The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “What if Apparitor tries to stop us?”

  “Why,” Tau said, still grinning, “then he’s denying my diplomatic right to free movement. And if I am no longer a diplomat, why should my seals fly over Helbride?”

  Baru had to laugh in appreciation at that. Then she thought of something that might chill Tau’s warmth. “I want to bring the prisoner Shao Lune.”

  “The navy woman? Why?”

  Because, Baru’s heart muttered, she’ll probably die if I leave her here. “She knows Ormsment’s tactics. She can help us protect ourselves if Sulane sends a party ashore.”

  “Trim will guard us,” Tau said. “But if you wish, I won’t deny you. Although I won’t be responsible for her care. She is a sailor and a killer, and I cannot be bound to her.”

  Trim again. But they caught Baru’s thoughts on her face, and held up a finger in reproach. “Before you cast me as the magical primitive with one answer for everything, which is to wave my hands and call on my gods, consider our respective positions, please. Consider what I have achieved, and by what means. Has it occurred to you that the Falcresti dismiss my beliefs? That they assume I play lip service to trim to guard more cynical maneuvers?”

  “You don’t really believe,” she said, with surprising disappointment.

  “Oh, I do believe, with all my soul! But”—Tau winked—“isn’t it funny that my genuine belief is most useful to me because the Falcresti think it’s disingenuous?”

  That made Baru think of something she’d forgotten. Someone had been telling her, there is a difference between acting out their story, and truly obeying their story. Do you know what it is?

  Her stomach knotted up before she could push the thought. “I strive to keep an open mind,” Baru groaned. “Will you excuse me?”

  “Take a bath,” Tau-indi suggested.

  As Baru bolted aft, she caught the eyes of the Enact-Colonel Osa ayaSegu. She was tying fighting ropes around her fists. As Baru passed, Osa held up a line, taut between her fists, and pulled; Baru heard the creak of fibers at their limit.

  Baru lost control. Her stomach revolted. She aimed herself over the rail and gagged up a thin stream of wine-sweet sick. Someone gave her a cup of brine. She swallowed it to gag, threw up again, and washed herself out.

  Now the enact-colonel was shaking her head in pity.

  “SAILS AWAY NORTH!” cried the masttop girl, a shriek so powerful it roused all the birds off the rigging. “NAVY RED IN THE NORTH!”

  “That must be Scylpetaire,” Captain Branne snapped, shoving past Baru. “Sulane’s companion turns up at last—watch girl, what’s her name-flag! Shout it down to me!”

  “She’s Ascentatic!”

  “Ascentatic?” Baru pushed her way through the scrum after the one-eyed captain. “What ship is that?”

  Branne stood halfway up the rail, her lips thin and quivering. “Shit,” she spat. “Bloody shit.”

  “She’s from Annalila Fortress on Isla Cauteria.” Apparitor descended from the ropes on Baru’s blind side. “If she’s come to help Ormsment … then Rear Admiral Maroyad is with the mutiny. Which means the mutiny’s spread beyond Ormsment’s command—”

  Branne seized his hand and gripped it hard. He stared numbly at the eastern horizon.

  “Lindon,” he said, hollow as a new year’s hope. “Lindon needs me.”

  * * *

  THE signal rockets went up from Ascentatic’s prow to cry their questions. Who are you, Juris Ormsment? What are you doing here? Who sent you? Will you ask our help?

  Aminata couldn’t bear to wait on deck for an answer from Sulane. She paced Captain Nullsin’s cabin, wanting to go below and interview Ake Sentiamut again, trying not to chew at little dry flaps of skin around her nails. When Nullsin came below she had to swallow the hole in her chest just to get a word out. “Sir? What word from her?”

  “Sulane sent warning of disease and recommended we stand off.” Nullsin grimaced at the hammer that had replaced his missing hand. There was nothing tangible he could strike or fix. “Maybe she just meant to warn us of the plague ashore. Maybe…”

  Maybe Province Admiral Ormsment was trying to say, I’m contagious. Learn of what I’ve done and you’ll be tainted. Come any closer and you’ll have to choose a side. Stay away, for your own sake.

  “Your orders, sir?”

