The Monster

by Seth Dickinson

  “Do you hear,” Apparitor cried, “do you hear? Tain Hu loved the woman you’ve come to kill! Would you murder what your cousin loved?”

  The killing woman perched on a low stone. Methodically she laid out her heavy crossbow, cut off the wet bowstring, began to fit a replacement. Iraji crouched behind Baru, ready to pull her down. Yawa sat in the prow, motionless and silent. And behind them the fire roared across the swamp, driving up the birds on columns of smoke, as Tenshy Diminute screamed and died on the spear in his bowel.

  “Why,” the flat-voiced mask asked, “did you let your beloved die?”

  “The law!” Baru cried. How could Baru make this woman understand the irony? Tain Hu died to help me win! Don’t kill me to avenge her! “The law demanded it! Let the traitor be judged by the moon, which knows the way of changing faces, and by the stars, which hold the constant faith!”

  “You are an agent of the Throne. You could have saved her.”

  “No,” Yawa said. “She would not have been saved to live as a hostage. Not Tain Hu. You know that, Shir.”

  The red-masked marine looked at the black-masked judge and the air shivered with alien force. Blue eyes meeting blue eyes. Baru could feel it.

  And Baru knew who the killing woman must be.

  Only her reptilian reflex to wait and think saved her from bolting straight upright in horror and falling off the skiff. She’d forgotten! In Haraerod, before the massacre, Tain Hu had asked her uncle Olake: “You were in Treatymont. I wondered if—” She’d glanced at Baru, hesitated, and continued in a hurry. “Word of our rebellion had all winter to spread around the Ashen Sea. Was there any sign of—by ship, perhaps, or even a letter, a symbol? Some mark left for your eyes?”

  Xate Olake’s eyes had hardened. “No,” he’d said. “I think we should be thankful for that.”

  And when Tain Hu had siezed Cattlson’s banner at Sieroch, Olake had welled up with pride, and said, I wish she had been my daughter instead.

  This woman was Olake’s actual daughter. The one he’d wished he could replace with Hu.

  “You loved her?” Tain Shir repeated.

  “Yes,” Baru said, “gods, yes. I did.”

  Tain Shir looked at Baru. Baru who claimed to love Tain Hu, daughter of her mother’s sister. And she passed her judgment on that claim.

  “Liar,” she said. “Liar.”

  “IRAJI!” Apparitor shouted. And Baru’s life ended in an equation.

  VARIABLES:

  The wet chaos of the marsh wind. The howl of the fire as it drank up the air. The whirling white birds that might distract the eye.

  The prowess of the killing woman’s shot.

  The rough, reliable brutality of her navy storm crossbow, designed to operate wet and warped.

  The training coiled up in Iraji’s body. The meats and eggs that fed him well last night. The uneasy sleep that quicksilvered his reflexes and sautéed him in fear. The shout from Apparitor, and the terror emblazoned in his body, a body which Iraji could read better than any text. Do not let her die! If she dies, I take the punishment!

  Baru understood it all. She saw all the variables. It was a little like godhood. And when Iraji tackled her face-first into the bilge, and the crossbow bolt buzzed overhead, some might have called it luck. But to Baru her survival was as sure and determined as the rising tide.

  Apparitor drew no knife. Shot no bow. But still he struck back in desperation.

  “TAIN HU SURRENDERED HERSELF!” he roared. “DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? YOUR COUSIN GAVE HERSELF UP!”

  And then, into the sudden silence: “Tain Hu came to me to be captured. She turned herself in by choice.”

  “What?” Baru gurgled. She was up to her chin in swampwater, her dinner clothes filthy, Iraji’s knee in her back. The world was full of fire and shrieking birds. But suddenly Apparitor’s voice was more important than air or life.

  What was he saying?

  What did I do?

  “She came down from the mountains!” Apparitor cried. Now he wept, and if his grief and his awe was theater, it was the finest Baru had ever known. “I never tracked her down! I never pulled her from some Wintercrest cave! She rode up to my agents and she told me to bring her to her sworn lord Baru Fisher!”

  Harder than a mace to the head. Tain Hu was dead but she still had the power to shatter Baru with her gallantry.

  She had obeyed her oaths.

  In life. In death. I am yours.

  She could have run into the Wintercrests. Lived to fight again.

