The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

And she was gone, too.

  Execarne peeked out the door behind her. “Jackal grenadiers out there. At least ten of them, coming in from the east. They’ll want me alive, I think.”

  He tore the back off a wine cabinet and produced two leathery masks with glazed eyes and bulbous sponge filters over the mouth. As he put his on he cracked the ampule of filtersoak in the nose. Baru tried the same: sharp alcohol stink flooded her sinuses. She coughed, and swore, and through the watercolor smear of the lenses saw Execarne reaching out to her.

  “We have to go!”

  Baru and Execarne linked hands—the old man’s grip fierce, his face wild with exhilaration—and ducked through the door. Up on the east ridge, tall lanky shapes moved against the sunrise. Oriati grenadiers with black faces, bright eyes, long rapiers. Bombs with thick oily fuses dangled from colorful bandoliers. They looked too wonderful to be real.

  Thirty feet away the well beckoned to them with its swinging pump-arm. Iscend and Yawa had already gone down.

  The ringing in Baru’s ears died down to a thin hum. Now from the north and west came the sound of voices.

  WE ARE THE FIST OF THE PEOPLE. WE ARE THE HAND OF THE MASK.

  CAST DOWN YOUR WEAPONS. LOWER YOUR NAKED FACES.

  WE ARE HERE.

  * * *

  THE stars fell.

  Sulane arced a constellation of rocket flares over the island and the hot light burned the images of the Oriati grenadiers onto Baru’s eyes.

  Then the saltgrass on the western edge of the farm made a sound like cut violin-string. Crossbow bolts caught flare light: starlight shrapnel. Grenadiers hit in the face, in the chest, in the prickled hands and pierced knees.

  Out of the grass came the red-masked marines. They did not fire or make any sound. On their harnesses they carried blood tampons and corkwrapped cylinders of oil and grenades and ropes and long knives cold and slim and thirsty.

  The Oriati threw grenades. Dirt fountained. Grass cratered. The silence died again.

  Baru bolted for the well. Execarne came after. Baru thought she might have pissed herself but couldn’t be sure: Wydd preserve her, Hu had fought in this, she had fought and kept her head and lived, the woman eternally a marvel. Baru tripped and stumbled and got up again into a three-limbed scuttle, headfirst right into the rim of the well. She fell back stunned.

  An Oriati grenade blurred across her vision, trailing its throwing-rope, and in the colorless sketch of her periphery it struck a Masquerade marine in the chest. It stuck. The marine looked at it with expressionless masked awareness, and tried to fold himself up. A sharp crack and a punch of air that threw up ground dust all around, as if the skin of a sandy beach had jumped, rabbitlike. It made Baru blink. When she looked again, the marine’s chest rig had split, his armored chest stove in: beneath the rim of his mask a huge splinter of fragment had gone up through his chin and palate.

  Baru fumbled around till she found a gutcord ladder and swung herself over into the well.

  Down. Down quickly. She scrambled down wet echoing stone. Someone shadowed the light above her—Execarne, singing madly, “Oh, the women of the veldt are rough to the touch, they’ll grind your hands to flour, and the buckle on your belt will rust right shut, when the veldt wife turns her glower, but hark now lad just lie on your back, you do not know your power, she’s grown to a lass on the flat endless grass, no she’s never seen a tower—”

  A crossbow grenade hit the rim of the well and tumbled past Baru. Somehow she could read the label before the grenade fell away and slapped into water far below.

  DANGER RAPID ACTION

  CHEMICAL SMOKE MECHANISM—PEPPERSEED FILLER

  FOR FLUSHING AND DISPERSAL

  “The ledge!” Execarne shouted, and his voice boomed off the walls, the ledge, the ledge edge edge! Baru kicked down and found a solid rocky step, tarred and sanded for footing. She put her weight on the stone, reached out for something to lean on, and fell through a heavy canvas curtain into the Morrow Ministry station.

  She landed arms-first on a putrid corpse.

  * * *

  EXECARNE lit a slow-burning flare. White light sputtered out across raw stone corridor, chalked wall-signs, moldered fabric, and the festering dead flesh under Baru’s hands. She roared in disgust: the mask alone saved her from obscene stink, but her bare hands were in cold rot to the wrist.

