“I saw you at the embassy—”
“I saw you!”
“—I had to burn the grounds, I thought I’d killed you—”
“—you did the right thing, it was Kettling—”
“—I had to talk to you, I had to know—”
“—I’m here, I’m here, please, but let’s get away, let’s go.”
The marines searched an indignant Kimbune for hidden weapons. Aminata whistled up at the ship that loomed above them. “That’s Cancrioth?”
“You know about them?”
“Yeah. A little. Well, no, not at all, except that they’re some kind of secret society, and the Admiralty wants to know more. Did you come looking for them?”
Could Baru answer that honestly? She had to sort out Aminata’s loyalties, but it was so hard to think. . . .
“Baru?”
She tried to tally all the ways Aminata might be a trick. Could Ormsment have sent her to lure Baru in? To get to Baru before Yawa did? Or what if she was off Ascentatic, sent by the loyal navy to erase all hints of the Cancrioth’s existence and Ormsment’s mutiny?
Aminata wilted. Her shoulders slumped, her mask tipped down, her hands went limp at her sides. “Baru,” she said, not a question, “you’re not going to tell me the truth.”
“I—I’ve had a hard day—”
“Me too, remember?”
“I know, I know, but things have happened—”
“I’d say things have happened! Baru, I came here to clear your name, but you’ve got to explain—first the Llosydanes, now the embassy, Tau-indi Bosoka caught in the attack—it’s like you’ve been trying to lure Ormsment into battle with the Oriati, so you can blame it all on the navy—”
“Ormsment’s trying to kill me!”
“I know! Captain Nullsin knows! So tell me something to prove she’s wrong! Tell me why you’re not out here to start a war!”
“No,” Baru rasped.
“No!?”
“No, we’re not going to do this. We will not be the friends who refuse to sit down and get the truth out. I’m going to tell you everything that’s happened”—well, almost everything—“it’s just, please, right now someone’s coming for me, and we have to . . .”
The words fell from her lips. She couldn’t escape. If Baru fled from Yawa, then Iraji would die.
She had to turn herself in for the lobotomy.
“Have to do what?” Aminata’s shoulders squared. Duty held her up like rigging holds up a mainmast, bracing Aminata’s soul under any weight. In that moment Baru loved her as deeply as she’d ever loved a friend. “What do you need?”
“I have to . . . turn myself over. There’s someone watching us right now. A woman named Xate Yawa.”
“The Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, right.” Aminata nodded as if this made perfect sense. “The prisoners said she was traveling with you—”
“What prisoners?” Baru hissed. “Aminata, what prisoners?”
“The rebels, right? From Tain Hu’s household? Ake Sentiamut and her cadre. I found them on the Llosydanes.” Aminata made a little grin of pride. “A man named Calcanish led me to them, and they said they’d been expecting me. They said they knew that I was going to get a letter from the—”
Tain Shir had used one of those prisoners against Baru. Made Baru choose between the cook Nitu’s life and her own. When Baru had chosen poorly, Shir had cut off two of her fingers.
“Aminata, where are these prisoners, and who exactly has them right now—”
There was a plop in the darkness, and then, a moment later, a splash.
The marine lookout said, softly, “Second boat’s coming in.”
“Who’s that?” Baru whispered. “Aminata, who’s there?”
“I came with another boat,” Aminata whispered back. “She was supposed to be right behind us. When I saw you I ordered us in and she must’ve hung back. . . .”
“She? Who’s she?”
The second plop was closer, and the second splash was louder. Something alien whistled in the dark: the sound of air forced through a bent flute or a broken bone. A wet chuff and a soft moan.
“Galganath?” Kimbune whispered. “Galganath, is that you?”
One of the marines unshuttered a lantern and turned it toward the sound. The cone of light found huge, grinning jaws. A white patch like a staring eye with no pupil. The cancer whale’s black true eye shone beneath it like a dark star.
But there was another monster in the lantern light.
Tain Shir.
She crouched on the prow of her boat with spears bundled across her back and a fat fish in her hands. Her face fell in shadow. Two stiff and deferential marines rowed her boat closer. Behind her, in the boat’s belly, canvas swaddled a row of human forms.
