TAU-INDI
I’d be fucked bareback in a pen of gonorrhetic pigs before I let Baru steal my home.
The gall of her. The bilious clotted gall. Ordering her pale little stooge back to Vultjag to seize control of the North! All she’d had to do was let Heingyl Ri give the pardons, trust Heingyl Ri to care for Vultjag and the others, but no, no, Baru had to have them for herself.
Baru might be a vicious narrow-minded weasel but she had a certain insight, didn’t she? If, in the spirit of my career as a hygienist, Aurdwynn could be imagined as a gigantic cunt (having midwifed most of my life I tended to think the nation and the organ shared a certain perverse resilience) then the coastal south was the happening end where all the business was conducted. But the north was the potential, the fallow womb, and Baru wanted to get her child in there first.
She knew what I was up to. Somehow she knew. And she was moving to stop me. I would need to write Heingyl Ri as soon as I could, and urge her to mind her security: Baru’s assassins would be at her already.
I’d been in a foul mood since Baru left me at the World Telescope, and doubly foul since that limp prick in the plaza tried to hang me with his cock-grip hands. But as soon as Baru began to move openly against me, I felt much better. I’d tidied away the whole mess of Baru at last. No more uncertainty. Hesychast was right about her, she had been irreparably compromised by Farrier’s secret process, and therefore she was an enemy of Aurdwynn’s freedom and had to be treated as such. My thoughts of befriending and tutoring her were easily dismissed. She was entirely wrapped up in her own ambitions, and would never accept me.
So I moved ahead with my other plan for Baru.
The enemies of kings are powerful prizes, my friends. If you know anything about the Stakhieczi, know that they do not like their kings. A Necessary King may be elected in times of need, but at his first sign of weakness he is unmade again.
The man who ruled the Wintercrests knew he had erred terribly by offering his hand and his armies to Baru, only to be betrayed. Now he looked a fool, dishonored and weak—
—and if he wanted his honor back, there was only one way to get it.
I would give him that honor. And in exchange he would give me my fulfillment.
As Baru drowsed in the cellar, drugged by the wine I’d left for her, I ordered Iscend to draw Dziransi outside. She simply challenged him to wrestle. He said he would not fight an unarmed woman, for it was against the gentle honor. She said he was afraid to lose. That note of pride gave the Stakhi man an excuse to beat her, so he went out, amiably, into the dark saltgrass.
In their first grapple Iscend drove a poisoned needle into his bare thigh. He felt the hurt but thought, I am sure, that it was a thorn. He won the fight, but that got his heart going, which only pumped the poison all the faster. (A metaphor, there, for this Republic we serve.)
Then he fell.
The boat from Helbride had already delivered the sarcophagus. Iscend and I worked swiftly to pin Dziransi within the braces and steel clamps of the casket, as motionless as a krakenfly in amber.
Then I opened the sarcophagus’s neck hatch and needled Dziransi with a big man’s dose of the dream-hammer.
I gained the Jurispotence of Aurdwynn at age thirty-six, and for the next twenty-four years I scourged the bodies of my people. Did I torture them? Fucking right I did. I sent them down into my Cold Cellar for reconditioning and the occasional radical surgery. I had their bodies altered to the demands of the Incrastic state.
But I was better than what came before.
Remember the old Duke Lachta with his breaking-wheels and his hot pears? His fascination with expanding all the holes in the human form? He could make anyone say anything, as long as he wanted it said in a scream.
I never tortured anyone like that. I don’t waste people.
The brave man Dziransi possessed great strength, and like many strong things he was therefore brittle. I admit that I bent him perhaps too hard. I hate the Mansion Stakhi for their cold ways and their avarice toward my home. I hate what their ideas of women did to the daughters of Aurdwynn.
I suppose I hated Dziransi a little, and hurt him for it.
Dziransi had been on drugs since he came to Moem, of course. Execarne kept all his guests on a low dose of cannabis and opiate to secure their calm and trust. But the dream-hammer, now, that was a drug to change the shape of a man’s soul. In old Belthyc myth the first caterpillars ate the dream-hammer before they went into their cocoons, and from their feverish metamorphosis emerged the nightmare race of man.
