The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

Out of sheer pride and grief and gratitude Baru would have burst into tears or (more likely) begun to hurl things, except that the screaming from outside finally overpowered the fiddler’s song.

  * * *

  IT was all over by the time they arrived. A man in the square had recognized Xate Yawa, and followed her a little ways, unsure of his courage. Then he’d taken a snort of mason dust and tried to strangle her to death.

  By the time Baru and Ulyu Xe arrived the man was dead on the ground with cut wrists and a slashed throat. His left thumb dangled by a tab of skin. Baru knew those cuts: you put your hands up by reflex, against the knife. But your hands could be cut, too.

  Iscend Comprine hummed as she went through his pockets.

  “It’s not the first time I’ve been throttled,” Yawa snapped, fending off Baru’s solicitations. “I see the diver lured you out. Good. The damn prisoners insist they must see you, or they won’t speak.”

  “This wasn’t necessary.” Xe looked down sadly at the dead man. “I knew him. He would’ve gone quietly.”

  “Gone and died of sepsis from those cuts,” Yawa said. “Baru, be a dear and help me up.”

  Baru lifted her by her armpits. “Roll your head about. Tell me if you feel any pain.”

  “Of course my neck’s in pain. I’m fucking sixty and I write too much.” Yawa extracted herself from Baru and went forward applauding: “Iscend, Iscend, I knew you were magnificent!”

  The Clarified woman took a bow and, like an artist, flicked the blood off her knife onto a stone wall in the lee of an overhang, where the scab would last through rainstorms. “All in the service, my lady.”

  Ulyu Xe stared at Iscend, too. Baru hadn’t thought anyone devoted to patience and reserve could easily express pure loathing. She was wrong. Xe looked ready to wait forever for Iscend’s messy death.

  “Now we ought to go, I think.” Yawa coughed twice, harshly, into her gloved fist. “I only paid the constables to ignore so much.”

  * * *

  THEY rowed a boat south to Moem islet, where the prisoners waited.

  “There’s Helbride,” Iscend remarked. Baru followed her pointing hand southeast. Clipper sails bobbed cheerfully against the bright afternoon sky: it was indeed Helbride, sailing south.

  Baru squawked in horror. “Apparitor’s leaving without us!”

  “Of course he is,” Yawa said. “Sulane came in last night. Do you think Apparitor would stay in close moor? Trapped against the rocks?”

  How Aminata would have teased her for forgetting her sailing rules: make some sea room before you fight.

  They beached on Moem’s rocky skirts. Xe led them to a narrow trail that spiraled up the outside of the mesa, and showed them how to belay themselves to the long-lines pitoned into the cliff face. They climbed along the steep path left by the face’s slow collapse. The exercise stole Baru’s thoughts, and her awareness narrowed to the distraction of Xe’s long easy stride, her hard legs glimpsed in swirled-cotton fractions as the wind stirred her robe, the padded curve of fat at her hips.

  I’m lustful, Baru thought. I haven’t gotten off since Sieroch and I just spent a night surrounded by beautiful women. I ought to mind myself for foolishness.

  On top of the islet a fringe of scrubby salt-grass sloped down into a cupped valley, and there sat Faham Execarne’s little Morrow Ministry station: a whitewashed stone farmhouse, a covered well, a pump-arm with a modesty screen for showers, fields of raw earth bordered in stone walls not quite half-built.

  “It’s nice,” Xe said, “isn’t it?”

  Iscend looked on it with Clarified eyes. “The proper signs are shown. It’s safe.”

  Up the trail toward them came a leathery old man with a crossbow and a fat pipe clenched in his jaw. The wind changed. A powerful stink of weed came over them.

  “Faham!” Ulyu Xe cupped her mouth to call ahead. “Faham, I’ve brought the guest.”

  “Trouble’s what you brought.” Faham Execarne studied them from ten paces, a compact dark brown man with deeply folded eyes and a strong blunt chin. Farm work kept him rangy and a little stooped, but Baru would never have mistaken him for a real farmer: his eyes marked them one by one, like files. “Hello again, Jurispotence Yawa. And if I’m up on my telltales, you’re the Imperial agent Baru Cormorant. The one from Sieroch. The one my guests insist on seeing.”

