“No, Faham Execarne told me as much—the Morrow Ministry didn’t have him.” Tau-indi wrapped bread in gauze-cut fish sliced so thin with glass knives that the light went through it to cast pink shadows. “Now, Faham and I speculated that he might be alive in the hands of the navy or the Imperial Throne. You are both agents of the Emperor, I deduce? If the Emperor knew Abdumasi Abd was alive, you would know it, too. So if he is alive, he is unknown to the Emperor. Therefore the navy is our suspect. Would any part of your navy hide a man who could start a war from the Emperor?”
“It’s possible.” Baru felt a prickle of respect for the laman. They might be somewhat given to religion, but their logic was good. They knew the trick of postprior reasoning, to assume a conclusion, and deduce the conditions that might make it true. A dangerous method, but sometimes powerful.
“How curious,” Iraji said, archly, “to hear that our own spymasters have been speaking to you, a foreign, ah, ambassador.”
“Who else would conspire to keep the peace? Spies hate war.”
“Do they?”
“Loathe it! A spy’s job is to appear entirely like a normal person, and nothing remains normal in war.” Tau poured celebratory wine. “This is wonderful! Look what we’ve accomplished already. So perhaps your navy has Abdumasi Abd. If I can find him, and make things right between us, I think I can stop this whole war at its source.”
“You mean—” Baru sighed. “—the hurt feelings between you?”
“Hardly just hurt feelings! When I was a young laman during the Armada War, my two closest friends were Kindalana of Segu and Abdumasi Abd. Now, our great house entertained two hostages from Falcrest—”
Baru regretted asking.
And then, suddenly, she did not:
“—named Cairdine Farrier and Cosgrad Torrinde. These men were on a mission to study our way of life. I took it upon myself to try to befriend them, believing that a small friendship might be echoed in a greater peace between our nations. But in doing so”—Tau’s voice fell, a deep and real sorrow—“I hurt my friend Abd. And the hurt was never healed.”
A wave broke against the sunroom window. Either the storm surf was picking up, or Cheetah’s stern had dropped.
“Are we finished?” Baru asked, nervously. “Can we go?”
“I don’t know,” Tau said, infuriatingly, but with apparently honest bemusement. “When the three of us are bound together, trim ought to point the way out of the ship, back to the human community. Nothing’s happened yet. Perhaps we need to talk some more, and have dessert.”
“Perhaps we need to break the windows and float out,” Baru suggested, “on a board or a table.”
But the Prince’s face fell suddenly. “I’ve just had a terrible thought.”
Baru resisted the urge to call all their thoughts terrible. “Have you.”
“Yes. If the navy has Abdumasi Abd … perhaps he was given to the Burner of Souls.”
“Oh no.” Iraji leapt up in dismay. “Oh, principles help us all. If the Burner of Souls has him, he must have broken by now. He must have admitted his sponsors—”
Tau-indi closed their eyes in fear and sorrow as Baru looked between them, trying desperately to figure out who, precisely who, was the Burner of Souls?
“But it may be worse yet if my friend hasn’t broken,” Tau said. “There are powers he might have called upon to sustain himself … powers which would shield him from the Mask, at the cost of all he was to me.”
“What powers?” Iraji began to tremble. “Surely you don’t mean—not the same power you implied—”
“Yes. The same power that attacked my ship.” Tau’s neck bobbed as they swallowed. Again they smoothed their khanga around wide hips. “It is here, upon this ocean. It has left its ancient safeness. You know its name?”
“I know its name,” Iraji croaked.
And he toppled in a faint.
Baru caught him. “Sorry,” she said, very worried now, and trying to hide it, “he’s excitable.”
Tau-indi stared at Iraji with an expression of majestic royal concern, a face much larger than life. The golden chains in their nose and ears rustled softly.
“I’ll be damned,” they said. “The things that trim brings to my door.” And then, shaking themselves, “I’ll fetch the salts.”
“This Burner of Souls.” Baru checked Iraji’s pupil response. “Who is she?”
