METAGAMES
I won’t kill her yet,” Apparitor snapped. “This isn’t your courtroom, Yawa, and you won’t hand me a verdict.”
“You’re sentimental.” Yawa sighed, to provoke him. “String your cook up on the yardarms, Svir. Let Sulane see what you do to traitors.”
“I don’t want her to die,” Baru whispered.
The two other cryptarchs blinked at her. “What did she say?”
“Speak up, Baru.”
Baru had screamed so much that she’d lost her voice. Every morning she had to change the dressing on her missing fingers, which made her howl like a ghost. She did it as soon as she woke. Do the most painful thing first: the pain is how you know it matters.
Iraji spoke for her. “She doesn’t want Munette hung. She forgives the cook for attacking her.”
From her huddle in the corner, Baru touched his ankle in gratitude. Apparitor glared from his hammock, where he fussed over a whittling. Yawa loomed in the curtained doorway like a raven. Their meetings had, Baru thought, become pitiable since the Llosydanes. Apparitor paced his decks cornered and desperate, trying to find a way to save himself from Itinerant and Hesychast and their pawns on his ship; Yawa spent her nights scribbling draft after draft of legal defense for her brother, if she was not down in the hold interrogating Shao Lune or tending to Execarne’s wounds; and Baru, well, she drank and tried not to remember the blood on Shir’s mask. Everyone was wretchedly hurt.
“Tell me again,” Apparitor said, to Yawa, “who you think could be the mole. The one who left a letter for Ormsment in the Llosydanes post.” Baru had relayed Tau-indi’s intelligence on this point.
“It had to be someone who knew we were going to Moem,” Yawa said. “We weren’t tailed there. Iscend would have noticed, and Execarne is no fool himself.”
The crossbow bolt had come out of Execarne cleanly but the poison on that bolt had lingered. He insisted on mixing his own treatments, most of which left him uselessly intoxicated.
“I knew,” Baru said. “Both of you knew, and Iraji. Ulyu Xe, I suppose, could’ve dropped a letter. . . .”
Yawa shifted uncomfortably. She tried to pass it off as an itch but Apparitor had already pounced. “What is it?”
“When we were on Moem, I ordered a special interrogation instrument shipped ashore from Helbride. A mole might have tracked the boat’s course.”
“Wait. What kind of instrument?”
“It was a device I used to interrogate Dziransi.” Yawa touched the spine of a book on Apparitor’s shelf. The Lightning Men: Falcrest’s Expeditions Eastward. “I wanted to learn what he knew about the state of the Stakhi Mansions. If an invasion’s coming . . . it’s vital that Aurdwynn be warned.”
Apparitor relaxed very deliberately. No one but Baru would have detected his thrill of terror. At any moment Baru could say, Oh, by the way, Yawa, Apparitor here is the brother of the Stakhi King. . . .
“Well?” Baru demanded. “What did you learn?”
“Very little.” Yawa sighed. “And you saw fit to send the prisoners away. I suppose Dziransi’s sailing back to Aurdwynn by now, hm? What a waste.”
“I need him in the north of Aurdwynn,” Baru countered, though it felt like sticking her fingers into the wound of their last fight. “I need him to open trade relations between Aurdwynn and the Stakhieczi. It’s the best way to avoid war.”
“Never mind that.” Apparitor clearly wanted to get off the topic of the Stakhieczi as quickly as possible. “We’re going to die before we make it to Kyprananoke.”
That got Baru’s attention back. Apparitor rubbed his face: springy red stubble had grown out far enough to curl. “I’ve talked to Captain Branne. We didn’t finish our work at the Elided Keep, and our hull’s still badly fouled. It’s slowing us.”
“How long,” Baru rasped.
“Sulane will catch us within two days.”
“And how long to Kyprananoke?”
“Two weeks. With good weather. Which we can hope for, but never count on.”
