The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  He won again. He kissed the card for the Empire Admiral and fell back, belching, against his hammock. “So,” he said, thickly. “We never finished our conversation.”

  “Which one?” It felt as if they’d never finished any.

  “How would one destroy the Imperial Republic?”

  Baru giggled, and covered her mouth, quite appalled at herself. “Bankruptcy, I think. The Empire could be rendered insolvent. By disruption of the trade.”

  “Spoken like an accountant.”

  “I am discovered,” Baru said, holding up her hands in surrender.

  Apparitor pawed overhead, knocked over a bundle of maps in bone cylinders, and, pouncing on one, revealed a schema of the Ashen Sea. “That won’t work, though, see?” He stabbed, roughly, at Falcrest, and missed, indicating instead the middle of the Mother of Storms. “Falcrest is the heart of the Ashen Sea trade circle. It pumps the blood.”

  “That’s exactly why bankruptcy would work—stop the trade, stop the money—”

  “Listen, listen.” He waved his fingers. “Say Falcrest can’t buy any more shit. No more great merchant fleets. No more trade ring. Take away that trade and you, uh, you get a lot of war, because if people can’t get what they need, they try to take it—”

  “A ut li-en,” Iraji whispered, to Baru’s horror.

  “—and then”—Apparitor flourished over the map, behold—“over the course of forty or fifty years, that’s how it happened with the Cheetah Palaces at least, those wars and raids lead to the destruction of most major cities. That’s, uh, that’s how it goes in a world where people take what they need, instead of trading for it. Then I’d expect plague, as refugees flee the violence, smallpox, measles, buboes, the Kettling. Then isolationism to hold back the plague, and five hundred years of chaos. The Palatine Collapse wiped out all complex interconnected civilization. I mean, it’s remarkable, it’s brilliant—” He belched articulately. “—in Falcrest we’ve got the entire known world hostage to our own economy. If we go down, so do they.”

  “People got along fine without Falcrest’s trade,” Baru said, skittering around thoughts of Taranoke and her parents. She hurt. The glass cut she’d suffered on Cheetah was stitched up with silk through her cheek, her missing fingers still ached and curled, and her period was due to start in a few days: meaning a dull awful heaviness in her stomach.

  She drank some more.

  “They got along fine on their own,” Apparitor said, “but now they’re connected, like the Llosydanes, remember the fucking Llosydanes? Stars help them if the trade stops. They’ll all die. Everyone will die if the trade stops. Because everyone’s connected.”

  “Quitter.” Baru waved her bottle at him. “How would you destroy Falcrest without ruining the rest of the world?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t.” He belched again. “I fully expect this fucking war to spiral out of anyone’s control and kill us all.”

  “How nihilistic.”

  “Not if you read your history, eh? Seeing as civilizations always collapse, all of them”—his hands moving rapidly left and right, to Falcrest, to the Camou, to the far eastern continent, to the unknown west, left and right—“the Jellyfish Eaters and the Cheetah Palaces and everyone else, and I think it’s our turn now: I just want to go. I want to go away.”

  Baru stared at him. “Go where?”

  “East,” he said, catching Baru’s attention with his finger, and pointing east, into her blind right, then west, then east again. A ring glinted on his pointing finger. Quite hypnotic. “East into the unknown. To escape the end of the world.”

  “The unknown…” Baru inhaled, long and slow, staring at the map. The unknown was on her blind side: she couldn’t see it, she could only see the known world, the Ashen Sea. Her mind caressed the shapes of money implied by the map. During the Armada War, Falcrest had chewed the fertile northeastern corner off Lonjaro Mbo, and the Tide Column, too, which controlled the trade between the Ashen Sea and the Mothercoast.

  Now Oriati Mbo had more people than it could feed, and its ships could no longer move food as freely … they had to go to war, or starve.…

  East. West. East. West. Apparitor’s finger ticked back and forth.

  “Look,” he said, “look at this.”

  Left. Right. Left. Right. Great rings of light began to shine around the reflections on Apparitor’s glossy hair, and the lamps above.

