The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

They recognized the Aphalone in her accent. They ran.

  She saw more corpses as she walked. Beggars with faces burnt to shining parchments by riot acid hauled the dead in for hygiene bounty. They would see not a province admiral but a bare-faced brown woman in a homespun dress, hurrying through the muck. But Juris was not afraid.

  Once the beggars must have been rebels. Part of the Coyote uprising that Juris had crushed, yes, damn it, that she had crushed, no matter how the Emperor tried to give the credit to Its Agents. Juris had beaten that Oriati fleet under Abdumasi Abd, the rebellion’s only hope.

  She felt vain and stupid, telling herself that. Oh, Juris, you great hero, you stopped the uprising, nobody else did it, it was you! But she had to seize the credit. This was what the Masquerade did to navy women: took their triumphs away.

  She knew she would never return to this city, and her melancholia brought out the beauty in Treatymont. The flowers were coming up with the corpses. The houses bloomed with hyacinth and cherry blossom, early magnolias, deadly nightshades in medicinal plots. Climbing vines opened small white flowers that attracted fat bumblebees. The morning sun glinted off the mast-top mirrors of the ships in the Horn Harbor. Far out the two burnt towers stood like empty tooth-sockets. You would hardly know, looking at this city, that it could drive a navy flag officer to grand treason.

  “Juris,” a woman called, taking the opportunity of the disguise to skip her rank. “Juris, you should go.”

  Her aide came up the hill from Arwybon Plaza. Shao Lune, oh, you sharp-toothed weasel: a viciously perfect specimen of the Republican ideal, immaculate in her work, intimidating in her aspect. One of those people Juris had never been, people who did everything with enormous sprezzatura, the casual and effortless grace of the superior.

  “She’s not here,” Shao said. “You should go back.”

  “I can’t,” Juris said. Physically, yes, it would be possible to call everything off. Morally it was impossible. She embraced her aide like a wayward daughter, though it was, actually, very hard to imagine Shao as anyone’s child, at least unstrangled. “You’ll draw everyone’s attention while I make the meet.”

  “She’s not going to show,” Shao insisted.

  “She’s coming, Staff Captain. I know she’ll come.”

  Shao Lune sneered, quite enchantingly, her face like a wonderful painting of your worst enemy. For a very long time Juris had wanted to court-martial her for insubordination and consign her to a fish-patrol corvette. But the more angry Juris became, the less she cared about the tone of Shao’s loyalty, and the more the quality of her work.

  “You could still go back to Sulane,” Shao said, “and save our lives.”

  No chance of that. The dead cried out against it.

  * * *

  SHAO Lune buttoned herself up and went out to sit in the sun with high-chinned dignity. A suitor arrived to dare her: a Stakhi man in a broad-shouldered tabard who offered olive oil.

  Ormsment had claimed a public bench (a Falcresti project, of course) on the south end. It was early yet, before the plaza filled with Aurdwynni merchants, mistresses-of-house, master sewers, cranksmen, collimators, caseworkers, stevedores, dog-runners, butchers, bastardettes, and other feudal traffic. She watched, amused but worried, as Shao Lune’s suitor tried, too late, to withdraw. Was he here to court a child bride, Shao asked him? No? Then why had he written poetry for illiterate idiot babies? Oh, begging his pardon, of course he had tried his best. He should show her around the plaza. He must know all the local excitements, the very best backlogged gutters, the most fascinating decay.

  Juris wished Shao would be more careful with her powers. An air of superiority made one a target in men’s circles. Sooner or later navy women had to make peace with that: or, if not peace, at least a cease-fire and a border.

  A bee settled on her thigh. Juris smiled at it. Rage slammed against the back of her teeth, and the front of her skull, and rebounded: rage, rage, they died because you trusted her, they died on your watch. A bee would die after she used her sting, wouldn’t she? So she had to choose carefully when to strike.

  Where the fuck was the agent?

  Then a burly woman in forester’s skins came out of the alley across from Juris, hitching up her pants: briefly, beneath the tough denim, Juris saw a pale scar across a brown gut, and the edge of a strong fat thigh. She chased off the orphans cutting up the dead dog with blows from her hatchet’s handle. What a tableau. Aurdwynn in a painting: a forester pisses in an alley, orphans cut up a frozen dog, the forester curses and beats the orphans. Next the forester would probably eat the dog. Juris loved this place, loved the charcoal smell and the taste of wheat pancakes on a campfire, the shining rivers that smelled like ice. But king’s balls she was glad she hadn’t been born here.

