The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Of course I’m awake. What is it?” He’d been going over his service ledger, scratching out the names of the dead. He’d chewed his bare knuckles down to blood.

  “Sulane’s on the northern horizon,” Baru panted. “She gained half a mile on us overnight.”

  Apparitor swore and threw his pen at Baru. She caught it in her right hand, without thinking, and they both stared at her fist in surprise for a moment. Then Apparitor threw a rag novel at her, too, which struck her in the breast and made her grunt, dropping the pen.

  “Why!” Apparitor shouted. “Why the fuck didn’t we go east? Isla Cauteria! Loyal ships! The trade lanes to Falcrest! Instead of fucking south! You know what’s south? Pirate waters and maelstrom and fuck all to help us!”

  “Because Yawa thinks the Llosydanes will—”

  Apparitor made a fist against the wall, slow, seismic, holding himself back. Baru saw there were already four bloody commas in the warped pine. Oh. He hadn’t gnawed his knuckles open. He’d been battering himself against the ship as he counted off the dead.

  “Yawa thinks, eh?” He beamed at her. “I don’t like her thoughts very much. You know why I suspect she sent her brother north to join you? So you’d kill him. She couldn’t bear to do it herself. How’s that feel, Baru, to be a public resource, a wellspring of cruel endings?”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Baru said. The barb struck her in numb scar tissue, and fell away. She lived now in a thick fog, and the lights of her hopes seemed very far away.

  “Well, I don’t like your thoughts, either!” Apparitor crashed down into his hammock. “Fuck my pink balls. We should be outrunning them. A clipper should outrace a frigate.”

  Baru stole his place at his desk. “Your crew’s Storm Corps, aren’t they? Trained for western waters? This is the navy’s ocean. They might know the currents better.”

  “I know,” he said, sullenly. He was thinking of his lover. Lindon Satamine the Empire Admiral, the man the navy’s admirals wanted to remove. “I know.”

  “We’re still a week out from the Llosydanes. Water’s short.” Baru cleared her throat. She liked telling him how to run his ship, which made her feel faintly guilty. “We should begin rationing.”

  “Water’s short? That can’t be right. I had the ship provisioned for—”

  “There’s fungus in the casks.”

  “Ah. Just our luck. Rations it is!” He offered a bottle of The Grand Purifier, dangled perilously between two fingers. “Vodka to fortify your day?”

  They drank together from tiny glazed coffee cups. The vodka stung and made Baru hiss. Apparitor frowned furiously at his cup, and didn’t speak.

  “I want to be clear,” Baru said, tentatively, “that, ah, that what happened back at the keep was my fault.”

  “Was it? The navy’s always hated Lindon, and the navy knows I protect him.”

  “They came for me. To punish me for what I did.”

  “Of course! Of course you want the blame.” He poured another thimble of vodka, drank, grimaced, and looked at her with red smiling eyes. “You want to be in charge of everything, don’t you? You even want to rule the disasters. Why—” He laughed with horrible cheer. “All your victories in Aurdwynn were massacres, weren’t they? So this must feel like another victory to you! Your hostage removed, my house reduced! Congratulations, Agonist. You win again.”

  Gods of stone and fire, Apparitor, I never wanted to take your people from you: I wanted to pay the whole price myself.

  It hurt like—how had she thought of it at Sieroch? Like glass powder in her cup. Like glimmering motes in the flesh of her throat, in the sponge of her lungs, pumped into her blood so glass lodged in the small joints of her fingers and the lobes of her ears. It hurt. But if Baru could just find a problem to tackle, a maneuver to plot, a precision to execute with all her life and work at stake, then she’d be too full of cleverness to grieve.

  These past few days she’d had trouble getting out of her hammock in the morning.

  “Let’s make a plan for the Llosydanes,” she said. “Let’s do something. We’re cryptarchs, aren’t we? Let’s conspire.”

  “No.” He stared listlessly at his bookshelf. She could trace his eyes’ passage over the titles. At Last, The Aurochime. Into the Next Manifold. I Awakened Crystodepsis. “No, let’s not. We can’t trust each other. They have Lindon, so I’ll look for their fucking Cancrioth, and they have Xate Olake, so I suppose Yawa will look, too. But you? Make your own plans. I won’t help you. Helping you helps Farrier, and I won’t be his pawn.”

  Baru swallowed cold poisonous calm straight from the bottle.

  “If Hu were alive,” she asked, “would it be different?”

