The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  She was bleeding, bleeding, the blood made her hungry, the hunger fed her soul. She whirled and caught the falling table on her body: it crashed into her across her stomach, drove the breath from her, but she roared a silent drowning roar, her blood so thick and fast it felt it would erupt from her eyes, and she kicked and kicked and pushed Tau-indi and Iraji away from their falling ship. Trim will save us and trim is only other people.

  Something impossible followed her. It was the fucking moon! The moon was after her again! Baru stared at it in fury and kicked harder.

  The moon pursued her. Out of the dark came a white-black torpedo shape, bigger than a horse, bigger than a whaleboat—Baru saw carnivore teeth, an eye bright with intelligence, a scythelike blade that she had taken for the moon, gleaming alien letters—a surface gnarled as brain coral, and deep within it, staring, the hollow eyes of a skull—

  She realized she must be hallucinating. Dying. And she imagined great kraken-arms reaching up from below to seize her.

  Galvanized by terror, serene with strength, Baru drew the dive knife from her ankle. She sawed the ties that held the iron curtainrods to the table. The ballast dropped away. Baru pulled herself back on top, on top with Tau-indi Bosoka and Iraji.

  Buoyed up by empty casks and light wood, they rocketed for the surface.

  The water parted across Baru’s back. She yawned against the roar, to make her ears crinkle and pop. As they rose they began to tumble, and Baru clung, watching starlight and sea-shadow sweep across Tau-indi, watching their warm eyes open and fix on Baru and smile. Iraji’s cheeks were pulled back by current: he stared at her with a squirrel rictus.

  They struck the surface upside down.

  They were trapped—she hadn’t thought of this, so stupid of her—Baru tried to kick hard enough to tip them over, but the whole weight of the table was on her, pressing her down, and she had no leverage to flip them. Iraji was drowning. The Prince was drowning—

  —and a long oar reached under the table and tossed them upright. Storm air and pelting rain needled her skin. Lightning split the sky. She laughed and howled in victory, and the thunder answered her.

  “Baru!” It was Apparitor, shouting. “I’m going to cut your feet off, you idiot!”

  “Do you have them?” The Enact-Colonel Osa. “Do you have the Prince?”

  Baru spat seawater and cheek-blood, rolled up on her knees, and bent to check Tau-indi’s breath. They were alive. Their pulse was steady, their breathing deep and ragged but strong. The waves swelled beneath them but did not tip their table over: well done, Engineer Cormorant.

  She went to Iraji, who coughed up brine but shook his head when she tried to help.

  “Oh,” Baru gasped. “We made it out. Oh Himu, I am clever!”

  He looked at her in wonder. “The spell worked!” Iraji said. “The spell of protection! I’m a genius!”

  * * *

  IN Helbride’s middeck, surrounded by the warm protection of Cheetah’s rescued crew, Tau-indi Bosoka spooned soup from a tin mug Baru had brought down to them.

  “What I don’t understand,” the Prince said to Baru, “is why, if you really are trying to save your own people, you’d do so much to destroy their rebellion.”

  Baru had been warming fresh blankets for the Prince over a hot stone. Now she looked up in wary fear. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, as I’ve, ah, brought up before, your actions in Aurdwynn lured Abdumasi Abd to his death or capture.…”

  And Baru had been too stupid to realize her rebellion would draw in bigger conflicts. But she couldn’t deny it. “Yes…”

  “Aurdwynn wasn’t the first place Abdumasi interfered.”

  “No?”

  “He was funding the resistance on Taranoke out of his own personal wealth.”

  Baru felt as if she’d stepped onto a needle, a cold needle tall as a mountain. And if she slipped it would run her through from sole to spine. Abd had been active on Taranoke? Of course he had. Where else would a merchant with a grudge against Falcrest strike first? Why hadn’t she thought of it? Oh, Wydd, she was no savant, she was a fool. She’d drawn the Oriati into a trap without even realizing it, and now she had destroyed her own home’s chances of resistance!

  And she kept putting off opening her parents’ letters—

  —had she known? Had she been trying to deny what she’d done?

  Baru sat paralyzed by anguish. The blanket, left too long on the stone, began to steam. Tau spoke carefully. “Presumably, if he’s under navy interrogation, he’s betrayed the names of his contacts on Taranoke.”

  Mother. Father. No.