Silence. Down from above came the low cries of the sailing-master conducting her sorcery. On Taranoke they’d had a saying, You can’t sail faster than the wind, which meant, You can only do as much as you can do. How could anyone sail faster than the wind? Surely, if your ship was traveling at wind speed, then the wind could no longer exert force on the sail: it was an elementary lesson for Taranoki children, Toro Haba’s Law of Force.
But the Falcresti could break that law. Arranged at the right angle, Helbride’s sails acted like a wing—they could get force from the air by some mathematical trickery. Helbride could run downwind faster than the air.
And so could Sulane. And she was winning the race.
“We can’t possibly fight Sulane.” Apparitor drummed his fists on the wall. “We can’t even trust the other ships we meet. We’re still in Ormsment’s waters. She has the power to commandeer trade ships and leave agents aboard. Anyone could be compromised.”
“No,” Baru said, looking up at Iraji, remembering his idea. “Not anyone. There’s one place we can go that Ormsment can’t touch.”
LOOK at you.” Shao Lune sneered. “Have you lost two fingers? I’ve been shackled in the bilge, beaten, interrogated, and left to rot. And somehow I’ve still come out ahead of you.”
Baru came down the stairs to find the treacherous staff captain better appointed than last time they’d sparred. She’d gained a lantern on a hook, a bucket for her toilet (clean, thankfully; it stank only of bleach), a few planks to keep her above the bilgewater, a supply of various linens and pads, and some slack on her chains.
“Looks like you’ve been cooperating.” Baru tested the boards underfoot. Shao Lune had done her carpentry well. “Left anything to sell to me? Or did you give it all to Yawa?”
“Left you anything? I’m in a better position than you, I think.”
“Funny.” Baru looked at her wrist. “I don’t see any chains on mine.” Then she thought of something she’d said to Tain Hu once: the Masquerade rules them, but it has not yet made them want to be ruled, the chains are not yet invisible, and nearly shouted in fright.
“I tell the Jurispotence this and that. What I know about Ormsment. What I expect her to do.” Shao Lune’s uniform hung from an overhead beam. In her cotton workshirt and rough canvas trousers she looked like a gutter mucker, but she lounged on her hard-earned carpentry with the poise of a schoolyard tyrant. Lamplight conjured faint implications through the cloth. She was not, without the uniform, quite as sleek and slim and minimal as she liked to appear. “I could tell her about you, couldn’t I?”
“What would you possibly tell Xate Yawa about me.”
“Still want to bargain with my admirals? Conduct a little military adjustment of Parliament? Yawa would love to learn about that.”
Baru would indeed very much like to arrange a military coup in Falcrest, right about the same moment she coaxed the Stakhi and Oriati to invade Falcrest. One convulsive cataclysm to break the mask off the world’s face.
“You know,” Shao Lune said, and what an eloquent sneer she had, “I think gava women don’t understand the scale of the world. I think you believe Parliament’s just like a few dirty elders huddled in a cave.”
Baru picked up a length of Shao Lune’s chain. The woman flinched. Baru grinned at her: she remembered last time. Baru slipped her hand under her shirt and, very slowly, extracted a wooden bottle of fern shampoo. “Would you like some soap?”
The staff captain’s wide eyes narrowed with contempt. “Please. I have dignity.”
“Where?” Baru peered around. “You’ve hidden it so well.”
“You knock-kneed gava virgin. You think you’re someone?”
Baru seized the captain’s chain and took out her general frustration by yanking Shao Lune back to her beam. A few circuits of the chain had Shao pinned with her arms at her sides. Baru’s maimed right hand complained. Baru flexed it and savored the reminder of pain.
Shao panted with the effort of her resistance. Out of her uniform she seemed somehow spiritually disheveled, her eyes too large and expressive, her mouth too cruel: as if deprived of necessary constraints, bindings that kept her merely human.
Baru whispered in her ear. “Tell me how to stop Ormsment.”
“Blow up her ship.”
“You know we can’t fight.”
“I’m just a simple navy officer. I only understand fire.”
Baru would need to offer Shao something more than soap. Something Yawa couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give her. Gods of fire, did her hand hurt. Gods of stone, it had grown so hard to think. She’d been clever once. Before she spent her days curled in her hammock, trying to dilute her pain with spirit.