I’d used it on myself once. On the night of my brother’s marriage. When I resolved to change the shape of my soul, to peel it away from the shape of his.
Tonight I used it on Dziransi. And the dream-hammer made me Dziransi’s god.
I felt blasphemous. I felt like I’d committed that mythic sin of hubris.
And I wondered if this was how Tain Shir lived her life. As a god who walked unshackled among the mortals in their chains.
FROM the very first instant my brother knew Tain Ko, the sister of the Duke of Vultjag, he hated her fucking guts. Olake hated her from the long braided fall of her hair to the proud angle of the Vultjag nose to her hickory-brown throat and high-bound noble tits and her unfashionably athletic legs and her presumably arrogant and demanding and oh-so-aristocratic cunt (perhaps she dissolved commoner cocks with acid). Especially, Olake hated Ko’s distaste for his city: Olake loved Lachta, his slushy muddy flea-bitten home, even back then before the Masquerade rebuilt the sewers. I myself lost that sentiment when I contracted a rot from the laundry-water. We drew a grease circle around the infection, and watched it grow, with frightening and almost visible speed, across that circle, across my thigh.
So Olake stood behind me with the ends of a belt in his fists. I could feel, through the leather, how his grip tightened with every shriek I chewed into that belt. And I cut that divot of flesh right out of my leg.
Good Himu did my brother hate Tain Ko. I said he hated her from the first instant he knew her, which was a street brawl between Ko’s retinue and my brother’s antiroyalists, and their hatred escalated from there. In no time at all they were hating each other on the floor of our apartment while I tried to sleep, hating each other in the back of the wagon while I tried to drive the horses, in stockrooms and meadows and anywhere else they could find. I believe they only came to like each other out of some animal release of passions: by sheer weight of fucking, their bodies seduced their minds along.
The child was unplanned. In those days under Duke Lachta contraceptives were contraband: I believe Tain Ko, unfamiliar with the city and its dubious markets after a life with the pharmacist-women of the north, bought a batch of fake silphium. She decided to keep the child, partly to deter suitors who wanted her for a political marriage. But she dared not reveal the father: Olake was a known antiroyalist, and Duke Lachta hated both Duke Vultjag and Olake. Vultjag’s sister bearing Olake’s child would drive Lachta to matricide.
The birth came earlier than planned. In those days I was still a laundry girl covered in bedbug bites and soap burns, and our flight from the city was a terrifying wonder: there were places in the world that hardly stank at all! I think something was born of me, too, a love of Aurdwynn entire, a love which I still carry and hope I always will.
I midwifed Ko while Olake paced under the pine boughs.
Tain Shir was born to a red moon and the flash of summer heat lightning. I swear in Devena’s name that she was born with one tooth already erupted, and that she bit me. We took her with us on our travels, and she grew up among revolutionaries, with words like freedom on her tongue.
Once, as we scraped our laundry in a Radaszic stream, she touched the scar on my thigh. Is that, she’d asked, what the dukes are like? A rot in us?
Her father, my brother, rubbed her hair and smiled. Yes, he’d said, so proudly. But a rot that we will cut away.
What about Mother, Pa?
She was born to aristocracy. But she made her choice to stand with us. Everyone has a choice, little blackberry.
Perhaps that was the moment that fate seized upon when it wrote Shir’s doom.
The Masquerade came on red sails, and with them a prayer of change: the masked people on the ships spoke of republic, and their Parliament where anyone could change the law. Shir was afraid of them. The wisest of us, although of course at the time we hardly knew it.
Like a gaggle of boys aroused by a hint of nipple, the dukes and duchesses all got hard for the new Masquerade trade and began to fight over it. In a blink they were at war and we, the antiroyalists, had our moment. I struck a deal with the Masquerade mission. And I kept my terms. I killed Duke Lachta with a little knife, and as his last breath bubbled from his throat, I wiped my blade on his white stacked linens and said, “Will that be all, Your Grace?”
Shir fought, too, on that night of reckoning. She killed. Not for the first time, I think.
My brother, “head of the revolutionary government,” signed the Treaty of Federation. So we gave Aurdwynn to the Masquerade, and at first young Shir rejoiced. But the new Incrastic laws were cruel like bleach—Aurdwynn, the Falcresti explained, had to be cleansed of sin. The land had to be scoured raw. In time their laws would ease, they assured us. If enforced well, and obeyed with enthusiasm. In time the laws would ease.
