INCARNATION
She came into her morning-room, where, before the ship and Tain Hu and the test, she’d read and written and then torn up all she wrote. Hard morning light came down through the hive window: teeth of fine thick glass in an iron truss and a clear scouring luminance, Incrastic, virtuous. Like the chimes of the proctors at the Iriad school, calling the girls out for dawn inspection.
Baru went into the little pit commode and vomited in grief.
When she came out, rinsed and empty, wanting strong whiskey to clear the taste off the back of her tongue, a map of the world had been laid out across the smooth dry floor.
She circled it in awe. Wine and no sleep gave her a singing headache: she felt brightly, tenuously alive. “Taranoke,” she said, determined to keep that name alive and spoken. “Taranoke . . . there you are.”
Beginning at her home, she surveyed the map.
And for the first time in her life the world revealed itself to her. Not the ring of the Ashen Sea, which you could see in any gazetteer, but the full sweep of the globe from end to endless end. Baru gasped in delight, and covered her mouth.
“It’s so blue,” she said. “I thought there’d be more land.”
Apparitor spoke from her blindness. “Eight parts water and two parts land, we think.”
“Has Falcrest surveyed it all?”
“Not all. Not the poles, though the ana-folk say you can walk across the ice all the way to the lodepoint. And the south? Who knows. The Oriati, maybe. We’ve never managed an expedition past Zawam Asu, into anterior seas or the western oceans. They sell us charts but it might all be fancy. Whale queendoms and the like. Creatures with tongues as long as kraken arms.”
“We used to think,” Baru whispered, “on Taranoke, I mean—there was a blue hole, that’s like an underwater well—”
“I know them,” he said. “Horrifying pits.”
“I swam in it,” Baru protested. “We called it the Navel.”
“Pit seeks pit, I suppose.” But he was staring at her. Wondering, maybe, where the executioner had gone.
She said, in a rush, “And we’d say the Navel was the lowest place in the world. That’s why all the rivers converged on the Ashen Sea. And if you went out far enough in any direction, eventually the mountains would rise up to the sky.” And then, with defensive pride: “Although we know, always knew, the world’s really a globe.”
“I’ll be outside,” Iraji said. Apparitor gave him a quick squeeze, not looking, absentminded gratitude. They were friends. Baru touched a coin with her mind, a disc with Duke Oathsfire on one side and Duke Lyxaxu on the other. The coin was proof that she could betray people even if she saw their dearest friendships.
Cold currency, of course. But valuable.
She gathered her attention on the known world, the Ashen Sea and its surrounds. Apparitor mistook this for disappoinment: “I’d like to fill in the more tentative edges,” he said, protectively. “It’s my passion, exploration. There’s trouble raising ships and money, with war so close, but I still have my ways. . . .”
“How does it work?” Baru said.
“Eh?”
“This. Our world. How does it work?”
The Ashen Sea was a lumpy ring, and the world, Baru’s theater of play, was a misshapen cross around that ring. North was Aurdwynn and the Winter-crests and icy mesa beyond; left-which-was-west was the Camou Interval, a great plague-ridden unknown, grasslands and mountains full of scattered people as unknown to Falcrest as Taranoke might once have been. Between those two arms a fan of steppe reached out northwest, into the fallen Maia heartlands.
It struck Baru as very odd that so much of the map was fallen empire, fallow territory, forgotten land. As if the tide of humanity was going out, all across the world. . . .
“I can’t tell you how the world works,” Apparitor said. “If I knew that, would I be scurrying around on the Throne’s errands? Would I have to put up with you?” And something about Tain Hu, which Baru jerked her attention away from: it vanished into her right-blindness.
“I have a theory,” Baru said. “About the world.”
“Of course you do.”
“The fundamental concern of all our history has been access to the Ashen Sea trade circle—”
“Did I say I wanted to hear it?” he snapped.
Baru still thought she must be right.
On the southern limb of the cross the Oriati Mbo jutted like a long tooth at the bottom of the Ashen Sea, coast and savannah and desert and sahel and jungle, all the way to Zawam Asu where the whales gathered for their fabled quorums. A gristly mass of land connected the Mbo northeast to Falcrest, belted by the strait called the Tide Column, which linked the Ashen Sea to the titanic Mother of Storms.