“You smell like blood and drink,” Lune hissed. “You’re degenerating, aren’t you? Reverting to your primal state.”
Baru clinched the chains a little tighter. “Ormsment blew up three Oriati ships. She’s out of control. She could start a second Armada War.”
“Pirate hunting is the admiral’s duty.”
“They weren’t pirates. They flew Federal Oriati colors.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why?”
“The admiral wouldn’t burn a Federal-flagged Oriati ship.”
Baru seized on Shao Lune’s weakness: she couldn’t quite repress her navy training, her need to provide accurate information. “Ormsment wouldn’t attack an Oriati diplomatic ship?”
“How should I know? As a loyal officer, I can’t understand the mutinous mind.”
Baru braced one foot against the post and drew the chain tight. Shao groaned and pushed her fists against the planking, desperate to breathe.
“Would an Oriati diplomatic flag stop Ormsment?”
“Let me breathe.”
“Tell me what I want to know. Would Ormsment attack an Oriati diplomatic ship?”
“I’d tell you anything—to breathe.”
Baru gave her an inch. Shao gasped in relief, panted, her icy composure in disarray. The effect was intriguing. Baru suddenly missed Ulyu Xe very much.
“You shouldn’t do his work,” Shao said. “He’s a mannist. He comes from a mannist society.”
Baru blinked. “What?”
“You’re taking the red man’s side, Apparitor’s side, against the navy. He’s Stakhi, and they’re a patrilineal culture. He’s an instrument of the sexual dialectic.”
“Oh, Captain, I don’t think the sexual dialectic has much to do with this—”
“Of course it does!” she crowed. “You child. Listen: Parliament doesn’t like the navy’s difficult women, doesn’t like us asking for fair pensions and seizing their trade ships for leverage. So Parliament asked the Emperor to put a man in the Empire Admiralty. To do that, to put Lindon Satamine in that post, Apparitor had to sabotage Ahanna Croftare’s chances. She worked her whole life for that post. And she lost it to Parliament’s stupid fears. If Croftare can’t get a fair chance, why should any woman?”
Baru thought the poor staff captain should try life as a Taranoki woman if she wanted to know about unfair sexual dialectics. But she sat down on the opposite side of the post, Shao’s slack chain in her fists.
“All the more reason,” she panted, out of breath from all the torture, “to help me adjust Parliament.”
“What can you even do to them?”
“I have the Emperor’s own power.”
“Power.” From Lune’s side of the post came an unexpectedly thoughtful sigh. “Ormsment’s fond of a riddle. It’s very current, widely discussed, a great many wise authors have meditated upon it. One hears it at the happening parties.”
Baru eyed the sloshing bilgewater beneath them. “Is that what this is? A happening party?”
“Of course it’s happening. I’m in attendance.”
Baru chuckled. Shao Lune snapped at her. “Shut up and let me finish. The riddle goes like this: Three ministers have gone to dinner together at a country retreat when they all taste poison in their wine. They cry out for an antidote. A lowly control secretary leaps up, showing a little nip bottle. She says, ‘I have one dose of antidote! Who should get it?’
“The minister of the Morrow Ministry says, ‘Give me the antidote, lest my spies uncover all your secrets and punish you with a lifetime of blackmail.’
“The minister of the Metademe says, ‘Give me the antidote, lest my eugenicists forbid your children from marrying and lobotomize your husband to use as a brainless stud.’
“The minister of the Faculties says, ‘Give me the antidote, or I’ll stab you with this fucking meat skewer, right up the tear duct.’
“Who gets the antidote?”
Oh. Baru knew this one. One of those profundities you’d introduce to invite clever self-flattering nonanswers from your tablemates. “I assure you,” she said, “that I don’t have the sort of power one quibbles over at country retreats.”
“Do you? You’re very sure of yourself. Who’s your handler?”
Baru thought at once of Farrier. She didn’t like that. “What do you mean?”
