The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “What, then?”

  Mr. Calcanish’s eyes traced the seams of her gloves. Lingered on the glittering pins in her cuff. He swallowed nervously, sensually, and met her eyes. Aminata felt a thrill of power.

  “Obviously the Emperor desires an Oriati civil war.”

  “Why?”

  “Once they’ve ground each other down, we can step in and save them.”

  Aminata was faintly disappointed to hear such pacifism from him. Oriati Mbo might be huge and old, but so was a tar pit. One couldn’t dilute or purify a tar pit. It had to be burnt off.

  She asked a clarifying question, which was faintly unwomanly, as women were supposed to intuit subtlety: but fuck it. “Who would possibly cause the Mbo to have a civil war?”

  “Cairdine Farrier,” Calcanish said, with a wry sadness she didn’t understand. “And Kindalana.”

  Aminata’s whiskey did not even jump. She was perfectly steady against surprise, even the surprise of two very familiar names. Kindalana, who Abdumasi Abd had seen in his tormentor’s face. And Cairdine Farrier, Baru’s patron. The man who had convinced Aminata that she needed to terrify Baru out of any affections she might hold … lest she come to a worse fate.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  * * *

  “CAIRDINE Farrier is a popular public figure,” Calcanish explained, “who wants an Oriati civil war. And the closer Falcrest and Oriati Mbo come to war, the stronger he becomes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there are many Oriati who would prefer a peaceful surrender to open war. The closer that war, the more concessions Farrier can extract from them.”

  Kindalana of Segu was one of those Oriati. She was the so-called Amity Prince, elected-to-birth Oriati royalty, and she came from the same Mbo nation as Aminata, if not the same tribe. For at least seven years she’d lived in Falcrest, working to achieve the outrageous and unlikely goal of an Article of Federation which would make Oriati Mbo part of the Imperial Republic, Falcrest’s hugest province.

  “But more of them,” Aminata countered, “would surely prefer war? Being a proud and unbiddable race?”

  “More of us, surely? You being Oriati?”

  “I’m a federated citizen of Falcrest,” Aminata warned him. “I’m not part of the Mbo.”

  “You shouldn’t be ashamed to call yourself Oriati!” Their food arrived: he spoke right over it. “I know Kindalana through business. You’re very much like her as she was in her youth. A great bit taller, of course, but she was brilliant, just brilliant. A credit to your race.”

  Aminata stowed away her irritation. “What about Cairdine Farrier? I knew him, actually.”

  “Did you?” Calcanish said, and somehow a certain heaviness of eyelid, a wrinkle of the lips, implied a kind of disgust.

  “Not in that sense,” Aminata reassured him (damn the women of her nation, for giving the world the impression they were all cads). “He was very proper.” In fact Aminata could never shake the feeling that he was somehow afraid of her.

  “Oh, I’m sure.” Calcanish tried his dish, and his eyes slitted in pleasure. Aminata enjoyed that expression, very superficially. He had what sailors might call, at the height of drunken articulation, a fuckable face. “Well, as I understand it, Cairdine Farrier is in favor with the Emperor, and everyone says this Baru Cormorant is Farrier’s new protégé.…”

  “I’ve heard that, yes, but do you know exactly what they might want? In the…” She kissed her fingertip in thought. “The grand sense?”

  Calcanish laughed. “Of course I do! Whenever he has an idea, the bastard writes a book.”

  She laughed, too. “That’s true, he does, doesn’t he?”

  “He’s laid it all out. He wants to walk us up to the very edge of war, to the moment when everyone’s clawing around for any other choice. When war seems inevitable, Farrier will leap onto the stage and reveal some digusting secret that turns the Oriati against each other—”

  “Like what?”

  “Does it matter? As the Oriati turn on each other, Farrier will offer his support to the pro-Falcrest faction; that is, Kindalana’s faction. Money. Roads. Development of their territory. Schools and ideas. Ships, even—I shouldn’t expect our navy to escape his control. He’ll do to Oriati Mbo exactly what he’s done to Sousward and Aurdwynn and all the rest.” Calcanish bit his fork too hard. A ferocious pain screwed up his face, a pain very much like hate. “Of course his protégés will take the blame for his crimes. He always uses them up, drives them mad, and casts them aside. I expect he already has his Baru woman luring the warhawk admirals to the drowning-stone—”

  Aminata choked on a chicken bone. She tried to cough it out in polite silence. Calcanish was not deceived: in an instant he was at her side, arms round her, pulling hard into her gut. She spat the bone into her napkin.

