The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  * * *

  FIRST, a quick stop at the post. She bought a clipper-rate seal, rolled up her letter to Purity Cartone, and left it for the next mail ship to Treatymont. Her letter to Aminata went in for routing through the navy.

  So that was that. Despite her fear for Apparitor’s personal anguish, she had promised him to the Necessary King. She was too busy to feel anything of it.

  “We’re going to the harbormaster,” she told Hu. “It’s the Cancrioth money we want, isn’t it? So first we find if anyone supplied those Oriati warships. Then we find out who.”

  A paper ticket got her an appointment, and a competitively priced bribe put her on the priority list. Her bravos played grids over a rudder table and whispered about her.

  “Miss Payo Mu?” The harbormaster, a compactly fat Belthyc woman of very handsome build and alert features, ushered her inside.

  “Nice desk,” Baru said, meaning it. She’d hammered planks across half a wooden wheel, creating a sort of formidable half-moon balcony. She looked as if she sat at the helm of a great ship.

  “Thank you. I do well at it. I understand you paid an urgency fee?”

  “Yes, your Excellence.” Baru curtsied extravagantly. “I’m with the Ordainments, Imperial Republic shipping insurance and futures. I’ve been asked to reassess the risks of trade near Kyprananoke. As your islands are not so far north of the kypra, here I am.”

  The harbormaster looked up sharply. “And you came to me? Not the Sydanemoot? Do you understand that any peril to the date trade means people starve?”

  “I work from the bottom up, your Excellence. It’s the republican way. I only want to see your shipping records.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m looking for unusual transactions,” Baru said, “transfers of water, salted goods, medicines, anything which might supply a large group of warships.”

  “Pirates. I see.” The harbormaster nodded very firmly. “We’d be happy to open our books to an authorized factor. I’ll just send a girl to check your papers against our records? Not to imply that you’re a fake, but an unscrupulous party might try to cause a panic.…”

  “Yes. About that.” Baru winced theatrically. “If word of my presence got out…”

  The quartermaster’s hand twitched. “Yes?”

  “Don’t you think it might cause a run on the local currency?”

  She made a face like Baru had gutted a rat on her desk. She very much thought it might cause a run on the local currency. And she knew that would doom her.

  The exchange rate between the Sydani ring shell and the Falcresti fiat note was nearly eighty to one: you paid eighty ring shells for one fiat note. Fiat notes were scarce here, because as soon as they came into the islands, they went out again to buy food. Just like any other good, their value depended on their rarity.

  If Baru actually were an insurance agent, she might decide the Llosydanes were dangerous. She might advise trade ships to stay away. Suddenly Masquerade fiat notes would be much more scarce here … and therefore more valuable. Four times as valuable, say. And suddenly you would need four times as much Sydani money to get a bushel of grain.

  If you were a harbormaster who (say) bought Masquerade goods and sold them locally, you’d lose everything. You’d need to quadruple your sales price, and then no one would buy.

  “Mam,” the harbormaster said, “I don’t think we’ll need to send a girl to check your papers after all.”

  “Excellent.” Baru smiled innocently. “Should I give you privacy, so you can inform the necessaries?”

  “Necessaries, mam?”

  “The Oriati spies who’ve asked you to alert them if anyone comes probing in your books.”

  “Oh, Wydd help me.” She flattened her palms firmly on the desk. “If I have diplomatic contacts, they’re entirely aboveboard and legitimate.”

  But she gave Baru her books to inspect.

  The book made a big dog’s bark when dropped on the wood. Two plates of bronze guarded pages of chiseled driftwood. Baru scanned the numbers, letting her savancy sift the money like a new vintage on her mind’s palate. She could taste honeyed relief when a trader arrived with rare textiles for a hungry market; brackish salt when rival ships unloaded preserved meats and the market raced to the bottom; an airy sense of peregrine speed as the end of trade season drove prices to extremes …

  … and a bitter false note.

  Baru frowned and flipped backward a few weeks, to the spring of AR 130, this very year, in the closing weeks of the Coyote rebellion. Her fingers probed the shipping figures for freshwater casks.