Shao Lune shifted. One bright eye glimmered around the post, and the edge of a sharp smile. “When Xate Yawa and Iscend come down here together,” she said, “I see that Yawa’s not in charge. She’s afraid of the Clarified woman. Who are you afraid of?”
“No one,” Baru said, staring into the dimness of the stern hold. No one but herself. “They tried to claim me with a hostage.”
“And?”
“I executed her myself.”
“Oh,” Shao said, with sudden respect.
“I loved her,” Baru said, for no useful reason. Now she was confiding in Lune. What a fool. But she couldn’t stop herself: the drink was not enough, she had to speak, she had to say how she felt.
“And I loved working for Ormsment,” Shao Lune said, “until she got in my way.”
Baru tugged listlessly on the chains. A gray shroud had settled over her.
“Tell me how to stop Ormsment,” she said, “and I’ll talk to the others about your parole. How would you like that? A chance to get out of your bilge.”
Shao’s bright glimmering eye watched her round the post. People, Baru remembered, had two eyes. She had forgotten the existence of Shao’s other eye while it was out of sight.
“She won’t dare attack you,” Shao Lune said, “if you’re under an Oriati diplomatic seal. I guarantee it.”
THE target would be the clipper Cheetah. “Tau-indi Bosoka owns her,” Baru explained, “she was sighted at moor in the Llosydanes. Right now Cheetah is somewhere north of us, headed home as fast as she can with news of that debacle at Moem. She’ll go into the Kraken Still to reach the Mbo. But first she’ll stop on Kyprananoke to take in water.”
Apparitor boggled at her: “You say that like it’s a stroll to the pharmacist! Don’t you know what’s down in the middle of the Ashen Sea?”
“Pleasantly unconquered islanders, happily canoeing about?”
“No, you lapsarian lunk, it’s a dead sea full of ghost ships and rotten crews! The currents conspire, the winds are inconstant, there is rock and maelstrom! They’d be mad to go in there!”
“But the Oriati know a way to cross the Still,” Yawa said.
“Since when are you an expert navigator?” Apparitor poked her in the breastbone. “You’ve never led an expedition further than Cattlson’s rectum!”
“I policed smuggling, didn’t I? Smugglers have to come up through the Kraken Still to get past the navy on the trade ring.” She nodded grudgingly to Baru. “Baru’s right. We can intercept Cheetah on its way to Kyprananoke. Baru and Iraji can go aboard, Baru to negotiate, Iraji to see after the cultural particularities.”
Baru had not, of course, mentioned to anyone that Tau-indi Bosoka thought she was infected by an apocalyptic spiritual disease.
Now she sat under her hammock in the arsenal and marked her vodka bottle with a grease pencil. She would allow herself not more than one dose per watch. A little more if her fingers really hurt.
The void said, in a young man’s voice, “I need to cast a spell of protection over you.”
“The left side!” Baru snarled at Iraji. “I said approach from my left!”
“But then you’d see me coming, and scuttle off.” In his fine fingers Iraji held out a wooden tile about the size of a playing card, engraved, beneath the much-worn varnish, with the face of a woman in a collared coat. “Will you help me cast this spell?”
Baru blinked up at him. He wore a pair of canvas shorts and nothing else, his delicate strength so pleasant, so graceful, trained to ornament. How compliant he could be: and yet now she never forgot that beneath that compliance he was his own bright mind.
“A spell? I thought you were a good Incrastic citizen.”
“In Falcrest I certainly am. But if your plan works, we’ll be going aboard an Oriati Prince-ship. We need Oriati protection for an Oriati place. We need a bond of trim.” Iraji held out the tile. “You come from Sousward, you must know the word. How do they say it in the Whale Words? Trim is a power that connects people.”
He offered her the card again, with a long, elastic patience that would soon, Baru felt, snap back against her. Iraji had grown very bold with her. Perhaps he felt he’d earned her attention when he saved her life.