  “Maybe he hasn’t cracked yet,” Baru said, and changed the subject as hard as she could, lest she erupt on the spot. “Did the people I sent to you on Moem reach safety?”

  Tau looked happy that she’d reached for a mutual connection. “They’re all safe. The boy, his guardian, the diver, the herbalist, and the pale man. I interviewed them, gave them papers and money, and left them to charter passage. Things were … unsettled on the Llosydanes.”

  They had not mentioned Nitu the cook. “Unsettled how?” Baru asked, to avoid that guilt.

  “There were some riots. A portion of the date crop burnt down. Some killed.”

  Baru had sauntered onto those islands, sent their markets into a panic, scooped out their pockets, and walked away with Abdumasi Abd’s name. She hadn’t even paused to think about what she’d left behind. Oh Himu, all that money she’d made! Why hadn’t she invested it in something? A charity? A school? Some sort of trust for development?

  Tain Shir said she was going to kill Baru’s parents.

  What if Abdumasi Abd had cracked under Aminata’s torture, he had named Solit and Pinion as insurrectionists, and they were even now in Tain Shir’s possession—

  “Baru?” the Federal Prince murmured. They reached for her hand. “What did I say?”

  She stood paralyzed. Maps of action and consequence unfurled from her lips and her fingertips, the possibilities of all she might do and say, but on the horizons of these maps she saw only Cairdine Farrier’s laughing mask and the blood-caked brute indifference of Tain Shir.

  “Baru?” Tau put down their soup. “Baru?”

  “Do I know that voice?” A slurred call: Baru shivered out of reverie. Through the Oriati came a Falcrest man, dowdy old brown sparrow among the tall chattery blackbirds, Faham Execarne with a pipe of weed and dressings on his wound. “Who’s that I hear preaching the dubious but comforting metaphysics of trim? Can it be the sacred hermaphrodite of Lake Jaro?”

  “Execarne!” Tau cried, sitting up. “You mangy addled runt! I’ve told you a thousand times, I’m not a hermaphrodite, I can’t satisfy your fantasies!”

  “Damn!” the spymaster said, snapping his fingers, which made Baru’s right hand ache. The enact-colonel Osa stopped him: he submitted wordlessly as she searched him for weapons.

  “How are you?” Tau offered, by way of apology.

  “Shot up and sore,” Execarne complained. “And nearly out of drugs. Ah, look, you’re befriending Baru! Risky fucking proposition, going by the evidence! I knew her about two days before I had marines and jackals burning down my farm.”

  “Did you lie to her? Lying at first meeting does invite misfortune.” Tau had gotten a bay leaf stuck in their teeth.

  “I didn’t even tell her I was the Morrow Minister!” Which faded into hacking laughter as he folded up around his crossbow wound.

  She put her hand into Tau’s mouth without permission and plucked the leaf right out so assuredly that she did not even brush their lips. “Goodness,” Tau said, “you’re nimble.”

  “You probably oughtn’t associate with her,” Execarne wheezed, “she’s definitely an Imperial agent, and she’s made it this far for purely political reasons. Dangerous.”

  “Nonsense. I’ve told you before, Faham, I believe that the atom of the human universe is the dyad, the connection between two people. The most precious thing th
ere can be.”

  “Is that so,” Execarne said. “Have you told her the truth about that ship that sank your clipper, then?”

  Tau stiffened so suddenly that Baru heard their teeth click. Behind Execarne the enact-colonel inhaled sharply. “Your Federal Highness, I strongly advise you to let this matter lie.”

  “Always so subtle, Osa.” Tau-indi touched Baru’s collarbone. “But I can’t speak of it. Baru, do you know what happens to a fetus exposed to uranium?”

  Baru had never seen such a thing, had never even read much uranium-lore: the Oriati insisted the black pitch was magical, the books said they were wrong. “No, I don’t. What happens?”

  “They become monstrous,” Tau-indi said, in a small brave voice which Baru could not bear to laugh at, although she wanted to. “The soul cannot inhabit them at birth, for they are already full of uranium light. What enters them does not come out of the Door in the East. Our alliance is young. There are certain things you and I cannot touch upon, lest our work give birth to a monster.”

  Baru’s wound prickled. Suddenly she did not feel like laughing.

