The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Baru held, as a principle, the impossibility of escape from trained killers once they had you cornered. You could not count on luck against soldiers: you had to be out of their way before they moved. “Should we flee?”

  “Yes. Definitely. Only—we’d miss this important dinner. So—”

  “If we were ready to flee at the very first sign of attack—”

  “—and we lingered just long enough to learn what His Glistenings and His Smugness wanted from us—”

  Baru giggled. Apparitor stared at her. “Sorry,” she said. “Glistenings. It’s funny. He does sort of … glisten.”

  “Don’t think this means I don’t hate you,” he said.

  * * *

  “I’VE been putting off your armament out of spite,” he said. “I suppose you should have these now. Behold. A cryptarch’s weapons.”

  His crew was moving cargo out to Helbride, and he’d made her come down to the yard to choose what she wanted to keep and what could stay. “Just a few,” he cautioned her.

  Baru goggled. “A few?” Silken leisure jackets, stiff high-collared sherwani, sheer many-layered robes and chemises to advertise the body’s form, a needle-narrow black waistcoat-suit, sporting wear with integral corsetry, heavy Grendlake denims, formal bathing costumes for occasions when one must be rakishly and confidently immodest, gloves in white and pale pink and deep gray and black, gowns of various daring and prudishness, an arsenal of formidable boots and finely cobbled shoes, huge arrays of Oriati khangas with prints that ranged from dour to parrot plumage, jewelry masculine and feminine and even lamine, scarves of wool and chiffon, a jeweled tooth-brace, leathers, jodhpurs, bracelets for the arm and the thigh, several codpieces of masculine profile, metal horns so a woman could piss while standing, a set of Devi-naga squadron caftans, dozens of plain work-tunics in black and white, pleated skirts, a navy formal uniform without insignia, a strophium with structure and padding to flatter the breasts, a strophium to bind breasts flat, finger-thimbles, a cloak made of a dead silver wolf. Thousands of hours of expert labor, and all of it, so far as she could see, tailored to her measurements.

  “They’re magnificent,” she protested. “I’m not qualified! You pick. You’re always dressed like a fine dandy.”

  “Sailors are intrinsically fashionable,” he sniffed. “Choose! Just pretend the outfits are dukes and duchesses who adore you, and thereby eliminate them one by one. Oh, blast”—he snapped his fingers—“but that would leave you nude, wouldn’t it?”

  “Ass.”

  She made her choices, favoring the practical, and the occasional instrument of intimidation. The pissing horns were a clever idea; she never wanted another infection from squatting in the woods.

  She expected Apparitor’s taunts with every choice, but he was pensive, pacing. “Do you know anything?” he asked.

  “We’re to be sent on an expedition.”

  “Where? For what?” He stared through the portcullis, at the ships. “I need to get home, I must be sure of—my finances, et cetera. Ah! Speaking of!”

  He presented her with a fan of gorgeous red envelopes, sealed in silver and marked with names. Payo Mu. Ravi Sharksfin. Barbitu Plane. Baru gasped into her glove. “False papers? Gods, are those—are those complete sets?”

  “That’s right. Date stamped, examined, notarized…” He flicked the back of the fan with his thumb. “These are complete lives. Assembled in real time by a dedicated clerk: twenty-two years of work.”

  “Legends,” Baru breathed. That was what you called a comprehensive false identity, immune to all inspection. A legend. “I get three? Do you know what these would sell for?”

  “They wouldn’t. Don’t get any ideas.”

  “Are they imprinted on me?”

  “One’s transferable.” He touched the Barbitu Plane envelope. “The identity has a woman’s name, but the race and features have been ambiguated. Don’t hand it over to the first pretty girl you meet, all right? The other identities are a bit flexible, too—”

  The keep’s great chime sounded: it was first dog watch, and dinner was beginning. Apparitor piled more envelopes into her arms. “Accounts, accounts, here you are—a list of the banks and names, everywhere from Grendlake to the Llosydanes. The list’s enciphered, the spice word is TAINHU, bit of a joke, see, so you can keep using her to get what you want.”

  Baru tore the corner of one of the legends. “Be careful!” she shouted, as if Apparitor had made her do it. But he wasn’t paying attention. Sweat-slick skin under the rim of his mask.

