Softly she sighs under the caress of the glove.
“Do you have to be naked?” Baru protests. “It’s—It just seems unseemly.”
“I want to be,” Hu says, “because you’re afraid of enjoying it, aren’t you?”
Baru has to admit that’s true.
“Listen,” Hu says, “listen. There is a difference between acting out their story, and truly obeying their story. Do you know what it is?”
“Please,” Baru begs, “please tell me.”
But then, as in all good erotic dreams, she wakes up unfulfilled.
* * *
THE eyes in the walls closed. The Throne slipped away like an octopus.
Baru woke in a hammock, mostly naked beneath a cotton shift: she deduced instantly that she’d been here a while, and they’d stripped her to keep her clean. “How long,” she groaned.
“Only a few hours.” Iscend Comprine knelt and grinned fetchingly. “You’ve been quite a difficult patient.”
“Am I going to be lobotomized?”
“Only if it becomes necessary, I’m sure. You’ve been conscious, but not coherent. Your left side was paralyzed, but you refused to believe it. We had to tie you down to protect you.”
To Baru’s bemusement, she felt wonderful, as clear and quick as a warm river. She didn’t remember exactly how the seizure had begun, or where … she’d been trying to make a wager with Apparitor … “What happened? Did I drink too much?”
Iscend grimaced and touched her brow. Baru interpreted that as some sort of Clarified distress: she wouldn’t signal it unless she wanted Baru to know she was in distress. She must be having trouble sorting through competing imperatives.
“It’s all right,” Baru croaked. “It’s all right to tell me. I serve the Throne. If you can help me, you help the whole Imperial Republic.”
“Fiend,” Iscend said, fondly, “you’re trying to turn me away from my master.”
“I’m on a mission for your master, remember? Hesychast needs me to find the Cancrioth. All else being equal, it’s better if I have more information, not less. What’s wrong with me?”
Iscend lowered her head to murmur, “When we tested you in the Elided Keep, we detected two separate responses to the Farrier Process.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We divided your perceptions down your centerline.” Baru remembered this. They’d put a helmet on her with a huge bladed nose, separating her vision into two hemispheres, and run Hesychast’s word-response test on each side. “We checked your disambiguation responses in each hemisphere. The Farrier Process works by creating subconscious associations which alter behavior; and indeed those associations are strongly present in you. But only if the test stimuli are presented on your left side. The right shows very different patterns of association. I believe your seizure was caused by some sort of exchange between the two minds.”
“Two minds? What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Iscend said, “that we’ve seen this condition before. In the Metademe we have induced it by cutting central areas of the brain with a length of wire. The two isolated halves of the mind diverge in opinions and habits.”
“Like those stories about the Tahari seditionist? Two personalities in one body? With separate handwriting, and separate friends, and even different names?”
“No.” Iscend had extraordinarily precise body language. She pinned that thought on a finger and pushed it aside. “That’s a peasant myth.”
“Why am I different?”
“You are exactly like everyone else. All of us contain these two selves, left and right. But they are usually kept in synchrony, like two diaries written by one woman.” She drew a perfect line down Baru’s nose. “Your injury has allowed them to diverge.”
Her blind half—wasn’t blind at all? Was there another Baru, across a mental moat, just outside her awareness?
“Which one am I?” Baru whispered.
“I don’t know,” Iscend said, in fascination. “To which one am I speaking?”
22
BARU IN THE BILGE
I HAD made Dziransi the instrument that would deliver Baru to her humiliation and much-deserved death. If I hadn’t fucked it all up aristocratically, and I was confident I hadn’t, then the dream-hammer had driven into his brain the conviction that Heingyl Ri must marry his master the Necessary King, and that Baru would be the dowry which bought the marriage.
So Baru would die in the high cold, far from the home she pretended to love. Consumed by the politics of the land (my land) that she’d tried to play for her own advance.
Which would all be very cathartic and satisfying, if I could just get her off Helbride and deliver her to her doom. There were too many witnesses aboard. Baru’s disappearance had to be made secret, an inexplicable and unattributable act of chaos, if Apparitor and I were to avoid Itinerant’s retaliation.
