The Monster

Spring came to Aurdwynn, and the streets of Treatymont bloomed with winter corpses.

Over the last four weeks Province Admiral Juris Ormsment had watched this corpse’s black foot grow out of a melting ice dam. This was her favorite spot in the city, a garden gallery off Arwybon Plaza, and she came here whenever she could to escape the suffocating Governor’s House, but the foot had rather ruined the mood. With the city’s workforce depleted in Cattlson’s debacle, corpses came out of the ice faster than they could be cleared. This one’s killers had cut away the big toe for a rebel bounty. (Or, maybe, it had been eaten. Samne Maroyad insisted there was such a thing as an ice-tunneling rat.) Probably this dead man was a faithful citizen, killed for his loyalty.

Dead sailors in a warm harbor, their eyes and their guts emptied by the gulls. And the chips of teeth left in their broken jaws chattered as they begged her:

ANNALILA TO TREATYMONT/ADMIRAL’S EYES ONLY

PASS BY ROCKET RELAY HIGHEST IMPORTANCE

ORMSMENT:

I HAVE CRITICAL NEWS.

EXCELLENT WORK BY LT CDR AMINATA HAS GIVEN US A LEAD.

IMPERIAL AGENT BARU CORMORANT—SAME AGENT WHO EXECUTED THE MASSACRE OF YOUR SAILORS AT WELTHONY—ALSO BAITED THE ORIATI ATTACK ON YOUR PROVINCE.

SHE IS INVOLVED IN PLOT TO TRIGGER SECOND ARMADA WAR. SUSPECT IMPERIAL THRONE DESIRES WAR TO FORCE ACCESS TO ORIATI MBO.

CONSIDER THIS AGENT HIGHEST POSSIBLE THREAT TO ASHEN SEA PEACE.

I HAVE DEPLOYED NULLSIN AND RNS ASCENTATIC TO TRACK AND SECURE HER. HOLD YOUR COMMAND. DO NOT DO ANYTHING WHICH COULD COMPROMISE US OR LEAD TO PURGE. I REPEAT DO NOT MOVE TOO SOON.

PROVINCE ADMIRAL FALCREST AHANNA CROFTARE HAS BEEN INFORMED AND WILL REPLY.

JURIS. DO NOT GO AFTER HER.

REAR ADMIRAL SAMNE MAROYAD

ANNALILA FORTRESS

CAUTERIA

The rage rose up in her again. Water hammer. That was the name. Water hammer—when you closed a pipe-valve too quickly, or detonated a mine underwater, then a pressure wave would form in the water or the sea. It could tear plumbing from the wall or cave in a ship’s hull. Water hammer. And for a moment she was eleven again, standing on the rusty ladder inside the settlement’s well, with the stone lid propped up on her fingertips: later they would swell up into bloody bulbs. She had watched from that well as the Invijay came through the fences (this was before the Armada War: there was no Occupation to the south to buffer the Butterveldt). She had watched them kill her mother and grandmother and take her father for a slave and a whore. They had that power, the power to end a life, to close the future off like a pipe and send the shock of that closure into the world. Water hammer.

She came back to this little gallery because it reminded her of the well. Stone duty on every side, chaos past those walls. And that water rising under her, rising to beat at the cover, rage and sorrow and need for justice, the water hammer—

Oh, Samne, she thought. How can’t I go after her? The dead cry out for it, don’t they? The sailors I left in Baru’s reach, the sailors who trusted me to trust her. Didn’t I betray them when Baru betrayed me? Didn’t I fail that trust?

Of course Samne Maroyad wouldn’t have sent the message if she thought Ormsment had any way to do something stupid. Any hint as to where to begin.

But there was another reason Ormsment came to this gallery. A stone hidden in the wall, with a flat white face where she could mark a date and time to meet.

“Hey,” she said, to the blackened foot in the ice. “Hey, you. Do the dead care?”

The foot had nothing to say. She tried clarifying. “Do you care what we do in your name?”

It was a fucking foot, so of course it wouldn’t answer. She had to do an admiral’s duty and decide for herself.

