The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Iscend leapt to Yawa’s side. “I told you to cripple her,” Yawa muttered, as if trying to comment on a distasteful dish at a party without bothering the host. “Not to obey her every command.”

  “My lady,” Iscend whispered, in a voice of paroxysmic rapture, “she serves our Throne, she is moved by the hand that moves us all! She knows the word!”

  “You useless idiot.” Yawa sighed.

  Baru shook herself. “The crossbow,” she muttered to Execarne. “Use the crossbow—”

  “Right,” he said, and dropped the crossbow on the stone floor.

  Baru groaned.

  “What?” he pleaded. “You expect me to take a shot at her? If I don’t get her with the first bolt, I know what happens!”

  “Baru,” Shir rumbled. “Come forward. Nitu, come out now. Show yourself.”

  Oh no.

  The portly cook ambled forward from the shadows behind Shir. “Hello,” she said, cheerily. “I’ve been drugged and I feel wonderful. Look, it’s Baru! Oh, Baru, I hope you die.”

  A hideous, prolonged scrape as Shir drew a machete from her hip. “Stop,” Baru cried, driven by panic to act, to charge forward and grapple with the horror rather than wait for it to reach her: this was always her choice. “Don’t hurt her! She’s not part of this!”

  “She’s not part of this?” The mask tilted. A great sheet of clotted blood peeled off to shatter silently on the stone. “She’s not of this world?”

  “What?” Baru gaped at the non sequitur, and then, racing ahead, trying to follow Shir’s thoughts, “no, she’s part of the world like anyone else, but she’s not part of this!”

  “This is the world. You have made it so.” Shir set the cold edge of the machete against Nitu’s throat. “Do you love her? Do you care for her life?”

  “Tain Hu loved her!”

  “You killed Tain Hu.”

  “I didn’t want to, damn you.”

  “Do you want this woman to die?”

  Baru hardly knew her, except as a reliable source of winter meals. Baru thought it very important that she care anyway: for if she lost that, the ability to care for a stranger, what human credential did she have left?

  “I don’t want her hurt,” she said.

  “Then here is my bargain.” Shir’s voice came up at them like low fire through the brush. Execarne, through drug-addled tremors, moaned in awe. “Your life or Nitu’s. Who do I kill? You choose.”

  Baru stood there with her fists at her sides, trembling with rage. “That’s not necessary.”

  “Why is this choice unnecessary, when it was necessary for Tain Hu to die?”

  “There’s nothing compelling this choice on you! It’s not the same!”

  “You’re free to do whatever you please.” The machete twitched. Nitu cooed in drugged rapture and stroked the blade. “I only arrange the consequences. Consequences for choices. That’s my aunt’s business. Isn’t it, dear Aunt Yawa?”

  “Your father’s alive.” Yawa’s voice like ringing steel: struck hard, but still strong. “Let us go, child. Let me save your father.”

  “Certainly I will let you go, dear aunt. If Baru tells me to kill this cook, then you can carry on your spider work.” The terrible blue stillness of her eyes. The single human finger bone notched among her crossbow bolts. “Surely, Baru, you don’t love this cook more than you loved Tain Hu?”

  The transitive property of human lives. If Baru’s mission is more important than Tain Hu, and Tain Hu is more important than the cook, then the mission is more important than the cook. And the cook should die.

  The mesa inhaled. Sea wind roared into the cave. Tain Shir stank of death.

  “It’s not the same,” Baru protested. “Those terms were set by the Throne. A power that holds the world—I couldn’t change the terms. You, though, you could walk away right now. Please, Shir.” The name a thorn in her tongue. “I remember you. I remember when I saw you at Farrier’s wool stand. There’s no reason you have to do this.”

  “I’m not doing this,” Shir said, with terrible distance. “You are. You set the terms. This is your choice, it is the shape of you, to spend people for power. I am your teacher now. I am going to force this choice on you. Here, and in the next place you go, and the next, and the next, I will force this choice on you forever. And so you will live in a world governed by the laws you have chosen.”

  “You don’t even know what I want!”

  “I don’t care.” Her spare hand settled on a grenade: DANGER INCENDIARY DANGER ADHESIVE ALL-PURPOSE BURN. “I kill you, or I kill this woman. Later the choice will come again. The diver will be next. Then your parents.”