She had not yet set up her vendettas to expose our secrets if she ever vanished. We still had a chance. She could be drawn out alone and snapped up in silence.
Since the boy and I had agreed to cooperate on Baru’s removal—he providing the seizure which would give us medical pretext to threaten her—I had been working on a way to net Baru alone once she fled Helbride. Faham Execarne’s Morrow-men would provide clothes for the operation, which was to say insulation from local authorities, boats, money, muscle that could be trusted not to spill before or after. Iscend would be the sharpest tooth in our jaw, as clever as Baru and certainly quicker.
But I was more and more certain that we needed someone at Baru’s side. Someone who would lead us to her no matter where her madness and her narcissism brought her.
So in the creaking dark of star watch I left Iraji drowsing in my hammock (Svir had asked me to speak to him about his faints, and I’d exhausted him with talk: nothing else, for ill or weal) and padded through drowsing sailors to the ladder belowdecks.
The woman in the bilge would fit neatly into the gaping hole at Baru’s right. The beautiful woman Baru liked to dandle about, exploiting and deceiving, until she could be discarded. It would only be a matter of finally offering her that long-delayed Imperial pardon.
I shivered as the cool wet air touched my bare feet. In my memory Baru slumped on the wall of Svir’s cabin, the poison in full bloom, her roar and rattle seized away by the emptiness of convulsion.
She had fallen for the trap exactly as she always did. Arrogant. Proud. Conceited. Oblivious to the maneuvers of those around her, except where she was causing them.
Except—
There were moments, instants of instants, when I felt her watching me, and thought she knew—
And as she tipped back into that seizure I might have sworn before an ilykari, if pressed to oath, that I had seen her right eye wink at me.
* * *
HELBRIDE crossed into the northern edge of the Kraken Still. These were chaos waters where no gazetteer could predict the winds and no chart would ever save a ship from ruin.
But Captain Branne chose her course well, and the spring luck went their way.
Helbride passed through clear warm channels between volcanic islands, the water choked with thickets and heaps and bladdered mounds of ash-kelp, swarming with crustaceans and long worms. Mutinous Sulane stalked them at a careful distance, wary of mines or foulage. As a test of Helbride’s legal wards, Apparitor sent a group of wildlife enthusiasts out on a boat with an Oriati clerk. Sulane did not respond. Perhaps the Oriati clerk held Ormsment back, or perhaps she feared a trap.
Baru wondered what Tain Shir might be doing. But she did not show herself.
The boat crew returned excited and aghast. The shallows around the nearest atoll were infested with some kind of bristling serpent or enormous underwater centipede, which burrowed invisibly into the silt and lurked until a fish came near. Then the lurkers snapped upward like springs, seized the fish in huge crescent jaws, and bit or battered the unfortunate fellow to death. The clouds of gore attracted small sharks, w
hich the worms ate too, and octopodes, who protected themselves with coconut half-shells tucked beneath their bodies.
Baru would very much like to go see the centipedes and the octopodes. But there was no time. Yawa had already begun to move against her.
Baru stopped by the surgery to scrounge hangover remedies and a hot rock, in anticipation of period cramps. She suspected the surgeon was taking small bribes to allow ship’s officers to conduct assignations in the quarantine slots. The Helbride officers had been unexpectedly pleased to take Cheetah’s crew aboard, and Baru hadn’t understood why until she realized the officers could ethically fuck foreign passengers—the Oriati being entirely outside the chain of command.
She’d made a joke. Something about people bringing back diseases from Kyprananoke. And the ship’s surgeon told her, levelly, “No one will go ashore at Kyprananoke except Apparitor and Durance’s handpicked operatives.”
“And me, of course.” Baru selected a smooth round hot-rock.
“No,” the surgeon said, with the faintest quaver, “you will not go ashore at Kyprananoke. After your seizure, I cannot allow it.”
Baru turned slowly, so the man could consider what fury he’d tempted. “On what authority?”
