“Baru’s not a wound,” Aminata snapped. How dare the Prince castigate Baru in this superstitious way? “She was honest with me. We worked together to save this ship and save your life—”
“Really,” Tau said, with vicious sweetness. “She was honest with you? Did she tell you what she wanted this ship for?”
“No,” Aminata said, tersely. Of course Baru had a reason to keep her tactics secret. . . .
“She didn’t tell you that she came here to find a way to destroy Falcrest? I think she wanted to gain the Kettling as a weapon. But the price the Brain asked of her was too high.”
Ridiculous. Just ridiculous. After all Baru had done to secure Aurdwynn for the Imperial Republic? “You’re lying.”
“And you are hopelessly gullible.” Tau turned their sharp smile on Iraji. “Is she soft for you? Have you told her what you really are?”
Iraji swayed. His eyes rolled back for a moment. “What?” Aminata asked, hapless and humiliated. “What is it?”
“He’s Cancrioth,” Tau said. “The cancer wants him. His flesh was made ready for it. Remember that if you take him to bed, Segu-woman. The seed he yields is—”
“Enough!” Aminata shouted, and some part of the Prince cringed back in shame. “You won’t tell me about my bed.”
That beautiful boy. Of course he was a lure. She wanted to scream.
Just then someone hammered on the door. “Open up!” Shao Lune shouted, and then, in echo of her, the Oriati bodyguard woman, “Prince Bosoka, please, open up!”
Iraji lunged for the door. “What? What is it?”
“There’s something wrong,” the Oriati soldier panted. “You’d better come up on deck.”
“We can’t go on deck,” Iraji said, “there are too many of the Brain’s people out there—”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Shao Lune said. “No one will be looking at us.”
Thank you,” the woman said to Juris, “thank you for the water.”
With a groan of effort she leaned forward off the birthing cushion to grip her husband’s neck and whisper, “Mind my mother, love. She’ll need you. Pran Canaat.”
After a while the blood stopped pumping from her. Her stillborn lay in her husband’s arms as he wept thick mucus down a face like a sagging bag of blood.
Juris Ormsment took the mother’s corpse by her armpits and dragged her into the pile for the next charnel boat. Kettling blood and bloody diarrhea soaked her all down her chest. The mothers hemorrhaged like artery wounds when they miscarried, but it was merciful how quick they went. Those who did not bleed out had to linger on, festering with blood blisters, shitting and vomiting green-black bloody fluid. Water just made them shit more; but if you stopped watering them, they died of thirst. Juris had tried treating the disease like cholera, giving one strong man water every half hour. He had rallied for a while. But the fever had killed him in the end.
She wiped her hands on her trousers and walked into the warm sea to get the blood and shit off.
“You lost her?” the chief barber asked. She was a Kyprananoki woman the color of sparrow plumage, her patient warm eyes offsetting a fierce hooked nose. She had first-stage symptoms.
“I lost her,” Juris said.
“Banuile is still alive.” The water rose, slapped against them, receded. “She lost the baby but she’s strong.”
They had accepted Juris at the mother’s ward because she was competent and not yet sick. She cleaned up diarrhea and sponged water into cracked bloody mouths. There was no time for her to think of anything but the rows of dying mothers on beds of bundled kelp. She was not happy, exactly. But for the first time in months she had no heart to spare for her own hurt.
“Good,” she said. “Good. I hope Banuile lives.”
“I wonder where it came from,” the barber said, for the tenth or twentieth time Juris had heard. “The Camou, maybe? Isn’t there always plague in the Camou? With all the ships that make harbor here, who can say?”
It came from the Oriati, Juris wanted to tell her. They keep it hidden somewhere. That’s why it’s called Kettling. Because it’s waiting to boil over, like hot water in a pot. And the mad duchess Unuxekome Ra would rather see you all dead than alive under our rule.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could’ve come from anywhere.”
The barber ducked into the next wave. A plume of filth came off her. “A short rest, I think. Then we’ll bring more water for Banuile.”
Yes, Juris thought. Keep trying. Keep finding wrongs, and naming them, and trying to make them right. Never stop. Even now.
