It was an even minute. Hesychast went on.
“I want you to find the secret of immortal flesh,” Hesychast said. “Farrier wants to break the Oriati Mbo apart. We think both our goals may be attained on this expedition. When you return with what we need, then … we will be reckoned.”
“Come on, Cosgrad!” Apparitor barked. “Say it!”
“It’s like this,” Farrier said, smoothly. “Renascent will judge the two of us.”
Renascent. The faceless pawn in Apparitor’s shuddering hand.
“She will select the man with the best plan for the digestion of Oriati Mbo. To that man she will grant her file of secrets. All the blackmail and perversion she has gathered in her life. And the man who takes that file, Hesychast or I … he will possess the other utterly.”
“But what expedition?” Baru cried. “Where are we going? How do you expect us to find these—incredible things? A secret to turn them on each other? Immortality? What if nobody knows? What if the Mbo just lasted a thousand years by luck? Are there scholars in the Mbo who study these things? Records? Books?”
“Of course there are,” Hesychast said.
Farrier smiled his raccoon smile.
“You,” he said, “are going to find their versions of us.”
* * *
BARU and Apparitor stared at the two older men like they’d just taken off their faces.
“Their versions of us?” Apparitor repeated.
Baru could’ve leapt up screaming. The realization struck like a thunderbolt. “You wanted me to draw them out! That was part of why you wanted the civil war in Aurdwynn, wasn’t it? Not just to draw out the Stakhieczi. You were after these Oriati cryptarchs, too.”
Hesychast stared into reflected infinities in his wine. “Whoever they are, they must be immortal. How could a civilization last so long without a steady hand at the helm?”
“I must credit Hesychast here with the beginning of the hunt.” Farrier chimed his knife against his wine flute. “Send in our colleague, please!”
Baru shot him a curious glance. He smiled. “You see, for several decades now Hesychast has had an agent seeking out this Oriati master-caste in the most unlikely place. She ought to be along shortly, with her companion.…”
“Oh no,” Apparitor breathed.
He looked at Baru with utter dread.
First came the rattle of chains. Then a snarl filtered through pores of steel.
Iraji chimed the door and cried, “Her Excellence Durance, advisor to Its Imperial Majesty, the Emperor! And her companion, whose name has been stricken!”
A man in bloodied linens and a thick leather straightjacket stumbled into the room. Wild-eyed. Shaved to the raw scalp. His face obscured by a steel muzzle that clawed all the way round his head.
He saw Baru, and shrieked, and whether he lunged at her or only fell she couldn’t tell: he went down to his knees, hard, on the stone.
She knew him. She had sat with him in Vultjag’s larder, stealing all the cheese.
Behind him came his sister.
Her brown face and burning eyes seemed adrift in the angular cantilevered mass of a quarantine gown. Veils of cotton and silk. Oiled bolts ready to receive a filtered plague mask, to clamp it tight against the seals. A wearable prison.
“Your Excellences,” said the Jurispotence Xate Yawa, exalted to the Imperial Throne. “I’ve come to make my report on the Cancrioth.”
9
… AND DURANCE
OH, for pity’s fucking sake. I’d let Baru out of my sight for half a year and she’d gone and broken herself.
When your job requires you to hand down verdicts of guilty, guilty, and most profoundly guilty you soon learn to spot the ways people break. Some will rush your pulpit and fail to kill you; some will bolt for the windows and end up in the suicide nets. And some will just sit there in the defendant’s theater, thinking.
Baru was one of those.
The poor dumb girl seemed to have developed a nervous tic. She looked at my face, then to her left, as if trying to scrub me off her vision. Perhaps she was afraid of me, remembering how close I’d come to ending her. Out of simple compassion I’d tried to keep her from getting involved in Aurdwynn—compassion for myself, mind, because I found her every dram as obnoxious as my brother thought her charming.
(My brother—)
Alas, she had an adolescent notion that her meddling was required everywhere. And Tain Hu liked her. That was what had kept me from driving Baru out of the game. Tain Hu stood up for her and my brother was glad.
