The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “There’s a Morrow Ministry station there. A spy house.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s where I sent the survivors of Baru’s inner circle. The Coyotes we captured.” She pulled the bone comb free with a grunt. “One of them must know something about the Oriati fleet that came to their aid. Where those ships came from. Who owned them. Where they harbored last. If that fleet had anything to do with the Cancrioth, then we track the fleet back to our targets.”

  It was a sound strategy. It would bring Baru face-to-face with everyone she’d betrayed.

  She turned away from the others, to hide her dismay. But Apparitor thought she was looking astern for their pursuers. He leapt up onto the rail to point to Scylpetaire, pursuing.

  “They can’t allow any survivors,” he said. “We’ll relay a report of their treachery to Falcrest, and the Emperor’s wrath will come down on them and their families. They’ll chase us to the ends of the world before they let us live.”

  The end of the world, Baru thought. The end of the world. Can the Cancrioth give me the end of the world? Falcrest’s utter annihilation?

  Is that what I promised Hu?

  On the mast-arm above Baru, a gull squawked and began to patter its feet.

  INTERLUDE

  RNS SULANE

  TAIN Shir walks the deck of RNS Sulane between the bombs and incendiaries and steel-tipped barbs. A weapon among weapons but she alone is free. The tragedy of the knife is the hilt. The tragedy of the crossbow is the trigger. Shir has neither. She cannot be gripped nor fired.

  She is unmastered.

  The sailors are rude with her. So be it. Etiquette is the domain of those whose power is conditional upon the respect of others, and Shir is unconditional. If she drifted alone in the void beyond the moon or if she walked among the monarchs of the ancient Cheetah Palaces she would not be altered in her capabilities or her intentions, for not one truth of her resides within a relationship to any other thing.

  The wind in the sails. The stars obscured by stormcloud. Far to the south lightning jags between the clouds as if the world might tear open into meaningless bright. Sulane is going south toward the lightning, south after Helbride, after Baru Cormorant, who escaped.

  Tain Shir let her go.

  The red-haired trifle Svirakir says that Tain Hu loved Baru. Little running Hu, who once beat her father’s horse with a poker, crying, “A ranger must disarm the rider from foot!” Poor Chafflicker kicked out the stable wall in panic and ran away. Hu reported directly to her father: the wall destroyed, and her enemy driven into rout. She was very proud.

  Those forest days. Days when Shir still believed that her father Olake and her aunt Yawa were going to save Aurdwynn from the evil Masquerade. Days before Shir understood the world and its dreadful freedoms.

  She knew Tain Hu only briefly, in the girl’s childhood, but she thinks Baru the sort that the duchess Vultjag might love. A shark-sleek woman of brooding intention, a danger and a lure. Like a dark stone beneath rough water. If you pass close to her then you might tear yourself.

  Probably Hu did love her.

  What Shir does not believe is the possibility that Baru Cormorant ever loved Tain Hu in turn.

  So she let Baru go. Not as mercy but as punishment. For in her flight Baru will reveal to Tain Shir what she treasures and what she hopes to achieve and that which she strives to protect. And then Tain Shir will take those things from her. Do you see, O ambitious one? The world does not answer to you. The code you follow will not grant you what you seek.

  Province Admiral Ormsment comes up from her war council. “Captain Shir,” she snaps. “Walk with me.”

  Shir paces her in silence.

  “They aren’t fleeing east to Isla Cauteria,” Ormsment says. “That suggests to me that they know Samne Maroyad might take my side.”

  “They’re sailing south to the Llosydanes,” Shir says.

  “Yes.” Ormsment measures her. “How did you know that?”

  “Baru has to execute the survivors of her rebellion.” The regent Ake Sentiamut, the Stakhi fighter Dziransi, Tain Hu’s occasional lover Ulyu Xe, Baru’s bodyguards, and various others. “In case they know anything compromising. That’s how the Throne operates.”

  “We’ve set course to follow them.”

  “And if they escape again? If they reach Falcrest?”

  Juris smiles as her wrath drums in her breast. Shir can hear it. “My officers turn themselves in to Samne Maroyad for execution. They’ll beg clemency for their families and the common sailors.”

  “And you?”

