The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “We all have our flaws,” he said, softly, “we all make our mistakes. But if we work to overcome them—if we prove that we can master our flesh—then we’ve triumphed.”

  Baru thought she’d won this conversation, or at least gathered valuable intelligence: she was just warming up to a little smugness when Farrier, offhandedly, knocked her back down.

  “Have you been catching up on the letters from your parents?” He beamed at her. “I’m sorry I held your mail these last three years. I just thought it’d keep you focused. I do hope they’re well!”

  “Letters from my parents?” Baru echoed.

  “Yes, piles of them, haven’t you—oh no.” He covered his heart in shock. “Apparitor didn’t show you the library?”

  6

  THE LIGHTNING IN THE EAST

  BARU’S tongue stuck to her palate when she breathed.

  The Liminal Library had been built to die. Carved into rock down below sea level, its air had to be parched by chemistry lest it rot the books; and if invaders struck, the library would flood. The Throne would not give up its secrets. Lanterns of iridescent jellyfish tea cast blue-green light on concrete buttresses, long chains in catenary arches, the marching monoliths of the shelves. The air was dry as bonemeal.

  In the distance, red hair and pale skin caught the light for a moment.

  “There you are,” Baru breathed. “Keep my parents’ letters, will you?”

  She slipped down the shelves toward Apparitor. It was so silent in the Library that she heard quite distinctly when he raised his head and said, “Oh, shit.”

  She broke into a sprint. His footsteps vanished suddenly but she was learning, and she had an easier time with sound on her blind side—she cut right between two shelves, lunged, and tackled him as he dashed past. He dropped his sack, and they went down together on the stone in a papery explosion of letters and books.

  Dingy rag novels poured over Baru. She picked up the book that settled on her neck and read the title: Intrusion from the Pointillist Plane! “What the fuck is this?”

  Apparitor tried to scoop all his spilled books away from her. A Reckoning of Archons! Nab Banadab and the Horror of Canduûn! I Summoned Antideath! All on the same rag cover dyed cheap yellow. One of them bragged, in red letters, of Impossible Truths from Behind the Moon’s Silver Mask—You’ll Wish You’d Never Known!

  “Are these codebooks?” Baru cried, delighted. “That’s ingenious.” A short-run novel would be a wonderful source of spice-words for encryption.

  “I just like cosmic mysteries.” Apparitor scooped everything up with bashful haste. “Well, do enjoy your mail catch-up, I’m sure no one will be offended you’ve been ignoring them for three years.”

  Baru stabbed him with a smile. “At least my family knows where I’ve gone.”

  “Fuck off,” he said, looking nervously around. “You haven’t told Farrier, have you?”

  “Of course not. They really don’t know?”

  “Not most of them.”

  A sheaf of cream paper in a gold-cloth band fell out of a book. Apparitor froze. Baru grabbed for the sheaf, very curious. Her half blindness didn’t keep her from reading: if she couldn’t always quote the right half of the page, the general meaning still reached her—

  Apparitor stamped on her fingers. “That’s not for you.”

  Baru wrung her hand. “A letter to your lover?” she said, just to prickle him. “You want to keep him up to date on your failures?”

  “Hardly, hardly; Lindon and I keep our love out of our politics. This is nothing you’d care about, believe me.”

  “Tell me, then, if it doesn’t matter.”

  He winked at her. “It’s just Tain Hu’s will.”

  And he was gone before she could even beg him to wait.

  * * *

  FARRIER had given her a key in an envelope, and it came with a note from Apparitor: You didn’t get much mail. I suppose because you’ve murdered or estranged everyone who’s no longer useful to you. Ha ha. That’s like a joke, in that we’ll both have to pretend we think it’s a joke so we can work together civilly. That’s my favorite kind of joke.

  “Fuck off,” Baru told the silence. She slid the key in all the way to its handle, an oily insinuation of teeth and tumblers. The lock thumped with satisfying heft. She’d like to own a lock to open and close as she sat in thought. Imagine a currency made of locks! A currency that measures the value of secrets, and the more the secret’s worth, the more locks you attach.

  The door whispered on silent bearings.