  “Well. I have a clear command from a superior officer to stand off.” Nullsin smiled impishly, though he tried to hide it. “But if that were not clearly communicated to one of my juniors, and she took some boats ashore to learn what’s really happening here…”

  “Say no more, sir.” Aminata didn’t salute, for it wasn’t an order. Maybe there was a little wink.

  But before she gave her orders she went back to her hammock and reread the letter. She had nearly left it on Cauteria, that mysterious convict’s plea, but some dutiful instinct against unread mail had made her take it on Ascentatic. After the Llosydanes and the vultjagata she’d gone back to it at last, out of desperation to know anything more about Baru. Now she kept it pinned to the planks beneath her hammock with the cormorant quill.

  To the Oriati Lieutenant who I know is close to my lord, I write this by the mercy of my captor, who hast permitted me a final inscribtion on the eve of the voyage which I hope will end in my death. Instead of a will I leave to the world this letter.

  My lord Baru Cormorant will very soon fight a great war. In this war the sides will be: Her mind and Her heart.

  It is true that my lord has accomplished very much with her mind and that this organ often seems to rule her.

  However I have learned through close inspection and some provocations and difficulties that my lord also possesses a heart which feels the full range of feelings. It is merely very well concealed and somewhat prickly like an urchin. I believe she thinks of her heart as an unfortunate growth. A sort of emotional hemorrhoid.

  It is therefore my final duty to reach out to the woman whose name she most often spoke with respect and ask her to carry on my station as her companion and protector.

  Please see to the well-being of my lord even when she will not. Please ensure that she is not alone even when she convinces you that she needs no one (she is lying). Please do not abandon her even when she makes herself wholly intolerable.

  She will not betray you. When I am done with her she will have had her fill of betrayal for one life. Thus I will protect you.

  I name you,

  By my station as Duchess Vultjag,

  A knight of Baru Fisher, Queen of Aurdwynn (by acclamation),

  And a ranger of the Duchy Vultjag.

  And I remain,

  My lady’s sworn Field-General,

  Tain Hu.

  Baru, Aminata wondered, Baru, what are you doing? What’s happening here? What became of this woman who thought she was your friend?

  A STORY ABOUT ASH 4

  FEDERATION YEAR 912:

  23 YEARS EARLIER

  THE summer of 912 grew hot.

  The termites built their mounds and the crows fished for the termites with sticks.

  The griots came up Prince Hill to tell the war.

  Cosgrad Torrinde recovered from his frog-licking and developed diarrhea. He was appalled and embarrassed that everyone had to work to filter enough water for him. He would boil his own drinking water on a little pot-fire even after they filtered it, and the housekeeps murmured that this ingratitude and mistrust was making him sick. His room filled up with smoke and steam and damp, which caused mold, and he scrubbed miserably in between bouts of shit. Cairdine Farrier came and visited him now and then, and they muttered together lowly, but inevitably the mutters would rise to shouts and Farrier would leave and Torrinde would crouch miserably over his pot.

  Tau-indi couldn’t figure out how to go talk to Kindalana and Abdumasi and repair their friendship.

  The griots began to soften their proud words. Kindalana noticed the change in the epithets and pointed it out to Tau, as she would point ou
t anything she thought was hidden from others. “The unsurpassed cunning of Eyotana Six-Souls” became merely “the clever words of Eyotana Six-Souls.” House Mbunu’s captains slipped from “invincible” to “formidable.” The skittish, fragile-looking Falcrest frigates were promoted, in metaphor, from water-bugs to makos and barracudas.

  Tau didn’t need Kinda to explain that this was a bad, bad sign. To the extent that the Mbo had a military, it was made of the brave and the venturesome, and its goal was to intimidate and dazzle so the enemy could be embraced and absorbed. When the heroes lost their shine, they lost that war, too.

  Padrigan and Tahr brought their children together to explain that it was time for their Instrumentality, a course of lessons that would make them ready to go anywhere in Oriati Mbo. They would be prepared to visit the archipelagos of north Segu and the very southern outposts of Zawam Asu, where indigenous tribes watched the Mbo’s explorers guardedly, and the Mbo’s explorers tried very carefully not to disturb them.

