“SHE’S alive! I’m sure of it. She’s a strong swimmer, and she had plenty of time to jump. Svir, you’ve got to look for her!”
They were up in Helbride’s foretop, where the foremast jointed from its lower trunk to its middle segment. The ship’s dancing seagull slept here when it was not begging the crew for food or shitting on things. It had fled the moment Barhu raised her voice.
“Please, Svir,” Barhu begged. “I didn’t even get to return her sword.”
She saw, in the little quirk of Svir’s smile, the cruel thing he might have said: she watched him set it aside. “This is odd. Normally you’d be certain that Aminata was dead and gone beyond help. Now you’d be drinking about it and pretending not to care.”
“Svir, stop evading!”
“I’ll send a boat to search the wreck. But I don’t think we’ll find her. Which is a shame. I didn’t even know you had friends. We’ve lost a magical archon.”
Barhu sniffed miserably. She hurt. Her back ached where Sulane’s barnacles had cut her open. Her eye throbbed in its pierced socket. Her missing fingers cramped like they were bent against her palm. Even Eternal was missing: the golden ship had turned south and vanished around the black heights of el-Tsunuqba, hiding from Helbride and Ascentatic as it tried to repair its damage and make ready to sail.
Barhu wanted Aminata back.
The grief-fatigue, the Oriati disease, had struck again. What should she do with her hands? Her tongue? Would she begin to repeat herself, stagger in circles, rasp like a broken clock? She’d felt so good after the passage through Tain Shir’s test, after Yawa’s unexpected mercy, after hurling herself at Ormsment and surviving. Everything seemed like it had turned around.
And then she’d lost Aminata, and slept, and that cold sore ring of fog had settled back down around her head.…
She’d had not even one day with Aminata before sending her to die.
Suddenly, to Svir’s obvious astonishment, which made her giggle wetly, Barhu began to sob.
“Are you going to fall?” He put up a hand, unsure (Barhu thought) if he meant to reassure her, or pull her to safety, or possibly push her to her death. “Do you need a line?”
She shook her head.
“We ought to get you down, anyway.” He mounted the pilot’s ladder down to the ratlines: and when, instead of following, she sat there, stiffly posed to keep the wound at her back away from the mast, weeping angrily, he dangled one-footed on the ladder and boggled at her as the pitch of Helbride swept them both across a little arc of sky.
“You never did this for Tain Hu,” he said.
“I was afraid. For obvious reasons.” Because then the Throne would know she cared.
“You should still be afraid. I’m not your friend. None of us can be friends.” That faraway, dangerous lightning flickered in his eyes. It was something about his skin, the pale contrast with the dark pupil, which made her think of stormclouds and menace. “I know what’s happening to you. You were in deepest despair yesterday. You thought that all was lost, that you were going to die. You struck the bottom of your fall. And suddenly you were so high, so free, and everything was all right. But really what’s happened is that you struck bottom so hard you bounced. Now you’re sinking again. This is how it goes, Baru. There’s no magical way out. You will be fighting your Oriati disease for months. For years. Maybe forever.”
Barhu did not know what to say to this. Stubbornly she repeated: “I know she’s still alive.”
“You don’t know.”
“Oh, what do you want from me, Svir? Should I just throw up my hands and abandon her?”
“No,” he snapped, “what you should abandon is the need to know for certain. Maybe we’ll find her corpse. Maybe we’ll fish her alive from the sea. Probably we’ll never learn her fate. So accept that you can’t know! Stop trying to be the perfect savant who controls every variable! Stop trying to make her alive or dead in your head so you can get your mourning over with! Do you think I’m convinced Lindon’s fine? I don’t know! I don’t know and I have to let it be!”
She wiped her eyes on the back of her arm and growled. “I hate letting things be.”
“I know.” He beckoned. “Come work. We have a situation to contain here.”
She didn’t want to think about it yet. Pine pitch glued her back together. Her right eye ached under layers of gauze. Too much saltwater and harsh soap had developed into an infuriating nipple itch, which bothered her in a way separate from the pain of all her wounds. They can put a hole in your skull, and cut off your fingers, and rip your cheek, and slice your back open, and your damn itch will still drive you mad. Like the way loss works: you cannot hide Tain Hu behind Aminata, or diminish Aminata with Tain Hu. How much could you lose in a year?
More than this, if she failed to do her work.
She wiped her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “We should begin. Help me down.”
“I think,” Yawa said, with quiet honesty, “that every time we’ve gathered here, we’ve failed. And I hope today we will not.”
Svir’s cabin was full of three cryptarchs, but empty, anyway, without Iraji. Yawa stood by the doorway, consciously high-chinned and bright-eyed, offering her strength. Barhu slouched in the corner where she’d had her seizure. Svir on his hammock, jaw hard, eyes downcast, toes on the floor, as if he might at any moment rise up and shout.
“How do we avoid failure,” he said, although it did not sound like a question. “What are your criteria. Don’t say no more secrets between us, or I will scream.”