  Baru’s lantern showed her the rack of letters labeled FOR THE CANDIDATE.

  She demanded absolute obedience from every muscle and nerve. With two fingers she pinched out one letter at random.

  To our daughter Baru Cormorant.

  From Solit Able and Pinion Starmap.

  Her loving parents.

  And then she was crying, sure as a storm brought rain. Mother. Father. You wrote me—oh, you wrote me so often, and I never wrote back!

  The tough cotton-rag envelopes. The heavy handwriting, as if perpetually frustrated, or, perhaps, shouting. Did they get news from Aurdwynn? Had they heard of Baru’s defection to the rebels? Had they read of her “true” loyalty to the Throne? Oh gods, what would mother think?

  The envelopes changed to slick waxy card stock. A new hand on the pen, and a new signature:

  To the Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn,

  From the Lieutenant Aminata isiSegu, RNS Lapetiare

  Baru sniffled and smiled. Look, the later ones came from the Lieutenant Commander Aminata isiSegu, Annalila Fortress, Isla Cauteria. Lieutenant commander! She’d been promoted, and so young! Aminata always wanted to be an admiral. She was closer now. Too bad that she probably hated Baru for sinking all those navy ships at Welthony Harbor. Too bad. Too bad.

  Baru knuckled her eyes and growled. Tain Hu was dead. Hold up that big pain next to losing Aminata. Look at you, tiny pain. You are so little. She had to keep everything in proportion.

  And here was a letter that Baru clutched to her breast with both hands, to warm her heart. Lao had written. Her second cousin, Baru’s first crush, the woman Baru saved from the awful hygienist Diline in the Iriad school. Baru had definitely saved her. No one else was sacrificed—so the act of saving Lao was unambiguously, absolutely good. She loved Lao just for that.

  But of course she had work mail, too, Throne mail, the fruit of certain subtleties she’d set in motion before Sieroch.

  Purity Cartone, Baru’s personal Clarified agent, had dispatched a letter.

  It must have come in through secret channels, fast sloops and dry mailrooms where women in black gloves sorted out codes they didn’t need to understand. The address read:

  RETRIEVED FROM APPARITOR DEAD DROP IN TREATYMONT

  ESCALATE TO APPARITOR FOR ROUTING

  Apparitor had scrawled a note below: Are you getting clever already? Who is it who sent this? Hope you wake up from your coma soon—you’re drooling oat mush on my good pillow right now—

  “I didn’t forget,” Baru told Hu. “See, I remembered the ledger of secrets! I didn’t forget!”

  The ledger had been created to force the Coyote rebels to trust each other. Every duke, duchess, judge, and accountant who’d joined the conspiracy had whispered a fatal secret to the Priestess in the Lamplight, the rebellion’s secret-keeper. Baru had told the truth: I want to fuck women. And the priestess had recorded that secret.

  When Baru had learned the priestess was also a Falcresti agent, she’d sent Purity Cartone to kill her and get the ledger back. Not only to protect herself, but to gain the secret written by Jurispotence Xate Yawa, whose glaring blue eyes hid agendas and loyalties Baru couldn’t begin to guess. The last time she’d gone up against Yawa, she’d lost so badly that only Tain Hu had saved her from mutilation.

  Xate Yawa was now exalted, just as Baru had been. And this ledger might be enough to protect Baru from her. But, of course, it would also be full
of the unbearably personal secrets of people Baru had loved and betrayed.

  Suddenly the bundle of letters was a burden. More heartbreak to wallow through. More ways to punish herself for the choices she’d made. Couldn’t she leave them for later? Wander back to her morning-room, perhaps, and play the Great Game against herself …

  A footstep scraped the stone.

  A hand closed on her shoulder.

  Baru whirled and her hands did two different things. With her left she pushed the man away: with her right she grabbed him by the collar and hauled him close. All the letters tumbled onto the floor and Baru, tossed off-balance by her manual disagreement, yelped and fell on her ass.

  It was only Apparitor’s boy Iraji. “What,” she said, from the ground, “are you doing!” But deep within her there was a reptilian calm, a slithering advisor which whispered, If he meant violence he’d already have hurt you.