  The victorious forester knelt and, with care, covered the dog’s frozen face.

  Then she looked at Juris.

  King’s balls, her eyes! Blue as lightning-flash, and terrible, and Juris sat bolt-upright, for those eyes were proof. Eyes like Xate Yawa’s. Blue like a tropical crow, and mad, mad.

  She was the Bane of Wives.

  She looked nothing like Juris had expected, nothing like a usefully built navy woman with big shoulders and long legs. Rough sinew and loose muscle, instead, and a survivor’s pad of fat.

  She chopped the frozen dog’s head from its spine, picked it up by its bloody ruff, and came over to Ormsment.

  The bee buzzed up to the high collar of Ormsment’s dress.

  The Bane of Wives underhanded the dead dog’s head. It landed on the bench next to Ormsment, thudded wetly, rolled against the inscription: LINGER AND APPRECIATE THE CLEANLY AIR.

  “You’re the admiral,” she said, in a calm low voice.

  “You’re the agent.” By officer’s habit Ormsment laid out her knowledge. “I read about you. You were on Sousward. Then in the Occupation, then sent to Mzilimake. You didn’t come back.”

  “Open the mouth,” the Bane of Wives said.

  “What?”

  “Open the dog’s mouth.” She knelt to scour her hands with ice. “There’s something for you in there.”

  After the black-footed corpse, surely a frozen dog wouldn’t kill her. Juris stripped off her good gloves and felt around under the dripping tongue. Something small, hard—a long flat stone.

  “I killed him in the winter,” the Bane of Wives said, throwing down her fouled snow, “and I froze him here. Mercy kill. He had pika. He was chewing on flagstones. Turn the stone over.”

  In rectangular Simple Aphalone characters a chisel had scraped the word ORMSMNT.

  “Well,” Ormsment breathed. “You knew I’d come to you?”

  “When they wouldn’t let you kill her. Then I knew.”

  “So you understand why I’m here?”

  “Because you want to pretend the world’s fair,” the Bane of Wives said, with a terrible indifference, which Juris did not like at all: the indifference, at least. The terror she needed.

  “I prefer to think I help keep it fair.” Actions had to have consequences. What you did had to come back to you, or the world would be as inchoate and unfair as her childhood in the Butterveldt. When people cannot count on justice they count on blood.

  Over the rebel winter she’d asked Cattlson, each and every time they met, can I order her death? We have agents in place, I know we do—no? No? But, your Excellence, how can we protect her? After what she did at Welthony?

  And Cattlson would say, it’s out of my hands.

  Away a few benches, the Stakhi olive-oil man had begun shaking his fist and making threats. Shao Lune said something in a tone like a sneer and the man pivoted, instantly, into mewling apology: he hadn’t realized she was navy, he hadn’t meant it, could he make it up to her, please? Shao Lune laughed at him. “I did this to you? You’re like a dog who comes at the chime of the bell. Yes, a dog, I said. A dog.”

  “What you’re doing is treason,” the Bane of Wives said.

  Looking a
t her was like walking up to the edge of a canyon. You had to do it carefully, and not for too long. “Maybe,” Juris said. “But it’s the right thing to do.”

  “They’ll purge your friends.”

  “We know the risks,” Juris said, we meaning the whole conspiracy, the plan to overthrow Empire Admiral Satamine and maybe even the Parliament that created him. “All of us do. I have to show the Throne that they can’t use us like dogs without us biting back.”

  “You don’t know how many of your officers they already possess.”

  “And you do?”

  “I know,” the Bane of Wives said. “They possessed me once.”

  Of course she had. Who’d sent the Bane of Wives to Mzilimake Mbo to stir up civil war? Who had dispatched her to the Occupation to turn the Invijay against the Oriati?

  The Bane of Wives had been the Emperor’s agent.

  “Tell me, then,” Juris whispered, her bones suddenly athrum, her nose stuffed with the smell of thawing dog, the bee buzzing in her ear and the spring sun glittering on the melt, the whole world waiting, waiting on this answer, “can you lead me to her?”