“Of course not,” Yawa said, gently. “We are what we are. But my recent, ah, conversation with Baru made it clear that we’ve been … unnecessarily antagonistic. All of us. We could’ve found a way to use Iraji as bait without risking his capture. We could’ve let Baru go aboard the Cancrioth ship, then pressured them for her safe release. Tau would still be safe in our care. Shao Lune would be—well, she would be our prisoner instead of theirs.”
That was a nice story. But it would have ended with a nugget of baneflesh growing in Barhu’s skull: because, given enough time on Eternal to overcome her fears, she would have taken the Brain’s deal. She would have beaten herself into believing she had to die to be worthy of Hu’s legacy. She would have the Kettling, and cancer.
Yawa had saved her from her own inevitable choice.
“That’s stupid,” Svir said.
“I beg your pardon?” Yawa blinked at him.
“It’s stupid and you’re stupid for thinking it. You two aren’t at odds because you lack charm and clarity and good feelings. I’m not keeping secrets from you because I’m worried that you’re cruel and unfriendly. The reason you two are at odds is that your patrons are mortal enemies. The reason you are at odds with me is that I am your competition.” His larynx stood out starkly on his throat, like something he couldn’t get out. “You were meant to destroy each other. It’s a central part of the reckoning between Farrier and Hesychast that their protégés must go to war. Your performance in the struggle against each other is part of the test of their rival methods of control! Why do you think you’re out here? Don’t you see how much better the Throne could use you if you were sitting in a desk at Falcrest? How much more influence you could wield? But this is a race! You two are snakes in a maze! You’re locked up on my ship, out on the edge of the Imperial Republic, with limited protection and scanty resources, to be sure that you can’t escape the contest, to be sure only one of you can come home victorious.”
He must’ve had all this bottled up since the Elided Keep. Now he boxed them on the ears with it. “Baru, you have every reason to hate and flee Falcrest. But if Farrier’s control keeps you loyal, even out here, then you’ll be the jewel in his crown—forgive my royalist obscenity, please, I’m just not very good at being polite about him.
“And Yawa—don’t think I’ve forgiven you for using Iraji, by the way, my vengeance is glacial in its patience—imagine your value to Hesychast, to his ideology of inherited behavior. You’re a wild-type Maia woman, born in strife and poverty, armed with generations of blood knowledge of Aurdwynn. The struggle between the Maia and the Stakhieczi, the wars between the dukes, the pain of the people trampled underfoot. All that is in your blood. If you were locked in a ship with Baru, the acme of Farrier’s education and conditioning, only to outfox her, lobotomize her, and use her as a dowry gift to the Stakhieczi king to buy peace—then you would have solved the same conflict that’s written in your blood. United Aurdwynn and the Stakhieczi with your inherited skills. And those skills would have triumphed over Farrier’s indoctrinated protégé.
“The two of you can’t both win! Even if you make it all square between you, bring home everything Farrier and Torrinde want, even if you skip through Commsweal Square holding hands and whistling, your masters need one of you destroyed and one triumphant. You’re cryptarchs now! Did you really think they’d just give you a mission that was everything it seemed?”
“But the truth is,” Yawa said, looking, once, to be sure the doorscreen was pinned shut, “that we aren’t under our masters’ control. Baru doesn’t give a fig for Farrier, except for his use as a resource. And I— Well, Hesychast is hardly my dear teacher.”
“And now I know that,” Svir said, with dreadful lightness. “Now I can expose you to Hesychast and Itinerant as seditious traitors—”
“Oh, please.” Yawa snorted. “Mere gossip? They’d hardly be surprised to learn we’re plotting and scheming to our own advantage. We are cryptarchs, after all. But Hesychast has my twin. He knows I won’t stray.”
“You try to betray us,” Barhu added, “and I’ll tell everyone your little secret, Svir.” He was the brother of the Stakhieczi king, and that made him royalty. Royalty did not survive in the Masquerade. Death was the most merciful sentence he could expect.
He did not look at all angry. If anything he was relieved. A bond of blackmail was easier for him to respect than the tenuous gamble of trust. Barhu found that both sad and sympathetic.
“Fine.” He gave them a gleaming white smile, arc of ice on autumn water. “You want to play revolutionary? Do it. Just remember that every cryptarch who’s ever worn our mask had their own agenda. Their own idea of how Falcrest ought to be. And they were all kept in control. Even me.”
“He … does make a cogent point, I’m afraid,” Yawa admitted. “No matter how much we want to escape this game, we have to keep playing to survive. And by the terms of the game, Baru, sparing your life was an enormous mistake.”
“It wasn’t.” Barhu snapped her left hand, which still had the fingers for it. “Because I can deliver Eternal to you. One of their leaders, the Brain—she swore to find me. She swore she’d follow. I can bring that ship wherever we require it.”
“And?” Yawa’s harsh face seemed to crack with strange, unaccustomed hope. “And what will this Brain give you? Something that can help me? Help Svir?”
“Yes,” Svir echoed, cool curiosity. “What’s on that ship?”
