The Monster

by Seth Dickinson

  INSIDE: stucco walls, a low arched ceiling, soft light, quiet.

  Tau-indi wept fiercely and succinctly. Baru tried to imagine what they might be thinking: how they had said the duel was a test of Baru’s trim, and what they might conclude from the way that duel had ended. A wound, they would think. A wound in trim . . .

  Tau touched their throat, spoke a silent word, and clasped Osa’s hand. “What’s happening?” they asked, without panic, but with absolute sorrow. “I heard the cries. Canaat rebels, I think. How did they get in?”

  “Masako let them in,” Osa growled. “That fuck.”

  “Why?” Tau said, but their flinch away from Baru said they already knew. A wound in trim admitted disaster and tragedy into the human world . . . and when they had called on Baru to prove her trim, what had appeared but the Black Emmenia itself?

  The shadow ambassador’s pregnancy gave Baru a thrill of protective horror—oh, keep this woman away from the Kettling, lest the Black Emmenia take her, too! She had the classical Oriati brow, slashed by the leather band for her strapping black eyepatch.

  She said, by way of hello: “Apparently Scheme-Colonel Masako has decided to support a Canaat coup against the Kyprists. He is using the embassy to pen and reduce the pro-Falcrest leadership.”

  “Where’s Dai-so?” Tau demanded.

  “Fishing.”

  “Dai-so hates fishing—”

  “They’re on the wrong end of the lines,” the shadow ambassador said, grimly.

  “Masako killed them?” Tau’s tears became a low, unexpected growl. “Dai-so’s dead?”

  “I’m afraid so. There’s been an . . . adjustment here. The Termites wanted to fund the Canaat against the Kyprists, so we’d have a harbor here, on Kyprananoke, when the war began. Dai-so objected, on grounds of trim, and the Termites—I’m sorry. There was nothing I could do.”

  Tau took a ragged breath. Paused. Blew it out. “Well. I’ll see to Masako’s trim for that. Will the coup spread?”

  “All across the kypra. The Canaat are coming across the quarantine now, storming the east side. It’s civil war.”

  “The Falcresti warships will step in to stop them?”

  “I expect so.”

  “Will they set fire to the infected islands?”

  “Without question,” the shadow ambassador said.

  “We have to stop it.” Tau-indi switched to Takhaji, the old tongue, for a short passionate conversation with the shadow ambassador.

  “Check your clothes,” Shao Lune hissed. “Check everything.” She and Baru went over each other for any black blood: there was nothing on them but wine. Baru slumped against her in relief. The woman held her for a moment. It was not a selfless act, nor generous, nor very kind. But it was the warmest Shao had ever been.

  “Kettling.” Shao drew away. “It’s actually Kettling. I thought the Oriati exaggerated it to frighten us. Who would be mad enough to let it out?”

  “I thought I saw Aminata,” Baru said, stupidly.

  “Aminata isiSegu? The Burner of Souls? Maybe Maroyad sent her down from Cauteria, to help handle the Oriati.” Shao gave a pop of incredulous laughter. “Even the Burner could probably learn a trick from these savages. King’s balls, that woman with the cane. She really disemboweled herself?”

  Baru could only nod.

  “Savages,” Shao Lune repeated.

  “No,” Baru said, slumping to the ground. “She was dead anyway. She decided what her death would mean.”

  “She disemboweled herself, Baru.”

  “She fought with the weapons she had.”

  A blast echoed down the hall. Hot air blew on Baru’s stitched cheek. Tau-indi and the shadow ambassador looked up from their Takhaji conference.

  “It’s the marines,” Osa said. “They’re coming in to take prisoners.”

  Baru thought, I must be taken, I must go back to Aminata, and to Ormsment. I must give myself over and save my parents. I must. She even started to get up.

  “Where are you going?” Shao snapped. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “I have a way out. Please follow me.” The shadow ambassador led them toward a very narrow stone staircase. “We’ll get out under the reef.”

  “That’s suicide,” Shao Lune protested. “You mean for us to swim all that way?”

  “We’ll be fine,” the shadow ambassador said. Baru thought she had the air of a woman who knew more than everyone about what would happen next. “I have a guide.”