“A gruesome sort of Masquerade artifact. An orphaned Segu girl raised by the Masquerade as a weapon against her own home. She was trained to deceive and compromise the most defiant subjects by Mister Cairdine Farrier.”
Baru looked up with a thrill of horror. “Do you know her real name?”
“Yes. She is a woman from the isiSegu.” Tau came back with salts. “Terrible, isn’t it? If the navy has poor Abdu, I’m afraid they’ve given him to Aminata.”
* * *
CHEETAH’S bell tolled out its dying song: let me go, let me go, let me go.
Inch by inch, gallon by gallon, the clipper foundered.
“I’m getting us out of here.” Baru ripped cloth and cutlery out of the sunroom closet. “I can’t believe how stupid you are!”
“You know the torturer Aminata,” Tau said, staring in fascination. “O principles, it’s working! I can hardly believe it! All these connections between us are becoming clear!”
A wave struck the hive-glass behind them. Cold brine spurted through the caulking. Yes, Baru wanted to scream, she knew Aminata. Aminata a torturer? Aminata who’d only wanted to command tall ships? At first Baru felt sorrow, and pity. But then her heart moved with selfish gladness. Aminata had been made into a weapon of the Empire, and so she might suffer now, she might hurt as Baru hurt, she might even understand why Baru had chosen the path she now walked—
Last of all came a growling fear from low inside her.
Aminata was never your friend. She was Farrier’s agent from beginning to end.…
She was part of the Farrier Process.…
Cheetah tipped as a wave sloshed through her broken hull amidships. The force slammed the clipper against Helbride. She rebounded, swayed, and at last righted herself on her stubborn keel. There was a moment of peace. And then, with a mournful creak and a hurricane of canvas, the clipper’s mainmast snapped and twisted and toppled down across the deck above them.
Baru clutched at the cabinet with her good hand and tried to compute their rate of sink. They would be finished soon. Well, there was nothing for it.
She whirled, hard-eyed, speaking to the Prince as she would speak to the dukes.
“Your Federal Highness,” she said, “do you remember what I said at Moem?”
“All of it,” Tau said, their eyes shut tight. They were summoning their courage.
“I intend to destroy Falcrest. I am a daughter of Taranoke on a deep-cover mission to bring down the Masquerade from within.”
Tau-indi Bosoka touched their throat: one long finger drawn from their smooth chin, down a line of skin paint, to their small collarbones. They had adorned their skin in golden patterns and green stars. The full regalodermia of a Lonjaro Prince.
“I can’t afford to believe you,” they said. “You used this same trick on Aurdwynn. You told them you wanted their freedom. I fear that. I fear that use of people as pawns.”
Why, Prince Bosoka, must you refuse me? Why must you lock us into a sinking ship?
She applied her thoughts to the shape of her own logic, and corrected it.
She was not thinking like an Oriati, the people who for decades had been tricked and exploited by the Masquerade. What could you do to resist that trickery? You could stop acting in what seemed to be your own calculated self-interest. You could avoid doing what was necessary, because then Falcrest could manipulate you by changing the terms of necessity. You could focus, instead, on basic goodness, an inflexible moral code: be honest, be kind, be charitable.
Was goodness still good if you hewed to it out of tactical necessity? Was there, Baru
wondered, any difference between being good and pretending to be good for your own gain, if you took the same actions in the end? Was there any difference between telling the truth unconditionally, and deploying the truth in service of your agenda, if you told the same truth?
Maybe the Oriati thought so.
Maybe the difference between truth-for-itself and tactical truth was the only difference that mattered. Maybe the most crucial and subtle distinction in life was the difference between someone who was truly good and someone playing at goodness to gain power.
Could she distinguish those two tendencies in herself?
Another wave crashed against the windows, dark and silty with lightning-burnt kelp. Tau-indi sat cross-legged and open-armed, open-faced, and again Baru saw them as a candle-flame, steady despite the wind. They were waiting her answer.
“I’m going to prove my honesty,” Baru said, “on your terms.”
“How so?”
“With trim.”
