“Don’t you dare talk about—”
“Dare what? Talk about the woman whose death you use to justify your atrocities? She gave you permission to do a terrible thing. Now she is dead, so she cannot withdraw her permission. But you know her permit only reaches so far: it does not extend to Iraji, or to me. So you’re waiting for me to give you permission to sell Iraji and Abdumasi to the Cancrioth. You want me to say, at least we’ll be together again, damned together in chaos, Abdu and Tau. Really, you’ll be doing what’s best for both of us. Is that right? I think it is.”
“Tau . . .”
A smile sweet like sugar rot. “You need me to be your little amphora, your bottle of reserve goodness, to shatter and use up. You’ve been dying a slow death since you killed Hu. You need to take another soul to finish your work. Only it’ll never be done. You’ll always need more. And no matter what you do here, Baru, I expect that by some strange coincidence it will end up being what Mister Cairdine Farrier wants. Don’t you think so, too?”
Baru lost her breath.
No matter what exercises she tried, no matter how she crushed her innards and panted like a bear, she couldn’t get her air back. Her fingertips prickled. Her heart stumbled. Dread settled on her like a crown. The green paint on the black ceiling above seemed to slither, like tapeworms dangling from a burnt lilac branch. The things Tau said made such sense—all her curiosity and intellect fastened on them and worried at them—
She felt genuinely as if she were drowning.
“Move,” Osa grunted, and shoved Baru forward.
She wanted a whiskey, a vodka: something, anything, to wipe the running centipede legs off her hands, to fill up the agonizing bubbles in her blood. Her heartbeats hit like hooves, cavalry charge, memories of Tain Hu turning the flank at Sieroch, memories that made the panic deeper.
So. So. This was what it meant to make an enemy of Tau, of a laman with the keenest understanding of empathy and sentiment. She had never been struck so precisely.
Tain Hu had seen the worst of her and stayed loyal.
Tau had seen the worst of her, and now they were telling her exactly what they saw.
Baru sat on the bed and breathed into her hands while Shao Lune told her not to be a fool.
“The Prince is a superstitious, emotionally volatile product of a degenerate civilization. Royalty are always self-centered, Baru. Wouldn’t you be, if your conception had been elected? If you’d been the most important person in the room since before you were even born?”
Shao Lune perched on the stuffed chair by the stateroom desk, straddling it in reverse. Her feet hooked around the chair’s legs, where cheetahs yawned in black bronze.
“Once,” Baru said, hollowly, “there were hardly any chairs in the world at all. I remember that from History of Materialism. The only chairs were thrones. Ordinary people sat on benches.”
She was so tired. But there was no time to sleep now—Yawa’s forces could be here any moment—why was she sitting down? Why wasn’t she doing something? She wanted to claw her own skin right off, peel back her fingernails and prod the soft places beneath until pain made her move—stop pulling at your own fingers and get up! Get up!
She could not get up. Tau had shattered something vital inside her. What they’d said about Tain Hu kept repeating itself in her head. A wound like a mouth.
“You were born on Taranoke,” Shao Lune said, soothingly. “A land ruled by family elders. Pleasing those elders is a compulsion written in your blood. That’s why you’ve panicked.”
What a stupid Incrastic explanation. But maybe it would be useful to believe it for now. . . .
“Think about this rationally!” Shao urged. “Identify your weaknesses”—one long finger counting off points on the seams of the chair leather—“act to counter them, and then do what has to be done to achieve your goal. You remember our goal, don’t you?”
“Get off this ship,” Baru muttered. “Bring home what we learned.”
Bring home the Kettling. Kill Falcrest. Make Hu’s death worth it.
“That’s right.” She smiled impishly at Baru. O Wydd, she had such huge, cruel eyes. “Would you like to know what I learned?”
Baru’s mind seemed to have been reefed like a sail: she just couldn’t catch the wind long enough to stay with a thought.
“Baru.” Shao snapped her fingers. “Baru, listen. I snuck out to explore. I saw such things, Baru. Monstrous skeletons shaped like people—I don’t mean the skeletons of people, I mean skeletons with bone skin, bone muscles, all their flesh turned to bone. Rooms full of old machines. Weapons, surgeries—oh, kings, the surgeries I saw! But do you know what else I found?”
