“Is this a trick? Did you come to my ship because you think you can turn me?”
“No,” Baru said, thickly.
“Do you understand why you’re here?”
“Because Apparitor and Durance sold me out.” A snarl crossed her naked face and died halfway. “Because Aminata doesn’t trust me.”
“That’s why you’re here?”
“Yes.”
Ormsment looked at her gloves for a moment, perhaps considering the dignity of an officer and the proper treatment of prisoners.
Then she backhanded Baru on her lobotomy eye. Baru cried out. Aminata kept her upright, and kept her own face reefed tight.
“Tell me why you’re here,” Ormsment repeated.
Away north, Ascentatic launched a barrage of signal fireworks. The crackle of detonations carried on a rising westerly wind.
“I’m sorry,” Baru whispered.
“I didn’t ask for an apology. I asked you to tell me why you’re here.”
“I really am sorry, anyway. For the harm done to you, and for everyone you’ve harmed.”
From this new angle Aminata could see the raw bit of scalp where the rim of Ormsment’s mask had rubbed against her hair. The mark of this mask and all the masks she’d worn before it.
“Actions,” she told Baru, “have consequences. Do you understand me? You betrayed me and killed hundreds of my sailors. I am the consequence.”
Didn’t Aminata believe in this? You had to teach people that their missteps would be punished, and their dutiful service rewarded. If they stopped believing that, who knew what they’d become.
Apparitor buffed his nails on his lacy cuffs. “I’d like to be off. Afraid I can’t stay for an officer’s mess, as there’s a ghost ship still out there and a fine young man aboard I need to rescue. Here are my terms. Note them well. You will all receive full and countersigned Imperial pardons—”
Some of the gathered officers cheered. It was a grim sound but it was still a cheer. Aminata, by reflex, almost joined them. You never wanted to be the Oriati sailor who didn’t cheer.
“—but I will do all in my power to revoke those pardons if Empire Admiral Lindon Satamine has been harmed during my absence.”
Beneath the mask, Ormsment’s mouth pursed in fascination. Her eyes were only for Baru. “I’m sure Sir Satamine is very well. No one else in the Admiralty played any part in these events. Rear Admiral Samne Maroyad’s innocence is on official record. The very same communique she sent to warn me that Baru was conspiring to start a war also begged me not to do anything about it.” Ormsment took Baru’s hand and examined the stumps of her missing fingers. “Do you have conditions for Baru, too?”
“Oh, don’t kill her yet. She’s full of secrets.” He smiled slyly back at Aminata. “Why don’t you have the Burner of Souls take care of her?”
Ormsment’s gaze settled on Aminata at last.
Mercy, Aminata thought, mercy, please look away. For she couldn’t bear the sympathy in the old Province Admiral’s face.
“No,” Ormsment said, “no, I won’t make the staff captain hurt her friend. Staff Captain Aminata, please turn the prisoner over to me. I’ll have some questions for you later, about your conduct during the capture.”
“Mam,” Aminata said, quietly, “permission to retire below for the duration.” The metal cylinder Baru had given her, the profane Cancrioth instrument, was tucked into her fighting harness. It seemed far too heavy for its size.
“Granted,” Ormsment said. “Go.”
Baru huddled smaller. She looked so entirely alone, surrounded by her enemies, hopeless: and yet at peace. Completely content. Never in her life had Aminata expected to see that expression on her face.
It was because Baru couldn’t do anything. She could, at last, stop working.
“Master-at-arms!” Ormsment called. “Prepare the ropes!”
Apparitor turned lazily. “You do know she’s too valuable to hang, don’t you?”
“And she’s far too dangerous to keep aboard.”
“Really? Lobotomized, wounded, and alone?”
“She was exiled and discredited when she tricked my ships into Welthony Harbor. Anything she does might be a ploy.” Ormsment nodded in decision. “No delays. No last meals or final letter. If she has some sort of contingency plan, or agents hidden in our crew, then we’ll force them to act. If she dies in the process, so be it.”
Aminata’s stomach twisted. “Mam? What do you mean?”
