The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  But on this mission she dares hope for a particle of redemption and so she reaches, like a petitioner, for the name of her childhood. The Bane of Wives is again Tain Shir.

  She has come to be her cousin’s rescuer.

  The Elided Keep glowers in a fog of chemical smoke, brutalist architecture of battlement and monolith, striped in zebra slashes of white and gray to break up its outline, perpetually disappointed in those who dare assault it. Juris Ormsment has ordered Shir to join the assault but the admiral’s orders are of no relevance to Shir nor will she make any account of her actions to those who pretend to command her.

  She is not mastered. The days of her service to the Throne or the navy or any other power died on burning Butterveldt savanna among the bones of orphans and lame dogs.

  Her skiff crashes onto the beach on a breaking wave.

  Go, she commands.

  The marines of her detachment spill ashore in a silent leaping swarm. Like the nymphs of some redsteel crustacean grown smooth and armored on the secret metals of the deep. Dogwatch sun scorches their wools and leathers and fills their masks with sweat. The clouds have burnt away and the sky is unforgiving deep blue.

  They move across the bare stone.

  Tain Shir strikes out to the east, climbing toward the high promontory and the drowning-stone beneath. Her command squad follows close behind her, calling out. Mam. Mam. What are your orders, Captain Shir?

  On the spine of the ridge they come upon a party of the Emperor’s apparatchiks. The spies surrender immediately, kneeling on the naked rock. They claim protocol’s protection. Do not harm us lest you violate the great law of our Republic, which says that the sword must always kneel before the pen.

  Shir walks among them and thinks of the acts she abetted in the Occupation, the burning of villages and the slaughter of the refugees, the selection of men as her chattel, the Invijay horsefighters crying out to her in exaltation and worship, our god-captain, our vengeance manifest. Her old master Itinerant ordered this.

  Kill them, Shir orders. They were sent here as distractions.

  Her marines hesitate and the surrendered Thronesmen look up in horror as if waiting for the world to amend itself in their favor.

  Shir puts a knife to their leader’s skull. A chamberlain or director. He stinks of piss but his face is brave. He says, you won’t hurt us. I am the personal chamberlain of Agonist, agent of the Throne. Touch me and you know what will be done to your family. Shir looks down at him and considers the membranes that men grow to insulate themselves from the brilliant truth.

  She punches the pommel of the knife and it goes into the man’s temple. The spies scream and call her mad. Tain Shir throws a gas grenade among them and they topple hacking so that they are as easy to slaughter as landed fish.

  They were only distractions.

  The cryptarchs will have a secret fastness. They will have a hidden ship in that retreat. She will find Tain Hu there.

  She attains the summit of the execution ridge. A human finger bone rests on the stone, gnawed by gulls. Shir takes the bone from the rock and slides it in among her crossbow bolts.

  * * *

  APPARITOR’S master-at-arms met them at the cave quay. He was a thin, swift man named Tenshy Diminute, and very competent. He already had skiffs waiting on the pale green cave-river, three full of Apparitor’s people, the fourth waiting for their master. “I’m bringing guests,” Apparitor said, beckoning Baru and Yawa forward. Diminute tried to take Iraji and Apparitor wouldn’t give him up. “Is the tunnel safe?”

  “Three quarters to high tide.” Tenshy’s voice was dry and cracking, his vocal cords burnt. “Helbride’s ready to sail once you’re aboard. We’ve prepared a—”

  Baru sneezed. Everyone looked up in horror. “Do you smell smoke?” Tenshy asked, urgently.

  “I think I do.” Baru put up a finger—there was a cold breeze from above, the Elided Keep’s cool interior air rushing down to the cave river and the marsh beyond. “Oh,” she realized. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”

  The navy’s marines would pour heavy smoke in search of secret exits. The draft would draw the smoke down here.

  “Get aboard,” Tenshy ordered. “We’re going now.”

  Xate Yawa sat in the boat’s prow like a nightmare figurehead. The soft light of the water shone through her gown from below. “Ever navigated a sewer before?” she asked Baru. “I have.”