  “Apparitor sent me, my lady, to help you with anything you required.” The jellyfish light picked out his gold-flecked eyes, Tain Hu’s eyes, and drowned that color in cold green. He had a good face, big-eyed and curious and beautiful, darker enough than Baru to be brown-black. In ancient days golden monkeys with clever faces were companions to the Oriati princes of myth, but Falcrest had stolen that image and racialized it, and Baru would not make the comparison now.

  Or had this entire thought only been an excuse to indulge in prejudice? Could she ever know?

  “He sent you to watch me, you mean,” she said.

  “Yes, my lady, he’s concerned for you. He hopes you will allow me to remain by your side.”

  “Yes, I gathered that when he sent you to seduce me.”

  “Generally seduction involves the front or the back, my lady, but rarely the side.”

  He said it very plainly, which made Baru laugh. “I don’t favor men. But I’m sure you knew that.”

  “Sometimes people are flexible.”

  “Sometimes. Not this time. Help me up.”

  She hauled herself up on his forearm. He had to throw his weight back and heave, as if he were trying to escape her grip. The gap between his slippers and his robe bared his hard black calves.

  “So you’re Apparitor’s homme fatal?”

  “Sometimes, my lady. I have many uses.”

  “Are you useful for picking up letters?”

  He was indeed. When they’d gathered the dropped mail he led her through quicklime-dessicated air to a desk occupied by what seemed to be a very patient, very still man. “The circulation desk, my lady,” Iraji said, pointing with an open hand. “And the presiding librarian.”

  A mummified corpse had been mounted to a steel ring behind the table. Hollow eye sockets stared forever into the shelves. A silver placard read:

  JAMAN RYAPOST.

  SUICIDE UPON EXALTATION. 11 SUMMER AR 101. PRESERVED IN LOVING* MEMORY

  (*WE THINK IT LIKELY THAT SOMEONE LOVED JAMAN RYAPOST)

  Suicide upon exaltation. Hm.

  Baru thought, absurdly, about killing herself.

  “Your Excellence?” Iraji asked, gently. Baru very much disliked her greed for his concern. “Are you all right?”

  “Tell Apparitor I’m frightfully upset,” she snapped. In the jellyfish light everything seemed to be underwater; looking at Iraji she had the idea that bubbles would puff from his nose. Again she thought of drowning. “Did he send you any message for me?”

  “My lord Apparitor did pass on this letter of introduction.…”

  A fresh envelope, marked, in very old-fashioned print, WELCOME TO THE CHANDLESPIDER CELL OF THE SPECIAL ADVISORY TO THE IMPERIAL THRONE. “Chandlespider?”

  “Yes, my lady. Once the Throne had multiple cells, hidden from each other.”

  “And now?”

  “To the best of my knowledge we are the only remaining cell. I understand the Throne had to be purged and rebuilt a few decades back. A period we call the Rebirth.”

  “Thus the name Renascent?” Apparitor had shuddered over that one anonymous pawn bearing the name.

  “Just so, mam. Our oldest. She initiated the, ah, period of regeneration. Before her, each member of the Throne kept their own staff. She created the Imperial Advisory to serve as a … commons of sort. The exiles who serve this keep belong to it.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “I can’t say, my lady. She’s imprinted a mark of destruction on the rumors that describe her.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Baru sighed.

  “I’m very serious, my lady.” He looked at her in absolute, boyish earnest. “She disseminates false rumors about herself, to smoke out those who inquire after her. People who pursue them vanish.”

  The power to make your own identity poisonous. What a skill that would be. Whenever they whispered to each other, That Baru likes her women too much, they would hold their throats and bubble from their noses and die.…

  She’d lied. She wasn’t tired. Tomorrow she might be tired, tomorrow this cold fire she’d inherited from Tain Hu might at last burn out. But now—

  She growled like a starved cat and tore the letter open, ripping, rattling, desperately and frighteningly hungry for the power within.

  To the future reader,

  With my fond regards,

  And my deepest condolences,

  Welcome to the arena of the rest of your life.

  If I am very lucky, and if history’s been kind, you’ve heard my true name, Honesty Kabrir. More likely you know me only as Elisiant, agent of the Emperor.