Everyone, Juris Ormsment thought, ended up dead. Everyone. If you stopped mattering when you died, life had no meaning: that was pretty clearly unacceptable. So you did matter after you died. Why? You mattered because people acted in your memory.

The living had a responsibility to the dead. A responsibility to honor their successes, and to make right the wrongs done against them. It was as true for a mother of dead sons as an admiral of dead sailors.

And that was that. She could choose not do it, of course. But a choice not to do the right thing had a name, and that name was evil.

She took the stone from its place in the gallery wall. In small Aphalone blocks, using a calligraphy brush, she painted a date and a time. She had never done this, and she had no reason to believe it would work, except that the Bane of Wives said it would.

Nothing had ever stopped the Bane of Wives from doing what she said she would do.

Juris Ormsment realized she would probably never see her little gallery again. So she got out her dive knife, knelt on the filthy ice in her dress uniform, and began to chip the black-footed corpse free of its tomb.

SHE called up her commands that night for a harborside review. They turned out on the piers in ragged order but fine spirits, cheering to each other, boasting of their ships: of sure helms and ready rockets, of rope splice and steady masts, the most beautiful boys and delicious cooks. Here were her Sulanes and Scylpetaires, Welterjoys and Juristanes and Commsweals, the enormous companies off Kingsbane and Egalitaria with their faces ash-blackened in disdain of the enemy. All in fantastic spirits after the spring’s reversals, especially now that their shares of the prize money had been paid out: symbolic prizes for the forty-three Coyote and Oriati warships burnt to the keel without a single Falcresti loss.

She’d commanded that battle. Navy Advance called her a hero of the Republic. Even His Hypocrisy the Empire Admiral, Lindon Satamine, had commended her to Parliament.

If she kept her calm and let this victory propel her she might one day be Empire Admiral herself.

But she would be Empire Admiral of a navy that sold its sailors to women like Baru Cormorant.

From Sulane’s mast-top she raised her open hands like yardarms and the roar of the crews broke over her like storm waves. And like a good ship in storm she rose up and shook off the water and kept her course.

Juris often dwelt on a riddle she’d heard at academy in Shaheen. What is power? Where does it come from, when is it false, when is it true? Imagine that the Minister of the Metademe, the Minister of the Faculties, and the Morrow Minister are at dinner when it is announced that the wine is poisoned. A nameless secretary leaps up with a bottle of antidote. Each Minister demands the secretary hand over the bottle. The Metademe threatens her family and her fertility, the Morrow Minister threatens her reputation and safety, and the Faculties threaten to stab her up the eyeball with a meat skewer. Whose power is truest? Who gets the antidote?

And if you called to your sailors to follow you, but their Emperor called them to destroy you, who would they heed? If you knew for certain that they would follow you to ruin—would it then be wrong to ask for their service?

She walked among them. They looked at her with hard-chinned gratitude: thank you for gathering us here and using us so well. Thank you for showing us what we earn with our duty, pride and purpose and a fair piece of cash. The force of their love and respect filled her up like a sail and she tried so hard not to grin.

Now and then she stopped and asked an officer, “What’s the word, sailor?” And mostly the woman would answer, “Fair winds and following seas wherever you send us, mam.”

They would follow her anywhere. Not just the true salt but the wide-eyed octopus girls so young they were still all arm and leg, the careerists trying to illuminate their service jackets with merit, the lemon-rind convicts who would never work anywhere but a ship again. All hers.

It was her responsibility to deny them that loyalty. To take only those who could understand the sacrifice she asked of them.

That night she began to draw up transfer orders. The young and hopeful and ambitious would come off Sulane and Scylpetaire. She would take the hard and fierce and angry, the sea revenants and the orphans and the widows.

She would fill her two prize ships with those who did not fear collective punishment. But that would not be enough: the Throne was too subtle. Some of them would still be leveraged, compromised, ready to mutiny or murder her when she broke from the Hierarchic Qualm.

AND then it was the day she had painted on that hidden stone, and in the morning she went out in disguise to the meet.

On the wagon-seamed downslope off the Ffynyrn Bramble—she had finally gotten used to pronouncing the Iolynic y, which made the name Faneern—two orphans played dam-builder in the runoff. A dead woman with gills carved into her throat lay in the mud upstream. Juris shouted, in her best Iolynic, “Children! Stay out of that water, it’s tainted!”

