THE sea struck Barhu right in the jaw, knocked her teeth apart, flooded her with hot salt and Sulane’s black pitch. She shut her right eye as tight as she could, afraid that the ocean would leak into her brain.
As a girl, she’d liked to drift in the Halae shallows, feeling the tug of current and tasting the sweet silt. Listening to the happy commerce of paddles and oars.
It was almost the same—
The rope around Barhu jerked taut and slammed her against the curve of the ship’s prow, down across the copper-jacketed keel, like pepper on a cook’s knife. She noticed, absurdly, that Sulane had been well-careened before she left Treatymont, and that the copper jacket had kept new barnacles from growing.
Mostly.
Something cut through her, as thin as the edge of a letter, from her right buttock to the back of her left shoulder. She hiccuped on seawater. A warm wet insinuation crept around her eye. She thought that maybe she had just died, doomed by an infected brain—
They hauled her again. Deeper.
The copper saved her life from dismemberment by barnacle so that she could drown instead. The rope pulled so deep into her skin that blood rose black around it. She was stretched out wrist to ankle like a living eight-knot, she was being dragged apart—she had to stay conscious! If she fainted she was lost!
The warship’s shadow darkened everything. After weeks and miles of pursuit, Sulane was at last overrunning Barhu.
Mother Pinion’s voice called down the decades. Baru. Pay attention.
I’m trying, Mother. It’s just so dark down here—
Baru. Stay awake!
A hand touched Barhu’s stomach. A hard knee brushed her thigh.
She looked down: saw her, just where she’d promised she would be. The diver Ulyu Xe, who could swim four hundred feet without coming up for breath. Who’d come over to Sulane by breathing through a reed, hidden from the sentries.
Barhu could have shouted all her air in joy.
Xe crawled up the length of her, hands tugging at Barhu’s cassock. The black blade clenched in her teeth glittered like an eclipse. The knife had come from one of Faham Execarne’s Morrow-men, six inches of el-Tsunuqba’s black glass, knapped to an edge so sharp it parted rope like gauze.
Xe slashed the bridle-rope from Barhu’s waist, reached up above Barhu’s wrists, and cut the drag rope. Barhu’s wrists snapped free, numb from fingertip to elbow. The next heave from above whipped the rope round her waist like a brand and it slithered in a searing coil around her ankles and away. They would know at once it was broken, but they would not know if it was the rope that had failed or Barhu’s body. They would rush to the sides and look for her to surface.
Barhu shrugged out of the heavy cassock and clung to Xe.
The diver kicked toward Sulane’s stern and the blind spot around the frigate’s rudder. Barhu’s thin cut bled a red cape behind them. On a bad day she could hold her breath for three minutes if she didn’t have to move. The keelhauling had cost her, but she could last two minutes yet. Xe’s skin brushed wonderfully against Barhu’s, a cool balm for rope burn.
She was alive! She’d come through that terrible night on Eternal and there was no cancer in her skull and no vial of Kettling in her pocket and no Tau-indi or Iraji or Shao Lune but she was in the water, she was free, she was alive.
When Barhu opened her eyes she saw the moon.
But of course it wasn’t the moon. It was the steel sickle mounted on the Cancrioth whale’s fin. And he was coming toward them through the wavering light. Coming with his jaws wide open, propped open, because he was carrying something in his teeth—
Barhu gurgled in alarm.
The cancer whale came at her with a naval mine in his jaws.
“HERE are your pardons!” Apparitor shouted. “Bottoms up!”
Aminata came up the ladder to the maindeck at the exact moment the red-haired man shot a flask of vodka, whooped, and hurled it overboard. In his other hand he brandished a fistful of paper. “Here! See them here?”
He shook the sheaf of documents like a dead seagull. “Take them! Every last one of you absolved of your crimes, from grand mutiny down to your overdue books in Shaheen! But they lack one thing!”
He scattered the pardons across the deck. Sailors pounced. Officers brayed for order.
“This is the missing piece!” He brandished a grapefruit-sized device, like a spherical clock. “This is an incryptor. It produces the codes which mark the Emperor’s authentic orders. Those codes will be carefully checked when you present these pardons to save your wretched lives! I have omitted the last digit of each one—and only I can supply the correct numbers! If I survive my return to Helbride, I will flash you the numbers, one by one, as my ship makes for the horizon. Do you understand?”
Juris Ormsment stepped up to the high rail on the quarterdeck. “Apparitor. This isn’t necessary. We had a deal.”
Apparitor’s pretty face hardened. “Deal’s done. I want safe conduct to Helbride.”
“Why?” Ormsment called. “What’s gotten you so skittish? Need to water your mason leaf?” A few sailors laughed.
“You thug,” Apparitor said, sweetly, “we both know you’ve got no reason to let me go once I sign those pardons. You’ll try to keep me aboard. You’ll try to control me. I won’t have it.”
“I’d shoot you dead like a dog if not for your vendettas, yes.” Juris came slowly around to the quarterdeck stairs, began to descend to the weather deck. Her hands were wide and empty. “But that day won’t be today. Stamp the pardons. Let’s turn our attention to troubles ashore.”
Apparitor made eye contact with Aminata, just for an instant, and his eyes said get out now.
But Aminata wasn’t going to run away with the job half-finished.
She slipped over to the starboard rail. A sunflash lantern on a hook waited for the officer of the watch to post news to Ascentatic. Aminata set the lantern on its bearings, trained the lens at Captain Nullsin’s distant frigate, pointed the collector at the sun, and began to work the shutter as quietly as she could.
N U L N U L N U L
A M N A M N A M N
ONE RED IF YOU SEE ME
ONE RED IF YOU SEE ME
Nullsin had of course posted a double watch on the mast tops, in case of ships fleeing. She’d asked him to keep an eye out for messages from Sulane. She trusted him.
Almost at once a red flare ignited up in Ascentatic’s republic sails. They’d seen her.
“Oh, Juris!” Apparitor cried. “You think we’re going to fix Kyprananoke? Solve it like a little puzzle? Once the wound’s in the gut there’s nothing you can do but end it quick!”
He was up on the port rail now, his feet tap-tap-tapping between lines and brackets as he danced out onto the channels that moored the huge mainmast shroud lines. “Time’s up! I’m going to leave, I’m going to go, and you’d damn well better do the same! Because that thing out there will have your little ship for a toothpick!”
Sulane’s rigging moaned in the rising wind.
Everyone else was utterly silent.
Behind Apparitor, the mountain gave birth.
“OH, virtues…” someone breathed.
A great rustle ran through the crew. At last the mast-top girls looked up from the drama below and cried out, “Sails! Sails away west! Ship coming out of the caldera!”
Fog rolled out of el-Tsunuqba, low and heavy, thick as soapsuds. Aminata knew at a glance that it was unnatural. But not half as unnatural as the silhouette that loomed within. The four hundred feet of preposterous immensity.
Eight masts, junk-rigged, not tall by Falcrest standards but absurd in their number. Sails like the canopy of a cloud forest. Huge curved broadsides, deck upon deck, studded with cannon-ports.
Eternal came forth. For the first time, Aminata saw it in sunlight.
Fuck me, she thought. It’s like a city.
Ormsment stared at the behemoth and Aminata saw the shroud of duty settle over her, smoothing her brow, flattening the cables of her throat. The admiral had seen her enemy.