“We already have a bond of sorts,” Baru admitted, “don’t we? You saved my life at the Elided Keep. You saved my life again, from Munette.” And maybe pinched Baru’s ledger of secrets before he did. But wasn’t that a sort of favor? Keeping Tain Hu’s coded trust far from Baru’s precarious heart?
“I was doing my duty.”
“And you did it very well.”
“Did I? You think I did a good job of breaking my friend Munette’s arm?”
“Well, you didn’t faint, at least. Why are you always fainting?”
He made an expression of extreme patience, extremely tested.
“I’m sorry,” Baru offered. She was sorry, she had great reserves of sorrow, it was not hard to make some of it fungible and grant it to Iraji. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be difficult. I’ve just been in . . .”
She did not want to talk about pain. Instead she reached out and took the tile with the woman’s face from his hand. “What do we do?”
“We learn to play Purge,” he said, and grinned suddenly. “Oh, I love this game.”
HE dealt a deck of wooden cards faceup, then poured out a pile of dry beans. Baru knelt to help him separate them into piles of ten. She remembered the night she’d looked up cryptarchy with Muire Lo, dictionaries and thesauri scattered around them. She’d known by then that he would, in all statistical likelihood, come to love her. She was a fair enough young woman and he spent a lot of time with her. There were Incrastic charts one could use to obtain the resulting odds of love.
She had failed to prevent that. Lo had died.
Maybe when Iraji said he had to create a bond of trim, he meant she had to care for him. Maybe that was his magic, an Oriati magic, concerned entirely with the connections between people.
But like all requirements, such a bond could surely be falsified.
“You think I’ll like this game?” She turned over one of the face cards. On the back, tiny inscribed Aphalone letters read, THE PRINCE-AMBASSADOR, and then, handwritten, Tau-indi Bosoka.
He hummed as he counted beans. “Your tastes aren’t hard to cater to, my lady.”
“Oh? You didn’t have much luck last time.” She remembered how to flirt like Hu. That lopsided smile, that gaze which did not break. It caught him and held him an instant. He laughed, surprised and charmed. He really must be like Ulyu Xe, drawn to men and women both.
“Come, look. This is Purge. . . .”
With an efficient and supremely unpatronizing manner, he showed Baru how to play. The players took the parts of rivals in Falcrest: the cards were ministers, admirals, parliamentaries, and polymaths who each contributed some political capability, whether moneymaking or law-writing or gossip-mongering or the creation of influence. To win, one first spent their influence (the dry beans) to recruit a cabal of allies (the cards). Some would help you get more influence. Some would let you alter the rules. Some would let you strike at your opponent’s cabal. “Strip away my support,” Iraji explained, “until you can have me convicted, or exiled, or murdered without much chance of anyone caring. But be careful not to run out of influence-beans. Each member of your cabal requires constant favors and protection, and if a tile is not satisfied with its allocation of beans, it may flip. . . .”
“The Tyrant’s Qualm,” Baru said. “You must divide your power to gain allies, but not too far?”
“Precisely.”
They sat under her tied-up hammock and played as the deck above them drummed with busy feet and the ship creaked with speed. Occasionally Iraji smiled, or laughed in delight. Baru lost twice, quickly and purposefully, not because she could have won but because she needed to see all the rules in operation to grasp the game-behind-the-game. The rules might say you could buy any minister you wanted at the beginning, but Baru knew that only a few ministers would be correct choices, opening paths toward a strategy that would defeat most other strategies. It was better, for example, to recruit people of influence early on, so you could use their influence to get even more people of influence. But later in the game, you would have to begin spending all your influence aggressively to complete your plots, and it was a waste of time to cultivate more patronage. This seemed to be the key to victory: choosing when to transition from growth for growth’s sake into the actual execution of your endgame.
“The metagame,” Iraji said, and this time his grin was joyful and spontaneous. “That’s what you’re talking about. The game-of-winning-the-game is called the metagame.”
“I don’t see how that’s different from the game itself. Isn’t the goal of the game to win the game?”
