The Monster

Aminata wrapped the boy’s clawed hands in linen, cleaned his burnt body with cold brine, weighted him down with stones, and committed him to the sea. “I’m sorry,” she told the boy’s father. But he didn’t speak Aphalone.

In her corner of the wardroom she knelt beneath her hammock at the remnants of her temple. The tufa center-pot couldn’t sail with her, nor the black Taranoki earth, nor the dead seeds she hadn’t tended. All those had remained behind on Cauteria. All she had brought with her was the cormorant feather, which she’d planted, as well as she could, in a crack between two planks.

“Baru,” she whispered. Her breath ruffled the feather’s gray barbules but did not tip or bend the shaft. That was Baru, wasn’t it? Ruffled by Aminata’s concern, but not moved. “Please tell me. How did you let this happen? I know I don’t understand everything you do. But this. Just explain it to me. Why?”

In the war folio on her left hip she carried the letter she’d recovered from the Eddyn mailhouse. Five paragraphs in their hilariously baroque childhood code. Five paragraphs to implicate Baru in a conspiracy against Parliament. Upon her return to Falcrest, I intend to recommend you to Province Admiral Ormsment . . . I wonder if we could discuss navy politics again, and the mutability of government. . . .

She’d come here to search for Baru. There was a Morrow Ministry station on the Llosydanes, and Maroyad thought it had received prisoners from Baru’s inner circle.

Instead of the prisoners, she’d found burning islands, dead children, and this damn letter.

Baru had been on the Llosydanes. She’d stopped at the mailhouse to send a note to Aminata. That night Juris Ormsment’s Sulane had arrived. At dawn a battle had erupted on the fallow islet Moem, and under the new light Ormsment had destroyed three Oriati ships.

If only it had stopped there. If only none of the Oriati survived—all could have been written off to storm losses. But a fourth Oriati ship had escaped under diplomatic flag. The Federal Prince aboard had already changed vessels to a fast clipper and sailed south to carry news of the battle to the Mbo federations.

The Mbo would demand an explanation from Parliament. And in Parliament they’d say, The navy is out of control, they’re going to drag us into war too soon. . . .

There would be purge, then. Swift recalls to Falcrest, “to report to Parliament,” and swifter trials, swifter verdicts.

Rear Admiral Maroyad said: The real purpose of your work, Lieutenant Commander, is to find the agents on our side who are working to provoke war. And Aminata had known it couldn’t be Baru, it just couldn’t, for Baru had always worked so hard to be an honest citizen. Baru did her duty, she took her exams, and she got her reward. Oh, Aminata had been dazzled when Baru landed the Imperial Accountancy—how she’d tried, in her clumsy, tongue-tied way, to tell Baru how much she admired and respected her. Maybe, if she found the right way to say it, Baru would open up in reply. Baru would tell Aminata how much she admired her.

If Baru couldn’t get ahead honestly, Baru with her mind and athleticism and her excellent scores, then how could Aminata hope to earn a ship by honest means?

Aminata put her fists on each side of the feather and laid her forehead on the planks. Through wood and bone, the crisp reports of bootstep on the deck. The slow roll of the sea beneath moored Ascentatic. A sailor’s lullaby.

What was happening here? What was Baru mixed up in? Was she working with Ormsment, or was Ormsment chasing her?

Aminata groaned. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how to feel. So she would keep on doing her duty, like an ox, a big, lumbering ox, because she didn’t fucking know how to do anything else.

Captain Nullsin was a short fat man with a hammer in place of his left hand and a brisk competence which was Aminata’s only comfort in all this. He began this officer’s dinner by tapping his hammer against a wineglass and, uncharacteristically, calling for a reading from the Book of the Sea. It was proscribed, but after today’s work in the burnt ruins not even the surgeons gave a shit. In fact it was the ship’s surgeon who lifted her chin and recited, from memory,

Remember first that you are of the sea

Carry fire far from homeland hearth

Keep the ways and moorings fair and free

Chart the stars and shallows all you see

Guard the salted yields of the earth

But remember first that you are of the sea

In time of war they send us from our berth

To humble ancient peoples’ ancient pride

To keep the ways and moorings fair and free

A hundred hundred miles from our birth

We fought and by the thousands died

And all those lost are ever of the sea.