“Give Apparitor a boat,” Ormsment commanded. “See him safely away. Sound battle stations and rig for fighting trim.”
Her crew looked up to her.
“That ship,” she roared to her crew, “belongs to the Oriati who released plague on these islands! I saw it done at the embassy! If they released plague here, they can bring it to Falcrest!
“At any moment that ship is going to strike a mine. And when it does, we will be in position to take it. We will bring the survivors back to Falcrest and we will reveal to our people what was done here. We will be heroes! Are you with me?”
A roar of approval and Aminata wanted to join it—she was trained to lead marine assaults, seizing the titan compartment by compartment, gassing out the degenerate Oriati conspirators from their warrens and pits.
She imagined them whispering in Falcrest about what Aminata had done, about the prize the Burner of Souls had taken. Cheering her as she stood up before Parliament, drawing record attendance for a member of her race. And her name registered upon the Antler Stone, the first Oriati chiseled into that long list of the people’s champions.
Imagine how proud Maroyad would be when Aminata reported back to her … imagine a crew, her crew, calling her captain …
“Mam?” a small voice called.
Aminata looked up from the lantern and there before her was a girl, the youngest person Aminata had seen on Sulane, which was crewed mostly by old-leather sea revenants and battered rope-ends. This girl was gangly, not more than seventeen, with the roughed-up voice of adolescence.
And she was Aurdwynni: pale as snow, with Stakhi blood and a round face and sunburn on her ears. She must have some mark on her service jacket, some weakness of behavior or heredity, which said that she would never be more than an able sailor. So Juris had accepted her on this final voyage.
“Mam,” the girl said, saluting, “if you’ve not got a fighting station, master-at-arms says we could use you down with the marines.”
And she bounded off across the slanting deck, across coiled shroudlines and boat ties, nimble as a squirrel.
When Tain Shir’s spear had punched her in the chest, Baru had screamed, no! Not her! No!
Baru wanted her to live. Baru demanded that she live. Baru had said, you send your signal to Nullsin, and you get off that ship.
But the girl. She was so young.…
“LOOK.” I guided Faham’s hand to the little dot of color that tossed in Sulane’s rising wake. The frigate was turning west, as we’d hoped it wouldn’t, but at least there was good news: “Do you see that boat there? Apparitor’s slipping away.”
“Where’s my spyglass?” he groused. “You! Go get me one of the Stakhi optics!”
“We haven’t any, Your Excellence, we sold them last month to launder the kickbacks from the—”
“My ministry for a telescope,” Faham groaned. “Someone!”
One of his Morrow-men scurried off to find him a lens just as another party of spies arrived with the prisoner Kimbune. I watched the Cancrioth woman carefully. She’d been nervous and withdrawn, but there was a deep-set fearlessness in her, too; not arrogance, I thought, but the assurance of divine protection.
She did not seem assured now.
At the sight of Eternal she cried out. “You said you’d get them away safely.” She looked between me and the red angles of tall Sulane, swinging west to intercept. “You said they’d escape!”
“They’ve cleared the minefield,” I assured her, which I had deduced from Eternal’s failure to explode. The ship, Baru said, was full of rocket-powder. “The trick with your uranium lamp worked. Aminata gave them the correct coordinates for the safe passage.”
“But your navy ship is still there! It still has all its weapons! The Brain made us do drills, how to die before the fire could get to you—you’ll let them all die like that? You promised me!”
I gave her a grandmotherly smile, wholly counterfeit. I had absolutely no idea what might happen when the two ships met. “Baru and the young Aminata have a plan to see to Sulane. Faham, what is that ship doing now?”
He was still in his foul mood, and that would only make him fouler: he would think his anger was causing misfortune. “What a disaster if we lose Tau,” he muttered. “That laman gave us at least ten extra years of peace, I’m sure of it. Quickly, quickly, which way’s the wind?”
“Out of the west.” With the sunrise the westerly blow had steadied and strengthened. I had no real understanding of wind or current, so I could not say if this was a manifestation of some nautical law. Weather was notoriously unpredictable at the edge of the Kraken Still.
“Hm.” Execarne grimaced. “Then Eternal has the weather gage over Sulane.”
“That’s good for them, isn’t it?” This I remembered from my conversations about pirate-hunting with Ahanna Croftare, before she’d been promoted and replaced by Ormsment. Whoever had the weather gage was upwind of their foe, and could ride the wind down on them.
“Not this time. The weather gage benefits an attacker but hurts a defender.” Faham knuckled his temples, plucked fitfully at the hairs of his beard. “The wind will push them toward Sulane. They have to fight. If they fight, they’ll lose. And if Ormsment goes home with a Cancrioth prize, we’ll be razing Oriati cities and retching up Kettling blood by autumn.”
“Trust Aminata,” I suggested.
“Can’t trust anyone,” he grunted.
“I trust you, Faham,” I said, which was true, as far as my trust went.
A Morrow-man returned with a spyglass for Execarne. He trained it on Eternal and moaned. “Oh, virtues. There’s Tau.…”
A small figure in a bright khanga stood at Eternal’s rail. I reached for Execarne’s hand and he gripped me so hard I had to put a nail in the back of his hand.
The laman stood limp, as empty as a winter field. I felt such pity. I’d looked that way on the night they’d brought me Olake’s execution order, the order I couldn’t sign.
Ormsment’s Sulane launched a spread of fireworks. “They’re ordering Eternal to surrender and push their weapons overboard,” Faham translated. “The Oriati are running out their cannon in reply.”
The golden ship’s starboard side opened dozens of tiny doors. Black tubes protruded to menace Sulane. Ormsment’s flagship tacked upwind toward the giant, a little red dog trotting toward a lion.
My vision had faded with age. My sense for motion at the edge of sight had not. “Look! Look there! Is that Baru?”
Apparitor’s little boat paused aft of Sulane to throw a line. A sleek brown woman hauled herself aboard. Her bound chest heaved for air. Surely that was patient Wydd’s student, Ulyu Xe. She and Apparitor reached over to haul another woman aboard—scowling face, black eye, why, who else it could be?
Baru was alive. She grappled with Apparitor, shouting: he shook his head.
With an inaudible cry she threw herself to the rear of the boat and stared at Sulane. She was looking for her friend Aminata.
That was the moment when Sulane’s stern exploded.
AMINATA was still on Sulane’s weather deck, working the sunflash to signal Ascentatic, when Eternal fired its ranging shots.
The huge Oriati ship’s starboard side decorated itself, silently, with ten little jets of smoke. She stared in wonder. It took the rocketry mate’s shouted “Down!” to make her duck.
The crack of the detonations reached her a moment ahead of the cannon shot—black blurs across the dawn-gold water—like arrows, but fast, so fast. Aminata clasped her hands over the back of her neck. Kings, what would it feel like? Would there be any time to feel the hit? She was tense, she had to loosen up, make herself soft like she was drunk—
Nothing happened. No crash of timber. No fire in the rocket magazines.
“They fell short!” the rocketry master called. “They hit the sea!”
Aminata peeked back up over the boatwale and took the range to Ascentatic. Nullsin’s ship was coming south, struggling in the lees of the islands—he could not possibly arrive in time to force Sulane to break off—not unless Aminata somehow slowed Sulane down—
A part of her could not believe, no matter how well she’d thought it out, that she was truly working to protect an Oriati ship.
