The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Tau-indi’s head rose. Their eyes fixed on the shadow ambassador. For the first time Baru could remember, there was not the littlest hope in their eyes. Only dread.

  “No,” they said. “Oh no.”

  * * *

  EXECARNE touched my shoulder. “I need to tell you something, Yawa.”

  The deeper we’d traveled into the kypra’s channels the tenser he’d grown. I almost wished he would light another joint, because his twitches and growls of dismay (as if his thoughts were nipping at him) chafed at my own tension.“Now?” I snapped. Our boat had just butted up against Baru’s rented houseboat, and Iscend was poised to leap aboard. “Can it wait?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s still here. I don’t know if it’d work.”

  “I can’t follow you, Faham.”

  He locked eyes with me, though I wore the quarantine mask. He was a strong man, a man of energy and charm, and it horrified me to see him hollow with worry. He said, very precisely, very rapidly, “A contingency was put in place when we occupied Kyprananoke. A way to deny the islands to the Oriati. Or to contain a pandemic disease … in the expectation that a plague crossing the Ashen Sea would first be detected here.”

  “Does this contingency matter right now? At this very instant?”

  Now he seemed to stare past me. Later I would realize he was looking at el-Tsunuqba, the ruined mountain with its perilous stone shelves and heaps of ash and obsidian debris teetering above the open arms of the ruptured crater, like a cup with its broken side aimed towards Kyprananoke.

  Later, when I knew about the thousands of blasting charges implanted in that mountain face, I would understand what he feared.

  He was the Morrow Minister, master of spies. I was the Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, and sanitation and hygiene were my dominion, especially the containment of plague. No wonder he wanted my advice. The choice he faced was appalling.

  I think that he shared with Tau-indi Bosoka a profound hope that by reaching out he could somehow bind the horror before it entered our the world.

  “No,” he said, nodding his head, yes, it does matter right now: but he said no. “I’m sorry.”

  I would tend to him once we had Baru. “Gaios,” I said, “Iscend, go in and bring them out. Gaios.”

  Execarne waved to his clothier, the man executing the operation. Iscend led the way in, and the Morrow-men followed. They took the houseboat in two smooth minutes.

  Baru, Tau, and Osa were gone. Iscend found only Iraji inside.

  The boy walked like a heron with a snapped leg. Broken grace. I had my mask on and so I indulged in a terrible habit, I gave him my silent sympathy, the boy looked like he needed it.

  Iraji’s grief seemed to eat his face like noma.

  Of all the diseases I’d treated in Aurdwynn, I think noma was the one I hated most—because it was so common, because it was so simple, because my father had it. Noma is a disease of starving children. It kills nine in ten, mercifully (the mercy is for those who are disgusted by the child, make no mistake, those who speak of a mercifully dead child mean that mercy for themselves).

  The tenth child survives to live a bitter life.

  When a starving child develops noma, the digestive factors in the child’s mouth become so desperately voracious that they turn on the flesh of the face. The mouth eats itself. First ulcers develop, and then, rapidly, a painless rot. It is incurable. Soon the tongue is devoured. Soon after the lips. The flesh of the lower face peels away. In time the bone, too, although not always.

  My father suffered noma as a child. He kept a scarf over the hole where his mouth had been. When Olake and I were eight, a whore in our house—she worked in the bed next to ours, behind a curtain, and we learned how to shame her customers if they didn’t pay—died of a hideous vulval rot that got into her blood. The rot looked so much like noma that my father took the blame: people said he’d put his hole on hers in the night, people said he’d cast a spell on her.

  So the whore’s mother came over and stabbed our father in the gut. It took him eight weeks to die. Men scream differently without a tongue.

  He was the first man I ever killed. Olake told him what would happen while I brewed the tea, and then I served his cup, and father poured it down his hole and held us till he passed.

  Iraji looked like a man who would drink a poison cup. “Oh, child,” I said, though I wore the mask and its clockwork voice-changer, though I sounded of gears and death. “What did she do to you? Where has she gone?”

  “She went. With Tau and Shao Lune and Osa. She went to them.”

  “Went to who?”

  “I have to go to Baru. I have to take her place.”

