The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Baru groaned. “Are you serious? A bath?”

  “You look like a greasy kitchen rat. You need a bath.”

  “You weren’t much help up there,” Baru complained. “I thought—”

  Thought what? That the oath they’d taken to Tain Hu would transfer flawlessly to Baru? That everyone could simply set aside what she’d done, and go back to her service?

  What a fool.

  “I don’t persuade people,” Xe said. “I can only show them what I know.”

  Baru growled low in her throat. “So you don’t think I’m trying to plunder Aurdwynn for riches?”

  “No. I think that you loved Hu and want the best for her home.”

  The growl become a groan. “I don’t want to talk about Hu.”

  “Yes you do. And so do I. Come.”

  Baru’s clothes were soaked through with nightmare sweat. “Fine. Fuck it. I do need a bath.”

  Sharp wind outside, and a gentle chill to edge the warmth. Baru gasped in wonder. The stars shimmered behind a mighty aurora, wings of green, red sheets of pyroclast, vast bars of purple light tilted like pillars seen from below.

  “I’ve never seen it so bright.”

  “There was a wildfire somewhere, and this is its ghost.”

  “You just made that up.”

  “Surely I wouldn’t.”

  “You would, though,” Baru realized, with some delight, “I bet you do it all the time.”

  “I am Wydd’s faithful student,” she said, not smiling, except in the roll of her hips as she walked. She was powerfully calm, like a hand run over the world to smooth it out. Home, Baru thought, suddenly: her dark seal body was so comfortable in itself that it made Baru think of a home. And she wanted to learn that art, of being at home wherever you stood.

  “Come,” Xe said, “there’s a drain behind the well.”

  Execarne had built a screen to wash behind after long days in the field. Baru stripped down, drenched herself in lukewarm water from Xe’s pot, and went to work, too hard, with a wire scour. Cold clean wind. Starlight. Caldera gods, she never wanted to go back inside. The runoff water went into a clay half-pipe, down into the fields, and the pipe murmured gently to itself as it worked.

  “My lady,” Xe said. “Your Majesty. You’re scraping yourself raw.”

  “How can you even tell?” Baru demanded. “Wait a minute. Are you on mason leaf?” Divers loved the stimulant leaf. It helped night vision, and also made them prone to fights and forthrightness.

  “A little,” Xe said. “We smoked too much weed with Faham, so I took a pellet to stay awake.”

  “Oh. So that’s why you’re so friendly.”

  “Why didn’t you go to her sooner?” Xe said, softly. Baru had just turned to get at her back, so Xe was on her blind side: the words drifted in like stragglers from a long retreat.

  “What?” Baru said.

  “Why didn’t you go to Tain Hu in the autumn? You could’ve been with her all winter. She wanted you. She spoke of you, with some frustration.”

  Baru had something on her back, lumpy and disfigured, and it had to come off—ah, no, those were her vertebrae. “I couldn’t. I knew what was coming.”

  “But you went to her at the end.”

  “I am a fucking idiot at times.”

  “You think it was a mistake?”

  “No,” Baru admitted. “No, I can’t think that.”

  “Did you go to her at Sieroch because you knew she’d die?”

  “What?” Baru stared over her shoulder. Ulyu Xe stood there like part of the night, a soft suggestion of easy brushstrokes, drawn in the same motion as the wind. Aurora light teased her shoulders and brow.

  “Some people are like that,” Xe said. “Death arouses them. In Aurdwynn there’s erotica about people who’ve been sentenced to death, and the wild things they do.”

  “That’s not my taste.” Her teeth were chattering. “Oh Devena, the weather’s turned, hasn’t it?”

  “We could fuck for warmth, if you want.”

  Baru laughed. “There’s a perfectly good house over there.”

  “It’s full of people you don’t like as much as me.”

  “Yeah,” Baru grunted, scraping at the boot stores on her ankles, “you and me, best of friends, there’s a picture.”

  “I thought that was why you’d called me to your tent at Haraerod.”

  “To be best of friends?”

  “To fuck. Men and women knew me for my companionship. I was spoken of by the lonely.”

  “Oh. No, I had a lot on my mind.”

  “You’ll always have a lot on your mind, Your Majesty.”

