The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Apparitor’s smug vodka-polished smile was very soon going to anger her. “Forgot about Heingyl Ri, did you?”

  “Oh.” Baru had forgotten about her. Fool, Baru, weak stupid fool. Heingyl Ri was the Stag Duke’s daughter. She’d met Baru on her first day in Aurdwynn with her sharp fox eyes, her frightful décolletage, and that one eerily prescient barb: I hope no one will regret your appointment. Least of all you. “She married Bel Latheman, didn’t she?”

  “Quite so.” Apparitor winked. “Xate Yawa prepared her very carefully for the Governor’s seat.”

  “I have her dismissed.”

  “How?”

  “I write a letter,” Baru snapped, “saying I’m one of the Emperor’s advisors and I want her to step down.”

  “I countermand your letter with my own. I want her to remain Governor.”

  “Then I—” She almost giggled. It felt like the childhood game of My Mana Mane, where you tried to convince your friend why your version of the legendary Oriati hero was better, and could absolutely step all over her version of Mana Mane. “I have her husband implicated in that scheme of Vultjag’s. I tell Heingyl Ri she steps down or I have Bel Latheman convicted.”

  “Fine.” Apparitor picked up his pawn and nudged hers over. “I murder you.”

  “What!” She crossed her arms. “You can’t just murder me.”

  “Why not?”

  Because—because everything she’d done, everyone she’d sacrificed, would be wasted before she ever got to hurt the Masquerade.

  “My patron would destroy you,” she said, which seemed plausible. Farrier had invested so many years of effort into her; and he had that wager with Hesychast about her capabilities. He would not want her dead.

  “I knew it,” Apparitor crowed. He got up to straddle Aurdwynn and throw up his hands in victory. “I knew it!”

  “Knew what!”

  “Farrier! Farrier convinced you to kill your lover.” Apparitor’s fist clenched: his little pawn poked out of it like a red-haired homunculus, smiling at Baru. “You did what he wanted and now you know he’s going to protect you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to insinuate,” Baru said, indignantly. “Of course he expected me to carry out the Republic’s law. What else?”

  “Farrier’s showing off.”

  “Showing off what?”

  “His control over you. You know, on some level, that you’ll be rewarded when you obey him. That’s why you killed Tain Hu. To earn his indulgence.”

  Baru wanted to stab him up through the nostril, into the pulp of his brain. The thought that he might be even the littlest bit right would annihilate her.

  He hissed across her plate of dead fledglings and ruined mango. “Tell me what he’s planning! Why did you kill her? Did you do something so horrible that you couldn’t leave any witnesses?”

  “Well,” she said, rising to the riposte, leaning into his salt and spirit smell, “I nearly married your brother, for one.”

  He’d lost his red handkerchief on the harbor wind, his neck was naked, and so she saw the convulsion of fear that snapped his teeth together. “What brother?”

  “Your brother,” she said, with a snake of guilt in her gut, which she tried, and failed, to step on. “The Necessary King of the Stakhieczi.”

  “I don’t know any king,” he said, too quickly.

  She smiled at him. “Come now. You were born prince of the Mansions. You tried to lead an expedition into the east, and the Masquerade kidnapped you off your ship.” Baru’s teeth closed on a tiny gannet-bone: it snapped between her jaws and slashed her gums. She’d heard the story from Dziransi, the Stakhieczi fighter in her retinue, and she’d known instantly, instantly, who that prince must be. “Does anyone else know? You’re kept in check by your hostage lover; but do they all know you’re royalty, too?”

  He was silent and he was still.

  “What would your colleagues do,” she whispered, “if your brother the Necessary King asked for your return, lest he invade? Would anyone protect you? Or would they send you home in rags and drool, with the lobotomy pick still jutting from your eye?”

  Apparitor looked at her with pale fire in his eyes, with an aurora light on his teeth, and the charge of the air outside the keep passed through the stone and metal to stir his long red hair.

  “You have me cornered,” he said.

  It would have been undignified to whoop aloud. Instead she smiled. The blood from her cut gums made him flinch.

  “Why do you do this?” he whispered. “I work for the Throne because it keeps me and mine safe. What do you want? What are you?”

