The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  A navy officer must always review her situation and her resources. Here she was, Aminata isiSegu, Lieutenant Commander in the Navy of the Imperial Republic of Falcrest, skimmed out of an Oriati orphanage by the navy’s talent scouts. First tour of duty on federated Taranoke, second tour on the frigate Lapetiare.

  She’d never had a third tour. She was marooned.

  Beneath her linens, marinated in sweat, Aminata thought, damn it, I’m still a torturer. No warship posts for her. No marks on her service jacket. No coin toward her great dream to earn command of a tall ship.

  When they’d come to her, she’d been so proud to have their attention. The old-leather women of the Admiralty, Rear Admiral Maroyad and her matron Ahanna Croftare, with a secret offer. Lieutenant, a war’s coming. We need Oriati interrogators who know Oriati fears.

  Can you learn how to break your own, Lieutenant Aminata?

  How could she refuse two admirals? Even if they asked her to trade the clean sea wind for the soft and sinister arts of Incrastic truth enhancement?

  How could she refuse?

  Science said that Oriati people were creatures of community. Mbo meant a thing that is whole because it’s connected. People only mattered in the context of other people: there was no room for individual genius, or solitary peace, or defiance, and that was why Aminata was glad she’d been rescued.

  Yet she missed her community, her people. Lapetiare was gone, gone like Taranoke with its easy boys and long warm nights and buttered lobster. They’d even cut her off from Baru: or, maybe, Baru had done that herself. Damn you, Baru, fucking write back, I don’t care if you died in that rebellion, at least have the courtesy to haunt some postmaster and send me a letter.

  At least Aminata had her whores.

  “Hey.” She poked him in the ribs. “Wake up. I’ve got to go do navy shit.”

  He woke up with a guilty start. He was a Stakhieczi boy from Aurdwynn and he had exotic skin like chicken sausage. She’d picked him out of sentiment, and paid him extra to stay over. Now the whore boy smiled expertly. She’d ruined his makeup last night, with her hands clawed around his skull and her thumbs digging into his cheekbones. But he was beautiful still, and he wore the ruin well enough.

  “I hope you got your money’s worth,” he said, and he stretched to show her the fans of muscle off his shoulders, the arch of his pectorals, the narrow cut of his abs. “You were so good.”

  Remember when you thought whores liked you in particular? Because you were kind, and you never beat the shit out of them if they didn’t perform? Give a woman a blackjack and a navy behind her and a man’s strength didn’t matter. And a lot of navy women liked to hit a man who couldn’t hit back.

  But now Aminata could hear what he was really saying. It wasn’t I like you. It was, mam, please leave a tip, my pimp takes a big cut.

  “Get dressed,” she said. “Don’t make me late.”

  He went around collecting his clothes. Aminata got out of bed, unpinned the fly screen on the window, stuck her head outside, and gasped a huge breath of the weather. There was, as the rag novels always said, a storm coming: not a storm of great change and crisis (if only!) but another plow of wet air to bring bad sailing and soggy clothes.

  I wish, she told the birds, that I were on a ship. I wish Baru would write back. I wish—I wish—

  I wish I knew, for sure, that all this hard work would get me somewhere. Even though I am who I am, a Segu-woman, an Oriati, a tunk, a beachboot, a burner. Even though.

  “Big day, mam?” he asked, to fill the silence.

  It was a big day. Maybe, with some kind of masculine intuition, he’d felt her urgency last night. Today was the day she had to ease Abdumasi Abd from the resentimente to the attachment. When Abd finally cracked she could be posted to a ship again.

  “Oh!” the whore said, delighted: he’d discovered her temple in its little rice-paper house. “This is a trim shrine, isn’t it?”

  “Hey!” Aminata lunged. “That’s private!”

  Planted in the tufa center-pot of her temple was a cormorant feather, gray on the fringes, tipped with steel-gray and full black, quill-down in Taranoki earth. To her endless guilt Aminata had never tended the flower seeds she’d planted, and they’d died. So the ragged feather was all that stood in her temple. Her stupid little hygiene-approved gesture toward the stupid traditions of her stupid race.

  “Go on!” she snapped, and the whore, pale as terror, went. She wanted to call after him, to apologize, to give him fare for a cart ride back to town.

  But she was late.