  Baru neither screamed nor sagged in horror. She did the one thing she had always done when overcome. She thought. With exacting, scrupulous detail she thought of Ulyu Xe pinned to a tree by a bolt through her chest. She thought of Pinion and Solit bound inverted upon great wooden wheels and hacked open from groin down to throat so the chevrons of their ruptured bodies were chalices for the insects and the birds. She thought of these icons of horror and she thought of them as the result of her choices. For if she proceeded as she always had, by giving up a life to gain a little more progress, then Shir would offer her these choices forever, and forever she would be forced to choose.

  Surely she could justify any sacrifice. To stop now would be to betray those lives she’d already spent … and the more lives she spent, the more reason she had to sacrifice even more …

  She was trapped.

  But she forced herself (and force it was, like peeling herself naked from a frozen steel plate, straining her skin until it tore and wept) to think logically. If she survived this moment, she could reach Helbride. She would have access to the Throne’s resources again. Shir was only one mortal woman. Shir could be killed.

  One life could be invested to achieve that goal. Hadn’t Baru’s choices already slaughtered thousands? One more life. Only do not look at her eyes.

  “All right,” Baru said. “Kill her.”

  The machete moved.

  * * *

  EXECARNE carried her screaming to the glider ledge.

  Through pain like a red sun Baru saw the green-gray sea tossing below, Helbride’s sails in the near distance, the rows of wood-and-canvas gliders that waited on their hooks above.

  She could only scream.

  In place of Nitu’s life, Tain Shir had macheted off two fingers of Baru’s right hand.

  Execarne had watched it happen. Iscend had physically restrained Yawa from interfering. Nitu had wandered off cooing and insensate. Shir’s machete the last thing Baru remembered before—the cut—

  “Hold her arm,” Yawa ordered. “Execarne, you’re biggest. Hold her down.”

  I’ve definitely pissed myself, Baru thought. What had she lost? Did she use those two fingers for anything important? Would she still be any good in bed? Could she still write?

  The alcohol bandage went on first. Baru’s stumps performed combinatoric operations on the possible varieties of screaming pain. She’d burnt out her throat: all she had now was a whispering sandy tube. Yawa was tying on the outer bandages, tight, too tight; Baru managed to shriek, “For fuck’s sake, Yawa!”

  “Marines are coming,” Iscend snapped.

  “Shit. Keep her still—”

  “She’s strong.”

  “She’s just a woman, Execarne, you can hold her!”

  “How anti-egalitarian of you, Yawa.”

  Execarne tried to force a pellet of wax or gum into Baru’s mouth and Yawa slapped it aside. “You can’t drug her, you ass. She needs to keep her blood up. You’ll kill her.”

  “If she struggles in the glider, I can’t control it—”

  “Baru!” Yawa slapped her on the cheek. “Baru, you’ve got to be still! Do you hear me? Stop writhing and be still! I need you alive, damn you!”

  The pain was in her right hand. Baru glanced left. The pain went. Something was still very wrong with her but now it didn’t seem so u
rgent.

  “How do these work?” she croaked, and pointed, left-handed, at the gliders. “I’ve never seen one before … the construction is ingenious, but I doubt that it’s light enough to fly like a kite. Without a mooring, they’d be impossible to control, wouldn’t they?”

  “She’s addled,” Execarne said.

  “No,” Yawa said, with a softness like relief. “This is normal.”

  Hands lifted her. Ropes and leather buckles clasped like surrogate arms. Now she lay on Execarne’s broad warm back in the glider’s harness. His feet rocked against the stone: he was crouching and uncurling, warming himself up. Baru squinted up at the canvas wing overhead. She knew very little about aeronics. Didn’t gliders usually flutter out of control and plunge?

  “You’ll need a little speed,” Execarne said to Iscend, who had harnessed Yawa onto her own back. “So dive at first, get the air moving under the wings, and then glide out toward Helbride. Don’t let the prow come up. When you strike the water the glider will float, that’s how we always land, but you must get out of the harness, understand?”

  “I understand,” Iscend said, smiling blissfully. “I’m to protect Xate Yawa. The word was given.”