A few officers flicked water onto the floor and murmured thanks to Ascentatic. Aminata looked away. The Cult of Ships was too dangerous for an Oriati woman, whose heritage might mix poorly with such superstition in the eyes of Navy Censorate evaluators. But out here on the middle seas, ever one day from disaster, she understood the need to worship. The ship bore up against storm and reef. The ship’s ropes trembled and sang to them on spring wind. Always, in the face of catastrophe, the ship endured. Aminata thought that only the truly heartless could lay hands on Ascentatic’s timbers without feeling a pulse.

Swiftly she summarized recent events: the rumor of trade closure, the collapse of the exchange rate, the mad night of currency speculation. “On that night Sulane arrived and began deploying marines onto the Llosydanes. By that point the currency exchange was normalizing, as an unexpected supply of fiat notes came into circulation. The next morning the Morrow Ministry station on Moem islet came under attack by Oriati grenadiers. Sulane’s marines counterattacked—”

“We’re sure of that?” Nullsin asked. “Ormsment didn’t strike first?”

Aminata wanted to beg him to un-ask the question. If Ormsment had struck first against the Oriati, she might as well have written to Parliament begging for a purge.

The ship’s master-at-arms said, “We’d better all hope that’s how it happened. If not . . .”

“Yes, sir. Sulane repelled the enemy from the station, destroyed three Oriati ships, and then sailed immediately south. On the islands, word got around that Sulane was fighting the Oriati, and people thought it meant the Oriati had come to invade them. A mob sacked and burned several Falcrest-owned buildings. I understand they counted on the Oriati winning, and wanted to curry favor.”

Captain Nullsin cradled his hammer in his good hand and stared straight ahead. Aminata knew what he was focused on. They’d both seen the tiny fist protruding from the wreckage. They’d worked together to move the tumbled limestone sheets. And together they’d found the fisted corpse beneath, curled up like a boxer, his child head charred into a featureless coal.

She cleared her throat and went on. “In short order the riot became a general rectification of Family grudges and insults. The Families began to drop bridges to try to contain it. That worked, mostly, but it meant fire gangs couldn’t move around except by boat, which led to the loss of . . . some good fraction of the date crop.”

It had been said in certain quarters that the Llosydanes, being ruled by women, must be immune to animal passion and reckless violence. Aminata, born in matriarchal Segu, felt a little cynical pride that she knew better. Give a woman power—not a hearth to keep or an office to run, but real power, power she didn’t have to constantly guard or justify—and she would gain all power’s evils with it. Evils which were not intrinsically masculine at all, but which, in societies that gave men power, belonged most often to men.

Nullsin nodded to her. “Thank you, Lieutenant Commander. We need to send a packet back to Cauteria with a report on the natives. What are our options?”

“I think we face a choice, sir,” Aminata said. “On the one hand, we can punish the Sydani for disloyalty. As I’m sure you all know from customs work, imports to the Llosydanes are buttoned up tighter than Stakhi ass.” Mild laughter. “If we lower tariffs and allow unrestricted trade, we’ll drive their remaining shipwrights and machinists out of business with cheap import. Then we sabotage their date crop, and when they need to take out a loan to afford food, we sink them so deep into debt they’ll be paying us back for a century.”

“However,” Aminata said, feeling everyone searching her for some sign of sympathy for the un-Falcresti, the unhygienic, “it looks as if Payo Mu might have planned for exactly that.”

“Our mystery currency speculator. I found her name on a mess of papers in the Sydanemoot.”

Nullsin looked warmly upon her. “You took the time to look into the currency event?”

“Made the time, sir. Now, I don’t know much about money.” This to defuse, in advance, accusations that she had stepped beyond her expertise. “But when I went through records from the night of the panic, I found that someone by the name of Payo Mu made a very fast fortune in local ring shell. And she seems to have . . . invested it in a peculiar fashion.”

“She established a trust. A big pile of money locked away for one purpose. The trustees—those who get to distribute the money—seem to be a local harbormaster, a junior woman of the Jamascine clan, a few local bravos, and a female prostitute.”

General laughter. Aminata waited for them to finish. “The purpose of the trust is the support of the Llosydanes’ trade with the Stakhieczi Wintercrests.”

