The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Well, mam”—don’t say well, it signals weakness of character—“that is to say, mam”—don’t clarify yourself, say it right the first time, nuance and ambiguity are Oriati habits—“today I pivoted Abdumasi Abd from the resentimente to the attachment.”

  “You stopped hitting him.”

  “Exactly, mam. I sent in Faroni as heartbait. In his pain he mistook her for a woman named Kindalana.”

  “Kindalana. Yes.” Maroyad exhaled a jet of mint smoke. “The Admiralty’s aware of her.”

  “Can you tell me anything, mam?”

  “She’s an Oriati Federal Prince who does charity work in Falcrest. The woman behind the Great Embrace campaign—you know it?”

  Federal Princes were the Mbo’s royalty: a child who, corrupted by years of groveling courtiers and favorable treatment, was then set loose to run the Mbo’s affairs as their whims dictated. Aminata hated them. “Great Embrace, yes. That’s the one where the Mbo surrenders to Falcrest and joins the Republic?” Ridiculous, of course: like pouring a gallon of mud into a pint of cream.

  “Yes. We’ve put in a request with the Morrow Ministry for their intelligence on her.” She took another drag on the cigarette. Only then, watching her slow considered motions, did Aminata realize the admiral was tense as an anchorline. “But given Parliament’s distaste for our fine navy, and the way the Morrow Ministry likes to eat Parliament’s cunt on hope of credit, I think the Kindalana file will be a long time coming.”

  “Perhaps the Prince Kindalana funded Abdumasi Abd’s attack fleet?” Aminata suggested, hopefully.

  Rear Admiral Maroyad stared at her, silent and unreadable.

  “Perhaps the Prince,” Aminata said, fumbling now, “thought she could curry our favor with her charity work, as a cover for secret movements against us?”

  “Put out your hand,” the rear admiral said.

  “Mam?”

  “Take your glove off and give me your hand.”

  Aminata obeyed, thinking, sourly, that she was probably not going to get her nails inspected.

  Rear Admiral Maroyad stubbed her cigarette out on the web of Aminata’s left hand. The mint sizzled on her skin. Aminata bit her cheeks and did not even hiss. Pain, huh? Come on in. Make yourself at home. I’m a navy tunk, I bleed cold brine and I stitch up my soggy cuts with fishing line. Come on in.

  “I’m not doing this to be a bitch,” Maroyad said, conversationally, “although I do like that word, bitch, a woman who’s not approved of: it has such wonderful eugenic overtones. I never had kids. Navy women don’t, usually. You’ve figured that out, I’m sure.”

  Aminata made an interested hm. Her eyes tried to well up. She forbade it.

  “I just want you to remember, every time you look at this scar”—she screwed the cigarette back and forth—“that if you do succeed in identifying Abdumasi Abd’s backers, and you tell anyone outside the navy, you’re going to fuck us all.”

  “Mam?” she croaked.

  “What do you think happens,” Maroyad said, flicking the cigarette into a planter across the room, “if Parliament finds out that some Prince or griot circle or perverse tunk conspiracy was behind that ‘pirate’ attack on Aurdwynn?”

  “I expect, mam, that Parliament would demand the Oriati turn the guilty parties over to us.”

  “Mm-hmm. And do you think your ‘people,’ by which I mean Devi-naga, Mzilimake, Lonjaro, Segu, and all the principalities within, can agree to extradite a bunch of powerful people?”

  “Well, ah, mam, if they don’t, I expect there’ll be—war.”

  “You’re fucking right there will.” Maroyad stood up, looked about, seized on her clamshell ashtray, and hurled it into the floorboards at her feet. “Fuck! Fuck damn it! Fuck fuck fuck!”

  Aminata had never seen an admiral express strong emotion before. It was a bit like watching your mother cry; or so she supposed. “Mam!” she said, a sort of general exclamation of subordinate dismay, why are you making me listen to you say fuck?

  “Fuck.” Maroyad sat down suddenly. “Ah, fuck. I wish we could make him disappear. Maybe it’s not too late. But we have to know—”

  “Mam?”

  “Whatever you learn,” Maroyad panted, wiping her mouth on her sleeve, “you’re not to tell anyone but me. I don’t want it down in writing. I don’t want Abdumasi Abd to sign a confession unless I specifically order it. And listen, listen, I don’t care if a little fish swims up your latrine and starts a conversation with your asshole, you do not speak to anyone about this prisoner, understand?”