  Baru shook her head in confusion and—

  She heard a crackle of undead sound, like a fist pushing up through shallow earth. She smelled salt. Tain Hu cried out hoarsely as she wrapped her own death-chains around her and battled the tide. The frigate birds drummed. On Apparitor’s shelves the stacks of rag novels glistened in the lamplight, Antibirth at Convent Clair, Nab Banadab and the Madness of Men, The Death Ship, impossible truths from behind the moon’s silver mask she would wish she’d never known.

  “The map,” she choked, having trouble with her tongue. “I can see the whole map…”

  Oh fuck oh joy she could see! She could see her whole world again, left and right, Apparitor’s entire face, Iraji’s two arms opened to catch her as she tottered. She had the other half of her world back!

  Baru looked right, into the place that had been missing.

  And there before her was the Emperor. Bound to the ropes and rigging of the Throne. Lifting one gloved finger to point at her. And with his motion the apparatus of Empire creaked and bent, stirring the people and the ships, sending waves of coin and laundry bleach crashing up on distant shores to toss dead crab and pus-bloody corpses onto beaches of soap and ash—

  “WHAT IS MY WILL?” the Emperor asked. “TELL ME MY WILL. ARE YOU THE ONE WHO THINKS MY THOUGHTS?

  “WILL YOU NOW BECOME ME?”

  He reached out to her and pulled on the cord that bound them, a cord that ran from his face like a slithering umbilical across the world until it fastened itself on Baru’s right eyeball. Like a strangler vine, it sent tendrils around her eye, inside her mind, fastened to eyelets drilled into the back of her skull.

  Baru heard herself roar and rattle. Her jaw clenched.

  Iraji held her. The curtains behind him parted—Iscend and Xate Yawa rushed in—Baru stared at them in awe, dumbstruck by the symmetrical wholeness of them, the leftness and the rightness, joined together.

  “You idiot,” Yawa said, “you fool, you gave her too much.”

  A seizure. She was having a seizure. She’d been poisoned. Yawa had gone to Apparitor and made a deal, let’s make her have a seizure, and then we can threaten her with medical internment. Seizures were cause for lobotomy, weren’t they?

  Oh, Hu. What’s gone so wrong with me?

  “Hello,” the Empire said.

  * * *

  “HELLO,” the room says. Everyone else is gone and Apparitor’s cabin is staring at her. Why has she never noticed that the room is made of eyes? Eyes in the whorled woodgrain, eyes in the flare of the lamplight, eyes with thick shadowy lashes peering between the books. Eyes in the charts, and their pupils are islands, their irises are currents and storm-tracks. Everything made of eyes.

  “Hello yourself,” Baru breathes, and she realizes that at last she is speaking directly with the Empire Itself. The fabric of causality which binds all choices back to the Imperial Will: the swarming summation of all those whose lives are bound up in Falcrest, whether in prosperity, or misery, or defiance.

  When the Empire’s work is done, resistance will be indistinguishable from service. There will be a map of cause and effect, and all causes will lead to one effect. Falcrest’s triumph.

  Baru looks down and sees herself gowned in taut canvas. Ropes and eyelets draw the canvas shroud tight against her body—no, look at those bloodstains spreading against the fabric. The canvas isn’t drawn tight over her skin. The canvas has actually replaced her skin. It feels like sail. She is full of wind.

  Hundreds of ropes bind her to the stone and steel of the Imperial Throne.

  She is the Emperor I
tself.

  She can feel the lobotomy pick in her brain. She can feel the ghost of its presence. It has emptied her of will, so that she might become a perfect vessel for the design of the Empire.

  “This,” the Empire tells her, “is your destiny. Allow me to be more precise. This is the destiny you chose when you accepted Cairdine Farrier’s patronage.”

  She sits on the Throne: she posesses ultimate power.

  She is lobotomized and bound: she has no power at all. She is an emblem and an instrument of hidden forces.

  Then Tain Hu cuts her way out of the Empire’s eyeball.

  Her sword tip pierces the pupil of a woodgrain whorl. Ink jets: the eye screams in the only way an eye can scream, by widening, and Hu slices her way free from within. She wears her leather tabard with its mailed shoulders, her riding jodhpurs, and her long black hair bound up tight above her hawkish nose.

  “Your Majesty,” she says, sardonically, and bows deep and wide-armed. “I came as soon as I heard.”