Suddenly the ship jumped beneath her: her sea legs soaked up the motion. Ten hundred times worse for her stomach was the detonation from astern. The magazines!
“Magazines!” the master-at-arms screamed. “Report the magazines! Sound off!”
Aminata tore off sternward, plunging down the ladder, crying, “Report the magazines!” That sounded like a signal firework detonating inside the ship, and if it somehow reached the Burn supply, they were about to die in clinging fire—
A sailor belowdecks screamed back. “Magazines secure!”
She turned to shout abovedecks. “Magazines secure!” Then, after a ragged breath, “What the fuck was that?”
“The rudder’s gone!” someone shouted back down.
“We hit our own mine?” Sulane was clear of anything marked on the charts.…
“I don’t know! But the rudder’s fucked!”
A collection of surgeon’s tools slid past her, blades and bonesaws ringing cheerily; a mercy-spike bounced off her boot and landed killing end down between two planks. Without a rudder the wind had taken them: the whole frigate was heeling north, prow coming starboard as Sulane tipped over.
Sulane had been maimed. She could go. She should go. That was the plan, to make sure Sulane couldn’t hurt Eternal. And then go.
Ormsment’s bellow: “Away the damage control party! Cut off the rudder, run out the drogue, I want the bow turned back into the wind! Lash me an emergency rudder! Come on, show me your salt!”
Ordinarily Ormsment’s flag captain would have picked up her orders and repeated them. But she was busy at the prow, tending to a wounded sailor: old amputee comforting the newly maimed.
Aminata felt two great hands seize her by the wrists and try to pull her in half.
One hand had four long fingers of duty and a thick thumb of guilt. Sulane was a warship in combat. Ormsment needed her staff captain.
But the other pull said—this ship is doomed. Ormsment’s a mutineer who led her crew to ruin. You made your choice. Jump overboard and swim, swim, it’s not too late. You deserve better than this!
You worked your ass off! Don’t die for nothing!
The wind’s slow hand pulled Sulane broadside on to the Cancrioth ship.
“OH Wydd,” I whispered. “Have they caught fire? Is it over?”
In a single silent instant Eternal’s whole cannon-studded side vanished in a wall of smoke. I had never seen anything like it outside of a forest fire. “Is it their magazine?” I demanded of Faham. “Has the magazine gone—”
The thunder came over us then, and I could not speak.
CHAIN shot tore through timber, lines, canvas, flesh. A mainsail shroud line snapped free and the lashing end took the master-at-arms across the eyes. Something struck the mainmast and whipped around it keening like a funeral till it smashed itself to a halt and thrummed there, four feet of chain, burnt and smoking.
Aminata clung grimly to the ladder and waited for it to stop. Huge god fingers drummed along Sulane’s port side, round shot beating against wood and slapping off water. The thud of direct impacts, the snap of broken rope, the groan of suddenly unsupported timber—
Then silence, and the screams of wounded.
“Surgeon!” someone bawled. “Surgeon!”
But it was Juris Ormsment’s voice that ruled. “Stand to your posts, sailors! The bastards couldn’t hit a cunt with a cock! Their shot’s bouncing right off our timber!”
She was up on the mainmast shrouds, dangling from the lines on Sulane’s tilted starboard side, hanging out over the ocean. She looked fearless. The crew cheered for her.
“Where’s my rudder?” Ormsment shouted. “I need helm!”
Aminata stumbled aft across splintered wood and spilled grease to help the damage control party. She found them struggling to lift the heavy wooden drogue, put her shoulder beneath it, and, pushing in time with the sailing-master’s call, helped tip it over the stern.
“Drogue’s away!” the sailing-master called. “Pass the word!”
“Drogue’s away!” Aminata shouted forward.
The floating drogue uncoiled behind Sulane, dragging against the ship’s motion, pulling at the stern so the whole ship turned west again, straight at Eternal.
“Strike everything!” the sailing-master cried. “Make her clean!”
Riggers hauled at capstans and blocks, the whole ship answering like a thing alive, tucking its wings like a peregrine on the dive. Aminata’s favorite thing in the world: the perfect coordinated labor of so many different people gathered in complex ways and yet to simple effect, all to make the ship go where it was needed. Everyone doing exactly what the ship’s design asked of them and in reciprocity the ship doing what they asked of it, together, hand in hand. And the smell of sealant, and the callus-ripping burn of taut rope over your palm, and Aminata knew she would never abandon this ship, never could abandon a ship in battle.
“Rocketry!” Ormsment shouted. “Cut me two long-fuse torpedoes! Put them right across her course! I want her holed and foundering before we get alongside!”
She was still fighting for her crew. Still fighting to win.
The master-at-arms clawed at his eyes and screamed for his mother. Aminata ran to take his place.
“AMINATA!”
Ulyu Xe tried to hold Barhu back so she could tend to the barnacle cut. All Barhu wanted (unfairly, wretchedly) was to shove her down in the bilgewater, seize the oars, and go get Aminata back.
“Why didn’t she come?” She’d watched Galganath fix the naval mine to Sulane’s rudder, watched the orca pull the arming lanyard. And she’d thought: thank Devena for that whale, because if Sulane loses her helm, she’s done fighting, and Aminata will come to safety.
But she hadn’t come.
“I don’t understand. She just had to jump and swim out to you— Apparitor, why didn’t you—”
“Row,” Apparitor said.
“What?”
“Take the oars. I’m exhausted. You row.”
Barhu looked, selfishly, to Ulyu Xe, but the poor woman had just spent long minutes underwater. She sat her ass down and took the oars. Apparitor sat on the stern thwart, his back to Sulane. Cannon sounded in the distance. The wind twirled the little hairs that had escaped from his braid.
“She chose,” he said. “She made the decision to stay. Not you.”
“So we’ll go back for her.” Barhu realized she’d only grabbed the left oar, and snatched for the right, getting it on the first try. “I put her in this position. I’m responsible.”
“I have a question for you.”
“What?”
“Do you understand that other people exist?”
“Yes,” Barhu said, viciously. “I understand that Aminata might have reasons to do things that—that I don’t understand or appreciate.”
“Good.” Apparitor began to undo his hair. Behind him, a blurred cannonball blew through the wall of Sulane’s flag stateroom, ricocheted off the iron struts of the hive glass, and bounced around destroying expensive things. Aminata would have stood in that room to speak to Ormsment. Aminata would have left her bootprints in the carpet.
“You won’t go back to rescue her.” He watched her levelly, his hands up behind his head, tending to his braid. “You know we won’t survive it. And you know that part of this job is leaving people behind. That’s what we do, as cryptarchs, when we change our identities. What if you made some friends as Barbitu Plane? Started a nice little Purge club, maybe? And then the identity was compromised? You couldn’t see them again. Ever.”
“I didn’t leave her behind,” Barhu snapped, jerking her head at Ulyu Xe. “Tain Shir was going to kill her, and I volunteered to die in her place. And she just saved my life.”
“But you did leave me behind, first.” Xe smeared piney unguent on Baru’s wound: the pain made her jump. “I was with Tain Hu when you exiled her. You left us all behind.”
Another volley of cannon fire slapped at Sulane, raising geysers port and starboard. The frigate was nose-on again, a small target, and the Cancrioth gunners were not having any effect.
