The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “You must be careful, now,” Tau warned her. “If the Kyprists discover you’re talking to the Canaat rebels, they may well kill you.”

  Baru tried a smile. She’d dared a little makeup, a masculine touch: she thought it put an interesting shine around her eyes in the mask. “Trim will protect me. Won’t it?”

  “Unless you’ve lied to me. Then trim will not protect you at all.”

  “Of course I’ve lied, Tau. I’m a cryptarch.”

  “Baru.” Tau cupped her masked cheeks. Their upturned face was black and gold and glorious: the honest fear in their eyes as raw and sickly-sweet as oyster. “You must be very careful. There is a terrible power loose on Kyprananoke. Do not provoke it.”

  Baru felt a thrill of horror. Of course they’re here, Iraji had whispered, his voice wet with the fluids of his body, particles of grief and fear. Of course they’re here.…

  “You’re alluding to,” she said, rubbing her scalp, “the civil war? Principles of discord?”

  “No. I mean the epidemic flags in the west. And the power that might have set that epidemic loose.”

  “Maybe it’s just a seasonal plague—all the winterlocked diseases have been freed up by the spring winds, to gather here by ship—”

  “No, Baru.” Tau’s voice trembled with fear and vulnerable defiant strength. “You know it’s not.”

  * * *

  BARU had read the Kyprist reports. They were exceptional record-keepers, these Kyprananoki tyrants. In the smokehouses their barber-surgeons performed mass autopsies on the corpses headed for the kilns. Some of the dire diagnosis came from these.

  The rest came from another method the Kyprists had learnt from Falcrest.

  In the quarantined west of the kypra, index patients suffered in stone cells. Convicts who had been exposed to the living and the dead, to their flesh or blood or breath, to sniff out the plague’s vector. One by one, on a fixed schedule, they would be executed and dissected. Had those exposed to dead flesh been infected? Had the men been struck harder? Or the women? Had lovers passed the disease to each other? All in the name of containing and understanding the plague.

  The plague.

  A hemorrhagic fever of extraordinary latency and mortality … first stage indistinguishable from a brief flu … second stage after eight to forty weeks* without symptom … the skin bruises at the slightest touch, the stool blackens, thirst and headache are most severe … blood weeps from the digestive tract … hemorrhage spreads to other organs with unpredictable course … liver, spleen, and kidneys struck next in more than a third of cases … the most rapid and certain deaths occur if bleeding spreads to the brain …

  A characteristic green-black tint colors the blood …

  Index patients on Mercipole Isle achieve a Blister Number of 2.9 except in pneumocystic cases** (however see—and here a scribble erased this line of the report).

  Mortality in the index population approaches seven in ten.

  Survivors experience persistent aches, visual abnormalities, madness … infectious reservoirs remain in the eyeballs and semen for weeks after symptopause …

  Vectors: Tainted blood and flesh. Sexual contact. Airborne transmission, but only in the case of pneumocystic cases** …

  The effects upon pregnant women are particularly acute. The fever induces massive uterine bleeding and sepsis of the fetus. Total mortality in mothers and unborn children.

  *The latency period presents an obvious challenge to the forecast.

  **Pneumocystic patients hemorrhage into the lungs. The sputum and vapor emitted by coughing is highly infectious, with a Blister Number of—(another scribble: this line, too, had been destroyed).

  “I always wondered,” Baru whispered, “why they called it Kettling, in the stories…”

  Tau seemed to stare through her. They were looking at the imagined suffering, at the dead. Baru was afraid that their warm eyes would suddenly swell with blood. “I would tell you,” they said, in a ghostly voice, “but the reason for that name is secret, and although it is pathetically obvious, I vowed not to reveal it.”

  “You know where it comes from.”

  “Of course I do. That’s why I’m afraid.”

  “Is it true that the Mbo will unleash the Kettling on anyone who invades your heartlands?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  Baru was about to ask, did someone release it here, and why? But just then Shao Lune and the enact-colonel came out onto the houseboat’s bow with them.

