The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “So I’ll have to bring in more clothing for the job, won’t I? Damn.” He blew a smoke ring over the rail. “I’m not supposed to have assets on Kyprananoke—Falcrest ‘remanded the islands to local authority,’ remember? That’s why this place is such a festival for the Oriati Termites now—they use these islands as a junction to dispatch their spies. I had to ‘kill’ a number of agents on ‘failed’ missions to move them to Kyprananoke, and let me tell you, keeping them contentedly dead takes a lot out of my purse. You’re asking me to burn this whole operation to grab one woman.”

  “I’m asking you to help me take Baru off the board. Her master wants an Oriati civil war, war that will spread across the Ashen Sea and cost my people—if you care—”

  “I do—”

  “—absolutely everything.”

  Execarne offered me the blunt. I took a grateful drag. His long-line twitched; he began to reel it in, hand over hand, his arms dimpled fetchingly with farmer’s muscle. “Does Hesychast know how you plan to use her?”

  “Hesychast just wants the Stakhi fat and well fed. Using Baru as a dowry fits well. She’s lost to the Farrier Process, anyway.” She seemed to think that the grief and disaster she provoked were inevitable, unchangeable. Farrier had made her well.

  “We’re playing a dangerous game here, Yawa,” Execarne said. I liked it when he used my name. “Moving against Farrier. He can swing half of Parliament just by changing the side he wears his cock.”

  His line jerked enormously. Thank Wydd he used a safe grip, or it would’ve cut through his fingers. With a shout of surprise, he let the long-line drop. We watched in shock as whatever he’d caught, a shark or swordfish, tugged the line in short sharp jerks, three of them in quick succession, a long slack interval, then five jerks, then seven.

  “Well,” Execarne sighed, “I’m not going to reel that one in.” He slashed the line free. “What were you saying?”

  “You were telling me we were in danger, fighting Farrier. And I know.” I wanted to take his arm in mine. And why not? Why not? I did. “But I cannot let Baru get Aurdwynn. And I cannot let her defraud even one more good woman to her doom.”

  She was all counterfeit, our Baru. The hints of yearning? The ill-hidden grief? Even her preoccupation with “rescuing” Tain Hu’s house on Moem? All scattered like pepper for the hounds. Designed to throw me off the scent.

  I’d realized the truth in that fetid cave beneath Moem, as Tain Shir hacked off Baru’s fingers. My mad niece was right. There was nothing on this ashen earth that Baru would ever value above her own power. Not her parents, nor her lovers, nor her home, nor her very selfhood. Give Baru a choice between honest death and terrible enduring life and she would choose to endure: even as some hideous Cancrioth implant, a knot of blackened cracked flesh festering in the skull of another woman.

  That was the difference between us: why she had to be removed, and I had to go on. There were things I knew I wouldn’t sacrifice but Baru had no limit. She’d shown me that herself. She could kill Tain Hu and I couldn’t abandon my brother. She spent people to achieve her power, and then, in a disgusting aristocratic loop of self-justification, she claimed those people who’d died for her as reason to go on spending: how can I stop, lest I betray those who gave everything for me?

  She’d killed Tain Hu to grant herself a universal license. A sacrifice that would justify any future atrocity. That was why she always appealed to Hu’s faith in her, and wielded that faith as a bludgeon against me. Dead Hu could never repudiate or abandon her.

  Dead Hu was now Baru’s line of unlimited ethical credit.

  “I won’t leave it to chance,” I decided. “Baru can’t be given any more opportunities to trick her way free. I’ll do the lobotomy as soon as we have her.”

  “You’re going to go ashore with us?”

  “I will. We’ll let our woman tail Baru when she makes her move.” I was not afraid of Kyprananoke. A strange violent city frightened me less than a ship alone on the sea. “Your agents will bring the necessary apparatus when we seize her. Then I’ll conduct the surgery. Then she disappears. No one else needs to know.”

  “Not even Tau?” He clenched up like a fist around a fear much deeper than I had ever seen in him, a fear beyond Parliaments or kidnappings. I had seen its like only in the faces of ilykari who felt they’d lost their way toward the virtue. It was a very nearly eschatological terror, a fear of world’s ending. And his eyes flicked, again, to el-Tsunuqba in the distance. Seeing my bafflement he said, as if this explained everything, “I hate lying to Tau.”