Apparitor raised his voice a little over the thunder. “I haven’t seen Lindon in nearly two years. I haven’t seen his kids, or his wife, or our child. You learn to say good-bye. And each time you do it you know it might be forever.”
“We’re going back for her!” But her traitor hands weren’t working right, she was fighting herself on the oars, pulling the wrong way—
“What did you really do to Yawa?”
“What?”
“How did you convince her to protect you? Do you have some hold over her brother? Slow poison? A letter that could influence his trial?”
“No,” Barhu said, exasperatedly. She had managed to get the launch circling to starboard—when the prow came round to Sulane she would pull with both hands and they would go back—
“How did you turn her? Tell me how you did it.”
“We don’t have time for this!”
“What else should we spend our time on? The rest of this is out of our hands. You know, I thought you were going to die whether or not we lobotomized you. I thought you were going to poison yourself, or leap into the water, or slit your wrists. Because you didn’t have anything inside you here”—he thumped his chest above his heart—“to hold.”
The creak of launch ballistae, suddenly released. Two sleek torpedoes hurtled off Sulane’s prow, splashed down, tugged free of their fuse cords, and ignited. The copper shark-shapes skipped off across the wavetops. Feedback gears twisted their tails to keep them on course.
“Oh, no,” Barhu whispered.
“It’s out of your hands now,” Svir said, mercilessly. “You can’t control what happens. Just like you couldn’t control Aminata’s choice—”
“I created the context in which she made her choice!” Barhu shouted at him. “I put her in the position where she chose to stay on a doomed ship! I am responsible!”
“Is that how you see other people? Like mice? You build the mazes for them to run, and it’s your fault if they don’t end up where you want?”
“Aminata’s my friend! I asked her to do this!”
His nostrils flared; he took a deep breath; Barhu had the strange idea that he was inhaling some intangible alcohol or elixir, a vapor boiling off her soul, and passing it through some special alpine organ created by all his race’s years of delving into the earth to ferret out poisons.
“You know,” he said, “last time you looked back when you were supposed to be running, you got hit in the head.”
“You got me out of there.”
“Yes. I did. If I hadn’t been there, you’d have died. Do you ever think about that?”
She’d never really thought about that. It offended her.
She thought about it, now, as the torpedoes ran in toward Eternal. The marvelous killing machines on their way to discover Tau and Osa and Shao Lune and the Brain and the Eye and the Womb and giant Innibarish and the woman with the scarified face and the cancer pigs and all the other marvels aboard. All the things that Barhu needed, somehow, for some mysterious reason, some master plan locked away in her blind right side.
It was easy, then, to give up on the arrogance of total control.
“I’ve been thinking,” she admitted. “Thinking about things Tau said to me. I’ve forgotten how … really, I’ve never been alone. Aminata helped me in school. And then there was Muire Lo, and Tain Hu, and you. And Lyxaxu, and Unuxekome, and Pinjagata … Xate Olake saved my life when Lyxaxu came to kill me. You saved my life when Oathsfire ambushed us. I just let myself think, somehow, that I’d done it all myself, that I was…”
“That you were a solitary savant, a bright star in the dark?”
“Yeah.”
“I wonder who wanted you to think like that,” Svir said, with bitter amusement.
“Hey. How long were you dosing my vodka?”
“The whole time, Baru. From that first bottle we shared. I had to know how you’d react.”
“You needed to know how I’d react to rye ergot and vidhara? Vidhara’s an aphrodisiac, Svir.”
“Anything to get you to do something for yourself. Something he didn’t want.”
“I thought the idea was to give me a seizure. So you could blackmail me.”
“That too.” He shot her a tired, twisted smile. “I am a cryptarch. Plots within plots.”
Sulane was now within half a mile of Eternal, and the pattern of cannon fire had disintegrated from volleys into spasms of individual fire. All the Cancrioth sailors at their guns, all those hobbyists the Womb had bemoaned, maybe even some Termites who had practice with cannon: all desperate to fend off one of Falcrest’s firebearers, Sulane as avatar of the whole Armada War and all the humiliations the Mbo had suffered.
Their shot skipped off Sulane’s flanks to flail the water. Tore fluttering pennants from Sulane’s sails. Scythed sailors from the open deck.
Did everything and anything but penetrate the frigate’s hull.
“No wonder nobody uses cannon,” Barhu said in frustration. “They’re awful.”
“Stop rowing,” Svir told her.
“No! We’re going back for Aminata—”
“Baru,” Ulyu Xe murmured. “You’re just turning us in circles.”
“We can’t get them back,” Svir told her. “Either of us.”
He had Iraji on Eternal, as Barhu had Aminata on Sulane.
At that very moment a torpedo struck Eternal.
“SULANE’S taken aback,” Faham explained. “The wind from ahead slowed her to a stop. Without water moving under her hull, she can’t steer. The drogue they threw off the stern will keep her pointing the right way, but she’s stuck.”
“What a curious thing to say of a ship,” I remarked. “Taken aback. Like she’s been affronted.”
“That’s where the phrase comes from in the first place, you innocent provincial lass. Taken aback means a ship without steerage, driven backward by wind—”
Kimbune cried out in horror.
One of Sulane’s torpedoes drowned and sank.
The other rammed nose-on into Eternal’s starboard side.
I had witnessed the Battle of Treatymont, where Ormsment’s torpedo barges had worked such ruin on Unuxekome’s ships, but it was still always a surprise to me when the strange devices worked. The piston crushed the detonator, the detonator fired the charge. Water spouted up the side of Eternal’s golden hull. The gold film cracked, baring black wood beneath; but the worst damage would be below, where water hammer and void tore at the hull.
“She’s hit, then,” Execarne said, tonelessly. “Holed at the waterline.”
Kimbune seized two fistfuls of her hair. “Will she sink?”
“I don’t know. Has she any pumps?”
“Of course! We invented pumps!”
I considered this boast, and allowed it. Perhaps irrigation had come north from the ancient Oriati.
“And do your people know how to fother a sail?” Execarne asked.
“Fother? I don’t know that word.”
“Then we’ll see.” He sighed. “If you’ll look north now, here comes Ascentatic.”
I gasped aloud in wonder. South flew Captain Nullsin’s Ascentatic, beam on to the morning wind, as small beneath her sails as a krakenfly’s slim tail between its lacy wings. All her signal batteries were firing, rockets booming around her:
STAND DOWN, CEASE FIRE, IN THE ADMIRALTY’S NAME STAND DOWN
Captain Nullsin, answering Aminata’s call, had come to stop the fighting.
But Sulane’s reply was another pair of torpedoes toward Eternal. Kimbune shouted in dismay, and began to draw angles in the air, as if she could calculate the weapons off course.
Eternal sprouted millipede legs.
Devena only knows how I, a Treatymont scullery girl, came to see such sights. It was astounding. The great ship produced banks of oars from all along its lower hull, like a galley. The long sweeps dug into the water, churning up vortices that flashed and glimmered with distressed jellyfish.
With a verve that would have earned a cheer from any ringside crowd, the Cancrioth rowers prodded the incoming torpedoes away, blasting one long sweep into a splintered stub, flipping and drowning the other torpedo. “Ai-o!” I called, the old cry from Treatymont’s duels, and then felt very sheepish.
But the Traitor-Admiral’s frigate was in motion again.