  “It’s true.” Baru laughed, too cruelly. “It’s true. Some day…”

  Ulyu Xe shifted and stretched, very powerfully, as if arching for the surface of a clear cool pond. Baru looked at her body, wanting it, wishing she lived in a place where she could want without fear.

  “Wait a moment,” she said. “Are you actually propositioning me?”

  “You shouldn’t spend so much time inside yourself.” Xe shrugged, her arms still raised, shoulders taut. Baru had been ignoring her body’s interests: now she could not. That thrill like a plucked cord. “You’re never here. And I’ve been lonely, and I know you like women. So.”

  Baru stopped scraping herself dry. “Huh,” she said. “I mean—no offense intended—but we’ve just met. Or—only just gotten acquainted, at least.”

  “Sometimes that’s the best time. Later we might detest each other.”

  “This seems a bit like you were put up to it.”

  “You were with her last,” Xe said, and this, most of all, rang of truth. “She left herself on you. I miss her too, you know.”

  Baru felt a sharp somatic pop, painful and yet correct, like her jaw snapping into place after a bad yawn. Somehow she was abruptly more fleshy. A rush of guilt followed, as if by putting her eyes on Ulyu Xe she had endorsed the pornographic narrative of divers as dolphin-fucking whores, and then after that came a lash of self-reproachment for immediately leaping to such an ugly topic. And then finally a skin-prickling terror. They had only just spoken of death. And now a proposition. Why must those always come together?

  Baru threw down the strigil. Her confusion made her angry and anger made her want to act. She’d been distracted too much by women lately. A fling could be justified tactically: to show them all how little she cared, how untroubled she was by Hu’s loss.

  “Fine,” she said, “fine, come here.”

  * * *

  XE smelled of work and the wind off the sea. “Do you kiss?” she asked, pragmatically: some people did not.

  Baru answered her. They struggled pleasantly against the wooden privacy screen. Xe’s height was a lovely challenge: Baru could bite the strong lines of her throat. Her diving costume was, of course, designed to come off easily, in case of an underwater snag. She tried pinning Xe against the cedar screen, as Hu had pinned her on the tent’s groundcloth: Xe’s breath rose eagerly.

  “Here,” she said, guiding Baru’s hand, “like this—yes. Ah.”

  A perfectly satisfying groan. Heat against her hand. Xe’s hips gave her a rhythm and let her carry it onward. The strong muscles of her hips and ass worked beneath the fat, and Baru felt that joyful work in her fingers. Xe began to whisper passion in Urun, in Stakhi, as if driven out of Aphalone by her pleasure; when Tain Hu had done that it thrilled Baru like nothing ever had.

  Yet Baru was disappointed by her own detachment. Xe had such grace. Such a unity of form. She could not be separated: the line of the hip up across the long smooth stomach, over the breast, arched through the firm shoulder. Lovely. But all very distant. She was a gentler lover than Hu, steady and rhythmic and very responsive to Baru’s touch, which should have been wonderful, but only made Baru self-conscious of everything she did. Xe was very warm. Baru felt a great fondness for her, and a low, limitless sadness at what must happen soon: some separation, some grief.

  She tried to
fantasize to make the sex better, which seemed entirely perverse. Why was nothing happening? She had met a lovely diver of an exciting older age. They had shared a day of light tension, and a bath, and an admirably forward proposition. What a thrill.

  No: none of it worked.

  Now she lay on her back on the saltgrass, staring up at the aurora, as Xe’s hair brushed her thighs. She felt like she had spent a very long time fumbling with a knot. “You’ve gone away again,” Xe said, from below, “haven’t you?”

  “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.” Baru twitched in mortal embarassment. “I’m sorry—it’s just not—oh, it’s me, I’m not working right.”

  “It’s all right. It’s not easy for some women.” Xe crawled up beside her. “I was too forward with you. I made assumptions. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” Baru said, miserably, “it’s me. It was easy for me last time.”

  “She was a wonder, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Baru said, with dead despair.

  “Hm,” Xe said. “I think I may sense the problem.”

  16

  TAU-INDI

  I’D be fucked bareback in a pen of gonorrhetic pigs before I let Baru steal my home.

