The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Would an Oriati diplomatic flag stop Ormsment?”

  “Let me breathe.”

  “Tell me what I want to know. Would Ormsment attack an Oriati diplomatic ship?”

  “I’d tell you anything—to breathe.”

  Baru gave her an inch. Shao gasped in relief, panted, her icy composure in disarray. The effect was intriguing. Baru suddenly missed Ulyu Xe very much.

  “You shouldn’t do his work,” Shao said. “He’s a mannist. He comes from a mannist society.”

  Baru blinked. “What?”

  “You’re taking the red man’s side, Apparitor’s side, against the navy. He’s Stakhi, and they’re a patrilineal culture. He’s an instrument of the sexual dialectic.”

  “Oh, Captain, I don’t think the sexual dialectic has much to do with this—”

  “Of course it does!” she crowed. “You child. Listen: Parliament doesn’t like the navy’s difficult women, doesn’t like us asking for fair pensions and seizing their trade ships for leverage. So Parliament asked the Emperor to put a man in the Empire Admiralty. To do that, to put Lindon Satamine in that post, Apparitor had to sabotage Ahanna Croftare’s chances. She worked her whole life for that post. And she lost it to Parliament’s stupid fears. If Croftare can’t get a fair chance, why should any woman?”

  Baru thought the poor staff captain should try life as a Taranoki woman if she wanted to know about unfair sexual dialectics. But she sat down on the opposite side of the post, Shao’s slack chain in her fists.

  “All the more reason,” she panted, out of breath from all the torture, “to help me adjust Parliament.”

  “What can you even do to them?”

  “I have the Emperor’s own power.”

  “Power.” From Lune’s side of the post came an unexpectedly thoughtful sigh. “Ormsment’s fond of a riddle. It’s very current, widely discussed, a great many wise authors have meditated upon it. One hears it at the happening parties.”

  Baru eyed the sloshing bilgewater beneath them. “Is that what this is? A happening party?”

  “Of course it’s happening. I’m in attendance.”

  Baru chuckled. Shao Lune snapped at her. “Shut up and let me finish. The riddle goes like this: Three ministers have gone to dinner together at a country retreat when they all taste poison in their wine. They cry out for an antidote. A lowly control secretary leaps up, showing a little nip bottle. She says, ‘I have one dose of antidote! Who should get it?’

  “The minister of the Morrow Ministry says, ‘Give me the antidote, lest my spies uncover all your secrets and punish you with a lifetime of blackmail.’

  “The minister of the Metademe says, ‘Give me the antidote, lest my eugenicists forbid your children from marrying and lobotomize your husband to use as a brainless stud.’

  “The minister of the Faculties says, ‘Give me the antidote, or I’ll stab you with this fucking meat skewer, right up the tear duct.’

  “Who gets the antidote?”

  Oh. Baru knew this one. One of those profundities you’d introduce to invite clever self-flattering nonanswers from your tablemates. “I assure you,” she said, “that I don’t have the sort of power one quibbles over at country retreats.”

  “Do you? You’re very sure of yourself. Who’s your handler?”

  Baru thought at once of Farrier. She didn’t like that. “What do you mean?”

  Shao Lune shifted. One bright eye glimmered around the post, and the edge of a sharp smile. “When Xate Yawa and Iscend come down here together,” she said, “I see that Yawa’s not in charge. She’s afraid of the Clarified woman. Who are you afraid of?”

  “No one,” Baru said, staring into the dimness of the stern hold. No one but herself. “They tried to claim me with a hostage.”

  “And?”

  “I executed her myself.”

  “Oh,” Shao said, with sudden respect.

  “I loved her,” Baru said, for no useful reason. Now she was confiding in Lune. What a fool. But she couldn’t stop herself: the drink was not enough, she had to speak, she had to say how she felt.

  “And I loved working for Ormsment,” Shao Lune said, “until she got in my way.”

  Baru tugged listlessly on the chains. A gray shroud had settled over her.

  “Tell me how to stop Ormsment,” she said, “and I’ll talk to the others about your parole. How would you like that? A chance to get out of your bilge.”

