“No.”
“Where is she now, then?”
“I don’t care,” Shir says, which is the truth. “Why have you come here?”
“I’m trying to stop the fighting. Organize water distribution and a quarantine. Before the ships can sail.”
“Why?”
Baru gets gingerly to her feet. “So I can contain the Kettling.”
“Why?”
“So these people don’t all have to die!”
Shir considers her as a tracker considers spoor. This choice is not the act of a woman who uses and discards her pawns.
“I came all this way to give you death,” she says. “And I have done it. You are dead and reborn.”
“I never died.”
“You asked for death. That was the important part.”
“To prove I wasn’t Farrier’s.”
“Yes.”
“You escaped Farrier, didn’t you? How?”
Shir moves, a shrug, a shiver. Behold what I am. “I escaped all meaning. You cannot. You are a reader of books and an interpreter of signs. When you look at the stars you see constellations. I only see lights. That is why I cannot be mastered.”
“I hope I’ll never be like you.”
“Of course you do. You need me nonetheless.”
“Why?”
“Because I can escape them, and you cannot.”
And Shir remembers the first day she ever saw Baru Cormorant, a child wandering the Iriad market, poking at the rolls of tapa cloth, leaning in so close to the racks of polished ash-glass that her breath left white smears on the telescope lenses. Shir was Cairdine Farrier’s agent and protégé, undercover as a guard at his market stall; Baru approached her, named her as a soldier, even deduced the existence of a warship moored off Taranoke.
And because Shir was Farrier’s creature, because she’d known at once that Farrier would take interest in Baru, she’d spoken to the child:
Little lark, I know what it means to see strange sails in the harbor. My name’s Shir and I’m from Aurdwynn. When I was a child, the Masquerade harbored in Treatymont, our great city. They fought with the Duke Lachta, and I was scared, too. But it all ended well, and my aunt even got to kill the awful duke. Here—take a coin. Go buy a mango and bring it back to me, and I’ll cut you a piece.
Here’s a coin.
Go buy a mango.
I’ll cut you a piece.
She had given the child a Masquerade coin, so that the child could buy her own island’s fruit, to be cut and apportioned to the child by a Masquerade agent.
She had inflicted Cairdine Farrier’s lessons. What you have belongs to me. What you need will be earned with my coin. What you desire will be divided by my knife.
This is why Baru needs her. Baru can play games of strategy with the very masters of those games. But in the end she cannot do what Shir is capable of doing. She cannot reach across the board and cut the other player’s throat. You cannot destroy the masters by mastering them. You destroy them by destroying.
“I will make you a bargain now,” she says.
Baru’s stormwater-brown eyes are full of the exhilaration and the terror of the gambler who has staked everything. “Go ahead.”
“I will guard the trust my cousin placed in you. I will remain above the filth you wallow in.”
Baru opens her mouth to jeer, to remind Shir of all the blood already on Shir’s hands. Who is she to speak of dirtying herself?
And Shir watches Baru realize that Shir has not in recent days ever killed the innocent. Marines and jackals, agents and spies, Kyprists and Canaat. But only those who have consented to stake their lives for falsehoods.
“These are the terms of my reprieve,” Shir says. “Listen well.”
Baru covers the stumped fingers of her right hand, and tries to stay in front of Ake Sentiamut. Ake shifts to hold her distance.
“I will hunt you across the world. I will watch everything you do and I will know everyone you know. I will judge each choice you make by the code of Tain Hu’s life. And when you betray her faith, when you succumb at last to Cairdine Farrier’s plan for you or to your own love of power, I will kill you. I will cut out your heart and prepare it on red coals. I will strain the flesh of your brain into its separate types, the gray and the pink, the stem and the bell. I will skin the meninges from your mind with an obsidian knife and I will knot up the nerves of your eyes. And then I will divide the relics of your mind among the four quarters of the world. Across Falcrest and the Mbo and the Camou and the Wintercrests I will quarter you.”
Baru stares at her. “Is that so.”
“It is so.”
“Do you really think you can do that? Do you really think you can’t be killed, Shir? I could have it done.”
