The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “You don’t fuck me because you’re guilty about the Cancrioth, or about Tahari.”

  “No. Not that.”

  “Is it Tau? You’re worried about Tau again?”

  Yes! Tau-indi’s heart shouted. Yes, worry about me, you clotted assholes. Worry about your young friend!

  “Tau’s furious with us,” Kinda said. There was a noise of stones moving. “And I really don’t know what to do. My patience with them is running out. I thought … when they pushed me at you, down in the lake, I thought it was because they were worried about you. They wanted someone to take care of you, because … you know, things are going to change.…”

  “I know I’m not a Prince. I won’t go with the two of you when you come of age. I knew it wasn’t going to last.”

  There was a soft exchange of breath: a kiss. Tau-indi imagined them curled up against each other with mad loving hateful relish. Even listening to them like this, the jealousy wasn’t sexual, or as little sexual as anything in Tau-indi’s mind this year. No, it was a nobler kind of poison. They’d been friends! They’d been good together, the three of them! Why was this necessary, this closeness between two of them? Why was it required, if there had been nothing wrong with their third?

  “What do you think they’re angry about now?” Abdumasi asked. “I mean, I can tell they’re angry, Tau’s not subtle—”

  “Not subtle!” Kindalana must have made a face, because Abdu laughed the shocked laugh of someone finally talking about a taboo thing. Tau-indi wanted to roll up into the waterfall and be sucked all the way out to sea. They had thought they were subtle …

  Kindalana sighed. “Tahr and my dad. I think they think it’s my fault, somehow. Tau thinks I made it happen, and they’re furious with me. It’s Farrier who’s made them think that way, I expect … the way he flinches from me, it’s like I walk around naked.”

  What? No! That wasn’t true at all.

  “Oh,” Abdumasi said. “Your dad and Tahr? Is that a thing?”

  “Only since she got back. She’s been sleeping with him occasionally.”

  “I can tell she’s different. More … intent?”

  “She’s stopped caring about trim.” Kindalana threw a stone. It whistled out past Tau-indi and vanished in the waterfall. “It’s not like you and me, I don’t think. I get the sense Tahr just doesn’t want to put things off anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like she thinks time is running out, so she might as well take what she can get.”

  “Does it bother you? The affair?”

  “Apparently it bothers Tau a lot.”

  “I didn’t ask about Tau.”

  Kindalana’s voice moved deeper and pitched sharper. “Well, I’m talking about Tau. Tau’s working too hard. Their trim’s in a snarl and it’s making them miserable.”

  “Sometimes,” Abdumasi said, so softly that Tau almost asked him to raise his voice, “I almost get up the courage to tell them that thing I told you. The thing about their dead twin.”

  Tau-indi pressed their cheek up against the cold stone.

  “Tell me,” Kindalana said. Their voice rolled out of the cave like something old and far away. “Tell me like I’m Tau. It’s a beautiful thing to hear.”

  “I want to say, Tau-indi, it’s the opposite of what you think. You didn’t kill your twin so you could be Prince alone. Something was wrong, over in the place where people live before they’re born, and you couldn’t both make it through the Door in the East. So your twin sacrified themself to help you make it into the world. They gave up a chance at life because they knew we’d need you over here, Tau, you in particular.

  “And that’s why you’re the bravest, Tau, that’s why you’re the only one who’s brave enough to talk to Cosgrad and learn all these terrible things. That’s why you can keep your house together when your mom’s gone and you’re sick with snails. That’s even why the griots come to you to learn. Because your dead twin gave their life to set your trim. You have a gift we don’t.

  “You’re the only one on Prince Hill who knows how to be alone.”

  The jungle dripped and murmured with life. Tau-indi clung to the rock so they wouldn’t reel off and hit their head and die like a fool for not knowing what to think or how to feel.

  From the cave came a murmur and a soft choked sound. “It’s okay,” Kindalana said. “Hush, Abdu, it’s okay. Don’t cry. It’s okay.”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” Abdu said. “I don’t want to lose Tau.”

  “Everything’s going to change.” Their voices were very close together. “We can’t stop that. We just have to figure out how to be strong.”