“Mine. I am the ship’s surgeon. I rule everything inside a living skin on Helbride.”
“My service jacket doesn’t have a living skin. And it tells me I can tear up your letters of physic and send you down to pump bilge—”
The surgeon crossed his arms. “I examined you myself. I collected signed eyewitness statements, including the testament of a Clarified expert. You’re epileptic. You are an agent of the Republic; neither by injury nor by neglect may I allow the Republic to come to harm. You will not leave my ship.”
“I have seizures if I’m fucking poisoned!” Baru roared.
“There’s no way I can know poison was involved.”
“You are going to regret this. You are going to regret it so dearly.”
“You won’t have the capacity for regret if you seize again.”
“Why is that.”
“Because I’ll be forced to perform an emergency transorbital.”
Baru flinched and dropped the stone. Phantom steel grated in her eye socket—groped up into her brain—her first instinct was to look around, wildly, for the lobotomy pick, and throw it overboard. But just then Xate Yawa swept in, fully masked in purple-black ceramic and a blood-spattered surgical gown. “One of the wounded from Cheetah died,” she told the surgeon. “I cut him open to try to get at the bleeding, but he was too far gone. The patient in bed six.”
She swiveled to Baru. “Ah,” she said. “Have you been informed of your medical arrest? I see you have. Very good. Never fear, my dear! We’ll see to matters on Kyprananoke.”
Baru had been outmaneuvered. She had no riposte ready.
She snarled at Yawa and went in search of weapons.
* * *
“ALL the ships are moored on the east side.” Apparitor chewed his lip. “Why east? Why’s no one taken the westward berths?”
“What the fuck did you put in my vodka?” Baru demanded.
“A special preparation of ergot. Oh, fuck me. Do you see what I see?” He offered Baru his spyglass—they were up on Helbride’s hummingbird prow, balanced on the fan of ropes.
“Ergot?” Baru snatched the spyglass. “You gave me cow poison?”
Ergot was a wheat fungus. Cows would eat ergot sometimes, and go mad—or so Cairdine Farrier said. But now Baru remembered a line in the Manual of the Somatic Mind about a drug called ergotic theogen: a fungus grown on the right kind of wheat and then chemically transmuted. It caused various hallucinations, convulsions, psychosis, and (in large doses) gangrene.
“Hesychast uses it to break down resistance in mental patients.” Apparitor touched the spyglass and steered her toward the trouble. He seemed almost solicitous; not sorry, but at least sincere. “I added a little vidhara, too. My personal mix! There, look … oh, will you look at that?”
The Islands of Obsidian Dreams stretched out before them like the bone shards of a crushed skull. On the southern horizon loomed the ruptured ruin of el-Tsunuqba, the riven god-mountain of the Jellyfish Eaters. Only in ancient art could you see the volcano in its forgotten wholeness, Mount Tsunuq, the Big Tit, a green and gentle cone with fertile slopes and a steaming peak—like a younger and less weathered Taranoke. In those days the houseboats sprawled out from Tsunuq like game tiles scattered across the sea. And at night the jellyfish farms filled the ocean with the green light of a million shining bells.
“There was a school here, in those days,” Apparitor said, Baru powerless to hide her interest, though she knew he was distracting her. She had never been taught about Kyprananoke. “The Tiatro Tsun, God’s Theater. Her library had books from across the Camou. The Liturges kept their houses there, each with nine secrets carved inside nine wooden rings, and the tenth finger bare, for the secret yet unknown. And the gray-haired Scyphu who ruled the Jellyfish Eaters came to consult them with teas of exum and subum from the jellies of the royal blooms; and all the world admired their wisdom. Or so it was recorded.”
On the Day of Thunder Capes, after portentous decades of quakes and smoke, Mount Tsunuq’s north face exploded with a blast they heard in Aurdwynn and Segu. The detonation blew the mountain’s bowels out across the sea. Imagine a drunken man bent over, belching up his innards: when he comes up all that’s left is a sunken starving frame. All that survived of Mount Tsunuq was the southern face, a blackened lip jutting up from the ocean, three thousand nine hundred feet tall. Today they called it el-Tsunuqba.