Shir says: “Kill me and you’ll never find your father Salm.”
Barhu enters a kind of paralysis, the absolute stillness of a mouse before a snake, as if she is afraid the slightest motion will betray her to the predator’s teeth.
“Liar,” she says, flatly. “Salm died after the battle at Jupora. He was killed by—”
“He was taken for Cairdine Farrier’s use. I should know.”
“How?”
“Because I was the one who took him.”
She remembers it perfectly. Ambushing Salm as he came back from his toilet behind the perfume trees. His roaring strength, and the soldiers she’d reprimanded for their viciousness in taking him. Much later, Salm had tried to offer her sex in exchange for information on his family. Thinking herself his protector, his advocate, she’d refused him, given him the information anyway. He’d wept over the copies of Baru’s school transcript.
And Shir realized, watching him weep, that even if she had never touched him she was still a rapist. She was the kind of woman who took people prisoner and made them so desperate that they would offer their bodies to win a rumor of their daughters. She had coerced him and then called herself noble for placing limits on her coercion. She had chosen not to rape but she had still kidnapped him and taken him into her power where rape could be inflicted without any hope of justice. The entire situation was therefore evil.
“You took him.” Baru’s voice is clenched up like a stomach wound.
“I know where he is kept now.”
“Where is he?”
“Do you think he would want to see you? After all you’ve done? He will hate you.”
“Your mother never hated you, Shir. Not even at the end. Yawa told me so.”
Shir laughs in delight. What a reasonable presumption it must seem: that Shir is grown like a scar around the day she murdered her own mother on the banks of the Vultsniada.
But Shir knows the world at its fundament, she is a creature of that scoured truth. Her mother was one of many and distinguished from the rest only by sentiment. All those she’s killed had mothers. All of them. None were worth any more or less than hers.
“Go from this place,” she tells Baru Cormorant. “Gather my aunt Yawa and Tain Hu’s house and all the others you cherish. It is not for you to save Kyprananoke. The world is larger than you, and older than you, and full of people who will not obey you.”
“We can save this place!”
“You cannot,” Shir says, for she cannot be saved, and Kyprananoke is now akin to her. “If Kyprananoke is saved it will only be by the Kyprananoki. And they are not ennobled by their wounds; they are not to be pitied or denied responsibility by those who do not share the wounds. They are still capable of evil. Let me show you.”
She comes through the water of the lagoon to take Baru by the hand. She draws Baru into the coconut grove. Ake Sentiamut follows warily. Baru’s hand is long and strong, reduced by two fingers, wet with fear-sweat and saltwater. She keeps asking questions. Shir ignores her.
They come to the heart of the coconut grove.
“Behold,” Shir says, and, placing her hands behind Baru’s shoulders, pushes her inside.
At the center of the grove is the mo
ther palm. And upon the trunk of that palm is a stain where the little children with dental work and surgical scars and the babies born of shiqusection were dashed against the wood. Beside that palm is the sinkhole, a deep shaft in volcanic rock, where the corpses of the machete-killed have been stacked almost to the water’s surface. And a thick skim of blood and yellow foam. And black massed flies upon that foam. And the world digesting the dead.
“Chaos,” Shir says. “This is chaos. And it is your purpose.”
Baru slips. Her kneecaps strike on black stone. She does not scream. She does not reach out, even by instinct, to catch herself on Shir: perhaps because Shir is standing on her right.
Baru’s purpose is to bring this to Falcrest. The grove, the meringue of blood and flies, the stain of broken children, the hole full of corpses, atrocity, chaos, death. The world in raw.
To return to Falcrest what Falcrest seeded here.
Psst,” Svir hissed. “You, with the bony ass. I need you.”
Faham snored. I lifted my cheek from his chest to glare at the impertinent child. Svir, not mollified, beckoned for me. There is no dignified way to disentangle oneself from a man in a hammock. Faham mumbled in his sleep. I had never understood a word of his dreams.