  Tau-indi and Kindalana had to spend hours cloistered together, reading or speaking to griots. Tau liked the griot lessons better: here they were encouraged to talk back, to question, to share their own stories, for griots were the living texts of Oriati Mbo. But Kindalana excelled at the written word, and what Tau at first took for brooding was, they realized, an almost trance-like absorption in the work.

  “Everyone is unhappy in the Butterveldt farms,” Tau-indi said, after they’d listened to the griots who’d talked to the griots who’d been to the Butterveldt. “How can Jaro feed itself without the farms?”

  The Butterveldt was the great temperate grassland that divided Falcrest and the northeast of Lonjaro Mbo. Right down the middle of the Butterveldt ran the Tide Column, the long narrow waterway that connected the Ashen Sea to the huge Mother of Storms in the east. Tau-indi imagined the farmers’ unhappiness as a plague of urchins, crawling up out of the Tide Column to eat their crops and pleasures.

  “It’s the blight,” Kindalana said curtly, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands tracing shapes in the air. She liked this memorization trick, which Tau-indi secretly suspected she’d learned from Cosgrad: she could associate certain facts with motions of her arms. “Something’s killing the millet and the wheat. Something from Falcrest, the farmers say.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Burn the whole crop.” She drew a line from her chin to her throat, like she was putting on her Prince paint.

  “But then we’ll starve.”

  “Yes, Tau, we’ll starve. So we’ll have to open the treasury and buy excess crop from Devi-naga and Mzilimake, if they have it. And if we can get ships through the Tide Column to Devi-naga without Falcrest taking them.”

  Tau-indi wished Kindalana would stop saying useful things, and say something warm instead. Every day Tau tried to break the chill between them. Every day Tau failed. “Yes, fine, we can buy grain from the other mbo nations. But what can we do for the farmers who lost their crop?”

  “What?”

  “The farmers aren’t going to have anything to sell. They deserve help.”

  “Talk to Abdumasi.” She touched her nose, and her ear, like one of Tahr’s chains. “He knows trade. He could figure something out, perhaps.”

  Tau did not want to go talk to Abdumasi.

  * * *

  “MEASLES!” the ferrymen on the lake reported. “Measles in Jaro!”

  Measles ripped through the city people, and cruelly, so cruelly, it killed their babies first. The morgue bakery ran out of ways to make ash cake, and so the mothers couldn’t burn and eat their infants children properly, which left the city swarming with wailing sobbing child-souls. Tau and Abdu wanted to go and call the souls out of the city, but Padrigan and Tahr forbade it. Measles was too dangerous.

  And the month after that, as Jaro griots raced to spread the word of the measles and the names of the dead (this made Cosgrad Torrinde panic, and beg Tau to stop the griots, lest they carry the disease—but Tau tried to explain that the mbo knew disease, that the griots moved too quickly for their exhalations to pool in one place), a mother-of-worms was found in the cisterns in the Segu capital Kutulbha.

  Nothing revolted Tau more than the mother-of-worms, a great mass of mature and fecund parasites, gathered in a snarl in the water. Cistern inspectors found the colony creature squirming in white lashing loops, shedding and peeling off masses of egg to fill up the drinking water.

  No mother-of-worms had ever been seen in Segu Mbo. They lived in southern Mzilimake and Devi-naga. But somehow one had made it to Segu, and worse yet, some merchant in Devi-naga, some cruel and selfish soul who Tau cursed with balled-up fists, had bought all the wormsbane and hoarded it. Wormsbane only grew in the jungle that bordered Devi-naga and Mzilimake, and it was the best treatment for worm infestation in a body: there was no easy way to get more.

  Rumors circulated, of course, that the merchant was a Falcresti agent. Tau wondered, cynically, if Falcrest had moved the merchant, or if the only motive was greed. The mbo should prevent such atrocious avarice … but the mbo, of late, seemed thin, like a ragged net.

  Ships refused to dock in Kutulbha. If you drank a worm egg it would grow inside you and crawl out through your foot over agonizing weeks, burning like a bee sting.

  Wracked by famine in Lonjaro and a shipping stoppage in Segu, the mbo staggered.

  And then all the money froze.