That, I think, we could have tolerated.
Then their fucking Parliament made an accomodation with the dukes.
The aristocracy would keep their stations and their privilege, in exchange for signatures on the Treaty of Federation. Falcrest’s Parliament had judged it impossible to profitably rule Aurdwynn without the dukes. Tax revenue would be unacceptably low for an unacceptably long time if the revolution disrupted industry. The duchies had to stand.
That we did not want to tolerate. But we went along with it. My brother and I acquiesced.
Shir fought us with the idealism of youth. How could we accept ducal rule, after so long fighting against them? How could her own father accept the title of Duke Lachta—a title stained with the blood and pus of the city’s suffering?
I tried to explain that we’d compromised.
Compromised, Shir told me, was another word for betrayed.
She was fifteen and I was thirty-six, but those twenty-one years between us might have been the distance to the moon. She would not bend. Her cousin Hu (brave young Tain Hu, who would one day meet and strike down the Pretender-King Kubarycz in single combat) was only five years old. Frustrated with the adults, Shir carried Hu on horseback through the forest, and spoke to her of injustice, and showed her how to kill trapped animals without hesitation. Later I would discover that Hu remembered everything.
Hu remembered what Shir had said:
You must understand, no matter what anyone tells you, that you are free. In this moment you may do whatever you choose. No one can stop you. They can choose how to react to your choice, but they cannot stop the choice itself. This is freedom, understand? A knife in your hand. And you may do with it as you please.
When people teach you what you might and might not do—they are bridling you. They are taking your freedom away. Yes, the world has laws, which are consequences for your actions. But remember that there is nothing you cannot choose to do. Only consequences you fear to face.
If anyone ever tells you that they have no choice but to compromise, remember this. They are afraid.
Shir developed an interest in an anonymous correspondent. The more she wrote to him, the less she spoke to us. He signed his missives Itinerant. I would say we tried our very best to reach her, but I would damn myself if I did, for Olake and I didn’t even know who we’d become, let alone the girl. I was preoccupied by the lies I had begun to tell my twin: lies of omission, lies about my plans, because whatever I told him he would tell his wife, the daughter of Duke Vultjag, the aristocrat in our midst.
And then one day Shir was gone. She left a letter tucked in my comb.
I have gone to seek out the nature of justice. Somewhere in this world there must be a good true way to live.
I knew very little about what she did after that. But I do know what turned her. I know where she began her descent toward the killing woman in the marsh.
IN AR 117, eleven years after the Treaty of Federation, a few of the dukes led by Duchess Naiu rose up against the reparatory marriage laws. Their cry was the old cry, Aurdwynn cannot be ruled! And they were doomed, doomed from the start, although we did not call it the Fools’ Rebellion yet.
Olake and I decided, together and without remorse, that the common people would only survive if we ended this damn rebellion swiftly and in defeat. Some of the dukes would remain loyal to Falcrest, some would join the rebellion, most would bide their time and play both sides. All of them would trample on the commoners to do it. The cost would roll down upon the folk.
We hated the Masquerade by then. Truly we did. But we needed decades of peace to arrange our own final revolution.
So we betrayed the Fools’ Rebellion to Falcrest. And, oh, did that put my brother’s wife, Tain Ko, in a bind. For her brother, Duke Vultjag, had joined Naiu’s rebels, and now her husband had backstabbed those rebels spectacularly.
I did not do this: a prisoner escaped from an Incrastic sanitarium in Duchy Heingyl and jumped a ferry up the Inirein. The ferry was faster than the yellowjackets who chased it. By the time the escapee reached Duchy Oathsfire his armpits had already swollen and it was too late. Plague swept west to east across the Northlands like a strigil on dead skin.
Duke Vultjag died in the first week, and left young Hu to inherit.
The people of Vultjag called Tain Ko to come home and serve as regent for Tain Hu. Olake pleaded with his wife, but she was a warhawk and a will and she would not abandon her blood.
She went over to the rebellion.