The laughter was now uproarious. The sailing-master had tears in his eyes. Even Aminata chuckled. It was a lot like a joke: What happens when two bravos, a fourth daughter, and a whore take up investment? Stakhieczi trade! The Stakhi did not trade, except the occasional disorganized sale of telescopes or metalwork for salt. And the idea of the Llosydanes sending trade parties not just to Aurdwynn but up the Inirein to the alpine north . . . wouldn’t that require dredging, and hired security, and better roads?

Still. Whoever Payo Mu was (and Aminata had her very firm suspicions), she had vision. If the Llosydanes actually managed to make contact, selling Stakhi glass and metal to the Ashen Sea would be a better way of life than date farming in rainy climes. Wouldn’t it?

The laughter died away. Nullsin stopped laughing first; when the captain stopped laughing you did not go on long yourself.

“I drew the dead boy,” Nullsin said. He produced a scrap of paper on which he’d sketched, in one-handed charcoal, the boy who’d burnt alive. A few efficient lines captured the pitiful stump of a head. The tormented arch of the back.

Aminata’s fists buzzed with the need to hurt the people responsible. “Savages,” she said, trying on the word, and then, with bitter anger and cold satisfaction, for at least she could say it accurately, “these fucking savages. The north is sick.”

“War runs in their blood.” Nullsin smoothed the picture with his hammerhead. “They get a little less sun at these latitudes, you know. A tiny poverty of light. You can’t blame them for obeying their nature.”

Implicit in that argument, of course, was the belief that an excess of sun caused peace, decadence, and philosophy. The Oriati afflictions. But in that one moment Aminata forgave her captain. She had enough weight to carry already.

“So the question is,” the ship’s surgeon said, “why it happened. Why did Sulane attack those Oriati ships? Why was Sulane even here? And what does it have to do with this Imperial agent, Baru Cormorant?”

Everyone looked to Captain Nullsin, who might have received a coded letter from Ormsment explaining her place in a grand scheme, advising Ascentatic whether to assist her or pretend ignorance or even chase her as a foe

“There was no letter,” he said, heavily. “It’s possible that she’s on sanctioned navy business, but it’s being kept secret from us. Or that . . . well. Best not to consider it. Lieutenant Commander, has anyone revealed to you why Sulane was here?”

SHE dressed to ravish, a word which had, in the not-so-distant past, meant to plunder.

Aminata had brought two of her suasioners with her from Cauteria Fortress, as they knew more tradecraft than the average sailor. Yesterday Midshipman Gerewho, dragging his coat in local establishments for anyone who might pass a discreet tip, had connected with a (reportedly very handsome) race-hygienist who said he might know more about the battle on Moem. Today he would be at the Demimonde restaurant on Eddyn islet at the beginning of second dogwatch, waiting for a navy contact. If the navy wished to speak with him, he thought they ought to send a charming nautical lady to appear as his companion, for he was known as a womanizer. But she should not, if possible, arrive in uniform. He did not wish to seem associated with the frightening warship offshore, which all the Sydani believed had come to punish them.

Aminata decided to handle this meeting herself. He might have some clue to Baru’s true purpose. Also she’d had no time to take a leave watch and go whoring, and she hoped, if he were a womanizer, that he would be agreeable. Spies did that, right? Spies were always consorting with seductive and dangerous men.

She drew the line, however, at his request for her to come not in uniform. Who would she be without the reds? They might take her for a Mbo Oriati. So she wore full starched dress, tall boots polished and buffed, her pins and links shining, a smart little folio on her hip, a clean shave for her scalp and a jaunty cover. Perfect.

The Demimonde was a longhouse, shattered black stone mortared together like a puzzle. When Aminata marched in, the sparse and quiet crowd all looked up from their gossip. Inevitably someone began to whistle “Hey Navy Girl.” Aminata ignored it.

The Belthyc-looking host had date wine on his breath and worry lines all around his eyes. Would she like a discreet table? Yes she would, Aminata said, and would he kindly tell the man that his appointment had arrived? What man? Why, the most beautiful man in the place.

In good time said man arrived in a corseted wedge of perfume and color. Aminata had bought a dram of import whiskey, the strong conservative Grendlake with its smoky tones. She looked up with practiced challenge. Her first impression was of composition, like a sculpture.

“Miss Aminata isiSegu?” His voice crisply Falcrest-accented, in his thirties or forties. “I spoke to one of your colleagues yesterday. . . .”