The riggers had put up fresh canvas. The wind in Sulane’s sails pushed her backward, and now, with water moving under the hull and an emergency rudder over the stern, the ship had steerage again. They cut their drogue away, close-hauled the sails, and made ready to beat upwind.
I had seen Sulane in the battle off Treatymont. I knew how Ormsment made her kills. She would skitter in close, where she would not need torpedoes. There her heavy ship-burner Flying Fish rockets could strike a mortal blow.
“How far does she need?” I whispered. “To make the shot certain?”
“A quarter mile,” Faham muttered. “Less than a thousand feet, if possible.”
Kimbune began to pray.
I found her tongue unsettling, the words too small, the syntax too rapid. But perhaps, coming from a land of Unuxekomes and Radaszics and epithets like ziscjaditzcionursz, I was prejudiced toward words that took their time.
Execarne began to murmur a translation. He knew the Cancrioth language. The man was full of marvels.
|
En ash li-en ek am amar |
|
|
Su au-ai vo bha to |
|
|
En ilu ilu es ahar |
Love of life is life’s one sacred art |
|
Su to en ilu a alo |
For you, love—I don’t know that word |
|
Ut oro ona ti ti-en |
The sky has no edges to find |
|
Aum ana ti se si ihen |
And we’ve more ahead than behind |
|
An elu it |
Forever is real |
|
Shu ah anit |
The sign and the seal |
|
Man aul aum ra na o ael-it. |
Not the line, love, but the wheel. |
Kimbune closed her eyes and touched her brow, where the sign of the round number had been tattooed across her thoughts.
Faham held my hand.
The fate of the Ashen Sea balanced on a moment: Juris Ormsment returned to Falcrest with a Cancrioth prize and all the world roused to war, or Eternal triumphant, Juris dead, and some hope, any hope at all, of my success.
With a plume of white sparks, with a whistle like a hawk descending, Sulane fired a Burn rocket toward Eternal.
“NO!” Barhu shouted, and her back ripped with the shout. She gagged in pain and yet she could not look away.
Fire was the foe of all ships, but Eternal, huge and undercrewed, full of untrained sailors and explosive powder, would suffer worst of all. The Burn could not be extinguished by water or by wind. It would eat everything it could reach.
Tiny figures on the Cancrioth ship’s rail fired pistols and bows at the incoming rocket. Among them stood one short colorful person, like a splash of paint. A stout woman behind that figure tried to draw them away. They would not go.
Barhu said: “Tau—”
And the golden ship burst into a swarm of kites.
At first she thought the sails had torn free. But there were sailors up in the rigging, playing out the lines of their kites, black diamonds and brilliant firebirds, jellyfish trailing tasseled tentacles and krakenflies with jointed legs. The wind was out of the west behind them, and it lofted the kites exactly where they needed to be.
Sulane’s rocket struck a huge vulture-kite, tumbled end for end, fell into the ocean, and popped into a scum of fire.
“Before you get too excited,” Svir said, grimly, “I feel I should remind you they were just taking the range.”
All the cannon on Eternal’s starboard bow were silent. Cancrioth sailors swarmed down the side of the ship, descending on nets and ropes, towing an enormous patch—a ship’s sail, but shaggy, covered in yarn and cord, smeared in pitch. They were fothering the torpedo wound: dragging a patch across it and using the pressure of the inrushing water to hold the patch itself in place. Then they could make repairs from within.
Red Sulane had regained her speed. She came swiftly toward Eternal, tacking sharply, all aboard performing to their utmost. The rocketry mates would be aiming lower now, shooting for the hull, where the kites could not interfere.
From the north Ascentatic raced to interpose herself. Barhu had read all about her in the public edition of the Navy List: an Attainer-class frigate fresh from the Thalamast’s yards in Rathpont. She had been improved over the old Shaheen-class in quiet, economic ways that Barhu appreciated: her lumber had been treated with a newer and cheaper process, she was three weeks quicker to cycle through the drydocks, her storm armor had been impregnated with a dye that killed infant shipworms, her rocket magazines could be swiftly flooded, her provisions came from the Metademe instead of a privately owned supplier—
And none of it would matter. She was too far to intercept Sulane, put marines aboard, and force her to stand down. She was certainly beyond torpedo and heavy rocket range, even if Nullsin were willing to turn those weapons on a comrade. Her hwachas might cross the gap, but those were weapons meant to kill crew, not damage ships.
“They’ve almost got the killing shot,” Svir reported with a catch of fury in his voice. “Damn it. Damn Ormsment and all her traitor crew. It shouldn’t have come to this. I would’ve sworn we pulled her too far out of position, especially with the rudder gone…”
“No,” Barhu said, though there was nothing to do now: “No, it won’t happen. I know it won’t. I have a plan for that ship.”
A light kindled in Sulane’s rigging.
Barhu took it for the first flash of a rocket launch and gasped in horror. But it was a flare, a green chemical flare. The flare began to bob and dance, and then Barhu realized someone was waving it, signaling in navy semaphore:
S H O O T A T M E
It was Aminata.
N U L S H O O T N O W
A M N S H O O T M E
SHOOT
SHOOT
SHOOT
Barhu had walked away from so many things. Taranoke. Treatymont. Sieroch. The Llosydanes. Eternal. Always escaping just in time, before the real cataclysm.
She had no idea what kind of strength it must take to stay behind.
S H O O T
Ascentatic ignited her hwachas.
Nullsin did not, in the end, hold back. It was a full barrage, sixty-four rocket arrows per hwacha by eight hwachas, five hundred and twelve burning arrows and not one a misfire. A plague of screaming narrow things. Their shadows moved on the sea. Dawn-glint reflections off steel shafts. Streaks of fire, dwindling as motors burnt.
Nullsin fired on his own mutinous fleetmate.
The hwacha barrage stitched Sulane’s rigging. Sailors fell from the lines and the tops to plunge impaled into the warm water. Not one of those who survived abandoned her post: lose the sails and you lose the battle, and they would not let their admiral lose.
“Aminata,” Barhu croaked. She’d been up there.
Fire caught in the shrouds, ignited by an arrow with an incendiary head. For a moment Sulane was crowned, left and right of the mainsail, by converging lines of flame, climbing the shroud lines. Then the sails caught.
Sulane was on the southerly leg of her upwind tack. With the sails suddenly ruined, the dawn gusts fought her emergency rudder and, by degrees, won. The ship’s prow came south toward el-Tsunuqba. Her stern slewed north.
She was caught broadside on to Eternal.
On Sulane’s sleek prow, a rocketry crew winched their mount around to bear on the golden ship. The rocketry mate knelt with her hands on the fuse-cords. Barhu saw Juris Ormsment, up on the taffrail, pointing one-handed toward the target. She dropped her hand like an axe: fire!
The Cancrioth shot every cannon they had.
Thunderflash, white jet of cannon, recoil pushing the black weapons like marching ant legs. The percussion drummed inside Barhu’s chest, a feeling like giddiness, like nausea.
The crew at Sulane’s prow Flying Fish launcher went to pieces in a blast of dateshot. The fused rocket fell off the launch mechanism and rolled across the deck. A pale little girl-sailor leapt onto the loose rocket, hugged it to her chest, and ran for the rail to leap overboard. It didn’t matter. The volley of point-blank cannon shot walked down Sulane’s starboard flank from prow to stern. Ricochets and low shots, waterspouts and snapped yardarms, cannonballs bouncing off the frigate’s copper and wood, snapped ropes whipping in panic: and then the fateful penetration, forward of the amidships frame and right about the waterline, into the rocket magazines. Which were too well-built for the cannonball to blow through the far wall and escape again.