(My brother is howling. His tears are filthy in the mat of his beard. His eyes are my eyes ringed in red, as if I’ve thumbed them down into his skull and his meat is welling up around them. He is screaming, screaming, I trusted you! Ku xu, I trusted you! They are taking him out of the courthouse, to the harbor, where he will be bound to the prow of a clipper and sailed round the sea till he dies—)
My brother took the revelation of my true allegiance very poorly. I’d see to him in a moment, he just needed (someone to treat him like a person, for Himu’s sake, Yawa, can’t you see what you’ve done to him? You wretched husk. The day he married into aristocracy was the day you stopped trusting him, your brother who kept you safe in the gutters, your brother who gave you the idea, Yawa, why can’t we be dukes? And instead of any comfort that would cost you anything you’re just going to give him) another dose of his tranquilizer.
I took a moment to count faces, while Olake’s howling had them distracted.
Hesychast, of course, fourteen years my junior and four years short of fifty. A ridiculously perfect meat-doll of a man. But he had kind eyes, and nervous fingers, and a deeply hidden desire to please. He’d been so shy in his recruitment that I very nearly had to stick my fingers down his throat (the third most common sexual fetish in Aurdwynn) and order him to compromise me: yes, I would serve as a deep-cover agent within Aurdwynn’s various conspiracies.
What did I want in exchange? Why—you know, it still stung how easily he’d accepted this answer—why, I would ask nothing but all the power he could offer me.
(When you are climbing a glacier you must drive pitons into the ice to secure your route. You must hammer them well. So I repeat to myself that I am the servant of Aurdwynn. I am the hierophant of the Virtues. I am nothing. The land and the people are all. Everything I do I do to save my home.)
Apparitor was here, as noisy, insolent, and difficult to kill as a flophouse full of orphans. As he smiled at me he made the Incrastic gesture against evil, hands washing each other before his face.
He’d brought my brother home for trial.
I’d been so certain that Olake would be safe with Hu. Hidden in the Wintercrests beyond the Masquerade’s reach. How had Apparitor caught him? He hadn’t been gone for nearly long enough.…
And who was this fourth person?
“Ah,” I said, casting a deshabille-thin veil over my contempt. Tests in the Cold Cellar found that prisoners responded powerfully to nudes behind thin veils. I always thought that was fascinating. The suggestion of nakedness stronger than the truth. “The wool-merchant Cairdine Farrier. I had no idea. You’re the Itinerant?”
“Your Excellence Durance!” He beamed at me. He had very good diction, and excellent pace of breath, and beneath that cultish charisma an ass-clenching sense of manic control. “I hear that ne’er-do-wells in Treatymont have been turning themselves in just so they can see you’re really gone from the courtroom. The vigor of their hate. Incredible!”
I bowed my head. “I always did wonder why Cattlson deferred to you, Farrier. I just assumed it was an idiot’s respect for a master idiot. How good to be wrong.”
And then I forced myself look straight at Baru.
Hesychast’s verdict still blew hot in my ears. He had run his tests, and judged her compromised, most terribly compromised, by Farrier’s process. Did she understand at all what had been done to her? How her ideas of happiness and fulfillment had been shaved do
wn into the certainty of grief and loneliness? Hesychast had detected Farrier’s influence in the very flicker of her eyes and the smallest confusion of her tongue … but I wanted to make my own judgment. I was not, in my heart, as wholly Hesychast’s disciple as I pretended.
I’d imagined, last time I’d seen Baru, that she would die in the snow. Her hot islander blood—that impatient, stalking, fidgeting way she had about her—she lacked the constitution for the wolf winter. But I’d been wrong. She’d lived, and my brother hadn’t been safe, and Tain Hu—
Where was Baru’s hostage?
Where was Tain Hu?
Baru flinched away from my eyes. She whirled on Apparitor. “You told me Xate Olake was dead. ‘Burned out of his hole.’”
“Sorry.” The boy shrugged. “Did you think I’d just say, oh, yes, we took him as a hostage against Xate Yawa? Hello, Yawa, pleasure to see you again in the flesh, if that’s what we’re calling your ghoulish wreckage. I see Olake’s not bearing up well. Have you finished your draft of his defense?”