And north of the Column, on a pudgy potato-shaped subcontinent jutting (Baru had to wave her head to remember the direction) rightward, eastward, was Falcrest. Not central. Not remarkable. Nowhere you would choose as the seat of power if you saw the world like a high hawk.
“We’re so small,” Baru squeaked. She had to swallow to get her voice right. A terrible vindication was in her, and she wanted it out: the notion that any crime could be pardoned for a chance to glimpse these world secrets.
“I take it,” Apparitor said, “that you’re not used to feeling small?”
“No,” she said, and then realized he was calling her an egomaniac.
“You never got high and lay down on your back on a mountainside? And watched the sky until you were afraid you’d fall up into it?”
“No . . .”
“Tain Hu did,” he said, “she told me about it.”
Her name like a thorn in the tongue. Baru glared at him. He grinned and waved a bottle: The Grand Purifier. “I needed an excuse to be rude,” he hiccupped, “so I stopped by Helbride and raided my vodka stash. Clear as spring melt! Here, for your health—”
“I’m not drinking anything you pour.” Baru took one last guilty, yearning glance at the map.
From the Mothercoast the map swept east: hundreds of miles of open ocean, barren islets, wild currents. The Mother of Storms. Baru’s eyes crossed the distance like a ship, imagining thirst, hundred-foot waves, maelstrom, thirst and thirst and desperate salty thirst. At last she came to a coastline complicated by inlets and fjords and interior lakes. Smoking volcanoes issued clouds of thin paint.
The mapmakers had written here, in plain blocks, THE SUPERCONTINENT.
“Why is it super?” she asked.
“Because it’s huge.”
“How do you know?”
“We found maps. Made by explorers from the pre–Oriati Mbo. They died over there.”
“Oh . . .” Baru said, dreaming of long eons and secret valleys. She would like to be an explorer.
“Who would ever want to oppose our glorious Republic?” Apparitor murmured, with bitter admiration. “Who would want to kill the thing that makes maps like this?”
Baru would. Because she would never share this world with Tain Hu. She would never point from a ship’s mast and say, See that mountain? I’ve named it for you.
“Tell me the rules,” she commanded.
BEHOLD, attend, hear ye hear ye, and et cetera,” Apparitor hiccupped. “Let these be the laws of those who act beyond the law.”
The cooks had laid out breakfast. Soft-boiled chicken eggs cooling in their brown shells, spring mango, smoked fish, rusk bread, and dipping coffee. The centerpiece was three guga in a sugar glaze: baby gannets, taken from the clifftop colonies which surrounded the keep in white fields of guano and squawking chicks. The exile staff held a contest every year to make the best gannet dish. For Baru they’d arranged the chicks upon mirrored vessels, posed as if in flight.
She was ravenous. She hadn’t eaten since she saw the ship coming in with Hu.
“The Cryptarch’s Qualm.” Apparitor stared into his vodka bottle as if he could read the words from the light in the drink. “Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. But to use your power you must touch the world. To touch you must be touched, to be touched is to be seen, to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish. Act subtly, lest you diminish.” He took a slug.
She only needed to survive long enough to destroy it all. Subtlety could be dismissed. “Eat,” she suggested. “Or you’ll be useless soon.”
“I don’t want to be of any use to you.” But he picked up an egg and began to juggle it, one-handed. “Next, the Tyrant’s Qualm—”
“Are we tyrants?” Baru sliced her mango. The blade snicked on the plate: the texture too much like flesh. Her chest hurt.
“You decide that as much as I.” He gave his egg a little backspin. “If you hold absolute power, everyone wants to take it from you. So you must entice supporters by granting them a piece of your power. But the more people you entice, the more thinly you are spread, and to spread is to perish.”
“Fine, fine.” She would need to learn to make allies. But never again could she let them as close as Hu. The price was so high. “Did you mean for me to pardon the duchess?”