  “Heard what?” Baru says, in a voice made of all her voices, the declaration and the plea, the whisper and the scream.

  “That you’d been made Empress, of course,” Tain Hu says, and her hobnailed boots ring on marble as she strides up to the Throne. “I do love to rescue young women. They are often effusively grateful. I saved Oathsfire’s wife from an ambush once, and when I would not take her money, she looked at me, like this, petulant and hooded, and she said, well, how shall I reward you?”

  “How?”

  “I told Oathsfire that she’d been lost in the woods a while after the rescue.”

  “But what really happened?”

  “I put her up in a cabin, shot a grizzly, and prepared it properly. We ate bear steaks and amused ourselves on the new rug.”

  “You rake,” Baru complains, and then she feels motion in the ropes that bind her.

  Hemp creaks. Slowly, in painful convulsive jerks, the rigging of the Throne forces Baru’s right arm to raise. A knife is necessary, the Empire decides, so a knife appears. Ah. No. It is a lobotomy pick.

  “Insurrection,” Baru groans, trying not to speak, but the ropes are pulling her tongue and peeling back her lips, “can be understood as a disorder of the mind, a form of uncleanliness. The purpose of Incrastic thought is very simply to align individual behavior with the greater good of mankind. Everything we do works to this end. A hygienic person is easily aligned, because their purposes—that is, the map which connects their desires to their behaviors, to their rewards—is cleanly laid out.

  “A filthy person, however, has a snarled and confusing map. They cannot directly link their desires to their behaviors, or their behaviors to their rewards. They may desire happy friends, but behave in ways that make their friends miserable, and yet their friends, trying to be kind, reward them with advice and company. They may desire sexual congress, and seek it out indiscriminately, doing so in a way that does not better the community with healthy, well-tended children.

  “Because human virtue is the only god, the only sin is to detract from this virtue. Disorder and poor hygiene are therefore mortal sins. But worst of all the uncleanly are those who promote disorder, for they not only possess perverse behavioral maps, they disturb and rearrange the maps of others. The insurrectionist not only behaves sinfully, but creates sinful states. Knowing that a sinful state is complex and disordered, we understand that the treatment for insurrection is to enforce simplicity.”

  Baru’s arm is made to brandish the lobotomy pick.

  “Simplicity begins in the mind.”

  Tain Hu brandishes her cocky, lopsided grin. She has drawn her sword, too, the tip aimed not at Baru but at the throne behind her. Goodness, Baru thinks, that is a sharp sword; no real sword was ever so sharp, was it?

  “Nice doctrine,” Hu drawls. “You sound like my uncle-in-law’s sister. Do you have a word for that in Incrastic pedigree? Your aunt’s husband’s sister? I’m sure you do.”

  Look out, Hu! Baru wants to scream to her. I have a lobotomy pick! I’m not in control of myself!

  But Tain Hu is perfectly aware that Baru is not in control. She seems to take this as a challenge. Her eyes glimmer black and gold, amused. She mounts the steps up to the Throne.

  A man steps into her way.

  He is Cairdine Farrier’s stooge, Governor Cattlson. “You brigand bitch,” he says, sulkily, and then he swings his sword at her—a thunderous stroke down from the high arc. But Tain Hu turns the mighty blow so it slides down her own sword and over her shoulder. As she did in the plaza duel, Tain Hu beats him in the head with the back of her sword so he falls. But this time Tain Hu lunges and pierces his heart. An unbelievable yet spectacular geyser of heartblood jets from Cattlson’s chest, paints Hu’s leather tabard, and glistens on her mail rings.

  Cattlson says, with frank irritation, “But I’m bigger!”

  “I stand for Baru Cormorant,” Hu says, and then, winking, “and she lies for me.”

  Baru feels faintly weak-kneed. The ropes of the Throne creak as they correct her posture. The pick in her right hand waits, cobra-poised, for Tain Hu to come in stabbing range.

  “Hu,” Baru tries to say, but all she can do is yawn and drool. The Throne does not will her to speak. She never did manage to warn Tain Hu of her own treachery: not until it was too late.

  “Hush,” Hu says, “hush, it’s all right: trust me.”

  Don’t trust me, Hu.