  Shao’s bright glimmering eye watched her round the post. People, Baru remembered, had two eyes. She had forgotten the existence of Shao’s other eye while it was out of sight.

  “She won’t dare attack you,” Shao Lune said, “if you’re under an Oriati diplomatic seal. I guarantee it.”

  * * *

  THE target would be the clipper Cheetah. “Tau-indi Bosoka owns her,” Baru explained, “she was sighted at moor in the Llosydanes. Right now Cheetah is somewhere north of us, headed home as fast as she can with news of that debacle at Moem. She’ll go into the Kraken Still to reach the Mbo. But first she’ll stop on Kyprananoke to take in water.”

  Apparitor boggled at her: “You say that like it’s a stroll to the pharmacist! Don’t you know what’s down in the middle of the Ashen Sea?”

  “Pleasantly unconquered islanders, happily canoeing about?”

  “No, you lapsarian lunk, it’s a dead sea full of ghost ships and rotten crews! The currents conspire, the winds are inconstant, there is rock and maelstrom! They’d be mad to go in there!”

  “But the Oriati know a way to cross the Still,” Yawa said.

  “Since when are you an expert navigator?” Apparitor poked her in the breastbone. “You’ve never led an expedition further than Cattlson’s rectum!”

  “I policed smuggling, didn’t I? Smugglers have to come up through the Kraken Still to get past the navy on the trade ring.” She nodded grudgingly to Baru. “Baru’s right. We can intercept Cheetah on its way to Kyprananoke. Baru and Iraji can go aboard, Baru to negotiate, Iraji to see after the cultural particularities.”

  Baru had not, of course, mentioned to anyone that Tau-indi Bosoka thought she was infected by an apocalyptic spiritual disease.

  Now she sat under her hammock in the arsenal and marked her vodka bottle with a grease pencil. She would allow herself not more than one dose per watch. A little more if her fingers really hurt.

  The void said, in a young man’s voice, “I need to cast a spell of protection over you.”

  “The left side!” Baru snarled at Iraji. “I said approach from my left!”

  “But then you’d see me coming, and scuttle off.” In his fine fingers Iraji held out a wooden tile about the size of a playing card, engraved, beneath the much-worn varnish, with the face of a woman in a collared coat. “Will you help me cast this spell?”

  Baru blinked up at him. He wore a pair of canvas shorts and nothing else, his delicate strength so pleasant, so graceful, trained to ornament. How compliant he could be: and yet now she never forgot that beneath that compliance he was his own bright mind.

  “A spell? I thought you were a good Incrastic citizen.”

  “In Falcrest I certainly am. But if your plan works, we’ll be going aboard an Oriati Prince-ship. We need Oriati protection for an Oriati place. We need a bond of trim.” Iraji held out the tile. “You come from Sousward, you must know the word. How do they say it in the Whale Words? Trim is a power that connects people.”

  He offered her the card again, with a long, elastic patience that would soon, Baru felt, snap back against her. Iraji had grown very bold with her. Perhaps he felt he’d earned her attention when he saved her life.

  “We already have a bond of sorts,” Baru admitted, “don’t we? You saved my life at the Elided Keep. You saved my life again, from Munette.” And maybe pinched Baru’s ledger of secrets before he did. But wasn’t that a sort of favor? Keeping Tain Hu’s coded trust far from Baru’s precarious heart?

  “I was doing my duty.”

  “And yo
u did it very well.”

  “Did I? You think I did a good job of breaking my friend Munette’s arm?”

  “Well, you didn’t faint, at least. Why are you always fainting?”

  He made an expression of extreme patience, extremely tested.

  “I’m sorry,” Baru offered. She was sorry, she had great reserves of sorrow, it was not hard to make some of it fungible and grant it to Iraji. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be difficult. I’ve just been in…”

  She did not want to talk about pain. Instead she reached out and took the tile with the woman’s face from his hand. “What do we do?”

  “We learn to play Purge,” he said, and grinned suddenly. “Oh, I love this game.”