With her intuition for structures Barhu could see the ball smashing through the stacked rockets and fireworks, ricocheting off firebreaks, splashing casks of piss, until, eventually, inevitably, powder crushed beneath hard iron, or the ball smashed a canister of Burn.
The Traitor-Admiral’s flagship ate itself.
Eternal, packed full of fine powder, would have exploded. Sulane went up slow and fat, the greasy squirming Burn spilling out through hatches and climbing the lines, the whole ship inhaling wind, hammocks curling like dying spiders, rats chittering in brown running rivers over the sides. The midships stairway exhaled white sparks onto the burning rigging. Everything afire now, the frigate drifting south into el-Tsunuqba’s black crags. Sulane spouted a drunken round of fireworks, a last ecstatic spasm, the mutiny is over, hoorah, hoorah, and the hulk ran down the current toward ruined el-Tsunuqba, the slouching enormity of the mountain waiting like a huge shattered cup, tipped over to welcome Sulane into its dregs.
Then Sulane struck one of her own mines.
The blast boiled whitewater all around the dying frigate, and as if to meet and match the fire, the ocean came up, inch by inch, into her hull, to drag her down.
Barhu watched it all burn.
Hey, thirteen-year-old Baru said, in the throatiest, most confident voice she could manage, not, in the end, really managing at all. Hey, she said, to the girl she envied so much, the lanky Oriati midshipman who got to carry a sword.
Hey yourself, Aminata said.
CAIRDINE Farrier is washing her hair.
“Let me be sure I’ve followed.” He teases the knots from her short growth. “You tracked Abdumasi Abd’s water purchases to Kyprananoke, where you found a Cancrioth ship. You were captured and taken aboard. But after meeting with their leaders, you negotiated your way out by offering them Shao Lune as a hostage against your good conduct and promising to repatriate Abd to their care once you found him.”
“That’s right.”
“They believed you?”
“Of course they believed me, Mister Farrier. They’re a people of careful pedigrees. Heredity is everything to them. When I told them I hated Falcrest, my skin was the only proof they needed.”
“And you’re certain they’re descended from the old slavers?”
“The Brain has a cancer in her mind, Mister Farrier. It’s very hard for her to lie. The hard part, rather, is separating the truth from her delusions.”
He allows himself to exult, so she will know how well she’s done. “When the world learns what they did to Kyprananoke, Baru, and to Tau-indi Bosoka, no one will be able to deny the need to act. I’ll put it in the broadsheets. I’ll have it sung in every market in the Mbo. I’ll tell Parliament and they’ll approve whatever consequences I suggest.”
She nods. Her scalp moves beneath Farrier’s careful fingers and he flinches back, as he always does when he feels he has touched her accidentally.
“Mister Farrier. Did you ever miss the Mbo, after you left?”
“Oh, I suppose so.” He sighs nostalgically. He knows exactly what to do to play this question off. “It was quite … seductively idyllic. A place where you might think everything would turn out fine, if you just let it be. Childish, in that way. Naïve.” What everyone thought of Tau-indi Bosoka, at first. What she thought. “Of course, turn over that warm stone and you’ll find the squirming things underneath. Parasitic nobility, everywhere you look. Constant raiding and warfare under the guise of ‘ritual combat.’ Families who won’t speak to each other over trade conflicts five centuries old. A system of inherited class they won’t call slavery.…”
“And the women,” she says, with a chuckle in her voice. “Too much trouble by half.”
Farrier’s hands seize for a moment on her hair. “Baru! Don’t say things like that.”
“But it’s true, isn’t it? Everyone knows that. Even my friend Aminata would tell me jokes about Oriati women. How everyone wants them and hates to admit it.” She lets the calm, cool air lull her voice toward sleep. “She thought the jokes were funny.…”
“Please, Baru.” He unclenches his hands, smooths out the tangle he’s made. “It’s true that the women are … not always given a chance to behave correctly. But some of that is exaggeration and prejudice. Some of it is fetishization of the foreign. When we talk about Oriati women as intrinsically erotic, somehow, we place demands on them. We contribute to their degradation.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be uncouth.” She lowers her chin contritely. “I was just trying to see things from your perspective. To imagine how it was, when you were there.”
FEDERATION YEAR 912:
23 YEARS EARLIER
UPON PRINCE HILL, BY LAKE JARO
IN LONJARO MBO
THEY left at dawn to arrange the surrender.
The decision took only a few words. “The other Princes will gather at Kutulbha,” Kindalana said, “to bring help, or to grieve the dead. We’ll deliver the terms of surrender. We’ll call a vote.”
Mother Tahr would come with them. Cosgrad Torrinde and Cairdine Farrier would come. Padrigan eshSegu would stay on Prince Hill to heal while his daughter went on mission. Abdumasi Abd would also stay behind to manage the houses, bound by trim to a merchant’s duty.
Prince Hill’s little mbo would be divided.
Poor Abdu wept into Kindalana’s shoulder. He made silent, yawning, damp screams into Tau-indi’s breast. They’d all known his mother Abdi-obdi as a cheerful absence, the woman who was always bustling around the edges of Abdumasi’s life, out on business for months or years at a time. She was gone but she had always been gone. The difference was that there was no possibility, not anymore, for Tau-indi to turn to her and say, oh, you are a person, alive, and I want to know you.
Abdumasi stood with his house to see them off. When Tau-indi passed, he stared at them with bright eyes, red-rimmed, sleepless.
“This is your fault,” he said. “I won’t forget.”
At first Tau thought Abdu was talking to them. But Abdumasi stared past painted Prince Bosoka, past the chained and silkened Prince Kindalana, at plain-shirted Cosgrad Torrinde and nattily dressed Cairdine Farrier.
Cosgrad hunched his strong shoulders and looked at his toes. Cairdine Farrier held Abdumasi’s eyes for a few moments and then said, quietly but firmly, “I’m sorry about your mother.”
Abdu spat at him. Farrier nodded.
Kindalana tried to give Abdu a formal good-bye. “Surely,” she said, “you will find more practical uses for your time, without me to distract you.”
“Yeah,” he said, roughly, trying to tell the same old joke, “yeah, I bet I will, you’re just so…”
But he had nothing to say. So he stepped forward and kissed her, right in front of all three houses.
Halfway down the hill, Abdumasi shouted and ran after Tau-indi to hug them and kiss them on the brow.
THEY went north, downriver from Lake Jaro to the coast. Swarming catfish parted before the boat. Rain fell in short furious bursts. To the north and east, in the direction of the Tide Column, farmers burnt their blighted fields and huge pillows of ash rose up to color the sun.
“Why are there vultures?” Tau-indi asked the barge crew. “What do vultures want with ash and burnt fields?”
There was a bush scout aboard, part of a shua band, her face white with clay sunblock. She pounded doorbag milk by the bucket but never seemed to get too drunk. “They smell death,” she told Tau. “Animals flee the fire. Animals on the run die. Vultures feast.”
Tau-indi imagined a fan of carrion, spreading out across the mbo, and shuddered.