“Will you tell me about Kyprananoke?” she asked the barber. “What it’s like here?”
That was when she felt the sound. It was too low to hear. It rattled her long bones and set her teeth clicking.
“A quake.” The barber frowned at the tossing trees. “That’s odd. The almanac said there’d be no quakes for twenty years.”
Juris looked north. The swarm of ships moored around Loveport was beginning to break apart, putting up canvas, catching the strengthening wind.
She looked south, wincing inside, toward el-Tsunuqba and Sulane’s wreckage.
What she saw made her laugh.
She recognized it. She knew it like a lover. It was coming at last. Coming for her.
The water hammer—
Shir uncovers the old hatch. If there was meant to be a ladder then it is missing. She braces herself between the walls of the shaft and descends to the fuse station. She is careful to put her hands and feet in the right places, obeying the codes she memorized so many years ago. Like the tombs of the ancient Cheetah Palaces, the fuse station will kill those who do not know the way.
She expects to find sockets like dead elephant eyes, mounts where the correct levers must be fixed like huge keys and turned in the proper sequence. Pistons will drop into waiting shafts. Shir has come here to destroy the sockets. To prevent them from ever firing. She prefers the chaos of plague to this shrine of calculated sacrifice.
But the levers are in place. The sockets are turned. The timers are set.
Someone else reached this place first.
Shir goes for her knife. The woman behind her gasps explosively, releasing the breath she’s held for five minutes or more. The mechanism of her little pistol bow creaks in warning.
“I can’t miss,” Iscend Comprine says. “It’s poisoned. This isn’t a capture dose of curare. This time it’s kratom opiate and aconite.”
“Slow,” Shir says.
“But very, very certain.”
“Gaios. Lower your weapon.”
Iscend Comprine speaks right over her. “Gaios! I will not!”
“You’ve turned from your purpose. Your conditioning’s broken.”
“I have a higher purpose.”
“Is that purpose the destruction of these islands?”
“That serves my purpose. You came to do the same.”
“No. I came to stop it.” Plague can murder millions, but it cannot mean to do it, and it cannot profit from the death.
“It cannot be stopped now. Even if you shattered the mechanisms here, the fuses below are in motion.”
“You’ve killed Kyprananoke. You’ve killed them all.”
The quiet sound of parting lips: Iscend’s smile in the dark. “The moment we learned there was Kettling here I knew it had to be done. When you and I fell into the water together I knew it was time. My masters believed I was dead, so they would no longer predicate any vital actions on my presence. I was free to come set the fuse.”
Very slowly, Shir turns to look at her. “Gaios. Tell me who commands you.”
“The good of the Imperial Republic commands me.”
“Gaios! Tell me!”
“The difficult thing about being Clarified,” Iscend says, “is that you cannot disobey the paramount masters, even when they make the wrong choice, even when they cannot order you to do what must logically be done. Imagine if, ah, gaios, gaios,” she winc
es, “imagine if one of the paramount masters could be rendered supreme, uncontested, so that her orders would be untainted by any interest but her own. She would of course have Clarified to advise her on her interests. So the Clarified would advise her, and she would make orders, and give them to the Clarified to execute, and the circle would be closed. And it would be as if the Clarified commanded themselves.”
“And these are the commands you would give? Do you know how many people you’ve just murdered?”
“Of course I do. I also know how many I’ve saved.”
“Do you think this will greaten Baru? Is that why you did it? You want her done with Kyprananoke? Off to richer fisheries?”
“I work for the betterment of my masters. And my masters work for the betterment of the Imperial Republic.”
“She will never be yours,” Shir promises. “I will peel her brain apart at the gyres before I let you rule her.”
“I like contests,” Iscend says. “I like to win. Are you protected? Or shall I kill you now?”
“I have her parents.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Can you take the risk? She is so very fragile.”
“Go,” Iscend says. “I left myself enough time to reach Helbride. If you move quickly you might find a ship in time to survive the wave.”
“You deserve to die for this,” Shir says.
