The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  She said: “Leave the prisoner’s seat. It’ll make an interesting conversation piece. I have the sense, from your reaction, that I was meant to fail this test. Will anyone confirm that for me?”

  No one would.

  “Then go!” she snapped. “And serve me fresh code seals with breakfast. I have letters to write!”

  They scattered in silence. One more time she wondered: how many of her predecessors had vowed, in secret, to defy their masters? None had succeeded. Or, worse, they had all succeeded, all of them defiant, all of their defiance expected and incorporated into the Throne’s victory.

  Baru had only one weapon they’d lacked.

  Tain Hu.

  Remember that name. Pronounce it in a special way, so that it repeats itself: Tain leads to Hu and Hu leads to Tain, and you never forget her, she loops through your mind like a cant of resistance, now and always she is chained starving and ferocious to the rock-face of your memory and she heaves you forward by the manacles of her death.

  Tain Hu.

  You will destroy the Imperial Republic of Falcrest. You will liberate the world.

  Tain Hu wills it.

  And something rushed at Baru from her blindness—

  * * *

  SHE whirled, desperate, doomed—how had they decided so fast—the assassin came at her swift, elusive, a flicker of bird-wing shadow in twilight, the Throne’s answer for the cryptarch who refused to be bound—she tried to run, she tried to draw her boarding saber and stop-thrust the phantom through the breast—but she wasn’t wearing her sword, and as her turn and her failed draw put her off-balance she tripped on her cloak and fell on her ass.

  No one there.

  Baru groaned and rolled onto her stomach. With willfully bleak humor (probing the wound, trying to pinch shut the vein) she thought, oh, I am glad Hu can’t see her last hope now.

  “My lady Cormorant?”

  Baru yelled and spun on her ass. It was only Apparitor’s little golden-eyed Oriati concubine, coming in from the shore and the harbor. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, irritably, “that depends on you, really, are you here to try to seduce me again?”

  He protected his throat with a soft calfskin glove. Yesterday Baru had pinned him against a stone battlement and choked him. “No, my lady. My lord Apparitor sent me to ask you which map you want prepared in the morning-room.”

  Oh, the poor boy. She shouldn’t lash out at him (had to learn, immediately, how to wield her power carefully). He’d probably been torn away from friends and family, initiated into service as a boy, dragged around the world on Apparitor’s missions—rather like Muire Lo.

  The flinch she felt at that name got her to her feet. “The map, yes. We’ll be discussing Aurdwynn. Get one of the full-rug maps, the sort we can walk on.”

  “Aurdwynn, mam? You’re certain?”

  “Absolutely.” Baru scuffed her boots on the marble, tugged her belt, adjusted her collar, and shot her cuffs. “It’s time to reward them for their return to our care. Ease off the lash. Give them a little”—slack on their chains—“honey for their table.”

  What was his name anyway? Irashee? Irama?

  “My lord suggests a map that will show you the full span of your new dominion.”

  “Does he?” Baru stretched her locked hands over her head, and yawned mightily. She was pleased, a little, when the boy’s attention wandered down her jacket and waistcoat: not because she cared about his tastes, but because his dark gold-flecked eyes were like Tain Hu’s. “What map is that?”

  Iraji. That was his name. Iraji of the oyaSegu tribe.

  “A map of the world, my lady,” Iraji said. He blinked at her, softly, and she saw that he had a mind for spying, a polite and empathetic cunning which could be turned to wound or weal. “You are exalted now. You must consider the mosaic, not the stone.”

  2

  INCARNATION

  SHE came into her morning-room, where, before the ship and Tain Hu and the test, she’d read and written and then torn up all she wrote. Hard morning light came down through the hive window: teeth of fine thick glass in an iron truss and a clear scouring luminance, Incrastic, virtuous. Like the chimes of the proctors at the Iriad school, calling the girls out for dawn inspection.

  Baru went into the little pit commode and vomited in grief.

  When she came out, rinsed and empty, wanting strong whiskey to clear the taste off the back of her tongue, a map of the world had been laid out across the smooth dry floor.

