“I’m sure, sir. We checked the latest Navy List.”
Svir stared at her. Then he said, concisely, “Shit.”
Together they bound his hand up. Svir braided his hair, thinking quickly, quickly. “Move Helbride to the escape harbor. The navy can’t know you’re here.” Branne had come up through the Storm Corps, like the rest of Helbride’s crew, never herself a navy sailor. “I’ve got to make sure Baru gets out safely.”
“My lord, the navy knows your face. You can’t risk being caught.”
“If she doesn’t make it,” Svir said, “Itinerant will punish me, understand? He made it very clear that I was to protect his protégé. And if I fail—”
Lindon’s family would be punished first. Then Lindon himself.
And he was not Baru Cormorant, content to let his beloved die.
* * *
BARU read the Handbook of Various Beasts.
Gyraffe
A cultural subspecies of the giraffe, a long-necked southern mammal native to the Oriati Mbo nation of Mzilimake. According to the Farrier expedition circa After Revolution 112, the gyraffe is a platinum example of the transformation of the body by repeated behavior. This transformation echoes the origin of the human races, which diverged from the Template Race as their behaviors altered their flesh.
The gyraffe often befriends gyrfalcons, which perch upon its high head. The falcons kill the birds that eat the gyraffe’s favorite berries. Farrier & Torrinde (AR 113) suggest that the gyraffe’s affiliation for falcons developed through a Triestic coupling between its dislike for berry-eating birds and its observation that falcons kill those birds. This offers an advanced example of Torrindic heredity, in which behaviors already acquired in the hereditary particles can be linked to each other through repeated thought.
See “noocana,” the proposed substance through which memories are inherited.
“Your Excellence?”
Iraji’s call came out of her blindness, but Baru imagined him slipping sideways through her door, his thong sandals silent on the hardwood, noble brow creased with curiosity. She was unfortunately glad to see him.
“Hesychast’s ship has been sighted, my lady Excellence,” he said. “He will be here within the hour.”
“To test me.”
“I expect so, my lady.”
Baru set down the book and picked up the machine on her desk. An incryptor, Apparitor had called it, a steel apple full of gears and pins. Unique in all the world—just one built for each cryptarch. Slide a paper into the incryptor’s mouth, configure the dials, touch the trigger, and the incryptor would stamp the Imperial pole-star mark, extraordinary privilege, do as I command. Tiny numbers ringing the seal changed with each use, but like children from the same parents they could always be traced, by cryptographic principle, back to an individual incryptor.
She held the power to command the Empire here in her fist.
“I need you to fight me,” she told Iraji.
“I—your Excellence?”
“I need to be hurt.”
Weeks, now, since Tain Hu had drowned. And it hurt to eat and breathe. It hurt to see the sun and the moon keeping to their course. It hurt to read, to plot, to mine secrets out of the texts in the Liminal Library. It hurt to sit on her bed and watch the oiled hinges move in exquisite silence, back, forth, back, forth, as she kicked the door open and shut.
Why did everything hurt?
Because everything kept working. Everything kept on as if nothing had happened. And Baru needed everything to hurt: Baru needed a sword for a spine, so that if she ever bent from her purpose, she’d be cut.
“Come up onto the battlements,” she ordered Iraji, and when he hesitated, “Come!”
A high daytime moon, a far horizon, great formations of birds above. Sea wind raked her hair. The sound of the waves that killed Tain Hu slammed down over Baru and made her suddenly cold and agile and furious.
The world should care! The moon should cover up its face in mourning!
Baru wanted to fight: anything, everything. She shrugged off her jacket. She kicked off her boots and she turned barefoot, toes clawing at the cracks between stones. With two curled fingers she hooked Iraji’s attention.
“Fight me,” she ordered.
“Last time,” he said, “you almost crushed my throat.”
“This time you can fight back.” She squared off in Naval System stance, hands half-curled to make a fist or claw an eyeball or crush a scrotum.
“Why do you want to be hurt?”
“So Hesychast can’t pick one wound from the rest,” Baru said.