  “The crew knifes me to death. So they can say they turned against my madness, at the end.”

  Tain Shir looks at her, this admiral in her second prime. Silver-haired, slim, sunspots on skin of a warm promising brown. It is spring in Aurdwynn now. The silted rivers will be the color of Ormsment as they inundate the fields.

  She smells rage, rage pent up inside the admiral like whiskey in a cask of smoked cherry. It reminds Shir of her own fury when she came to know the true order of the world.

  “What happened to Shao Lune?” she asks.

  Ormsment grimaces. Her staff captain vanished during the keep assault. “Saved her own neck, I expect. You didn’t tell me she was compromised.”

  Shir is indifferent.

  Ormsment seizes her by the elbow. “Some of the marines say you had a chance to kill Baru. The ship whispers that you let her go.”

  “I missed,” Shir says.

  “The fuck you did.”

  “Reprimand me, then.”

  “You know I will. I hold this ship together, Shir. My authority. You can’t be seen to get off easy.”

  Shir shrugs off her jacket and strips her workshirt. She accepts the world as it is and the world accepts her thus. She is not mastered. What is done to her cannot confine what she will do.

  “What are you doing?” Ormsment says, not out of surprise but curiosity. “Are you willing to be lashed?”

  “No lashes.” Shir kneels to untie her boots. “I volunteer for the keel.”

  “What?” Ormsment stares in astonishment. The sergeant-at-arms and his marines flinch as if Tain Shir has just doused herself in lamp oil and reached for a smoke.

  “I volunteer for the keel.”

  She walks barefoot to the prow. Here the keelhauled are shackled and thrown under the ship to drag against the razor barnacles of the copper-jacketed hull. Most pop out the stern drowned or mad.

  The sailors stare at Shir in warrior awe. The scar-streaked hatch of her back, clamped shut over brute muscle. Her pillar-thick legs. Heavy arms and strangler’s hands all limber and loose. Upon her tall torso one of her breasts is cut crosswise by an old and devastating scar. The soft of her gut would disqualify her from the gymnast pageants in Falcrest but she is not a gymnast nor is her work a pageant.

  “King of fucking kings,” Ormsment breathes. “What a wreck they’ve made of you.”

  In Falcresti poems they say that women are the fairer sex, blessed with smooth skin and bright eyes and a shape ineffably more compelling to the artist. Men write these poems, mostly. In Segu Mbo, where there is a matriarchy of sorts, they write that men are the fairer sex, beautiful, disposable ephemera who pass among women and die young of violence.

  Shir doesn’t care who’s fairer. She knows her birthright. A body that can survive the wilderness while sick and wounded and bearing child. She knows that she can dash brains with a stone. She knows how to take a punch on the chin, or the breast, or the gut. She knows that the best of men have strength and speed beyond her own, as the bear has strength on the wrestler and the catamount has speed on the runner, but still they fear the human for the human is more violent. She is more violent.

  “I can’t keelhaul you,” Ormsment says. “If you don’t drown you’ll die of infection in your cuts. I need you to fight.”

  “I won’t die.”

  “Don’t be stupid. You’re flesh like anyone else.”

&
nbsp; Shir looks back at the sailors. They are on the deck and in the rigging, on mast-top and yardarm, caught at their posts by the sight of her scars and her muscle and her fat. She is flesh like anyone else.

  And what the flesh can do when it knows itself.

  “Behold,” she says.

  She throws herself from the bowsprit. Impact is a black star and a cold concrete slap. She plunges down. The frigate comes at her, over her, a titan of wood and rope hurled against the waves at sixteen miles an hour. The copper jacket is heavy as blood in the dark light. Barnacles jut like sharp hooves to trample her.

  Tain Shir dives into the warship. Under it. Hand over hand she pulls herself beneath and along the fatal hull.

  When she climbs the stern and hauls herself onto the ratlines with the ocean streaming off her shoulders and her breath hard in her chest she will speak into the awed silence. She will order Juris Ormsment to send Scylpetaire south to Taranoke and claim Baru’s parents.

  If the woman wants to spend those who love her for power, then Shir will help her spend.