“What,” Baru said, dully.
“I saw tunks in white blouses.”
White blouses. Scheme-Colonel Masako, the man at the embassy who’d let the rebels in . . . he’d worn a white blouse.
“Oriati secret service. Termites!” Shao rocked the chair in excitement.
“Termites are like Jackals?” Baru did not quite remember.
“Jackals are the professional fighters. Termites are the ‘armed diplomatic corps’ they use as spies. If they’re aboard, we have the proof of collusion! We can take it to Parliament, prove the Oriati federal forces are in bed with the Cancrioth, and win the Emperor’s eternal thanks! But we have to act now, quickly, before Yawa reaches us, before she takes all the glory—”
“I know that!” Baru shouted. “I know we have to act!”
And, to her own horror and shame, she began to weep.
She couldn’t do it anymore. She just couldn’t do it. Tau had been so kind to her. Iraji had been her friend, played Purge with her, sparred with her when she wanted to be hurt. And she’d had to harm them both to reach this moment, the moment of crux, the goal she’d worked toward all her life. The harm she’d done should make it all the more urgent to go forward, to complete the task. She had the weapon to end the Masquerade.
And for no reason except that she was pathetic and stupid and worthless, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t get up.
Everyone was counting on her. Ake Sentiamut and all the Vultjagata, the members of Tain Hu’s household who’d survived. Her parents and everyone else on Taranoke. In Aurdwynn, the sodomites and tribadists and bastard children and mothers out of wedlock who would be erased by Incrasticism. And Tain Hu most of all. Baru had been given every opportunity to deserve her trust . . . and so there was simply no one to blame but herself for failure.
Sulk and drink and fail, again and again and again and again—all she’d done since the Elided Keep! Drink and fail! Drink and fail! Chased off one island after another in a stupid tragicomic cycle without any progress or achievement except to drink and fail!
“Baru,” Shao said, with a sudden, unadorned concern. “Why are you crying?”
She ground her eyes into the back of her arm. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
Shao Lune got up. Baru expected the other woman to come over and siphon off her tears with a little eyedropper, for use in some perverse cosmetic or tincture: despair of a young Souswardi woman, purified with alcohol, for clear and shining skin.
But instead Shao dismounted her chair, moved to the bed beside Baru, folded her hands in her lap, and said, not soothingly, but without any particular contempt for Baru’s state, “I found a pantry.”
“A pantry?”
“I stole as many drugs and sanitary supplies as I could. I even stole things to build a fluid level. You like figures, don’t you? I measured the ship’s roll period. I think the ship’s overstabilized. She rolls quickly, which means . . .”
A matronizing silence. She wanted Baru to answer, and being a school-taught fool Baru couldn’t help but do it.
“A high metacenter of roll,” she said, sniffling, “so the ship is hard to capsize or flood. But quick to tip in waves and therefore uncomfortable to sail.”
“Right. Out on open sea she must pitch like a three-legged horse. So we know they’re not exquis
ite shipwrights, by our standards. We know they buy their medicines from abroad—”
“They do?” Damn Shao for being so useful.
“They do. Look, here’s proof.” Shao produced a small velvet pouch, cinched shut with a golden cord. “Recognize this?”
“Mason dust.” Some curiosity stirred in her. It was a powerful stimulant, made in Aurdwynn from the treated extract of the Stakhieczi mason leaf. The government chemists sold it at a premium, often illegally, because there was no other source: the process to make it was an Incrastic secret.
Baru stroked the thickly piled velvet of the pouch. “When I was at dinner with Bel Latheman, back in Treatymont . . . I would see rich people carrying their doses in bags like this. They would pour the dust onto their hands to sniff. Here, at the break box.” Her fingers brushed over the two tendons below Shao’s thumb, finding the bones there, radius and scaphoid: the break box. “So these drugs came from Aurdwynn. Maybe Hesychast was right about Cancrioth agents there. . . .”