  “You mean,” she rasped, “Baru’s trying to purge the navy?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “She’s on a mission to cause, and then destroy, a navy mutiny?”

  “Well, I imagine so.” He touched her throat solicitously, probing for lumps, his fingers precise and strong. “Farrier would need the navy under his control.”

  Yes. He would need to be rid of the women Aminata admired most.

  Oh, Baru, no. Was that why she had written a letter to Aminata? To invite her into the honeypot?

  Aminata threw her whiskey down her bone-cut throat. It made terrible sense. Baru had already betrayed the navy once. Why stop there? Why not help arrange a purge? If she did it in service of the Emperor, who could blame her? And she could get rid of Ormsment, who probably had a grudge against her for Welthony Harbor.…

  Only—only—Aminata had told Baru, told her so often, that she wanted to be an admiral. She’d said that on the last night they spoke, when they got drunk and beat up one of Xate Yawa’s spies.

  Baru hadn’t written between that night and her recent invitation to mutiny. As if she’d discarded Aminata as a loss, until she suddenly became useful again …

  “Lieutenant Commander,” Calcanish murmured, “what’s wrong?”

  She set down the tumbler. Such bubbled, ugly glass—whoever had imported it couldn’t afford quality. “I have to get back to my ship.”

  “I understand,” he said, with an expression of pleasantly ill-hidden regret. “That’s too bad. Well, here’s the key to the apartment on Jamascine where I’ve put up the Aurdwynni refugees. The address is written inside. I’ll happily turn them over to the navy’s custody. May I take your bill?”

  She shook her head. A woman who turned up at a dinner without a way to pay was a grossly masculine woman indeed. “I have a navy credit stamp. I already gave the papers to the waiter.”

  “Wonderful.” He stood and offered his arm. Everything he did seemed to involve the ripple of small muscles, like an anatomy show. “May I escort you to the dock?”

  She wanted to stop thinking about Baru. She wanted to stop thinking. “I would love an escort.” She took his hand and pointed toward the back. “Would you like to follow me?”

  “But, Lieutenant Commander, the docks are down that way, this is the way—”

  “To the alley, yes. Am I being too forward?”

  “Oh,” he said.

  * * *

  SHE dragged him out the back, across the driftwood ramp that bridged the kitchen slops, into the quiet well-kept alleyway that she had suspected might be here. “Take your gloves off,” she ordered, leaving hers on.

  “Are you propositioning me?”

  “Yes, I’m trying to fuck you.”

  “But we’ve just met!”

  “I’m going to be on a ship for a long time and I’m impatient. One tryst, right here, and I won’t take on or offer any obligations of contact. Do you understand?”

  He blinked at her, rather owlishly, a curiously hesitant and intellectual face on a man so self-assured. “I’m not sure I ought to…”

  “If you don’t like Oriati women, just say it
.”

  “No,” he said, without defensiveness. “It’s just, without any offense, that you seem young.”

  “Get over yourself,” she said, “we’re not getting married.”

  His fingers played over the buttons of his coat. “It’s not proper.…”

  “No one’s ever gotten off on propriety.”

  He laughed. “Trust me, mam. Someone has gotten off on everything.”

  Aminata hooked her cover on a protruding brick. Fresh sea wind caressed her scalp. She closed her eyes, and sighed, and stretched against the wall. “You knew this important Oriati woman when she was my age, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Kindalana? Don’t tell me you didn’t want to fuck her. Everyone goes for important Oriati women. They’re so unattainable.”

  A tremble of passion across his broad face. It took a moment for him to master himself. “You seem quite attainable,” he said. His eyes had gone casually dead, neither eager nor fearful, simply resigned. Aminata realized, with a soiled thrill, that he must be a whore of some kind. He’d said he was a womanizer, yes. Was he ashamed? Was he debased that she’d recognized him as wanton? She liked that a little. Men had strange reasons to proposition her, racialized and fraught. Whores did it for sex and money, which were much safer.