  She circled it in awe. Wine and no sleep gave her a singing headache: she felt brightly, tenuously alive. “Taranoke,” she said, determined to keep that name alive and spoken. “Taranoke … there you are.”

  Beginning at her home, she surveyed the map.

  And for the first time in her life the world revealed itself to her. Not the ring of the Ashen Sea, which you could see in any gazetteer, but the full sweep of the globe from end to endless end. Baru gasped in delight, and covered her mouth.

  “It’s so blue,” she said. “I thought there’d be more land.”

  Apparitor spoke from her blindness. “Eight parts water and two parts land, we think.”

  “Has Falcrest surveyed it all?”

  “Not all. Not the poles, though the ana-folk say you can walk across the ice all the way to the lodepoint. And the south? Who knows. The Oriati, maybe. We’ve never managed an expedition past Zawam Asu, into anterior seas or the western oceans. They sell us charts but it might all be fancy. Whale queendoms and the like. Creatures with tongues as long as kraken arms.”

  “We used to think,” Baru whispered, “on Taranoke, I mean—there was a blue hole, that’s like an underwater well—”

  “I know them,” he said. “Horrifying pits.”

  “I swam in it,” Baru protested. “We called it the Navel.”

  “Pit seeks pit, I suppose.” But he was staring at her. Wondering, maybe, where the executioner had gone.

  She said, in a rush, “And we’d say the Navel was the lowest place in the world. That’s why all the rivers converged on the Ashen Sea. And if you went out far enough in any direction, eventually the mountains would rise up to the sky.” And then, with defensive pride: “Although we know, always knew, the world’s really a globe.”

  “I’ll be outside,” Iraji said. Apparitor gave him a quick squeeze, not looking, absentminded gratitude. They were friends. Baru touched a coin with her mind, a disc with Duke Oathsfire on one side and Duke Lyxaxu on the other. The coin was proof that she could betray people even if she saw their dearest friendships.

  Cold currency, of course. But valuable.

  She gathered her attention on the known world, the Ashen Sea and its surrounds. Apparitor mistook this for disappoinment: “I’d like to fill in the more tentative edges,” he said, protectively. “It’s my passion, exploration. There’s trouble raising ships and money, with war so close, but I still have my ways.…”

  “How does it work?” Baru said.

  “Eh?”

  “This. Our world. How does it work?”

  The Ashen Sea was a lumpy ring, and the world, Baru’s theater of play, was a misshapen cross around that ring. North was Aurdwynn and the Wintercrests and icy mesa beyond; left-which-was-west was the Camou Interval, a great plague-ridden unknown, grasslands and mountains full of scattered people as unknown to Falcrest as Taranoke might once have been. Between those two arms a fan of steppe reached out northwest, into the fallen Maia heartlands.

  It struck Baru as very odd that so much of the map was fallen empire, fallow territory, forgotten land. As if the tide of humanity was going out, all across the world.…

  “I can’t tell you how the world works,” Apparitor said. “If I knew that, would I be scurrying around on the Throne’s errands? Would I have to put up with you?” And something about Tain Hu, which Baru jerked her attention away from: it vanished into her right-blindness.

  “I have a theory,” Baru s
aid. “About the world.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “The fundamental concern of all our history has been access to the Ashen Sea trade circle—”

  “Did I say I wanted to hear it?” he snapped.

  Baru still thought she must be right.

  On the southern limb of the cross the Oriati Mbo jutted like a long tooth at the bottom of the Ashen Sea, coast and savannah and desert and sahel and jungle, all the way to Zawam Asu where the whales gathered for their fabled quorums. A gristly mass of land connected the Mbo northeast to Falcrest, belted by the strait called the Tide Column, which linked the Ashen Sea to the titanic Mother of Storms.

  And north of the Column, on a pudgy potato-shaped subcontinent jutting (Baru had to wave her head to remember the direction) rightward, eastward, was Falcrest. Not central. Not remarkable. Nowhere you would choose as the seat of power if you saw the world like a high hawk.

  “We’re so small,” Baru squeaked. She had to swallow to get her voice right. A terrible vindication was in her, and she wanted it out: the notion that any crime could be pardoned for a chance to glimpse these world secrets.

