onto the weather deck at Eternal’s bow. The sea was glassy smooth under a steady wind out of the southwest, and, straight above, a sugarspill of stars fell so clear and high that Aminata could taste their light.
“Oh,” she said, and she was glad to be at sea, no matter why.
“Elelemi!” a voice screamed. “Elelemi, come quickly!”
Mother!” Innibarish barked. Aminata scrambled after him down the deck. The dry laundry slapped aside by his body swung back to claw at her face. The sterncastle stairs rose up from nowhere and she stumbled up on all fours, trying to keep up with Innibarish and his huge leaping legs, desperate not to be left behind, alone, in this place where anything could happen.
Ordinary ships had one level of construction above the weather deck but on Eternal the sterncastle was like a ziggurat, deck after deck, stepping up to heaven—but at last the black wood gave way to night sky, and a dead garden. And to a woman with burning hands and a huge pregnant belly who knelt over Tau-indi Bosoka’s curled body.
Tau-indi lay in the dry dirt, among the crumbled leaves, with black scab caked from fingertips to elbows.
“Oh no,” Aminata gasped.
“Do they live?” Innibarish bellowed. “Do they live?”
But the Prince was smiling. The black crust on their arms was only dry ink. “Aminata,” they breathed. “Look at you. And you still haven’t decided? You still don’t know?”
The Womb snapped to Innibarish in En Elu Aumor, and he went to his knees to scoop Tau up and carry them away to safety. But Tau put up one black ink hand in Innibarish’s face, and he froze.
“You know,” Tau said, apologetically, “that I was trained in magic? When I was in Mzilimake, a village sorcerer taught me to defend myself. I have the black hand, Elelemi. I’ll put my life into yours. You’ll die of growth.”
“What’s happening here?” Aminata barked, in the voice she’d use to frighten sailors from their gambling stoops. “What have you done to the Prince?”
“What have I done?” The Womb laughed helplessly. “The Prince did this! They told their bodyguard they were going out to find drugs to treat her burns. And they certainly found the drugs, Miss Aminata.”
“Your Federal Highness,” Aminata said, “you are an idiot.” Tau-indi should have known better: the suicide of an ambassador was the suicide of their peace. “We’ve got to feed them charcoal and as much water as you can find. If we’re lucky they’ll piss it all out—”
Tau’s face had little dimples when they smiled. “You know Hesychast, don’t you, Aminata? Cosgrad Torrinde the Hesychast, Minister of the Metademe.”
Aminata had not met any Ministers of the Metademe lately. “Come on,” she grunted, checking vitals—pulse rapid and shallow, breathing same, eyelids hugely dilated—“up with you, we’re going to pump you full of water and charcoal and laxative, shit your royal brains out.”
“Kindalana.” Tau’s eyes so close and knowing. And the tang of virtues-knew-what poison on their lips. “You’ve been told you’re like Kindalana. Haven’t you?”
And she had. Faham Execarne had told her she looked like “old Kindalana.” The man she’d met on the Llosydanes, Mister Calcanish, he’d said that Kindalana was going to cause an Oriati civil war, Kindalana as a pawn of Cairdine Farrier. Calcanish had told her to fear Baru. Calcanish had told her that Baru should be sent to Aurdwynn and exiled into the Wintercrests.
Restless, eager for an outlet while she was still ashore, Aminata had taken Mister Calcanish into the alley behind Demimonde and fucked him. And when she’d said, pretend I’m Kindalana, he’d passed from the slow thrusts of a practiced, whorish man to the bestial desperation of passion.
Pretend I’m Kindalana.
She jerked away from Tau. The Prince’s limp head dropped back into the dead garden soil. “Aha,” they said, smiling at her. “I knew it.”
“What did you do?” Aminata cried. “How did you know that? What have you done?”
“Oh, I’ve done what Cosgrad told me to do.” They curled up on their side and smiled at the moon. “Cosgrad told me that if I ever lost all hope, I should use his ideas, and change my flesh to change my thoughts. Drugs, he said, entheogenic drugs, ergot and psilocin mushrooms”—the Womb groaned loudly at that—“they are all known to relieve the Oriati Emotional Disease, to transform the wounded personality. ‘Don’t be arrogant, Tau,’ he told me, ‘you’re wise enough to know you need help in every other part of your life, so don’t pretend you can force yourself back to sanity all alone.’
“And,” Tau ran one finger across their scabbed brow, “failing that, I was to give myself a concussion. Or be struck by lightning. Either one, he said, could relieve the despair of the Disease. Jar the mind from its grooves. Oh, Aminata, how you must hurt. . . .”
That bruise on their forehead: they’d been smashing their head on things. “Oh, queen’s cunt,” Aminata groaned. Truly the aristocrats were fools.
“What have they done to themself?” the Womb hissed.
“They’ve tried to treat themself for the Oriati Disease.”
“What’s that?”
“Persistent despair. Helplessness. The urge to self-annihilation.” Whenever Aminata felt it she got drunk and went whoring and either the filthy ecstasy or the aching shame afterward seemed to help. The Book of the Sea had a mantra about it: cock cunt and drink, sailors don’t think; payday and stormcloud, thinking allowed; plotting and steerage, thinking encouraged; fire and blow, thinking’s too slow.
“Why’s it called the Oriati Disease?” the Womb asked, warily.
“I don’t know,” Aminata said, not wanting to explain that the Metademe considered it a disorder of social withdrawal, a special curse of the Oriati, who were bred to live in groups. “Bad luck to call it the Falcresti Disease, I suppose.”
“I’m all right,” Tau said, in wonder. “I’m all right. I’ve figured it out.”
And they vomited thin, medicine-smelling fluid onto the dead garden.
Aminata, grimacing, helped the Prince upright. “Bed,” she told the Womb, confident in her medical advice if nothing else. “Bed
and water, and alternate charcoal and emetics to soak up whatever’s left in their stomach and get it out. Then laxatives to clean out the intestines.”
“Baru,” Tau croaked.
Aminata froze. She had forgotten all about the reason she’d come. “Baru,” she repeated, in place of the question she wanted to ask: what does Baru want?
Tau answered anyway. “What I told you is true, Aminata. Baru wants to destroy the Imperial Republic. She wants vengeance on Falcrest and justice for what was done to Taranoke. But she fears that she will have to destroy herself to do it. And she fears that if she does not destroy herself then she will be corrupted.”
Baru was a traitor.
A fucking Federal fucking Prince, foreign royalty, was calling Baru a traitor. And Aminata believed it. Utter obscenity.
All the things she’d shared with Baru just a lie. That moment on Kyprananoke when they’d clasped each other by the back of the neck and rubbed their foreheads together like two ship’s cats—idiot! What an idiot she’d been, what a sucker, what a fool! To think that a woman who’d deceived an entire rebellion would be honest with her! To think that Baru was her friend just because she’d clung to a good saber and tricked a duchess into sending a letter!
She’d killed Ormsment for Baru. She’d destroyed a flag officer and all her subordinates for a woman who was a grand traitor—
“I’m an idiot,” she said, and barked a little laugh.
“She needs our help now,” Tau said, with such misplaced sympathy that Aminata laughed again. “Your help in particular. You are the Burner of Souls. I never thought of it before. I always took it for a torturer’s name. But flame has other uses, too, doesn’t it? You burn a sample, in chemistry. And the color of the flames tells you what it’s made of.”
She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be listening to this mad drugged Prince while two living tumors watched it all in silence. Oh, virtues, she would be so tainted.
The Tyrant Page 42
