The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Get frogsweat and weed,” Tau-indi ordered the groundskeeps.

  “Apple ester,” Cosgrad said. He stared balefully at Tau-indi. “If it’s tetanus, I want apple ester.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Of course you don’t!” He snarled, and tried to turn over, and screamed.

  Tau ordered a chorus to sing around his room to drown out his agony, lest his pain spread. Cosgrad shouted at them with incredible distemper until his jaw locked up.

  The griots came to Abdumasi’s house to sing about the ongoing war, about the principles of justice, the elephant slow to anger but terrible in its fury. The Oriati Mbo would show no more mercy. Kolosan and Cho-oh Long Oar would sail a thousand ships east to smash Falcrest, smash them so decisively that the fish would lose their taste for the flesh of people and turn to eating seabirds.

  Tau watched Abdumasi and Kindalana as the griots sang. They sat together between two raspberry bushes, and Abdumasi settled against Kindalana’s side, his head pillowed on her breast. Kindalana stroked his head, but her eyes were far away, and thoughtful.

  The men of Prince Hill were all love-struck, and the women of Prince Hill all thoughtful. It was up to Tau, as it had been up to the lamen in ancient and more traditional days, to mediate.

  The mbo continued to fray.

  Between Prince Hill and the frettes to the south was a great expanse of irrigated rice-field, fed by long canals. The fish that lived in the canals began to die. Birds shed their feathers and flew blindly into rocks. Ants were found presenting themselves on the grass to be eaten by goats, which was an awful omen. Tau-indi imagined principles of death moving under the earth, under the clouds, leaping from man to laman to woman.

  Something terrible was happening.

  And then Tau-indi was seized by a thought as hard and hateful as tetanus muscle. They remembered their own spite, their desire to possess Cosgrad so as to make their friends jealous. Hadn’t they said, in fact, that they were fighting a war against their friends?

  Cosgrad Torrinde was bound to the mbo as a hostage, a prisoner volunteered by Falcrest to maintain tenuous diplomacy. Thus trim bound Cosgrad to the very war itself. The large reflected the small.

  Tau-indi Bosoka had made Cosgrad a guest of their house, and used Cosgrad in their battle against Kindalana and Abdumasi, a foolish selfish battle.

  Without realizing it, Tau-indi had connected the war between Falcrest and Oriati Mbo to their own childish war against their friends.

  The logic of trim was irrefutable.

  The war could not end until Tau-indi Bosoka made peace.

  * * *

  THEY walked to Kindalana’s house. The bees were gone, as was Cairdine Farrier, who’d gone over to Jaro to study the death rites. The raspberry bushes had withered. Tau used the mallet to ring the door, and smiled at the door sentry, and walked up to Kindalana’s room, dry-throated, wishing that they could do something with their hands.

  “Yes?” she said. She’d been dyeing cloth. Her arms were wet to the elbow. Sweat and motion had pressed her ratty old work shift close against her, but Tau-indi noticed that with distant disinterest compared to the fright and buzz of meeting her eyes. She swallowed very slowly, as if to hide the motion from them: as if to pretend that she did not need to inhale or swallow, she never needed to move anything into herself, only out.

  “Do you still want to go together?” Tau-indi asked.

  She’d ask a clarifying question now. She’d make Tau-indi say something she already understood, so that she could draw them out.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Do you still want to work together to serve the mbo, as Prince companions, the way we used to talk about?”

  “Oh.” Kindalana wrung the wet from her hands in short snaps of the wrist. “Your mother’s going to be here soon. I don’t know if it’s a good time to talk.”

  “Do you want help with the dye?”

  She looked at Tau-indi with her jaw set and her hands loose at her sides, turning, turning again, as if she could stir up the air between them and knead it out flat and simple.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said.

  Tau grinned and shrugged. “Me neither.”

  “Okay. Come help.”

  Someone came into the house later to visit Padrigan, and the housekeeps brought the two filtered mint water. Tau-indi and Kindalana both knew who it was, so they talked to each other stiffly and loudly, to warn their parents not to have sex.

  When they were done, Kindalana said, “I’m trying to seduce Farrier.”