  She set her broken pawn down on Aurdwynn. The map rug was huge, huge, and she got up to pace the ring of the Ashen Sea, leaving him kneeling there with her plate of leavings and Aurdwynn in all its checkered peculiarity.

  “This,” she said, kicking the ocean. “This ring. Trade goes around it, and around it, and around it. Falcrest to Oriati Mbo to Taranoke to Aurdwynn and back to Falcrest. Does it remind you of anything?”

  “A water wheel.”

  “An engine. Yes.” Baru surveyed her ocean. “What if that engine stopped?”

  He did not even hesitate. “Falcrest collapses.”

  “Well,” Baru said. “We can’t have that. We should explore the possible ways the trade could be stopped, so we can prevent them.”

  “Are you speculating on the downfall of our great and beloved Republic? Some might consider this a mote suspicious.”

  She waved in dismissal. “The hand is blameless, if it acts in service of the Throne.…”

  “Quoting the Hierarchic? You learn our stories too well.” Apparitor clapped his hands on the rug, and everything rattled, the dish and the bottle, even Baru’s jaw. “Do you understand? You don’t. You will.”

  A chime at the door: Iraji announced his return with the touch of a rod. “Pardon me, Excellences, but it’s time.”

  Baru frowned. “Time for what?”

  “For your exaltation, mam,” the boy said. “You go before the Emperor, and put on your new mask. And you tell us your name.”

  “We’re not waiting for Hesychast?” Apparitor said, innocently. “He’s sailing all this way.…”

  “What?” Baru staggered backward, cracked her hips on the breakfast table, and nearly sat in the guga. “Hesychast’s coming here?”

  “Of course he is,” Apparitor said, adulterating his own coffee with wine. “Who do you think was going to take your hostage away?”

  He gave her a two-fingered salute.

  “May you regret what you did today,” he said, soberly, “until the end of time.”

  * * *

  INCARNATION is the art of form mimicking content.

  Write a poem about linked destinies, and each verse begins with the end of the last: this is incarnation. Write a story about a mountain and it tapers to a peak on the page: incarnation. Baru always thought it was a stupid gimmick. Nobody demanded that the word billion be a thousand times longer than million, because that would be unwieldy.

  The Throne had incarnated its virtues in the ritual of exaltation. And they had done it perfectly.

  A great murmur of excitement ran through the gathered people—Elided Keep staff and Apparitor’s crew—as they opened their envelopes. Everyone had their own instructions; no one knew the full design.

  “Is the gull part of the rite?” Baru asked her chamberlain.

  It was a fat greasy-white seagull with yellow feet, perched on a spear-shaft that flew Duke Pinjagata’s banner. Apparitor said Pinjagata had been stabbed under the chin by a Clarified disguised as one of his troops. Baru missed him.

  “I’m sorry, my lady Excellence.” Baru’s chamberlain had organized cabin boys to stone the gull. “It hopped down the east tower stairs. We’ve been trying to corner it but it’s quite fierce.”

  The gull squawked and began to pitter-patter its feet. “Oh dear.” The chamberlain, gray and thinly drawn, covered his mouth in worry. “K
ill it before it—”

  The gull stopped pattering, stared in fury at the people below, and then relieved itself on Pinjagata’s banner. All the clerks groaned together. Baru bit her wrist to dam up a laugh.

  “I’m so sorry,” her chamberlain whispered, “it does that whenever it patters its feet. We’ll have it taken down and cleaned, at once, at once.”

  “Don’t bother. Pinjagata would’ve liked it.” She turned to the assembled technocrats. “Who’s been feeding this gull?”

  “Feeding it, my lady?”

  “See how it hops back and forth? It’s been trained to dance for food. Enterprising little bastard, isn’t it?” Polite laughter from all these people, people afraid of her. “Never mind. Let’s begin!”

  The crowd in the throne room formed two columns, their hands outstretched before them, turned upward: a path of palms, from the doors to the high gray throne.

  Baru walked between them, in her porcelain half-mask, a simple waistcoat and black trousers, with her gloves buckled at her wrists and Aminata’s boarding saber at her hip.

  Oh, Wydd, what a thrill she felt. What a hateful thrill.

  At the end of the path of hands the Emperor awaited her upon Its Throne.