  Aminata gathered her things for the bath, lifted up her uniform jacket, and blew a speck of grit from the collar. She would go out there and do her damn best. She would make it. She was more than her home.

  That was what the merchant Cairdine Farrier had told her, back on Taranoke, when he’d recruited her for his scheme to protect Baru by frightening the shit out of her: he had said we can all be more than our bloody birth.

  * * *

  SHE stopped at the guard post to check her mail. No one ever wrote, but like the prisoner with the lever, she always checked, because maybe, maybe today …

  The Lever was a trick she’d used on Abdumasi Abd, and he’d fallen for it, he’d fallen so hard that he’d broken the lever in his cell (they were built to break). When it snapped in his arms he’d wept in despair.

  Lapetiare’s captain had once told Aminata, drunkenly, that life worked exactly like that lever. Did the lever give you a gum pellet with a little bead of opiate every time you pulled it? No, of course not. Give a prisoner a lever that worked that way and he’d pull it only when he wanted a fix. But give him a lever with a tiny random chance of yielding a pellet on each pull—

  Then he spends his whole life pulling. Because every moment he’s not pulling that lever, he’s wasting a chance.

  Navy life, the captain said, was built just the same way. If you knew exactly what you had to do to earn your promotion, you wouldn’t be properly motivated, would you? But with a little uncertainty—a little corruption, a little racial preference, a spice of terror and purge—then you’d work your ass off, wouldn’t you? Lest you miss your big break.

  Aminata hated to believe that. But some days she felt it anyway. No rest. No reprieve. Life is random and unfair, so you must pull that lever until your arms break out of their sockets—

  —and someone had written.

  Aminata gasped. The letter was from Aurdwynn.

  She knifed the seal open, tight-lipped, steady-fingered. It must be from Baru, it must! Some kind of explanation. Baru had definitely only pretended to go over to the rebels. The ships sunk at Welthony Harbor had been full of convicts, not real sailors. She’d been thinking constantly of Aminata, and only her work had kept her from writing—

  Cheap paper. That didn’t make sense for Baru. Marks told her it posted from Welthony a few weeks back. The Coyote rebellion had died near Welthony, hadn’t it? On the plains at Sieroch?

  Oh no. Was Baru…?

  Wait a moment. Had Baru misspelled her name? The letter was addressed to “Lieutenant Aminota.” Was Baru hurt?

  “What the fuck,” Aminata whispered, “is going on up there, Baru?”

  No one had a clear view of Aurdwynn this year past. The navy was silent. Advance mentioned unrest, disrupted markets, travel restrictions. But there was always samizdat, the rumors spread by illegal presses. Samizdat said Baru had changed sides after being recalled to Falcrest, that Baru had pretended to be recalled in order to change sides, that Baru had married a king, that Baru had declared herself queen, that Baru had beaten in Governor Cattlson’s head in a duel, that Baru had eloped with a heartbreaking beauty of a duchess and married her and her husbands.

  All everyone seemed to agree on were the dead sailors.

  A flotilla of navy tax ships had vanished at Welthony Harbor. The names of the ships had been struck from the List. The names of the crews had stopped appearing on the Navy Advance bulletins.
r />   Aminata couldn’t believe Baru had been part of that.

  Of course, she hadn’t believed Baru would forget to write for three years, either.

  She pressed the letter open against the wall.

  To the Oriati Lieutenant who I know is close to my lord, I write this by the mercy of my captor, who hast permitted me a final inscribtion on the eve of the voyage which I hope will end in my death. Instead of a will I leave this letter …

  Huh. Strong handwriting, but the writer could hardly spell, so— Aminata groaned. It was just convict mail. Convicts got a day to write free letters, and often they pissed into the Republic’s mail circuit in hopes of turning a sympathetic ear. No doubt some prisoner in Aurdwynn had mistaken Aminata, who’d once served as a bank auditor, for a wealthy and merciful woman.

  So it wasn’t from Baru after all.

  Her old friend had forgotten about her. Just like everyone else.

  Aminata left the letter in her mail slot, to deal with when she got home.

  * * *

  “WHAT is the Cancrioth!” Midshipman Gerewho roared. “Tell me!”