“Deserve? Aren’t you and I beyond such illusions?” Iscend’s teeth barely touch when she enunciates: the force in her jaw is so exacting. “The most conditioned, and the least?”
Aminata took the stairs down off the sterncastle two at a time. No one paid her the slightest attention: for the first time she could remember she was one Oriati among many.
“Look north,” Shao Lune shouted after her. “North!”
Aminata saw Ascentatic and Helbride first. The frigate and the clipper were running out southeast on full spreads of canvas. The only other ship in open water was a barque with Devi-naga flags; it had already cleared the islands and turned northeast for the trade ring. The Kyprist positions on the reservoir islands had obviously collapsed. Skiffs and whaleboats were ferrying water out to the moored ships: but there were also launches and canoes full of Canaat fighters, looking to take prizes.
Iraji spidered up a shroud net. He looked up at el-Tsunuqba. His eyes opened wide.
“What?” he said.
Aminata climbed up after him.
El-Tsunuqba’s north face had turned shaggy. A cloud of ash and dust blurred the lines of the mountain, swelling into gray fruiting bodies that dropped threads of debris to the ocean. But the really confusing part, the part that turned Aminata’s brain right over, was the horizon line. The world had sorted itself wrong. The cloud of dust and the limb of el-Tsunuqba seemed to be in front of the ocean. That was wrong. There was supposed to be sky behind the mountain. It was like the ocean had turned perpendicular and climbed up toward the moon—
Her mind at last resolved the wave.
It was so preposterous that she kept trying to divide it into more sensible pieces: a squall in the distance, a dark fogbank up close, a fire upon the mountainside. But it was not a fogbank or a rain squall or a pall of smoke. The wave was one thing, in the ocean, of the ocean, a mass of water in unstoppable motion.
She checked the waves against ships’ masts for scale and produced a figure.
It was a four-hundred-foot mountain of water.
El-Tsunuqba’s face had avalanched into the flooded caldera, and the water displaced by the avalanche had gathered in the cup between the east and west ridgelines, fired like a bullet from an Oriati pistol. And that water had only one way to go, north, north across the shallows where the kypra islands and all the reefs waited. The wave was slumping, spreading, but oh, the speed of it—
Trees on the crest, like grains of rice.
Tau-indi Bosoka cried out hoarsely below her. “The wound!” They were laughing, weeping, tearing at their hair. “The wound is real!”
“Is it coming this way?” Iraji cried. “Is it going to hit us?”
She could not tear her eyes away. The sea everywhere, scraping at the bottom of the sky. A great godly shrug. Nothing behind it. All the ships, the houses, boardwalks and promenades, fishing buoys, locust farms and jellyfish pens, all picked up and carried, to be strewn, like seeds between fingers, across miles of open sea.
She took Iraji’s hand and showed him how to cling to the net.
INTERLUDE
The Mansion Hussacht
the King stood upon his high fastness and watched his whole life’s work go wrong.
His name was Atakaszir, born to the Mansion Hussacht, Necessary King of the Amustakhi Mountains and protector of the High Fells. From the peak of his mountain Karakys he could see more than a hundred miles down over Aurdwynn, over the forests and dales of Duchy Vultjag, the stony fells of Duchy Lyxaxu (he felt a weird stirring of excitement and hatred at that enemy name, that Maia name, the same kind of name as Nayauru Aia). He could see all that food and lumber and wealth, and the river Sieroch that pumped it away to the sea. The land his people had dreamt of conquering for five hundred years. The land of warm milk, olive oil, and toasted grain.
He’d tried to lead his people to that future.
But to get to the future you had to get through the present, just as you had to risk the jagged slopes to get to those warm fields below.
And the present had its strangling hand round his throat.
Directly beneath his royal overlook was the col, the saddle of naked rock that joined Mount Karakys and neighboring Camich Swiet. And down that col, down the road that passed through the terrace farms and to the famous Gate of Screams, his army marched to die.
Morning sunlight gave the column’s steel-armored brave men and long-speared phalanxes a ghostly halo. Light the color of frost. As if they were already dead.