  “What?” Tau squawked. “Why?”

  “Because you’re right,” Kindalana said, “there’s power between people, and I don’t think Falcrest understands that power. And Farrier’s afraid of his attraction to younger women, to foreign women, and whatever he’s afraid of, I need to pursue. Because that’s how I’m going to beat them.”

  Tau imagined “seduction” as a ridiculous theatrical process in which one’s clothes “accidentally” fell off. “Kinda,” they said, “this doesn’t seem like good politics.…”

  But Kindalana looked back at them with those serious studious eyes. “We’re Princes,” she said. “The Mbo trusts us to do our jobs. If Falcrest thinks women have special seductive powers, then I’ll take advantage of it.”

  It seemed troublesome and unfair and strange to Tau. But it was also so complicated that they didn’t know how to argue.

  * * *

  COSGRAD Torrinde’s tetanus passed. For a while he suffered spasms and babbled. “I have to go,” he’d say, trying to charge out through a wall. “I have to go! Renascent told me, she told me, go out and determine by what means matter becomes meat and meat becomes flesh and flesh becomes thought! Determine the mechanism of heredity, so that I may write my law in it! I can’t fail her, I can’t, I can’t, I have to go work!”

  “You’re not making sense,” Tau-indi said, patiently. They’d seen so much of Cosgrad by now that the man’s body had lost all mystique and become faintly comical. It was hard to be impressed by a man’s cock when you knew it got hard and wibbled while he slept.

  He stood there panting and hunched over, grimacing at the wall. “If I don’t get the Metademe,” he said, out-and-out whining, “they’ll give it to Farrier, and all Farrier wants to do is breed plagues. Plagues and vile thoughts. He doesn’t understand eugenics, or anything else, except flattery and pageant!”

  But soon Cosgrad’s muscle spasms faded away like a knot coming undone. For a few months Cosgrad was weak and biddable and profoundly apologetic. The only lingering problem was his stiff neck.

  His stiff neck didn’t go away.

  After a while he began to complain that his neck hurt so much he couldn’t move his knees.

  Tau-indi, sitting with him, wanted to scream in frustration. They knew what would happen now, and they were afraid Cosgrad would die of it.

  Meningitis hit Cosgrad harder than anything before. He contorted into shapes like the letters of an underwater alphabet. He fought with dreams. When they gave him frogsweat and everything else they had, the dreams only got worse. He stared at Tau-indi with red-rimmed eyes and hissed, “What are you? How do they make you? Tell me how!”

  “Me?”

  “Tell me how they made you!”

  “I came from my mother and father.…”

  “And where did they come from! Where, Tau, where! No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, no one knows that.” He lapsed into silence for a moment and then he came up shouting. “They made you special. They made you different. Tell me how!”

  Oh. It must be the Falcresti confusion. “No,” Tau-indi said patiently, “they didn’t make me into a laman. I chose my gender. Didn’t you choose to be a man? Or do they say, you have a penis, so you’re a man? What about people with both? What about the people who don’t want sex and all the other sorts? How do you sort them, if you don’t let them choose for themselves?”

  “Degeneracy,” Cos
grad muttered. “The Oriati have decayed. Too much drift. Not enough competition among you, to keep the breeding healthy … but oh so rich … so much raw material to work with, so much pedigree to study, if only, if only I had the Metademe.…”

  Tau brought Cosgrad cold water, chilled in the night and stored belowground. He wept it back out and screamed about a world unbound by law, spectral shapes in the mangrove shadows, bloody leeches clinging to his calves. “Farrier!” he would scream, red-eyed and roaring in his meningitis dream, “Farrier! They are not yours to take!”

  On the next month, the gossip and the comic refused to come to Prince Hill to tell the story of the war. There was nothing funny to say. There was no gossip to tell.

  The epic came up the hill, trudging and broken, covered in grief ash, with the satirist trailing behind.

  At the beginning of the war the epic had named Kolosan and Eyotana Six-Souls, Cho-oh Long Oar and the Man with the Rudder Thumb, the sons and daughters of House Mbunu, and even salt-jeweled Nyoba Dbellu. The epic had bound himself to those stories. He was fated to tell of their thousand-dromon fleet, advancing bravely up the wind, into the skittering Falcrest frigates with their forest of sails and their unquenchable fire.