  The gall of her. The bilious clotted gall. Ordering her pale little stooge back to Vultjag to seize control of the North! All she’d had to do was let Heingyl Ri give the pardons, trust Heingyl Ri to care for Vultjag and the others, but no, no, Baru had to have them for herself.

  Baru might be a vicious narrow-minded weasel but she had a certain insight, didn’t she? If, in the spirit of my career as a hygienist, Aurdwynn could be imagined as a gigantic cunt (having midwifed most of my life I tended to think the nation and the organ shared a certain perverse resilience) then the coastal south was the happening end where all the business was conducted. But the north was the potential, the fallow womb, and Baru wanted to get her child in there first.

  She knew what I was up to. Somehow she knew. And she was moving to stop me. I would need to write Heingyl Ri as soon as I could, and urge her to mind her security: Baru’s assassins would be at her already.

  I’d been in a foul mood since Baru left me at the World Telescope, and doubly foul since that limp prick in the plaza tried to hang me with his cock-grip hands. But as soon as Baru began to move openly against me, I felt much better. I’d tidied away the whole mess of Baru at last. No more uncertainty. Hesychast was right about her, she had been irreparably compromised by Farrier’s secret process, and therefore she was an enemy of Aurdwynn’s freedom and had to be treated as such. My thoughts of befriending and tutoring her were easily dismissed. She was entirely wrapped up in her own ambitions, and would never accept me.

  So I moved ahead with my other plan for Baru.

  The enemies of kings are powerful prizes, my friends. If you know anything about the Stakhieczi, know that they do not like their kings. A Necessary King may be elected in times of need, but at his first sign of weakness he is unmade again.

  The man who ruled the Wintercrests knew he had erred terribly by offering his hand and his armies to Baru, only to be betrayed. Now he looked a fool, dishonored and weak—

  —and if he wanted his honor back, there was only one way to get it.

  I would give him that honor. And in exchange he would give me my fulfillment.

  As Baru drowsed in the cellar, drugged by the wine I’d left for her, I ordered Iscend to draw Dziransi outside. She simply challenged him to wrestle. He said he would not fight an unarmed woman, for it was against the gentle honor. She said he was afraid to lose. That note of pride gave the Stakhi man an excuse to beat her, so he went out, amiably, into the dark saltgrass.

  In their first grapple Iscend drove a poisoned needle into his bare thigh. He felt the hurt but thought, I am sure, that it was a thorn. He won the fight, but that got his heart going, which only pumped the poison all the faster. (A metaphor, there, for this Republic we serve.)

  Then he fell.

  The boat from Helbride had already delivered the sarcophagus. Iscend and I worked swiftly to pin Dziransi within the braces and steel clamps of the casket, as motionless as a krakenfly in amber.

  Then I opened the sarcophagus’s neck hatch and needled Dziransi with a big man’s dose of the dream-hammer.

  I gained the Jurispotence of Aurdwynn at age thirty-six, and for the next twenty-four years I scourged the bodies of my people. Did I torture them? Fucking right I did. I sent them down into my Cold Cellar for reconditioning and the occasional radical surgery. I had their bodies altered to the demands of the Incrastic state.

  But I was better than what came before.

  Remember the old Duke Lachta with his breaking-wheels and his hot pears? His fascination with expanding all the holes in the human form? He could make anyone say anything, as long as he wanted it said in a scream.

  I never tortured anyone like that. I don’t waste people.

  The brave man Dziransi possessed great strength, and like many strong things he was therefore brittle. I admit that I bent him perhaps too hard. I hate the Mansion Stakhi for their cold ways and their avarice toward my home. I hate what their ideas of women did to the daughters of Aurdwynn.

  I suppose I hated Dziransi a little, and hurt him for it.

  Dziransi had been on drugs since he came to Moem, of course. Execarne kept all his guests on a low dose of cannabis and opiate to secure their calm and trust. But the dream-hammer, now, that was a drug to change the shape of a man’s soul. In old Belthyc myth the first caterpillars ate the dream-hammer before they went into their cocoons, and from their feverish metamorphosis emerged the nightmare race of man.

  I’d used it on myself once. On the night of my brother’s marriage. When I resolved to change the shape of my soul, to peel it away from the shape of his.

  Tonight I used it on Dziransi. And the dream-hammer made me Dziransi’s god.