  “Then don’t lie. Tell Tau she had to be stopped.”

  I had another reason to move against Baru now. If I could only show her to Shir, maybe Shir would, in all her madness, recognize that I had avenged Tain Hu.

  Maybe I could bring Shir home to her father.

  Perhaps then Olake could forgive her, and me.

  “It’s a shame.” Execarne sighed, and settled his cigar again. “She had a fascinatingly disfigured mind.”

  * * *

  BARU packed the lies that would protect her. Payo Mu from Aurdwynn, Ravi Sharksfin from Taranoke, Barbitu Plane from Falcrest. Her gorgeous mask and Aminata’s faithful boarding saber. And her incryptor, which she kept in a waterproof gut-pouch on her belt. When she left Helbride, she would need to carry everything she needed to see this through—whether it stopped with Unuxekome Ra or led all the way to the Cancrioth.

  “Baru,” Iraji croaked.

  Baru whirled right, checking her blindness, but in fact he’d just snuck up the ordinary way, on her left. She completed a near-full orbit to find him in the doorway of the arsenal, bracketed by boarding spears. He’d been crying again.

  She shocked herself: without hiding the legends or making any effort to conceal her preparations to leave Helbride, she went to him. “Iraji. What is it?”

  “I’m afraid,” he whispered.

  Baru tore the canvas curtain shut behind him, and tacked it to the wall. “Is it Apparitor? Did he hurt you? Is it Yawa?”

  “It’s you,” he said, and began to weep again, silently. “Oh, Baru…”

  She offered him a snifter of vodka, which he refused, and a seat on her hammock, which he accepted. She did not leap to the idea that he was in love with her, or any such ridiculous tosh. She remembered her revelation, on Moem, about hash functions and cartouches. Iraji’s grief was a cartouche, a hash of many possible inner states into one hunched, red-eyed distress.

  She asked questions that would allow her, tenderly, to update her notion of Iraji’s inner state. “You’re afraid you’ve wronged me.”

  He nodded.

  “Because you helped poison me.”

  He nodded again, shakily, and put his arms around her. She held him wordlessly. She selected her most recent item of evidence on his behavior—she’d asked if he was all right, and he’d said, No, my ship is full of Oriati!

  She put the two ideas next to each other, Iraji’s role in her poisoning and Iraji’s distress at all the other Oriati, and searched for connections.

  A channel opened.

  We need Oriati protection for an Oriati place, he’d said. We need a bond of trim.…

  “You made a bond of trim with me,” she said. “And now we have so many other Oriati aboard. Do you believe … is trim real for you? Is this place an Oriati place, now?”

  He took a big long breath, firmed himself up, and said, “You saved my life. And look how I repaid you. Poison in your bottle.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Baru said, quite honestly, “for doing what you had to do.”

  “But when we poisoned you … you were calling out to Tain Hu,” Iraji whispered. “You were so hurt.”

  The wound too raw to probe. She made a riposte, to put him back on the defensive. “Iraji.” She took him by the shoulders. “Why are you so afraid of having Oriati people aboard? Is it about why you left them? Is it…?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve destroyed the world,” he said,
in utter earnest. “I’m afraid I’ve doomed us all to war.”

  Baru’s mind flickered along lines of logic. He’d been born in Oriati Mbo, and he’d fled, but still he believed in their ethos: he had reached out to Baru as a human being, to connect them: he had betrayed Baru in service of his master, but on a ship now full of Oriati, a ship where he felt himself reconnected to the great web of the Mbo.…

  Did he feel he’d passed some principle of betrayal into the whole Mbo?

  “Iraji,” she said, slapping him on the back, “I think the Mbo can digest you and I.”

  “Not I,” he said, and teetered, his eyes rolling up in his head, his chest spasming, “oh no, oh principles, ayamma, ayamma, save me—I have to tell her—let me tell her!”

  And Baru grasped the patterns. She knew the boy’s doom.

  Over dinner at the Elided Keep, Iraji had listened at the door as they spoke of the Cancrioth, and he’d fainted.

  On a boat off Moem, Baru had said, old Duchess Unuxekome can put us on the trail to the Cancrioth. And Iraji had fainted.