  “Hush, hush, it’s all right.” Execarne appeared with a cup of coffee and a blanket. As he wrapped Iraji, he glanced sharply at me and made an o-shape with his fingers. We were out of time. Even now Shao Lune would be laying the trail for Execarne’s Morrow-men, and we had to pick it up before the jellyfish dye ran too thin.

  “She went in my place, do you understand?” Iraji husked. “I have to go to her. I can’t let her do this for me.”

  I sat there in the itchy quarantine gown, and I think its alien weight was the only thing that kept me from throwing everything aside to help Iraji. I wanted to say, oh, child, how well I know this pain. How well I know the need to go to my twin and suffer in his place.

  Baru isn’t worth it, do you understand? Baru eats people.

  Instead I adjusted the ticking voice-changer pressed against my throat and spoke.

  “What place of yours did Baru take?”

  * * *

  A TREMENDOUS explosion sounded from the direction of Loveport. An Oriati mine, detonated above water. Baru imagined a police post or Kyprist warship shattered. There were fire bells everywhere now, and from the west, in constant streams and squadrons, came the boats of Canaat fighters crossing to the Kyprist east.

  On the little felucca, Unuxekome Ra touched the point of her blade and swallowed. “You’re doing it here?” she asked the shadow ambassador. “What if you cut too much?”

  “I won’t,” the pregnant woman said. “The Prince’s ties are thick.”

  What did that mean? Tau’s ties of trim were thick? They were going to cut Tau’s trim? Who were these people?

  Baru scrabbled up to sit. A thrill in her chest. A sound like cavalry in her ears. She wondered for an instant if she were about to seize again, if this sense of everything coming together was a precursor—

  “Oh gods of fire,” she breathed, staring at the shadow ambassador, who was not, she realized, pregnant at all. “Oh gods of stone and fire.”

  Baru’s plan had worked.

  She’d dangled her bait, and the great fish had swallowed. She had shown the picture of Iraji, and mentioned the rhyme he knew, and the shadow ambassador had heard—

  “No,” Osa breathed, staring at the shadow ambassador. “It can’t be…”

  Beneath her khanga, the Oriati woman’s wet dress clung to the curve of her stomach. Her small breasts were not much swollen, Baru judged. She wasn’t pregnant.

  With her left hand, the child’s taboo hand, the shadow ambassador of Hara-Vijay touched the baby-sized tumor that filled her womb. With her right she pointed to Tau-indi Bosoka.

  “No,” Tau gasped, “no, no no no, please don’t—”

  “I cut you,” the shadow ambassador intoned. “I cut you out of trim. Na u vo ai e has ah ath Undionash. I call this power to cut you. Alone you will serve us, Tau-indi Bosoka, alone we will be your masters, to save the nations we both love. Ayamma. A ut li-en.”

  “STOP!” Osa roared.

  “Ayamma,” the shadow ambassador repeated. “A ut li-en. It is done.”

  Tau fell weeping onto their knees. Had their hands been cut from their body, Baru would not have pitied them more, or wanted to go to them more terribly.

  The shadow ambassador lowered her hand. “Well,” she said, shivering now, “that’s over with. Ra, take the boat we
st. We’ll lose our tails in the kypra and then go home to Eternal. I’ll signal our return on the uranium lamp.”

  “Incredible,” Shao Lune breathed, staring at the Oriati. “They think they’re doing magic.…”

  Ra laughed as she unstayed the boat’s tiller. “You stupid little girl. You think it’s all theater? Because you can’t understand it, it’s not real?”

  “It’s just superstition.”

  “Is it?” Ra pointed past her. “Is it just theater? Is that theater, you wretched Falcrest cuge? Is that theater?”

  A school of ghostly white jellies had surfaced behind them, thousands of them drifting together, their feeding tentacles intermingled—and through that jelly raft there came a blade like the moon.

  It was a fin. A tall black dorsal fin, slightly backswept, and on the leading edge it was fitted with a steel cutting surface. And as the creature turned, as Baru realized this same beast had towed her under the reef, the whale’s long body breached the surface for a moment.