  “This isn’t a sewer,” Baru protested, “it’s a secret river—”

  “It’s an underground waterway that carries your sorry little shits,” Yawa snapped. “That makes it a sewer.” The bite of Olake’s absence was sharp in her.

  “Well said, Yawa.” Apparitor stepped down into the skiff. It rocked perilously but his head was steady as an owl’s. “Baru can row the boat, I’ll see to Iraji, and you can supervise acerbically. Baru, don’t forget your right-side oar.”

  * * *

  HER old master waits for her among the mace-grass.

  With her spyglass Shir watches the man stroll down the boardwalk. Time has hardly touched him. As if his image engraved itself on the back of her eye at their last meeting to pursue its intrigues in the pulp of her mind. He is whistling to the marsh birds, over the clamor from the keep, and the waves jostle the boardwalk under his feet.

  She knows how to kill cryptarchs. They ward themselves with intrigue and secrecy but a knife will cut exalted meat as easily as rat-skin. Like a sorcerer they must be struck down before they speak.

  Shir would shoot him down to rot in the marsh except that she knows him. He will not show himself except where he is invulnerable. His name carries weight, his heavy brows and fine beard beam from the front plate of the Manual of Expedition, which everyone has read. And he knows things which everyone needs.

  Even Shir.

  She lifts herself onto the boardwalk and trains the crossbow on his back. One shot will kill him. The world is indifferent to the reputations of men. Beneath the veil of civilization the truth prowls on an older earth.

  “Farrier,” she calls.

  She knows how grotesquely he grapples with his own incarnation as a body. He wants to be more, he wants to be a thought and a word. He forces himself into a fastidious abstinence, and it only makes his appetites, his temptations, more dire.

  Shir has seen them together, Farrier and his temptation. And Shir knows that he will never rest until he can master that temptation, master the threat of her, achieve dominion over her and all she cares for so that all her happiness is at his disposal. Not one of his students. One of his foes.

  He looks slyly over his shoulder. “Hello, Shir. I came out here to see if you’d turn up.”

  “Who will die if I kill you?”

  “We have your father. He would be made to regret my passing.”

  “I walked away from him once.”

  “You did, didn’t you? And then you walked away from me. You’re running out of people to abandon, Shir. Let your father die and you’ll have no one left.” He offers her a wax-paper bundle. “Care for some leftovers?”

  She feels nothing. There is nothing to feel. The world is indifferent and she is not of men but of the world. “I will kill you now.”

  “No. You won’t.”

  He waits there, smiling. With a prickle of ancient emotion she remembers this smug expression. He is waiting for her to pick up the clue he dropped. Let your father die, and you’ll have no one left.…

  There should be one more soul worth saving. One more.

  “Farrier,” she says, over the taut string of the crossbow. “Where’s my cousin?”

  He puffs his cheeks and sighs.

  “Farrier.”

  “Do you remember what happened with your mother?” He shakes his head mournfully. “Baru’s a quick learner, I’m afraid. Quicker than you ever were, Shir.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Why would I risk my favorite student by telling you?”

  There are only two ways to understand that
. Tain Hu is with Baru Cormorant, and Farrier does not want her to find Baru. Or Tain Hu is dead. And Farrier does not want Shir to have her vengeance.

  She won’t kill him now. There are finer ways to hurt him than death.

  “Run,” she tells him. “Run, sheep man. I hunt your student now. And when I take her I’ll lever your jaws off and pour you full of poison from the sac of her cured womb.”

  He smiles sadly. He shakes his hairy head. “You poor, stupid animal,” he says. “You could’ve had the world. Look what you’ve become.”

  * * *

  “AHEM. Hem hem.”

  “What?” Yawa snapped.

  “Now that I have both of you together,” Apparitor declared, “I’d like to read this letter Baru wrote.”

  Baru didn’t realize what he meant until he already had the paper unfolded. The little sneak must’ve pinched it from her mail bag when he shuttled it to Helbride! “Let’s see, hem hem. Here’s what Baru wrote: ‘To the Imperial Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, Her Excellence Xate Yawa. I know your game—’”

  Baru’s arms were busy with the oars. She tried to bite the letter out of his grip. He held it away, grinning. “‘I’ve been playing it, too. I suppose I’ve already won, if you can call it victory. You played your part flawlessly, of course—’”

  Yawa’s black glove pinched the letter and vanished it into her gown. “Let Baru speak for herself.” Her lens eyes turned to the circle of light ahead.