  On sinking Cheetah, Iraji had asked Tau-indi, what powers frighten you so? And Tau-indi had said, the same powers that attacked my ship, powers they would not name.

  And Iraji had fainted.

  “You’re one of them,” Baru whispered. “Aren’t you.”

  He clutched at her and groaned in fear. She went on anyway. “That’s why you ran away to Falcrest as a child. That’s why you’ve been conditioned to go into syncope when we speak of them. You’re trying to hide your own identity even from yourself.…”

  Iraji slumped against her.

  No wonder Apparitor had remained on Helbride at Moem. No wonder he hadn’t seemed very enthusiastic about hunting the Cancrioth. No wonder at all that Baru had detected a flash of fear in his eyes when she refused to give up the mission.

  He already had evidence of the Cancrioth in his hands, and he loved that proof, and he wanted to protect him.

  Baru held Iraji’s head in her lap and checked his breathing. Slow, serpentine terror licked the edges of her eyeballs. She knew a way to use the boy as a lure. Iraji’s secret could lead her to the Cancrioth, and, perhaps, to final victory over Falcrest.…

  But that would consume the boy. As giving Apparitor to the Necessary King would consume him.

  She checked her bandages and the silk stitches in her cheek. She seemed to be holding together.

  Then she scooped up Iraji and carried him to the maindeck, where Tau-indi was gathering their party to go ashore.

  “Iraji’s coming with us,” Baru said. “He needs trim to heal him.”

  Tau-indi knew exactly what she was about. She could see it in their eyes; she could see they had known, since Cheetah, that Iraji had a secret, that he had seen the Cancrioth and knew its name. But they did not know, Baru thought, that Iraji was one of them.

  “Did he ask to come?”

  “He’s bound to me,” Baru said, trying to grin. “Remember? Didn’t we get out of that ship? Aren’t we bound together, Tau, you and he and I?”

  “If I let you do this,” Tau said, with absolute dignity and composure, “you must honor the principles of trim as you travel with me. A time may come when you wish to make one choice, and trim forces the other. Are you prepared for that?”

  “Of course,” Baru said.

  24

  IRAJI

  “WE must go carefully,” the enact-colonel whispered to the ambassador-prince. “Death is in the air.”

  “I wish,” Baru murmured, “that I’d stolen Yawa’s gown.”

  “But you would miss this lovely wind!” Tau cried. “It doesn’t smell of plague or death. I should say it smells of … ginger.”

  “It’s always the plague you don’t smell that gets you,” Osa said, straight-faced.

  The escape from Helbride had been a contest of papers and insinuations. Prince Tau-indi had very deftly used their diplomatic freedoms to extract Baru and her companions from the surgeon’s authority. Under a filter mask it was easy to pass off Iraji as one of the Oriati boys, sick and in danger of death, going to the Oriati embassy. The only other complication had been a brief attack by the dancing seagull, which wanted Baru’s mask.

  But they were safely away, passing through the swarm of moored ships, and now Iraji dozed in Tau-indi’s lap. Osa and Baru rowed. Shao Lune brooded in the stern.

  Baru caught her eye. “Tell me about Kyprananoke.”

  “You read the files.”

  “They lacked your keen insight, Staff Captain.”

  “If you insist.” Shao Lune was unamused. Perhaps, having maneuvered her way out of Helbride’s hold, she no longer cared to taunt Baru. That was quite unexpectedly hurtful. “While Falcrest held Kyprananoke we arranged the exile of the old Scyphu families. They inconvenienced our control. But when we withdrew our government, this left no one of any authority except for the barbers we had trained up as surgeons. The rebels fought for revenge on the collaborators, and the collaborators did what was necessary to hold their power. In the end the Kyprists retained control.”

  “The Kyprists are surgeons?”

  “Not all of them.” Shao Lune tipped her head back to breathe clean air. “Some are the generals of the old Republican Progress Regiment.”

  “Secret police,” Baru translated.

  “Yes.” Shao opened one storybook-perfect eye, wet red with exhaustion, still venomously alert. “They have excellent accountants, you know. We used them to prosecute the black market. Kyprananoke was our furthest port before we had Sousward, and in those days we were careful to keep all the trade in our hands.”

