And then Baru felt relief. Hideous warm relief, soiled, pathetic, like pissing herself. At last it was over, and there would be no more loss. She could give up. She could close her accounts. If she fought and died here she would never have to spend a life again—
“Baru.”
Tau-indi’s breath warmed her cheek. The little laman had to pull themselves up on their tiptoes by Baru’s soldier to whisper in her ear. “Baru, breathe. Listen. We got out of Cheetah together, didn’t we? We were locked into a dying ship and trim saved us.”
“I saved us,” Baru croaked.
“You did. Trim is nothing but people. Believe in that trim again, Baru. If you go into this duel to protect your parents, if you are truly and selflessly devoted to saving them—” Tau swallowed, and went on, with warm hope. “—I tell you that you cannot lose.”
“Trim isn’t real that way,” Baru whispered. “Trim won’t stop a sword.”
“People are real.”
“Will Osa stand for me? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No!” They laughed as they sighed. “Baru, you must face this yourself. Think of all you’ve achieved these past weeks—”
But what had she achieved, really? Compared to her time in Aurdwynn, where she had ruined currencies and ordered massacres and torn down an entire aristocracy? She’d thrashed and sweated in misery on Helbride. She’d upturned the Llosydanes like a cluttered breakfast table looking for the scent of Abdumasi Abd’s sponsors. She’d written letters for Ake and the Necessary King, and nabbed Tau off their sinking ship, and cringed from Tain Shir, and fled from a mutiny, and lost two fingers, and suffered a seizure, and hurt, hurt so terribly and so often …
She did not have the Cancrioth. She hadn’t reached Falcrest. She was no closer to liberating Taranoke. Her grand plan to pitch Falcrest into a war on two fronts was still embryonic.
“I’ve done nothing,” she said, flatly. “I’ve made nothing.”
“You’ve found people,” Tau whispered, with urgency, and trust, and a soft encouragement Baru knew she never deserved. “Yawa and Svir have come to know you, haven’t they? You’ve met me, and Osa, and Iraji, who you clearly care to protect. That lovely diver who was at your side when we met. And I know you want your parents safe. I know you care for them.”
I do, Baru thought. I want Mother and father Solit to be safe. And I want Ulyu Xe and her companions safe, too. And even Shao Lune, though she looks very excited to watch me die.
“You are bound to Ormsment, now,” Tau murmured. “Isn’t she here because of you? Because of the pain you caused her? She is no less your companion. You are less alone than you once were, Baru, and that is all of everything. Go forward! You will be safe.”
“You want me to kill Ormsment?”
“I want you to trust in trim,” they said, as they smiled up at her. “No one will die here unless it is deserved. Ormsment refused the peaceful way.”
“It’s a duel to the death, Tau!”
“It’s a duel to the end. If you win, killing her is a choice. I told you that I would ask you to face what you could not face, didn’t I? And you swore on your parents that you would not lie to me. Now trim has called that oath back on you and given you a chance to prove you are worthy of your parents. This is a test, Baru! A test of your trim! I tell you that if you go against Ormsment now, and if you have in true faith tried to help your parents and all your companions, if you have honest intentions and good hopes, the bonds you have built will protect you and help you see this through. Face what you have done to her, Baru. Acknowledge she is real. It is the only way.”
But, Baru thought, Tau, I haven’t been honest. I haven’t told you what I’m doing with the little portrait of Iraji. I haven’t told you the Cancrioth are here. So even if you’re right, and this is a test, I will fail, I will invite the most hideous disaster, and you’ll know that Ormsment was right.
You will regret ever knowing me.
She hesitated there with Tau’s lips up at her ear and her right side turned to Ormsment.
And on that right side,
up on the balcony above the garden,
there was Aminata.
Looking down in anguish, as if all she wanted
was to leap down and come to Baru’s aid.
Aminata! It’s me!
And from the corner of her eye Baru saw Scheme-Colonel Masako’s face. She couldn’t name the expression but she recognized it instantly, because she had made it herself so many times. It was the mask of an agent keeping their tenuous calm in the instant before a secret arrangement came to fruition.
On some venal, calculating level Baru must have seen that face and thought, oh, good, the duel will be interrupted, and I’ll be spared.