  “Of course, mam.”

  “Good. Do you want to know why?”

  Aminata nodded cautiously.

  “Because the moment anyone finds out we’ve got Abd,” Maroyad said, “everyone comes for him. He’s a coin to buy a war. The Judiciary will want him, and Parliament, and the Imperial fucking Throne—who knows what’s behind that silk straightjacket except a lot of slithering councilors who don’t like us? And to get Abd, they will purge anyone who tries to hold him. Do you see now?”

  Aminata stared at the cigarette burn on her naked hand and thought, bloody fucking period shit, I am in way deeper than I realized. She knew that the Emperor meddled in the navy’s affairs, for It had installed the Empire Admiral Lindon Satamine as a check against the navy’s ambitious women admirals—

  But to imagine that Emperor reaching down for her …

  “I understand, mam. Should I … delay the interrogation? Bungle it?”

  “No. Absolutely not. Abd needs to name our enemies for us.”

  “Our enemies, mam?”

  “Yes. The people who want this war. The Imperial agents who baited Abdumasi Abd’s attack with the Coyote rebellion. I think they wanted to draw the Oriati into a foolish move. Why, Lieutenant Commander, would the Throne want the Oriati to attack us?”

  “So we’d have public support for a war, mam.”

  “That’s right. And what happens when people get excited about a war?”

  Purge. Purge happened. Parliament feared an independent navy, a navy with power over the trade that fed their purses. War would be the perfect time to clean out the Admiralty. If the loss of good sailors cost them a battle, well enough. A few defeats would silence the hawks and keep the navy from winning too much public love.

  Falcrest had once, very briefly, possessed an army. It had been disposed of. Field-general was still slang for someone doomed to destruction.

  “So.” Maroyad clicked the little guillotine she used to cut her cigarettes off the roll. “The real purpose of your work, Lieutenant Commander, is to find the agents on our side who are working to provoke war. Do you have a lead on any of those agents?

  She should speak Baru’s name.

  But if she did, Baru would be the next person she had to suasion.

  She stood there helplessly, caught between two loyalties.

  “Lieutenant Commander,” Maroyad sighed, “you’re such a lousy fucking liar that I can see you planning the lie out before you say it. Give me the name.”

  Oh, Baru, please forgive this. Aminata looked at the floor, because if she looked at Maroyad she would see past her, to the sea and the birds, the memory of Baru.

  “Abd did mention the former Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn, Baru Cormorant.”

  “Baru? Fuck her!” Maroyad snarled. “She drowned hundreds of Juris Ormsment’s people at Welthony. I saw what that did to Juris. Fuck. Ass fuck.” She kicked the fallen ashtray. It richocheted off her stately display of model ships and landed on the hardwood right at Aminata’s feet.

  “Pick that up,” Maroyad ordered, breathing heavily.

  “Mam?”

  “Pick up the ashtray and hurl it, Lieutenant Commander.”

  “Mam, I’m not sure that’s decorum—”

  “Don’t you see?” Maroyad snapped. “Parliament wants to carve up Oriati Mbo into little colonies and suck them dry. If they get their way, you’re going to spend the whole war interrogating prisoners. You’ll
die with your head full of screaming faces.”

  Aminata stood there as the implications boxed her on the ears. She wasn’t going to get a ship, was she? No matter what happened, they would say, oh, Aminata isiSegu, she has excelled at extracting vital intelligence from her racemates.

  Keep her on as a suasion expert. Forever.

  She picked up the clamshell ashtray and hurled it overhand into the wall. “FUCK!” she roared as the clamshell shattered. “FUUUUUCK!”

  “That’s the spirit.” Maroyad collapsed into her chair. “Now I have a mission for you, Lieutenant Commander. A very sensitive, very secret mission.”

  “Anything,” Aminata panted, and regretted it at once.

  “Take Captain Nullsin’s Ascentatic. Find Baru Cormorant. Learn who she’s working with—every last name. Bring her back here if you can.

  “And if you can’t, remove her from play.”

  4

  NEATH THE DEAD DOG’S TONGUE

  SPRING came to Aurdwynn, and the streets of Treatymont bloomed with winter corpses.