Let me tell you the most pathetic and embarrassing sort of grief in the world. It is the grief you feel as you sit in a canvas tent with your hands over your ears, trying not to listen to your brother fuck his estranged wife for what they both know will be the very last time.
I had a plan to capture Ko and pardon her. I was well into the arrangements when Tain Shir came home on a Masquerade ship up from Taranoke. She traveled with a band of men and women who killed callously and spoke very little. They were in Treatymont for two days before marching north, and by then I had four murders pinned on them. Of course I couldn’t prosecute. They carried a letter with the polestar mark, the Emperor’s authority: they were outside the law.
Tain Shir took her killers north into the forests. By year’s end the rebel leadership were all dead, and careful dispensation of Falcrest’s funds had placed collaborationist relatives into their seats to bicker over the terms of surrender.
Vultjag was the last to fall.
The way Tain Hu told it, Tain Shir came down into the valley, alone, to negotiate with her mother. They met above the waterfall where Hu would one day build her keep. They paced each other on opposite banks of the river.
Shir told her mother, Vultjag, listen, I serve a better master now. Put down your spear. Come back to Lachta. Mother, you can serve my master, too.
Tain Ko raised her spear for the last time. She chose her final words.
I am not mastered.
The crossbow was faster than the spear.
DURANCE,” Iscend whispered. “He’s ready.”
“Yes.” I shook myself too hard. I had to lean on my elbow, like a reclining lover, to get my head down to the ear of Dziransi’s casket.
“Dzir,” I murmured, in mountain Stakhi. “Dzir, do you hear me? Follow my voice. You’re not alone. Follow my voice.”
Sealed and muzzled within the steel sarcophagus he couldn’t so much as wiggle a toe. I think from the noises he made that he thought he’d been crushed in a collapse in the tunnels of his home Mansion, high up on Mount Karakys in the Wintercrests, where no trees grew.
I signaled to Iscend for light. She lit a candle with her sparkfire and dilated the casket’s left iris to the width of a blade of grass. “I’m holding up a light, Dzir,” I whispered, showing him the candle. “I’m holding up a light for you. Can you come to it?”
He gagged and rasped.
“Come closer, Dzir.”
Like river rapids the dream-hammer sucked him under. Like a sluiceway the drug flowed beneath the dam of his discipline. The dream-hammer gets into the fork of the mind that divides the roads of truth and falsehood, and it turns all the signs toward truth.
I unbuckled the casket’s faceplate.
Fungus-green eyes stared back at me, red with grief and madness. His beard had tangled in the steel muzzle that clapped his jaw shut.
“It’s all right,” I whispered, “it’s all right, I’m here.”
He looked up into the face of a strange woman against aurora stars. Not with a year’s planning could I have staged a better backdrop. The stars were everything to the Stakhi, and against those stars I had blue Stakhi eyes.
Gently I unmuzzled him. I knew he wouldn’t scream. Not as long as I held his eyes.
“Dzir,” I murmured. He shuddered at my touch. “Dzir, do you want to go home?”
He nodded as much as he could in the casket: only a tremor of his lips. He was weeping. He wanted very badly to go home.
“I have a message for you to carry home. Will you do that for me, Dzir?”
His jaw firmed up. His scowl tightened. He was summoning his courage. “Yesh,” he mumbled, in Stakhi. “Yesh. My duty.”
“Tell your king that the final salvation of his people awaits him in Aurdwynn. Tell him—” And I bit my tongue, checking carefully the words I had prepared, keenly aware that Iscend listened to be sure I did not disobey Hesychast’s plan. “Tell him that the bride of the mountains will be Heingyl Ri. Tell him that through their union she will deliver all the milk and grain of Aurdwynn unto the Mansions of the Stakhieczi. Tell your king that if he marries Heingyl Ri he will save his people forever from the Old Foe.”
“Heingyl Ree.” His head trembled against the brackets that held it in place. “Yesh. Heingyl Ree.”
“You came to find a queen for your king. Now you have her. She is Governor Heingyl Ri the Stag Duchess.”
“But . . .” He frowned incredibly: the low corners of his mouth almost reached the cabled muscles of his neck. “But the dowry . . . the blood price . . .”