  Of course It couldn’t be the Emperor, who sat in the People’s Palace in Falcrest between sluiceways of glass eyeballs and ice water. Of course the marble seat in this throne room wasn’t the Throne. The Emperor here would be a lobotomite, his will pithed and destroyed with a steel pick.

  They had prepared him in the full Imperial Regalia. A white smiling mask of enameled steel. A white silk raiment which bloomed out from beneath the mask and ran out taut and angular like a tent until it met the marble of the throne, where it gathered into braids, the braids woven thick and sure as ship’s rigging into steel eyebolts. Beneath the silk rig the man’s form could not be seen or selected as human. He was continuous with the weft of the Throne. Behind him the braids of silk spidered out through bolt and pulley to run away into secret corridors behind the wall. Arteries of secrets, pumping out into the world.

  The gull squawked angrily. No sound otherwise, except the small decisions of Baru’s footfalls.

  “STOP,” the assembled technocrats boomed, the Emperor’s voice invested in them.

  Baru stopped.

  “TELL ME YOUR NAME.”

  “Baru Cormorant,” Baru said.

  “BY WHAT MERIT DO YOU CLAIM MY ATTENTION?”

  “I claim the polestar mark,” Baru said, and she opened her folio where her exams and assignments had been recorded, showing it to the Emperor and to the room: here is my worth. “I claim the Emperor’s authority. By my works I make my claim.”

  “APPROACH ME.”

  She climbed the short steps.

  The great silk bindings of the Throne creaked and shifted: the Emperor’s left hand was drawn away, revealing a maple case. “MASK YOURSELF,” the chorus commanded, and inside that maple case Baru found a face of glazed blue-white ceramic, exquisitely blank. Around the right eye blazed the eight-pointed polestar mark, rendered in silver. The sign of overriding Imperial authority.

  The mask was sleek to the touch, sensuously unyielding. Baru wondered how thrilling it would be to smash the perfect thing. Behind the right eye the interior swarmed with codes.

  It fit her, of course, like a second face.

  “TELL US YOUR NAME,” sang the servants of the Throne.

  Baru turned to the little crowd. The whole pyramid of her life, turned upside down, with its vast base cornered by her distant ancestors, balancing on a tiny point: her, here, now.

  I MADE IT she wanted to scream, red-lipped, broken-toothed, marrow spattering off her tongue, as certain and lethal in her arrival as a shark breaching with the broken body of a seal in its mouth. I made it. No living thing may call itself my ruler.

  “I am Agonist,” she told them. “Let it be known.”

  Agonist. It meant one who struggles.

  The Emperor began to laugh.

  An instant of horror and shame from the crowd, even a few giggles, as if a child had run out bare-assed and squalling to interrupt the ceremony: everyone thought the lobotomite had misbehaved.

  But there was something in that laugh which Baru recognized. Her first stupid thought was that this simply wasn’t fair: the memory would be tainted, now. He had infiltrated this moment. He always would.

  Apparitor leapt out of the crowd. “Baru!” he shouted, into the mortified silence. “Baru, unmask it!”

  “Yes,” she said, and she reached out to the man bound to the Throne, gripped his smiling white mask, and lifted it off his head.

  Deep folded eyes, laughingly sad, and skin almost as dark as Baru’s. The finely kept beard, which she had always thought must itch. Gods, he had tears in his eyes, tears of pride. Who else in the world could say they were genuinely proud of everything Baru had ever done? Only him. Only him.

  “Surprise!” Cairdine Farrier beamed.

  And then, his voice stopping up, “Oh, Baru, thank you, thank you. You’ve done it. You’ve saved us, you’ve saved us,” now thick-throated joy, “Baru, we’ve won. Falcrest is saved.”

  INTERLUDE

  THE WAR PAPER

  For the edification of the Parliament of the Imperial Republic,

  At the request of Parliamin Miss Truesmith Elmin, Egalitarian Whip, Chair of the Committee for the Maintenance of the Peace,

  The Morrow Ministry presents

  A PROJECTION OF DEATHS IN A SECOND ARMADA WAR

  With the cooperation of the polymaths of the Metademe, we have prepared two assessments of the human cost of a second Armada War between the Imperial Republic of Falcrest and the Federations of Oriati Mbo.