  Over the last four weeks Province Admiral Juris Ormsment had watched this corpse’s black foot grow out of a melting ice dam. This was her favorite spot in the city, a garden gallery off Arwybon Plaza, and she came here whenever she could to escape the suffocating Governor’s House, but the foot had rather ruined the mood. With the city’s workforce depleted in Cattlson’s debacle, corpses came out of the ice faster than they could be cleared. This one’s killers had cut away the big toe for a rebel bounty. (Or, maybe, it had been eaten. Samne Maroyad insisted there was such a thing as an ice-tunneling rat.) Probably this dead man was a faithful citizen, killed for his loyalty.

  Killed like too many others.

  Dead sailors in a warm harbor, their eyes and their guts emptied by the gulls. And the chips of teeth left in their broken jaws chattered as they begged her:

  Why did you abandon us, Admiral Ormsment? Where were you when she struck?

  Why did you let this happen?

  She flattened the rocket signal across her lap and read it again.

  ANNALILA TO TREATYMONT/ADMIRAL’S EYES ONLY

  PASS BY ROCKET RELAY HIGHEST IMPORTANCE

  ORMSMENT:

  I HAVE CRITICAL NEWS.

  EXCELLENT WORK BY LT CDR AMINATA HAS GIVEN US A LEAD.

  IMPERIAL AGENT BARU CORMORANT—SAME AGENT WHO EXECUTED THE MASSACRE OF YOUR SAILORS AT WELTHONY—ALSO BAITED THE ORIATI ATTACK ON YOUR PROVINCE.

  SHE IS INVOLVED IN PLOT TO TRIGGER SECOND ARMADA WAR. SUSPECT IMPERIAL THRONE DESIRES WAR TO FORCE ACCESS TO ORIATI MBO.

  CONSIDER THIS AGENT HIGHEST POSSIBLE THREAT TO ASHEN SEA PEACE.

  I HAVE DEPLOYED NULLSIN AND RNS ASCENTATIC TO TRACK AND SECURE HER. HOLD YOUR COMMAND. DO NOT DO ANYTHING WHICH COULD COMPROMISE US OR LEAD TO PURGE. I REPEAT DO NOT MOVE TOO SOON.

  PROVINCE ADMIRAL FALCREST AHANNA CROFTARE HAS BEEN INFORMED AND WILL REPLY.

  JURIS. DO NOT GO AFTER HER.

  REAR ADMIRAL SAMNE MAROYAD

  ANNALILA FORTRESS

  CAUTERIA

  The rage rose up in her again. Water hammer. That was the name. Water hammer—when you closed a pipe-valve too quickly, or detonated a mine underwater, then a pressure wave would form in the water or the sea. It could tear plumbing from the wall or cave in a ship’s hull. Water hammer. And for a moment she was eleven again, standing on the rusty ladder inside the settlement’s well, with the stone lid propped up on her fingertips: later they would swell up into bloody bulbs. She had watched from that well as the Invijay came through the fences (this was before the Armada War: there was no Occupation to the south to buffer the Butterveldt). She had watched them kill her mother and grandmother and take her father for a slave and a whore. They had that power, the power to end a life, to close the future off like a pipe and send the shock of that closure into the world. Water hammer.

  She came back to this little gallery because it reminded her of the well. Stone duty on every side, chaos past those walls. And that water rising under her, rising to beat at the cover, rage and sorrow and need for justice, the water hammer—

  Oh, Samne, she thought. How can’t I go after her? The dead cry out for it, don’t they? The sailors I left in Baru’s reach, the sailors who trusted me to trust her. Didn’t I betray them when Baru betrayed me? Didn’t I fail that trust?

  Of course Samne Maroyad wouldn’t have sent the message if she thought Ormsment had any way to do something stupid. Any hint as to where to begin.

  Which she didn’t. Yet.

  But there was another reason Ormsment came to this gallery. A stone hidden in the wall, with a flat white face where she could mark a date and time to meet.

  “Hey,” she said, to the blackened foot in the ice. “Hey, you. Do the dead care?”

  The foot had nothing to say. She tried clarifying. “Do you care what we do in your name?”

  It was a fucking foot, so of course it wouldn’t answer. She had to do an admiral’s duty and decide for herself.

  Everyone, Juris Ormsment thought, ended up dead. Everyone. If you stopped mattering when you died, life had no meaning: that was pretty clearly unacceptable. So you did matter after you died. Why? You mattered because people acted in your memory.