  Shao Lune wore her freshly cleaned and starched uniform, without any pins or insignia. She’d skewered her hair into an intricate braid with two steel picks. Beneath the uniform she’d slipped an item of mountaineering gear, a thick net bodystocking designed to trap insulating air between one’s skin and overclothes. Baru would never have thought it could be used as erotica, and about that she was very wrong. The net drew faint lines on Shao’s wrists: she had run a slender silver chain across her open collar, and the net sectored her skin beneath.

  The suggestion of control and submission did not escape Baru. Nor did the temptation to imagine the contours of the net.

  Shao winked. Baru was so distracted that she didn’t anticipate the enact-colonel’s warning. “They’re coming ashore. Now.”

  “Oh principles,” Tau breathed. “She’s coming now?”

  “How many?” Baru snapped, for they must mean Ormsment.

  “All the marines.” Shao had climbed up the houseboat’s mast to get a better view. Baru could tell by the pace of her chest. “Ormsment is with them. I think they’re trying to reach the Kyprists before Baru does.”

  “And Tain Shir?”

  Shao spat on the very fine rug. “I didn’t see the bitch.”

  “What about Ascentatic?” The other navy ship had exchanged coded rocket volleys with Sulane, but there was still no hint as to her purpose.

  “She’s sent no one we saw.” Osa buckled on her knives. “Prince Bosoka, I know you’ll refuse, but I must advise—”

  “We’re not skipping the reception,” Baru and Tau said, in more or less the same words, except that Tau added an apology. “We need to reach that embassy. All my resources on Kyprananoke depend on it.”

  Osa began to rope up her fists. “So be it, then.”

  “You do know,” Shao Lune whispered to Baru, “that Ormsment is—”

  “Coming in to attend the reception. Of course.”

  “Of course, she says, of course she’s attending a diplomatic reception, how sensible, how obvious.”

  “It is obvious. The Kyprists would invite the commander of any Falcresti warships anchored offshore.”

  “You know what they’re afraid of, don’t you?”

  “Death, I’d think.” The Kyprists feared that Sulane and Ascentatic had come to burn the islands and cauterize the plague. “They want to assure Ormsment they have the plague under control.”

  Shao smirked. “What if Ormsment tells the Kyprists you’re a renegade? What if she demands your head?”

  “Why, then my naval attaché will have to tell them who’s really gone renegade, won’t she?”

  “What if I don’t? What if I let Ormsment take us?”

  “Then we’ll die together in our formalwear.”

  Shao studied Baru with narrow-eyed amusement. “And if I’m—”

  “Ormsment’s deep-cover agent, waiting for the perfect moment to betray me?”

  “Exactly.”

  Baru tugged her toward the gangway by the chain at her throat. “Then I’ll raise you both a toast before I die.”

  25

  THE EMBASSY

  “SHE took Iraji!”

  Apparitor burst into my cabin with his hair in wet ringlets. He caught me halfway into my quarantine gown, still doing up the horrid mantis-skeleton: this made me cross enough to stay silent about the tripwire on my door. He tangled himself up very thoroughly, and after a few hops and an exclamation about my virginity, he fell on his ass.

  I looked down
at him where he sprawled and selected the drawl of an aristocrat. “I shouldn’t worry about Iraji. Baru is always fixing on this man or that as her disposable companion.”

  “Iraji is not disposable!” Apparitor kicked at the wire, and then, with a sudden blank-faced calm, drew his dive knife to slash himself free. “I want him safe. I want him back, Yawa, and if I lose him I’ll—”

  I sighed heavily. I was in truth already nervous. Himu’s fingers worked in my gut: Execarne had arranged his operation for tonight, and if I were not back on Helbride by dawn, Baru safely packed away, there was every chance Ormsment and Tain Shir would find me. “What will you do to me, Svir?”

  “I don’t know.” Apparitor groaned. “I think he went with her voluntarily.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Then whatever can I do to help you?”

  Apparitor hopped to his feet. He smelled so strong of whiskey I thought for an instant I’d stumbled into an operating theater. Ghastly pink round his eyes, the waxing crescent of a grief moon, and he’d chewed his nails past the pale tips of their beds.