He looked more frightened by that. But he put up his hands.
So they went at each other in wary sideways steps, and Baru felt in her body all the art of all she was: hiding her intent, denying to Iraji the flickers of muscle and stance that would betray her next blow, capturing ground, yielding it, trading a foot of territory for a better angle, hunting for information in the boy’s curled shoulders and half-hidden teeth, and all this was like the art of being a spy and a lord and a queen, all this was the game of learning without being learnt—and like that game all of it was a prelude to pain.
Iraji had a man’s height and reach. That was enough to win. He chose when to step in and take the hit, when to flow from strikes into grapples, and once they fell to wrestle across the tower-stones his long fingers and strangling arms gave him edge. Baru might be stronger, but she couldn’t match his leverage, she couldn’t get up at his throat when she had him in her guard.
“Your Excellence,” he said, after his punch slammed Baru’s half-blind skull against the tower stone.
“Again,” Baru said, smiling blood.
“Your Excellence,” he said, when Baru nearly arm-barred his elbow to pieces and he gut-punched her so hard that she gagged.
“Again,” she said, spitting bile.
“Your Excellence!” he cried, when after an elbow to the chin, Baru sat down growling and couldn’t stand.
“It’s fine,” she said. The world was full of ringing sick pain now. The world cared about Tain Hu. She’d made it care. Cast a veil of hurt across everything you see, and everything you see is hurt. “Everything’s fine. You’ve done well.”
“Your Excellence,” Iraji said, with careful calm, “you could catch my blows even when they came in from your right. Did you notice that?”
“Could I? Interesting.”
Last time she was on the battlements with Iraji, she’d looked up through a swarm of petrels and seen a sail on the horizon. Helbride coming with Tain Hu. Baru could still feel that sail on her blind right, way out on the horizon: a tooth of memory erupting through the water. She could still feel—
She frowned.
She could feel three sets of sails.
“Iraji,” she said, and pointed right, into nothingness. “What’s out there?”
She watched his golden eyes narrow against the wind. He put up a hand to block out the sun: she wondered, quite Incrastically, if the dark of his skin let him see better in bright light.
“I don’t understand,” he said, softly. “Hesychast should’ve come alone.”
On the southern horizon three ships approached: a clipper like Helbride, and two warships rigged like fast navy frigates.
Hesychast sailed like he was going to war.
* * *
SHE staggered into the morning-room in compression linens and a breechcloth, clutching a block of cellar ice in silk to the side of her head. Farrier was there, and the moment he looked at her, her trap was sprung.
“Oh!” He very politely turned his back. “You’re not proper, Baru.”
“I was with the concubine,” she said, to make it worse on him. “What are you doing? Come, help me sit.”
“When you’re modest, Baru.” He shrugged his coat off and lobbed it backward to her.
“You make these things strange, Mister Farrier.”
He chuckled easily enough. “When one travels the world one lear
ns not to bend to other’s standards. I hold myself to my own rules, lest I ever err. We must be blameless, hm? Always blameless.”
It was a nice sherwani. Baru left it on the floor. What did Farrier see when he looked at her? Not lust—he wasn’t interested in taking advantage of his power that way. But he saw something he didn’t like. Tain Hu had told her once—you wear symbols when you decide how to dress yourself, how to look at men and women, how to carry your body and direct your gaze.
Maybe Farrier saw an aspect of her that he couldn’t control: young and vital, coiled with strength. Maybe Farrier saw her flesh as the dominion of his enemy.
“Hesychast’s here,” she said.
“I know.”
“He’s brought two warships.”
He looked up sharply, and did not look away. “Really? Interesting. Well, fear not. I have a way out. And until our reckoning is done, you are beyond his power.” He had already arranged the Great Game across the map rug. “Let’s discuss tactics as we play.”
She was surprised to see fleets and armies on the board, along with wealth, currents and storms, persons of power. The Oriati armies outnumbered Falcrest’s tenfold or more. What was he up to? Why include the military? He had said it himself: we never conquer anyone …
“Tell me about Hesychast,” she said.