  “Of course it would.” He struggled back to his feet, suddenly electrified: “Have you been feeding that gull? The one who dances on the mast for food?”

  “I— Yes, why?”

  “Do you know who trained it to do that?”

  “Farrier, I think.”

  He grinned madly at her. “Farrier! Ha.”

  * * *

  AS Baru went out, the ship’s cook, an old Falcresti woman of darker color and weird very nearly Stakhi-rounded eyes, came by to ask Apparitor about the menu. Did he like his trout swimming in wine sauce and salt capers, or would he prefer it thinly cut, prepared in the Oriati style of glass and gauze? She had raspberries, too, from the Elided Keep’s interior gardens, which she could serve stuffed with fat caviar. Soon they would have to rely on preserved foods and sea catch, so he should eat richly while he could.

  Apparitor looked up at her silently for a while. Baru tried to keep herself out of the way, in case he exploded in rage at the cook’s frivolity. But instead he leapt up and embraced the woman, bloody apron and all, just as he had smeared himself on Captain Branne when he came aboard.

  “Munette,” he said, “I’ll have the same tajine from the same pot you’re serving everyone else, and you’ll lottery your fancy dishes to the keep’s survivors. You’re a marvel, you know that? Raspberries and caviar! A marvel!”

  She shuffled and muttered. When Apparitor let her go, she looked crossly at Baru. “Does the Souswardi have a special diet?” she asked. “Will she require attentions?”

  I want to eat a heart, Baru thought. I want a tender deer-heart, cut out raw and still trembling, all its lobes spread out like a butterfly and slathered in cream and simmered over low coals. And I want my bodyguards laughing around me as Hu crouches across the fire and whittles her wood.

  Well, she would have her bodyguards back soon enough. Though not at all in the way she wanted.

  “No,” she said. “I need meat, and hard liquor, and lemon. That’s all.”

  The cook turned to go, and then Xate Yawa stood in her way, barefoot and severe in a cotton peasant’s dress. In that instant Baru saw the most curious thing. Yawa began to duck her head and avert her eyes, like a serving-girl passing a Falcresti steward in the hallway.

  Then she was smiling brilliantly at Baru and Svir, and the cook had been entirely erased from her body’s reactions.

  “Iscend and I have reached a bargain with Shao Lune,” she said. “She’ll tell us about the mutiny and its scope in exchange for an Imperial pardon for grand treason and a guilty plea to charges of excessive loyalty to an officer below the Emperor.”

  Baru was very disappointed. She’d wanted to slip in and offer Shao a better bargain on the side. Well, there was still a chance. “Let’s go see her now!”

  “I don’t want to talk to her.” Apparitor began scrounging around for his pen. “She’s a mutineer and an opportunist, she only ‘defected’ to us because she wanted to save her own life, and fuck, fuck!” He came up with a broken pen in his fist. “Fine, fine, I’m done throwing a tantrum, let’s go see her.”

  “Very good,” Yawa said.

  Baru went after them and Apparitor blocked her. “Not you. Go talk to Captain Branne, figure out how to ration the water.”

  “Svir’s right.�
� Yawa smiled sweetly. “I think seeing you might enrage her. For you are, after all, the face of all her troubles.”

  * * *

  BARU went back to her hammock in the ship’s prow arsenal, which was fitting, because she was in a seething fury. She resolved to at last open her mail. But instead she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling, and after most of a watch, lulled by the ocean and the sweaty warmth, she fell asleep.

  In her sweat she dreamt of Hesychast’s utopia. She was in the school at Iriad, where she had lived through the fall of Taranoke. But instead of ash-concrete the school was made of polished coral, and the walls slipped coolly beneath her fingers. She was going to her class, where they would be tested, today, for the fidelity of their birth: she would dance, and if the secret dance taught to her mother had come down through the flesh into her, then she would dance as her mother had when she heard this same music. Later there would be calisthenics, and lessons keyed to pleasure and discomfort, so their bodies would know that good clean work felt like cool water, and that poor work was itch and sweat. The time would come soon for injections of flesh memory from Falcresti donors: but not yet.

  In the baths she saw her second cousin Lao, older and more graceful: in this dream she had aged with Baru, in that way dreams do. Oh, she was a marvel, as tall and poised as a heroic statue in the Exemplaries of Falcrest; but she had a masterless joy too, in the way she grinned and the fall of her thick black hair across her body. She was laughing with her friends, who loved and admired her. And seeing Lao’s goodness and her power, to brighten and inspire and delight, Baru wanted her, wanted her so badly, so she could make Lao feel as wonderful as she truly was: and in her gut that sense of falling quickly, like a leap from the reef into shallow sea.