  “You have ships?”

  “Two, yes, enough loyal crew for two ships.” Those officers who’d stayed here under Ormsment, rather than moving on with Ahanna Croftare, did it for love of her. “Will you tell me who among them are compromised?”

  “If you let me see to them myself.”

  That rankled at Juris, but so did the idea of blackmailed officers simpering among her loyal few. “So you shall.”

  “Good.” The Bane of Wives spat into the snow. “Baru’s at the Elided Keep. It’s not on your charts. But I can take you there.”

  And now Ormsment had no excuse to turn back.

  “Of course,” the woman said, looking at Shao Lune, now alone, with callous appetite, carnal or violent, Juris couldn’t tell, “once you do this, you can’t come back. Even if you take Baru. Even if you force her to write you a pardon. The Emperor will destroy you.”

  “I have to do this,” Ormsment said, simply. “The dead demand it.”

  The Bane of Wives looked at her as if she recognized something she might respect. “The dead do task us.”

  The bee whirred off to find a brighter flower. The dog’s jaw creaked shut. Shao Lune’s suitor fled.

  “I have a price,” the Bane of Wives said.

  “What is it?”

  “I get to keep Tain Hu.”

  5

  THE END OF HISTORY

  WILL you admire Cairdine Farrier?

  He is fifty-four years old, a big man, a happy man, well liked and deep in love. He owns nineteen businesses, but these concerns own stake in others, too: unless you could find all his false names and paper legends you could never count all his money. Fisheries are some of his favorite investments. He owns, perhaps, one in a hundred fish in the sea, and who else can claim that? No shark and no kraken, no gape-mouthed whale with combs of baleen. Farrier has outmaneuvered the leviathans of the deep. Ships are very useful to him, but it does not suit him to seem like he has a private navy. So instead of possesssing vessels he possesses their masters.

  He speaks in Parliament, where he is a great favorite for his humor and his digressions, and, of course, for the things he has accomplished. The opening of Sousward-which-was-Taranoke to the Republic’s trade, which completed a great circle of commerce that rings the entire Ashen Sea in one golden river of endless profit. The young tyrants of the Suettaring markets call the modern prosperity the Farrier Age. The Egalitarians who protest beneath the Suettaring hills call him the King of Pillage. Parliamins and Ministers call him Mister Farrier, with great respect.

  In the Faculties the students ask after him for lectures, may we hear from the adventurer Cairdine Farrier, who has been all the way to Zawam Asu? Women seek his hand in marriage. He is seen with lady friends but he does not settle. The gossip says, admiringly, that Farrier is mad for an Oriati princess some years his junior, a forbidden love, not because of their ages but because the Metademe has placed an attaintment upon the blood of Oriati royalty.

  If he knew her carnally he would forfeit his citizenship. How chaste and gallant he must be with her!

  Mister Farrier really is devoted to his work, isn’t he? Even in love he wants to better the world’s unfortunate. Imagine giving your husbandry and your citizenship to a member of a royal line. Next, Farrier’s detractors say, he will adopt a cow and coax her into clothes, and she will write letters with ink from her teats. Daer Parliament, she will squirt, Msr. Farrier treets me vry well. Please invest in his veal enterprise. He is convinced us to haf the calves he neets.

  For more than forty years, Caird’s had his hands around the throat of his classmate Cosgrad Torrinde, a man who he named, in the cruelty of their teenage arguments, a cruelty he now sometimes but not often regrets, the squid priest. Very few know for certain that Cosgrad Torrinde, Minister of the Metademe, is also the elusive Hesychast. More know that Cairdine Farrier is also Itinerant, the Emperor’s Adventurer: but not many more.

  Farrier loves the world because he knows it so well, and he loves his princess because he knows her so little. In his fifty-four years, he’s spent not twenty-five at home.

  Will you now admire Cairdine Farrier?