  Yawa met Baru’s eyes. She looked immensely, sourly displeased. Baru tried to signal back to her that at least she still had all her fingers. Then Iscend crouched, and kicked, and her whole glider slid forward above her on the wooden rack until she leapt off the cliff and the glider tore free with an enormous shudder and vanished from Baru’s sight.

  Execarne tested his footing. “I think I’m high enough to do this,” he said.

  A harsh shout came from behind: “Stop! Stop right there!”

  “Oh shit,” Execarne growled, and he ran forward grunting, and then—

  * * *

  BRINE slapped at Baru’s face. She howled in dismay. She’d grayed out! She’d missed the flight! “Go back,” she snarled, desperate to experience such a marvel. “Go back, do it again!” Then she felt Execarne beneath her, unmoving, and saw the bright blood pooling around the glider: they’d landed on the wavetops, the glider’s wing settling above them.

  Execarne had been shot. A bolt jutted from his right shoulder. He was breathing but he would not move.

  Baru reached around to untie herself from him and smashed her stumped fingers against the harness. Pain like sickness. For a while she could only curl and yawn in agony. Then, determinedly, she put both her hands underwater and found the buckles. Execarne dropped free with Baru still bound to him. A wave crashed over them and they sank. Baru kicked and stroked, her wet stumps numb now, roiling brine all around her, and everywhere the bladdered ash-kelp that Baru had once gathered for glassmaking. To the surface. To the surface. Where the fuck was the surface? Was that the moon—swim for the moon, Baru!

  The moon swam toward her. The moon itself. A silver crescent in the darkness, fast approaching. Why, that wasn’t a trick of light—something real was coming toward her—maybe the moon was death itself—

  Baru gurgled and clawed upward.

  An eye stared at her. A great white eye. And beneath it a small black second eye, glittering—the two eyes swept past and in hallucinatory sequence Baru saw a silver crescent moon, a gnarled mass of brain coral, a human skull, a black door sweeping toward her—

  Something struck Baru and smashed her to the surface. She gasped for air, kicked, and arched Execarne’s weight across her chest and stomach, lifting his head, at least, above the water. He gurgled the water he’d inhaled.

  Baru smelled fire.

  Ormsment’s frigate Sulane stood silhouetted against Moem in a holocaust of burning timber and arching rockets. Two Oriati ships had tried to swarm the frigate—dromon galleys with banks of oars, nimble and quick, well-suited to fights near shore—and Ormsment had destroyed them. A third dromon closed with Sulane nose-on to ram. A fourth fled east, her oars working like millipede legs, and that galley alone flew the gold-and-jade banner: the Oriati Prince’s ship, Tau-indi’s ship, protected by diplomatic right. Sulane fired no rockets after her.

  Baru gasped in relief. Xe and the rest of Tain Hu’s house were, with any luck, aboard that ship, going home.

  Where was Helbride? Where was Apparitor?

  The third dromon swung aside at the last moment, baring her flank to Sulane’s nose. Explosions boomed and crackled down her side: a weapon that shot puffs of smoke from little black tubes. In wonder Baru watched blurred projectiles skip off Sulane’s copper-jacketed hull.

  Whatever the weapon might be, it didn’t work.

  Sulane’s rocketeers swept the dromon’s deck with their hwachas. Marines tossed incendiary grenades down onto the Oriati ship. It drifted away in a pyre of wood and sailcloth, oars dragging in the waves, ropes curling and lashing in the flame.

  A few rogue rockets had landed on the islands nearby Moem.

  The date groves were burning.

  When she looked down from the fire, Iraji was reaching for her, Iraji in Helbride’s whaleboat, Yawa and Iscend and a gaggle of sailors behind him. She groaned and arched again to get Execarne up from the water, and then she tried to get to Iraji’s hand. Their fingertips slipped. A sailor grabbed Baru with a boathook, tangling it in the harness that bound her to Execarne, and dragged them in.

  “Your hand,” Iraji gasped. “Your hand’s hurt—Baru, why are you tied to the Morrow Minister?”

  “He’s the Morrow Minister?” He’d said he came here from Falcrest, to look after vital intelligence work—but she hadn’t thought he would be the spymaster, the lord of all Falcrest’s agents. “Oh.”