  And then she felt her bowels twist. The blood rushed from her head like she’d stood up too suddenly. Lao’s nakedness fell out of focus as the headache came. Baru went into the commode and gagged down the hole. In an hour she would have a rash; tomorrow a wrung, exhausted lack of energy, like after a bad fright. The flesh did not agree.

  But in the dream she was also in the courtyard after lessons, sulking over a poor mark. And Tain Hu was there, too. She was climbing the lychee tree Baru had helped plant (in the dream it had grown tall), deep brown and strong, her mulberry-paper shirt and trousers pulled apart by her exertion to bare hard stomach. The girls (in the dream bodies of women) cheered her. She got to the top despite the thick branches, never looking down: she plucked a red spiny lychee, put it in her mouth, and somehow, by art of tooth and tongue, cracked the rind perfectly in half so it shucked off in her hand and let her bite down. Baru felt quite perturbed.

  Without looking at her—as if barely aware she existed, but aware still—Hu plucked another fruit and tossed it, as if discarding it, down into cousin Lao’s lap. Then Hu put back her head and swallowed the lychee; her throat arched, and Lao looked as if she might faint.

  In the dream Baru looked away. But there was no gut-ache, and no rash.

  She woke up groaning and gummy-tongued. A chime on deck told her she’d slept deep into the night. It was star watch, Helbride suffocating in the hot still hours before a morning storm. She’d wasted the day. She was alone.

  Shame clubbed at her brow. Quickly. Quickly. Tain Hu was counting on her. She had to do something important. What was important?

  Whatever hurt the most.

  Baru stuck her hands through her hammock and pawed around until she found the envelope with Purity Cartone’s message, the message with the ledger of secrets, the secrets of everyone she’d betrayed. No more delay! She would face the pain.

  She found a candle and lit it with a few snaps of a sparkfire lighter. Then she tore the envelope open with the edge of a nail and—

  It had already been opened. The envelope had been slashed.

  “No,” Baru hissed, “no, no, no…” She turned it inside out and something tumbled out onto the deck—a snake! Baru recoiled, fell off her hammock, landed on the candle, and burnt herself into darkness.

  She lay there panting. It wasn’t a snake. She was being an idiot. It was just a smooth leather strip. A garrote? No, this must be a scytale! There ought to be Aphalone letters carved into the leather—yes, there. Now it had to be wrapped around a cylinder of the correct size so the letters aligned.

  Purity Cartone would choose a cylinder he knew Baru had close to hand. A spyglass? No, nor a scabbard, too easy to sell or lose.…

  Baru braced her leg against the bulkhead and wrapped the scytale around her left calf. Still nonsense. But she was certain her calf would be the right key.

  It must be a ciphertext, then. Chewing absentmindedly on the leather, Baru arranged her ink and scrap paper and recorded the letters as they’d aligned on her leg. Then she converted each Aphalone letter into a number by its place in the alphabet.

  (Who had gone snooping through her mail? Apparitor? Xate Yawa? Iraji? Iscend Comprine? And why hadn’t they taken the scytale? Because they knew they couldn’t decrypt it?)

  She began from the assumption that Purity Cartone was good at spycraft. He’d never risk a simple substitution cipher like a is six and b is seven—any decent mathematician could crack that with frequency analysis. So he must have used the Cipher of Spices, which was impenetrable.

  First, make the letters into numbers. Then choose a spice-word, any word you like. Convert that word into a string of numbers, and add those numbers to the original text, breaking up the shape of the enciphered words the way cumin broke up the taste of the stew.

  What spice word would Cartone choose?

  Easy. Cartone had been discharged from Imperial service. Baru was now a surrogate empire to him, hegemon of his every purpose. He would use the word that defined their relationship.

  His conditioned command word.

  Baru wrote out the word SUSPIRE, enumerated it, and subtracted that string of numbers from the ciphertext, beginning over at the number for S whenever she hit the last letter E. Nonsense! Perhaps if she added the spice-code instead of subtracting it … shit, shit, shit. Nothing.

  “Why am I so thick?” she asked the darkness. “Wasn’t I a savant?”

  “Mmph,” Iraji said, and Baru struck her head against the forward bulkhead in surprise. He was in the arsenal with her! He’d pitched his hammock while she was asleep—a slim shadow curled up in the lees of the crossbow lockup.