  “Like Tau.”

  “Like Tau.”

  * * *

  TAU fled. They fell on the way down the wet rock and cracked their left knee and skinned a huge peel off their right side and stumbled on weeping silently and making agonized oh, oh, oh faces.

  In a tangle of kudzu near the trail they found Cosgrad Torrinde.

  He was sitting with his face in his hands, a rock balanced on his left knee, a tiny frog on his right. He’d tried to peel some of the leeches off. His legs were covered in huge red scabs and the tiny black remnants of leech-mouths, still attached.

  He looked up at Tau-indi with hopeless frustration, and Tau-indi looked back at him with quavering dismay.

  “It’s too complicated,” he said. He threw a fistful of leech-flesh into the mangroves where it spattered and made the leaves tremble and rain. “Your land, it’s impossible to understand. That’s why you have a story about everything, down here, because it’s the only way to make sense of anything. No laws, no rules; they don’t even work! The mangroves grow wherever they please! It’s magic! Oriati Mbo runs on magic!”

  “You’re afraid,” Tau-indi said, recognizing, somehow, the dismay in Cosgrad’s voice. “What are you afraid of, guest of my house?”

  “We’re going to lose,” Cosgrad said, snatching at the kudzu vines. The frog on his right knee vibrated with indignation. “I’ll never understand you, so Farrier will take her favor, Farrier will try his methods, and he’ll fail! We’re doomed, Tau, the whole work of the revolution is doomed!”

  Oh principles. Tau realized that Cosgrad was tripping—he’d licked the tiny frog! He licked the frog to see what would happen! And now he was having frog dreams!

  Cosgrad picked up the stone and underhanded it in a tight snapping motion. “We’re going to lose!” He began to weep in quiet sighing bursts. “I can’t understand you, you’re all too old and complicated, I’m too young and simple and Farrier’s going to have his way, and he’ll fuck it up, and we’re going to lose! Back into the silt and the ooze! The end of humanity!”

  “Come,” Tau murmured, “come, come.”

  They walked the poor man back to the picnic as he fought with frog dreams. “It’ll be all right,” Tau whispered to him. “No one will lose. Everyone can win. We’ll teach Falcrest the magic of trim, and everything will work out. Falcrest can be made mbo, and filled with delights, and we can even give you all the other kinds of cats.”

  * * *

  THE truth was an awful birthday present!

  Tau had been all wrong about their friends. Kindalana and Abdumasi hadn’t been keeping their trysts secret from Tau—they’d thought Tau wanted to be alone, Princely and self-reliant. They thought Tau had pushed them together.

  Perhaps now their friendship could be repaired? Perhaps. But the strangeness between them had become a habit, and habits were hardest to fix.

  As they all straggled home from that birthday, each of them bugbitten and thirsty and maybe satisfied, depending who, Tau-indi resolved to make another try at reading the Whale Words. A good Prince should read the Whale Words beginning to end, for if Oriati Mbo had a holy text, it must be the Words.

  Everything in the world happened in circles, the Whale Worlds told Tau. This was why the world held together. The end of the story told the beginning how to happen, so that t
he story could go on.

  Beware those who would change the ending, O you whose story is the story of rule. For those who wish to master the future also wish to master the past. And in their work to build a tall tower they will undermine the foundations of everything.

  21

  THE MAP ENTIRE

  JAMAN Ryapost’s skull grinned at Baru from its bolted frame.

  Suicide upon exaltation.

  He had reckoned the costs. He had found himself too deep in debt.

  Baru woke from the dream with a shriveled pig’s bladder curled in her arms, drained almost entirely of wine. The dregs had run out like sweet afterbirth down her stomach, and she found her mind cold, hard, and hurting like the length of a nail. She rolled out of the hammock, did her exercises, washed her mouth, and decided to spend her odd focus on the most difficult task available.

  “Iraji?” she called. “Iraji, I need you.”

  He was not in his hammock.