  “The Prince needs to rest,” Osa said, firmly, and suddenly the nearby Cheetah crew were toasting Execarne and Baru, shouting thanks for the timely rescue, inviting them into a circle of smiling faces to offer them fine wine, over here, away from Tau-indi Bosoka.

  “It’s all bullshit,” Execarne said, conversationally, to Baru.

  “What’s bullshit?”

  “The Cancrioth,” he said. “That’s what you’ve been sent to find, right? Yeah, I’ve got bad news. I think the Cancrioth is one of our deception missions. Useful bogeymen. That’s all.”

  Baru’s mind was so awhirl and her right arm so shot through with cold sick threads of pain which seemed to wrap up around her throat and jaw and down her tongue that she could barely even muster a lie. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said weakly.

  “Of course you don’t.” He sighed and took someone’s proferred wineglass. “The three of you, Durance and Apparitor and yourself, aren’t meant to find the Cancrioth. You’re just supposed to rampage around causing diplomatic incidents.”

  “But the ship—the Prince implied—”

  “The Prince, virtue bless them, is eager to blame every possible cause for war on ancient cancer cults. A convenient lie for them, that’s all.”

  But that can’t be, Baru thought. Hesychast believes in them, Farrier believes in them, and I have gambled everything on their power …

  A shout from the deck stopped Baru from any further confusion, panic, or bodily agony: a shout picked up and repeated all across the ship.

  “SAILS ON THE PROW! SAILS HO!”

  Baru bolted up onto the maindeck. Apparitor was already there. “It’s Sulane,” he said, grimly. “She’s circled ahead of us. It’s time.”

  * * *

  HELBRIDE’S crew ran up Cheetah’s diplomatic flags.

  Sulane came at them from the bow, running perpendicular to the wind, tossing slightly in rough surf. She looked very small in the sea, small and outrageously red, like a bloody splinter in the snow: but she grew so quickly as she came. Baru imagined the stabilizers of her hwachas and rocket batteries flexing on their springs, steadying the gunnery crews, keeping their instruments trained on Helbride, so rich with paper and canvas and things that burnt.

  Apparitor chewed his lower lip into blisters with worry. “We’ll be fine,” Baru assured him. “It’ll work.”

  “I’m not afraid of Sulane,” he muttered. “She’ll kill us or she won’t. There’s nothing I can do about it now.”

  “Then what?”

  “Iraji hasn’t passed out this often since the last time we did work in the south.”

  “Is it stress?”

  “No,” Apparitor said, but he was interrupted by Tau-indi’s arrival.

  “Your Federal Highness.” Apparitor bowed and kissed Tau-indi’s hand. “Thank you for coming aboard.”

  “Your Excellence, I could not be more charmed. How is Lindon?”

  “Very well,” Apparitor said, though he clearly worried otherwise. “Will Xate Yawa be joining us?”

  “I’m here,” Yawa said, appearing from below in a simple peasant’s dress. She looked down at the laman with deep unease. Baru wasn’t sure if she disliked lamen, or Oriati, or Princes. Probably, she thought, it was Princes.

  The laman seemed to make Apparitor uncomfortable too, or, at least, self-conscious: his eyes skittered over their hips and up their soft proud throat, where they had painstakingly reapplied the golden paint of their station. Baru remembered Apparitor saying, a man can become a woman, or a woman a man, depending on how they dress and act—but what we hate, in the Mansions, is a liar.

  Who did not carry their childhood prejudices? Even Tain Hu had looked down on the Belthyc people. Even Baru would sneer at a plainsider.

  “Firing range in ten seconds,” Branne reported.

  INS Sulane came straight at them.

  “Masks on,” Apparitor ordered.

  Baru reached up and slid the porcelain half-mask down over her head and looked back up again, faced now in white, like bone. Apparitor’s banner of hair streamed out from behind a mask marked around the right eye with the silver polestar. Captain Branne’s full-face sea mask glistened with oily filters and the weathering of harsh eastern seas. Execarne slid on his dull varnished wood. Yawa’s black judge mask shone with faint purple highlights. Together they faced the mutineers.

  Tau-indi Bosoka and the Enact-Colonel Osa looked at each other. Baru watched the Prince shiver.

  “We’re in firing range,” Branne said.

  Sulane did not launch.

  “Keep course,” Branne ordered. “They’ve got the fighting rudder. It’s on them to turn off.”