  But of course she didn’t give Baru the letter back.

  They broke clear of the underground river and passed among the fat brown mace-headed grasses of the marsh. Sheets and ribbons of seabirds wheeled overhead. Baru gasped the salt air, grateful to be free of the river—imagine being trapped in there at high tide, to drown.…

  Tenshy Diminute’s armsmen in the other skiffs hunched low and smeared their faces in mud. “Poles,” Tenshy called, and they all switched to spear-shafts to punt through the marsh. Iraji roused from his faint and, despite Apparitor’s gentle pleas, took up a pole himself.

  A clamor from overhead drew Baru’s eyes. A glossy black crow parted the mass of seabirds, diving among shearwaters and gannets. It called out indignantly.

  “Shit,” Apparitor hissed. “A scout.”

  Xate Yawa’s mask tracked the bird. “Before the treaty, when we still fought against Falcrest, the Vultjag people would train falcons to kill the crows.”

  “We,” Apparitor said, mockingly. “Like you ever fought—”

  Suddenly: a greasy pop.

  One of the skiffs full of armsmen caught screaming fire.

  The gel flame fused cloth to flesh and smeared itself purple-white across blistering skin. For a moment the sailors beat at themselves in pure confusion: then the pain came over their battlements and sent them howling into the swamp water. The heads of mace-grass burst like garlic in a pan.

  “ARMS!” Apparitor roared. “THEY’RE ON US!”

  Iraji poled faster. Baru, stricken, fell out of rhythm.

  Tenshy Diminute poled his skiff toward the burning wreck. “Haul them up!” he called. “No one gets left! Watch round the—”

  Baru saw the dripping fist that rose from the swamp water, grabbed his pole, and yanked. He went face-first flailing into the marsh and stopped on a spear. A bloom of hot blood spattered into pollen-thick water. Frogs drummed in panic.

  “There’s someone in the water,” Baru hissed to Apparitor, her mind running back through the explosion: someone had put a grenade into the skiff from below. “There’s someone underneath us!”

  An armswoman cast her spear into the muck and hit a fleeing black shape. The otter came up wailing, curled on its impalement. Mace-grass exploded with a sound like low chuckling. Baru tried to get back in rhythm with Iraji’s pole, and gagged at the sight of charred dead chicks bobbing on the tide.

  “Svir,” Yawa said. “It’s her.”

  “You don’t know that!”

  “Who’s her?” Baru snarled. She was sure she had to flee, and flee now, or die. When men trained to kill came upon the untrained they did not fail. Nothing would stop a soldier except another soldier. There would be no crossbow bolts humming harmlessly past, no counterattacks.

  “My niece,” Yawa said.

  “It can’t be her!” Apparitor wailed. “She went into the jungle! She never came back!”

  The master-at-arm’s skiffmates tried to pull Tenshy off the spear while he thrashed and bubbled blood. Something hit their skiff from the far side. It tipped, lifted from below, and spilled its three sailors yelling into the muck.

  From the burning rushes rose a single red-masked Masquerade marine.

  A faceless and dripping figure with a heavy crossbow. Water beaded on the oils of her equipment. Knives glimmered in sheathes of wax. Behind her mask her eyes were a crow-feather shine.

  She raised a finger that gleamed with steel knucklebraces.

  She pointed to Baru.

  The smoke grenade in her fist burped and gushed chemical mist. With the ease of a drunken dockworker embracing a buddy at the bar she took the nearest sailor in her arms and slashed his throat and left the grenade stuffed in his collar to float with his corpse. The second man in her reach screamed and pulled a dive knife. She shot him in the face with her wet storm crossbow, as casually as a cat biting off a bird’s bright-feathered head. He fell like a comic, his feet walking on out from under him, his broken skull snapped back.