  “That shriveled little ballsack!” Execarne shook his fist at the corpse. “He was trying to climb into my well! The fucking gall of him!”

  Baru leapt up wringing her hands in loathing and, seizing on the nearest clean cloth, wiped her hands on Execarne’s jacket. “Sorry,” she mumbled, when he stared at her. “Who the fuck is this?”

  “Faham Execarne,” Faham Execarne said. He stripped off the jacket and draped it over the dead man’s head.

  “What?”

  From a purse on his belt “Execarne” produced a silver seal ringed in tiny chiseled codes. “I really am Morrow Ministry. I’m just not the exact Morrow Ministry agent you think I am. Come on. I’ll explain while we go.”

  He trotted off down the narrow stone slot. Baru chased him into a domed cave easily as large as Execarne’s house, lit from above by a mirrored shaft, furnished with card tables, shelves, a gallery of landscape paintings, even a rack of bottles.

  There were corpses everywhere. Dead men and women in plain Falcresti dress scattered across chairs and tables. Mouths and noses red with poison foam. Hands spidered. Faces contorted in agony. Baru had seen that agony before, at Haraerod, when Purity Cartone used war gas on Nayauru.

  “You gassed them,” Baru said, numbly. “You gassed the Morrow Ministry station.”

  “I certainly did.” Execarne hopped across a cluster of bowel-stained dead and made for the far door. “Slowly at first, mind. By the time I dispersed the good stuff I don’t think they could even move. Come on.”

  Baru smashed a bottle from the alcohol rack and washed her hands. The corpses were fresh. Xe had implied she’d been here for weeks, at least. Therefore, Execarne had gassed them recently, much more recently than he’d arrived here—therefore he’d probably worked with these people before killing them—so why would Execarne have gassed his own station?

  Because he had good relations with the Oriati spymaster Tau-indi Bosoka.

  Baru snatched up her best theory. “This isn’t your station. Or, at least, you’re not usually here. You came here from Falcrest.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “To handle vital work. The interrogation of these prisoners?”

  “Might be.”

  “Tau-indi came here for the same work, but from the Oriati side. You two knew each other; you conspired to keep the peace. And they told you someone in your station was a mole. A mole for who? Who were you afraid would learn about the prisoners?”

  “Does it matter?” He beckoned from the corridor’s mouth. “I ran out of time to flush the mole from Execarne’s station, so I just burnt the entire asset. They deserved it anyway.” He spat on the nearest corpse: a woman in a sundress, convulsed by mortis across her reading desk. “They tested war gas down here. On living Sydani. People are always dying and vanishing on these islands. What’s a few more? I don’t like that. So I tested their own war gas on them.”

  “And you left the bodies to rot?” Baru howled.

  “Sure. You think I was going to risk coming down here to clean up?”

  She had to admit a certain bleak sense there. “Do I call you Execarne, still?”

  “That’s as good a legend as any. Do you mind if we move on? Someone else is in here.”

  “What?” Baru hissed.

  Execarne raised his crossbow. “Someone beat us down here.”

  “Yes, Yawa and Iscend were ahead of us—”

  “No. There’s someone else.” He tapped the snout of his mask, where the sponge filter must obscure all scent. “I can smell them.”

  “You can’t smell anything.”

  “Bad trim stinks,” he said, which was
the first time Baru realized he might be mad.

  * * *

  THE heart of the station was a crack in the world.

  Eons of water flowing down from Moem mesa had carved a tall thin chasm in the rock. Narrow wooden walkways let them cross beneath enormous anchor-chains. Just as in the Elided Keep, the Morrow Ministry had safeguarded its files and secrets in huge swaying gridwork shelves, hanging all around them in frightful suspension, each volume insulated from the humid cave by sacks of gut as the whole library poised on the edge of precipice.

  “Good Devena,” Baru breathed.

  Execarne pointed her to a corroded steel lever. “Push that.” He knelt to align tiny codewheels. Baru had a general policy of never pulling unlabeled levers, but given the circumstances she would do anything to get out of this labyrinth before Tain Shir’s gore-spackled mask peeled itself from the shadows.

  She threw the lever. With a tortured shriek a gear engaged and pulled a cable. High above mechanisms of brute steel struggled, screamed, and turned. Pins clattered out of their sockets.