  They were completely unremarkable.

  They were fake.

  “Just so you know.” She pushed the book over to the quartermaster. “You botched up the counterfeit records.”

  The harbormaster groaned. “On what grounds do you—”

  “The first digits of your water sales that month were randomly distributed. See? About as many numbers start with five, or nine, as one or two.” Baru prodded the page. “Real accounts always have more ones and twos on the first digit. It’s called the Littler Law. Remember it next time you need to forge a page.”

  Someone here had sold a lot of water to a lot of ships. And it had been kept off the books.

  The harbormaster looked as if she might withdraw her head into her neck and vanish under a shell. “It’s not what you think.”

  “Oh? What do I think?”

  “That I’m a traitor. But the man who told me to do this was Falcresti. He told me that I had to cover up the sales. He said the Llosydanes could be destroyed if I didn’t.”

  Baru spun that around in her head, considering the angles, and decided on the most likely scenario. A Morrow Ministry agent had buried the evidence of the Oriati attack fleet to try to avert war? Sensible enough. Yawa might be speaking to him right now.

  “Is there anything I can do to make this go away?” the harbormaster asked.

  “Sure.” Baru leaned up grinning on her desk. “Some people are going to come ask you some questions. Tell them the truth. Tell them there might be no date season this year, on account of fear of pirates.”

  The harbormaster raised her chin. “I won’t drive the Families to a panic.”

  “Yes you will. One day of panic for me to profit from … and I promise I won’t ever report this to Falcrest. Let them think the season’s ruined, and I’ll see that it isn’t.” She dropped a ten thousand note bond on the desk. “I’ll sign that over to you tonight. If you’re good.”

  She waved at the two spies in the plaza outside, went down to her bravos at the base of the steps—and found them both, two very fit and self-possessed women, nonetheless terribly besotted, laughing and making big eyes at one Miss Iscend Comprine, who was demonstrating gymnastics while chatting in fluent Iolynic.

  “Yawa,” Baru hissed, and turned, and—

  * * *

  “THERE you are.”

  Xate Yawa’s voice sprang out of her blindness, close enough to brush noses. “Fuck,” Baru snapped. “Don’t do that!”

  “Hello. I thought you might need a chaperone,” Yawa said. She had absolutely crept up to nose-distance of Baru just to frighten her. “The bank told me you’d gone to the post, the post to the harbormaster. I just had to ask for ‘the woman with the angry Maia face and the money.’”

  She’d worn a canvas jacket and silk trousers, and her bright green scarf was so ghoulishly out of place that it looked like plunder off another woman’s corpse. “No!” Baru shouted. “I don’t need a chaperone!”

  “Good, then, we’ll go together. Would you like to know how this island gets freshwater?”

  “No…” But Baru really did.

  “It’s all a matter of age,” Yawa said, taking her arm. “The years have chiseled the islands to a certain hardness.”

  Baru groaned. “Oh, tell me more about the hardness of age.”

  “Simple! The base of these pillars”—she pointed down, a thrilling reminder of their
altitude—“must be the hardest and most impermeable stone, to resist the sea so long. That creates a cup against which freshwater aquifers can pool.” Yawa conjured a cup of her own from her pocket, a little cork travel thimble. “The old and hard supports the new and bountiful, hm? Together they survive.”

  “You should be careful here. They might know who you are.”

  “Of course they’ll know!” Yawa adjusted the bun of her hair. “Your dear grandmother, who resembles Xate Yawa by coincidence.”

  “I have some work in motion here I need to look after—”

  “Baru,” Yawa murmured, in a raw cold voice like city slush, “we should talk. You drink all day and lie awake in your hammock all night. You’re sick. You’re dying, in fact, and you don’t know it, because by the time you’re dead it will feel quite normal to be lifeless. And you talk to Apparitor like he’s your friend, when he’s poisoning you day by day.

  “I tried to keep you out of all this. I failed. You are in it now. I won’t see you waste what my niece gave you. Will you listen, please?”

  * * *

  BARU did not want to listen. “Did you find the Morrow Ministry station?”