  * * *

  HE dealt a deck of wooden cards faceup, then poured out a pile of dry beans. Baru knelt to help him separate them into piles of ten. She remembered the night she’d looked up cryptarchy with Muire Lo, dictionaries and thesauri scattered around them. She’d known by then that he would, in all statistical likelihood, come to love her. She was a fair enough young woman and he spent a lot of time with her. There were Incrastic charts one could use to obtain the resulting odds of love.

  She had failed to prevent that. Lo had died.

  Maybe when Iraji said he had to create a bond of trim, he meant she had to care for him. Maybe that was his magic, an Oriati magic, concerned entirely with the connections between people.

  But like all requirements, such a bond could surely be falsified.

  “You think I’ll like this game?” She turned over one of the face cards. On the back, tiny inscribed Aphalone letters read, THE PRINCE-AMBASSADOR, and then, handwritten, Tau-indi Bosoka.

  He hummed as he counted beans. “Your tastes aren’t hard to cater to, my lady.”

  “Oh? You didn’t have much luck last time.” She remembered how to flirt like Hu. That lopsided smile, that gaze which did not break. It caught him and held him an instant. He laughed, surprised and charmed. He really must be like Ulyu Xe, drawn to men and women both.

  “Come, look. This is Purge.…”

  With an efficient and supremely unpatronizing manner, he showed Baru how to play. The players took the parts of rivals in Falcrest: the cards were ministers, admirals, parliamentaries, and polymaths who each contributed some political capability, whether moneymaking or law-writing or gossip-mongering or the creation of influence. To win, one first spent their influence (the dry beans) to recruit a cabal of allies (the cards). Some would help you get more influence. Some would let you alter the rules. Some would let you strike at your opponent’s cabal. “Strip away my support,” Iraji explained, “until you can have me convicted, or exiled, or murdered without much chance of anyone caring. But be careful not to run out of influence-beans. Each member of your cabal requires constant favors and protection, and if a tile is not satisfied with its allocation of beans, it may flip.…”

  “The Tyrant’s Qualm,” Baru said. “You must divide your power to gain allies, but not too far?”

  “Precisely.”

  They sat under her tied-up hammock and played as the deck above them drummed with busy feet and the ship creaked with speed. Occasionally Iraji smiled, or laughed in delight. Baru lost twice, quickly and purposefully, not because she could have won but because she needed to see all the rules in operation to grasp the game-behind-the-game. The rules might say you could buy any minister you wanted at the beginning, but Baru knew that only a few ministers would be correct choices, opening paths toward a strategy that would defeat most other strategies. It was better, for example, to recruit people of influence early on, so you could use their influence to get even more people of influence. But later in the game, you would have to begin spending all your influence aggressively to complete your plots, and it was a waste of time to cultivate more patronage. This seemed to be the key to victory: choosing when to transition from growth for growth’s sake into the actual execution of your endgame.

  “The metagame,” Iraji said, and this time his grin was joyful and spontaneous. “That’s what you’re talking about. The game-of-winning-the-game is called the metagame.”

  “I don’t see how that’s different from the game itself. Isn’t the goal of the game to win the game?”

  “Yes. The game is the set of rules I’ve taught you. But the metagame is the game of knowing how others tend to play the game, and choosing a strategy that will defeat the common strategies.”

  “Like yomi?”

  “Yomi is a part of it, yes, knowing what I’m likely to do.”

  Baru frowned in thought. He mistook that for confusion, and went on:

  “Last century when Purge was new, everyone complained that military coup through the navy was too powerful, so play centered around control of the Admiralty. Then the Foreign Policies variant came into favor, wherein both players could lose if the Admiralty were badly compromised by intrigue. The metagame changed, people stopped focusing so much on the Admiralty.”

  “Aha. That’s a very useful word, metagame,” Baru said, and went on to lose three more times, all by the narrowest margin, before she realized that Iraji was playing with her—always performing just a bit better than she could beat. Baru looked up at him with vengeful delight, infuriated and happy to be furious: “You’re a snake. If I keep losing, why can’t my player just have your player to dinner and stab him?”

  “Ah, a simplicity!” He clapped. “The game presumes that all parties involved have guarded themselves against basic tactics like assassination and poisoning, which we call the Simplicities.”