  Tau-indi couldn’t understand it! Everyone still needed everything, the goods were out there, the money was available, supply and demand existed, nothing had changed! But all the griots complained that the merchants had tightened their fists and the families on the road were ungenerous. The hawala banks stopped conducting transfers across the mbo, preventing merchants from moving their fortunes.

  The principles of anxiety and miserliness had snarled up the mbo.

  Tau went over to Jaro and talked to the merchants in the bazaar, who had talked to their suppliers, who had talked to the shipping captains, all of whom were slashing their prices, down and down and down, trying to get anyone to buy: no one would, not even at ruinous discounts.

  “Something must be wrong with our trim,” Tau-indi said, baffled. “Why would everyone just … stop spending money?”

  “It’s not trim!” Kindalana shouted, throwing down the knotted string she’d been using to do figures. “You idiot, you idiot, don’t you learn anything from Cosgrad? It’s a deflationary collapse!”

  “A—a what?”

  “Everyone’s uncertain and afraid,” Kindalana snapped, her posture perfect, her gestures articulate, every inch the young Prince. “Why would they invest in new business right now, or try to sell their crops abroad, when ships are being taken and ports are being closed? You might lose it all. Better to eat your own food, and keep your goods to yourself, and wait, wait until the world stabilizes. So the ports idle, and the businesses who rely on the ports close down, and the hawala banks stop loaning and sending. The mbo’s gold and shell and jade is all locked up in vaults and attics. It’s not moving. Do you understand?”

  Tau did, actually: there was less and less money on the market, so each piece of money was worth more, each golden coin or silver bar could buy more things, which made people even less willing to risk it on a loan or a shipping expedition. It was like water freezing, a phenomenon Tau had never seen: it grew slow, and thick, and clotted.

  “I think,” they said, politely, “that the solution is clear. We must make everyone unafraid. We must cheer them up, and make them brave. The griots should be encouraged to tell the ancient epics, and the comedies.”

  Tau’s politesse just enraged Kindalana further. “You,” she said, stalking to the door, “think like an old person.”

  “I think like a Prince.”

  “Haven’t you learned anything from him?” Kindalana shouted. “Anything at all? This isn’t about trim! We’re like an old, old elephant, and Falcrest is running us down, herding us toward the pit!”

  “No,” T
au said, calmly. “There’s no Falcrest, really, nor any Oriati Mbo. Just two groups of people. It’s always about the connections between people. That’s where we’ll make a difference.”

  Thinking back upon it, Tau realized that Kindalana had taken inspiration from this moment: if not, perhaps, in the way Tau expected.

  That night Kindalana drank sorghum malt beer with Cairdine Farrier and told him loud jokes. The bearded man seemed to relax a little. Tau couldn’t figure out why Kindalana was acting so crudely, until they realized Kindalana was trying to behave like a commoner, and an adult.

  * * *

  COSGRAD Torrinde’s diarrhea cleared. Tau went to visit him, to be sure he was comfortable.

  “What should we do,” Tau asked him, “if everyone stops spending their money, for fear of risk?”

  “Print money,” Cosgrad suggested.

  “Print money?”

  “Yes. Use fiat currency. Paper notes that say they can be exchanged, later, for gold or gems or bone. Flood the market with your paper, and expand the supply of money: you must shock the market back into motion, you must lubricate it with, ah”—he searched for words in Seti-Caho—“with lube? Is that the word?”

  “No,” Tau said, giggling, “that means sex oil. Perhaps fish oil, or olive oil?”

  “Oh. But my point stands! You must print fiat money.”

  “Cosgrad,” Tau said, deeply concerned, “that would be lying. You can’t trade someone a promise to give them something valuable later. You’d be inventing something from nothing. You’d be paying them with magic.”

  And in accord with Tau’s fear for Cosgrad’s trim, not even a week later Cosgrad developed tetanus.

  “Your Federal Highness!” a clerk screamed, running into the sleeping-quarters. “Your Highness, come quick!” Tau-indi leapt out of bed to find Cosgrad curled up and snarling in irritation. He insisted it was just a backache but no, the signs were clear, he had tetanus. Tau-indi made a hasty calculation on the calendar. Tetanus hit hardest when it hit fastest. If Cosgrad had contracted tetanus on Tau’s birthday, up in the frettes, then it should now be survivable.