  “Never mind that.”

  “Did you steal my ledger?”

  “Your ledger?”

  “Never mind. There are two spies following me—”

  “Oriati, I expect,” Yawa judged. “The Termites must have a post here. Keep an eye out for a tunk case officer.” She dropped the obscenity without apology or hesitation. The streets had brought out the commoner from behind the judge. “Through here, now, we’ll take the bridge back over to Samylle.”

  They crossed the dizzying height across sand-roughened hardwood. Yawa clung to Baru and refused to look down. Around them passed crowds of women. The way they held hands made Baru reflexively nervous. It was a culture of public adoration and touch, not a sign of romance, but fear was fear.

  In Samylle plaza an old fat man in handsomely drab costume played the role of Wydd, sitting patiently as children tickled and tugged on him. Merchants sold little scrimshawed idols of Wydd and Devena and Himu: Devena, a tall spare woman with flat breasts and her hands opened equitably; Himu, a delightful dancing grotesquerie with motherly hips and a jutting erection.

  “Vile,” Yawa muttered, surprising Baru, her anger not Incrastic at all, “vile to sell likenesses of the virtues.”

  “Why?”

  “The virtues must come into you and live in you and express themselves through your works. Idols teach you to keep them outside. Idols mislead.”

  “Unuxekome told me you were a believer,” Baru ventured, “but I didn’t know whether…”

  “Whether I’d lied to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, child!” Yawa laughed sadly. “Do you think Falcrest would choose an unbeliever as their persecutor? When you want to slaughter the cattle, you spare one of them, and then you send her to the next herd to lead them. You don’t waste time putting a man in a cow suit. Come, come down here, see what a believer I am. I had to visit it.”

  She led Baru down the road called Llallyrd (she said yee-a-yeerd) to a square at the edge of the islet.

  Baru gasped in wonder.

  A tremendous cylindrical device of tapering bronze stood upright, like a pillar, beneath a sailcloth awning. The central shaft had been fixed in place by six stone columns and an ingenious apparatus of rope and precious bronze. Yet it could not be a functioning telescope, for even if, by some miracle, mirrors of that size had been made, it was aimed straight down.

  “What kind of telescope is it?” she asked Yawa.

  “A spiritual one.”

  “A spiritual telescope?”

  “Of course. It peers into the world.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Come, come along, you balk like a baby goat.”

  Yawa led the way down the ampitheater steps into the telescope’s pit. Directly beneath the apparatus was a pool of clear water—but no, no, that couldn’t be water, it didn’t seem to catch the light quite right.

  Baru peered over the edge.

  The well plunged into shimmering confusion. Far down below shone a blue-green light, like tide fire. But it came up to Baru through illuminated layers of color character, golden, greasy, soap-shine iridescent. “What is this?”

  “An oil pit. The lens of the World Telescope.” Yawa tucked her feet beneath her on the bottom step. “Five years ago, in Duchy Lyxaxu, a dry pit was found in an ancient valley. I ordered it filled with concrete. Not the worst thing I ever did. But close.”

  It smelled faintly but bitingly of alcohol. Open-mouthed she breathed the well air, until hints of deeper flavor gave her a theory. “Ah! The well’s full of different layers of chemistry. Alcohol water is the lightest, so it comes to the top. Next should be, ah, I can’t remember my densities.…”

  “Lamp oil, I should think.”

  “Yes! A vegetable extract next—”

  “And freshwater at the bedrock base. The light from the bottom of the world comes up through the layers of oil, see, and becomes distorted by each layer—”

  “But why would anyone want the light distorted?” Baru protested.

  “Because this telescope observes messages from the heart of creation! One dares not see such things too clearly.”

  “I’d dare,” Baru grumbled.

  “Because you’re already quite insane.”

  Baru stared at her wavering reflection. The tiny motions of the earth and air must stir this pool of layered oils. The very subtlest derangements of the universe, captured in the tremble of the surface.…

  “I’m not insane,” she said, softly.