I shrugged into linens and a dress. “Out here,” Svir muttered, and led me to his own little cubby. “I just got a signal from Execarne’s Morrow-men. Baru’s not dead after all. The Morrow-men were able to attract some local fighters to attack the Canaat warband. Apparently Tain Shir was involved.”
“Shir’s alive?”
He grimaced. “Unfortunately.”
“Is Baru coming back aboard?” There were certain matters I’d put in place, before our alliance, which I needed to disclose to her. I had induced in the Stakhieczi brave man Dziransi a prophecy: Baru Cormorant would be the dowry for his Necessary King’s marriage to my protégé, Aurdwynn’s Governor Heingyl Ri. Dziransi was already sailing north. If he convinced the King he saw true, it would put my alliance with Baru in a bind. We would be hard pressed to find an equal dowry to make the marriage work.
Svir growled in frustration. “Apparently not. She’s still with Ake and your mad niece.”
“Doing what?”
“Camping, apparently. Spending the night on an islet near Balt Anagi. She failed with the rebels. So I suspect she’s trying to get to the Kyprists.”
I stole one of his anise pellets, popped it into my mouth, and grimaced at the sweetness. “It’s futile, of course.”
I understood this part better than Baru. She would never convince the Kyprists to give up their power. To convince them she had to persuade Barber-General Thomis Love, their leader. And like any leader of a junta, he was Barber-General because he was willing to fuck over the common people to protect his immediate supporters. This was how kings kept their thrones: by currying the support of those who could threaten them, at the expense of all those who needed their protection.
Svir chewed at his bare red knuckles. “Why? Why did she leave that letter for Shir? Have they been in cohort all along?”
“No. Her eryre did it.” No way to hide that reverence in my voice. “Through her right hand.”
“Why? Why?”
“I think . . .” I had to laugh. “I think one half of Baru wanted to force the other to confront Tain Shir. Remember, she’s not really Tain Hu. She’s a part of Baru that acts the way Baru thinks Hu would.”
“Conspiring against herself? Typical.”
I spat wet anise on his desk, making him squawk. “What’s this secret Baru brandishes at you, Svir? She has some leverage over you I don’t share.”
He looked at me crossly. I suffered a moment of confusion: he was very beautiful, and after years of case studies, my mind was a compost heap of perversion. I wondered what he looked like in bed with his men.
But I could not chase away the older fear he called up. I did not know if it was a racial obsession or merely my own. It was the image of a steel avalanche pouring down the Wintercrests, and of grim Stakhieczi soldiers cutting spear-furrows all across Aurdwynn, through grain and people, to the Ashen Sea.
“It’s not a secret,” he said, tartly, “that I have a hostage.”
“But it’s not about him,” I said, meaning Lindon Satamine, his lover. “It’s something Baru knows but I don’t. She only learned you were an agent of the Throne last fall. So it’s something she discovered over the winter, while she was in the North. Closer to your home. Closer to your past. Something you did when you were one of the mountain Stakhi.”
He ignored me entirely. What else could he do?
“We’re going to have to use it,” he said. “The apocalypse fuse. Are you prepared?”
I was afraid that I was. “Are you?”
His jaw twitched, a bestial motion: fury at an entire condition of existence. “I grew up in the Wintercrests. I’ve seen greater waste of life. Entire Mansions eradicated by the pride of a few stubborn men. Kyprananoke is . . . small to me. Kyprananoke is a little stone in an old graveyard.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt that there was something different about annihilating an entire people, rather than just one part of a greater whole.
“You’ve done worse already, you know,” he said. And I remembered, again, why he was so dangerous: why he of all the Throne’s agents spent so long out at the frontier, in dagger reach of death. “Last winter in Aurdwynn, you killed more people by starvation and sickness than you’ll drown here on Kyprananoke.”
But those were my people. I’d starved in Aurdwynn. I’d hacked cubes of frost from frozen ground to bury little children in the winter. And when spring came again, there was still an Aurdwynn to remember the dead.
There would be no memory of Kyprananoke. Or, at least, no Kyprananoki memory of Kyprananoke. And I was sure in my soul that there was some vital difference between the memory of seeing and the memory of being.