Baru edged in front of Aminata to hide her from Shir’s gaze.
“Shir!” Aminata called, butting up against Baru, trying to push past. “I’ve got her. Let’s get her to safety and I can sort out the truth.”
“Yes,” Shir said. “Let’s sort out the truth about Baru.”
She threw the fat fish to the whale. Huge jaws clapped shut on it. The beast whuffled in delight. Shir stooped, grabbed, and hauled someone up from under the canvas. She was a woman in sailor’s slops and a diver’s strophium, her smooth, fat-padded stomach bare. Shir lifted her by the scruff of her neck. The woman was long as a seal and limp as death. There was no expression at all on her face.
She was Ulyu Xe, the diver, very briefly Baru’s second lover. She was here so Baru could order her death. Exactly as Tain Shir had promised, last time Baru had faced her.
The diver will be next. Then your parents.
The stumps of Baru’s missing fingers thrilled with the memory of Shir’s cold machete, falling free, part of her forever separate. She had stared in wonder at the wound even as she screamed.
“The Bane of Wives.” Kimbune sat forward in fascination. “The one who escaped the Renderer. It’s her. . . .”
How, Baru wanted to cry? How are you here, Ulyu Xe? I sent you home to Aurdwynn! I saved you! How did Aminata find you? How did she bring you here? I saved you!
But her women always came back to die.
“That’s my prisoner!” Aminata cried. She and Baru jostled each other, Baru trying to conceal her, Aminata trying to force her way forward. The marines behind them were muttering in confusion. “Set her down, do you hear me? We don’t threaten prisoners!”
Tain Shir whispered into Ulyu Xe’s ear. The diver twisted hard in her grip, naked abdomen torquing, a meaningless dance, grotesque exhibition. Her face was blank. Shir stared at Baru, as if willing her to grasp some lesson in Xe’s body, in this body Baru had wanted and been wanted by: sex and death, death and sex, together.
Baru felt the most awful, incredible, despicable kind of jealousy. Had Shir fucked her? Had she seduced Xe, had she crouched with Xe’s back arched against her stomach, trembling with effort? It wasn’t that Baru was jealous or possessive of Xe’s body or what she chose to do with it. No, it was that—that—
—that Shir had stolen Baru’s story. Xe was her lover. Shir couldn’t kill her. Xe was supposed to die for Baru.
What a diseased, repulsive thing to feel.
And yet Baru felt it. She undeniably felt it.
“Show her the others,” Shir commanded.
One of her marines yanked the canvas sheet free. Shackled beneath were the survivors of Tain Hu’s house. The herbalist Yythel, who had been Xate Olake’s lover, before he discovered Baru’s treachery, and his twin sister’s treachery, and went mad.
The forester Ude Sentiamut and his pimply adopted boy Run.
Ake Sentiamut, who should be governing half of Aurdwynn by now.
No sign of Dziransi, the Stakhieczi brave man—
“Hey!” Aminata shouted. “You put that woman down or I’ll have words for the admiral!”
“I can’t,” Tain Shir called back. “I’m not in control here.”
The Canc
rioth whale whistled softly through its blowhole. There was metal in there, fitted into the flesh. Did it suffer? Baru didn’t know.
“I order you to put her down!” Aminata shouted.
“I can’t,” Shir said. “I have to do what Baru tells me. I am under her command.”
“What?” Aminata whirled. “What the fuck does she mean?”
“I killed her cousin,” Baru whispered. “I sacrificed Tain Hu.”
“Baru?”
“So I could escape the Throne’s control. I sent her to die.”
“Baru?”
“And I didn’t realize,” Baru said, as everything caved in, as she finally admitted what she had for so long refused to coalesce into a single thought, “I didn’t realize why I did it. She’s trying to show me.”
Shir drew a machete and lifted it to Ulyu Xe’s throat. “Do I kill her, or do I kill you?”
“I can’t,” Baru croaked.
“You must. You must choose. One by one. For you to live, you must choose for them to die. As it was with Hu, so will it be here.”
“Please don’t. Please.”