I smiled very, very thinly. Every night I worked on the defense I’d use when Xate Olake went on trial in Falcrest. Pointless, of course, because the verdict would be set by then. If I failed to perform as the Throne required, Olake would certainly be lobotomized.
They’d probably make me conduct the operation.
Olake was screaming BARU and HU in gruesome polyphony: BARHU, BARHU. “Baru,” I said, with all the damnable griefs and furies of my life summoned to sustain me. “Baru, where is the duchess Vultjag?”
Cairdine Farrier smiled like a satisfied cat. Hesychast crossed his arms. My brother wailed.
“She’s dead,” Baru said, absently. “I had her executed.”
I’d seen a glacier calving once. Far away east in Starfall Bay. Something older than worlds, colder than winter, a dirty frozen mass that bared its glowing blue interior as it crashed, unstoppable and hideous, down into the sea.
Yawa fed her brother a gum-pellet of opiate. He curled up on the floor like a dog.
Baru’s meal crept up as acid. Poor Olake. Remember when he’d pretended to be a carriage driver? Remember how he’d snuck into her towertop apartment and pretended to poison her wine? His bearded grin as he stumbled into the war council at Haraerod with the Masquerade’s battle plans?
Xate Olake, who’d looked on the victorious Tain Hu and whispered, I wish she had been my daughter instead.
Xate Olake in a steel muzzle and a bloody shift. Whimpering on the floor.
Baru’s mother, Pinion, had taught her a special law, Toro Haba’s Law of Force, to explain the way two boats collided. When unequal forces meet, they always bargain fairly. One boat cannot strike another without being struck in return. Did memories obey this law? Is this how you keep grief from crushing you—whenever you are struck, you strike back from within? Your soul sustained by the equiposition of violence inside and out.
Baru tried to imagine some way to comfort Olake. Maybe she could go to him in secret and whisper, Your Grace, hope endures in me …
Then he would strangle her and chew on her spine.
“Your Excellence Durance.” Hesychast drew out a chair for Yawa to sit. “Your report on the Cancrioth, please?”
“Of course.” She wouldn’t look at Baru. Maybe her pride was wounded. She suffered a hostage, and Baru had escaped. Not monster enough, eh, Yawa? Not quite monster enough.
“The Cancrioth.”
* * *
SU Olonori was the Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn before Baru, murdered when he came too close to discovering a certain duchess’s counterfeits. Baru knew him through his notes.
Yawa had canvassed him for intelligence.
And he’d yielded a terrible trove.
Su was born in Lonjaro Mbo, where his branch of the House Olonori (of the Umbili Kingdom, of the Rate of Brown Millet) had been disowned in a squabble over the most correct and wholesome edition of the Whale Words. Like Baru, he’d been raised in an Incrastic school, and like Baru, Su was a most zealous convert to Incrasticism.
He and Yawa had bonded over their particular races’ superstitions.
For Yawa there were the ykari. When the Maia and the Stakhi slammed into the ancient Belthyc from north and west, three of the sparks that fell from the shield-wall were Himu the virtue of energy, Wydd the virtue of patience, and Devena who stood between them. Olive oil, and cedar, and the flickering flame. Not gods but virtues, and the people who had practiced those virtues so completely as to be subsumed into them.
One of ykari Himu’s aspects was cancer. The excess of life.
Yawa would tell Olonori about the curious and hideous trials she oversaw. There had been, on this day of her story, an alimony trial of grotesque particulars—did the husband have to pay pregnancy support to the wife, if the wife’s “pregnancy” was a cancerous mass which never came to term?
Olonori was disgusted beyond all reason. Yawa asked him why the cancer bothered him so terribly: didn’t he know Aurdwynn was a cruel place, rife with infanticide and miscarriage?
Thus, with the prurient thrill of a son who’d seen his father in bed, he’d told her all about the myth of the ancient and unspeakable Cancrioth.
He said:
“Once, before the Oriati had an Mbo, we tilled the uranium earth and we woke a greater power. And it came to live in us.”
* * *
“DO you know the Cancrioth?” Su Olonori whispered. The scrupulous, secretive accountant had dissolved in a bath of whiskey and terror. His pupils were immense in the lantern light. “Have you ever seen a woman in the street who seems amputated from all the life around her? A woman like the woman in your trial, whose pregnancy never ends? Have you seen the passersby make a sign like this—a sign like a horn coming out of their eye?