  “As I am guarded, here on Helbride, by my patron’s threat against your master’s hostage.”

  “Just so.”

  “So only more sophisticated tactics can reach me.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as this effort to win my confidence.”

  “You think I’m here to befriend you on Apparitor’s orders?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Iraji touched the cards between them. Lacquer-painted faces stared up from the wood of the deck. Slowly, hesitantly, he stroked one of the faces: and then, with a duelist’s speed, he reached up to touch Baru’s cheek.

  She froze. He had very steady warm hands, and his eyes were dangerously open. Not a seductive openness, half-lidded and open-lipped, but a curious kind of trust: stupid, cowlike, tactically foolish trust, extended to her like a line of credit.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said. “I don’t believe you are what you pretend to be.”

  “I— What?”

  “I can see you are in agony, my lady. Why do you have to bicker with my lord? Are you determined to be nothing but edges and lye?”

  So he was here for Apparitor. To pry, again, at Baru’s cracks.

  “We’re rivals,” Baru said. “We must defend ourselves from each other.”

  “The best rivals share a certain respect, don’t they?”

  “In his rag novels, maybe.” But not, she thought, after one of them has decided the other is a monster, and after that monster has decided to send him home to his brother and a terrible fate.

  “He is lonely! Not for a lover,” he smiled, quickly, and in pride, “but a peer. He has been on mission so long … the two of you could ease each others’ pain, if only you were friends.”

  And Baru remembered how genuinely Apparitor had grieved for Tain Hu. How truly he had liked her. Pity. Very briefly she pitied Apparitor. To lose so many of his staff at the Elided Keep, to lose his hope of befriending Tain Hu, and to gain only this feral arithmetic-ghoul named Baru, who would rip him from his lover and send him into exile.

  They’d almost confided in each other, on that day when they came to the Llosydanes. Apparitor had talked about his doomed voyage east, and meeting Lindon, and … and then he’d said something cruel. You know the best class of pawn?

  And they hadn’t, really, been even a little friendly since. Why?

  It was obvious, when Baru put it in economic terms. He’d offe
red her confidence. She hadn’t returned it. She hadn’t told him anything about her past, or her lovers, or her plans. He’d offered an ante and she had not matched.

  “I—” she began, looking at Iraji wonderingly, unsure whether to take him at his word, or to defeat this clever insinuation.

  Then the game began again.

  “ROCKETS!” The shout came down from the masts, relayed by the officer of the watch. “ROCKETS TO THE EAST! SHIP IN DISTRESS!”

  Baru bolted for the stairs, slammed her head, and reeled up onto the deck cursing and spitting. Apparitor was halfway up the mast, dripping from his bath, wearing nothing but a skirtwrap. “What is it?” Baru shouted to him.

  He climbed down lightly to the deck. His face was grim.

  “It’s Cheetah,” he said.

  “Excellent!” Baru cried. “I’ll make ready to go aboard.”

  “You don’t understand. They’ve been attacked. They’re sinking.”

  19

  CHEETAH

  THE Prince-ship Cheetah drifted, kraken-struck.

  Her distress rockets had cried out unknown ship in pursuit. She was a clipper, and she must have run from that ship with all her clipper speed, but it was not enough, she had not escaped. Cheetah’s predator hadn’t murdered her in the ordinary ways: her masts had not come down under a crush of stormwind, her back hadn’t been broken by a mine, her wood and canvas hadn’t ignited under the cackling spray of Burn.

  No, her wounds were more subtle, and Baru tallied them with unease—something new had done this work.…

  She snapped her fingers for the acting master-at-arms (Diminute having run afoul of Tain Shir at the Elided Keep). The habitual motion did not work: she poked her stump with her thumb and gagged in pain.

  “What was that?” the master-at-arms called. “Are you all right?”

  “Get Shao Lune up here,” Baru snarled. “I want to know what she sees.”

  Cheetah’s hull had been punched in along the waterline, wound after wound after gaping splintered wound. As if a steel-tipped kraken had reached up from below, embraced the clipper, and driven its arms through and through. The sight made Baru heartsick. Her name was Cheetah, and Baru could only think of a dead cat with wolfsbite on its belly.