Hesychast had explained his plan quite succinctly. “The solution to the Stakhieczi problem is trivial. We simply give the Necessary King everything he wants. His people will eat our food, and have babies, and very soon there will be too many of them. The Stakhi will starve by the millions without our trade. After that they will never dare invade.”
Hesychast hadn’t accounted for one thing, of course.
The Necessary King’s honor. The King’s need to redeem himself before his court. To show them the woman who had made a fool of him roped from the ceiling, hooks through her ankles, her scalp slashed open to drain her blood through her thoughts.
He would be destroyed if he could not punish his betrayer.
“I have the dowry,” I whispered. “I promise that I will deliver the dowry to your king. She is in my grasp now. Yes. I offer as dowry the traitor Baru Cormorant.”
WHO the fuck is that?” Baru said.
Xe had convinced Baru to come out and watch the dawn on Moem’s eastern cliffs. Baru found herself in an oddly pleasant mood. A warmth ran between her and Xe. Not the drug rush of infatuation, but a friendly understanding, like a blanket.
She had tried to warn Xe that she might be hurt for association with Baru. The priestess shrugged it off. “All will happen as it must. Take what you have at hand.”
Xe’s morning calisthenics required one to do everything very slowly. A minute for a single crunch, a pushup held for a hundred count. Baru lost patience after she fell on her face, and started doing her Naval System exercises, huffing and uffing and hissing while Xe posed in the dawnlight with her muscles taut and gleaming. In her effort to avoid staring too much at Xe, Baru watched the sea, and so she saw the boat first.
“Who the fuck is that?”
“Who the fuck is who?” Xe asked.
“Look. Someone’s coming in with the tide.”
A short lively black-skinned person rowed in toward Moem, their head bowed, their bright yellow khanga hitched up to their knees. When at last the boat bumped up on the rocks, they unloaded a caravan’s worth of bundles and bags and bolts. Then, looking up at the mesa towering above them, they sat down in exhausted frustration.
“Let’s go help them,” Baru said, with a glimmer of suspicion. “I think they might be looking for me.”
“Why?”
“I left a message for the Oriati spymaster yesterday. I asked to meet.”
“Ah,” Xe said, nodding sagely. “And Execarne keeps in touch with the Oriati spymaster. So they would come here to see you. But that can’t be their spymaster.”
“Why not?”
“Do you see the markings on their throat? The green painted stars? And those golden chains from nose to ear?”
“No, I don’t—do you have telescopes in your eyes?”
Xe laughed. “Those are the regalia of an Oriati Federal Prince. The governing sorcerors of the great Oriati Mbo.”
“Governing sorcerors?”
“Yes, they wield and protect the great trim of nations. They wouldn’t do espionage.”
“Oh,” Baru sighed. “Sure, trim. Whatever that means.”
“Don’t be so dismissive, Your Majesty. The Oriati are a great and scientific people.”
“Did they tell you that themselves?” Baru teased.
“Of course they did.” Xe put her hands under her chin (now they were lying side by side to stare over the cliffside). “Duke Unuxekome loved the Oriati. Their ships would come in to Welthony, and we divers would take contracts to clean their hulls.”
An absolutely eerie sense of synchronicity came over Baru. It was Unuxekome who’d called for the Oriati fleet’s help in attacking Treatymont. And if Ulyu Xe had spent time in Unuxekome’s town, maybe she knew some of the ships involved. . . .
“Xe,” Baru said, thoughtfully, “do you know where those Syndicate Eyota ships sailed from? Before they stopped on the Llosydanes, I mean?”
“No, not at all. Although . . .”
“Yes? What do you remember?”
“Some of the divers from Welthony mentioned a letter for the Duke Unuxekome, from his mother Unuxekome Ra, who was once Duchess but lives now on Kyprananoke. And I remember thinking, oh, that letter must have come in with the Eyota pirate ships, so they must have come through Kyprananoke, too.”
Baru clicked more puzzle pieces together. On the deck of his little mail-ship, Beetle Prophet, Unuxekome had told Baru, I used to dream I was a bastard. My mother sailed with the Syndicate Eyota, see? All those dashing Oriati buccaneers, raiding and adventuring . . .