  Yawa took Execarne gently in her arms and cut him free of Baru. “Old fool,” she murmured, checking the bloody crossbow bolt. “You old fool, you should have been faster. Ach. He might live. If the wound stays clean.”

  She tore off her mask and threw it into the bilgewater. Baru flinched and tried to guard her wounded hand, which bumped against her shoulder and made her curl up yawning in agony again. Yawa’s alien blue eyes measured everything: only, when Baru twisted to put Yawa on her blind right, she thought Yawa looked confused and lost, not cruel.

  “We failed,” Yawa croaked. She stripped her gloves to check Execarne’s breath. “I don’t know where we go next. I didn’t get anything from the prisoners. My niece…”

  “Tain Shir again?” Iraji asked, in a terrified hush.

  “Yes. She’s hunting Baru. I think…” Yawa covered her face and groaned. “I think maybe we should send Baru somewhere safer. Back to Aurdwynn, perhaps. Heingyl Ri will know where to secure her.”

  “Not a fucking chance,” Baru groaned. If she looked left, at Helbride and Apparitor up on the prow, waving frantically, the pain seemed very far away.

  “If we don’t complete our mission,” Yawa snapped, “my brother dies, Apparitor loses his lover, you lose nothing—”

  “But you can’t go forward without me. I know where to go next.”

  Yawa’s eyes narrowed. “You do?”

  “We have to go to Kyprananoke.”

  “Kyprananoke?” Yawa frowned. “We can’t go to Kyprananoke.”

  “We have to,” Baru said. “Duke Unuxekome’s mother is down there, and she can lead us to the man who funded the warships.”

  “But if I—I can’t be near Unuxekome Ra!”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Yawa said, “I’m the one who exiled her to Kyprananoke. And she swore her revenge on the life of her son.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Baru said, in too much pain for any patience. “She can give us the trail to the Cancrioth!”

  The burning Oriati dromon blew up. A great full-bodied explosion that reached skyward and flattened the waves. Thousands of tiny white stars arched like anenome fingers back down into the sea. From the center of the blast a single streak of fire shot skyward, through the screaming birds, into the dawn.

  Iraji, perhaps dazed by all the blood and fire, fainted right away.

  INTERLUDE

 
; THE LLOSYDANES

  AMINATA wrapped the boy’s clawed hands in linen, cleaned his burnt body with cold brine, weighted him down with stones, and committed him to the sea. “I’m sorry,” she told the boy’s father. But he didn’t speak Aphalone.

  So she went back to Ascentatic to beg Baru for an explanation.

  In her corner of the wardroom she knelt beneath her hammock at the remnants of her temple. The tufa center-pot couldn’t sail with her, nor the black Taranoki earth, nor the dead seeds she hadn’t tended. All those had remained behind on Cauteria. All she had brought with her was the cormorant feather, which she’d planted, as well as she could, in a crack between two planks.

  “Baru,” she whispered. Her breath ruffled the feather’s gray barbules but did not tip or bend the shaft. That was Baru, wasn’t it? Ruffled by Aminata’s concern, but not moved. “Please tell me. How did you let this happen? I know I don’t understand everything you do. But this. Just explain it to me. Why?”

  In the war folio on her left hip she carried the letter she’d recovered from the Eddyn mailhouse. Five paragraphs in their hilariously baroque childhood code. Five paragraphs to implicate Baru in a conspiracy against Parliament. Upon her return to Falcrest, I intend to recommend you to Province Admiral Ormsment … I wonder if we could discuss navy politics again, and the mutability of government.…

  It wasn’t what she’d wanted to find.

  She’d come here to search for Baru. There was a Morrow Ministry station on the Llosydanes, and Maroyad thought it had received prisoners from Baru’s inner circle.

  Instead of the prisoners, she’d found burning islands, dead children, and this damn letter.

  Baru had been on the Llosydanes. She’d stopped at the mailhouse to send a note to Aminata. That night Juris Ormsment’s Sulane had arrived. At dawn a battle had erupted on the fallow islet Moem, and under the new light Ormsment had destroyed three Oriati ships.

  If only it had stopped there. If only none of the Oriati survived—all could have been written off to storm losses. But a fourth Oriati ship had escaped under diplomatic flag. The Federal Prince aboard had already changed vessels to a fast clipper and sailed south to carry news of the battle to the Mbo federations.