He had a face like the morning, wide and bright, with a small flat nose, powerful cheekbones, and perfectly classic eyes. His sherwani flattered a muscular body of pornographic leanness. He was quite uncomfortable to look at, in the sense that it was hard for Aminata not to stare. How had he gotten so definite? Isometric training, perhaps, to isolate and endow each muscle?

Aminata saluted him with the whiskey. “Hello,” she said, “just the man I was looking at.”

“That, too.” She pushed out his chair with one boot tip. “I’ll excuse the Miss. I’m Lieutenant Commander Aminata. I don’t come ashore often, so I hope you’ll forgive my indiscretions. Are there any drinks here as fine as the company?”

“The restaurant company, I’m sure you mean,” he said, dryly. “You’re a drinker?”

“Not when I’m on duty,” she said, reminding him, with the Grendlake malt, that she wasn’t on duty. “You?”

“Calcanish. You know that my reputation could be damaged if I’m seen with you, Lieutenant Commander? And that’s not all that might be hurt.”

The waiter delivered samplers of dates in sweet honey and pure spring water. The table was a little too small for them, each quite a specimen of height, and their knees touched. Aminata complimented Mister Calcanish on his makeup. They made small talk about the island’s hydrology and Calcanish’s work. He was a demographic hygienist, checking for inbreeding. What would he do if he found it, Aminata wondered? Import brides from abroad? No, Calcanish explained, in general men were more valuable for that type of import, as they could be studded. Did the men enjoy that work, Aminata asked? But Calcanish did not play along. He thought men were already treated dreadfully on the Llosydanes, and did not care to speculate on what an experimental stud might think of being twice chattel.

Aminata ordered a garnished chicken in wine. Calcanish selected a dish of nuts in crystallized date syrup. “You must be very disciplined,” Aminata suggested, “to maintain such, mm, aesthetic. Are you a dancer, perhaps? Or otherwise ornamental?”

“Bodies are my primary interest,” he confessed, as if ashamed not by the topic but by the depth of his enthusiasm. “I’ve been accused of religiosity, actually. Worship of the human mechanism. Of course, as a navy officer you must understand the critical role of experimental physiology in our great Republic?”

“Oh yes,” Aminata agreed, “at bathing times I’m surrounded by experimental physiologies.”

He laughed. “Is that so? Experimental? You know, to be a proper experiment, they’d need to be divided into home and traveler groups.”

She drank her water. Swallowed. Wet her lips. He looked deliciously aware of her every motion. Aminata veered, sharply, into the questioning. “Tell me what you know about the battle. How did a navy warship come to burn three Oriati dromon?”

He didn’t know. He’d arrived just afterward, in time to meet a small group of very confused foreigners trying to book passage to Aurdwynn using Oriati papers. The dockside authorities were very curious to know where this gang of misfits had gotten Oriati diplomatic protection. Calcanish took pity on them, saved them from interrogation, and brought them to a property he owned on Jamascine islet.

Aurdwynni commoners, as far as he could tell, refugees from the Coyote rebellion. A midwife, an herbalist, a man and his son, and a frighteningly pale and thin Stakhi woman.

Aminata clenched her fist in triumph under the table. Those were the prisoners who’d been dispatched to the Ministry station here! He had them. Perhaps they’d seen Baru. Even spoken to her!

“Baru Cormorant, yes. I heard she’d been spirited off to Falcrest to receive a new name.”

“I’m trying to track her down.” She shouldn’t have said that. She just wanted to be connected to Baru’s infamy, in his eyes.

“Oh?” He kissed his napkin. “Why? She’s the Emperor’s creature, isn’t she? Very elusive. A mask without a face.”

She couldn’t help boasting a little. “Because she’s put the whole Imperial Republic in danger of open war. First she drew the Oriati into attacking Treatymont. Now this second encounter between our navy and Oriati covert forces.”

He frowned fetchingly. “I suppose that makes sense,” he said, “if the Emperor wants to do to the Oriati what he did to Aurdwynn.”

“No!” He flinched in shock. “No, goodness, an actual war between Falcrest and the Mbo would be appalling. Can you imagine the trade disruptions? The pandemics?”