  She undid two buttons on her jacket and lingered on the third. “Yes or no?”

  He took several measured breaths. His eyes liked the shadows beneath her unbuttoned coat, the strict womanly confinement peeling away. But he was still thinking too much: “You’re an officer. You can’t marry. You can’t touch the men under your command. So you proposition strangers. I know how that is. You need an outlet.”

  “King’s balls, man, I don’t care. Yes or no?”

  “Well…” He quibbled a moment. “Do you have a cap?”

  Of course she had a cap.

  She left her jacket on, but unbuttoned. He shrugged out of his, and the undershirt, naked to the waist, spectacular in the evening chill. She could trace every cell of his abdomen, the hard curve of his pectorals, the thrilling breadth of his shoulders. They didn’t kiss but very assuredly went about provoking each other. She unbuttoned him, tested his heft and hardness, and tied the cap on. To keep him occupied through this fairly technical process she took his wrist and showed him, efficiently, how she liked to be touched, with the flesh of the hood as a buffer. He knew. His broad sure-fingered hands had the violent thrilling precision of surgery. She leaned back against the wall and wrapped her legs around his waist, daring him to hold her up, and he was not a disappointment: he pressed her against the alley wall and came into her and they fucked standing there with Aminata’s open mouth pressed against the cabled curve of his shoulder and throat.

  “Too gentle,” she whispered, when the first thrill had passed.

  “I don’t want to hurt you—”

  “Pretend I’m Kindalana,” she teased, which made him tremble all over, and sent him into a frenzy whose emotional components Aminata had neither the interest nor the concentration to analyze. For a long exultant time she arched against him and savored his desperation. He must be twenty years older, and she’d had him on their first meeting, a man of good status and carnal delight. What a catch. She might have a new story to impress sailors on the first night drinking.

  At last she got sore, and as happened with overused men, he couldn’t come with ordinary sex. They took turns on their knees on the soot-scattered flagstones: she came on the thrill of his beautiful upturned face, on her guilty delight in his confusion and lust. Afterward, she could see he was ashamed. “Thank you,” she said, with a twinge of conscience, and pecked him on the cheek. The used cap she put in the rubbish pit, certainly built here for just such things. One did not name a restaurant Demimonde without certain arrangements. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” he said, roughly.

  “I liked that.”

  “I’m glad,” he said, with a shaky but genuine smile. “It was … I’ve been tense, too. A calm body makes a calm mind. Thank you for your discretion.” Meaning her future quiet.

  “One learns.” She checked that her trousers still had the key, and dressed. “Ah. Please don’t take this wrong. I know it can be tempting, sometimes, but I meant what I said. It’s better if you don’t try to reach me.”

  “Aminata,” the man said, with soft concern. She turned to see him at the mouth of the alley, rather charmingly trying to adjust his worn manhood through the fabric of his trousers. But he sounded different—older, more confident, and more afraid.

  “If you want to protect Baru, and your navy too,” he said, “I think you should bring her back to Aurdwynn. She can be sent into the Wintercrests, away from all this. There’s safety in exile. The only safety for her, I’m afraid; and for the rest of us who fear her.”

  “Baru’s a savant,” Aminata protested, still proud, despite these revelations, of her terrible young friend. “The Republic needs her.”

  “She isn’t safe.” Calcanish slipped his gloves back on. “She’ll never be safe until she’s away from her master, Farrier. She will do anything for him. Kill her lover. Kill you. Beware Baru Cormorant.”

  * * *

  HER suasioners Faroni and Gerewho waited at the docks with a marine squad. She’d ordered them to be ready in case she had to move tonight. “How’d it go, mam?” Gerewho asked.

  “I got what I went for,” Aminata said, sticking her thumb through her clenched fist, “and the prisoners, too.”

  “You rake,” Faroni said, enviously. “Is he affordable?”

  “Lieutenant, he’s not even for sale.”

  “You went honest?” Faroni blinked. “I can never—” She swallowed the truth, which was a complaint about the great difficulty Oriati women faced getting laid in Falcresti settings.