She saw more corpses as she walked. Beggars with faces burnt to shining parchments by riot acid hauled the dead in for hygiene bounty. They would see not a province admiral but a bare-faced brown woman in a homespun dress, hurrying through the muck. But Juris was not afraid.

Once the beggars must have been rebels. Part of the Coyote uprising that Juris had crushed, yes, damn it, that she had crushed, no matter how the Emperor tried to give the credit to Its Agents. Juris had beaten that Oriati fleet under Abdumasi Abd, the rebellion’s only hope.

She felt vain and stupid, telling herself that. Oh, Juris, you great hero, you stopped the uprising, nobody else did it, it was you! But she had to seize the credit. This was what the Masquerade did to navy women: took their triumphs away.

She knew she would never return to this city, and her melancholia brought out the beauty in Treatymont. The flowers were coming up with the corpses. The houses bloomed with hyacinth and cherry blossom, early magnolias, deadly nightshades in medicinal plots. Climbing vines opened small white flowers that attracted fat bumblebees. The morning sun glinted off the masttop mirrors of the ships in the Horn Harbor. Far out the two burnt towers stood like empty tooth-sockets. You would hardly know, looking at this city, that it could drive a navy flag officer to grand treason.

“Juris,” a woman called, taking the opportunity of the disguise to skip her rank. “Juris, you should go.”

Her aide came up the hill from Arwybon Plaza. Shao Lune, oh, you sharp-toothed weasel: a viciously perfect specimen of the Republican ideal, immaculate in her work, intimidating in her aspect. One of those people Juris had never been, people who did everything with enormous sprezzatura, the casual and effortless grace of the superior.

“I can’t,” Juris said. Physically, yes, it would be possible to call everything off. Morally it was impossible. She embraced her aide like a wayward daughter, though it was, actually, very hard to imagine Shao as anyone’s child, at least unstrangled. “You’ll draw everyone’s attention while I make the meet.”

Shao Lune sneered, quite enchantingly, her face like a wonderful painting of your worst enemy. For a very long time Juris had wanted to court-martial her for insubordination and consign her to a fish-patrol corvette. But the more angry Juris became, the less she cared about the tone of Shao’s loyalty, and the more the quality of her work.

SHAO Lune buttoned herself up and went out to sit in the sun with high-chinned dignity. A suitor arrived to dare her: a Stakhi man in a broad-shouldered tabard who offered olive oil.

Ormsment had claimed a public bench (a Falcresti project, of course) on the south end. It was early yet, before the plaza filled with Aurdwynni merchants, mistresses-of-house, master sewers, cranksmen, collimators, caseworkers, stevedores, dog-runners, butchers, bastardettes, and other feudal traffic. She watched, amused but worried, as Shao Lune’s suitor tried, too late, to withdraw. Was he here to court a child bride, Shao asked him? No? Then why had he written poetry for illiterate idiot babies? Oh, begging his pardon, of course he had tried his best. He should show her around the plaza. He must know all the local excitements, the very best backlogged gutters, the most fascinating decay.

Juris wished Shao would be more careful with her powers. An air of superiority made one a target in men’s circles. Sooner or later navy women had to make peace with that: or, if not peace, at least a cease-fire and a border.

A bee settled on her thigh. Juris smiled at it. Rage slammed against the back of her teeth, and the front of her skull, and rebounded: rage, rage, they died because you trusted her, they died on your watch. A bee would die after she used her sting, wouldn’t she? So she had to choose carefully when to strike.

Then a burly woman in forester’s skins came out of the alley across from Juris, hitching up her pants: briefly, beneath the tough denim, Juris saw a pale scar across a brown gut, and the edge of a strong fat thigh. She chased off the orphans cutting up the dead dog with blows from her hatchet’s handle. What a tableau. Aurdwynn in a painting: a forester pisses in an alley, orphans cut up a frozen dog, the forester curses and beats the orphans. Next the forester would probably eat the dog. Juris loved this place, loved the charcoal smell and the taste of wheat pancakes on a campfire, the shining rivers that smelled like ice. But king’s balls she was glad she hadn’t been born here.