They looked at her in wonder. “Will you?”
“If I get the three of us out of here, that means I’ve passed your test of trim, right? I’m a real person. I’m connected. We’re like—” She grappled at the air, trying to find a metaphor. “We’re like spiders, reeling in our thread to get back to the web. And I cannot get us back to that web if I was never bound to it.”
“Yes,” Tau-indi said, smiling. “That’s how it works.”
“Good.” Baru wrestled the folded dining table out of the closet. “I’m going to build a diving platform for you and Iraji. And when it works, and all of us are safe on Helbride, you’re going to help me track your friend Abdumasi Abd.”
“You have a lead on him?” Tau cried eagerly.
“I know where to find a woman who helped him on his way.” And from that woman Baru would find the Cancrioth, and whatever she could gain from them—power to overthrow Farrier and Hesychast, power to crush Falcrest by war, power to free Taranoke and Aurdwynn.
Immortality, perhaps. If that was necessary to see the work complete.
And along the way she would find some way, some fucking way, to be sure she was not under Farrier’s control.
* * *
HELBRIDE smashed into Cheetah, and Tau-indi fell.
A wine bottle shattered beneath them, red glass starbursting. They shouted in pain, and Baru pounced on them, searching for the wound. The wine bottle had cut them: a long, thin slash up the skin of their back. The golden khanga parted shyly around the blood.
“It’s beginning,” the Prince said, with real fear.
“She’s going down.”
“Yes—believe me, your navy taught us all about how ships sink.” A chuckle. The Prince thought they were very funny.
Ropes twanged and snapped. Above them, with ponderous creaking malice, Cheetah’s second mast collapsed across the deck. The impact punched the stern further below water. Thin sheets of seawater jetted through the window.
The Enact-Colonel Osa was shouting, too far away, “PRINCE! PRINCE BOSOKA!”
Tau-indi grimaced at the cut, and pawed for Iraji’s hand. “I must confess,” they said, “that I didn’t lock us in here completely out of trust in trim.”
“Don’t, don’t admit you’re not a fanatic, I was just starting to understand you—”
“People are many things,” they said, seizing Iraji’s hand. “When I had the door shut behind us, I thought to myself, Baru Cormorant is an Imperial agent. And they always have another way out.”
“And here,” Baru gasped, dragging the dining table over to Iraji and the Prince, “I thought you were mad.”
“Trim is nothing but other people,” Tau-indi said, and cried against the pain. “I don’t think I can swim like this.”
“I’m getting you both out of here,” Baru promised.
“You won’t leave the boy?”
“Never again,” she snapped, without thinking.
They had to sink faster than the ship. To get out through the stern windows, they had to go down. Descent was the hardest part of diving. The body wants to float, so the ascent goes easily—but when you dive, when you go deep, you are fighting against your nature. Like running downhill.
Baru tore open the casks of sweet wine, poured them empty, and hammered them shut again. Every blow made her scream a little from her fingers: she went on anyway.
“My vintages,” Tau said, mournfully. “I was quite sentimental about that one.”
“They’re for flotation. Now I need ballast.”
“Try the curtain rods—”
“Perfect.” She seized the heavy rods from their mounts above the windows and lashed them to the table. “When I open the windows,” she grunted, hauling at the knots, “the sea is going to flood in and trap us in a bubble of air. We need to dive—down there, through the windows—then kick free of the ship’s suction and get back to the surface.”
A cell of hive glass popped from the window frame. Water jetted in.
Baru and Tau looked at each other in dismay.
Another cell popped, and another, and from the stern the sunroom began to flood.
“I’m going to tie you to the table,” Baru snapped, “here, quick—trust me—”
“Of course, of course, every time a woman’s tied me to a table, it’s been grand.”
“Don’t flirt with me! I’m trying to save you!”
“I’m trying to encourage you!” the Prince said, laughing, and the laugh must have jarred their wound: they groaned and swore in Uburu, “Oh, fuck a noma face!”