  She bundled up her parents’ letters in her arms and went looking for him. Helbride’s sailors were crowded thicker than ever on middeck, their hammocks pitched two or three deep in some places. The Oriati from Cheetah had set up their camp on the maindeck, preferring the sun and rain and wind to even the appearance of captivity. Enact-Colonel Osa’s sailors were pitching in (literally) with Helbride’s work, helping to tar up the hempen ropes.

  Baru slipped aft to Apparitor’s nook, but Svir was not there: he was probably up on the deck, hopping and swinging up in the ropes like a red clown fish darting through his home anemone. She sighed, and turned to go, and then saw Iraji huddled in the right-hand aft corner of the nook, the same corner where Baru had huddled at the last meeting.

  Hello,” he sniffled, and tried to smile. “Looking for Svir?”

  “For you, actually.…” Baru clutched the letters awkwardly. “I wondered if you’d help me … go through my parents’ letters.”

  “Do you need an analyst?”

  “No, I just…” She dithered in the threshold, playing with the canvas curtain. “It’s just that I can’t, ah, well, it might become difficult for me, and if someone’s nearby, I’ll be too embarrassed to…”

  “To grieve.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you want me to be with you, so you’ll restrain yourself.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Well,” he said, tremulously, “I’m sorry, I’m not the right person for that just now.”

  Baru felt like an ass. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” he snapped, “my ship is full of Oriati!”

  Oriati like him. And he had come to Falcrest very young, like Baru. He could never pass as one of the Mbo Oriati, and he would never really be Falcresti: now he had a ship full of both, to make it clear he was neither.

  “Let’s get together with Apparitor tonight,” she suggested, fumbling for some way to help him, some answer to his pleas for a friend, “and play Purge?”

  He looked up at her with entirely inexplicable dread.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling with only his mouth. “Let’s.”

  * * *

  WITH her dive knife Baru slashed open the letters from her parents. She sorted them by date, waited briefly and pointlessly over a rag in case she wept, and began to read. There would be two hard places, she expected. First, after she defected to the Coyotes: would her parents have dared to write, would they have said, at last, you are truly our daughter? We are so proud.

  And second—

  After Sieroch—when they learned that she’d betrayed the Coyotes—

  Fuck it, though! So what if it hurt? Control the pain, Baru, get the information, add it to your plan. Are they all right? You have to know! Baru grabbed the top letter, scrabbled at its stuck-together pages, hissed as she cut the tip of her thumb, and at last, with a little print of blood, unfolded it against the deck.

  At the top of the letter Mother Pinion had sketched a cormorant, surfacing from a dive, her hooked beak raised to the sun. The low sharp contours of Halae’s Reef in the background.

  Baru exploded into sobs.

  She did not cry. She mastered her furious homesickness. Letter by letter she followed her parents’ lives and the patterns of them leapt up to kiss her.

  Mother Pinion wrote the body of the letter in shorthanded Urunoki, and Solit then scribbled comments and designs in the margins. Pinion sent drawings she’d taken during her work as a surveyor and message-runner. Solit rather favored diagrams of clever devices he’d encountered or made while working in the Iriad shipyards, where, he reported soberly, he helped the Imperial Republic prepare its brave new fleet, which would protect the seas from “Oriati aggression.” Together they intimated small acts of sedition, confided to Baru the traditions they’d kept safe from the brackish Falcrest tide, and hinted at occasional lovers, including a plainsider woman. That shocked Baru: a plainsider? But perhaps the occupation had brought plainside and harborside together—

  And there was—

  —a code!

  Baru could feel the bumps of information carved into the negative space between words. She couldn’t articulate what exactly she’d detected. Were the spaces between the letters somehow systematically arranged? Would the first letters of each line spell out a message? Perhaps if she translated it all into Aphalone …

  A plainsider lover? Really? Plainsiders raided, stole, and trafficked with pirates. Obviously some of that had to be prejudice, certainly the plainsiders believed harborsiders were corrupt, haughty, and tightfisted … but a plainsider lover?

  And with that clue Baru cracked the code.

  Every sentence that described her parents acting out of character contained a hint. The code was not cryptographic but steganographic, meaning that it hid the truth behind secret shared meaning, rather than mathematics.