  “I take it,” Apparitor said, “that you’re not used to feeling small?”

  “No,” she said, and then realized he was calling her an egomaniac.

  “You never got high and lay down on your back on a mountainside? And watched the sky until you were afraid you’d fall up into it?”

  “No…”

  “Tain Hu did,” he said, “she told me about it.”

  Her name like a thorn in the tongue. Baru glared at him. He grinned and waved a bottle: The Grand Purifier. “I needed an excuse to be rude,” he hiccupped, “so I stopped by Helbride and raided my vodka stash. Clear as spring melt! Here, for your health—”

  “I’m not drinking anything you pour.” Baru took one last guilty, yearning glance at the map.

  From the Mothercoast the map swept east: hundreds of miles of open ocean, barren islets, wild currents. The Mother of Storms. Baru’s eyes crossed the distance like a ship, imagining thirst, hundred-foot waves, maelstrom, thirst and thirst and desperate salty thirst. At last she came to a coastline complicated by inlets and fjords and interior lakes. Smoking volcanoes issued clouds of thin paint.

  The mapmakers had written here, in plain blocks, THE SUPERCONTINENT.

  “Why is it super?” she asked.

  “Because it’s huge.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We found maps. Made by explorers from the pre–Oriati Mbo. They died over there.”

  “Oh…” Baru said, dreaming of long eons and secret valleys. She would like to be an explorer.

  “Who would ever want to oppose our glorious Republic?” Apparitor murmured, with bitter admiration. “Who would want to kill the thing that makes maps like this?”

  Baru would. Because she would never share this world with Tain Hu. She would never point from a ship’s mast and say, See that mountain? I’ve named it for you.

  “Tell me the rules,” she commanded.

  * * *

  “BEHOLD, attend, hear ye hear ye, and et cetera,” Apparitor hiccupped. “Let these be the laws of those who act beyond the law.”

  The cooks had laid out breakfast. Soft-boiled chicken eggs cooling in their brown shells, spring mango, smoked fish, rusk bread, and dipping coffee. The centerpiece was three guga in a sugar glaze: baby gannets, taken from the clifftop colonies which surrounded the keep in white fields of guano and squawking chicks. The exile staff held a contest every year to make the best gannet dish. For Baru they’d arranged the chicks upon mirrored vessels, posed as if in flight.

  She was ravenous. She hadn’t eaten since she saw the ship coming in with Hu.

  “The Cryptarch’s Qualm.” Apparitor stared into his vodka bottle as if he could read the words from the light in the drink. “Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. But to use your power you must touch the world. To touch you must be touched, to be touched is to be seen, to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish. Act subtly, lest you diminish.” He took a slug.

  She only needed to survive long enough to destroy it all. Subtlety could be dismissed. “Eat,” she suggested. “Or you’ll be useless soon.”

  “I don’t want to be of any use to you.” But he picked up an egg and began to juggle it, one-handed. “Next, the Tyrant’s Qualm—”

  “Are we tyrants?” Baru sliced her mango. The blade snicked on the plate: the texture too much like flesh. Her chest hurt.

  “You decide that as much as I.” He gave his egg a little backspin. “If you hold absolute power, everyone wants to take it from you. So you must entice supporters by granting them a piece of your power. But the more people you entice, the more thinly you are spread, and to spread is to perish.”

  “Fine, fine.” She would need to learn to make allies. But never again could she let them as close as Hu. The price was so high. “Did you mean for me to pardon the duchess?”

  Apparitor rolled his eyes and took a slug straight from the bottle. “Pardon her?” He gasped: a little bead of vodka sat between the ridges under his nose, quivering. “I thought you’d beg for her life. Thirdly, the Great Game. Every advisor to the Emperor, no matter their particular program of interests, shall maintain a familiarity with the Great Game—”

  A game. Baru would love to play a game of intrigue, of calculation, a game that overflowed her mind and doused her heart. “What is it?”

  “It is the Throne’s model of the world, honed by decades of intrigue and contest. We play it on a map, with the assistance of very large rulebooks. And when our work is finished, there will be no difference between the rules of the game and the laws of the world.”