So Unuxekome’s mother Ra was with the Syndicate Eyota, on Kyprananoke. She might know who had funded Abdumasi Abd’s doomed venture. And if those funds came from the Cancrioth and its agents . . . victory.
So Baru would go to Kyprananoke next, to find Unuxekome Ra.
Baru’s mission on the Llosydanes was accomplished. She groaned in relief. She had done it, she knew where to go next, and she hadn’t betrayed or ruined everyone around her! Except that brief panic—but as long as there were no sign of actual Navy-Oriati conflict near the Llosydanes, it would do no harm to date season. . . .
Ulyu Xe looked at her with amusement. “Have you just found last night’s satisfaction?”
“Hush, you.” Baru leapt to her feet. “Why can’t a Federal Prince be a spy-master?”
“It wouldn’t be good trim for a Federal Prince to lie. Their trim is entwined with all the people they serve and govern. When they lie it touches all those millions. Ordinarily, I think, there is a shadow ambassador for espionage instead.”
Nonsense. A good spy never had to lie. You tell everyone the truth, you tell them exactly what you plan to do: she’d said to Tain Hu, resistance is meaningless, we must find a way up from within. And they believe you, they believe in you, and so they cover up your true intentions with their own belief.
“Let’s go help them carry their gifts,” she said.
THE hardest run is the run downhill. The world wants to pull you forward by your own momentum and dash you down on your face, and you must resist it: the art of running downhill is the art of the controlled descent.
As Baru ran she also descended, lulled by pounding feet and crashing waves into her past.
Fifteen years ago, before pestilent corpses burnt in Taranoke’s crater, Baru had been a happy hungry child in the Iriad market. Her appetite could only be satiated by cooked sweet pineapple, brown with extra sugar. Usually her parents bought her some if she was good. But she was not a fledgling bird to be fed by mother! Today she was going to buy her own pineapple.
She simply had to figure out how to convert the little shell in her fist (dug up from the Baru Cormorant Industrial Sand Mine, All Liabilities Guaranteed) into actual money.
“You, kind foreigner!” she called.
A smiling Oriati laman knelt to greet her. Their khanga stretched across narrow knees, high smart brow and full lips all misted in sweat. They smelled of pork smoke and grown-up. Behind them the Iriad Percussion Parade banged on their drums and shouted gladly the news of peace. They’d played the last war with the plainsiders, where Baru hadn’t been allowed to watch as her father Salm killed a man and a woman in the circle.
“Kind foreigner,” Baru intoned, “what brings you to our market?”
“I am here to trade,” the laman said, solemnly.
“Excellent,” child-Baru declared. “I have acquired a priceless artifact. This, O most wise lama, is a valve-shell.”
“A valve-shell, eh? What does it do?”
“If crushed up and swallowed, it takes the place of an injured heart valve. Feed it every day with a cup of black coffee and a raspberry tart, and it will provide you long and boisterous life.”
The laman squinted, stroking their chin. “Why would you sell such a marvel?”
“I already have a full set,” Baru boasted, pounding her tiny chest. “I’m immortal. All I ask is a fee of twenty reef pearls, and a signed contract releasing me from all indemnity and malfeasance!”
“Hmm.” From their purse the laman extracted fifteen reef-pearl coins, making Baru squeak in greed, and held the coins over Baru’s head in a closed fist.
“Fifteen,” the laman offered, “and no contract.”
“Twenty! And I must have the contract, I am a legitimate businesswoman!”
“Fifteen,” the laman repeated, and their warm eyes narrowed. “And a lesson, given freely. You have a wonderful soul, child, and the Door in the East must have swung wide to let you into the world. Tell your stories as you please! The world is made of stories, which bind us all together, and impossible stories are the best of all, for they bind us in impossible ways. But remember—remember this well.
“When you use a story to deceive in your own service, the world remembers what you have done. The world knows trim, which is the power that binds. And trim will make your own story echo the stories you tell to others. If you deceive those around you, you will in the end deceive yourself, to your own grief.
“Do you understand?
“Do you understand?”
HELLO there!” the Prince called. “Are you guests of Faham Execarne?”
Despite their burden of bundles and gifts, and their obvious exhaustion, they spoke in a high clear voice, each word pronounced with thought and care. Brightly, Baru thought, they spoke brightly.