“I don’t control the terms.” Shir had the brutal ghost of Tain Hu’s face, bones and skin the same, but where Hu had painted high cheekbones and tied up long hair, Shir’s face was a naked map of scars, Shir’s hair was hacked off and burnt. “I only enforce your precedent. This is the world you chose to live in. A world governed by your law.”
“Could you kill her?” Aminata muttered to one of her marines. “One shot? Before she could cut that woman’s throat?”
“Hit her? Yes, definitely. But she’d see me aiming, mam.”
No, Baru thought. You can’t kill her. Those aren’t the rules.
The rules say I have to choose.
And it was time to make the right choice.
She was alone. Tau-indi Bosoka had tried to warn her that the Cancrioth would strip away her connections to the human world. And if she wanted to laugh that off as superstition, well, O Incrastic scientist, hadn’t she lost everything? Who was left to her? Her choices had brought doom down even on her own parents.
How was any of this going to help Aurdwynn? Or Taranoke? Even if she brought Kettling to Falcrest, how could she stop it from spreading to the provinces?
How had she in any way lived up to Tain Hu’s trust? Tau-indi alienated, Tain Hu’s companions about to be butchered, Iraji given to the Cancrioth, Xate Yawa here to seize her and take her away, plague and war . . .
Only Falcrest would benefit from this madness. Falcrest and Cairdine Farrier.
Kyprananoke was tearing itself apart like a dog gnawing at the rot that would kill it. In a month there would be nothing here except fire and gunsmoke and a skullbacked whale gliding through the bodies in the sea. The world had rubbed thin. Something horrible was coming into it.
And it was coming in through Baru. She was the wound.
Farrier had made her so.
“A theory of perfect rule,” said the dead man in the Elided Keep, the one whose letter had greeted Baru on her first day in the Throne. “A means by which the Imperial Republic of Falcrest may be rendered causally closed, so that the sprout of every seed and the turn of every cyclone occurs in accordance with our predictions, and therefore in accordance with our decrees. Thus we may at last achieve the state of ruling without ruling, a self-governing world.”
And then he went on, as the letter had not, in the voice of Cairdine Farrier:
“A self-governing world shall require a self-governing citizen. It will require a woman who can without coercion or persuasion be trusted to make perfect choices to keep the Masquerade strong. Once this citizen can be created, then the Republic will last forever. No force of law will be required. All citizens will gladly perform their own functions, for no reason except the joy of it. This is the great desire of Renascent, the Throne Reborn. And I must prove to her that I am the way to fulfill this desire.”
“And this requires,” dead Muire Lo explained, as the plague swelled his face into an atlas of pus, “that the law of the Republic be written into the individual citizen, and passed down perfectly from generation to generation, more perfectly than the color of the eye is passed. The citizen must become a self-ruling subject.”
“I see,” Baru said, into the fortifications of her mind, and she felt a pain and a satisfaction in her cramped bowel like digestion, like the digestion of the whole world, for she did see, she understood. “Hesychast the eugenicist says, we must breed the perfect citizen.
“And against him, Itinerant the trader says, we must teach them to rule themselves.
“So I am his model. A wild-type islander girl taught to govern herself perfectly. Taught to obey Falcrest no matter how terribly she wants to resist. Taught to deny herself the companionship and compassion she requires. I am his proof to Renascent that his method triumphs over Hesychast’s eugenics. I am the one who will always obey, because I can always rationalize my obedience as my own will.”
In Urunoki, Baru gasped: “I am his weapon. . . .”
Remember the Cold Cellar?
In that pit of Incrastic hygiene, Xate Yawa used simple conditioning to treat marital infidelity. Show a woman her husband, and at the same time feed her a pleasant smell, dose her with a wonderful drug. Soon the woman will learn to associate pleasant feelings with the husband.
Show this woman a man who is not her husband, a man like the men she lusts for. Then make her taste acid, and batter at her ears with a horrible gong. She will learn to cringe away from those men.
This was the technique of simple conditioning.
But there were more sophisticated techniques. One of them was called operant conditioning, or, in clinical parlance, paired-icon behavioral coaxing.