“Oh, Baru, do you need what I know?” He threw her the booklet describing her position at the start of the game. “You’re past the point where you can depend on my advice.”
“Tell me anyway. What’s his real name?”
“Cosgrad.” His smile flickered up and died in his guarded eyes. “He’s Cosgrad Torrinde.”
“You wrote a book together,” Baru exclaimed, remembering Farrier & Torrinde (AR 113). “About giraffes, and other things.”
He laughed with more sadness than humor. “Yes, we’ve worked together. He’s right about a great many things. Eugenics, for instance. Behavior can be inherited, that’s certain.”
She was set to play the Oriati. She did not know what to do with her armies. Farrier’s fleets were gathered to guard his trade. Tentatively she began arranging her southern forces for a march into the jungle, on hope they would find something interesting or die (she needed their salaries elsewhere).
“Why are you so afraid of him?” she asked.
He had a playing piece in his palm. A broken stub. It was hers: the Agonist piece. He reached down to play it onto the capital, onto Falcrest-the-city. “Because he’s often right,” he said. His eyes snagged on her thigh. He looked away. “I wish you’d dress.”
“He’s often right, but he’s wrong about this?” She pointed to the map with her toes. “This game?”
“Exactly.” He tapped the broken Agonist piece on its point. “In the game, you’ve just gone before Parliament on 90 Summer. You’ve reported the result of your expedition. Go to the end of that booklet I gave you.”
Baru flipped to the last page, frowning: it had been sewn together in haste. “Revelation,” she recited. “You are the Princes of Oriati Mbo. Falcrest’s Parliament has discovered the existence of a secret society in your midst. They are the ancient slavers who once ruled your people, and their strength is now grown again. They are strong in Mzilimake, among the old conquerors of Lake Akhena and the mystics of Uranium Gorge. They are powerfully entangled with Segu’s western coast, with the tribes of the Aam and the Yeni, where their shipyards have built secret fleets. Already they have attacked Falcrest, hoping to provoke a ruinous war … is this all fantasy?”
“Read on.”
“Falcrest’s Parliament demands you hand over the leaders of this cult, and all their collaborators, for trial. If you do not, punitive bombardments will strike your great cities. The word of this cult’s existence has been sent to your griots, to be spread among the people, and now a great wrath arises in them: they do not love Falcrest, but they hate the old slavers with a thousand years of fury.…” Baru blinked at the rules. “Could this happen?”
“It will.” Farrier no longer seemed to care about her immodesty. “Play, now.”
She found unrest rippling through her people. The effect on the economy was quite shocking: where people disagreed with each other they stopped trading, and that caused uncertainty in crops and prices. Where certainty evaporated, people stopped spending money. As if by magic famine began to arise, first in little patches and then growing blights.
She went after this cult with griot-investigators. They were murdered. She sent an army into southern Mzilimake to dig them out. A poor roll of the dice saw a coup by Uranium Gorge seize Mzilimake’s government in the name of the slaver cult. Civil war was instantaneous, and huge, and appalling—there were so many people in Oriati Mbo, and all the death was magnified proportionally—
“I will sell you grain,” Farrier offered. “Cheap. Just give me those ports.”
She had to agree, to save lives.
“I’ll send Charitable Service clinics to contain the plagues.”
She had to agree, to save lives.
“I have architectural concerns who can use those forests and that stone better than you. Grant me some labor, and I’ll clear those canals, I’ll rebuild those roads, I’ll have cash crops growing again.”
She had to agree. She needed money to prop up her side in the civil war.
“Give me access to the Black Tea Ocean,” Farrier said, pointing to the western sea off Oriati Mbo, the sea few Falcresti had glimpsed, “and I’ll send a fleet down there to seal off the slaver ports.”
Her ships had been decimated in the fighting. She had no choice: she would lose the coast entirely, otherwise.