  “Iraji,” Apparitor said, very swiftly, very levelly. “It’s her. Give me my files.”

  Baru watched, hypnotized. The third sailor off the skiff was big and brawny. He reached for the red-masked woman to grapple her and throw her down. She met his grasping hands with a knife, she moved loose-wristed, cutting, disengaging, cutting again. The man fell against the capsized skiff and his own weight pumped a gush of blood through his slashed wrists.

  “Ah,” Baru heard him say—he wore a neatly trimmed little goatee, it must have been done up this very morning—“ah, ah.”

  The third skiff came at the woman in determined coordinated silence. Spears and crossbows ready for the mace-grass to part and give them a clear shot. The killing woman tore a fat red grenade off the ring on her chest and there was a tremendous rip like a kraken’s beak tearing through steel as the grenade’s inner mechanism engaged. She held it to her ear for a moment, listening to the fuse, and then underhanded the grenade from waist height into the last skiff.

  One of the sailors tried to bat it away with her pole. The grenade ruptured on contact. Grease sprayed in gobbets and streams. The fire raced up oil and flesh.

  Incinerated screams.

  And then Apparitor shoved Baru aside to climb into the prow of their skiff. Brandishing a leather folio he shouted:

  “TAIN SHIR! STOP!”

  * * *

  APPARITOR stood against the killing woman with only paper as his ward.

  “You!” he shouted. “I know your name! Look at me!”

  The red mask tilted. Gore and murk streamed off heaving shoulders. “Svir,” she said, in a voice as alkaline and impersonal as the filters in her mask. “Where is she. Tell me.”

  “She’s dead, all right? Your cousin’s dead.” Svir stood highlighted against the sky, a slim man-shadow with a whirl of red to crown him. Baru tried to understand his gambit.

  This madwoman’s cousin was dead?

  Who’d died at the Elided Keep except …

  … oh Wydd, except me?

  Baru could not accept it. It had to be true.

  Somehow this marine was Tain Hu’s cousin.

  How could that be? How could Tain Hu’s cousin wear the mask? And how could Hu have kept her a secret from Baru?

  Apparitor touched Baru’s head with one hand. Brandished the paper with the other. “I have your cousin’s final testament right here. Tain Hu’s will. And in this testament I have her assurances that she loved this mud-speckled woman, Baru Cormorant.” He flourished. “Rise up, Agonist. Speak.”

  Th
e killing woman’s blood-spattered mask turned back to Baru.

  “I…” What could she say? Apparitor was making faces at her, a strange gesture, oh, he was blowing kisses. Tell her that you loved her cousin, and her cousin loved you. Tell her that vengeance for Tain Hu would be misguided.

  Baru clambered to her feet through a cloud of buzzing spring flies. The skiff rocked beneath her. And she tried to tell the truth, the truth that Apparitor would hear as a lie.

  “I loved the duchess Vultjag dearly. She was my …

  “She was the compass that kept my course.

  “We fought together. She was my field-general, my trusted hand.

  “And when I needed to do something hateful, I asked another.

  “Because I would not force dishonor on Tain Hu.”

  “Do you hear,” Apparitor cried, “do you hear? Tain Hu loved the woman you’ve come to kill! Would you murder what your cousin loved?”

  The killing woman perched on a low stone. Methodically she laid out her heavy crossbow, cut off the wet bowstring, began to fit a replacement. Iraji crouched behind Baru, ready to pull her down. Yawa sat in the prow, motionless and silent. And behind them the fire roared across the swamp, driving up the birds on columns of smoke, as Tenshy Diminute screamed and died on the spear in his bowel.

  “Why,” the flat-voiced mask asked, “did you let your beloved die?”

  “The law!” Baru cried. How could Baru make this woman understand the irony? Tain Hu died to help me win! Don’t kill me to avenge her! “The law demanded it! Let the traitor be judged by the moon, which knows the way of changing faces, and by the stars, which hold the constant faith!”

  “You are an agent of the Throne. You could have saved her.”

  “No,” Yawa said. “She would not have been saved to live as a hostage. Not Tain Hu. You know that, Shir.”