Apparitor rolled his eyes and took a slug straight from the bottle. “Pardon her?” He gasped: a little bead of vodka sat between the ridges under his nose, quivering. “I thought you’d beg for her life. Thirdly, the Great Game. Every advisor to the Emperor, no matter their particular program of interests, shall maintain a familiarity with the Great Game—”
A game. Baru would love to play a game of intrigue, of calculation, a game that overflowed her mind and doused her heart. “What is it?”
“It is the Throne’s model of the world, honed by decades of intrigue and contest. We play it on a map, with the assistance of very large rulebooks. And when our work is finished, there will be no difference between the rules of the game and the laws of the world.”
He had put down his bottle and produced a bag of tiny figures from his pocket: he was laying them out on the map-rug with the warm egg still cupped in his off hand.
“Hesychast.” He held up a broad-shouldered brown bust. “One of us. The agents of the Throne.”
Baru knew that name. When she’d first met Apparitor she’d asked if he were Hesychast—Cairdine Farrier’s rival, the eugenicist. The one who thought her race was fit only for farming, fishing, and pleasure.
“Hesychast told me you’d beg for her reprieve,” Apparitor said. “He guaranteed it.”
“I suppose he thought my lust would control me.”
Apparitor stared at the figure with hot distaste. “He believes that the isoamorous—people like you and I—must be consumed by incredible passion. Like addicts. Why else would we persist in our obscene fascinations, when the whole world is against us?”
Baru remembered her fathers flirting on the beach, fearless and beautiful. The whole world had not been against them, no matter what the Empire said. And that was the beginning of hope: if the world had not always been as the Empire demanded, then it might not always be as the Empire demanded.
He pitched the egg overhand and it landed in the cup of wine Baru had just poured. She blinked and sputtered. “Is that a glint of conscience I detect?” he said. “A sliver of human compassion?”
“Doubtful,” Baru said, acidly. “I’m only tired. I stayed up too late with the prisoner.”
“Tormenting her with her failure?”
Baru stuffed her mouth with baby gannet meat, so she couldn’t reply.
“Anyway. These figures are members of the Throne. Here’s Itinerant—” A smiling waistcoated bust, her patron, Farrier. He put it down on the edge of the map. “Stargazer—” A telescope lens, also for the edge. “Me—” A pale figure, with red paint for hair. He put it in Aurdwynn. “Renascent—” A featureless pawn, which he placed, with a shudder, on Falcrest. “And you.”
The pawn he produced was extraordinary. Narrow, thoughtful, storm-dark eyes: Baru’s cheekbones and chin: a faint, uncharacteristic smile, as if the pawn wanted to make Baru happy. All carved from the wood with the most expert care.
“Whittled it myself,” Apparitor said, cheerily. “On the ship with Tain Hu. Thought it’d be a nice gift once you’d spared her. Ah well.”
He smashed his vodka bottle down on the pawn’s head and it split. Apparitor flicked the broken stub over to Baru. “Your pawn, my lady,” he said, and emptied the bottle down his throat.
“Now,” he gasped, “we play.”
“I don’t know the rules—”
“And I won’t tell you.” He stepped onto the map. “Tell me what you’ll do to the world, Baru Cormorant. Show me your savantry!”
“What do I—”
“I told you. I told you.” His eyes glinted in the slatted dawn light. His jaw twitched, like a smile trying to wriggle out of its cage. There was something bestial, something cunning and atavistic about his pig-pale flesh, as if his ancestors had lived in their mansions too long, too far from the light. Baru hated the thought—she hated these prejudices!—but when the earth trembled with a distant avalanche or tremor, and the chandelier of the map of the moon moved above them in sympathy, she almost gasped aloud in fear.
“The rules of the game,” he said, “are the rules of the world. Play!”
Baru set her pawn down in Aurdwynn. A splinter from its broken face got under her thumbnail: she hissed and sucked it out. Blood wicked into the wound and turned the nail red.
“You are in Aurdwynn,” Apparitor said, singsong, mocking. “You have just betrayed all your friends. The rebellion is over. You have gained the absolute overriding authority of the Imperial Throne. What do you do?”