  I felt blasphemous. I felt like I’d committed that mythic sin of hubris.

  And I wondered if this was how Tain Shir lived her life. As a god who walked unshackled among the mortals in their chains.

  * * *

  FROM the very first instant my brother knew Tain Ko, the sister of the Duke of Vultjag, he hated her fucking guts. Olake hated her from the long braided fall of her hair to the proud angle of the Vultjag nose to her hickory-brown throat and high-bound noble tits and her unfashionably athletic legs and her presumably arrogant and demanding and oh-so-aristocratic cunt (perhaps she dissolved commoner cocks with acid). Especially, Olake hated Ko’s distaste for his city: Olake loved Lachta, his slushy muddy flea-bitten home, even back then before the Masquerade rebuilt the sewers. I myself lost that sentiment when I contracted a rot from the laundry-water. We drew a grease circle around the infection, and watched it grow, with frightening and almost visible speed, across that circle, across my thigh.

  So Olake stood behind me with the ends of a belt in his fists. I could feel, through the leather, how his grip tightened with every shriek I chewed into that belt. And I cut that divot of flesh right out of my leg.

  Good Himu did my brother hate Tain Ko. I said he hated her from the first instant he knew her, which was a street brawl between Ko’s retinue and my brother’s antiroyalists, and their hatred escalated from there. In no time at all they were hating each other on the floor of our apartment while I tried to sleep, hating each other in the back of the wagon while I tried to drive the horses, in stockrooms and meadows and anywhere else they could find. I believe they only came to like each other out of some animal release of passions: by sheer weight of fucking, their bodies seduced their minds along.

  The child was unplanned. In those days under Duke Lachta contraceptives were contraband: I believe Tain Ko, unfamiliar with the city and its dubious markets after a life with the pharmacist-women of the north, bought a batch of fake silphium. She decided to keep the child, partly to deter suitors who wanted her for a political marriage. But she dared not reveal the father: Olake was a known antiroyalist, and Duke Lachta hated
both Duke Vultjag and Olake. Vultjag’s sister bearing Olake’s child would drive Lachta to matricide.

  The birth came earlier than planned. In those days I was still a laundry girl covered in bedbug bites and soap burns, and our flight from the city was a terrifying wonder: there were places in the world that hardly stank at all! I think something was born of me, too, a love of Aurdwynn entire, a love which I still carry and hope I always will.

  I midwifed Ko while Olake paced under the pine boughs.

  Tain Shir was born to a red moon and the flash of summer heat lightning. I swear in Devena’s name that she was born with one tooth already erupted, and that she bit me. We took her with us on our travels, and she grew up among revolutionaries, with words like freedom on her tongue.

  Once, as we scraped our laundry in a Radaszic stream, she touched the scar on my thigh. Is that, she’d asked, what the dukes are like? A rot in us?

  Her father, my brother, rubbed her hair and smiled. Yes, he’d said, so proudly. But a rot that we will cut away.

  What about Mother, Pa?

  She was born to aristocracy. But she made her choice to stand with us. Everyone has a choice, little blackberry.

  Perhaps that was the moment that fate seized upon when it wrote Shir’s doom.

  The Masquerade came on red sails, and with them a prayer of change: the masked people on the ships spoke of republic, and their Parliament where anyone could change the law. Shir was afraid of them. The wisest of us, although of course at the time we hardly knew it.

  Like a gaggle of boys aroused by a hint of nipple, the dukes and duchesses all got hard for the new Masquerade trade and began to fight over it. In a blink they were at war and we, the antiroyalists, had our moment. I struck a deal with the Masquerade mission. And I kept my terms. I killed Duke Lachta with a little knife, and as his last breath bubbled from his throat, I wiped my blade on his white stacked linens and said, “Will that be all, Your Grace?”

  Shir fought, too, on that night of reckoning. She killed. Not for the first time, I think.

  My brother, “head of the revolutionary government,” signed the Treaty of Federation. So we gave Aurdwynn to the Masquerade, and at first young Shir rejoiced. But the new Incrastic laws were cruel like bleach—Aurdwynn, the Falcresti explained, had to be cleansed of sin. The land had to be scoured raw. In time their laws would ease, they assured us. If enforced well, and obeyed with enthusiasm. In time the laws would ease.