  The first assessment describes an easy victory.

  The second assessment describes a strategic catastrophe.

  A HOPEFUL SCENARIO

  In the best case, our naval attacks against the Mbo swiftly close their harbors. Rocket barrages threaten the destruction of Yama, New Kutulbha, and Devimandi. We block the Tide Column, severing Oriati trade between the Ashen Sea coast and the Devi-naga Mothercoast.

  The three coastal Mbo federations surrender immediately.

  In protest of their surrender, landlocked Mzilimake declares war on Lonjaro, Segu, and Devi-naga. Civil war erupts. The governments of the coastal federations call on Falcrest for help.

  Between 10,000 (one Faculties graduating class) and 100,000 (the city of Shaheen) Falcresti citizens die in the course of a ten-year civil war. Most succumb to unknown diseases native to Oriati Mbo. Returning expeditionaries quarantine on Sousward, containing these pandemics away from our heartland, with the risk of total loss of Sousward’s vulnerable native population.

  Crop failure, internecine violence, and plague cause between 15 million (ten cities of Falcrest) and 35 million (the population of the entire Falcresti heartland, Normarch, and Occupation) deaths in Oriati Mbo.

  Infant mortality in the Mbo climbs from 20 per hundred to 35 per hundred.

  The death of griots and the destruction of records erases one month out of every year of recorded history.

  Outbreaks of the Oriati Emotional Disease introduce additional death, but it is our hope that Incrastic progress will fend off the better part of these suicide casualties.

  A MORE TROUBLING SCENARIO

  A war of attrition in the Ashen Sea and inconclusive naval battles along the Mothercoast force both powers into a stalemate.

  Our Metademe deploys demographic weapons against Oriati Mbo. Oriati Mbo retaliates with the bushmeat defense, including especially the zoonotic reservoirs of the Kettling. The Stakhieczi launch an opportunistic invasion of Aurdwynn, cutting off shipments of grain and lumber to Falcrest.

  Between 1 million (one out of thirty) and 6 million (one out of five) Falcresti citizens die to food rationing, contaminated water, and the Oriati bushmeat defense.

  Between 35 million (one out of six) and 70 million (one out of three) people in the Mbo die in fam
ine, unrest, and the use of demographic weapons.

  Nearly one in six people in the known world die.

  We predict the total collapse of most societies within the Ashen Sea trade circle due to the spread of crop blight and the end of agricultural trade.

  The remote possibility exists that Ashen Sea civilization will disintegrate entirely, triggering a return to sustenance agriculture in small polities (as in the Near Ancient collapse of the Jellyfish Eater and Cheetah Palace civilizations).

  LET IT BE NOTED

  That Parliamin Mister Mandridge Subahant, Candid Whip and Chair of the Committee for Realism, has entered an allegation of sensationalism against this paper and a motion of censure against Miss Truesmith Elmin.

  It must be repeated, in the interest of pragmatism, that the digestion of Oriati Mbo would give Falcrest the keys to the known world and secure an Incrastic future of well-ordered, prosperous, scientific society.

  3

  THE LEVER

  SAIL down the arc of the trade circle from wolf-wintered Aurdwynn southeast toward Falcrest, the jewel of the world, and halfway along your journey you come to an island of great green forests and rich white guano, an island where compasses turn madly under alien influence as the caves jet steam and the mountain rumbles.

  Once this island was called hell. Today it bore the burnt-clean name of Isla Cauteria.

  Life stirred. Day birds screamed the dawn to night birds as they passed in their thousand-strong flocks and murmurations. Shallow-water fish with eyes like coins peered from their dens at the deepwater squid rising to eat the day. The fisherfolk of the Cauteria Catch Concern raised anchor for a double shift on a boom market. And the wind out of the northwest filled their sails before it crossed the slanted black Normarch-style roofs of Cautery Plat, on up the slope to Annalila Point, across the walls of looming Annalila Fortress, through the racked hwachas and batteries of anti-ship rockets, down through banners and mill-sails that creaked as they turned the engines below, into a ward-house window: to rouse the lieutenant commander from her whore-satisfied sleep.

  Aminata groaned and pressed her fists against her forehead.

  Awake. Fuck. She was awake again. Hey there, navy girl, here’s waking up to you.