  “Mam,” Gerewho said, cautiously, “are you sure he wasn’t a honeypot of sorts? I mean, it wouldn’t be hard to arrange, knowing a navy ship’s coming ashore.”

  Aminata judged Calcanish far too genuinely fucked up to be a plant. “Let’s go find out. Marines, fall in, we’re headed to Jamascine.”

  The safe house was a second-floor apartment in a Falcrest-style house-of-eight. It had no plumbing or heat except for a central firepit and a waste pipe. Graffiti scrawled in grand fish-oil sweeps, a gorgeous rendering of a masked and garishly piss-colored Falcrest “shielding” a pillared island with an enormous golden coin. Beneath the island, piles of dead boys, rendered as tiny shapes wrapped in rope.

  Aminata knocked on the door of resurfaced driftwood. It opened at once. “Hello,” said a very tired-looking Stakhi woman. “Come in. We’ve been expecting you.”

  Aminata had read up on Baru’s known associates in Aurdwynn. “Ake Sentiamut? I’m Lieutenant Commander Aminata isiSegu, off RNS Ascentatic—”

  “I know you,” Ake said. “You helped Her Majesty audit the Fiat Bank. I was Bel Latheman’s secretary. Are you with the mutiny now?”

  “What mutiny?” Aminata asked, heartsick with dread. Please, please, if she would name anyone but Juris Ormsment …

  “Province Admiral Ormsment on Sulane. Are you with her?”

  Behind her, the crowded apartment held a peering crowd of Aurdwynni faces: a golden brown Maia woman with an otterlike figure, a cynical crossbreed woman of some age, a handsome tanned Stakhi man guarding a pimple-faced youth.

  “Nitu,” the cynical-looking woman called. “Nitu, are you with them? She’s not with them. Navy mam, have you found Nitu?”

  When the situation begins to escalate out of your understanding, you do not chase after it. You impose order. You step back to the last moment you understood, and proceed from there.

  “What do you mean,” she demanded, “you were expecting me?”

  “The duchess said you’d come to us,” Ake Sentiamut said.

  “The duchess?”

  “Yes, our Lady Grace Tain Hu. You’re the faithful friend Baru spoke about. The one whose loss she regretted most. I
sn’t that why you’re here? Didn’t you get Tain Hu’s letter?”

  INTERLUDE

  THE MANSION HUSSACHT

  NO one south of Vultjag knew how high the Wintercrests might climb. On some days the snowy peaks could be seen from the harbor at Treatymont, in spite of the vast northward distance, which should have put them over the horizon: some said this was an illusion of optics, and others said the Wintercrests just climbed up and up and up, fourteen or seventeen or twenty miles tall at their crest, and that this was why white mountains loomed over seaside Treatymont on certain days. Though the Incrastic geologists called them mad.

  But the King of the Mansions knew his Amustakhi Mountains. He knew the cracking cold and the taste of lichen; the dead air of the mines and the dead soil of the overworked terraces; the dysentery and cholera that swept downslope settlements who drank water tainted by sewage from above. He knew the pink flamingos in their high lakes, and the pink sunburnt faces that smiled at him when he came out in his shining armor plate. He knew the silent old women who swept the babies off the exposure shelf and down the crevasse.

  When he imagined the way his mountains rose from Aurdwynn he saw a great ramp. And he was like a bale of grass on that ramp, trying desperately not to roll downhill. His crown burnt with the cold, but he could not take it off.

  “Ziscjaditzcionursz,” he said, zish-jaditshionursh, softer than the wind; it meant, more or less, may a rusty nail be driven into my bloody flank by a traitor, though really it meant, oh, fuck me. Very few lowcomers ever learned Mansion Stakhi, which could not easily be pried apart. Would only that the same could be said of the Stakhi mansions themselves.

  His name was Atakaszir, of the Mansion Hussacht. From the peak of his mountain, Karakys, he could see more than a hundred miles down over Aurdwynn, when weather permitted. He could see the great green forests of Vultjag, and the high stony fells of Lyxaxu (he clicked his right incisors together, thoughtlessly, by tradition, at the enemy name, the Maia name) and the bright river that carried their food and wealth away from him, to the sea.