  “Svir,” she whispered, trying out his personal name. It felt wrong. “Is it so bad? Will Ormsment really attack us? Has she any chance?”

  His throat bobbed and smoothed and went hard with tension. “My lover,” he said, “is the Empire Admiral Lindon Satamine. We put him in the Empire Admiralty to control the navy, especially Ahanna Croftare and her little club of Merit Admirals. Ormsment is one of hers. For all my life with him I’ve studied the navy’s capabilities, against the day they turn on us.

  “I would not wager against them if I had every jackal in the Mbo.”

  * * *

  SHE chose a slim sherwani and trousers for dinner, in case they had to flee.

  As she came up the stairs the string quartet struck up “In Praise of Human Dignity.” Iraji, sleek and cunning in a black silk waistcoat and piratical pants, flourished, struck the steel chime with his rod, and cried, “Her Excellence Agonist, advisor to Its Imperial Majesty, the Emperor!”

  From within the dining room there came soft applause. What’s the sound of six hands clapping, Baru thought, if they’re clapping in service to the Throne? Whatever sound they make, you can’t blame them for it. Ha ha.

  She went in. They’d prepared the evening-room with purple gauze across the western windows. Cutouts set into the hive-glass made contoured shadows. The oil lamps burnt soft and clean, sweeter than whale fuel.

  Cairdine Farrier the Itinerant, Cosgrad Torrinde the Hesychast, and Prince Svirakir the Apparitor sat on three sides of a six-sided table. All were half-masked in white porcelain, and the polestar glinted around their right eyes. They were applauding: Farrier with great gusto and his hands above his head, Hesychast with perfect form and politely inclined eyes, Apparitor with two stiff palms and his eyes rolled halfway back. The servers had already laid out the full course, with flutes of clear cool water and berries for dessert.

  “So.” Baru sat. “Empty seats. Are we expecting more company?”

  Farrier’s eyes danced. “We have two special guests for you, Baru.”

  Her chest ached with trepidation. Her parents? Would he dare?

  “My hearty congratulations,” Apparitor said, unctuously, “for all your very hard work in Aurdwynn! Camping in the pristine wilderness for a few months while I ran around positioning the pieces. I do hope you didn’t exhaust yourself taking all the credit.”

  “Do shut up, Svir,” Farrier said. His beard complemented the mask very nicely. “A toast, if I may? To the first unbound Special Advisor in some years. May she outlive the others!”

  “Long life,” Hesychast murmured, raising his flute. “Come, Svir, come along.”

  “Suck my cock, Cosgrad,” Svir snapped, to Farrier’s soft tut-tut, but he put his glass up. Baru chimed her flute against theirs and drank. Pure dew-distilled water. One drop of lemon. The glass flawlessly cast, one piece, from kelp ash.

  The string quartet finished “In Praise” on the third verse. Silently they ushered themselves out.

  “I was just telling these men,” Farrier said, “about the history of unleveraged cryptarchs, which is to say, those who lack a hostage or other control. Quite a gamble, if the records are to be believed! More power, but more risk. Rather like double or nothing. Although it’s always turned up nothing, so far.”

  “He means,” Apparitor said, “that you’re going to die.”

  Baru wasn’t sure she’d expected anything but death since midwinter. She began to serve herself. Ca
rve the whitefish first, then pluck the small bones from the flesh with the steel clasp. She made a little pile of them. “I’d like this matter of the duchess closed,” she said. “It troubles me that my colleagues expected me to fail. I prefer to be relied on for success. Now, with respect to those two warships offshore—”

  “Apparitor’s problem,” Hesychast said. “Farrier and I are unconcerned.”

  “Unconcerned?”

  “Yes, these two fucking gat szich neath castrated shit fucks”—Apparitor jabbed his chopsticks at the two other men—“are smug in the certainty that the navy won’t touch them! Too much navy money depends on too many parliamins under their control, which, they assure me, is very good protection against crossbows and fire.”

  “It’s your job to control the navy,” Farrier said, helping himself to a candied flower and a bowl of nihari with sheep brain. “If the man you put in place can’t do that, it’s hardly our fault.”