  He had put down his bottle and produced a bag of tiny figures from his pocket: he was laying them out on the map-rug with the warm egg still cupped in his off hand.

  “Hesychast.” He held up a broad-shouldered brown bust. “One of us. The agents of the Throne.”

  Baru knew that name. When she’d first met Apparitor she’d asked if he were Hesychast—Cairdine Farrier’s rival, the eugenicist. The one who thought her race was fit only for farming, fishing, and pleasure.

  “Hesychast told me you’d beg for her reprieve,” Apparitor said. “He guaranteed it.”

  “I suppose he thought my lust would control me.”

  Apparitor stared at the figure with hot distaste. “He believes that the isoamorous—people like you and I—must be consumed by incredible passion. Like addicts. Why else would we persist in our obscene fascinations, when the whole world is against us?”

  Baru remembered her fathers flirting on the beach, fearless and beautiful. The whole world had not been against them, no matter what the Empire said. And that was the beginning of hope: if the world had not always been as the Empire demanded, then it might not always be as the Empire demanded.

  He pitched the egg overhand and it landed in the cup of wine Baru had just poured. She blinked and sputtered. “Is that a glint of conscience I detect?” he said. “A sliver of human compassion?”

  “Doubtful,” Baru said, acidly. “I’m only tired. I stayed up too late with the prisoner.”

  “Tormenting her with her failure?”

  Baru stuffed her mouth with baby gannet meat, so she couldn’t reply.

  “Anyway. These figures are members of the Throne. Here’s Itinerant—” A smiling waistcoated bust, her patron, Farrier. He put it down on the edge of the map. “Stargazer—” A telescope lens, also for the edge. “Me—” A pale figure, with red paint for hair. He put it in Aurdwynn. “Renascent—” A featureless pawn, which he placed, with a shudder, on Falcrest. “And you.”

  The pawn he produced was extraordinary. Narrow, thoughtful, storm-dark eyes: Baru’s cheekbones and chin: a faint, uncharacteristic smile, as if the pawn wanted to make Baru happy. All carved from the wood with the most expert care.

  “Whittled it myself,” Apparitor said, cheerily. “On the ship wi
th Tain Hu. Thought it’d be a nice gift once you’d spared her. Ah well.”

  He smashed his vodka bottle down on the pawn’s head and it split. Apparitor flicked the broken stub over to Baru. “Your pawn, my lady,” he said, and emptied the bottle down his throat.

  “Now,” he gasped, “we play.”

  “I don’t know the rules—”

  “And I won’t tell you.” He stepped onto the map. “Tell me what you’ll do to the world, Baru Cormorant. Show me your savantry!”

  “What do I—”

  “I told you. I told you.” His eyes glinted in the slatted dawn light. His jaw twitched, like a smile trying to wriggle out of its cage. There was something bestial, something cunning and atavistic about his pig-pale flesh, as if his ancestors had lived in their mansions too long, too far from the light. Baru hated the thought—she hated these prejudices!—but when the earth trembled with a distant avalanche or tremor, and the chandelier of the map of the moon moved above them in sympathy, she almost gasped aloud in fear.

  “The rules of the game,” he said, “are the rules of the world. Play!”

  Baru set her pawn down in Aurdwynn. A splinter from its broken face got under her thumbnail: she hissed and sucked it out. Blood wicked into the wound and turned the nail red.

  “You are in Aurdwynn,” Apparitor said, singsong, mocking. “You have just betrayed all your friends. The rebellion is over. You have gained the absolute overriding authority of the Imperial Throne. What do you do?”

  Where to begin! She would do what Tain Hu trusted her to do. “I order the release of religious prisoners, the end of reparatory marriage, and a program of universal inoculation for children. I set patrols on the Inirein and the other major trade rivers. I dredge the Welthony harbor. I—”

  “The provincial Governor refuses your suggestions. The Governor wishes to keep the north of Aurdwynn impoverished and ill, so the Stakhieczi cannot seize it and use it as a springboard for invasion.”

  “The Governor?” Baru said, in confusion. “Isn’t Cattlson dead?”