  INTERLUDE

  ADMIRALTY WAR PLOT

  IT was thundering in Falcrest, the City of Sails, Old King Poison, and the fire brigades were out in full array, waiting in their boats beneath the veranda of the canal on the Nehr ab-Gamine for a lightning strike to start the bells and the bidding. Lindon Satamine, the Empire Admiral, watched them as his own open-topped skiff slipped past, and, impetuously, because he had burnt himself terribly in the lightning-struck expedition camp and so (he supposed) he was also someone who went into fire, he saluted the brigade captain.

  She looked straight back at him across the stippled canal water, saw his uniform and insignia, and mouthed, Coward.

  Well, Lindon thought dryly, though the rain pounded his sealskin drape and dripped down his long face to caress the burn scars down his throat, there’s me taught to be polite.

  The city wanted war. The nation wanted war. And virtue help Lindon if he had to provide one, for he and Svir would not survive.

  White light split the sky. A carillon of thunder. Lindon closed his eyes and imagined the bolt carrying him away, into the east, down the jagged quicksilver sky. “Landed up on the Suettaring, I should think,” Brilinda Vain, the Censorate Admiral riding in his skiff, judged, “and with any luck it’ll burn down the whole Slaughterhouse.”

  “Tut-tut, Admiral,” Lindon said, mindful of the Parliamentary agents who infested his staff. But the idea did tug a little grin up under his mask. The Slaughterhouse markets were betting hard on war, and on a brutal purge of the Navy’s officers before that war, including he himself. Which was not to say Brilinda Vain herself was loyal, probably Province Admiral Croftare had already turned her, but Lindon found his comfort where he could. Even in the invented sympathy of his betrayers.

  He looked up into the rain and the lightning and he thought, Svir, where are you? When will it be time for us to go? For I am afraid, love, that we are running short.

  The skiff came into the Admiralty docks among a great upset of white pelicans, and a squad of marines hurried the admirals inside with their skins lifted up over their heads. The Admiral’s Gutter got them in the back way, Lindon thinking the whole while, as they walked half-bowed through tunnels of ancient ceramic tile like an old bathhouse, of his predecessor Empire Admiral Juristane, who had vanished, one day, between the Gutter’s entrance and its inner door. No one had ever admitted to the act, which meant, often enough, it was the Emperor’s doing.

  They came in to War Plot, where the white lights had been doused to hide the motion of shadows under the doorframes from any eavesdroppers, where the great secret map waited on its pedestal with its scattered balsa miniatures. And Lindon gritted his teeth for the daily battle he fought to retake his own headquarters from the woman who wanted his flag.

  She was here already, of course. She always got here first when news came in. Lindon might be Empire Admiral of the Navy, but he was not first in the navy’s esteem, and especially not when the navy smelled war wind.

  “Report,” he commanded.

  She looked down at him from her seat at the Admiral’s Pulpit. Her mask was the old red color of dead blood and Lindon thought, Khamtiger, khamtiger, what do you eat? Your dogs and your cattle and your two running feet. Once he’d slipped up and referred to her as khamtiger while drinking. Svir had taken him by the hands and captured his eyes and said, “Lindon, do not do her work for her. Do not build her up in your mind. She’s only one woman.”

  But he was frightened, anyway, of Ahanna Croftare the Khamtiger, the Man-killer. She had fought in war: she had taken prizes. Lindon, come up through the Storm Corps, had never helmed a ship in battle. He was and always had been a peacetime admiral.

  “Rumors out of the north,” Ahanna Croftare said. “From Fifth Fleet.” She had a voice smoked rough by fires, on Kingsbane and Hygiatis and Mollify before. The khamtiger was a beast of myth in Devi-Naga who rode the monsoon and the tsunami, but the khamtiger was also real. Storm-tossed and ragged they came ashore on the waves from wherever the sea had plucked them. And with no territory to hunt, with starvation like a worm in them, they went for the children and the weak.

  Lindon took off his sealskin. Rain spattered the shining tiles. “What rumors?”

  “Sulane and Scylpetaire left Treatymont. Sailed east. Haven’t been seen since.”

  “Did Province Admiral Ormsment report why?”

  Those teeth of hers were watching him. That nose of hers was sniffing for his sweat. “She’s aboard Sulane. She left her flag with Welterjoy’s captain. She isn’t planning to come back.”