Mr. Calcanish’s eyes traced the seams of her gloves. Lingered on the glittering pins in her cuff. He swallowed nervously, sensually, and met her eyes. Aminata felt a thrill of power.

Aminata was faintly disappointed to hear such pacifism from him. Oriati Mbo might be huge and old, but so was a tar pit. One couldn’t dilute or purify a tar pit. It had to be burnt off.

She asked a clarifying question, which was faintly unwomanly, as women were supposed to intuit subtlety: but fuck it. “Who would possibly cause the Mbo to have a civil war?”

“Cairdine Farrier,” Calcanish said, with a wry sadness she didn’t understand. “And Kindalana.”

Aminata’s whiskey did not even jump. She was perfectly steady against surprise, even the surprise of two very familiar names. Kindalana, who Abdumasi Abd had seen in his tormentor’s face. And Cairdine Farrier, Baru’s patron. The man who had convinced Aminata that she needed to terrify Baru out of any affections she might hold . . . lest she come to a worse fate.

CAIRDINE Farrier is a popular public figure,” Calcanish explained, “who wants an Oriati civil war. And the closer Falcrest and Oriati Mbo come to war, the stronger he becomes.”

“Because there are many Oriati who would prefer a peaceful surrender to open war. The closer that war, the more concessions Farrier can extract from them.”

Kindalana of Segu was one of those Oriati. She was the so-called Amity Prince, elected-to-birth Oriati royalty, and she came from the same Mbo nation as Aminata, if not the same tribe. For at least seven years she’d lived in Falcrest, working to achieve the outrageous and unlikely goal of an Article of Federation which would make Oriati Mbo part of the Imperial Republic, Falcrest’s hugest province.

“But more of them,” Aminata countered, “would surely prefer war? Being a proud and unbiddable race?”

“I’m a federated citizen of Falcrest,” Aminata warned him. “I’m not part of the Mbo.”

“You shouldn’t be ashamed to call yourself Oriati!” Their food arrived: he spoke right over it. “I know Kindalana through business. You’re very much like her as she was in her youth. A great bit taller, of course, but she was brilliant, just brilliant. A credit to your race.”

Aminata stowed away her irritation. “What about Cairdine Farrier? I knew him, actually.”

“Did you?” Calcanish said, and somehow a certain heaviness of eyelid, a wrinkle of the lips, implied a kind of disgust.

“Not in that sense,” Aminata reassured him (damn the women of her nation, for giving the world the impression they were all cads). “He was very proper.” In fact Aminata could never shake the feeling that he was somehow afraid of her.

“Oh, I’m sure.” Calcanish tried his dish, and his eyes slitted in pleasure. Aminata enjoyed that expression, very superficially. He had what sailors might call, at the height of drunken articulation, a fuckable face. “Well, as I understand it, Cairdine Farrier is in favor with the Emperor, and everyone says this Baru Cormorant is Farrier’s new protégé. . . .”

“I’ve heard that, yes, but do you know exactly what they might want? In the . . .” She kissed her fingertip in thought. “The grand sense?”

Calcanish laughed. “Of course I do! Whenever he has an idea, the bastard writes a book.”

“He’s laid it all out. He wants to walk us up to the very edge of war, to the moment when everyone’s clawing around for any other choice. When war seems inevitable, Farrier will leap onto the stage and reveal some digusting secret that turns the Oriati against each other—”

“Does it matter? As the Oriati turn on each other, Farrier will offer his support to the pro-Falcrest faction; that is, Kindalana’s faction. Money. Roads. Development of their territory. Schools and ideas. Ships, even—I shouldn’t expect our navy to escape his control. He’ll do to Oriati Mbo exactly what he’s done to Sousward and Aurdwynn and all the rest.” Calcanish bit his fork too hard. A ferocious pain screwed up his face, a pain very much like hate. “Of course his protégés will take the blame for his crimes. He always uses them up, drives them mad, and casts them aside. I expect he already has his Baru woman luring the warhawk admirals to the drowning-stone—”

Aminata choked on a chicken bone. She tried to cough it out in polite silence. Calcanish was not deceived: in an instant he was at her side, arms round her, pulling hard into her gut. She spat the bone into her napkin.

“Well, I imagine so.” He touched her throat solicitously, probing for lumps, his fingers precise and strong. “Farrier would need the navy under his control.”