That was the impulse that made her take the first step into the circle.
* * *
THERE was a better world, a world Aminata could not imagine how to find, where she would vault this balcony and land light-footed among the gaudy important people below. And she would call out, “Ormsment! I know you’re a traitor!”
Then she would step forward, between her friend Baru and the traitor Juris Ormsment, to offer herself as Baru’s fighter in this duel. She would take her old boarding saber (Baru had kept it! She had kept it close! Like the cormorant feather in Aminata’s shrine!) from Baru’s hands and raise it up to guard. And whether she lived or died, in Falcrest they would hear of what had happened on the embassy island Hara-Vijay, where Lieutenant Commander Aminata dueled the Traitor-Admiral Juris Ormsment in defense of the Emperor’s own. And they would all marvel that such gallantry could yet spring from such old soil.
Ake Sentiamut insisted that Ormsment was a mutineer.
But—but—
What if Juris was about to save the entire navy from purge? What if she’d discovered Baru’s scheme?
Aminata’s hearts and hands ached to go save Baru. She was so close. Just one leap and one shout and they would be together again, and all this uncertainty could be resolved.…
But what if throwing in with Baru set Aminata against Samne Maroyad, who trusted her? Against Captain Nullsin, who’d helped her dig out that burnt boy? And his orders were to obey the chain of command until they had proof positive Ormsment was a mutineer.
So Aminata kept her hand on her flare pistol and squeezed her jaw shut, and although she knew she would regret her inaction for the rest of her life, her duty pinned her in place.
* * *
“COME on!” Ormsment barked. “They said you were brave at Sieroch. Will you be brave for your parents now?”
As if by an outside will Baru was stepping forward. Her hand was on the hilt of her saber, Aminata’s boarding saber, and her mouth moved, her tongue curled, she spoke: and a soaring freedom took her heart. She could not bear the choice as Baru Cormorant. So she made the choice another woman would have made.
She said, without knowing the words until they left her mouth,
“I stand for Tain Hu.”
And she drew, and the saber came out with an eager rasp, the blue killing edge as long and lunar as the underwater moon she had hallucinated while she drowned. Enact-Colonel Osa nodded once, in satisfaction and respect. The crowd murmured, and children were drawn away, and Juris Ormsment drew her own saber with hydraulic grace: the rage that animated her pumping itself down her arms, into the blade. She went down to the plow guard, her left foot far out front and her hilt tight against her stomach with the blade tipped up towards Baru’s face.
“You didn’t order me shot dead,” she said, with wary respect. “You didn’t beg the embassy for protection. You didn’t run.”
“I love my parents,” Baru said, and that was the truth.
“Come on, then,” Ormsment said. Baru looked at her and saw surprise: the surprise of a woman suddenly at peace, after so long she had forgotten how it felt.
Baru put up her saber to the high ox guard, two-handed like a longsword, like Tain Hu’s own favorite blade, and waited for the firs
t strike.
And then the dead invaded the courtyard.
* * *
“I’M thirsty.”
She was a stooped Kyprananoki woman in a black caftan and a hood, and she walked with a cane. Her voice came very weak. If not for the hush she might never have been heard.
“I’m thirsty,” she croaked. From the shade of a lilac tree she stumped toward Governor Love. There was something wrong with how she moved, sore and roundabout, as if she had to fold herself away from certain inner pressures.
“What’s this?” Scheme-Colonel Masako pointed to her, drawing a general sigh from the audience, who hoped the theater would reach a proper climax with Baru’s surrender. “Excuse me, mam, are you with the birthday party—?”
“I’m thirsty,” a woman in a broad pregnancy khanga called, and when she stood up Baru saw that she was fat with child and that the child had gone wrong. Black blood streaked her calves and ankles.
Black blood. Oh Himu. Baru stumbled backward from the duel, fumbling to scabbard her sword, turning desperately to find Shao Lune and Tau. There was a moment for Ormsment to sneer and begin to pronounce coward, and then—
“I’m thirsty!” the pregnant woman screamed, and her scream went raw, and she doubled over a cramp or contraction, the grass beneath her blackening with a fat drop of blood; she was in the middle of a miscarriage, but she kept her face up, glaring at Governor Love, her trembling fists raised. “I’M THIRSTY!”