In this paradigm, the subject was always allowed to make her own choices. No external force inflicted stimuli. No handsome stranger or faithful husband, no soft music or crashing gong. The subject was offered the illusion of freedom. The experimenter only controlled the response to her choices.
As the subject explored possible actions, and discovered the planned responses, she was allowed to teach herself the rules of the conditioning.
The rules of the conditioning were this—
When Baru’s mother Pinion and father Salm had gone away to war, Baru had begged her father Solit to let her go to the Masquerade school, so that she could understand what was happening to her world.
She removed herself from her family. The school rewarded her with knowledge and power. How swiftly and quietly she’d transferred her loyalties. . . .
Then Salm had vanished. Farrier had ordered it, hadn’t he? Of course he’d ordered it. Of course he’d ordered it. Confused by grief, Baru had asked her mother: Was he my father, or was he only a sodomite?
Pinion had cried out in horror at the Masquerade word, and struck Baru in fury. She punished Baru for asking, just as the school rewarded her for inquiry. The pain of Salm’s disappearance became something that Baru’s own mother inflicted on her. Something that the school eased.
Her cousin Lao had come for help to escape a rapist teacher. Baru had befriended Aminata, and used the navy’s influence to get the rapist fired. Farrier had been very angry with her. But he had not taken Aminata away, had he? He had not deprived Baru of the friendship she treasured, for it was not Farrier’s role in the Process to cause pain or hardship.
No. He had tricked Aminata into rebuking Baru, beating her, screaming at her that there was only one punishment fit for a tribadist: the circumcising knife.
Through her mother, and through Aminata, Baru had taught herself that connections led to pain.
And then—
And then—
Farrier had deployed Baru to Aurdwynn.
After years of preparation, Farrier had allowed his student to slip the leash.
Where she obeyed the lessons he’d taught her.
She took Apparitor’s bargain: give up Aurdwynn to gain power in Falcrest. Just as she’d t
raded her family for the Masquerade school.
She’d used the navy to sidestep Governor Cattlson and insinuate herself with the rebels, just as she’d once allied herself with Aminata to get rid of the rapist teacher Diline.
She’d betrayed and murdered her navy pawns at Welthony Harbor: because hadn’t she learned that the navy could be useful, but also that the navy would never be her true friend?
She’d met a family exactly like her own, a mother and two fathers, Duchess Nayauru with her lovers Duke Autr and Duke Sahaule. And she’d destroyed that family. Just as her own had been destroyed. She’d ambushed them in their traveling camp as Salm had been ambushed in his.
She’d met a woman she loved.
And she’d kept that woman at a distance, despite Tain Hu’s cunning and charisma and devastating presence, despite Baru’s own fantasies. She’d kept that woman at arm’s reach until the very night she knew Tain Hu and all the rest of the rebels were doomed.
Only then had she allowed herself to fall.
When their love could only lead to death.
As she had allowed herself to be with Ulyu Xe only on the night before they were separated.
As she had allowed herself to be with Shao Lune only when drunk and desperate and certain Shao Lune was using her.
She loved women only when that love was deniable and doomed. Farrier had taught her so. How could she have missed it?
What had she told herself even as she chose Tain Hu to be her queen?
I will destroy myself if I choose.
On this one day I will not deny what I am.
In that very moment of defiance she had recapitulated the law that had been taught to her. To confess what she was, to indulge her love for women, meant destruction. She had said it herself! To be what she was was to destroy herself! Exactly as Farrier required her to believe!
Hadn’t her battle in Aurdwynn been a battle of two fronts: one to prove her skill at conspiracy, and one to prove her mastery of self-repression? Hadn’t her talent at concealing her true loyalties from the Coyote been the same talent she used to conceal her true feelings from Tain Hu?
Hadn’t she come to see those two skills as the same?
No wonder Farrier had celebrated when he learned that she’d executed Tain Hu. No wonder he’d cried Falcrest is saved! His process had worked. He had educated a bright young foreign woman to become a perfect self-governing subject. He could send her anywhere, on any mission, and she would continue to rule herself by Falcrest’s law. He could leave her with the most desirable and interested woman in the world and Baru would find a way to deny her own want unless it was paired with that woman’s extinction.
The Tyrant Page 17