  “I mean it,” Hu says, neither smiling nor winking, but fixing Baru with the plain intensity she often used in field command: a woman who knew death, and trusted it as a companion. “I’m bringing her to you. I know you don’t understand why. But you need her. Trust me.”

  Tossing her sword to her other hand (a trick she would never use in battle) she undoes the steel snaps and thong ties of her tabard. It falls off her. Beneath it, she is sensibly dressed, but not modestly. The dancers in Treatymont had a way of walking, foot crossing over foot, that made their hips sway. Tain Hu doesn’t walk like that. She comes up the stairs to the Throne shrugging out of her tabard, padding straight-hipped and barefoot like a curious catamount, absolutely self-possessed.

  Baru shivers at this sudden and quite surreal turn toward erotica: she is still bound to this cold Throne, and she still holds her lobotomy pick. Those things do not belong in a fantasy of brown and muscled Hu padding up to her with a sword, displaying to Baru the incalculable ways in which her body is (and still remains) the most ferociously arousing thing Baru has ever seen. The cuts and bands of muscle beneath her smooth, dark-scarred body, strength which appears in unexpected places as she looks about and stretches, as if to say, I am made to do everything well. The perfect definition of her back, down which Baru has spent minutes running her hands. Baru has seen plenty of breasts, but likes Hu’s best, although she would struggle to describe them in particularities: but above this list of specifics Baru likes something about the totality of Hu, an ease and power which Baru did not see in her fellow schoolgirls, or even in the wary adults of post-occupation Iriad. She moves, Baru realizes, a little like Ulyu Xe, with that same unity of purpose. But where Xe is tranquil and reactive, Tain Hu prowls. She pounces. She has the smug mastery of a large cat.

  This is what Tain Hu shares with Tain Shir: a sense that she is her own dominion, unmastered by the world.

  She steps out of her trousers: she unties her linens and lets them fall. Baru realizes with a shock of horror how this dream or hallucination will end—Tain Hu is going to die naked on her knife. Tain Hu will writhe against Baru in carnal desire and then Baru will stab her and Tain Hu will die in blood—her last moans a poisonous admixture of agony and orgasm.

  Sick. Sick. The technique is abominable.

  “No,” Hu says, in response to her thoughts, “it’s not like that. Or—it is, yes, that will happen, because that’s how they want it to go, but you taught me how to beat them. Look.”

  Tain Hu reaches the throne. She flicks her blade here, and there, and cut
s away the ropes that bind Baru’s right arm. Suddenly she can move again! She tries to hurl away the lobotomy pick in horror—

  And Tain Hu closes her fist around the pick, so it can’t get away. “No,” she says. “Hold that. Make it a knife. Yes. Change it into a knife. Like that.”

  She snaps the small cords that hold Baru’s mask to her skull and flips it off. Without the mask Baru finds her lobotomy wound gone. She can move her eyes where she pleases now.

  Tain Hu’s golden eyes shine back at her, full of trust and love, and Baru is grieved beyond words that she will betray them.

  Tain Hu kisses her, fiercely. She bites blood from Baru’s lip and draws away, lingering. “Remember that,” she says. “You’ve been forgetting.”

  She is close against Baru, and warm. Baru remembers that there is nothing more wonderful than a naked, trusting body in your arms, especially when she is so strong and so at ease.

  “Hu,” she says, desperately, “I’m losing control. I think I’ve destroyed my parents. I think Aminata was always Farrier’s agent. I ruined, ruined the Llosydanes, all for one stupid name. I don’t think I can beat them—”

  “Baru.” Hu presses the flat of her sword to Baru’s lips. “They’re too clever for you. As you were too clever for me. How do we beat the clever? They lay out their roads for us to walk down. So how do we escape?”

  When the roads belong to the enemy, you do as Tain Hu had done in Aurdwynn. You go into the wilderness instead. As Tain Shir had gone into the jungle, and returned a monster.…

  “Shir.” Hu shivers. “You’re in her thrall, Baru, do you know why? Because you’re a terribly narcissistic person. And you see in her what you’ll become.” She cuts Baru’s left hand free, impatiently, and with a what are you doing waiting? frown she lifts the glove to her breast. “She’ll make you worse, if she can. Don’t let her. I always tried to make you better.”