  The living had a responsibility to the dead. A responsibility to honor their successes, and to make right the wrongs done against them. It was as true for a mother of dead sons as an admiral of dead sailors.

  And that was that. She could choose not do it, of course. But a choice not to do the right thing had a name, and that name was evil.

  She took the stone from its place in the gallery wall. In small Aphalone blocks, using a calligraphy brush, she painted a date and a time. She had never done this, and she had no reason to believe it would work, except that the Bane of Wives said it would.

  Nothing had ever stopped the Bane of Wives from doing what she said she would do.

  Juris Ormsment realized she would probably never see her little gallery again. So she got out her dive knife, knelt on the filthy ice in her dress uniform, and began to chip the black-footed corpse free of its tomb.

  * * *

  SHE called up her commands that night for a harborside review. They turned out on the piers in ragged order but fine spirits, cheering to each other, boasting of their ships: of sure helms and ready rockets, of rope splice and steady masts, the most beautiful boys and delicious cooks. Here were her Sulanes and Scylpetaires, Welterjoys and Juristanes and Commsweals, the enormous companies off Kingsbane and Egalitaria with their faces ash-blackened in disdain of the enemy. All in fantastic spirits after the spring’s reversals, especially now that their shares of the prize money had been paid out: symbolic prizes for the forty-three Coyote and Oriati warships burnt to the keel without a single Falcresti loss.

  She’d commanded that battle. Navy Advance called her a hero of the Republic. Even His Hypocrisy the Empire Admiral, Lindon Satamine, had commended her to Parliament.

  If she kept her calm and let this victory propel her she might one day be Empire Admiral herself.

  But she would be Empire Admiral of a navy that sold its sailors to women like Baru Cormorant.

  From Sulane’s mast-top she raised her open hands like yardarms and the roar of the crews broke over her like storm waves. And like a good ship in storm she rose up and shook off the water and kept her course.

  Juris often dwelt on a riddle she’d heard at academy in Shaheen. What is power? Where does it come from, when is it false, when is it true? Imagine that the Minister of the Metademe, the Minister of the Faculties, and the Morrow Minister are at dinner when it is announced that the wine is poisoned. A nameless secretary leaps up with a bottle of antidote. Each Minister demands the secretary hand over the bottle. The Metademe threatens her family and her fertility, the Morrow Minister threatens her reputation and safety, and the Faculties threaten to stab her up the eyeball with a meat skewer. Whose power is truest? Who gets the antidote?

  And if you cal
led to your sailors to follow you, but their Emperor called them to destroy you, who would they heed? If you knew for certain that they would follow you to ruin—would it then be wrong to ask for their service?

  She walked among them. They looked at her with hard-chinned gratitude: thank you for gathering us here and using us so well. Thank you for showing us what we earn with our duty, pride and purpose and a fair piece of cash. The force of their love and respect filled her up like a sail and she tried so hard not to grin.

  Now and then she stopped and asked an officer, “What’s the word, sailor?” And mostly the woman would answer, “Fair winds and following seas wherever you send us, mam.”

  They would follow her anywhere. Not just the true salt but the wide-eyed octopus girls so young they were still all arm and leg, the careerists trying to illuminate their service jackets with merit, the lemon-rind convicts who would never work anywhere but a ship again. All hers.

  It was her responsibility to deny them that loyalty. To take only those who could understand the sacrifice she asked of them.

  That night she began to draw up transfer orders. The young and hopeful and ambitious would come off Sulane and Scylpetaire. She would take the hard and fierce and angry, the sea revenants and the orphans and the widows.

  She would fill her two prize ships with those who did not fear collective punishment. But that would not be enough: the Throne was too subtle. Some of them would still be leveraged, compromised, ready to mutiny or murder her when she broke from the Hierarchic Qualm.

  She needed the Bane of Wives.

  * * *

  AND then it was the day she had painted on that hidden stone, and in the morning she went out in disguise to the meet.

  On the wagon-seamed downslope off the Ffynyrn Bramble—she had finally gotten used to pronouncing the Iolynic y, which made the name Faneern—two orphans played dam-builder in the runoff. A dead woman with gills carved into her throat lay in the mud upstream. Juris shouted, in her best Iolynic, “Children! Stay out of that water, it’s tainted!”