“Have you heard them whisper:
“‘Ayamma. She bears old life?’
“Have you been to Devimandi, the gate to the uncharted east? Have you gone down into the slithering sewers of the old city and walked among the encysted mothers-of-worms till you find lurking in a wet overflow tunnel a chemist who will sell you a poison in the blood of a living pig? Deliver that pig’s raw blood to your enemy and it will taint their seed, man or woman or laman, it does not matter. All your foe’s children born as a fluid sac with a ring of clubbed arms. Like a starfish of grief and shrieking horror.
“There is a tumor closing up the chemist’s throat. She signals to you with her hands. We sell to you this death: but for those who win a place among us, we offer everlasting life.…
“Oh, Yawa, I know what you’re thinking! Rag stories from the Filthy Continent. Savage rituals deep in the fetid jungle, where worms crawl up the dickholes of good Falcresti men. But that sensationalism is just our Republic protecting its pride. There is no Filthy Continent. Oriati history is no more hideous than our own. They invented laws and farms! They created the first calendar and outlawed slavery forever! They not only ended (most) warfare, they seduced all their conquerors!
“And when they produced abomination, it came not from savages doing unspeakable things in the jungle but from the work of their sorcerer-scientist elite. Yes! Scientists! They were the first practitioners of empiricism. In the time before the Oriati had a Mbo, sorcerers plumbed the jungle for the first medicines and prophylactics. They developed a method to test the effects of their compounds: home-group and journey-group, the basis of the experimental method. We in Falcrest cannot admit this, because it would be disastrous to confess how wholly we adopted the tools of science from our Oriati neighbors.
“But am I not an Oriati accountant? Isn’t that evidence we were once great empiricists? The old numeracy is strong in my blood.
“Anyway. Some would tell you that those first sorcerer-scientists, Undionash and Virios and Abbatai and the rest—some would tell you that after a thousand years they still live. Some would tell you that their names are even now hot on the lips of those who seek an ally to destroy Falcrest. Some would tell you so.
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“But not I. I am a good Incrastic citizen.”
* * *
BARU began to imagine dreadful things. Why was Yawa wearing that quarantine gown? Had something infected her? A horrible garment—like the shadow of a raven cast up into strange dimensions—an angular and feverish architecture, black robe with a skeleton and a superstructure, cantilevers and flying buttresses.
When Yawa fell silent, Baru almost gasped in relief. She believed in a world that could be understood, apprehended, made to work for her. Yawa’s story … did not come from that world.
Apparitor burst out in incredulity. “And you want us to go find these people? For blood’s black sake, why?”
“Hush, Svir.” Farrier patted him matronizingly on the arm. “Hesychast, tell them.”
The man-temple leaned in to command the table. “I have been hunting the Cancrioth for most of my life. We can begin with their origins in myth. As the Whale Words tell it, the Oriati Mbo was founded as a pact between all the tribes of Segu, the houses of Lonjaro, the kettles of Mzilimake, and the squadrons of Devi-naga. They came together in revulsion against the Cancrioth who ruled and enslaved them.
“After a great uprising they drove the immortal suzerains of the Cancrioth into the shadows. Some say the Cancrioth awaits the day when the Oriati will need to call on them again. Others believe they wait for the Mbo to fail, when they will retake the chattel they lost.”
Everyone had stopped eating. Baru felt triply queasy: sick at the images from the story, doubly sick at her fascination, for imagine what you could achieve if you lived forever—
And triply sick because she had missed the clues.
Four years ago, Farrier had taken their ship Lapetiare off-route on its way to Aurdwynn to visit a little Camou village called Chansee.
And where had he taken Baru?
A cancer ward.
And who had he mentioned, for the very first time in Baru’s memory?
Hesychast.
With a student’s instinct to answer first, she burst out before even thinking: “That’s why you had Xate Yawa ripping through the ilykari. The usual reasons, of course, the need to clean up superstition—but you were looking for signs of a cancer cult!”
The Monster Baru Cormorant Page 15