  He snapped a cane rod against the prisoner’s bare left foot. The man shrieked a raw failing shriek, his throat too ripped by screams to hold a meaning. Cats made sounds like that, Aminata thought. Not people. She wanted to torture cats even less than men.

  Gerewho caned him again, twice, quickly. “Tell me! Who are they? Where do they meet?”

  “He’s really overdoing it,” Faroni oyaSegu fretted, alongside Aminata in the oversight room. “I won’t have anything left to befriend.”

  “He hates the poor fucker.” Aminata sighed.

  “Can you blame him? It’s Lonjaro men like that”—meaning the prisoner—“who are the reason Lonjaro men like him don’t get respect.”

  They looked at each other. Aminata wasn’t sure if Faroni was serious. Faroni looked like she wasn’t certain if she’d gone too far. A scream pulled them back to the cell periscope and the drama below.

  The prisoner Abdumasi Abd had been chained spread-eagled and facedown in the center of a stone slot. His emaciated body was piebald with acid burns, his shoulders grotesquely protuberant against taut skin. Hug the man too hard and his ribs would probably crown through his skin like baby teeth. Gerewho Gotha beat him, Aminata’s brute, sixteen and vicious; real men needed passion and viciousness was an easy passion when you hurt. This was the first stage of Aminata’s process, the resentimente, old-fashioned hardhanded torture from which no good intelligence could be milked. Prisoners needed something to be rescued from.

  Break Abdumasi Abd, Rear Admiral Maroyad had ordered her. We want the names of everyone he’s conspired with. In particular we want the names and location of the Cancrioth.

  What’s the Cancrioth, Aminata had asked her.

  Irrelevant to your work.

  If you won’t tell me, how am I to know if he’s lying?

  You will know when he speaks the truth. You’ll hear the madness in him.

  Fine. She’d work with what she knew. Fact: Abdumasi Abd had led an Oriati pirate syndicate in a brave and hopeless assault on Aurdwynn. Hate made you do that, she figured. Principled hatred of Falcrest and personal loathing of its people.

  She had to focus Abdumasi Abd’s hate down upon a single person. Then she could remove that person, remove the hate, and swap in a substitute, a friend, a confidante, which would be Faroni’s role.

  Two years ago Aminata had been ordered to condition her first prisoner into terrified insanity. She’d used incendiaries, hallucinogens, and certain strains of pepper to teach the man that all things contained an inner fire. Everything burnt. When she’d let him see the sun after weeks in the dark, he’d screamed in horrified revelation. It was getting closer: it would never draw away. They were all falling into the fire.

  Then the Admiralty sent him back to Devi-naga Mbo. A reputation-builder, they’d told her. He’d gone home in catatonic terror, trapped in a world that smoldered, populated by men and women whose fat would pop and spatter in spontaneous flame, whose eyeballs sizzled as they cried for him with trails of blue-white grease cinder.

  Now the Oriati called Aminata the Burner of Souls.

  “Tell me the names of the Cancrioth financiers!” Gerewho bellowed, and he caned the prisoner on the soft of his calf: a flick and a line of blood, a step too far, they couldn’t risk infection in an open wound.

  “Go!” Aminata pushed Lieutenant Faroni toward the stairs. “Go, rescue him now.”

  With any trim at all—Aminata pardoned herself, a shitty childhood habit, by trim she of course meant luck—she would seem to rescue Abdumasi Abd from the brute.

  Down below Gerewho heard her footsteps, and knelt by Abd’s tear-stained face to deliver his final threat of mutilation.

  He never got the chance.

  Abd said something to his torturer. Aminata saw his lips purse and his throat move.

  Gerewho flinched back in shock.

  She couldn’t see past his iron fullmask, but he dropped the cane rod and fell onto his ass to scramble away from Abd. Aminata blinked and played with the focus. What just happened? Had Abdumasi Abd been holding a centipede in his mouth?

  Lieutenant Faroni burst into the cell. “Midshipman Gerewho!” she roared. “What in the name of fuck is going on here? King’s shriveled balls! What have you done to my prisoner? Let him down now and report to the Commander of the Brig! And send me an apothecary, this man needs ointments!”

  The moment was lost, except in Aminata’s gut. She felt like she’d pounded bad tequila, a sick curiosity. What did the words mean? What did Abd know?

  “Mister Abd,” Faroni said, with fervent concern, “I’m your advocate, I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. Let’s get you cleaned up and dressed. What the fuck is this contraption?”