“Keelhaul her,” Ormsment ordered.
In the science of Incrastic behaviorism there was a concept called “the dominant response.” Barhu had always hated it. “The thing an organism tends to do in a given situation”: what kind of useless tautology was that? What use was it to say, oh, yes, people tend to do the thing they tend to do?
And now she understood it. She knew her own dominant response.
Tie a woman up to be keelhauled. Tie her up and hurl her under the prow of a warship and drag her along the barnacle-edged hull in a race between asphyxiation and death by blood loss. What is her dominant response? Does she fall limp? Does she faint? Does she struggle and roar? Each woman will have her own tendency.
Barhu knew her own dominant response. It was cold, serpentine calm.
“I know the answer to the riddle,” she said.
A single line ran from her waist, over the point of the frigate’s prow, down under her entire length, up to the sterncastle, and back across the deck to Barhu again, completing a full circle. A gang of sailors waited amidships, ready to haul on the rope and thus drag Barhu under the ship from stem to stern. A second loop ran side to side around Sulane like an enormous bridle, with Barhu as the bit. By taking in the slack on this loop, the crew could adjust Barhu’s depth. If they left her deep, she would drown before she made it to the stern. If they dragged her shallow she would be shredded by the hull.
“What’s that?” Juris Ormsment knelt beside her. Her voice was almost motherly. Maybe devoting your whole being to someone’s end was a little like devoting yourself to their beginning. “What answer do you know?”
“The riddle about the three ministers and the poison. Shao Lune told me”—she stopped to groan against the pain in her eye—“she told me you asked everyone about that riddle. Wherever you went.”
“I do, Baru. Because I care how other people think about the world. Where did you take Shao Lune?”
“Do you want to know the answer, Province Admiral? The right answer?”
“There’s no right answer,” Juris said, because how could there be, the riddle was designed to provoke. Three ministers have gathered for dinner when they taste poison in their wine. One attending secretary has a dose of antidote. All three ministers demand the bottle.
One minister says, give me the antidote, or I will release the files that detail all your affairs and mistakes.
The next minister says, give me the antidote, or I will destroy your right to ever bear children.
The third minister pulls a knife.
Who gets the antidote? Whose power is strongest? Who is truly in control? Why should the secretary, who has all the power here, yield to one minister over another? It was a bad riddle, in the end. You couldn’t answer it without making some smarmy, lawyerish argument about the primacy of one power over the rest.
Only it was not a bad riddle, Barhu had realized.
“There’s a right answer. I figured it out when you told me that you had my parents. People are engines, Juris. Each of a unique make. And if you discover the schematics of that engine you may find the power that drives it. You’d found a power over me that I couldn’t challenge, because everything I do comes from that day when I was seven years old and I wanted to make my parents happy again.”
“You’re babbling.”
“I’m not. This is the answer.”
“There is no answer—”
“There is. Who contrived to put three ministers at a dinner party with poisoned wine and only one d
ose of antidote? Who arranged the dinner? Who provided the poison? That person has the true power.”
“It’s a rhetorical device, you self-important cunt,” Juris said, with a contempt that was almost fond.
“No,” Barhu said, her accountant’s mind sweeping over history, over what had been and what was yet to come, this second Armada War between Falcrest and the Mbo, the Throne concealed behind its masks, the Cancrioth tumored in the thriving Oriati heartlands, these forces converging. As a child she had asked her mother, as they watched a Falcresti warship come into Iriad, Why do they come here and make treaties? Why do we not go to them? Why are they so powerful?
She knew why.
“Power can’t be separated from its history. A choice can’t be taken in isolation from its context. Power is the ability to set the terms of the riddle. To arrange the rewards and punishments by which the choice is judged.”
The traitor can choose to execute her lover for political gain but she cannot choose the laws that condemn her lover as a traitor, or alter those men who stand to benefit and to suffer from her choice. Falcrest made those laws. Falcrest made those men. Not her. True power was not the ability to conduct a killing or a business deal or an assignation but to alter the context by which those acts were judged and evaluated.