  But Tain Hu had sought out Baru so that she could discharge her vows—

  —keep my deepest loyalties.

  Tain Hu had volunteered to die. She had planned her battle well.

  Oh, kuye lam. Not for me . . .

  I made an oath. I kept it.

  For Taranoke.

  For Vultjag.

  APPARITOR raised one hand: white-gloved, long-fingered, palm upraised in admonition. He was a cryptarch, exalted for his mastery of secrets, knowledge sharper than a Maia sword, quicker than Falcrest’s fire, surer than the Stakhi plate. Thus he held back his own death.

  “We have your father,” he said. “We’ll punish him if you harm us.”

  A soft indecipherable sound from Xate Yawa.

  “Is that so?” The red mask swiveled to her. “Will you let them hurt your brother, Auntie Yawa? Will you let them hunt your little Shi?”

  Yawa didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

  “Auntie,” the red mask rasped. “Look at you. Remember what you told me? It’ll get better. I promise.”

  “Shir,” Yawa said. Baru knew that weight on her voice. It was old pain poorly hidden. “Don’t do this now. You don’t understand—”

  A smoke bomb crashed into the water and gushed a gray-white cloud between them. The red mask vanished into the water and the mist.

  “Finally!” Apparitor cried.

  “What?” Baru shouted, offended on a deep and irrational level that things kept happening without her consent. “What?”

  Iraji pointed Baru to the boats coming across the marsh from Helbride, armed with little hwachas. The rocket fuses glimmered like fireflies. Apparitor’s people had arrived.

  “Come on!” a woman cried. It was Helbride’s Captain Branne, with her bronze eye glittering in the firelight. “We’re casting off!”

  Tain Shir. Tain Shir was the cousin of Tain Hu. Baru remembered that now.

  Why did it feel that she’d forgotten something else?

  Why was she certain that she’d known Tain Shir as long as she lived?

  HELBRIDE slipped from her hidden river into the shallow edge of the sea.

  Copper and wood tasted the waves. She raised wings of canvas, spruce, pitch-smeared rope and fir, and the sailors in her rig set her downwind. Scylpetaire tried to cut her off, but Apparitor had strewn mines to guard his exit, and the navy ship had to beat upwind to clear the threat.

  “Isn’t that poetic?” he said to Baru. “They come to kill you for mining a harbor, and now they can’t get past my mines.”

  Then he looked back to the marsh and the Elided Keep, and Baru watched all the jaunty swagger drain down through his jaw and throat until he was as pale and sickly as a strangled pig.

  The marines were killing everyone. Their knives flashed at the throats of secretaries and librarians. Pale lapwings warbled and wheeled overhead in anger and the tide ran with the blood-yellow effluent of eggs broken beneath hobnailed boots.

  Again Apparitor wept. “My house,” he said. “I left my house to die.”

  Iraji touched his shoulder. Baru watched his fingers curl in reassurance. Experimentally she curled her own fingers against her own shoulder. It didn’t help.

  And then she came walking out of the carnage.

  The killing woman. Resplendent and profane in burnt muck, in broken eggs, in armor sprayed by artery blood. She paced them on the shore, pointing—promising. You think I won’t follow you across the sea, O Fairer Hand? You think I
won’t follow you into the new names and faces you assume?

  “What is she?” Baru whispered.

  “That’s Tain Shir,” Apparitor croaked. He was bent with grief. “Your patron Farrier’s old favorite. She was supposed to be the living proof of his work . . . a foreign woman educated into a perfect instrument.”

  “She’s your niece,” Baru said, to the right-hand void where Yawa stood.

  “Yes.” Yawa’s voice crackled like paper. “She was born to my brother and Tain Ko, a secret marriage between commoner and aristocrat. She . . . left us, in her youth. Farrier told her she could find a truer revolution with him.”

  “Farrier was in Aurdwynn? I thought you didn’t know him!”

  “Not as Farrier, no. The Itinerant has wandered the world for a long, long time. He took her with him, when he went to Taranoke. . . .”

  “Oh gods,” Baru gasped. Dizzy revelation tipped her world halfway over. She did know Tain Shir! She had seen Tain Shir as a girl on Taranoke. Remember the guard by Cairdine Farrier’s stand? The guard who’d offered to buy Baru a piece of mango?

  She’d had brilliant blue eyes. Xate Yawa’s eyes.