  “The old witch admirals don’t respect a young explorer,” Apparitor snapped, “I told you that when we selected him—”

  Hesychast made a soft sound in his throat. Apparitor shut up like he’d been poked with a hot brand.

  The eugenicist said, “Lindon’s purpose is to provoke the Merit Admirals. Just as Baru’s was to provoke Aurdwynn. Whether he survives is up to you.”

  A moment of taut silence. Then Apparitor reached across the table to crack a clam open with his hands. “Did you know,” he said to Baru, “that traditionally this meal is a presentation of hostages? When I had my first dinner they brought Lindon in with an envelope. It was his indictment for traffic with foreign royalty. It’s still on deferment, pending trial. Clever, hm?”

  “Very,” Baru agreed, and she felt a shiver of nameless not-quite-grief, a bittersweet acknowledgment of what might have been. Imagine Tain Hu here among them. Suffering in muzzled silence. Looking for her chance to kill one of them, or more, before they shot her dead.

  * * *

  FARRIER and Hesychast began a strange ritual. Hesychast poured two flutes of deep red wine. Farrier produced a vial of white powder. “Ready?”

  Hesychast covered his eyes. “I’m ready.”

  Swiftly Farrier unscrewed the vial, passed his hand over both glasses, and deposited the powder into Hesychast’s flute. He cuffed the vial away. “Open your eyes. Choose the safe glass.”

  For an instant Hesychast watched Farrier. Then, suddenly, his attention was on Baru; she tried to stiffen herself but it was too late—he winked at her.

  He took the flute closer to Farrier and drained it.

  Farrier drank the poisoned cup. “Gack. Waste of good wine!”

  “I win,” Hesychast said. “Where do we stand now? Eleven and eight, your favor?”

  “It’s salt, only salt,” Farrier assured Baru. “But I trust the game is obvious?”

  “It’s called the poisoner’s dilemma,” Hesychast said. “How do you make a decision when your decision depends on someone else’s choice? And when he’s modifying his choices based on his own predictions of yours? This is the basis of the theory of yomi, which is the art of knowing your opponent’s choice before they do.”

  “Oh, enough foreplay,” Apparitor snapped. “I want to know what you’re going to inflict on the rest of us.”

  Hesychast and Itinerant looked at each other. The seam of hate so thick and sweet it could’ve come out by the dripping handful. Hate. The filthy friendly hate of men who were once enemies, and reconciled, and came apart again: Baru knew it by the sugar stink. Once, in the winter, she saw the field surgeons try to drain a man’s abscess, but the abscess went deep and deeper into him, and it would not run dry.

  “Oriati Mbo must be digested,” Hesychast said. “There are ten of them for every one of us. Ten years of their history for every one of ours. We cannot get toward the closure of our Empire, the salvation of our species, without incorporating Oriati Mbo. The time has come to finish the work. The question is not when or why to accomplish it, but exactly how.”

  “And you,” Farrier said, looking not at Apparitor but straight at Baru, “will answer that question. You will bring us what we need to conquer and possess the thousand-year Mbo.”

  “What is that?” she whispered.

  “I want the secret of immortality,” Hesychast said.

  “And I,” Farrier said, “want the secret that will turn the Mbo against itself.”

  * * *

  BEFORE these past weeks, it had never occurred to Baru that a nation could resist Falcrest’s slithering approach. Taranoke had lived by trade before the Mask, and by that trade it had been conquered. The Oriati were traders of everything. How could they resist?

  If she hadn’t seen it in the Great Game she would not have believed it. The Oriati would not succumb. Not to Falcrest’s money or to Incrastic hygiene; not to honey or to lye.

  “Twenty-six years since the Armada War.” Hesychast tapped his glass. “Twenty-six years we’ve tried and failed to compromise the Oriati. Failed fiscally, failed socially, failed ideologically. I ask my Oriati friends—” Something passed between the two men here. A temblor of utter loathing. Hesychast went on smoothly. “I ask them, what is it that eats our people, turning them native or sending them home in despair? They say it’s—”

  “Magic,” Apparitor said, gleefully. “Fucking magic. Sorcery and witchcraft.”

  “It’s not magic,” Farrier snapped. “It’s a social factor we don’t understand. Something to do with the trim ideology, perhaps. The communal spirit.”