  His crossbow was pointed at Iscend all the while. He clamped his pipe in his teeth and jerked his chin toward Yawa. “Jurispotence, has your thing here killed anyone yet?”

  “Just one I’ve seen. In self-defense.”

  “Self-defense. Those Metademe fucks. I tell you, if you teach a woman to feel good when she kills in self-defense, she’ll get real proactive about that defense. I don’t like having her up here.”

  “She’s just a person,” Baru said, remembering Purity Cartone shot in the chest at Welthony. “Crossbows work on her like anyone else.”

  “Just a person, eh? Isn’t that what they said about Shiqu Si?” Execarne sighed heavily. “Well, come on in. Storm’s on its way, so one road or the other you’re still going to spend the night here. Might as well meet my houseguests. Do you know my protocol?”

  “No interrogation,” Baru said. “No guards, no restraints.”

  “That’s right.” Execarne let the crossbow down with a grunt. “Never been any interrogator who could open people up as good as a true friend. You hear that, Xe? Friends! Come on, show me that holy smile.”

  “Smiles come when they ought,” Xe said, peaceably.

  “That’s my Xe.” Execarne squinted at Baru. “Now you, the noki woman, I’ve heard quite a bit about you. Fair warning, lass, they’ve been talking about whether to devote their lives to murdering you. And the arguments in favor seem strong.”

  Baru didn’t want to be knifed like Prince V Asra the moment she walked in the door. She didn’t want to be the damn fool sucker coaxed by Ulyu Xe and Xate Yawa into a deadly net.

  “I think,” she began, “that I ought to wait outside. Xe, why don’t you go in and warn them all I’m here, so Iscend has a chance to see how they respond—”

  Xate Yawa took Baru by the hand. “Let’s not dither, dear,” she said, with no little relish. “Your Coyotes must have missed you.”

  “How are they? What are they like?” Baru floundered desperately for information. “How did they react to you? What did you ask them?”

  “I told them exactly what you should tell them,” Yawa said. “They are now prisoners of the Imperial Republic. Their best hope for a happy ending is to cooperate fully with us. And if they do, I will ask for their pardon from the lawful Governor of Aurdwynn, Her Grace the Stag Duchess, Haradel Heia, who is styled Heingyl Ri.”

  * * *

  WITH one hand already on the door latch, Baru discovered she could not possibly see this through.

  She had never gone backward before: she had never gone back to anything. She’d left Taranoke and she didn’t know if she still had any hope of return. She’d abandoned her tower in Treatymont, forsaken Muire Lo to die of plague, and walked out of Tain Hu’s tent at Sieroch to meet her destiny. She’d even failed (after all these weeks!) to open the letters from Aminata and her parents.

  She was simply incapable of turning back. Therefore, she could not go inside the farmhouse, nor confront the survivors of Tain Hu’s house: she would have to return to Helbride, and find another way—

  She tried to back out of the breezeway. Ulyu Xe was in her way.

  “Move,” Baru hissed.

  “I feel good here,” Xe said.

  “What’s the problem?” Faham called. “Is it stuck?”

  “No,” Yawa assured him, one hand on his shoulder—how quickly she worked to charm him—“it’s just that Baru’s faintly addled. Watch, in a moment she’ll remember how doors work.”

  “I am not addled,” Baru protested, “I just think that Iscend really ought to go first.”

  Xe put her warm, strong hand on Baru’s shoulder. “They swor
e an oath,” she said. “Remember that an oath runs two ways. Remember to be worthy of it.”

  And while Baru was distracted, Xe’s other hand worked the door latch, and Baru fell stumbling backward into a farmhouse full of people whose loyalty she had ultimately and completely betrayed.

  The last thing she saw before they fell on her was Yawa’s impish smile as she reached out and pushed the door closed behind Ulyu Xe, shutting Baru inside. Then everything was hot flesh and wetness, meat flapping at her hands, on her face, the bestial panting of someone who stank of grass and meat—

  Baru got her arms around it before she realized it was a dog. “Oh,” she said, with enormous relief, as the golden barrel of man-sized love and drool pranced around her pawing and woofing. “Oh, it’s a—very friendly—er—Xe, would you please—”

  “Down, boy,” Xe clucked. The dog went down on all fours, panting enthusiastically, as if it couldn’t wait to lick Baru more. Gingerly, she mopped the dog drool off her chin.