The bushman looked Tau up and down speculatively, lingering on their hips. “You’re one of the Princes?”
“Yes,” Tau said, nodding graciously, “as it pleases the people.”
“Seventeen?”
“Not quite,” Tau said, though they felt like preening. “Do I look like I’m seventeen?”
“Parts,” the woman said, without quite leering.
Tau, whose household staff were always respectful and therefore very dull, who had sat with rising frustration through many audiences with renegade and beautiful shua, sat up a bit straighter and raised their chin. “And if I were seventeen—”
“No, no no no,” the woman said, chuckling, but looking away. “Don’t trust anyone who says a thing like that to you, understand? Not while you’re a child.”
“I shouldn’t trust you?”
She grinned half-toothlessly and wobbled her hand. “Not that way,” she said. “I live too much with dogs.”
In the burning fields whirlwinds descended to stir the ash.
Tau-indi and Kindalana walked through the port at Yama, speaking to the crews, plucking at ties of money and duty until they found a dromon they could commandeer without ruining the crew’s fortune. People gathered around them as they moved. Hand in hand, Tau and Kinda preached hope to the crowd, telling them how the mbo, like a basket weave, would tighten as it strained.
Then they sailed west, toward wounded Segu and burnt Kutulbha. The rowers pulled in time with the drums, their broad backs bent, moving the ship out of harbor with a grunting work song.
“This is the mbo,” Tau-indi said, showing Cosgrad the crew all together. “This strength of harmony.”
Cosgrad turned his notebook over in his hands, writing nothing. “You know what I’ll say, don’t you?”
“You’ll tell me something about Falcrest strength. About your special oars. Your sentences and mathematics describing the correct oarmen.”
“Our ships have no oars.”
“What do you do when the wind goes against you?”
“We can always make the wind useful.” Cosgrad hesitated. “I don’t think I can tell you about that. It’s a military matter.”
Tau wanted to seize him and beg him to make it right. Cosgrad, they would cry, Cosgrad, stop this! Let us be together, all of us. Let us trade and sing. You and I, your people and mine—
But Cosgrad would say, sadly, Tau, there are powers at work here you don’t understand.
And perhaps Tau was the fool. Perhaps the world had never been about trading and singing together.
“You’re sad,” Cosgrad said, softly. “Is it about…?”
“Everything.”
“I know.” Cosgrad stared down into the rippling water. “Me too.”
Kindalana walked among the rowers, touching their shoulders, letting them see the Prince whose birth they had elected. She looked back at Tau-indi and Cosgrad, her jewels and chains gleaming in the dark. She was beautiful, wasn’t she? Not as an ornament, but as an intent, a mind that was a face and a body and all the things that body wore, an active and inseparable wholeness.
She would be famous for it, Tau realized. Famous for charisma and compulsion, for the way you felt when you looked at her, as if you desperately wanted to be worthy of her thoughts. And she knew it, had known it for years. What a terrible wonder to know your own beauty, without shame, and to set it to use, for yourself and for your duty.
Cosgrad would have equations to describe those arches of chain Kindalana wore, those filigreed catena from ear to nose. But he would have no equations to describe Kindalana, or the way she made people feel. Not yet.
Cosgrad and Farrier caught lice and had to shave their heads.
IN Kutulbha, rain fell on the ash and made it into a paste of wood and flesh that settled like concrete. The city became a plate of mortar and the mortar was full of skulls.
But they had not reached Kutulbha yet.
“Farrier will come for all of you,” Cosgrad said. He stood on their dromon’s stern, looking out over evening harbor at a quiet fishery town where no one, not even the children, threw good-luck bread to the shearwaters. There was no grain to make bread anymore. “Farrier has his appetites set on Oriati Mbo.”
Down below them, in the harbor shallows, a jellyfish pulsed blue-green. Tau-indi gathered their khanga up a little closer. “What appetites do you mean?”
Cosgrad scowled, like a spike driven up through his face, and then sighed. The sigh was strange because it was full of shame. “Farrier is an explorer, a very public man, a man in favor. Everyone loves Mister Farrier. He writes books and gives speeches, he is seen with women of advantage, he is summoned to Parliament to give testimony … even on matters of heredity and social hygiene, which are my specialty.”
Tau-indi set a hip against the rail and smiled up at Cosgrad. “Mister Farrier makes you jealous.”
He put up a hand to shadow Tau-indi’s face from the sun. “Even here,” he said, sounding like he was trying very hard to joke, “he finds ways to steal from me.” He swallowed and went on very hastily: “What does Kindalana think of me?”
Tau remembered Kindalana and Abdu, talking about Cosgrad in that cave. “That you’re very beautiful. That you’re a foreign agent. She doesn’t have … easily settled feelings about people, I think. She’ll like you in one way and think you’re a fool in another.”
Cosgrad looked as if he might spit. “Then I hope she’s realized that Mister Farrier is a groomer. He has the nasty habit of befriending young people, treating them like they are his equals, and bending them, gradually, into his instruments.”
Tau-indi gulped down a laugh before it could get out. Cosgrad saw it and huffed. “No! It’s hardly the same as our friendship.”
“It isn’t?”
“We speak. We learn from each other. I’m fair with you, I hope.” He paused there, endearingly, and Tau-indi nodded, yes, he was fair.
“Cairdine Farrier treats no one as an equal. The world is a bazaar to him. He sails down the Mother of Storms to Devi-naga and says, oh, they have birds with feathers as long as a man is tall, we must study these birds in their habitat. He sails to Taranoke and says, oh, their women are licentious and their men are sodomites, they let their children know what they do, we must save the poor children.
“But with his letter from Devi-naga he sends a feather, and the invitation to use it as an ornament. With that plea from Taranoke comes a sketch of the Taranoki on their beaches, savage and tempting. He shows people things and tells them not to want them and then sells them anyway. Farrier is a trickster, a liar, a huckster. He dreams of a world in which all men are permanently deceived, their minds bent from birth to serve his idea of a perfect republic. And this war has given him the opportunity to practice his deceit on an imperial scale.”
Left to their own devices, Tau-indi would have probed Cosgrad’s personal anger, rather than the facts of politics. But they tried to ask what Kindalana would ask: “What would you have done with this war? What opportunities did it offer you?”
A soft purple star rose out of the deep harbor below, unfurled white hunting tentacles, and began to ripple with light. It was as long as a man. Cosgrad stared down into the water as if he could lean forward and fall through it, into the sky.
“Farrier talks about historical dynamics. Breaking the, ah, what was it, the degenerate stalemate between the rural power of the farmers and shua and the concentration of administrative power in the Princes and the cities. Unlocking the true potential of Lonjaro and the whole continent. All that shit.” Cosgrad made a stone-throwing motion. “You know why I came to Oriati Mbo. To study how you live. To learn if there’s truth behind the superstitions in Falcrest: that the Oriati are bound to ancient powers.”
Tau-indi remembered the sorcerer aflame, walking calmly toward Cosgrad. They shuddered hard against him. “Cosgrad, listen to me. You must turn away from that path. Only the deepest and most dissolute grief awaits you there.”
But Cosgrad had his grave scholarly face on. “I have a grand theory, Tau-indi, it is my life’s work. It is the story of how life came to be.”
“Out of the Door in the East?”