“I’m really very clever,” Barhu whispered.
“You should have been a student.” Ormsment sighed. “Everyone would’ve been so much happier.”
She pushed Barhu forward onto the bowsprit. The keel rope dangled off her waist like a doubled umbilical cord, front and back. The bridle ropes tugged her port and starboard as the sailors adjusted the slack.
Barhu stared down into the warm blue waters of dying Kyprananoke. Gods, she thought. It looks just like the Halae cove. Where I learned to swim.
“Baru Cormorant,” Juris pronounced, “by the powers invested in me by the Book of the Sea, powers which do transcend the authorities of the landlocked state, I sentence you to death for the crimes of murder and treason. The sentence will be carried out at once.”
And she shoved Barhu off the bowsprit.
When the sailing master cried heave! then Aminata knew it had begun. Nothing to do now. Just do what you need to do, Aminata, get it done, stop imagining her down there while the barnacles saw her apart—
She shuddered. The heavy cylinder in her hands closed, iron case sliding on oiled runners, and ruined the entire sequence.
“Shit,” she muttered, and started again.
Kimbune had taught her to use the uranium lamp exactly like a signal lantern. You flashed it open and shut, and apparently the invisible light went out through wood and stone, to be perceived by (Kimbune had been very offended when Aminata laughed) a frog. The frogs had been bred for sensitivity and range. They glowed when they sensed the uranium light, and the more of the black pitchblende rock you exposed to air, the more the frogs glowed.
Aminata had no idea whether to believe any of it. But she began the sequence again anyway, exactly as Kimbune had taught her: beginning with Kimbune’s special code, then the letters that apparently meant MINE, and then the coordinates.
In the pool of lamplight beneath her was a chart of Sulane’s minefields. Aminata had asked for the chart so she could double-check that the positions of the mines had been correctly relayed to Captain Nullsin on Ascentatic. It was the kind of job you might expect a staff captain to handle.
When she’d heard Kimbune speak in her own Cancrioth language, she’d flinched. She’d recognized that tongue. It was the language that had frightened her interrogator Gerewho Gotha; it was the language Abdumasi Abd had used to curse them. Incrasticism said that her antipathy toward that language was really a hereditary taint, blood recognition of the Mbo’s ancient enemy. Aminata didn’t know if she believed that.
There were things Incrasticism couldn’t explain, and the uranium lamp was one of them.
Aminata had asked Kimbune, “Is that magic?”
Yes, Kimbune had said, it’s true magic. Not the only true magic in the world, or even the strangest. But it is magic. And you must respect it.
Now a boot fell behind her. A woman cleared her throat. Aminata couldn’t abort the sequence: she just kept shuttering the iron sleeve, up and down, up and down, turning numbers into flashes of invisible light.
“What’s that, Staff Captain?” Juris Ormsment asked.
“It’s a device from the enemy ship, sir,” Aminata said, oathbound to tell the truth. “I recovered it from the Morrow Ministry party. They’d taken it from a prisoner.”
“What does it do?”
“It’s supposed to send messages at a great distance.”
“Mm,” Juris said. “Interesting belief. Why are you using it?”
“I’m just trying to detect any change in temperature, any strange ache, whatever might suggest a function.”
“And the minefield chart?”
Oh, why did it have to be Ormsment herself? Anyone else she could’ve tried to pull rank on. . . .
“Ah, mam, I thought I’d try to send a set of map coordinates, the way you might flash them with a signal lantern. Then we could see whether the Oriati ship paid special attention to that area. But I had to be certain I didn’t steer them around our minefield by accident. So I thought I’d check that I wasn’t sending the coordinates of the mines.”
“Perhaps the sort of thing you’d best run by me first,” Ormsment said, dryly. “Communicating with the enemy.”
“Yes, mam, only I thought, if they have the ability to send flashes across great distances, it’s very important to know. They might be in communication with other ships here. Or parties ashore.”
“An excellent point,” Ormsment allowed. “Still. The kind of initiative you clear with your commander, yes?”