  Innocently she pulled the Lever in the cell wall. Aminata kicked a footswitch to grant the Lever’s request, and a pellet of opiate gum rolled down into Faroni’s hands.

  “Ah,” Faroni said, “opiate, good, this should help with the pain. Here—”

  “Please help me!”

  Abdumasi Abd clawed at Faroni’s uniform jacket, trying to burrow inside. In pitiful scratchy Seti-Caho he mewled, “Kindalana, help me be strong!”

  Kindalana. Hm. Aminata noted the name down for follow-up.

  “I can’t tell them,” Abd gasped, “Kindalana, please, I can’t tell them!”

  “Hush, hush, shhh.” Faroni stroked his bushy hair. Gently she pushed the opiate gum past his teeth. “Eat this. It’ll make you feel better.” And condition him to associate Faroni’s appearance with pleasure.

  Gerewho came stomping in, ripped his mask and pig-blood–stained apron off, and fell gasping onto the ready bench. Aminata bounced an eyebrow at him—hey, remember you’re a sailor?—and he snapped a salute. “Midshipman Gerewho, reporting for debriefing, mam!”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Noises.” Gerewho shoved the heels of his hands into his eye sockets and pressed away the sight of Abdumasi Abd’s skeletal screaming face. “He just made these noises and they, mam, they frightened me.”

  “What noises?”

  “Yammer ah oo teen? Ya loot ian? Something like that.”

  “You responded sharply, Midshipman.”

  “I know. I can’t explain it.” Gerewho’s shoulders bunched. “Perhaps it’s taint, mam. He triggered some sort of racial memory.”

  Taint. The stain of Oriati degeneracy, bred into them by a thousand years of decadent, self-contented peace and perversion. How else, the Incrastic scientists asked, could the Oriati have failed to discover infectious hygiene or sanitary inheritance? Failed to better themselves?

  “We’ll beat it, Midshipman,” she promised him. “Remember your qualms. You carry the weight of your ancestors—”

  “—but I lift it, and that makes me strong, mam.”

  Below them they heard Faroni ask, gently, “He’s made you bleed! What made him do this? Was
there some particular question?”

  “He wanted to know who funded me,” Abdumasi Abd groaned. “He wanted me to name the Fairer Hand…”

  “Who?”

  “The Fairer Hand.” Abd closed his eyes. “Her parents told me she could be trusted. They were wrong. I was wrong to trust Baru Cormorant.”

  Aminata straightened up slowly.

  “Well,” she managed, through her tumbling distress: Baru, what have you gotten yourself into? “That’s interesting.”

  * * *

  REAR Admiral Maroyad puffed on a cold-mint cigarette, tapped the ash onto a clamshell, and sighed.

  People called her the ice-fisher, one who could harpoon her prey through shadow and turbulence. Aminata was terrified of her. Her ships guarded a full quarter of the trade circle around the Ashen Sea, from noon to three o’clock. And with all that salt and silver under her command, she could still make Aminata feel like she was the only fish on the admiral’s harpoon.

  Maroyad stabbed her embered cigarette at Aminata. “Do you want to start a war?”

  “If I fail in my duty, mam?”

  “No, Lieutenant Commander. If you succeed.”

  “I don’t understand,” Aminata said, desperately. “How so?”

  Maroyad was Bastè Ana, one of the fish-eating people who lived in Falcrest’s icy Normarch. Recently (Aminata followed the race laws closely) the Metademe had discovered that the Ana were simply a Falcresti subrace, as evidenced by their phenotypes and expert ice constructions. Aminata had read that women once ruled all Bastè Ana households, and that men actually had to sneak into other womens’ homes to court the daughters—but surely that was tosh. Even in Segu, the closest the world had to a matriarchy, men and women married openly. Even if the women then abandoned their poor husbands and tiny daughters to hare off in search of fortune.

  “Tell me again what Abd said,” the rear admiral ordered. “Tell it plainly.”

  Through the good glass behind her the high prow of Annalila Point stabbed north. Fishing feluccas and junks tacked across silver-tipped afternoon water below; a mail clipper raced in ahead of the storm. Aminata thought that if the meeting went very badly she might be able to jump through the window and hurl herself off the point.