  Behind the fin, a bony tumor ruptured the creature’s back. The growth ran down along its spine halfway to the tail. At first Baru thought it was a huge barnacle, or an infection, but no barnacle gleamed that unnatural bone-white color, sun-bleached and sterile: no infection could be so solid. The tumor had erupted from within the beast. A tumor of bone. And although the tumor knobbed and festered with hideous spines and bulbous growths, it wept no pus, the wound was clean, the skin knotted tight with scar tissue around the extrusion, even the contours of the tumor had been streamlined by the flow of water.…

  The creature rolled lazily to bare its passing flank. A tremendous white eye-shape, blank, empty, gazed on Baru: beneath it was a single black eye, keen, aware. For a moment great teeth glimmered at her in a carnivore yawn.

  Embedded in the tail end of that tumor was a grinning human skull. Its lower jaw subsumed into the flesh. Its eyes filled with furry, swollen bone.

  The whale blew a gout of water through its blowhole and the blow whistled like no living whale should ever whistle, like thunder piped down a thigh-bone flute, like the mad shriek of an archon folded into the world.

  Baru had found the Cancrioth.

  ETERNAL

  TAIN Shir shoots the maelstrom in the rowboat she took from the men she killed.

  The ocean crashes up against the ruin of el-Tsunuqba, the corpse of the old mountain. Jutting obsidian half-smoothed by the sea shatters and bares fresh edges. Craters and crevasses climb skyward to a ruptured, tilted crater. The slope is sheared along flat planes where ancient and devastating forces cracked the stone. It is a landscape indifferent to humanity and if all the shaheens and suzerains of ancient days had carved their works into the flanks an eon ago not one trace would now remain.

  She rows the sea below those slopes, where the waves have cut a phantasmagoria of sucking cave mouths and belching geysers. Narrow slit passes open between walls of flood basalt. Whirlpools roar in the labyrinth of debris and through one of these whirlpools Shir makes her transit to the interior of the corpse.

  Earlier in the day she leaves Sulane at the edge of the kypra and she hails a fishing ketch to make her way south into the settled islands. The fisherman’s old Psubim name is Haga el-Anagi and he has not taken an Aphalone name for he speaks to no one but the fish. Shir enjoys his company. If all the works of humanity were exiled from the face of the sea, his life would go on unchanged. He is uncontingent and unmastered.

  She goes into the kypra and hunts an Oriati agent to learn where his masters nest. He will not break even when she loops his arm in a wire tourniquet pulleyed to a bucket and lets that bucket fill drip by drip with water from the solar. He dies. She finds the Termite station by inspecting sewer records for a warehouse or shop that produces too much shit.

  She parleys with the spymaster there. Freely she admits her purpose which is to locate one Unuxekome Ra. The Oriati spymaster says she will trade Ra’s location for information on the Falcresti ships and their intentions. Are they here to prevent the uprising? Are more ships on the way?

  No, Shir says. We came for one woman. Ra will lead me to her.

  Ra is in el-Tsunuqba, the spymaster says. She goes out there in a little felucca.

  Thank you, Tain Shir says.

  After she leaves she climbs up to the chimney and gasses the spies.

  She does not hesitate in her judgment, for all who participate in the apparatus are complicit in its crimes. Even the least functionary in the lowest ministry. They had a choice to refuse to participate in the devastation of Kyprananoke but they did not. The spymaster would plead that she has a duty to her nation. The spymaster would plead that through small evils she prevents greater disasters. The spymaster would plead, I did not know what they were doing, I did not know who I was working for, how could I anticipate the use of Kettling?

  Shir would ask:

  Who says you have a duty to a nation? Who says you cannot reject an unjust duty?

  Who says you can decide which evil is small enough to tolerate, and which is too great to allow?

  Who says you should allow anyone to hold such power over you, the power to use your work for purposes you do not understand?

  If the spymaster could be forgiven for helping to arrange the civil war upon Kyprananoke, then Shir could herself be forgiven for what she has done. And she cannot be thus forgiven.

  Shir holds her breath, plunges the trigger on a slim grenade, waits for the crystals to crush and mix with the smoking agent, and drops the cyanide bomb down the chimney.

  She watches from the roof. No one comes out.

  Tain Shir fashions herself an atlatl, the bloodiest weapon in all of human existence, if you reckon the lives it has taken. As the uprising begins she kills a Kyprist and takes his patrol canoe. Paddles east. She moves between two rednesses, evening light in the west and the sooty stain of firelight thick in the east. A group of Canaat rebels hail her. When they see she is a foreigner they demand that she heave to for inspection.