  “You’ve got to call it off,” he said. “What you’re about to do. You can’t go ahead with it.”

  He knew. His crew had probably seen Faham flashing messages ashore in the night.

  “I won’t call it off.”

  “You have to. Iraji could be hurt.”

  “You’ve lost worse than one dear boy to this mission.”

  “Not him. I won’t lose him. Not in this place.”

  “You’ve been perfectly willing to risk him before—”

  Apparitor’s throat had a tantrum. His tendons stood out in such defined rage I thought they would peel his jaw wide open till his cheeks ripped. But above his chin he was blank, blank, calm and green-eyed composure: his teeth did not even click. I swear to Wydd that for one moment all my old street instincts told me he would kill me.

  And so I knew I’d found something important.

  “Perhaps,” I purred, “if you explained why he mattered so much to you…?”

  He lied to me. He lied a long weepy lie about his broken heart, his burning passion, his fear for his lover Lindon Satamine. How could he survive the loss of his only comfort, dear Iraji? Hadn’t I heard their frantic grappling these past nights?

  I listened to him and did not believe one word. Their burst of carnal appetite was not desperation but the product of Apparitor’s meddling with vidhara, a remarkable aphrodisiac: he and Iraji had been very careful preparing Baru’s dose, which required some experimentation.

  But at the end of his performance I assured him I would delay the attack.

  “Tonight?” Execarne murmured, as I came up onto the quarterdeck.

  “Tonight.” He was deep into his drugs, red-eyed and slow of tongue. “Will you be sober for it?”

  “Not if I can help it,” he said. He’d explained to me that he saw the world as a construct produced by the locus of human perceptions. By drugging himself into calm, he claimed, he was smoothing out the world around him, preventing the intrusion of misfortune and chaos. In that respect I thought he was very Oriati, and he certainly did seem to get along well with Prince Tau-indi. “Are there any complications?”

  “Nothing of significance.”

  “I don’t like this place,” Faham said, and I followed his gaze over the rail, across the bright blue shallows, through a copse of masts to the sprawl of the kypra. I’d never been this far south before. The wind had died with the evening, and in the west the plague-flags hung like snot from the empty houses of the quarantine.

  I could read the doom of this place in its law-books. All power here flowed from the single precious aquifer beneath el-Tsunuqba’s stony base. The junta of Kyprist governors held that aquifer, and the easterly ports; I thought it very convenient that plague had struck the west, where the Canaat movement thrived in the fishing villages and cricket ranches and the shallow farms that eked out cassava and yam and pepper and saltwater rice and bok choi in sea-slime fertilizer and preparations of their own shit.

  Their cisterns would run out soon. They would need to come out, through the quarantine, to get more.

  And in reply the Kyprists would do exactly what Hasran Cattlson and old Duke Lachta would have done. They would use force to quell the uprising. They would not have enough.

  So they would ask the two Masquerade warships at their port to use the Burn.

  “I don’t like the water situation,” I said, as a gentle prompt to make him share his fear.

  “I don’t like…” He sighed heavily. “There’s something I oughtn’t tell you about. But it is wearing a hole in me, Yawa. Maybe soon I’ll need to share it.”

  “I’ll be ready to listen,” I promised.

  A very fat, very greasy, very familiar gull settled on the rail near Faham. “Aw, hello,” he clucked, and patted himself for some salt pork. “Do you know who trained this little monster? Apparitor told me.”

  “Who?”

  “One of the prisoners who traveled on this ship. A duchess.” Faham fed the creature a crumb from his purse. “She studied birds on her last voyage.”

  * * *

  BARU rowed into Hara-Vijay down a broad shallow canal carved out of the coral by the weight of monolithic stones. In the years before the Masquerade thousands of Kyprananoki had worked together to drag those stones, greasing them in fat and kelp to get them sliding, hauling the whale-gut lines, wearing the way smooth by sheer persistence. At low tide the canal could be waded on foot, if you wore tall boots and went slowly. At high tide it flooded with glowing jellies longer than a man, and the birds descended to feed on the jellies, and the jellies devoured each other, and turtles crept from the coral to snap the jellies in their beaks.