“Your currencies are in tatters,” he pointed out, for the war had put various Princes and their principalities so deep into debt that they’d been forced to coin more money, leading to rampant inflation. “I can’t accept anything in payment but Falcresti fiat notes.”
Baru sighed. She knew from the rules that very soon her necessaries—traders, laborers, shipping magnates, even troops in the field—would refuse to take payment in anything but fiat notes. “I think,” she said, “that I should refuse…”
“I will take payment in orphans, instead,” Farrier suggested. “Let me save these bankrupt cities. Just let me build schools for the war orphans.…”
The Mbo was breaking. She could hardly believe it—especially after all her reading. The thousand-year Mbo was cracking apart before her, and Farrier’s ivy was growing in the seams.
“What is this?” she breathed. “You break them by turning them on themselves?”
Farrier breathed into his cupped hands. “It was the same on Sousward,” he said. “Plainside against harborside. This is just … much larger.”
He was aiming Baru at his next target. And the stakes, she was certain, were beyond tally: not just for the world, but for Farrier himself. “The expedition.” She went at him, even as he drew away, and got him by the shoulders. “Look at me. What’s this expedition?”
Suddenly he was indifferent to her body. Suddenly he had the room’s gravity again. The immediacy of the change was appalling. He smiled, warm and natural. “You and Apparitor and a few others will be going on a mighty journey, Baru. A journey that Hesychast and I have both gambled everything upon.”
“Tell me!” she cried, nearly salivating.
“You,” he said, soberly, “are going to go on a fact-finding mission. Parliament has called a vote on war with Oriati Mbo. The date is set for summer’s end, the ninetieth day of the season. You will provide the Emperor’s Testimony. Did the Oriati Mbo itself attack us? Was it only pirates? Is there cause for war? Or will the peace last?”
“Good Devena,” Baru gasped. “I’m to decide that?”
“Quite. But of course it’s not just about that. Hesychast wants one thing from the expedition. And I … well. I hope you will secure the future of the Republic under my philosophy.”
“What philosophy?” she hissed. “What does he want? What do you?”
“Ah,” he said, his clever hands steepled, “we are antitheses, he and I, he is the body and I am the mind, he is the race and I am the Republic. He sees humanity as cattle to breed and I cannot abide that—oh, Baru, if you knew the hope you’ve given me, the hope that anyone can be disciplined and taught to live righteously. That hope sustains me!”
Baru grinned like a barracuda, she was so hungry and so angry to eat his trust like a fishing line and to pull him down by it into the water from which he’d snagged her.
“What do I have to do to beat him?”
* * *
HESYCHAST was perfect.
He looked like an archon summoned up from the handbooks and the statuaries, invoked as incarnation of manhood: his lean height, his light-footed strength, his broad flat face composed against the masculine passions and yet, like a team of oxen in the yoke, still ready to move powerfully. His brown eyes were deep and bright and deeply folded, the image of classical Falcrest beauty. All his motions were demonstrations: you see, this is how it is properly done. He wore a wedge-shaped jacket with long tails, and trousers that cupped his narrow hips. She could have balanced two coffee cups on his shoulders.
Farrier had said, he will strike you in your wound.
She called down to him from her high throne. She wore her Library key ring around her throat, with the keys fanned across the jacket’s unbuttoned breast. She ought to have worn a gown, to conceal herself. Too late. She and Hesychast were alone, except for the dancing gull, which came and went on its own schedule.
“Welcome to the Elided Keep,” Baru said. “I am Agonist.”
Farrier had said, he will bring it back to the flesh. Always. He will say you couldn’t kill Tain Hu without dividing your brain. He will say you learned nothing, no discipline, no control. You only cut your flesh in two.
The eugenicist tried a stiff formal smile, and couldn’t hold it, and grinned at her in sparkling earnest. “Agonist! What a name! I see you have a gull problem? I’m very good with birds.”
Baru laughed. “Someone’s trained that gull to dance for food.”
Casually, and without malice: “Ah. Behavioral conditioning. Sounds like Caird’s work. I’ve been told he’s here.”
The Monster Baru Cormorant Page 12