  Hesychast nodded. On this the two men seemed to be in perfect agreement. “The central mystery of the Oriati. How have they remained in a state of functional, stagnant prosperity for a thousand years?”

  “Ah,” Farrier protested, “that’s only if you accept the various ages as one continuous civilization—”

  “Technicalities.” Hesychast waved him off. “A thousand years. The Cheetah Palaces didn’t last that long, nor the Jellyfish Eaters, nor the classical Maia. And perhaps neither will we. By size and sheer variety the Oriati Mbo ought to be in constant chaos. Certainly, in every conceivable measure their lives are inferior to ours. They die more often, and younger. They have less wealth and fewer opportunities to climb society. They suffer pitiful diseases. They are our inferiors in every way … except that they’re happier. They’re happier than us.”

  “It’s as if everything we do to them is somehow absorbed. Countered. Nullified.” Farrier looked at Hesychast in feverish, hateful excitement, and Baru flinched when he turned to her. “As if they’ve been rendered—”

  “Causally closed.” Baru sat bolt upright. “Is that what you’re afraid of? They have the secret you need?”

  “Exactly!” Hesychast slammed his fists on the table in excitement. “They have the key to an eternal empire. By accident or ancient design they know how to endure—even if they don’t know they know.”

  “But of course,” Farrier said, his eyes locked on Baru’s, begging for her keenest attention, “he and I do not agree on the nature of that secret. He believes it is fleshly. Physical. A medicine or technique of indoctrination. I fear something far worse.…”

  Hesychast silent now. Farrier went on:

  “Imagine an idea like a disease. It spreads because it makes people happy. It makes them happy by convincing them to be content with what they have. Why invent a better fire when you can feel warm in the cold? Why save your children when you can shrug off their deaths? The Oriati Mbo, they say, is a happy land. A land of ancient philosophers and artists. They take care of each other and they accept their lot in life. And so they do not need to better that lot.

  “Can you imagine a greater threat to our destiny? A more terrible fate than pleasant, blissful decay?”

  Hesychast and Farrier fell back into their chairs, breathing hard. Baru stared at them with her chopsticks halfway to her mouth, quite paralyzed. She was thinking many thoughts at once. One was a thread of fury. When she had asked her teachers in sc
hool why she’d been happier before the Masquerade’s arrival, they had told her just what Farrier now said about the Mbo. The primitives were always happier in their ignorance. Before they realized what they lacked.

  Some part of all this was Incrastic smoke. But Farrier and Hesychast thought that smoke was solid.

  “You want immortality,” she said. “And you want them turned on each other, Farrier? So you can get your schools into them? Your coins? Your roads?”

  Farrier nodded. His eyes squeezed shut. “I know there are very good people in the Mbo. But ask yourself, please, what does the Mbo have to offer us? What medicines? What sciences? What is worthwhile about their society?”

  Baru did not trust herself to speak. A tiny part of her whispered, At home, on Taranoke, what hope did you have to learn the world’s true ways? Isn’t he right?

  “We can save the people,” Farrier said. “But their history, their traditions, their literature … it’s all tainted. Incrasticism must be introduced.”

  “And that’s why you’re sending Baru?” Apparitor was curious now, in spite of his fury. “Because you’ve tested her immunity. You think she can’t be seduced.”

  “I can’t be,” Baru said. “I know it.” And she squeezed a phantom fist shut around the imagined shape of Taranoke, its black beaches and obsidian promontories, the sharp coral of the thriving reefs. She squeezed until her fist bled. She could not be seduced.

  Of course, she only knew the precise outline of the island from a Masquerade survey map.

  Apparitor rose up in his chair in delight. “Have either of you told her about the Reckoning of Ways? Does she know?”

  Farrier clucked and rolled his eyes. Hesychast’s big shoulders went hard.

  “My good great cock! You haven’t told her!” Apparitor clapped. “Shall I do it?”

  “Both of us—” Hesychast began, while Farrier spread his hands and said, “Our plans both require—” They looked at each other, each attempted to yield the floor, each claimed it again with a little inhalation, and then both turned to the wall clock. Perhaps Hesychast took the even minutes, and Farrier the odd.