  The ruin of these heroes and hunters, whose lays and sagas now darkened and dripped with unnumbered tears.

  The thousand-ship main assault on Falcrest had failed. The fish would not lose their taste for the flesh of people, for no flesh had come into the sea, only wrack and ash. The swarming armadas of the mbo had been tricked and drawn in and then Falcrest’s fireships had fenced them in. Everything had burnt.

  Already they were calling this defeat the Unspeakable Day.

  The satirist got up to mock the dead, the foolish overconfident leaders who had brought more than a hundred thousand sailors and fighters to ruin. Everyone wept silently and clung to each other, trying to be polite and strong: trying to let the satirist do their necessary work.

  The satirist fell on their knees. “My brother,” they wept, their voice rent, the principles screaming through them, “my brother, my brother. My brother is burning!”

  They had no brother. But no one doubted they told the truth.

  Padrigan and Tahr embraced each other and wept, she in the place of his missing wife, he in the place of her missing husband. Kindalana went off into the darkness and then came back to the fire with an armful of her fine garments, which she cast into the flame, to burn into ash for mourning. Abdumasi ran to his mother’s arms and then looked at Tau-indi trembling with some inexpressible grief.

  Tau-indi stood there trying to imagine some way in which this was not their doing, the course of the war as selfish and disastrous as their own conduct, the world visiting retaliation on Oriati Mbo for the monstrousness of its young Prince.

  Cairdine Farrier whispered, “Tau, Your Highness, there are better ways than war. Please remember, as the news comes bitter, that there are many in Falcrest who would rather trade and teach than fight with you.”

  “There are many in the Mbo who would trepan themselves before they forgave this loss,” Tau said, with more grief than bitterness.

  “Perhaps,” Farrier said. “Perhaps the Mbo needs to learn how to rid itself of those people. So we may have peace.”

  The next day a mob sailed across the lake from Jaro to kill Cairdine Farrier and Cosgrad Torrinde.

  And in the chaos there came up Prince Hill a sorcerer, her hands and eyes alight with blue-green uranium power, to cast a spell of ruin. She spoke En Elu Aumor, the tongue of the Cancrioth. Abdumasi Abd witnessed her, and Tau-indi, and the two men of Falcrest. And in that spell all their fates were written: three men to seek that power, and one laman to refuse it and all it represented.

  But first, before they could go to their fates, they had to survive that day.

  23

  THE PITHING NEEDLE

  THE plan to disappear Baru forever had encountered a complication.

  Call me a callous old bitch, but I prefer that my pawns be interchangeable. If one falls off his carriage and dies of a broken spleen I damn well want another ready to take his place. The smaller the conspiracy the more its success hinges on particular people, and people make me nervous. I’ve never known anyone who didn’t compromise themselves somehow. My brother married a royal. I betrayed my brother for it. Heingyl Ri took a Falcresti husband. Even Tain Hu trusted the wrong woman, in the end.

  There is no unalloyed good in the world of power. Even a healer has to choose whom to save.

  Himu help me if Heingyl Ri refused to divorce Bel Latheman. Himu help me if I had to kill Bel. But Ri had to be ready to wed the Necessary King. There was only one path between the Falcresti quicksand and the jaws of the Stakhieczi, and I needed access to the Stakhieczi royalty to walk Aurdwynn down that path.

  I prayed to Devena that the Necessary King would not be too much like Ri’s father for her to ever bear the child.

  But before I could see to Heingyl Ri’s remarriage, I had to get Baru to the Necessary King. And I’d just lost my best way to do it.

  Iscend had a particular technique to prepare her catch, which she called ikejime. I would have called it prissy and obsessive, but the fish were exquisite, and anyway if you insulted Clarified they would make a great effort to correct their wrongs, which I found exhausting. It was hard to explain that sometimes I just needed to excoriate someone.