“We are,” Baru called, “we’ve come to help you up the trail, Your Federal Highness.”
“Don’t call me that,” the laman said, “and please don’t lie, either, it’s dreadful luck to lie at first meeting.”
Baru drew up short. “Excuse me?”
“You’re not a guest of Mister Execarne’s farm. You came in on Helbride yesterday, you turned over the harbormaster’s records, caused an exchange panic, and asked my spy to see me.”
Baru shot a victorious little ha at Xe: see, a spymaster! Xe shrugged.
“You came very promptly,” Baru said, “and I’m surprised you’re alone.”
“How else would I come? You only invited me.”
“With security, I’d think.”
“But then I’d betray the terms of your invitation. This way trim protects me. Not that I expect you to believe in that protection.” They smiled up at Baru, a middle-aged laman of little height but warm forceful presence, like a candle-flame still burning cheerfully in the cold. They had deep black skin, short kinky hair, a fine delicate jaw under the classical high brow. Against that skin they had set a golden khanga wrapped tight down to the waist, then loose like a skirt around wide hips. The embroidered hem of the khanga read, in Aphalone, Compassion is the surest wind if we only raise our sails. Golden chains bound their nose to their earlobes, and their throat glistened with green stars and golden lines of paint. Baru thought they were impossibly beautiful.
“I am Tau-indi Bosoka,” they said, “Federal Prince of Lonjaro Mbo.”
For once Baru had no money metaphor to deploy. The Prince Tau-indi looked priceless, unbuyable, unbendable, a person beyond market.
“Here, this is for you!” The Prince offered Baru a case of inlaid wood. Inside Baru found a gorgeous magnetic compass, the needle mounted on a clever device of steel and exotic rubber: she gasped in delight. Tau turned to Xe. “And for you, miss, I think a pearl will do.”
Xe murmured thanks. “Now,” Tau-indi Bosoka said, apparently satisfied that this gift-giving had secured them against eavesdroppers or assassins, “let’s walk and speak, if you don’t mind doing both slowly. Am I mistaken, miss, that you come from Aurdwynn? You have the Maia look.”
“No,” Baru said, “I’m from—”
But of course Tau-indi had been speaking to Xe.
“Yes,” Xe said, “my great-family is from the north.”
“The north. Very far from the sea! But your, ah, your general figure and your way of walking, do I presume too much to think you may be a diver?”
Xe nodded. “I am.”
“And you did harbor work, perhaps? In Treatymont or Welthony?”
“I did.” Baru was by now quite impressed with this Prince’s incision. They had come to the same conclusions as Baru.
“Wonderful. I’m looking for a friend who went missing in Aurdwynn during the civil war. Do you know,” Tau-indi’s voice fell as low as the wind, “a man named Abdumasi Abd? A merchant with shipping interests?”
“I do,” Xe said, “I know that name.”
“You do?” Tau-indi Bosoka stopped, whirled, and threw out their hands like a beggar. “Oh, bless you, bless you. I can’t say how much this means to me. Abd is my dear friend and I’ve been searching for him for months. Can you tell me—anything at all?”
Xe considered. “The divers who were closest to the Duke Unuxekome told me he had a new ally. An Oriati merchant named Abdumasi Abd. Abd was rich, and bold, and he hated Falcrest—he was building up the Eyota privateers into a full fleet. Unuxekome hoped he’d come to the rebellion’s aid.”
“Oh.” Tau-indi sagged in disappointment, but only for a moment. They summoned cheer and offered their hands to Xe. “Thank you so much. Thank you for remembering my friend.”
Baru was again thinking very quickly. Was this the secret Iraji and Apparitor had been keeping from her? Tau-indi’s interest in Abdumasi Abd?
But Baru had to focus on her own mission. Could this Prince help her destroy Falcrest?
“Your Federal Highness.” Baru offered her arm to help them up the cliff. “I wanted to meet you to discuss an arrangement.”
“Oh?” Tau smoothed their khanga against their hips. There was a surprising caution in their voice. “Did you?”