“Yes, mam. I was just”—and wasn’t this the truth—“ashamed, mam. I didn’t want to be seen . . . engaging in Oriati superstition.”
She finished the last sequence and closed the cylinder. She had already sent the warning Baru had requested, about Sulane’s speed and armament, about the powerful need to stay out of torpedo and rocket range.
Now, with her back to Ormsment and the weight of her duty on her shoulders, she said what she had decided she had to say. This was not part of anyone else’s plan. This was hers.
“About the Oriati ghost ship, mam.”
“Yes?”
“I saw her up close. I don’t think we can take her intact. With tensions so high, maybe it’s best to . . . to let her slip the net. So as not to provoke the Oriati. Especially as Tau-indi Bosoka is a hostage aboard.”
Ormsment was silent for a moment.
Aminata held her breath.
“Staff Captain,” the Province Admiral said, with deep and painful affection, “you took some of my marines last night, and you went in search of Baru. I frankly believed you’d been killed, or arrested to vanish forever. Or, according to what my marines reported, defected to Baru’s side. And, to be quite honest”—oh, she was coming closer, kneeling to confide—“if you hadn’t brought Baru back with you, I wouldn’t have let you aboard. I would’ve discharged you from my service and returned you to Ascentatic.”
Oh, she couldn’t bear this. “I’m sorry if I disappointed you, mam.”
“My marines say you welcomed Baru as an old friend. That means you put your personal need for closure above the integrity of my command. Which”—Ormsment laughed sharply—“I can’t very well condemn. But that’s all done now, understand? Baru’s finished. We have to look to the future. We have to prove that we did all this to stop the harm she’d done to our Republic. So our mission now is to capture that vessel and return prisoners to Falcrest.”
“Even with the Oriati ambassador aboard?”
“The ambassador that Baru kidnapped? I think we have every right to try to rescue them.”
“But, mam . . .”
She looked back at Ormsment then, helpless to express what she had to say: if you don’t back do
wn, mam, I have to kill you.
The Province Admiral smiled wistfully down at her.
“If we gave ourselves the chance, we’d talk ourselves out of ever doing anything. Because the world’s not fair, and that means anything you do might turn out unfairly. Duty’s not about calculating every outcome, Aminata. It’s not about making a complicated schematic of everything that might unfold. Duty’s about acting the way you’d want the whole world to act, anyone in this situation, anywhere, now and forever.” She beat her knuckles once against the wall, rapping the bones of her ship. “If I’d drowned in Welthony Harbor, I know that I’d want the woman responsible hunted to the ends of the world. And I’d want her schemes uncovered. Baru wanted something from that ship. That means I have to find it, and bring it to light. Even now that she’s gone.”
“Gone, mam?”
“Yes.” Ormsment’s eyes softened. “I came down here to see if you were all right. I know you were close to her, before she . . . made her choices.”
“I want to see her body, mam,” Aminata said, very steadily, as glassy and smooth as a bottle.
“I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.”
“Mam?”
“The barnacles cut the rope. We watched for a body, but she must’ve sunk. Nothing came up but blood.”
12
Man aul aum ra na o ael-it
The sea struck Barhu right in the jaw, knocked her teeth apart, flooded her with hot salt and Sulane’s black pitch. She shut her right eye as tight as she could, afraid that the ocean would leak into her brain.
As a girl, she’d liked to drift in the Halae shallows, feeling the tug of current and tasting the sweet silt. Listening to the happy commerce of paddles and oars.
It was almost the same—
The rope around Barhu jerked taut and slammed her against the curve of the ship’s prow, down across the copper-jacketed keel, like pepper on a cook’s knife. She noticed, absurdly, that Sulane had been well-careened before she left Treatymont, and that the copper jacket had kept new barnacles from growing.
Mostly.
Something cut through her, as thin as the edge of a letter, from her right buttock to the back of her left shoulder. She hiccuped on seawater. A warm wet insinuation crept around her eye. She thought that maybe she had just died, doomed by an infected brain—
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