  On the day we sighted Kyprananoke, I came up onto the quarterdeck to enjoy the wind and speak to the charming Mister Execarne. But I paused at the quarterdeck stairway to observe Iscend’s fishing. She had magnificent poise. Such grace and strength. If I could trick this avatar of all Falcrest’s obsessions, this epitome of youth and incision, then I could beat Hesychast and all the rest as well. I could still save Aurdwynn, and my brother, too.

  Iscend’s net came up fat with squirming silver, and she dumped the whole load of fish into a tub of water chilled by a brick of Helbride’s precious ice, stunning them. One by one she selected her favorites and performed her ikejime. The pithing needle glittered in her fist.

  I’d threatened to pith Baru. Apparitor and I had agreed upon that step: poison her into seizure, place a medical arrest upon her, and watch her squirm her way free and flee onto Kyprananoke. She would be driven out of the safety of Helbride, where we couldn’t move against her without eyewitnesses, and onto the turbulent kypra.

  There, in the anarchic eye of the Ashen Sea, she would vanish—whisked away by Iscend, shipped north in captivity, delivered to the Necessary King. Apparitor and I would complete the mission to find the Cancrioth, and that success would earn Hesychast his triumph.

  How fitting that an old woman would destroy Baru, mm? She’d been raised by Falcrest, raised to let old women do the work. Let us lay out the smooth road for you, so you may prance down the easy way and trample the dried-up rind on your way to take the credit.

  Damn Baru. And damn Iscend for straying.

  It happened like this: first she grasped the fish firmly around the gills. Then she drove the needle into the brain behind the eye. If done correctly (and it always was) the fish would fan its fins and then go limp. Iscend returned the dead fish to the ice water, where its flavor would remain succulent until she was ready to cook.

  As she completed the first ikejime I saw her mouth move.

  She constantly murmured mantras and qualms to herself, but I noticed this whisper in particular because it was hesitant. I’d never seen Iscend hesitate before. What could she be saying?

  Her fingers flashed. The needle went in. The fish died.

  Iscend’s lips fumbled with a word. What was it? Maia, perhaps? Was she imagining each fish as a person with a gender and a race? Some kind of mnemonic exercise?

  Her fingers flashed. The needle went in. The needle came out slick with fish-blood.

  Iscend whispered Gaios.

  I clutched the rail in a fit of fury. Not this! Not now! Not here before Kyprananoke, where the dangers would be greatest—where t
he opportunity had been arranged! For a Clarified to utter one of her own words was an Act of Punishment, instilled since childhood. Iscend had been taught that if she ever said Gaios there would be maggots conjured in her bed.

  She pierced the fish. The needle glinted in the sun. Gaios.

  There was no one here to put maggots in her bed.

  I saw the sigh of contentment that swelled her chest.

  * * *

  I FOUND Mister Execarne up on the quarterdeck, slouched in a wicker chair, his long-line trailing into the water and a huge overstuffed cigar blunt clenched in his teeth. “Hello, Yawa,” he puffed. “Care to join me?”

  I did care. I wanted to sit down with him and have a long idle conversation about nothing in particular. But I hadn’t the patience with myself.

  “I’d care for you to join me in a little work,” I said. “I thought you’d be up and about, scheming to contact your people here. Kyprananoke doesn’t agree with you?”

  “There’s a secret buried here which I wish I didn’t know,” he said, smiling up at me: but his eyes went to the distant carcass of el-Tsunuqba, looming against the sky. “You managed your share of outbreaks. You know that the necessary measures can be harsh.”

  “I do…” I said, inviting him to go on.

  “But here I am, putting my own thoughts before yours. What can I do for you?”

  “Iscend’s deprogramming herself.”

  “Shit.”

  “Quite.”

  “I hate Clarified,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I hate your master. I’d see him in the harbor if I could.”

  He couldn’t, though. There had been a time when his Morrow Ministry’s secret police had curled Falcrest in their squid arms, every sucker bound to a high minister or a member of Parliament. But that had ended by the Emperor’s will, ended in the clatter of Judiciary printing presses. Raven courts drowned the Morrow Ministry’s elite by the hundred. Urchins in Falcrest’s Caulbasis Down still told stories of gulls with the rolling panicked eyes of long-dead spies, trapped in the animals that ate their flesh.