  “Oh,” Osa said, in disgusted fascination. “Look at that!”

  She pointed astern to a golden jelly, an obscenely huge flesh-bulb with arms a hundred feet—a hundred feet?—yes, Baru checked their length against the mile markers, a hundred feet long. A white petrel had come hovering too low to the water, as petrels did, and the jelly snared it. The shrieking bird disappeared in a slow coil of tentacles as fine as hair.

  “You should avert your eyes,” Tau said, reproachfully.

  “Why?” Baru was queasily fascinated.

  “What if you see a cormorant devoured?”

  “Will it be an omen?” Shao Lune said, tauntingly. “Will it be a sign of her Excellence’s doom?”

  Baru felt moved to defend the Prince. “I like cormorants. They dive so well.”

  “They fly like shit, though,” Enact-Colonel Osa said, from the other oar. Baru looked at her in surprise. She shrugged. “I did my finishing study on the flight behaviors of seabirds. Short wings, cormorants. They don’t last too long up there.”

  Tau beamed at Baru and Osa. Baru realized Tau had maneuvered them onto a common subject. “Er,” she said, trying, for whatever reason, to please Tau, “perhaps they fold their wings so often, while diving, that the behavior has begun to alter their flesh?”

  “That’s the Incrastic account, I suppose,” Osa muttered.

  “And what’s yours?”

  “Do you care?”

  “Osa,” Tau said, reproachfully. “Don’t be rude.” But the moment was gone.

  The Oriati embassy compound stood on stilts and pilings in the lagoon, the outbuildings linked by rope bridges and floating walkways, the structures themselves built of concrete and sturdy imported Oriati hardwood fastened together not with metal but black resinous treenails. Great gold-and-jade banners hung flat in the calm. From the open-air pavilions came the delicious smell of hot honey.

  The reception was underway, the Oriati having brought in smaller parties to garnish the area with principles of celebration. Tau pointed out a puzzle club from Loveport, a party of children “straight off a syndicate pirate ship, bless their little hearts” playing with the octopi in the rocky aquarium, a group of Oriati writer
s from Galila, which was a kypra island famous for its studios, gathered in a circle to smoke hash and mumble toward inspiration, and even a local banker in a Falcresti waistcoat throwing her daughter a birthday. The embassy staff themselves had thrown out a silken sheet on the main steps, inviting their visitors to trample on luxury (the joy of their company being worth far more to the properly trimmed household than the fabric itself).

  “All is prepared,” Tau said, contentedly.

  “I’d say.” Osa did not like the pre-parties at all. “Everyone’s had a chance to case the grounds and slip in their agents.”

  “An embassy is not a fortress, Osa.”

  “It should be,” Osa muttered.

  “You would put thorns on dessert cakes if you could, Osa, to keep them from being licked.” Tau aimed Baru toward the quays at the north edge of the lagoon. “I expect the Prince-Ambassador will turn out in person to say hello. Dai-so Kolos is an old colleague. Look for the laman with the curiously straightened hair…”

  But no straight-haired ambassador waited at the quayside.

  Their gondola kissed Hara-Vijay’s mortared rubble pier, and they came up to meet a small party of Oriati in khangas or death-white uniforms. A lean man in a puffy white blouse stepped forward to salute them with his rapier to his brow.

  “Your Federal Highness.” He kissed Tau’s hand, and then Baru’s. “Your Excellence Barbitu Plane. Ladies of the house. I am Scheme-Colonel Masako ayaSegu. I can only offer my poor company in lieu of the ambassador’s. May I send ahead for anything? A refreshment? A companion?”

  “Guide,” Shao whispered to Baru, “not companion companion.”

  “Trust a sailor to think first of whores.”

  “I wouldn’t want the gava girl to grope the wrong hole.”

  “I don’t grope at all.”

  Tau and the scheme-colonel began to apologize to each other: for being late, for their ill dress, for the condition of the embassy grounds and the state of the weather. Then, when Baru thought it might finally be over, they started reassuring each other that everything was quite all right on each point. Baru couldn’t take it.