“I should like to leave,” Tau whispered, drawing Baru into the crowd. Osa was already pushing people aside.
“We have to go,” Baru hissed. “Shao, lead the way, I know you found a way out—”
A man in the crowd of partygoers threw back his white Kyprist mask. His teeth were black. His eyes streamed blood. A chevron cut across his right shoulder marked him—the documents had said—as a Canaat fighter; Pran Canaat meant the world for people, but what made everyone shout wasn’t the chevron but the blood that poured from his nose and mouth and eyes, a second mask of blood that ran thick like new clot.
“I’M THIRSTY!” he howled, and he clawed two handfuls of blood off his face and lunged for the nearest man. “DRINK ME!”
“PRAN CANAAT!” another bleeding throat shouted. “DOWN WITH KYPRISM!”
Ten of them, Baru counted, twelve, fifteen, their caftans opened, their masks removed, the bleeding dead who raised their faces with cries of I’m thirsty and Pran Canaat! and offered their sickness to share. The courtyard rang with screams. Blood and fluids on the grass. The Scheme-Colonel Masako watched it all with a little smirk of satisfaction. Masako, of course. Masako whose lies had tipped Tau-indi off to something wrong, Masako whose embassy had been accused of funding the Canaat rebels—
He had smuggled these sick rebels into his own house. Why? Why? How could he benefit? Because Barber-General Love was here, and so many other Kyprists.
There was no more time to think.
The woman with the cane fell on Governor Love. Ormsment and her bodyguards had flinched away, afraid as only a good Incrastic could be afraid of the plague—and now the woman was on Love, tearing at him, clawing off his mask, spitting, shrieking, and a knife flashed in her right hand—
Thomis Love screamed like a wretched child.
“I’M THIRSTY,” the woman screamed, “AND YOU DRINK!”
She disemboweled herself.
Baru would never forget it: the way the woman opened her innards to smear her death across the Barber-General. She bled and slithered on him in rapture—Tain Hu had known this, she had told Baru, madness is a way to power—oh Wydd, make her stop that ecstatic screaming, as her organs fell thickly over the Kyprist governor—
Love howled. His mouth was full of black blood.
Ormsment blew a wooden whistle and forty Sulane marines rushed the embassy.
* * *
“THEY’RE Canaat.” Faroni reached for her weapon. “They’re inside the walls.”
Aminata saw a man bleeding from the eyes and she knew at once what it had to be. The bushmeat defense, the navy files called it, but it would forever be the Black Emmenia to her, for she had heard stories of the green-black blood in the orphanage.
Someone had eaten one of the forbidden meats from the forbidden place. Someone had done it here, on Kyprananoke, and then they had shared the behemoth sacrament of their blood.
“They’re sick,” she said. “Get up. Get out. Now.”
And she fired the flare pistol up into the sky, to call Ascentatic’s marines.
Faroni jumped onto Gerewho’s cupped hands, leapt, caught the eave above, and hauled herself up on top. “You next, mam,” Gerewho panted. “Hurry!”
“Wait—I have to find—”
Baru had disappeared in the crowd. Where? Where was Baru? Aminata had to follow her! There was the Oriati ambassador in their bright khanga—running for an archway—there was Baru! But she was headed into the embassy! She would be caught inside!
“Fuck,” Aminata snarled, because she would never, could never be at peace again unless she got to talk to Baru one more time. Just once, to understand, to know the truth. Did she remember Aminata? Had they really been friends?
But Baru had gone.
She stepped onto Gerewho’s hand and pulled herself onto the roof. Her marines swarmed up ladders from the reef behind the embassy to meet her. “Lieutenant!” Aminata called, marking the woman in command. “Take your first company and blast holes in the roof! Get down there and get everyone out! I want diplomatic protections—this is a rescue operation!”
“The courtyard’s dirty!” a marine bawled. “Dirty blood in the courtyard!”
“It’s Kettling!” someone shouted, to general dismay. “It’s the fucking Kettling! They set it loose!”
“Look at their eyes! Their eyes are bleeding!”