“Maybe life came from the east. Maybe. It came from the sea, I am sure. My theory comes not just from the study of beetles and birds and mangrove trees, but from my surveys of ancient myth.”
The jellyfish constellations moved on the harbor current. A hunting fish passed in front of a distant shining bell and made it blink. A cold salt breeze came up to chop the water and get in their marrow.
“In Aurdwynn they tell stories of the ilykari, ancient people who practiced and came to embody virtues. Among them is Wydd, who is patience and the flow of water. In the Stakhieczi Mansions they worship brine and aquifers, the water deep below the stone. Here in Oriati Mbo, you remember the Cancrioth, and the power in the water that wells up out of secret caves. And in Taranoke, they say the gods sleep under the mountain’s caldera, down under the water and above the fire. Do you see?” His voice was entranced, but his eyes were sharp. “All of it comes from the water below. Tau, of all the animals, we alone can think and speak and act. How did this come to be?”
“The world was made for us. The principles organized it out of chaos.”
Cosgrad’s eyes gleamed like jellyfish. “The world,” he said, “was bred.”
Tau-indi looked at him and there was no way inside Cosgrad’s thoughts. They had no idea how to find the want behind these words. They waited, shivering in the wind.
“I think all life radiated from something primal. All living things are descendants of a simple ancestor, differentiated by the needs of their environment and the war for survival. But I don’t know how that differentiation occurs. I have one piece: I know that everything competes for life. But—” He thrust out his hands, seized the ship’s rail as if to crush it into its constituent atoms and sort them into piles. “How do things change, so that they can find new ways to compete? How did birds get wings? They must have a flesh-memory, a part of their bodies that stores their struggles, so they and their children can change in response. They must have remembered, in their flesh, the need to leap higher and higher, to escape predators, to reach food. That was how they grew wings. And people must have that memory, too. We must have something that says, oh, you have labored hard at the oars, so your children will be strong. And you, you were sickly, so your children will be sickly, too.”
“You think we were once…” Tau-indi looked at the jellies pulsing in the chop. “Like that? Our great-great-great-great-grandparents were jellyfish in the sea?”
Cosgrad’s hands made the rail creak. He looked down, and then up, his eyes wild, full of a tiny piece of something huge, whirling around inside his skull and unable to get out. He groaned, a terrible noise.
“I can’t find the words for it yet. I can’t find the proof. But I think, I think, I think … I think life came up, out of the sea. In the old sea a mind was born, I don’t know how or why, but that mind was soft and pliable, a wet mind without fire or sharp tools, and it had only one power, only one!”
At the harbor mouth the shearwaters complained for lack of bread.
“The soft sea minds could remake flesh,” Cosgrad whispered. “That was their power. That’s what the squid and the octopi do; I’ve seen it, they change their forms and the markings upon their limbs … and down in the deep, beneath them, there might be kraken with the power to alter their own flesh so wholly that it buds off in tiny nymphs that grow into something else.
“And they made us. They made us to conquer the land. The things we remember as ilykari and brine and power-in-water and gods beneath the caldera, those were the soft minds. They made us, the race of man, with a special gift. We can pass our thoughts by speech, and so put what we learn into each others’ flesh. And those thoughts we speak into our flesh are born into our children.
“Why else are the Aurdwynni fractious and rebellious, except that their wars have been bred into them? Why else were the Maia rapacious and conquest-hungry, except that they violated each other and bred promiscuously? Why else are your people wise and passive and superstitious, except that you spent centuries in comfort, telling stories about worlds beyond our own? We have let the world breed itself into us, get into our testes and wombs, fill us with memories of storms and plagues and leeches. We have let ourselves degenerate. Our whole species is spiraling down into a festering nightmare future, Tau. You have never seen the world as I have. You have never seen what Farrier will make of it. He will welcome the degenerate; he will put them in the fields and the mines; he will make himself king of an empire of slaves.
“But if I can just find the right way to live, Tau-indi, the perfect way, if I can just convince Parliament and the Faculties and Renascent to listen to me, then that correct way can be bred into all life. We will all be masters of ourselves. There will be no slaves and no lessers, for we will all be perfect. Our flesh remembers! I only need the equations, the descriptions of the right way, and then we can put the future into the germ, into our children, and all their children, raised up together, forever.”
Tau-indi gaped. It felt right and good to learn this about Cosgrad, to understand what drove him. He had a majestic conviction.
But what he proposed was an act of cosmic hubris. It was like rewriting the end of a story to change its beginning. Like reaching up with your finger and blotting out the moon.
Cosgrad put his head in his hands. “But everyone thinks I’m mad,” he said. “Squid Priest, Farrier calls me. His dream is much more palatable, I think. He says he will achieve the dream of our forefathers: a society ordered by proper thought, not by fever dreams of octopi. The squid priest! Everyone thinks I’m mad.”
KINDALANA flung her hands at the table full of reports. “Farrier says we invited this on ourselves. Did you know that?”
Tau-indi had a toothache and that made them want to snap but, really, if Kindalana had learned something awful and inconvenient, she would certainly tell you about it. “That’s ridiculous. That’s evil speech. What could we possibly have done to Falcrest to earn this?”
“We meddled in their affairs, he claims. We supported their monarchy, when it favored us. Tried to conquer them, once.”
“Tahari,” Tau-indi said, remembering the name from the songs Tahr sang to them in the cradle. “Wasn’t there a warlord, a rabies prince, named Tahari? And she went north across the Butterveldt and broke the wall in Falcrest, long ago?”
“She sacked the city. She stole their narwhal horn, the one brought down out of the north by the Verse-hammer.”
“They had a narwhal horn?” Tau-indi felt a great indignation against this ancient pillager. Then they felt like an idiot child who cared more about a legendary beast’s horn than the ruin of Kutulbha at Falcresti hands. “Do you believe these things Farrier tells you?”
She shrugged with an odd shyness, as if she’d been stung stealing honey. “Not entirely. But it helps me get inside his head. We have to bind them to us. I think that’s what we do, Tau. We surrender, and we find a way to ease their hurt.”
“Are you still going to seduce him?” Tau blurted.
Kindalana looked at them equitably, without either shame or reprobation. “He says he’s not much older than me, so he’s in my reach; though I think he’s a few years past what he claims. But he’s wary. He knows I possess myself, and that frightens him. And, anyway…”
Tau could not imagine anyone declining the advances of Kinda, with her wide-set eyes and elegant clavicles and shoulder blades like a bird’s folded wings. But Farrier was very odd. And maybe Kindalana had not made any advances until she was sure she would succeed.
“And anyway,” Tau said, finishing her thought, “you have to marry Abdu.”
It was the only thing to do. Abdumasi’s fortune was gone, his mother dead, his house on the edge of dissolution. To save that house he needed a quick union to someone with wealth. As a guest Prince, Kindalana did not receive tribute or investment from anyone in Lonjaro, but the eshSegu held her share of the tribal fortune.
“I have to marry Abdu,” Kinda said, and tried to hide from Tau, tried her best and Tau loved her for it, to conceal the quick shudder of anger and frustration in her hands.
“You don’t want to marry him.”
“I don’t want to marry anyone,” Kinda said. “Not yet. I wanted a political marriage, a very good one, when the time was just right. I wanted to use what I have,” an unselfconscious shrug, she remarking on herself, “to do good work. I wanted … but I do love him, Tau. And he loves his house.”