  She couldn’t imagine why he’d come to sleep near her. She never could imagine, could she? Her eternal mistake. Forgetting to put herself in other peoples’ minds.

  Ah. And that was why she couldn’t decipher Cartone’s message.

  He’d remember that she was an accountant. He’d try to fit the message to her mind—and an empty account started at zero. So if she treated the first Aphalone letter as zero, not one, then—

  TO MY AUTHORITY AND HANDLER

  YOUR EYES ONLY

  TARGET ANNOTATED. I HAVE RECOVERED HER FILE OF SECRETS. SUMMARY ATTACHED.

  TARGET ADMITTED UNDER DURESS THAT SHE REPORTED TO YOUR PEER “HESYCHAST,” MINISTER OF THE METADEME AND CHIEF SCIENTIST OF THE INCRASTIC PROJECT. HER PURPOSE WAS TO SUPPORT THE REBELLION AND TO PURSUE TRAFFIC WITH THE AGENTS OF A FOREIGN SECRET SERVICE CALLED THE CANCRIOTH.

  SHE DESCRIBED HESYCHAST AS AN INCARNATION OF THE AURDWYNNI RELIGIOUS FIGURE YKARI HIMU. SEVERAL TIMES DURING HER INTERROGATION SHE APPEALED TO HIMU FOR IMMORTALITY.

  I HAVE RECEIVED RECALL SIGNALS BUT THEY CONFLICT WITH THE JURISPOTENCE XATE YAWA’S DISCHARGE ORDER. THEREFORE YOU REMAIN MY SOLE AUTHORITY AND HANDLER.

  I WISH TO OBEY YOU MORE COMPLETELY AND I DO NOT KNOW HOW EXCEPT TO GIVE YOU MY PROGRAMMING-WORD. “SUSPIRE” COMPELS OBEDIENCE BUT THE WORD “CAENOGEN” PERMITS PROGRAMMING.

  PLEASE ASSIGN ME A NEW TASK. PLEASE RECOLLECT THAT THE LOSS OF MY TESTICLES MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO ESCAPE NOTICE IN ANY SITUATION REQUIRING NUDITY.

  CONTACT ME AT: KETLY NORGRAF, SNOWDROP HOTEL, TREATYMONT.

  I AM VERY HAPPY TO SERVE

  B
aru grinned hugely, and felt a hunger in her head, an acid growling disquiet. It was the appetite to cause vast havoc. And if it was not indulged it would ulcerate her mind.

  She could find these Cancrioth and raise the Oriati to war against Falcrest from the south. And from the north, the Stakhieczi. If only she could convince them to march.…

  She dipped her pen in the ink-bulb, flicked the excess at the bottom of the page, and above that lash of spilled ink began to write. She ordered Cartone north, into the Wintercrest mountains, to contact the Stakhieczi Necessary King.

  DELIVER ENCLOSED MESSAGE. INFORM KING I HAVE LOCATED MISSING STAKHI PRINCE. RETURN WITH RESPONSE.

  DESTROY THIS LETTER

  It was odd that someone had gone through her mail rather than just pinching it. They must have been in a desperate hurry. Someone who feared discovery by the ship’s crew, then. Iscend? Or Yawa?

  Baru sketched out her message to the Necessary King.

  We will never marry, Your Majesty. I am not a queen for kings.

  By now you know that my rebellion was a lie. By now the survivors of your armies have reported what I truly am. An agent of the Emperor in Falcrest.

  But my ambitions exceed mere agency. In pursuit of those ambitions I am still prepared to offer you what you most desire. Access to Aurdwynn’s grain, to feed your people, and commerce with her valleys, to enrich your artisans. And security from the Imperial Republic of Falcrest, which desires absolute suzerainty over the world.

  I will soon prepare a special trade area in the Duchy of Vultjag, where you may dispatch your traders to barter.

  In exchange I ask that you help me destroy the Masquerade. My aims are as simple as yours. As proof of my good faith I offer you the return of your lost brother, Svirakir.

  Make your armies and fleets ready, King of Mansions. When the time is right, I will open the way to Falcrest.

  I remain,

  Your only hope,

  Baru Fisher, the Fairer Hand, Queen of Aurdwynn

  (by acclamation)

  * * *

  THE ledger of secrets was missing.

  Cartone said he’d attached a transcript of the dukes and duchesses’ killing secrets and it was missing.