Dark stars and bright sea: the night sky dull with haze, the ocean living green all around. Waves of light stirred the jellyfish and slid up the white sand to Barhu’s toes.
Tain Shir built a campfire out of lumber pillaged from an abandoned house. “Expensive,” Barhu noted, imagining how rare hardwood must be on Kyprananoke. Shir ignored her.
Coconut crabs fled from the fire. Shir loped out into the dark to catch one, returning with a specimen the size of a small goat. “You know how to cook that?” Ake asked her, skeptically.
“I put it on the fire,” Shir said, “until it stops tasting raw.”
“You know what raw crab tastes like?”
“Better than raw snake.”
“When I was starving,” Ake muttered, “I just chewed leather like a normal person.”
Barhu paced up and down the tideline, watching green fire curl around her feet. “Alive.” The word popped under her tongue. “Salm’s alive.” She’d never dared hope! “Ake, have I ever told you about Salm—”
“No,” Ake snapped. On the short crossing from Balt Anagi to this islet she’d been stung on the ankle by a jellyfish. She had her foot in a coconut bowl full of warm seawater, and her fists balled in her lap.
“He was one of my fathers. I thought he’d been killed. My mother was sure he’d been taken. She was right, he’s alive, oh, she’s going to be so smug.”
Barhu whirled to Shir, who was snapping the legs off the crab, a sound like a wrist beneath a wagon wheel. “You sent Scylpetaire to seize my parents. Where will they be taken?”
“Not far.” The crab’s face sheared off under her knife. “Ormsment ordered Captain Iscanine to arrest your parents and transfer them to a navy prison hulk off Taranoke.”
“Well,” Barhu said, fiercely, “I’ll see to that soon enough. And as for Salm, wherever he is—”
“You will not find him.” A grunt, a great ripple of her shoulders. The crab’s legs tore free from its body: Tain Shir’s method of emancipation. “I will find him. You lost the right to rescue him when you gave him up for dead.”
/> Ake sat moon-pale in the firelight, staring at her balled-up hands. Thinking of her lost husband, who she could never rescue: he was dead of plague in Yawa’s Cold Cellar. Tain Hu had cared for Ake, afterward.
Barhu reached out for her. Ake shuddered away. Barhu, caught with her arm extended, made a vague waving motion, floundered, and withdrew.
Shir laughed at her.
“Oh, fuck off,” Barhu muttered. “Shir! Shir. You were Farrier’s—his protégé? Yes?”
“I was what you are now.”
“And when did you . . . free yourself?”
Shir worked at the fire. Her hands did not seem to burn. “During my travels.”
“Where?”
“I went to Mzilimake Mbo to stir up civil wars for Farrier. The far south, where the jungle grows around the lakes. Then I went to the Occupation, to teach the Invijay tribes to kill Oriati. I sailed on a pirate ship. I became a monk in Devi-naga, in an austerity squadron. I got dysentery. I went insane. I cannot remember the order. I married three women in a sahel tribe because the only way to power there was to gather younger wives. Many women did it. My wives all divorced me, though. The Mzumauli, the moon worshipers, they divorce each other by shouting their old names five times.” She blinked as if astonished, an expression Barhu had never seen on her before. “I don’t tell stories often.”
“And you must have seen so much of Farrier! Do you know his secret?” She could not resist guessing at the leverage that bound Farrier into the web of the Throne. “Is he a pedophile? Is that why he’s always so proper with me? Why he was angry when I had Diline dismissed?”
Shir was silent.
“Tell me!” Barhu commanded her. “Tell me about Farrier’s secret—”
The woman Barhu spoke to, the maker of fires and cooker of crabs, was just gauze across a wound. The thing unmastered rose in silence and the crab’s huge shell in her hands made a groan like a cracking skull. Barhu did not flinch away: only looked up in wonder and horrified awe at this unnameable unorderable Object that loomed above her like the black wreck of an eclipse moon.
Barhu gave up her breath, had to gulp it back to speak. “All right. All right, I won’t tell you what to do.”
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