  On the day Cairdine Farrier had selected Baru as his next protégé, his harvest from Taranoke, he’d had his protégé from Aurdwynn right at his side. Wasn’t Farrier drawn to brilliant young people with political ambitions? Was it any surprise he’d chosen Xate Yawa’s niece, Olake’s daughter, Tain Hu’s cousin—blood of aristocrats, and blood of the commoners who’d delivered Aurdwynn to the mask?

  One Tain had abandoned her homeland.

  The other had remained, and ruled, and changed Baru’s course forever.

  BARU.”

  She whirled left, searching for the whisper, and went all the way around in a full spin before fetching up face-to-face with the black judicial mask and hideously angled raven-gown.

  “What,” Baru snapped, quite charged with hurt and exhilaration, totally unready to have a delicate fencing match with the Jurispotence. “What is it, what, what?”

  “I read your letter.”

  “Oh.” A schoolgirl’s flush of humiliation: the teacher had found her diary! “Well, ah, yes. A bit theatrical. I didn’t think we’d see each other until—”

  “You thought he’d died.”

  “Olake? Yes, er, Apparitor told me he’d . . . he’d been killed.”

  “You tried to save him.”

  The unblinking lenses were impossible to stare down. Baru tried to fidget with her coat, which stank of smoke, and accidentally dirtied herself with cooked marsh filth. “Yes, I sent him away with Tain Hu.”

  “He must have followed her south,” Yawa rasped. “He was trying to save her. That’s where he was captured. I didn’t know.”

  Baru’s throat closed up with horrible grief. Nothing was harder than imagining the love and loyalty shared by those she’d betrayed. Nothing. She had the uncomfortable image of a serpent’s tongue flickering behind that mask, tasting her guilt. The crew moved around them, executing a ferociously intricate algorithm of tying and untying and rigging and cutting and hauling, readying the ship for a long race. But Baru would sooner understand their work than Yawa’s thoughts, she felt.

  “What’s that?” Yawa touched the side of her mask, adjusting optics. “There. Look.” She seized Baru’s wrist and made her point. A little rowboat had broken from the saltwater marsh and moved to cut off Helbride’s escape.

  “Boat ahead!” the prow watch called. “Two women aboard! She’s flying signals!”

  Apparitor sprinted forward, with Baru right behind him. “It’s not one of mine.” One woman rowed. Another had been shackled to the boat’s rear bench—a prisoner. “I don’t know those codes. Get some crossbows up here and kill them.”

  “Wait!” Baru stole his spyglass. “Wait, I know her.”

  The rowing woman was Iscend Comprine, Hesychast’s Clarified terror. She’d taken a navy officer prisoner, a very slender woman in a particularly well-tailored uniform. Aminata would probably call that cut not strictly regulation. Baru thought it was quite endearing to the eye.

  “Bring her aboard,” Baru ordered, and when Apparitor protested, on the grounds that it was Baru’s idea and therefore probably bad for everyone around her, “bring her aboard, we need to know more about this mutiny!”

  They held the boat at a safe distance with poles and boathooks, in case it carried a mine. Iscend Comprine cut the navy woman free and sent her up the ropes. When the prisoner’s face cleared the ship’s wales Baru hated her instantly. She was big-eyed and small-chinned, with a sweet heart-shaped face and dark hair in a bun. Superciliousness just dripped off her.

  Elegantly she sat on the rail, swung her legs over, and came aboard into a circle of armed sailors. “A fine welcome I get,” she sniffed, “trying to show my loyalty to the Emperor.” She took the canteen a sailor hadn’t offered her and drank. “I am Staff Captain Shao Lune, and I’ve escaped the Traitor-Admiral Juris Ormsment. I have insight into the mutineers’ plans. Who’s in command here?”

  “Ah. Shao Lune. How wonderful to see you.” Xate Yawa glided up beside Baru and Apparitor. “I worked with this young woman over the winter. She is most career-minded. You there, young lady, did this woman turn herself in to you?”

  Iscend Comprine shouted up from the ladder. “Yes, your Excellence, she asked to be taken to Helbride.”

  “Of course. She defected the instant it looked like we’d get away. I assure you she will defect back to the mutineers at the very first sign they will catch us. Throw her in the bilges.”