  I write this message as a man condemned. Yesterday the gang of feckless scholars and polymaths in thrall to my colleague Renascent slaughtered my theory of eidesis on the marble floors of Purifier Hall. My political support is gone, and my debtors have come calling. Those who prepared my poisons and my illegal moneys will soon testify.

  Renascent knows about my other family. Virtue guard the male sex from its worst nature! For my infidelity I will face a punishment befitting the crime. Death first, of course. I will not be their stud.

  But enough of me—

  Why would they leave my advice for you, when I’ve failed so bitterly at the One Trade? The answer, dear future initiate, is that we are cryptarchs, the people of secrets. Only the failures can be made to share their tricks.

  You cannot have Renascent’s secrets, so you’ll have to settle for me.

  Incrasticism is our Republic’s creed. The word means for tomorrow.

  In your exaltation to our Throne you join a lineage more than a century old. Understand first that the Throne has a trait that our shipbuilders would call dynamic instability. Our organization is meant to topple if not carefully maintained: and in its failure, the Throne is designed to purge all its members in an orgy of fratricide.

  Why?

  This reason first. No empire needs a camarilla of secret conspirators. Parliament, the Ministries, the Admiralty, and the Judiciary—these organs are enough to keep the blood pumping.

  We are not a government. We are not the eyes, or the ears, or the mind of the Republic. We are parasites. And if we ever cease to benefit that host, the Republic will expunge us. Understand this, my inheritor! If Aurdwynn’s first habit is rebellion, then Falcrest’s first love is revolution. Falcrest, oh Falcrest, she will lobotomize her rulers and rise up crying out from the Suettaring hilltops:

  We demand a better form of tyranny!

  It will be up to you to devise that better form.

  For the more we feed our host Republic, the hungrier it seems to grow.

  In our grand successes over the past century we have invented a monster called a middle class. Our predecessors pillaged the Ashen Sea, and now the people are accustomed to receiving that pillage. And they are accustomed to their innocence. If they learn what we do on distant shores to secure their safety and prosperity, I am certain they would hang us all. Not for the crime of what we did, mind! But for the crime of allowing them to know.

  Once I told a man in Commsweal Square that in our foreign
provinces we still force women into reparatory marriages or sterility. He laughed! Not us, he told me, not us: those things happen elsewhere, they happened once, but not in our Republic today.

  We cryptarchs have one godlike power. We have maps. We know how to change the idea of safer childbirth in a distant province into the fact of a hundred thousand red-cheeked survivors. Can you explain to me how your desire to walk across the room becomes the motion of your limbs? No, you cannot.

  My power over the empire is clearer and more true than my power over my own body.

  I believe that the fate of the entire human species balances on this brief century. We live in a narrow and closing doorway, and the forces of discord and disaster close in on us. Again and again the great empires of the past have been struck down.

  We must step forward, lest we be caught on the threshold and dragged back to ruin. You, too, will be held to account for your contribution to the great and final work, which is our quest for a theory of perfect rule: a means by which the Imperial Republic of Falcrest may be rendered causally closed, so that the sprout of every seed and the turn of every cyclone occurs in accordance with our predictions, and therefore in accordance with our decrees. Thus we may at last achieve the state of ruling without acting, a self-governing world.

  Welcome to the project.

  Kindest regards,

  The late Honesty Kabrir

  Elisiant

  “Is he real?” she asked Iraji.

  “I doubt it very much. Who could say? So many records are hidden behind unbreakable codes. But this was the letter Apparitor was given when he was exalted. Elisiant is a tradition of sorts, I think.”

  She should discourage him from liking her. Men who liked her were invariably doomed. “Would you like to take dictation?” she asked him. “So you can tell Apparitor what I write?”

  He covered his smile. “Will you strangle me for it?”

  “Not without provocation,” Baru purred, and the purr reminded her of Treatymont, pretending to flirt with Bel Latheman as he pretended not to hate her, or up in her accountant’s tower with Muire Lo, watching the city’s laundry lines blow against a low cold autumn sky, taking bets on the ducal partisans fistfighting in the plaza.