“I have extensive access to the ministries and faculties of the Imperial Republic. I can track down anything you might imagine.” Baru took a deep, deep breath. “I understand you are a Prince of the Mbo. I know there exist certain tensions, growing tensions, in the relationship between Falcrest and your great nation—”
“Oh, yes,” Tau-indi said, soberly, “if we can’t stop this war from breaking out, I believe it’ll be the end of the world.”
Baru blinked. It was very peculiar to hear Farrier’s words in this Prince’s mouth.
“I’m not mad,” Tau said, still quite somber. “The war’s why I have to find Abdumasi. Years ago, you see, I mistreated him. That opened a tiny wound in the trim between us. That wound has grown now, and threatens to devour the world.”
Baru had no idea what to say to this alien notion. Tau smiled at Xe. “Miss diver, do you know the properties of a wound in trim?”
“A curse, I think,” Xe said. “An evil thought.”
“Oh no, no. A curse means an ill wish—the opposite of a blessing. But a wound in trim is the absence of all that is human. It exposes the attainted to the world in its natural state, unordered by the human heart. Ha! Look at your face. You do think I’m mad.” They sighed, without self-pity, with a certain wryness. “It’s very hard to convince people the world will end. They insist it’s never happened before. But it has, it has ended many times: the Cheetah Palaces fell, and so did the Jellyfish Eaters when Mount Tsunuq erupted. Their worlds ended.”
“I don’t want a war, either,” Baru said, choosing her words very carefully. She very badly wanted the approval of this spymaster-Prince, who was so like the lamen of her childhood. “My home, my homes, would be destroyed. But if war is necessary, I have to be sure it ends the right way.”
“War’s never necessary.”
“What if that war destroyed Falcrest?” Baru said.
“I’m sorry.” The Prince laughed. “I must have misheard you?”
“Would you go to war with Falcrest if I could guarantee your victory?”
The Prince Tau-indi Bosoka flinched as if snakebitten, and dropped the bundle they’d been holding. Glass and wine shattered at their feet to soak the cloth. “I know you,” they said, in a voice soaked like wet paper with fear. “I recognize the way you think. You’re Baru Cormorant. You’re the Imperial agent from Sieroch.”
“Yes,” Baru said, retreating a few paces away from the cliff, “yes, that’s me. . . .”
“You baited out the Coyote rebellion. You asked Duke Unuxekome to sail against Treatymont.”
“It wasn’t quite like that—”
“Did you do all that to draw Abdumasi Abd’s ships into the rebellion? Did you spark civil war in Aurdwynn only to justify a larger war between Falcrest and Oriati Mbo?” A terrible regal power galvanized their voice, galvanized, the word for the hardening of the muscle when seized or lightning-struck. “Did you do this? Tell me the truth! Were you dispatched by Falcrest to create cause for war?”
Baru wished that she had her mask. “Wait. Wait wait wait.” She held up her hands: now she wished for gloves. “I’m making you an offer, Your Federal Highness. I have access to the very highest levels of Imperial strategy. I can tell you anything you need to know to defeat them—”
“It’s already in you,” Tau-indi breathed, staring up at Baru in rapturous horror. They shrugged off their pack and dropped their bundles. Wonderful porcelain smashed on the rock. Wooden jars of precious stones tumbled into the sea. “The wound is in you. Oh, principles save us, it is growing now. I will have nothing to do with you.”
Swiftly they wheeled to Ulyu Xe. “Diver miss, please tell Faham that the situation has changed, and I can no longer protect him.”
“What do you mean?” Baru hissed. “Wait a moment—”
But the Prince had utterly blanked her out. “Tell Faham that despite his countermeasure he still has a mole in his station. Yesterday someone left a letter in the post addressed to Rear Admiral Juris Ormsment. I obtained a copy. It tells Ormsment that her quarry has gone to ground at the Morrow Ministry station here, on this very island. Ormsment landed yesterday. She has the letter by now.”
“What!” Baru shouted. “A mole? Who—is there any name, any sign—?”
Tau-indi seized Xe’s hands so fiercely that even the stoic diver winced. “I can’t protect you, do you understand? My people cannot allow the prisoners here to fall into the navy’s hands. You know too much that could drive your Parliament to war. Despite my protest, our Jackals are on their way to this island to take you all away.
“And now Ormsment’s marines are coming, too. If you don’t move quickly, the war could begin right here.”