Shao’s full lips made a satisfied catenary arch, pleased by Baru’s interest. “A telling find, I think. They stock their pantries with our product. They cannot make it themselves. So the fabled Cancrioth are not advanced beyond Incrasticism. Just another jungle cult, Baru. A jungle cult with very big ships.”
“You’ve done well. Discovered a great deal.” And it only made Baru loathe herself more.
“I have. Have you?”
Baru shook her head. “I talked to one of their leaders, but he was useless. Head buried in compost.” How could she fall apart now? How could she collapse with the end in sight? Just get the Kettling, get the tainted blood, and go. . . .
Shao sighed. “Do you know the story of Auroreal and Purpose?”
“No.” Baru groaned. Doubtless another missing stone in the mosaic of proper Falcresti womanhood.
Their hands were still touching, through the velvet of the pouch. Shao did not let go. “Auroreal and Purpose were two ships built in the arctic yards in Starfall Bay. They were meant to reach the lodepoint. The northernmost edge of the compass, where every direction becomes south.
“As in any good experiment, each ship received a different treatment. Purpose was assigned an elite crew, tested by schooling and sea service. Their provisions were calibrated by starvation studies in prisons. The Storm Corps designers calculated the ship’s layout to preserve a core of warmth and comfort.
“Auroreal, on the other hand, was crewed with survivors. Sailors who’d straggled home from failed expeditions. Officers who’d led their boats across leagues of open ocean and pack ice. The Storm Corps sourced their provisions from traditional Bastè Ana techniques. Of course, Auroreal fell behind Purpose when the expedition set out. Purpose had the better design, the better crew. . . .”
“But it was Auroreal that returned,” Baru interrupted, impatiently guessing the moral of this little qualm. “Will and grit proved more valuable than finesse and talent.”
“Not at all.” Shao showed her white, white teeth. “Auroreal vanished into the north. It was Purpose’s elite that returned.”
“They reached the lodepoint?”
“No. They gave up. When things began to go wrong on that exquisite ship, there was no tolerance for error in the design, no patience for mistakes among the crew. Everything was made to work perfectly; nothing was made to survive imperfection. So they concluded, very rationally, that they had to turn back. It was Auroreal that pressed on, irrationally, courageously, into the north.”
“Please, Shao, what’s the moral?”
“There are two kinds of people, Baru. One kind is like Auroreal. They just go on and on, no matter how awful the circumstances. But you’re like the other kind. You’re like Purpose. You are a precision instrument, intolerant of damage. You must be calibrated.” She took Baru’s hand, inspecting the bandaged stubs of the two fingers Tain Shir had cut away. “You’re brilliant, but you break so easily.”
“I thought I was strong.” Baru could barely make herself speak. “I thought, after what I did in Aurdwynn, that I’d be . . . harder.”
“You can’t change who you are,” Shao said, Shao Lune the perfect, coiled ideal of Falcrest womanhood, who would never need to change. “And that’s why it’s good I’m here with you. Because”—she folded Baru’s hand between hers—“I can tell you the truth. Which is that you’re being weak, and sentimental, and stupid. It doesn’t matter if you feel bad. It doesn’t matter if you’re tired or sad. You need to work.”
Baru’s hand complained at the leverage on her wrist. She was stronger than Shao, but she let herself yield. If Shao made her do it then it was not really her fault. . . .
“You’re going to go back among them,” Shao murmured, “and do whatever it takes to get us safely out of here. Stop tripping over your sentiments about Tau. Stop trying to protect the Iraji boy. Don’t tell me you can’t let them go. You can. You executed that traitor duchess, didn’t you? So you can do this, too.”
She lifted the velvet bag again. The mason dust inside made a sound like fine dry sand.
“This will help,” Shao said. “Have you ever dosed before? No? Let me show you.”
NOW
Farrier’s cloth leaves alcohol on her skin. It evaporates like a cool mountain morning. Flesh and sweat sublimate into clean chemistry and vapor: as he would have the whole world, if he could.