  Everyone sat there, staring at her.

  All her old companions. Gathered, as if for portraiture, at Execarne’s long dinner table: one ragged exile family under cedar rafters and whale-oil lamps. Closest to Baru sat widowed Ake Sentiamut, who had run Tain Hu’s counterfeiting scheme, and who Baru had left as regent over Vultjag. By her were two men—or, really, a man and a boy—Baru’s jumpy bodyguard Ude Sentiamut, who’d shot a friend in the stomach on the Fuller’s Road, who hadn’t had the courage or ice to slit that man’s throat and end his pain. He had his fatherly arm around pimpled Run Czeshine, a boy who’d been so pathetically taken with Baru that she’d been afraid he might have a glandular condition.

  And three more: Nitu the cook, whose enigmatically clotted and greased curries went down like a dead squirrel scraped off a wagon axle, but who never ever made anyone sick. Yythel the herbalist, who brewed prophecy tea and planted silphium everywhere she went, sewing the love groves that let women decide when and how often to bear children.

  And a wraith. A pale, half-real sketch of a man with moss-colored eyes and bloody hair. The jagata fighter Dziransi, ghostly son of the Wintercrests, who had offered his king’s hand to Baru, and led his phalanxes into battle for her lie.

  How terribly he must want to murder her.

  “Uuf, uuf,” the dog said, and nuzzled Baru’s boots. No one else spoke. Baru stood in the doorway barefaced and unready.

  In time the things you’ve done become too large to carry with you. So you set them down. And you think that you are free. But then you look back and see that someone else carries your burden now: you see that you have dropped your weight upon those who stood behind you.

  Dziransi rose from his place at the table. Little abacuses clattered in Baru’s mind, judging the speed of his lunge, the strength of his arms, the chance he’d have to kill her. But he did not try.

  He spoke in deep, earnest, awful Aphalone. “Is the oath kept?”

  “The oath is kept,” said Ulyu Xe. “Duchess Vultjag is dead.”

  Ake Sentiamut rose up across from Dziransi with tears in her eyes and a tremble of power in her throat. When she spoke, for all her Stakhi blood and somber age, she could have been Hu’s sister.

  “Your Majesty Baru Cormorant, Traitor-Queen of Aurdwynn, I am Ake Sentiamut and I speak for your oathbound Vultjagata. By the power of that oath, and in the name of the people of the rebel duchies, I wish to negotiate the rebellion’s conditional surrender.”

  15

  IF I TALLIED MY LIFE TODAY

  AKE’S decision was in retrospect obvious, and elegant, and necessary—but Baru had not foreseen it, and so at first, although she had all the power, she was afraid.

  She’d expected rage and sorrow. She had prepared for madness. She had armed herself against despair: all the things she might find among the survivors of Tain Hu’s house she had anticipated.

  But Tain Hu’s house was made of people, and people always slithered out of Baru’s plans. She had not expected grace, or tenacity, or greatness of spirit in the face of the end of a lifetime’s hope.

  The survivors had organized—oh, Falcrest had expected them to collapse like starved mice when Baru revealed herself—but here in their prison on Moem, so far from home, they had organized magnificently.

  If only it wasn’t utterly futile.

  “The rebellion’s over,” she said, and did not flinch from Ake’s expression. “In the eyes of the Republic it never began.”

  “We know, you stuck-up cunt!” the cook Nitu snapped. The dog whined and Ulyu Xe shushed it with a touch.

  “Nonetheless,” Ake said. “We wish to negotiate.”

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” Baru said.

  “I think your intentions are rather beside the point,” Ake said, crisply. “Run, will you please?”

  The boy Run came out from under Ude’s arm and with downcast eyes offered Baru a page of paper. She accepted it, and murmured thanks: he flinched like she’d put a spark out on his eyelid. Ude went to the back, where a low arch and a sooty curtain led to a hearth room, and brought a stool back for the head of the table.

  “Your Majesty.” With a short bow he invited Baru to sit. He would not look at her. “If you please.”