  All around them, in creaking unison, the shelves of secrets dropped to their doom in the flooded depths below.

  “Burn the asset,” Execarne said, with manic intensity. “Don’t let them know what we know. Come on—come on—”

  She hurried after him. Darkness and dead lamps. Panting grunting flight through corridors so narrow they had to squeeze sideways through necks of dripping stone. “Where are we going?” Baru shouted. “Where’s the way out?”

  “It’s compromised!” Execarne shouted. “We’ll use the gliders!”

  “Gliders?”

  “It’s been two centuries since a woman went aloft on a kite,” Execarne said, “I don’t understand why everyone’s so afraid of cutting the mooring.”

  “You’re mad!”

  “I’m optimistic!”

  “You’re extremely high!”

  “That helps, yes!”

  They burst out of the maze into a stone-cut hall supported by columns of natural rock. Execarne ripped his mask off. Baru tried the air, and nearly wept with relief. She could smell the sea. The sea! And there, ahead, the faint light of the sun, they were almost free.

  A hand seized Baru’s right shoulder. A papery whisper in her ear. “She’s here.”

  Baru froze in terror. Yawa’s gloved finger crept to her lip. “Shush. She’s hunting.”

  “Who’s hunting,” Execarne whispered. “Your viper girl?”

  “Yes. Iscend. She’s gone to find her—”

  “Who?”

  A whipcrack voice echoed down the gallery. A woman’s bark of command. “Gaios! Gaios! Walk!”

  Yawa hissed in dismay. Baru knew exactly why.

  Someone was shouting Iscend Comprine’s command word.

  * * *

  THEY wait at the mouth of the north tunnel for the moment to attack.

  Her marines check the soak on their filters. A soft rustling of masks and canteens. The Oriati do not ordinarily use gas, but their scouts have already penetrated the Ministry station. By now they may have stolen any number of weapons.

  Tain Shir plunges her own filter into her canteen and fits it into her mask and her lungs fill up with a sharp ether stink like something you would only drink when already drunk. Ormsment commanded Shir to slip her marines in ahead of Sulane’s bombardment and secure the Ministry station below the surface. The admiral hopes that when Baru flees she will flee below. Shir obeys this plan because it is in accordance with her own.

  She has come to Moem as a teacher. She has a lesson to impart today.

  Yesterday she found the letter left for her at the Eddyn mailhouse. Baru is going to the Morrow Ministry station on Moem. Baru needs your lessons, Shir. She swam to Moem in the night and arranged her blind among the saltgrass. Beneath the pale aurora she watched as Baru seduced the diver. She felt no shame in her voyeurism for the satisfaction of another woman’s appetite is as uninteresting to her as a cow’s progress on its cud.

  What matters is the lie. The lie that Baru Cormorant ever loved her cousin Hu. See how she takes her satisfaction with another woman. See how she does not even pretend to mourn.

  Hu was deceived.

  In the middle hours of the candle watch, Shir returned to Sulane and the province admiral. “Baru is here. She is on Moem. It may be a trap.”

  She watched the rage sluice through the Admiral. Juris Ormsment has been building millwork to harness her fury. “We’ll strike at dawn,” she commanded.

  Dawn has come. Today Shir teaches a lesson. A lesson for Baru on the nature of the world she has chosen to inhabit.

  * * *

  “FIVE,” the sergeant at the front of the column calls. “Four three two one go.”

  He swings around the corner into the black mouth of the tunnel. His crossbow searches for targets. Shir comes around after him. They go down into the Ministry station two by two so that if they are shot they can drag each other to cover. In the narrow stone slots they have no shields and must gamble entirely on speed.

  Shir hears Oriati cries echoing through the bowels of the mesa. “They’ve found bodies,” she tells the sergeant, translating the Takhaji battle language. “Something killed the Ministry staff. The Oriati fear gas or plague.”

  “Do we go on?” he asks.

  She puts a hand on the join of his shoulder and his throat. “Don’t stop.”

  In the station’s north bunkroom Falcresti corpses have soaked rotting into their feather mattresses. Ten Oriati grenadiers in steel cuirasses and colorful spinal flags circle the chamber with rags at their mouths. They are giving the dead last blessings for their voyage through the Door.