But the volcano’s erupted gore splashed into the sea and made the kypra, a maze of atolls, reefs, and islands. In time life returned. The Jellyfish Eaters had passed into history, and the kypra became Kyprananoke.
“Too bad about the school,” Baru said, with true regret. “If we had their library, we could know some of how the world lived before Incrasticism.” She could test the truth of claims about the Jellyfish Eaters’s downfall: could it be blamed on their way of life, their unsanitary practices?
“Oh, the library survived,” Apparitor said, looking at her with that cunning baited smile. “Four of the Liturges fled before the eruption, warned by the jellyfish. They stole as much of the library as they could. Afterwards they made a deal with the gray-haired Scyphu families to reestablish Tiatro Tsun. Kyprananoke kept its archives and great school until not sixty years ago.”
“What then?”
“Incrasticism came upon them, of course,” Apparitor said, “and the scholars and archives were taken to Falcrest to be joined with our Faculties. Far too precious to be left out here on the little islands, we judged. In exchange we destroyed the compost pits they used to grow their traditional and rather toxic roots, consolidated their freshwater aquifers under government control instead of family rule, and moved them all over to coconut and arrowroot and imported foods. These islands are too young for much good soil, so Falcrest says agriculture must be rationalized. Gave them all horrible tooth problems, the sugar did. Lucky we had dentists, hm?”
“Bastards,” Baru muttered, recklessly.
“As ever,” Apparitor agreed. “But we were discussing your brain.”
Baru had never been anywhere so astonishingly low. Even on the plains of Aurdwynn you could always look north and see the high Wintercrests ramping up toward the sky. Here on the kypra there was nothing taller than a tree, except for el-Tsunuqba like a dead hand in the southwest. And if the sea ever rose … Baru imagined herself alone on the last spit of rock, with the tide coming in from both sides. The world’s margins closing in on her. She shivered, and the shiver brought her back to the memory of seizure, and to Apparitor’s poison.
“I don’t need my mental resistance broken down,” she said.
“But you are the victim of a lifelong program of brainwashing.”
“The fuck I am—”
“Be rational!” Apparitor put h
is fist between them. “Let’s count your life. Count the good and bad things that have happened to you. Come on! Make an account! One. Farrier spots you in a marketplace and gets you into the Iriad school, that’s good.” He put up a finger, to keep a running tally. “Two. Soldiers kidnap your father and destroy your family, that’s bad. Did Farrier have anything to do with it? No. Did you ever wonder if he did? I doubt it very much. Three. You make a friend in the school, that’s good, but who warns you against her? Farrier. Four. Your friend turns on you, she beats and threatens you for your tribadism, that’s bad, Farrier turned out to be right. Do you see his method? Do you see?”
Baru’s guts revolted: fear for Aminata, fear of Aminata, too much bad wine, too many bad dreams. She gagged and spat into the bow wake.
“You all right?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who poisoned me!”
“I poisoned you because Yawa said that might give us a way to threaten you. And if we have something to threaten you, we can start to trust you: which is the only way we’re going to survive this place.”
“We’ve survived plenty,” Baru said, though she knew it was sullen.
“Not like Kyprananoke. The Oriati Termite spymasters are here in great force, looking to flip the government to their interests. The archipelago is a chasm full of of intrigue and corruption. And now something far worse has come to play in the shallows. Look! Look at what’s waiting for us!”
Baru saw why all the ships at Kyprananoke had put in to the east.
The Kyprananoki built their homes on storm stilts, or as freestanding flotables like very dowdy ships, tangled together by a web of laundrylines and moorings and buoy bridges. In the east the islands roared with shipping—ketches, clippers, dromons, junks, barques, canoes, brigs, brigantines, and outriggers.
But in the west a great stillness. No one moved in the waters or the boardwalks. Nothing moved. Except for the dirty red-and-yellow flags that flew like pus-stained rags from every line and rooftop.
The Monster Baru Cormorant Page 45