  He knows how to write and argue in Aphalone, Old Vitatic, Seti-Caho, Uburu, Takhaji, Roque, and two sorts of Urun. He could sell horns to a ram. He speaks richly, and with a laugh in his eyes. When he tells you something, you feel that he is holding back a little more, and you want to know it, for it must be the best part. He can quote every revolutionary handbook from Somatic Mind to Manumission, and he has written his own, the Manual of Expedition. When he goes to the spice boutique to buy a jar of cardamom for one of his famous recipes, the women speculate over his purpose, and the men ask him for advice.

  He has a deadly secret, but it is not one of the ordinary species. He is not incestuous. He’s never been caught conducting an affair or taking the woman’s place in sex, nor documented in an unhygienic fetish like necrotica or bestiality. He has no strange compulsion, nor any illness which would oblige him to seek treatment. The fevers and parasites of the tropics were repulsed by his youthful vitality. His finances are now in order, and he has gone unindicted for his crimes.

  Very few know his secret.

  But all the nation knows his deepest hope.

  This is his hope, as he has expressed it in that Manual of Expedition. He wishes to unite the entire world in a perfect meritocracy, a republic in which the worthy may rise from wherever they begin, whether it is a nursery in Falcrest’s Suettaring or a plague hovel in the faraway Camou where buboes fester and they whisper of older plagues that weep green blood from swollen eyes. Genius, he says, may be discovered anywhere, and our Imperial duty calls us to discover that genius and to save it from decay.

  Isn’t that a hopeful dream?

  Hope. Hope keeps Farrier moving, through those early days of heady adventure and then the pitifully wasteful and terribly necessary crisis of the Armada War, on into the compromise and digestion of Aurdwynn and Taranoke. Hope sustained him even as he pretended to languish on Taranoke, as he prosecuted the awful, soul-rotting business of sowing civil war among the Oriati, sending his best student into the Mzilimake jungles and the bloodstained grasses of the Occupation, stirring up the Invijay and the pygmies against their Oriati “friends.” Hope sustained him as, one by one, his protégés fell away from the designs he had instilled in them. Chaos infected his students, just as it infected all the great races who rose and fell in ages past. The world distorted the laws that he had insinuated into his chosen few. They returned abominable.

  Farrier needs his protégés to triumph. For time is almost out.

  Ten years, maybe: the next ten years will decide the future of all human life. The course of history will be set. Will the Republic select the true method of eternal, perfect rule? Or will humanity collapse into a final spiral back down to the seabed ooze? It all dep
ends on the confrontation between Falcrest and the Oriati Mbo, and the choices made as a result.

  He will be sixty-four in ten years. In Falcrest they don’t believe the old can do much work beyond the archive and the teaching stand. It’s the fear of monarchy, you see. A king holds his power unto death, but the republican should abdicate young.

  Cairdine Farrier doesn’t believe in hereditary destiny. He doesn’t believe in the Metademe’s eugenics as a solution to the looming catastrophe. But he’ll admit his dear nemesis Hesychast makes one strong point. Flesh does matter. Nothing’s more than flesh, not yet. Kill the man, you kill his ideas.

  Unless. Unless.

  Unless Farrier finds the answer to the Imperial Question, the riddle of closure. Unless at last one of his protégés comes back perfect.

  Then, in the only way that matters, he will be immortal.

  * * *

  BARU played the Great Game with the man who’d butchered her home.

  Gods of older fire, was she happy to see him? Wasn’t that sick? He’d condoned the rape of Cousin Lao as a medical necessity: keep that ember in your fist, so it always burns. He’d called the plague on Taranoke as inevitable as the tide: keep that tightness in your chest, so you feel it when you breathe.

  But didn’t he want to help her?

  Baru was mostly sure she was happy to see him only because he was useful. She liked useful things. But there was the risk that she simply wanted to be around someone who cared what happened to her.

  He wandered the map of the world that carpeted her morning-room: a bit less than her height, richer, rounder, with a neat beard and deep-set laughing eyes. He wore a dashing short-tailed sherwani. He looked at people with a beaming cleverness that was too charming, most of the time, to seem like avarice. All in all he was like a very self-satisfied raccoon.

  “We’ll play Hesychast rules,” he said, but before Baru could ask, what are Hesychast rules, he huffed and wrung his hands and made a noise of hurt.

  “Your Excellence?” she ventured.

  “Oh, for shit’s sake, Baru, call me Mister Farrier.” His eyes shone. “I just … oh, king’s balls.”