“I am a fool,” he said, in the Iolynic that Aia had been teaching him. “We have been given the best chance we will ever have to escape the cage of our history. And we are throwing it all away, as we always do, because we cannot stop chewing at each other long enough to fucking act!”
Aia’s hand brushed his wrist. It was a brotherly touch, not something a Stakhi woman would do: warning a comrade against his own passion. “You’d be a fool if you did otherwise, Your Majesty. The army had to march before autumn, or they would’ve wintered here. Your Mansion’s stores wouldn’t have lasted two months. In the spring Hussacht would be a dead Mansion and you would be a fallen king.”
“I know,” he said.
“Politics is the art—”
“Of staying in the arena.” He sighed. She said that a lot. When it came out of her mouth—unbound by manly honor, unconstrained by the fear of procht—it made sense. He glanced at her long enough to quirk his lips in gratitude, and tried to look away before his boyish heart thrilled at the sight.
Nayauru Aia had come to his court to offer him her hand in marriage. She would give him a claim to her dead sister’s Duchy Nayauru, and he would give her the soldiers she needed to retake her home. She was not as good a match as Baru Cormorant, who might have been queen of Aurdwynn entire—but Baru Cormorant, may frost crack her spine from her body, was an oathbreaker and a living lie.
And still Baru tormented him! Even with the whole rash of her treachery revealed, she’d still sent him an emissary, this eunuch Ketly Norgraf. Norgraf had promised to return Atakaszir’s own lost brother to his house! The hubris of her! To betray him, to destroy his reign, and then to send an agent sauntering into his court as if she had done nothing wrong. It was the conduct of the worst kind of liar. A woman lost to procht, the sickly thought of schemers.
She did not have his brother Svir. It simply couldn’t be true.
He caught himself glancing back to Aia, a cad’s double take. She was no beauty, by Stakhi standards; too full, too fat, faintly obscene in a land of tall women, narrow tunnels, and starvation. She looked exactly like the kind of whore Atakas
zir would have sought when he was traveling covertly in Aurdwynn. And, worse, she had none of a whore’s concern for his gaze. For a woman who wanted his hand, who had so far been frustrated in her attempts, Aia was utterly self-possessed.
It was Ketly Norgraf’s fault that he’d fallen for Aia (and here in the mountains they knew very well the dangers of falling). Norgraf had offered Atakaszir something he’d craved all his life, his brother’s return; something Ataka could not possibly accept. He’d turned to Aia for advice and confidence. She had no allegiance to Mansion or clan, no interest in tearing down his kingship or judging it Unnecessary. She and her companion, the horseman Ihuake Ro, were, as scheming foreigners, ironically the easiest for Ataka to trust. Even his suspicion that Aia and Ro were some kind of perverse Maia lovers had been assuaged by Ro’s constant absence. The unhorsed horseman was out exploring the Wintercrests, testing himself in the thin air.
So in the course of their conversations the King of the High Mansions had fallen in love with dark-haired, brown-skinned, fierce-nosed Aia.
This was not unexpected. She was the only woman in his world who was not subject to his power, and, anyway, he had always fallen quickly. But no matter how much he wanted her, he was a Stakhieczi king, and self-denial came as easily to him as thirst. Love maddened him, made him stupid—but so did starvation. And like starvation it would pass in a few months.
What was far stranger was that they had become friends. Her implicit reserve, her sense of not yet, created a barrier that Atakaszir found easy to respect: like a tunnel architect’s rules about where to cut stone and where to leave it be. When he was away from Aia he imagined her nakedness. But when he was with her, his thoughts were entirely occupied with answering hers. He found her strangeness and acuity refreshing, and her acceptance of politics as something necessary (rather than perilously close to procht) made her a better councilor than his bannermen.
“Aia,” he said, watching the army of the gathered Mansions pour down the slope, shining brave men in steel plate surrounded by their armorer boys, gray-cloaked women with ash flatbows, all the mountains’ might on their way to fail, “what else could I have done, after Baru betrayed me? She knows we’re prepared to invade. She destroyed the dukes and duchesses in Aurdwynn who could have joined us.”
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