  “Flare,” Shir whispers.

  The sergeant kneels at the door and rips a flare grenade off his chest ring and the ring engages the grenade just as meant and crushes the interior compartments so all the chemicals mix. The sergeant stares at the conjured fire in his fist as if shocked it worked. The training grenades do not burn: the chemicals are too precious.

  “Throw,” Shir reminds him.

  He skitters the flare into the bunkroom and it bursts up in a jet of hot sparks, spinning and shrieking and hurling itself between bedposts. The Oriati cry out. Shir leads her column around the corner and they split to follow the walls so the confused Oriati are doubly enveloped. Shouts and clamor among the corpse-racked beds. Shir shoots the nearest man in the throat and her repeating crossbow kicks in her arms and although it does not have the armor-piercing strength of a proper storm crossbow she works the lever and in a second it is ready to fire again. Marine crossbows clatter all around her. The Oriati duck behind the beds. A marine accidentally shoots another marine on the opposite wall but the slender repeater bolts will not penetrate marine harness.

  The Oriati captain cries out, “Swords up, bravos! Back to back!”

  Too close in for shots now. Too much clutter. Long knives come out and the Oriati raise fists wrapped in tough rope to challenge the masked marines all around them with the gallant shining length of their rapiers. Shir advances between the beds and then she is upon the Oriati captain who steps at her grinning to stop her with the point of his rapier. Shir grabs the post of the bunk bed to her right and with a grunt topples bed and mattresses and corpses down upon the captain. When he sidesteps nimbly his eyes go up to the falling dead and his rapier pivots a little away. Shir steps in, knife leading, past the rapier, into his arms. She stabs him under the chin and withdraws and stabs his eye and withdraws and stabs his face through the boneless aperture of the nose and he is smiling no more.

  Shir drops his corpse on his dead comrades.

  They search the dead. Tactical clerks kneel to stamp rapid notes on the origin and armament of the Oriati grenadiers. Time stamps crunch as the clerks break the mechanisms of the single-use clocks to certify and seal that this record was made at exactly this time and date.

  “What happened down here?” her sergeant hisses, pointing to the dead Morrow-men. “Did an ex
periment go wrong?”

  “They lost someone’s trust,” Shir says. For she knows the stakes of the One Trade.

  They proceed south through the dead stone maze of the poisoned station. Sulane’s rockets send rumbles and crashes through the stone above. The surface teams have scattered heavy smoke to seek out vents and secret entrances to the Ministry station, and now that smoke pours down to haze the cave air.

  Just north of the station archive Shir finds a team from the surface assault coming down a hidden stair, dragging a plump woman who shares Shir’s Maia blood.

  “Prisoner, mam,” the team sergeant reports, “she’s asked us for asylum from Baru Cormorant. I thought I should get her safely belowground and wait out the assault.”

  Shir seizes the woman by the chin. She stares back with sullen defiance. Another daughter of Aurdwynn cast to the ringing wind.

  “Who are you?”

  “Nitu,” the woman says, spitefully. “I’m just a cook.”

  Shir smiles beneath her mask. Shir asks her question.

  “Does Baru Cormorant pretend to love you?”

  * * *

  BARU would have run, if there were anywhere to go.

  Tain Shir was upon her. Tain Shir born out of the light and the sea wind. A behemoth crusted in gore and instruments of killing. Iscend Comprine retreated before her like a charmed cobra, and each time Shir snapped “Gaios!” Iscend sighed like a phantom hand had caressed her cheek.

  “King’s gallstones,” Execarne breathed. “The Bane of Wives.”

  “She’s not his anymore,” Yawa said. She’d stepped in front of Baru, who almost shoved her aside to protect her; but fear had rooted her to the spot.

  The terrible ugly grace of her. The brutal indifference. Nothing in nature could ever be so violent. Look at a white bear rolling in the gore of its kill and you will see the primordial savagery which civilization struggles to escape. But it is still a bear. You still know what it wants, and at worst it will kill you for sport.

  Look at Tain Shir and you cannot fathom the name behind the cartouche. You cannot extract her reasons. You only see why men turn to religion: for hope that there are gods to oppose her.

  “Guard your charge.” Shir pointed with two lazy fingers to Xate Yawa. “See to my aunt. Gaios.”