Oh, Baru, no. Was that why she had written a letter to Aminata? To invite her into the honeypot?

Aminata threw her whiskey down her bone-cut throat. It made terrible sense. Baru had already betrayed the navy once. Why stop there? Why not help arrange a purge? If she did it in service of the Emperor, who could blame her? And she could get rid of Ormsment, who probably had a grudge against her for Welthony Harbor. . . .

Only—only—Aminata had told Baru, told her so often, that she wanted to be an admiral. She’d said that on the last night they spoke, when they got drunk and beat up one of Xate Yawa’s spies.

Baru hadn’t written between that night and her recent invitation to mutiny. As if she’d discarded Aminata as a loss, until she suddenly became useful again . . .

She set down the tumbler. Such bubbled, ugly glass—whoever had imported it couldn’t afford quality. “I have to get back to my ship.”

“I understand,” he said, with an expression of pleasantly ill-hidden regret. “That’s too bad. Well, here’s the key to the apartment on Jamascine where I’ve put up the Aurdwynni refugees. The address is written inside. I’ll happily turn them over to the navy’s custody. May I take your bill?”

She shook her head. A woman who turned up at a dinner without a way to pay was a grossly masculine woman indeed. “I have a navy credit stamp. I already gave the papers to the waiter.”

“Wonderful.” He stood and offered his arm. Everything he did seemed to involve the ripple of small muscles, like an anatomy show. “May I escort you to the dock?”

She wanted to stop thinking about Baru. She wanted to stop thinking. “I would love an escort.” She took his hand and pointed toward the back. “Would you like to follow me?”

“But, Lieutenant Commander, the docks are down that way, this is the way—”

SHE dragged him out the back, across the driftwood ramp that bridged the kitchen slops, into the quiet well-kept alleyway that she had suspected might be here. “Take your gloves off,” she ordered, leaving hers on.

“I’m going to be on a ship for a long time and I’m impatient. One tryst, right here, and I won’t take on or offer any obligations of contact. Do you understand?”

He blinked at her, rather owlishly, a curiously hesitant and intellectual face on a man so self-assured. “I’m not sure I ought to . . .”

“No,” he said, without defensiveness. “It’s just, without any offense, that you seem young.”

Aminata hooked her cover on a protruding brick. Fresh sea wind caressed her scalp. She closed her eyes, and sighed, and stretched against the wall. “You knew this important Oriati woman when she was my age, didn’t you?”

“Kindalana? Don’t tell me you didn’t want to fuck her. Everyone goes for important Oriati women. They’re so unattainable.”

A tremble of passion across his broad face. It took a moment for him to master himself. “You seem quite attainable,” he said. His eyes had gone casually dead, neither eager nor fearful, simply resigned. Aminata realized, with a soiled thrill, that he must be a whore of some kind. He’d said he was a womanizer, yes. Was he ashamed? Was he debased that she’d recognized him as wanton? She liked that a little. Men had strange reasons to proposition her, racialized and fraught. Whores did it for sex and money, which were much safer.

He took several measured breaths. His eyes liked the shadows beneath her unbuttoned coat, the strict womanly confinement peeling away. But he was still thinking too much: “You’re an officer. You can’t marry. You can’t touch the men under your command. So you proposition strangers. I know how that is. You need an outlet.”

She left her jacket on, but unbuttoned. He shrugged out of his, and the undershirt, naked to the waist, spectacular in the evening chill. She could trace every cell of his abdomen, the hard curve of his pectorals, the thrilling breadth of his shoulders. They didn’t kiss but very assuredly went about provoking each other. She unbuttoned him, tested his heft and hardness, and tied the cap on. To keep him occupied through this fairly technical process she took his wrist and showed him, efficiently, how she liked to be touched, with the flesh of the hood as a buffer. He knew. His broad sure-fingered hands had the violent thrilling precision of surgery. She leaned back against the wall and wrapped her legs around his waist, daring him to hold her up, and he was not a disappointment: he pressed her against the alley wall and came into her and they fucked standing there with Aminata’s open mouth pressed against the cabled curve of his shoulder and throat.

“Pretend I’m Kindalana,” she teased, which made him tremble all over, and sent him into a frenzy whose emotional components Aminata had neither the interest nor the concentration to analyze. For a long exultant time she arched against him and savored his desperation. He must be twenty years older, and she’d had him on their first meeting, a man of good status and carnal delight. What a catch. She might have a new story to impress sailors on the first night drinking.