Where to begin! She would do what Tain Hu trusted her to do. “I order the release of religious prisoners, the end of reparatory marriage, and a program of universal inoculation for children. I set patrols on the Inirein and the other major trade rivers. I dredge the Welthony harbor. I—”
“The provincial Governor refuses your suggestions. The Governor wishes to keep the north of Aurdwynn impoverished and ill, so the Stakhieczi cannot seize it and use it as a springboard for invasion.”
“The Governor?” Baru said, in confusion. “Isn’t Cattlson dead?”
Apparitor’s smug vodka-polished smile was very soon going to anger her. “Forgot about Heingyl Ri, did you?”
“Oh.” Baru had forgotten about her. Fool, Baru, weak stupid fool. Heingyl Ri was the Stag Duke’s daughter. She’d met Baru on her first day in Aurdwynn with her sharp fox eyes, her frightful décolletage, and that one eerily prescient barb: I hope no one will regret your appointment. Least of all you. “She married Bel Latheman, didn’t she?”
“Quite so.” Apparitor winked. “Xate Yawa prepared her very carefully for the Governor’s seat.”
“I have her dismissed.”
“How?”
“I write a letter,” Baru snapped, “saying I’m one of the Emperor’s advisors and I want her to step down.”
“I countermand your letter with my own. I want her to remain Governor.”
“Then I—” She almost giggled. It felt like the childhood game of My Mana Mane, where you tried to convince your friend why your version of the legendary Oriati hero was better, and could absolutely step all over her version of Mana Mane. “I have her husband implicated in that scheme of Vultjag’s. I tell Heingyl Ri she steps down or I have Bel Latheman convicted.”
“Fine.” Apparitor picked up his pawn and nudged hers over. “I murder you.”
“What!” She crossed her arms. “You can’t just murder me.”
“Why not?”
Because—because everything she’d done, everyone she’d sacrificed, would be wasted before she ever got to hurt the Masquerade.
“My patron would destroy you,” she said, which seemed plausible. Farrier had invested so many years of effort into her; and he had that wager with Hesychast about her capabilities. He would not want her dead.
“I knew it,” Apparitor crowed. He got up to straddle Aurdwynn and throw up his hands in victory. “I knew it!”
“Knew what!”
“Farrier! Farrier convinced you to kill your lover.” Apparitor’s fist clenched: his little pawn poked out of it like a red-haired homunculus, smiling at Baru. “You did what he wanted and now you know he’s going to protect you.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to insinuate,” Baru said, indignantly. “Of course he expected me to carry out the Republic’s law. What else?”
“Farrier’s showing off.”
“Showing off what?”
“His control over you. You know, on some level, that you’ll be rewarded when you obey him. That’s why you killed Tain Hu. To earn his indulgence.”
Baru wanted to stab him up through the nostril, into the pulp of his brain. The thought that he might be even the littlest bit right would annihilate her.
He hissed across her plate of dead fledglings and ruined mango. “Tell me what he’s planning! Why did you kill her? Did you do something so horrible that you couldn’t leave any witnesses?”
“Well,” she said, rising to the riposte, leaning into his salt and spirit smell, “I nearly married your brother, for one.”
He’d lost his red handkerchief on the harbor wind, his neck was naked, and so she saw the convulsion of fear that snapped his teeth together. “What brother?”
“Your brother,” she said, with a snake of guilt in her gut, which she tried, and failed, to step on. “The Necessary King of the Stakhieczi.”
“I don’t know any king,” he said, too quickly.
She smiled at him. “Come now. You were born prince of the Mansions. You tried to lead an expedition into the east, and the Masquerade kidnapped you off your ship.” Baru’s teeth closed on a tiny gannet-bone: it snapped between her jaws and slashed her gums. She’d heard the story from Dziransi, the Stakhieczi fighter in her retinue, and she’d known instantly, instantly, who that prince must be. “Does anyone else know? You’re kept in check by your hostage lover; but do they all know you’re royalty, too?”
He was silent and he was still.
“What would your colleagues do,” she whispered, “if your brother the Necessary King asked for your return, lest he invade? Would anyone protect you? Or would they send you home in rags and drool, with the lobotomy pick still jutting from your eye?”