  Shir complies. When the biggest man steps between their boats she waits until he has one foot on each side and she embraces him and stabs him in the taint and pushes him back into his boat with a blast grenade under his body.

  She takes a pistol and some shot from the boat’s carnage. The rocket-powder comes in tiny clever sacs of animal gut which can be stuffed down the oiled barrel. She smiles at the workmanship. Hello again. Cancrioth craft, as she remembers it from the jungle.

  She knows where Baru Cormorant will go.

  Tain Shir is here to teach a lesson. A lesson about the costs of manipulation, and the hubris of forcing others to pay those costs for you, and the lie that you can serve a master today without also ceding to him all your tomorrows.

  She rows south, to scout the teaching ground.

  Past the maelstrom the fjord plunges in toward the flooded caldera of the dead mountain. Light kindles all around her. A million worms cling to the shadowed stone cliffs.

  And by this light Tain Shir beholds the immense grandeur of the ship that destroyed Cheetah.

  Four hundred feet of golden-clad hull. A rudder like a door to heaven. Eight masts and their rigging is so vast that it might swaddle a baby sun on the first night of its radiance. Shir computes a crew of at least a thousand. Cannon peer through windows in the huge hull.

  There is no nameplate. But great symbols down the flank speak in En Elu Aumor, the sacred tongue of the Pitchblende Dictionary. They say:

  Eternal.

  On the high rail, a tiny man stands silhouetted against lantern light. Shir sees the long horn of crabbed flesh jutting from the eye socket. The man is onkos. He bears the immortata. The cancer grows.

  The Cancrioth has come out of its fastness to walk the world again. And Baru Cormorant will be with them soon. She must be taught. She must know that she will never gain her freedom by insinuating herself with her enslavers. She must learn that she can no longer expend those around her to pay the toll of her passage into power.

>   Shir will use all of Baru’s friends and companions to teach her.

  And if Baru fails to learn, then Shir will retrieve from the place where she once hid him the man who she was tasked to capture and vanish on Taranoke fourteen years ago.

  Baru’s father Salm. The very wheel and shaft of Baru’s mission. The man Baru has resolutely believed must be dead. For she has swallowed Cairdine Farrier’s protocols of grief, which do not permit any hope of reunion. And she has made death and loss the feet she walks upon.

  Tain Shir will break those feet from under Baru and cast her down into the ash of those she treads upon.

  Yes. She judges this fine ground for teaching.

  BARU

  CORMORANT

  needs us

  WILL

  you

  RETURN

  for her?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sine qua non: Gillian Conahan, Marco Palmieri, and Jennifer Jackson.

  Endless thanks to Rachel Swirsky, Ann Leckie, Kameron Hurley, Max Gladstone, Yoon Ha Lee, Brooke Bolander, Mia Serrano, Alyssa Wong, Amal El-Mohtar, Ilana Myer, and all the others who talked me through this process. I couldn’t have done it without you.

  Some of the wonders of Baru’s world are less fantastic than they seem. The naturally occuring nuclear fission reactors in Mzilimake’s hot lands existed on Earth in the past, although long before human history. Baru’s brain injuries, while somewhat idiosyncratically presented, are all known to occur in real people, though I make no claim of clinical accuracy. While the specific gender of “lamen” is fictional, many societies around the world have a third gender, and the partible paternity practiced on Taranoke is as real in our world as the matriarchy of the Bastè Ana. Cancer can be transmitted not just clonally between individuals (as in the sad case of Tasmanian devils) but across species—tapeworm to human transmission has been observed. The famous case of Henrietta Lacks, in which a woman’s unethically harvested and quite immortal cervical cancer cells provided the necessary human tissue for polio vaccine research, is a striking example of the durability and longevity of cancer cell lines. More than twenty tons of HeLa cancer cells are now thought to exist, spread around the world in a distributed superorganism which has contaminated other cell lines. The Cancrioth’s immortata is a similar superorganism, though it has been divided into specialized “breeds” targeting specific areas of the body by the selective amplification of tumors with the desired effects. Readers repulsed by the Cancrioth’s practices would be well cautioned to consider that both Oriati Mbo and Falcrest are hardly unbiased observers, and that it is easy to demonize that which offends our own sense of hygiene.