  Shao Lune’s face went smooth with poison charm. “I look forward to my first interview,” she said, sweetly. “Show me to my temporary quarters, then.”

  Iscend Comprine pulled herself over the rail like a gymnast mounting her beam. She looked sweaty and soot-spattered and magnificently in command of herself. Baru stared.

  “Regards.” She bowed. “Hesychast asked me to represent his interest on this expedition. May I come aboard?”

  “No,” Apparitor said, voice rising, “no, no-no-no, I will not have one of them on my ship—”

  Baru thought of Purity Cartone. An instrument of limitless uses. A man who’d been shot, burnt, and castrated in her service. A man whose utter obedience had thrilled her. She shuddered at the thought of the temptations Iscend would bring—

  But a talented bodyguard had just saved Baru’s life, and Iscend would be more talented yet. . . .

  Xate Yawa spoke up before she could. “I’ll take the Clarified miss,” she said, “as my responsibility. I’ve worked with them before.”

  HELBRIDE turned south-southeast and ran out to sea.

  Baru wondered if the Liminal Library had been flooded yet. Poor Jaman Ryapost. Now he would be a drowned skeleton as well as a suicide. “Do you think the coup’s spread?” she murmured to Apparitor.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. “No,” he said, with soft desperation. “This is one revenge-crazed Province Admiral with a couple ships of fanatic crew. The rest of the navy is still loyal. Lindon’s fine. Parliament need never know.”

  Captain Branne joined them at the rail. “Sir,” she said, clapping him roughly on the cheeks, brushing at his shoulders, taking an inventory of the boy who ruled her, “you’re a mess.”

  He tried to smile. “Another narrow escape, eh, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll add it to the log.” With rough compassion, as if pulling off a child’s scab. “My lord, should we send out boats to check the fallback at Prydoc River? Maybe others escaped the keep.”

  “The only ones who made it out were the other cryptarchs,” Apparitor said. “Why would the keep staff flee? They’re all convicts. They live here or they die. No, no one else survived.”

  And very suddenly he embraced the old woman, smearing her from collar to crotch in marsh ooze. She patted him on the back, tolerantly.

  “Now I need a course, my lord,” Branne said. “Once we’re offshore and we catch the trade winds
we can make Isla Cauteria in—”

  “No!” Baru and Yawa barked together.

  “You can’t be serious.” Apparitor gaped at them. “You want to keep going?”

  “Yes!”

  “We need protection! We need to change our identities, re-flag the ship, send a whole fleet to arrest Ormsment—we have to get back to Falcrest and tell the rest of the Throne what’s happened!”

  Yawa began to undo her mask. The fine thin skin beneath, the brilliant eyes. A kind of beauty like angry handwriting. “None of us can risk that,” she said. “Not you, not I, not even Baru. Even if they had no hostages at all. We would have to go on.”

  Apparitor huffed.

  “You know it’s true,” Yawa said. “We’re running out of time. Parliament votes on war at summer’s end. And the moment that war breaks out, and Falcrest’s fleets are drawn south toward Oriati Mbo . . .”

  “The Stakhieczi invade Aurdwynn,” Baru whispered. That was the reason Falcrest had wanted a quick, clean civil war, to unite Aurdwynn as a shield against the threat. “Shit.”

  Duchy Vultjag pressed up against the Stakhieczi Wintercrests. Tain Hu’s home would be the very first to fall to the invaders.

  “Taranoke would be targeted by the Oriati,” Yawa said. “If that matters to you.”

  Baru couldn’t say how very much it did. Her fear for Vultjag and for home roused her thoughts and two ideas struck like flint. She had to get control of this war, didn’t she? She had to turn the invaders on Falcrest and spare those who might otherwise be caught in the devastation. How better to do that than to complete this mission?

  “I know how to find the Cancrioth,” she said. “I know how to follow their money.”

  And if she found the Cancrioth, wouldn’t she have power over Farrier and Hesychast? Wouldn’t she be able to bend them to her will? They would both require what she had. . . .

  Wouldn’t she have the power to begin a war which would scour the world clean?

  “What money?” Apparitor demanded. “You think a cult will have account books?”

  “Of course they will!” Baru rounded on him. “Remember your Cryptarch’s Qualm? To use your power, you must touch the world. To be touched is to be seen. Didn’t they send a fleet to help my rebels? Didn’t they act? They’ll have left traces.”