Apparitor looked at her with pale fire in his eyes, with an aurora light on his teeth, and the charge of the air outside the keep passed through the stone and metal to stir his long red hair.
“You have me cornered,” he said.
It would have been undignified to whoop aloud. Instead she smiled. The blood from her cut gums made him flinch.
“Why do you do this?” he whispered. “I work for the Throne because it keeps me and mine safe. What do you want? What are you?”
She set her broken pawn down on Aurdwynn. The map rug was huge, huge, and she got up to pace the ring of the Ashen Sea, leaving him kneeling there with her plate of leavings and Aurdwynn in all its checkered peculiarity.
“This,” she said, kicking the ocean. “This ring. Trade goes around it, and around it, and around it. Falcrest to Oriati Mbo to Taranoke to Aurdwynn and back to Falcrest. Does it remind you of anything?”
“A water wheel.”
“An engine. Yes.” Baru surveyed her ocean. “What if that engine stopped?”
He did not even hesitate. “Falcrest collapses.”
“Well,” Baru said. “We can’t have that. We should explore the possible ways the trade could be stopped, so we can prevent them.”
“Are you speculating on the downfall of our great and beloved Republic? Some might consider this a mote suspicious.”
She waved in dismissal. “The hand is blameless, if it acts in service of the Throne. . . .”
“Quoting the Hierarchic? You learn our stories too well.” Apparitor clapped his hands on the rug, and everything rattled, the dish and the bottle, even Baru’s jaw. “Do you understand? You don’t. You will.”
A chime at the door: Iraji announced his return with the touch of a rod. “Pardon me, Excellences, but it’s time.”
Baru frowned. “Time for what?”
“For your exaltation, mam,” the boy said. “You go before the Emperor, and put on your new mask. And you tell us your name.”
“We’re not waiting for Hesychast?” Apparitor said, innocently. “He’s sailing all this way. . . .”
“What?” Baru staggered backward, cracked her hips on the breakfast table, and nearly sat in the guga. “Hesychast’s coming here?”
“Of course he is,” Apparitor said, adulterating his own coffee with wine. “Who do you think was going to take your hostage away?”
He gave her a two-fingered salute.
“May you regret what you did today,” he said, soberly, “until the end of time.”
INCARNATION is the art of form mimicking content.
Write a poem about linked destinies, and each verse begins with the end of the last: this is incarnation. Write a story about a mountain and it tapers to a peak on the page: incarnation. Baru always thought it was a stupid gimmick. Nobody demanded that the word billion be a thousand times longer than million, because that would be unwieldy.
The Throne had incarnated its virtues in the ritual of exaltation. And they had done it perfectly.
A great murmur of excitement ran through the gathered people—Elided Keep staff and Apparitor’s crew—as they opened their envelopes. Everyone had their own instructions; no one knew the full design.
“Is the gull part of the rite?” Baru asked her chamberlain.
It was a fat greasy-white seagull with yellow feet, perched on a spear-shaft that flew Duke Pinjagata’s banner. Apparitor said Pinjagata had been stabbed under the chin by a Clarified disguised as one of his troops. Baru missed him.
“I’m sorry, my lady Excellence.” Baru’s chamberlain had organized cabin boys to stone the gull. “It hopped down the east tower stairs. We’ve been trying to corner it but it’s quite fierce.”
The gull squawked and began to pitter-patter its feet. “Oh dear.” The chamberlain, gray and thinly drawn, covered his mouth in worry. “Kill it before it—”
The gull stopped pattering, stared in fury at the people below, and then relieved itself on Pinjagata’s banner. All the clerks groaned together. Baru bit her wrist to dam up a laugh.
“I’m so sorry,” her chamberlain whispered, “it does that whenever it patters its feet. We’ll have it taken down and cleaned, at once, at once.”
“Don’t bother. Pinjagata would’ve liked it.” She turned to the assembled technocrats. “Who’s been feeding this gull?”
“Feeding it, my lady?”
“See how it hops back and forth? It’s been trained to dance for food. Enterprising little bastard, isn’t it?” Polite laughter from all these people, people afraid of her. “Never mind. Let’s begin!”