At last she got sore, and as happened with overused men, he couldn’t come with ordinary sex. They took turns on their knees on the soot-scattered flagstones: she came on the thrill of his beautiful upturned face, on her guilty delight in his confusion and lust. Afterward, she could see he was ashamed. “Thank you,” she said, with a twinge of conscience, and pecked him on the cheek. The used cap she put in the rubbish pit, certainly built here for just such things. One did not name a restaurant Demimonde without certain arrangements. “Are you all right?”

“I’m glad,” he said, with a shaky but genuine smile. “It was . . . I’ve been tense, too. A calm body makes a calm mind. Thank you for your discretion.” Meaning her future quiet.

“One learns.” She checked that her trousers still had the key, and dressed. “Ah. Please don’t take this wrong. I know it can be tempting, sometimes, but I meant what I said. It’s better if you don’t try to reach me.”

“Aminata,” the man said, with soft concern. She turned to see him at the mouth of the alley, rather charmingly trying to adjust his worn manhood through the fabric of his trousers. But he sounded different—older, more confident, and more afraid.

“If you want to protect Baru, and your navy too,” he said, “I think you should bring her back to Aurdwynn. She can be sent into the Wintercrests, away from all this. There’s safety in exile. The only safety for her, I’m afraid; and for the rest of us who fear her.”

“Baru’s a savant,” Aminata protested, still proud, despite these revelations, of her terrible young friend. “The Republic needs her.”

“She isn’t safe.” Calcanish slipped his gloves back on. “She’ll never be safe until she’s away from her master, Farrier. She will do anything for him. Kill her lover. Kill you. Beware Baru Cormorant.”

HER suasioners Faroni and Gerewho waited at the docks with a marine squad. She’d ordered them to be ready in case she had to move tonight. “How’d it go, mam?” Gerewho asked.

“I got what I went for,” Aminata said, sticking her thumb through her clenched fist, “and the prisoners, too.”

“You went honest?” Faroni blinked. “I can never—” She swallowed the truth, which was a complaint about the great difficulty Oriati women faced getting laid in Falcresti settings.

“Mam,” Gerewho said, cautiously, “are you sure he wasn’t a honeypot of sorts? I mean, it wouldn’t be hard to arrange, knowing a navy ship’s coming ashore.”

Aminata judged Calcanish far too genuinely fucked up to be a plant. “Let’s go find out. Marines, fall in, we’re headed to Jamascine.”

The safe house was a second-floor apartment in a Falcrest-style house-of-eight. It had no plumbing or heat except for a central firepit and a waste pipe. Graffiti scrawled in grand fish-oil sweeps, a gorgeous rendering of a masked and garishly piss-colored Falcrest “shielding” a pillared island with an enormous golden coin. Beneath the island, piles of dead boys, rendered as tiny shapes wrapped in rope.

Aminata knocked on the door of resurfaced driftwood. It opened at once. “Hello,” said a very tired-looking Stakhi woman. “Come in. We’ve been expecting you.”

Aminata had read up on Baru’s known associates in Aurdwynn. “Ake Sentiamut? I’m Lieutenant Commander Aminata isiSegu, off RNS Ascentatic—”

“I know you,” Ake said. “You helped Her Majesty audit the Fiat Bank. I was Bel Latheman’s secretary. Are you with the mutiny now?”

“What mutiny?” Aminata asked, heartsick with dread. Please, please, if she would name anyone but Juris Ormsment . . .

Behind her, the crowded apartment held a peering crowd of Aurdwynni faces: a golden brown Maia woman with an otterlike figure, a cynical crossbreed woman of some age, a handsome tanned Stakhi man guarding a pimple-faced youth.

“Nitu,” the cynical-looking woman called. “Nitu, are you with them? She’s not with them. Navy mam, have you found Nitu?”

When the situation begins to escalate out of your understanding, you do not chase after it. You impose order. You step back to the last moment you understood, and proceed from there.

“Yes, our Lady Grace Tain Hu. You’re the faithful friend Baru spoke about. The one whose loss she regretted most. Isn’t that why you’re here? Didn’t you get Tain Hu’s letter?”