  They plunged down stairs carved into volcanic rock, trampling on each others’ heels, swearing, chased all the way by the screams and the big-bell tones of a fire alarm. Shao Lune held up a scrap of cloth and watched it bend. “The fire is drawing up the air.”

  “Those poor people,” Tau whispered. “Those poor people. They came to celebrate.”

  “Trim, huh?” Osa said, bitterly.

  “Have faith, Enact-Colonel,” Tau said, but it was the weakest Baru had ever heard them. And they looked at Baru in fear and horror.

  Baru thought, with dull guilt: I wished for something to interrupt the duel, didn’t I? I wished for it.

  They went sideways through a corridor so narrow Baru was afraid the shadow ambassador’s pregnancy wouldn’t fit, but she was agile enough. Now water lapped at their feet. A black pool opened before them and the passage plunged down into it. There was nowhere else to go.

  The shadow ambassador grabbed a rope that trailed down into the blackness and showed Baru how to loop it around her right wrist so she could cling to it. “Like this. It will hurt. You’ll be pulled so quickly you’ll think you’re going to be dashed to your death. But don’t let go until you see sunlight above you, understand?”

  “No I do not.” Baru was not going to get on the rope until she understood. “Why are we tying ourselves to this rope?”

  “We have to get all the way under the Hara-Vijay reef, out into the sea.”

  “So we need to swim along the rope, don’t we?”

  “It’s too far to swim to open water.”

  “Then how—”

  The shadow ambassador’s one good eye seemed to smile. She had a little cleft in her lip, like the navigator on Mannerslate (who Baru had led to die): probably it had been sewn up when she was a child, and she had learned, while healing, not to move her mouth much.

  “Thank you for asking after the boy,” she said. “It shows you’ve a good heart.”

  A ghost licked the length of Baru’s spine, a raspy cat tongue of intuition, something’s still wrong. . . . She stuffed her portrait of Iraji and her incryptor into the gut-pouch in her jacket pocket and tied it shut. Osa and Tau were stowing Tau’s jewelry.

  “Onto the rope, please,” the shadow ambassador said. “We’re going to be towed.”

  AMINATA watched them burn.

  She had to watch. She had ordered this. It was her duty and that made it a weight she had to carry forever, these people who she’d watched chattering and flirting and planning their long ambitious lives, burning now, humiliated by the flame, stripped not just of flesh but of their dignity, screaming, screaming.

  While she commanded marines on Lapetiare she’d led the taking of pirate ships, both true pirates (who mostly surrendered, but were very erratic) and Oriati privateers (who mostly fought, and were very disciplined). In the low compartments and long oar-banks of burning ships she’d fought with grenades and knives. She had definitely stabbed one man enough to kill him: slowly and in agony, she suspected, for it was a gut wound.

  So she knew a little about death.

  But everyone she’d killed on those ships had been a killer, too.

  On Hara-Vijay, she watched her marines butcher families and children. She watched Burn fire lick across the courtyard of the Oriati embassy and claim the screaming Kyprananoki spattered in black blood. The marines on the roof with her seemed to go mad: some of them fell down trembling and refused to shoot. Some of them howled and laughed as they threw grenades. How could you bring yourself to k
ill children? Apparently you laughed. You laughed at the way their bones bent in the heat. You laughed at yourself because it was so easy that it became absurd.

  People’s knuckles popped in the heat. Their eyes. Their nostrils eroding. Rivulets of simmering fat. One plump Kyprananoki woman in a dashiki dress hauled herself up the trellis at the south wall, got onto the top, and hesitated. She was looking back down—at one of the Canaat, the pregnant woman with black blood on her legs, who was curled raving in the fire—oh, queen’s cunt, she wanted to go back and help the pregnant woman—

  “Shoot her!” the sergeant snapped.

  A crossbow bolt stuck in the woman’s rump. She fell southward, off the wall, out of the fire.

  “Bring up the piss!” Aminata cried. The shout went down the line to the boats at the reef, where combat engineers hauled up big tubs of piss-soaked sand. But the fire was already under the eaves, up the trellises, among the purple flowers and spreading across the embassy compound. Aminata knew at once that the whole of Hara-Vijay was lost, and she ordered her marines out.

  First company pulled some of the embassy’s staff clear. Most of the Oriati guards had already gone.

  There was no sign of Baru.