Baru lashed the Prince and poor fainted Iraji facedown to the dining table with a coil of stowage rope. Now she just had to mount the casks for buoyancy—but how? “Eyelets,” she shouted, tearing through the closet. She couldn’t find a way to lash the barrels to the table. “Have you any eyelets?”
“Do you keep eyelets in your sunroom?”
“I don’t have a fucking sunroom! I live in an armory!”
“There’s your problem,” Tau said, philosophically, “too many swords, not enough sun.”
Baru grabbed all the rope and spare khanga fabric she could find, shoved the khangas under the two Oriati as cushioning, looped the ropes around the casks, ran them under the table and around Tau-indi and Iraji and then back up. She grinned as she worked. The thrill of the fight, the frigid water, the crisp satisfaction of working with her hands—she felt like a fisher on the hunt, like a smooth graceful creature.
“What happens now?”
“Now,” Baru said, “I’m going to flood the room.”
Like all hive-glass, the stern windows were made of small glass panes set into a steel lattice. That steel could be a fatal cage. But the windows had been built to swing open in sections, so the passengers could take air on a nice day, or run out fishing lines. If she opened those two frames …
“They swing outward,” Tau-indi called. “Is that a problem?”
Shit! They did swing outward! The water outside would press them shut. She would need to equalize the pressure, inside and out, before she could open them.
She put up her cloth-wrapped fists and began to punch out the glass.
Cheetah had now tilted past thirty degrees, the sunroom entirely underwater and flooding quickly. When Baru broke the first cell, a stream of seawater pushed her down onto her back. Roaring, she struggled up against the current and broke another, another, ruining the expensive work of some Rathpont glassblower and his nervous apprentices, battering out Cheetah’s stately view. Water rushed in, cold and sharp as winter sky, up to Baru’s waist, her navel, her breasts and armpits. She hissed against the cold. Iraji moaned on the table, bound next to the Prince.
“Wake him up,” Baru snapped, “wake him up, he’s got to hold his breath.”
Tau-indi began to whisper fiercely into Iraji’s ear. The boy’s eyes snapped open, wide with fear. Baru, too, felt a curious nonspecific fear: something was wrong. Something in her blindness. What? Was it the Prince?
She turned to loo
k.
Behind the Prince, up the slope of the sinking sunroom, water wept around the door.
Oh fuck. The ship above them had flooded. Only the door held back the deluge.
“Get ready!” Baru shouted. “Take your breath!”
She squatted and pulled the table down over her, Prince and Iraji and rope and casks and curtain rods and all. Breathing smoothly, setting her legs wide, drawing the mass of the table down onto her calves and thighs, Baru held Tau-indi and Iraji and waited for the sea to rise.
O Wydd, she thought, let my breath last.
Cheetah tilted to port and did not stop, could not stop, she just kept tilting and tilting and tilting. She was capsizing, she was turning over—
The door holding back the flood snapped off its hinges. The weight of the sea rolled down to crush Baru. The weight of the sea.
20
GLASS PIERCES CHEEK
A FIST of water slammed Baru down against the sunroom windows. She struck face-first.
The dining table with its passengers crashed down on her back.
A sliver of broken glass went in through her mouth and out her cheek. She could feel it with her tongue: she tasted the puff of blood, sweet in the brine—
But she remained
calm.
With her left hand she reached up to the frame she was pinned against and clicked the latch open.
With her right hand she unlatched the window frame to her right.
The windows swung open beneath her. She let herself fall out of Cheetah.
Silence and bottomless dark bubbled up around her.
She drew the table down with her. Tau-indi’s khanga fluttered in the current. Their cheeks were comically puffed, their eyes squeezed shut. Iraji clutched at their hand.
The quiet of everything. High above, rain stippled the surface of the sea. Helbride was silhouetted by her own whale lanterns. Crew overboard from Cheetah thrashed in the waves.
Baru thought, I am a daughter of Taranoke. I am born from the navel of the world. My home was made from the fire of the earth and the deep of the sea. I will not drown here. I will not drown your hopes, kuye lam.
The Monster Baru Cormorant Page 39