King’s balls, her eyes! Blue as lightning-flash, and terrible, and Juris sat bolt-upright, for those eyes were proof. Eyes like Xate Yawa’s. Blue like a tropical crow, and mad, mad.

She looked nothing like Juris had expected, nothing like a usefully built navy woman with big shoulders and long legs. Rough sinew and loose muscle, instead, and a survivor’s pad of fat.

She chopped the frozen dog’s head from its spine, picked it up by its bloody ruff, and came over to Ormsment.

The Bane of Wives underhanded the dead dog’s head. It landed on the bench next to Ormsment, thudded wetly, rolled against the inscription: LINGER AND APPRECIATE THE CLEANLY AIR.

“You’re the agent.” By officer’s habit Ormsment laid out her knowledge. “I read about you. You were on Sousward. Then in the Occupation, then sent to Mzilimake. You didn’t come back.”

“Open the dog’s mouth.” She knelt to scour her hands with ice. “There’s something for you in there.”

After the black-footed corpse, surely a frozen dog wouldn’t kill her. Juris stripped off her good gloves and felt around under the dripping tongue. Something small, hard—a long flat stone.

“I killed him in the winter,” the Bane of Wives said, throwing down her fouled snow, “and I froze him here. Mercy kill. He had pika. He was chewing on flagstones. Turn the stone over.”

In rectangular Simple Aphalone characters a chisel had scraped the word ORMSMNT.

“Because you want to pretend the world’s fair,” the Bane of Wives said, with a terrible indifference, which Juris did not like at all: the indifference, at least. The terror she needed.

“I prefer to think I help keep it fair.” Actions had to have consequences. What you did had to come back to you, or the world would be as inchoate and unfair as her childhood in the Butterveldt. When people cannot count on justice they count on blood.

Over the rebel winter she’d asked Cattlson, each and every time they met, can I order her death? We have agents in place, I know we do—no? No? But, your Excellence, how can we protect her? After what she did at Welthony?

Away a few benches, the Stakhi olive-oil man had begun shaking his fist and making threats. Shao Lune said something in a tone like a sneer and the man pivoted, instantly, into mewling apology: he hadn’t realized she was navy, he hadn’t meant it, could he make it up to her, please? Shao Lune laughed at him. “I did this to you? You’re like a dog who comes at the chime of the bell. Yes, a dog, I said. A dog.”

Looking at her was like walking up to the edge of a canyon. You had to do it carefully, and not for too long. “Maybe,” Juris said. “But it’s the right thing to do.”

“We know the risks,” Juris said, we meaning the whole conspiracy, the plan to overthrow Empire Admiral Satamine and maybe even the Parliament that created him. “All of us do. I have to show the Throne that they can’t use us like dogs without us biting back.”

Of course she had. Who’d sent the Bane of Wives to Mzilimake Mbo to stir up civil war? Who had dispatched her to the Occupation to turn the Invijay against the Oriati?

“Tell me, then,” Juris whispered, her bones suddenly athrum, her nose stuffed with the smell of thawing dog, the bee buzzing in her ear and the spring sun glittering on the melt, the whole world waiting, waiting on this answer, “can you lead me to her?”

“Two, yes, enough loyal crew for two ships.” Those officers who’d stayed here under Ormsment, rather than moving on with Ahanna Croftare, did it for love of her. “Will you tell me who among them are compromised?”

That rankled at Juris, but so did the idea of blackmailed officers simpering among her loyal few. “So you shall.”

“Good.” The Bane of Wives spat into the snow. “Baru’s at the Elided Keep. It’s not on your charts. But I can take you there.”

“Of course,” the woman said, looking at Shao Lune, now alone, with callous appetite, carnal or violent, Juris couldn’t tell, “once you do this, you can’t come back. Even if you take Baru. Even if you force her to write you a pardon. The Emperor will destroy you.”

The Bane of Wives looked at her as if she recognized something she might respect. “The dead do task us.”

The bee whirred off to find a brighter flower. The dog’s jaw creaked shut. Shao Lune’s suitor fled.