“This is marvelous,” he tells her. She has just paused in her account. “This is better than I could’ve hoped. The whale! Unbelievable! The size of their ship! And the restraint you showed with Shao Lune, the exquisite discipline, no matter how you were tempted . . .”
“A little tempted,” she murmurs. “She was very beautiful. I always wonder what beautiful women will look like in the throes of the act . . . do you? Is it the same for men?”
“I suppose it must be.” He’s on her blind side, but she can detect the uncomfortable catch. He darts, minnow-quick, to another topic. “We should sell this as a novel, shouldn’t we?”
“But it’s all true.”
“Exactly why it should be a novel! The frame of fiction allows the reader to . . . adjust their comfort. If they want to trim away a few of the more extreme points, write them off as artistic exaggeration, well, we give them permission. And if they want to imagine things went further, that we are hiding the juicy bits . . . well, we equip them to imagine.”
“You’re suggesting,” Baru says, edging toward playfulness, “that you’d like to imagine things went further?”
That strikes so well that Farrier ignores it completely. He dabs behind her right ear, careful around the thin flesh of the lobe. Not to damage the instruments, now. “The novel is a young form, did you know? Compared to the poetic epic, the philosophical treatise, and the paean . . . still young and full of promise.”
“Like I was,” she says.
“Like you are, I was about to say.”
“I know something’s happened to me. Please don’t lie to me, Mister Farrier.”
His inhalation tugs at her hair: premonition of words, detected by the scalp. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“But you did. You lied to all of us. Apparitor and Durance and even I. You told us you were sending us on a vital mission. You said we were going to determine the future of Incrasticism.”
The cloth goes back to its careful attentions, as if Farrier means to tidy up not just her skin but whatever mess he can find in the brain below it. “You think I lied to you?” Recentering the question on her opinion, rather than on his actions.
“I think,” she says, as the alcohol evanesces into mist, carrying part of her away to infiltrate other bodies, other places, “that you wanted the three foreign-born cryptarchs out of the way while you . . . finalized the situation in Falcrest.”
This time Farrier does pause. The cloth lingers on the back of her neck. “You’re right,” he says, finally. “I can’t deny that. Hesychast and I agreed that it would be best to keep the arena clear while we conducte
d our, ah, final contest.”
He really does respect her. Good.
“But your mission was vital, Baru. You had to find the Cancrioth. We knew they were out there, spending money, moving ships. The Oriati Mbo has been asleep for a very long time, and we needed a cold spur to awaken them. We had to make contact with the Cancrioth. Hesychast had his reasons as much as I did. That’s why he sent Yawa to . . .” He looks away. She can tell by the way the aspect of his voice changes. “To hurt you. He was terrified of the fact that you didn’t have a hostage. He had to destroy you before you reached Falcrest and came into the fullness of your power.”
“And you let me go with her anyway. Knowing what she’d try to do to me.”
“Of course I did.” He says it so softly and so earnestly. He is reassuring himself as much as her. “You were my greatest find. You could do anything. And you did. You won.”
She tips her head back. The hardwood chair digs pleasantly into the nape of her neck. She lays down the next stone on the path, the road that Farrier thinks he is leading her down. That’s the trick, she thinks. You let them choose which road to follow.
But first, you have your people build the roads.
“Abdu,” she says, dreamily. “He’s the one who taught you that the Cancrioth could break them.”
“Pardon?”
“That’s what you saw at Lake Jaro, isn’t it? Nothing in all the time you spent there gave you a hint about what might render two hundred million Oriati digestible to Falcrest. Nothing until the Cancrioth came.”
A STORY ABOUT ASH 7
Federation Year 912:
23 Years Earlier
Upon Prince Hill, by Lake Jaro
in Lonjaro Mbo
The eight hunters who came up the south side of the hill were not Cancrioth.
Tau would learn this later, when investigation and rumor uncovered how these shua hunters, professional pelt-takers, became adherents to a power that offered them strength in a time of helplessness. On that day Tau saw only their wounds. They had abased their flesh with bracelets of thorns, and mortified their bodies with sorghum vinegar and black pepper oils. Now they walked up Prince Hill jagged with blood and prickle.
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