  “Oh kings,” Lindon said, in utter horror. Not now! Not with Svir away, with his arsenal of leverage and secrets out of play; not with Parliament eyeing the Navy like a fat foal, and the Oriati waiting for one loud voice to call them to their final war, and rumors, nightmare rumors, of a Kettle spilled out into the world, and of black blood leaking from a swollen eye.

  With more urgency than he wanted to betray: “Did she resign? Did she leave a confession?”

  “I don’t know,” Croftare lied. It was navy custom for the Empire Admiral to remain isolated from his Province Admirals, so he would not be tainted when they fell. But that gave the Province Admirals room to maneuver, room Lindon might soon regret.

  He knew what he had to do. He had done it in all his nightmares. “You must denounce her. No matter what she intends she might be after Oriati, and we cannot take that chance. We cannot be blamed for a war. Get in front of Parliament and call her a traitor, before Parliament learns about her and does the same to you.”

  “I won’t,” Ahanna Croftare said, with that look Lindon hated, the look of a woman who had a fire inside her which Lindon would never know. “You destroy her if you must. I won’t be part of it.”

  “Don’t be proud,” he begged her. “If Ormsment goes down, you’ll fall with her—you and Maroyad and you too, Brilinda, you’re all too close—”

  “I think she’s gone after Baru Cormorant,” Croftare said.

  If he were not in his uniform, if the Empire Admiral’s maelstrom pins were not fixed cold on his collar, if he lacked that armor of authority, then Lindon would have staggered. Svir was out there seeing to Baru Cormorant. So if Ormsment went for Baru she would find Svir—

  “You motherfucker,” he said, with appalled and genuine admiration. “You hope she wins. You’re waiting to see if she turns up with Baru dead and Apparitor in her pocket. And since you’ve told me, I dare not act against you until I know he’s safe from you. Is that right?”

  Ahanna Croftare the Province Admiral of Falcrest declined to comment, except to hold his gaze, daring him to show a little fire, a little black-eyed shark-toothed aggression, daring him, in short, to go to Parliament and demand that his admirals be purged for their disloyalty.

  But he couldn’t move against her. Not until Svir was safe beyond her reach. And somewhere out there right now Svir would be thinking, I cannot move ag
ainst Ormsment too sharply, until I know Lindon is safe.…

  “Damn you,” he said, with soft, respectful hatred. “Damn you both.”

  ACT TWO

  THE FALL OF THE LLOSYDANES

  11

  SCYTALES AND SHAO LUNE

  HELBRIDE ran south on bright spring seas.

  The mutiny followed.

  “Apparitor!” Baru dashed through the clipper’s middeck, through the low-hanging beams and steel hooks. Helbride’s guts boomed with energy. The roar of voices and the smash of hammers, the shriek of scalpels on glass, the groan of timber and rope as Helbride ran on the wind; among the sickbeds the stink of blood and alcohol and hot amputation saws. Cooks boned their fish over blood gutters.

  Helbride was as loud and wet as a living thing.

  She broke through streams of sailors calling out in Apacaho creole, skittered around carpenter’s tools, vaulted a barrel only to trip on loose ropes and batter her elbows against stored timbers as she fell. When she stood she slammed her head into the tarnished arm of a spare anchor. Grunting and swearing she staggered into the stern, where a few slender slot cabins served the ship’s passengers, surgeons’ work, and Apparitor himself.

  “Svir!” she shouted, because using his name in front of the crew would irritate him. “Svir, wake up!”

  He had disassembled the captain’s cabin and the wardroom to make more space for survey instruments and maps. Now he slept in a cubby of varnished pine with his hammock, his books, a lacquered wooden map nailed to the outer wall. Bottles of The Grand Purifier vodka and golden Aurdwynni whiskeys glimmered warm under a whale-oil lantern. But that warmth did not reach Apparitor, who stood like a ribbon of pale shark cartilage, unshirted, with his hair down his back and his knuckles in his teeth.

  Baru stared in astonishment at his naked back. He had terrible, branching jellyfish-sting scars, pink and pale, all over him. They were absolutely not the wounds of a lash. He looked as if he’d put a jellyfish on as a cap, and let it sting the whole height of him.…