The crowd in the throne room formed two columns, their hands outstretched before them, turned upward: a path of palms, from the doors to the high gray throne.
Baru walked between them, in her porcelain half-mask, a simple waistcoat and black trousers, with her gloves buckled at her wrists and Aminata’s boarding saber at her hip.
Oh, Wydd, what a thrill she felt. What a hateful thrill.
At the end of the path of hands the Emperor awaited her upon Its Throne.
Of course It couldn’t be the Emperor, who sat in the People’s Palace in Falcrest between sluiceways of glass eyeballs and ice water. Of course the marble seat in this throne room wasn’t the Throne. The Emperor here would be a lobotomite, his will pithed and destroyed with a steel pick.
They had prepared him in the full Imperial Regalia. A white smiling mask of enameled steel. A white silk raiment which bloomed out from beneath the mask and ran out taut and angular like a tent until it met the marble of the throne, where it gathered into braids, the braids woven thick and sure as ship’s rigging into steel eyebolts. Beneath the silk rig the man’s form could not be seen or selected as human. He was continuous with the weft of the Throne. Behind him the braids of silk spidered out through bolt and pulley to run away into secret corridors behind the wall. Arteries of secrets, pumping out into the world.
The gull squawked angrily. No sound otherwise, except the small decisions of Baru’s footfalls.
“STOP,” the assembled technocrats boomed, the Emperor’s voice invested in them.
Baru stopped.
“TELL ME YOUR NAME.”
“Baru Cormorant,” Baru said.
“BY WHAT MERIT DO YOU CLAIM MY ATTENTION?”
“I claim the polestar mark,” Baru said, and she opened her folio where her exams and assignments had been recorded, showing it to the Emperor and to the room: here is my worth. “I claim the Emperor’s authority. By my works I make my claim.”
“APPROACH ME.”
She climbed the short steps.
The great silk bindings of the Throne creaked and shifted: the Emperor’s left hand was drawn away, revealing a maple case. “MASK YOURSELF,” the chorus commanded, and inside that maple case Baru found a face of glazed blue-white ceramic, exquisitely blank. Around the right eye blazed the eight-pointed polestar mark, rendered in silver. The sign of overriding Imperial authority.
The mask was sleek to the touch, sensuously unyielding. Baru wondered how thrilling it would be to smash the perfect thing. Behind the right eye the interior swarmed with codes.
It fit her, of course, like a second face.
“TELL US YOUR NAME,” sang the servants of the Throne.
Baru turned to the little crowd. The whole pyramid of her life, turned upside down, with its vast base cornered by her distant ancestors, balancing on a tiny point: her, here, now.
I MADE IT she wanted to scream, red-lipped, broken-toothed, marrow spattering off her tongue, as certain and lethal in her arrival as a shark breaching with the broken body of a seal in its mouth. I made it. No living thing may call itself my ruler.
“I am Agonist,” she told them. “Let it be known.”
Agonist. It meant one who struggles.
The Emperor began to laugh.
An instant of horror and shame from the crowd, even a few giggles, as if a child had run out bare-assed and squalling to interrupt the ceremony: everyone thought the lobotomite had misbehaved.
But there was something in that laugh which Baru recognized. Her first stupid thought was that this simply wasn’t fair: the memory would be tainted, now. He had infiltrated this moment. He always would.
Apparitor leapt out of the crowd. “Baru!” he shouted, into the mortified silence. “Baru, unmask it!”
“Yes,” she said, and she reached out to the man bound to the Throne, gripped his smiling white mask, and lifted it off his head.
Deep folded eyes, laughingly sad, and skin almost as dark as Baru’s. The finely kept beard, which she had always thought must itch. Gods, he had tears in his eyes, tears of pride. Who else in the world could say they were genuinely proud of everything Baru had ever done? Only him. Only him.
“Surprise!” Cairdine Farrier beamed.
And then, his voice stopping up, “Oh, Baru, thank you, thank you. You’ve done it. You’ve saved us, you’ve saved us,” now thick-throated joy, “Baru, we’ve won. Falcrest is saved.”