“Yes. The game is the set of rules I’ve taught you. But the metagame is the game of knowing how others tend to play the game, and choosing a strategy that will defeat the common strategies.”
“Like yomi?”
“Yomi is a part of it, yes, knowing what I’m likely to do.”
Baru frowned in thought. He mistook that for confusion, and went on:
“Last century when Purge was new, everyone complained that military coup through the navy was too powerful, so play centered around control of the Admiralty. Then the Foreign Policies variant came into favor, wherein both players could lose if the Admiralty were badly compromised by intrigue. The metagame changed, people stopped focusing so much on the Admiralty.”
“Aha. That’s a very useful word, metagame,” Baru said, and went on to lose three more times, all by the narrowest margin, before she realized that Iraji was playing with her—always performing just a bit better than she could beat. Baru looked up at him with vengeful delight, infuriated and happy to be furious: “You’re a snake. If I keep losing, why can’t my player just have your player to dinner and stab him?”
“Ah, a simplicity!” He clapped. “The game presumes that all parties involved have guarded themselves against basic tactics like assassination and poisoning, which we call the Simplicities.”
“As I am guarded, here on Helbride, by my patron’s threat against your master’s hostage.”
“Just so.”
“So only more sophisticated tactics can reach me.”
“Such as?”
“Such as this effort to win my confidence.”
“You think I’m here to befriend you on Apparitor’s orders?”
“Aren’t you?”
Iraji touched the cards between them. Lacquer-painted faces stared up from the wood of the deck. Slowly, hesitantly, he stroked one of the faces: and then, with a duelist’s speed, he reached up to touch Baru’s cheek.
She froze. He had very steady warm hands, and his eyes were dangerously open. Not a seductive openness, half-lidded and open-lipped, but a curious kind of trust: stupid, cowlike, tactically foolish trust, extended to her like a line of credit.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. “I don’t believe you are what you pretend to be.”
“I— What?”
“I can see you are in agony, my lady. Why do you have to bicker with my lord? Are you determined to be nothing but edges and lye?”
So he was here for Apparitor. To pry, again, at Baru’s cracks.
“We’re rivals,” Baru said. “We must defend ourselves from each other.”
“The best rivals share a certain respect, don’t they?”
“In his rag novels, maybe.” But not, she thought, after one of them has decided the other is a monster, and after that monster has decided to send him home to his brother and a terrible fate.
“He is lonely! Not for a lover,” he smiled, quickly, and in pride, “but a peer. He has been on mission so long . . . the two of you could ease each others’ pain, if only you were friends.”
And Baru remembered how genuinely Apparitor had grieved for Tain Hu. How truly he had liked her. Pity. Very briefly she pitied Apparitor. To lose so many of his staff at the Elided Keep, to lose his hope of befriending Tain Hu, and to gain only this feral arithmetic-ghoul named Baru, who would rip him from his lover and send him into exile.
They’d almost confided in each other, on that day when they came to the Llosydanes. Apparitor had talked about his doomed voyage east, and meeting Lindon, and . . . and then he’d said something cruel. You know the best class of pawn?
And they hadn’t, really, been even a little friendly since. Why?
It was obvious, when Baru put it in economic terms. He’d offered her confidence. She hadn’t returned it. She hadn’t told him anything about her past, or her lovers, or her plans. He’d offered an ante and she had not matched.
“I—” she began, looking at Iraji wonderingly, unsure whether to take him at his word, or to defeat this clever insinuation.
Then the game began again.
“ROCKETS!” The shout came down from the masts, relayed by the officer of the watch. “ROCKETS TO THE EAST! SHIP IN DISTRESS!”
Baru bolted for the stairs, slammed her head, and reeled up onto the deck cursing and spitting. Apparitor was halfway up the mast, dripping from his bath, wearing nothing but a skirtwrap. “What is it?” Baru shouted to him.
He climbed down lightly to the deck. His face was grim.
“It’s Cheetah,” he said.
“Excellent!” Baru cried. “I’ll make ready to go aboard.”
“You don’t understand. They’ve been attacked. They’re sinking.”