  Shao Lune had probably not been more than a girl, those fifteen years ago. She said we as if she’d been there, because she was navy, and the navy had.

  “And we left because…?”

  “Because it was no more use,” Shao said, indifferently. “No cash crops, desultory fishing, no minerals. Your Sousward would serve better as a trade hub and fleet base. Kyprananoke could be left like rotting bait, to draw up the smugglers and pirates.”

  “And they didn’t go back to their old ways?” Baru probed, thinking of home.

  “I told you,” Shao said, with sudden spiteful interest. “We destroyed everything that kept them together, so that they’d need us more than we needed them. And then we didn’t need them at all. So we left. And like the savages they are, they came apart.”

  In Baru’s memory, Cairdine Farrier asked the question again. What do they have to offer us? What medicine? What sciences? What is worthwhile about their society?

  She hadn’t known how to answer that on the Llosydanes. Here she felt that even if she had the correct instruments, she would find that most everything worthwhile had already been lost beyond recall.

  But were the Kyprananoki to blame? No.

  Hadn’t they been pillaged, and wounded, and left to die?

  * * *

  THE kypra had no edge. Dead Mount Tsunuq’s molten gore had spattered down in strings and mounds across miles of shallows, and the coral had grown up between the stone into a maze of channels, lagoons, and pocket coves. A good diver (Baru thought of and wished for Xe) could easily bottom and return.

  Helbride was the only proper clipper in the mooring swarm on the east side, and therefore any boat from Helbride was remarkable, but Baru had hoped that they would get ashore without much attention. She had hoped they would not be marked as a major political event.

  She did not get her wish, for they were serenaded by a floating band.

  Barber-General Thomis Love’s Singing Marshals, forty strong, beat their big drums and blew their trumpets from a barge moored off the promenades of Loveport. A tangle of stalls, shops, boardwalks, and tent pavilions drifted at moor in Loveport cove. “Rather like your Iriad, isn’t it?” Tau said and, seeing Baru’s face, detecting some clue she couldn’t fathom, “Oh, I’m sorry. You must miss it so.”

  “I do,” Baru admitted.

  It was like Iriad. Pirate
captains haggled over sealed map-cases, privateer mates traded letters of take with Oriati attachés, stilt dancers advertised ratting dogs and birding cats for sale, teamsters hauled bundles of planks to the south quays, taciturn cooks called to customers with bursts of spicy hot-stone steam, acrobats mimed brutal war and vigorous sex on bamboo frameworks, addicts staggered from pole to pole in mumbling trance, rhetorics shouted their retorts from the posts of floating galleria, geometry clubs of old Kyprananoki and Oriati gathered to work on tile puzzles on the ground between big pots of dried beans and raisins and candied corn, pulque-makers and ash-paper sellers moved product in narrow stalls where coins clicked and flipped like game pieces, money everywhere, money and sun-touched flesh, the smell of spices hammered into fresh sizzling fish and the delectable sound of crab legs torn by teeth. Somewhere close by a handball game had drown a raucous crowd.

  But there was something wrong. The music—the music was wrong. Baru knew that melody the band played, why, it was—“In Praise of Human Dignity.” An Incrastic hymn.

  “Good grief,” Tau said. “They think we’re a Falcresti delegation!”

  “So they do. I’ll take the lead, then. We’re on a goodwill tour, showing how much we’re not at war.”

  “Excellent.”

  The barber-general waited with his band and retinue, surgeons in white caftans with bandoliers of scalpels, generals with peace-knotted rapiers on their belts and soft orange shoulder-length gloves. The men and some of the women went sensibly bare-chested in the late spring heat, the men shaved sleek, the more heavily built women haltered in nets or cotton strophia. A few of them, men and women and a scattering of lamen, favored khanga; the tradition upon Kyprananoke being that lamen should dress to hide their bodies.

  Each and every one of them wore a white ceramic mask.

  “Kyprists, of course,” Shao murmured to Baru. “They idolize our image.”

  “Do we still fund the Kyprists covertly? No? Then why do they pay us service?”

  “How would you hold this place together? Islands full of gava, tunks, jellyfish eaters, three cultures older than the king’s mummy? If they could see each other’s faces they’d set right back to cannibalism.”