The sergeants brayed for discipline.
Aminata had the space of a breath to decide what to do. Without orders she would lose control of the marines. She had no time to lay out the facts. All she knew was that there was live plague in the courtyard below, she was the officer in command, and she had a duty to discharge—
—but Baru was down there—
—but it was her duty, her duty to be sure not one splash of dirty blood made the waterline—
“Second company!” She pointed down into black blood hell. “Burn it!”
* * *
SULANE’S marines came through the front gate in a blast of sparklers and a wall of pepper smoke. They were carrying the grenades in their fists, and the smoke streamed back across them in the sea wind, parting over their masks, maning them in chemistry.
They hit the crowd with the blunt end of their spears. Ormsment beat her way toward them with a broken whiskey bottle.
“They’ve blocked the way out!” Baru shouted, over the screams. “We can’t get back to the boat!”
“Shit.” Osa herded them away from the chaos. “Shit shit shit.”
“Tau.” Baru grabbed their arm. “Did you find the shadow ambassador?”
“I did, I did, we passed the signals—”
“Do you see her?”
“Yes! Over there, she’s calling to us!” They pointed to an archway into the embassy’s manor house. A woman beckoned—why, it was the eyepatched pregnant Oriati lady Baru had spoken to earlier. “Osa, get us that way.”
Baru caught sight of Ngaio Ngaonic, a napkin wrapped over his face, shoving determinedly through the screams to the woman in the pregnancy khanga, who was miscarrying, publicly and horribly, her child probably long dead inside her, her body sustained by drugs and madness. She screamed in convulsive agony, and came up again, raising her fists, “KYPRISTS DID THIS!”
The Black Emmenia, Baru thought, it’s the Black Emmenia, and Ngaio knows it’s fatal, so why is he going to help her—
But that was what people did when the world went mad. They tried to help.
Someone on the balcony above the madness fired a Falcresti flare pistol. A sputtering b
lue spark arched up past the seabirds. Baru followed the arc of smoke down to a tall Oriati woman in local clothes who looked exactly like—
Aminata? Aminata? It couldn’t be!
“Aminata!” Baru shouted, waving. “Aminata, it’s me!”
Then she remembered her fear that Aminata was Cairdine Farrier’s agent.
“What are you doing?” Shao Lune hissed, pulling down Baru’s arm. “Don’t draw attention!”
Ormsment’s marines beat at the crowd with the long shafts of their lances. It was not enough, there were too many people and they were too desperate to get out, and the black blood was driving them. A sergeant bawled an order, “Ring smoke! Throw!” The marines ripped their grenades free and the fuses spewed thin jets of sparks as the smoke went up: smoke, thank Devena, not fire.
A man clung sobbing to a screaming Kyprist surgeon. He was bleeding from empty eye sockets into the surgeon’s hair.
Shao Lune pulled Baru. “Stop watching! Go!” Osa had actually picked up the Prince-Ambassador. Together they plunged through the crowd toward the archway, where the silhouette of the shadow ambassador beckoned, here, here. Something wet splashed on Baru’s face. She clawed at herself in silent shock—it was only someone’s wine, hurled—a Kyprist staggered past her with a crossbow bolt in his chest, blinking rapidly, as if to clear his head—
Falcresti marines appeared on the rooftops. They wore dark green slashes on their masks: Ascentatics. They’re going to burn us, Baru thought. I know that’s what they’ll do. They’re confused, so they’ll burn everything.
“Tau,” she said, “Tau, I’m sorry.” The lilacs were all torn from their branches, swirling underfoot. “Tau, I’m so sorry.”
Tau would not look at her.
“In here,” the woman in the archway called, and then they were hurrying through into a low stone hall, and the woman lowered a steel portcullis behind them, chaining it shut, sealing them inside, away from the screams and the spreading death.
* * *
INSIDE: stucco walls, a low arched ceiling, soft light, quiet.
Tau-indi wept fiercely and succinctly. Baru tried to imagine what they might be thinking: how they had said the duel was a test of Baru’s trim, and what they might conclude from the way that duel had ended. A wound, they would think. A wound in trim …
The Monster Baru Cormorant Page 54