  Sulane came closer yet. Waves split across her prow like tendons on a scalpel. Baru counted the spears that lined her rails, and the red-masked marines who stared back at her, and the count brought her no comfort.

  A ship’s girl looked up from her chart of figures. “We’re in the fifty-fifty bracket.” Any rocket fired from Sulane now stood a coin’s chance of striking Helbride’s rigging and dooming them all.

  “She’s adjusting course again,” Branne reported. “Correcting for the wind. She’ll ram us in two minutes.”

  Baru raised the spyglass, and beheld her.

  The killing woman stood on Sulane’s bowsprit, half-crouched, bare-footed, her weight low and swaying as the frigate chopped through the waves. She wore knives across her chest and a bug-eyed mask. The mass of her calves flexed and relaxed with feline ease. The storm crossbow in her arms could have lanced a harpoon into a good-sized whale.

  She raised a hand and pointed.

  You. I want you.

  Baru could have vomited, so sudden and profound was the fear. Would she haul Ulyu Xe out onto the bowsprit and keelhaul her while Baru watched? Would she drag Baru’s parents in a net behind Sulane until they came apart for the sharks?

  Xate Yawa inhaled hard, and did not speak.

  Then Sulane began to shout. The officers led the crew and the crew called out across wind and waves. The human mind has an ear for the human voice, and Baru heard clearly:

  SAVE YOURSELVES, the mutiny bellowed. LEAP THE RAIL. SWIM TO US.

  WE WILL HONOR YOUR SURRENDER.

  “Ah,” Yawa clucked. “The amnesty. Very predictable.”

  “Keep your stations!” Captain Branne roared.

  “Don’t shout,” Yawa murmured. “Show the crew you trust them.”

  “Captain Branne,” Tau-indi said. “I presume you have a signal lantern aboard?”

  “Yes, Your Highness.”

  “Send my compliments to Province Admiral Ormsment at once. Ask after her health, commend her again on the olive oil she sold me in Treatymont, and assure her that I will offer her asylum in the Oriati Mbo.”

  “You’ll what?” Svir roared, wheeling on the Prince. “The fuck you’ll give her asylum! That woman bet
rayed her oaths and killed my people!”

  “And you killed my neighbor Abd’s people,” Tau said, “you lured him into war and burned his friends, and I do not know where he has gone. But here I am, saving your life with my flags, just as you saved mine. Listen to me. You must give Ormsment a way out, or she will fight like a wolverine.”

  “They’re navy.” It was Iraji, coming up to stand by Apparitor. “They’ll never go live in the Mbo. They exist to burn Oriati people.”

  “I have to believe otherwise,” Tau said.

  Sulane passed Helbride barely two lengths away, turning hard. No rockets ignited. No torpedoes fired. She executed a full turn and came back on Helbride’s stern, pacing the clipper.

  Suddenly she fired—

  —Baru’s heart nearly burst in terror—

  —but the salvo of white hornets blew up harmlessly all around Helbride’s masts. They were only signal fireworks. Cries from aloft as the topgallant crews called out to each other, and the indignant shriek of the ship’s beggar gull.

  “It worked,” Baru breathed. Her plan, Iraji’s plan, she must be careful to remember to credit him, had worked. Cheetah’s flags kept Helbride safe. Ormsment would not make the navy responsible for an act of open aggression against a Prince’s ship.

  Apparitor sighed hugely and hooked his hands in his belt. “Tell the crew they’re free to take turns at the sternrail mooning those bastards. Ormsment can’t touch us.”

  Not until we have to leave the ship, Baru thought. Not until then.

  * * *

  TAU-INDI seized Baru’s right shoulder and hissed. “Who is that woman on their prow?”

  Who indeed. “That’s Tain Shir.”

  “Tain Shir?” The Prince shuddered. Baru felt it in their fingertips. “Oh no.”

  “You know her, too?”

  “I know Cairdine Farrier, who created her. She was his … argument.” Tau-indi Bosoka came out of Baru’s right-hand darkness and stood before her, huddled like a wet finch, hands cupped before their face, elbows tight together. Baru realized they were resisting the urge to reach out: to Baru, or the Enact-Colonel, someone, anyone. “He used her to provoke war in places where he wished to dictate the terms of peace. And then she … there was an expedition sent into the jungle. An expedition intended to uncover the old sciences. She did not return.”