  By sundown the Canaat had broken quarantine all over the kypra. All around Hara-Vijay people screamed “I’M THIRSTY!” and killed the orange-gloved Kyprists in the streets. The Canaat had bombs and grenades and even pistols, stupid, brutal, flashy weapons that fired sprays of broken metal and left hideous wounds. Weapons of terror.

  And some of them were bleeding.

  Aminata’s order to burn the embassy guests had accomplished nothing. Nothing. On the Llosydanes she’d found a little boy in the wreckage of a beerhall with his head burnt to a stump, and she’d washed that boy, and cast him into the sea, and gone to her shrine to beg Baru for answers.

  She’d followed Baru to Kyprananoke. And now she was the one burning the children.

  Her imagination would not stop chewing at her wounds. She heard Baru’s knuckles popping in the heat. Her fierce storm-eyed face screwed up in confusion, an arrogant sort of dismay, this isn’t right, I didn’t plan on this, and then the fire took over her face—tendons shriveling, muscles cooking, the lips seared against the skull and rolled back to reveal a dying rictus, Aminata, why did you burn me? her face peeling away to scored bone, eyes empty, black holes asking, Aminata, why did you burn me, why?

  “Mam?” Faroni whispered. They were on the boat back to Ascentatic. “Mam, are you . . . are you all right?”

  “I think I just killed my best friend,” Aminata said. She looked at her sooty gloves. “And I don’t even know if she deserved it.”

  On Ascentatic she went down to the wardroom and put her boot tip against the cormorant feather wedged into the planks.

  The gray quill did not bend in fear. It did not turn to look at her.

  She could step down and break it in half. She could. Do you hear that, Baru? Are you alive? I am not your friend. I do my duty even when it means burning you. Friends don’t do that. I cannot call myself your friend.

  What if Baru was alive, and in trouble right now? What if Baru needed Aminata’s help? What if Calcanish was lying, and Baru wasn’t involved in any conspiracy against the navy and the peace?

  Thoughts of treason stalked Aminata like starving dogs. She had run from dogs, as an abandoned child in Segu Mbo: the ports were desolate and abandoned after the Armada War, the orphanages unable to meet rent, the dogs of the dead left to wander and rut in the streets. If Baru really was an agent of the Empire, wouldn’t Aminata be blameless for joining her?

  But then she would be betraying her duty to the navy.

  “Fuck,” Aminata snarled, and put her head in her hands. Her boot came down, accidentally, and shaved the barbules off the right side of the feather. Aminata knelt and tried to set the feather right. But it would not go back. It would not go back.

  That was what she’d told Baru, the last time she’d seen her. You can’t go home. You can’t find it again. Even if you go back, it’s not there anymore. Someone’s always changing someone else.

  Someone’s always changing . . .

  “Gerewho,” Aminata breathed. Why had she just thought of Gerewho?

  Because he’d reported that Shao Lune was signaling to him. I’m drowning: throw me a line. . . . Which Aminata had interpreted as a plea for rescue from Baru.

  But what if Shao Lune wanted to get away from Ormsment? What if Shao Lune had seen Ascentatic crew and assumed they weren’t under Ormsment’s control? And that was why she was asking for help?

  Why would she expect a lieutenant commander to fall outside a province admiral’s command?

  Because she knew something, a secret which would invalidate Ormsment’s authority. If Aminata could only prove that, she could convince Captain Nullsin to help Baru—

  No. Aminata beat at her temples with the heels of her hands. She was rationalizing! She wanted Baru to be innocent—framed—she hadn’t blown up the transports at Welthony, hadn’t manipulated Ormsment into that disaster on the Llosydanes, it was all a trick—but that was selfish fantasy. She had to do her duty.

  But her duty was to gather all the information . . . and Shao Lune might know something . . .

  It was a hunch worth checking on, wasn’t it?

  “Lieutenant Commander Aminata!” a seaman shouted. “Sulane’s sending a party! Province Admiral Ormsment’s aboard. Says she wants to talk about combining our efforts. Cap’n wants all officers on deck!”

  Aminata pulled the broken feather from the planks and tucked it into her collar. It itched against her throat. She swallowed. It tickled her chin a little, like a gentle finger-touch, and she had to smile.