  “Oh, come now,” Yawa clucked. “Let’s not bicker over the obvious. You have blunt-trauma dextral hemineglect with an alien limb and possible complicating fugue flight. If I were reviewing your marriage license I’d never let you bear children. Imagine them all born half-minded. Or half-bodied, goodness.”

  She let that rest a moment. “And if I’d been asked to develop a case for your institutionalization in the Metademe, I would have no trouble writing a very convincing report.”

  Nothing Baru could imagine would be worse than the Metademe. Conditioning and endless reconditioning, mush and children’s block puzzles, and the memory of brilliance pierced by a steel lobotomy pick.

  “Hesychast asked you to do that?” she said. “Develop a case for my insanity?”

  “Mm. In case you needed to be removed. He thinks you are too deeply in Farrier’s control to be managed.”

  “Can I persuade you to stop?”

  “He has Olake. I can’t refuse him.”

  Once Baru had asked Olake, what will Yawa do when Treatymont falls to us? The mobs will tear your sister apart.…

  And he’d said, with gleaming earnest eyes, I’ll save her, of course. She’s saved me often enough. Devena knows these things come back around.

  “Thank you for the warning,” she said. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

  “Baru, I want to help you. I don’t want us to be at odds forever.”

  “The way you helped me with Cattlson’s duel?”

  “Baru,” Yawa said, and then, chuckling, “what would you have done in my place? Let a foreign girl take the reins of the scheme you’d grown so carefully? And Treatymont doesn’t show us honestly. We were always watched. You never knew me as I truly am.”

  “I didn’t change much when I left,” Baru said.

  “What a remarkably self-deprecating statement.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “You need my advice, Baru. You haven’t been cautious enough with Apparitor. He’s playing a very subtle game with you.”

  “Oh? I should come running to hide under your skirts?”

  Yawa’s eyes flashed: lids peeled back, teeth glinting, bone-white rings around irises of lightning blue. “You think you’ve nothing to learn from me?”

  Baru knew at once that she’d trespassed on Yawa’
s pride. Stupid to assume the old woman had infinite patience. Stupid, Baru, stupid. But her throat ached, and her head felt thick, and she wanted to hurt Yawa for what she’d done to Muire Lo.

  “How about this,” Yawa said, unctuously sweet. “You go on trying to do everything yourself. When you have your first seizure, then you come to me.”

  “Why would I have a seizure?”

  “Experience tells me they often strike in cases like yours.”

  Baru sighed. “That’s not what you mean.”

  “Don’t tell me what I mean, child—”

  “You’re telling me that once I have a seizure, you’ll have an excuse to poke me with a lobotome. You want to be sure I come report it to you, don’t you? You want to be sure you get the confession. Then you can put my mind out.”

  “Hmm,” Yawa said, thoughtfully. “You want me as your enemy, don’t you? That’s too bad. Much too bad. I thought, maybe, we could cooperate to help Aurdwynn. But Hesychast’s right, Farrier has cut the possibility of friendship out of you. You don’t want to help anyone but yourself, do you?”

  “Tain Hu never trusted you,” Baru said. And in the silence afterward she got up and went, quickly, quietly, not looking back.

  * * *

  SHE had the spoor of the pirates’ passage in the erasure of the water sales. Now she had to learn who had sold that water.

  She followed her bravos’ directions to the date market.

  This early in the season the market was nearly empty. Date trees were a poor fit for island growth, even the hardy, stubby, peculiarly tangy Sydani dates—like the people, they clung to this place with a stubbornness Baru admired. The families would be thinning the dates now, pulling some so others could grow to full size. Infanticide.

  It wouldn’t be until late summer, the seventy-fifth or the eightieth, that the harvest would come in. Just as Parliament in Falcrest planted a harvest of its own: the vote on war or peace.

  “Futures.” Baru spun her half-sight round the plaza. “Who sells the date futures?”

  With a little ruckus and shouting Baru caused the appearance of a junior niece from the Jamascine family, a gaunt Belthyc woman who was minding the trade office in case of unannounced visitors. “Hello,” Baru said, sitting on the woman’s desk. “I’d like to buy some date futures.”