  When mother wrote, Solit and I fought today over who missed Salm more. We tried to hide it from our neighbors, but what’s fought in the home quickly spreads: no, they would never fight over who’d missed Salm the most!

  They were part of an armed resistance. The fight was growing.

  Solit wrote, The shipyard work is very boring, and sometimes I think I find a new man to my left every third day. It’s hard to see others promoted in the favor of our overseers while we work down here to bend Masquerade steel. I guess they say the right things.

  The blacksmith Solit bored by the chance to work with steel? Utter nonsense! He was saying that many people had given up, and some had turned traitor, obeying their elders as they had been taught—even when those elders were Falcresti bureaucrats.

  “A new man to my left every third day…”

  Was that a fact? Had Taranoke lost more than a third of her native population? Census and Methods would know for certain … maybe Solit had gone and looked it up …

  Baru bit at the silk sutures in her cheek. Cold tears sprang up.

  Her parents wrote, Today was the customary beginning of the Iriad market, although lately we see no Oriati ships. We hope to entice them back once we can remove the protectionist clauses from our treaty of federation. We have learned much from the Masquerade, medicines and shipbuilding, doctrines of discipline and profit, and I hope that Falcrest will soon let us reopen our markets to the Oriati and reap the benefit of free trade with those less fortunate.

  They’d been bargaining with the Oriati. They’d offered what Taranoke had always offered to the Mbo: a port for their traders and explorers. But now Taranoke also knew how to build Masquerade ships and deliver Masquerade inoculations. Taranoke could be an ally to Oriati Mbo in the war to come.…

  Baru read the rest in a rush, and oh, it moved her to the choking edge of tears that she could still tell exactly when her parents broke character—

  They wrote,

  Of course the Oriati are bitter about losing our market, and not eager to risk such losses again.

  They meant, the Oriati remembered the Armada War, and many of them would not dare to fight Falcrest again. />
  But at least one of their bolder merchants has begun to reach out to Taranoke, seeing new opportunities. We’ve sampled a few of his wares, and spoken to a few of his factors, and we find his offers enticing. He says that he knows old, old business concerns, long-lasting and quietly powerful.…

  That was the last letter they’d sent.

  The bold merchant they’d mentioned could be no one but Abdumasi Abd. Abdumasi Abd who Baru had destroyed, or, worse, lured into the navy’s hands.

  She might, by now, have destroyed her parents, too.

  When she looked down at herself she found her right hand clasping her left wrist, as if to pin the hand in place.

  * * *

  “NO,” Apparitor said, laughing, “you can’t see Tain Hu’s will.”

  “It’s a bet, Svir, come on”—Baru slapped the boards of his cubby’s floor—“let me see if if I win the round!”

  “Why are you so interested, anyway? Are you sentimental now? Is that your new game?”

  “Xate Yawa stole a palimpsest I need,” Baru said, pausing to belch. She had secured a bottle of Grand Purifier with an early victory, and she did not intend to forfeit it till it was empty. “I thought if I had Tain Hu’s will I could trade it for the palimpsest.”

  “You think she cares about Tain Hu’s will?” Apparitor finally selected a card to play. The Minister of Time. He paid his fee in beans and bought himself an extra turn, making Iraji groan and declare said Minister “fundamentally unsound bullshit.”

  “I’ll stake…” Baru thought about her assets. She couldn’t think of anything solid. “I’ll finish the bottle if I lose, you show me the will if I win.”

  “At the rate you’re going,” Apparitor said, “you’ll have no stakes left when I win.”

  “I fold,” Iraji said, wiping his tableau of faces and beans. “I hear too much bickering. Would anyone like a brine shot? It soothes the constitution.”

  He poured a shot of hard whiskey and a shot of diluted canning brine, a foul and compelling combination if you took both shots together: like swilling out your guts. Baru had two before she switched back to The Grand Purifer. Apparitor went on to win, growing more loose-tongued with each drink but not less devastatingly capable, his patter flowing between Aphalone and Stakhi as he took the pot. They played not for money but for chits with the names of nations and great leaders carved upon them. Baru wanted to get Shiqu Si or Iro Mave, but didn’t manage.