  She would find the truth. And if Baru were still alive, somehow she would pick up her friend’s trail, wherever it led.

  She said aloud what she wished she had cried out to the world as she leapt into the dueling circle. She said it and it felt more right than duty.

  “I . . . stand for Baru Cormorant.”

  BARU surfaced into sunlight and shouts.

  The embassy on Hara-Vijay cast a bar of smoke against blue sky. Past the reef, Loveport crackled with signal fireworks: booming fusillades requesting reinforcements from Sulane, from Ascentatic, from Helbride, ordering Kyprist loyalists to the shorelines, to the barricades, to their spears and machetes.

  Far in the west, single yellow starbursts burst over dark villages. A Masquerade code. Quarantine broken.

  The Canaat were coming out to claim their freedom.

  Baru desperately wanted know what thing had towed her. Back in the cave a pull like a draft horse had snapped the rope taut and drawn them all down. The tunnel was too dark to see ahead, but there came over Baru a rhythmic wash, the stroke of a huge fin. As if the rope were not being hauled in by a winch or crew but towed by an animal.

  As they passed out into sunlight she’d tried to squint through the wash of water and resolve the animal’s form. But all she’d seen was a human skull receding before her. And its jaws were stuffed with bone as thick and spongy as marrow.

  Osa and Tau treaded water, arms linked, heads together: the Prince was reassuring her of something. Baru spun her blindness round and found a boat waiting: Shao Lune had just popped up gasping at the stern, as if she’d taken the time to swim underneath and inspect the hull. Baru reached up to the boat-wale to haul herself up.

  Someone seized her hand. The stumps of her missing fingers crushed against wood and she screamed aloud. The hand pressed down, as if to milk the bone from the wounds, and Baru howled, howled.

  “Ba-ru!” A face appeared over the boatwale: a grin full of silver and porcelain and lead and the teeth of dead men. “There you fucking are, you shit-stuffed umbilical, you dreg. Come here.” Strong hands grabbed her by her lapels and lifted her up to meet a knife, a sharpened hook, a curve that would pierce her throat and seize her arteries and windpipe and pull them out through the wound. The voice was a woman
’s, heavy Urun accent in the Aphalone, and familiar, so familiar—a storyteller’s voice, thick with salt and pitch.

  She sounded like her son, minus the joy.

  Unuxekome Ra threw Baru down into the bottom of the boat. Her boot came down on Baru’s breast and pushed: Baru’s breath went out like a bellows.

  “Save yourself,” Ra said. She let her boot up so Baru could draw a breath, tensed, and pushed. “Lie and save yourself!”

  “I have a file—” The boot came up, she drew a breath, spat on Ra’s next stomp. “—of your son’s deepest secrets!”

  “I don’t care. Try something else.”

  “I can give you—Xate Yawa!”

  Her broad brown face with the sun behind it, noble face of a duchess, weathered face of a pirate and a grieving exile. When had she learned of her son’s death? How fresh was the wound?

  “I’ll get to Yawa when I get to Yawa.” Ra’s knife glinted as she stooped. “Anything else?”

  Duke Unuxekome had no children. Duke Unuxekome had no siblings. “I’m carrying your son’s heir,” Baru cried. “I have his child!”

  Ra recoiled as if struck physically by the power of blood. Baru got a leg up and kicked her in the cunt. She fell away, knife up, growling—and then Shao Lune tackled Ra, dripping wet and shouting, “That’s my pardon!”

  “Stop it!”

  It was the shadow ambassador. She stood in the prow of the boat, wrapped in a dry khanga, her eyepatch dripping briny tears down her cheek. “Ra,” she called. “We need them alive. Don’t you hurt her.”

  “Baru. Baru.” Ra kicked free of Shao, grunting, narrow-eyed. She pulled herself up by the boat’s tiller, false teeth clicking, and she was laughing low and hateful. “My son wrote me a letter about you. He said he wanted to be your husband. He was my only child, did you know that? He was the last Unuxekome.”

  Baru blindsided her to gain a moment’s distance. The boat was a little felucca, two crew aboard beyond Ra. One of them, a Kyprananoki man with his lips slashed off, helped Osa pull Tau-indi aboard. “I need someone to take up strangling me during sex,” Tau groaned, “and then I can maybe enjoy all these drownings.”