  Faham Execarne came in with an armful of driftwood from his curing-pile. “Hello, everyone,” he called, “remember my rules about guests. If anyone gets hurt I’ll feed you so many tapeworm eggs that you’ll never satisfy your appetite till the day you die. And a terrible day that will be, as the worms split your guts and crawl out your navel. Carry on, everyone!”

  The dog bumbled amiably against his ankles. He ruffled its scruff and went off into the rest of the house to start a fire.

  The paper in Baru’s hand read, in sharp Aphalone blocks, ACTS OF SURRENDER.

  It was like they were putting on a play, and the topic was a diplomatic meeting. But they had to know, certainly, that they were utterly powerless.…

  “I don’t understand what you want,” Baru admitted. “Why are you doing this?”

  There was a general rustle around the table. Dziransi’s fists curled. “We want to negotiate,” Ake repeated, with finality. “To make our terms. Will you sit?”

  “If this is not a negotiating table,” Ulyu Xe said, reasonably, “what else could it possibly be?”

  And then Baru, through a roundabout and cryptic detour, understood.

  * * *

  WHY do people do the things they do? If there are reasons for their acts, reasons like threads which trail back into the snarled silk of a life, how can we deduce those reasons from the acts?

  Begin with a hashing function.

  A hashing function is a one-way equation. How can there be such a thing? If two and two make four, then four is made of two and two, isn’t it?

  No. Given only the number four you do not know if it was made from two and two, or three and one, or four and nothing. You cannot easily go in reverse.

  Say that you are a spymaster.

  Say that you need to give your operatives a way to recognize each other. Of course you can’t give them each a full list of all your trusted spies. What if, instead, you gave them a list of secret words which are not names, but which are derived from names, as acts are derived from thoughts?

  How is this useful?

  Given a code name of any size, like AGONIST, and a hashing function, and some very patient mathematicians, you can produce a secret word of fixed shape, called a cartouche. Say the cartouche for AGONIST is 0AB002. See how the cartouche is six letters? You can put any word of any length into this function, you can put in LAPETIARE BEGAN THE REVOLUTION or the full text of I Summoned Antideath! but the hashing function does not care, it is set up to always yield six letters.

  The names of everyone in this room—Baru and Ulyu Xe, Ake and Dziransi, Run and Ude, Nitu and Yythel—could all be given to that hashing function and made into six-letter cartouches, 038801 for Baru and 0AC802 for Ulyu Xe and so forth. And if Baru wanted to prove to Ulyu that sh
e was on Ulyu’s list of trustworthy agents, she could say, “Run my name through the hashing function, and you will get the cartouche 038801, which is on your list. See? I am one of yours.” It would take a well-trained clerk with an abacus and some devices, but it could be done.

  But the trick is that you cannot get the original name back from the cartouche, even if you know the hashing function: for many possible names might produce the same cartouche. Ulyu Xe cannot look at 038801 and say, “Oh, yes, that means Baru.” She might, if she had a lot of spare time, compute all the names that could hash into 038801—but there are too many.

  Baru thought: What I see of other people is the output of a hashing function.

  I’ll never know anyone’s true self, will I? Their thoughts and memories, the selfness of someone, the me-ness of me: that’s like a true name, a person in all their formless awesome grandeur. But we do not see that grandeur. We see each other only in the shapes we are forced to assume. Words constrain us, and also our laws, and our fears and hopes, and the wind, and the rain, and the dog that barks while we’re trying to speak, all these things constrain us.

  We all force our true selves into little hashes and show them like passwords. A smile is a hashing function, and a word, and a cry. The cry is not the grief, the word is not the meaning, the smile is not the joy: we cannot run the hash in reverse, we cannot get from the sign to the absolute truth. Maybe the smile is false. Maybe the grief is a lie.

  But we can compare the hash to a list, and guess at the meaning.

  We come to a house full of those we betrayed most hideously, and they do not act as we expect. They have given us a strange cartouche and we can only guess what it means.

  And we realize—I realize—that I haven’t given Ake Sentiamut enough thought.

  She’s been so many women to me. How did I never notice? She taught me the arts of makeup and disguise, so I could survey Treatymont’s slums. She was the regent I left behind when I took her people to war. She was Tain Hu’s friend who taught her to read Aphalone. But—I must remember!—the women she has been to me aren’t all of her. No, I never knew Ake when she was a wife, or when she became a widow, or a spy.