Death. Death for the whole world. If Barhu had promised to paint Tain Hu across history in the color of Falcrest’s blood, then the Kettling was the perfect paint. And she’d failed to obtain it, because she was too cowardly to accept death as Tain Hu had—
Stop. Stop.
I died so you could be free.
The Kettling was not the answer. Barhu was not sure why she was so sure of it, except that it simply did not fit. She was an accountant and a thinker, not a plague-bearer, not a conqueror.
So what was on that ship that mattered so much? Her instincts screamed that it was the key. But how?
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“You don’t know?” Svir repeated. “You risked your life, Aminata’s life, and my fucking life to protect Eternal, and you don’t know what it’s good for?”
Even four years out of school she wanted to apologize to Svir like a teacher she’d disappointed. “I just know it’s important. Something in me,” she did not name the tulpa, “knows that ship’s important.”
“Oh, shit.” Svir groaned. “You drilled too deep, Yawa. Of all the people to leverage me, I get an idiot.”
“I saved that ship because there were people on it,” Barhu insisted, ashamed of this answer, not sure why, wishing that Tau were here to explain her feelings. “I didn’t … I just couldn’t let Tau and Osa and Shao and Iraji all die.”
“No.” Svir shook his head in perfectly performed disappointment. “This is not the way Agonist, betrayer of Aurdwynn, conducts her work. Where’s your calculation? Where’s your foresight?”
“It’s here! I have foresight!” She looked pleadingly to Yawa. “I know that ship is absolutely vital.”
“Svir!” Yawa barked. “Has it occurred to your air-starved brain that perhaps Baru is trying to break years of systematic conditioning Itinerant forced on her? That maybe she’s chosen not to act like the ‘betrayer of Aurdwynn’?”
He blinked at her. “Of course it had occurred to me. Many stupid things occur to me. Let’s say Baru has secretly made a strong move, though. Let’s say that Eternal really is the key to our survival in the Great Game. What do we do next, Baru? Do we sail around el-Tsunuqba and offer Eternal our aid?”
“No,” Barhu said.
“No? Then what do we do next?”
“We need to help the Kyprananoki,” she said. “We have to bring some mercy to the people here.”
“Why,” Svir said, flatly. “Why should we not destroy these islands and get on with our mission?”
Destroy the islands? Not likely, not with a single remaining frigate at their disposal. “Because they’re like us! They’re people Falcrest has used. We owe them our…” She struggled for a word, and found one in Lapetiare’s own writing about the revolution that made Falcrest. “Our solidarity.”
Svir sat deep in his hammock now, back straight against the wall, staring out at the two women as if from the bottom of a grave. “Kyprananoke chose the Kettling and civil war. Now Kyprananoke must live and die with the consequences.”
“The common folk here never got to choose. They never asked to take up Canaat machetes or bleed Cancrioth plague. They certainly never asked for their Kyprist rulers to water-starve them into submission.”
“Do you want to put the old regime back in power? Half the Kyprists are already dead. The rest are barricaded on the reservoir islets waiting to die.”
“No. I want the revolution to succeed. I want it to be more than a death spasm.”
“Do you think we have the time for that? We’re due in Falcrest by 90 Summer! I have to be there to save Lindon. Yawa needs to be there for Xate Olake’s trial. We can’t risk that by lingering here while—”
“While what?” Yawa interjected. “What exactly do you think will happen?”
Cruel truth smoothed out his throat. “While the survivors on these islands die of thirst and plague. We have no responsibility to them.”
Barhu hated that idea. “You think we’re not responsible? Even though we triggered the revolution?”
He looked between Barhu and Yawa, narrow-eyed, taken aback by their unity. “We didn’t cause it. The Cancrioth did. The Scheme-Colonel Masako at the embassy, he conspired with them to arm the Canaat for an uprising. He killed the local Oriati ambassador to keep it secret. You told me that.”
“But we forced them to act! Think of how it looked when we arrived, Svir. Two Falcresti warships. A Falcresti clipper with diplomatic flags sending parties ashore to meet the Kyprists? All this not long after an Oriati fleet passed through, heading north to Aurdwynn to make war? It looked like we were coming to crush the rebels.”
“The rebellion would’ve happened anyway!”
Yes. As it would happen on Taranoke, as it would happen again in Aurdwynn. Somewhere, somehow, one of these rebellions had to succeed. She had destroyed a rebellion; she had to know how to see one through.
“Svir,” she said. “Svir. Just because you hate your own home, just because you’d let the Stakhieczi starve and rot rather than let Lindon or Iraji be hurt, doesn’t mean nothing in the world is worth saving—”
“Oh, shut up,” he snapped.
“Yes,” Yawa said, softly at first, then fiercely, “yes, she’s right, Svir. We are Falcrest’s cryptarchs, but none of us are Falcresti. Not Baru, not me, not you. We’ve put on their masks to steal some of their power. Let’s use it. Let’s help the people here.”
“Suddenly you’re a charity?”
“I am an Imperial Jurispotence.” Yawa lifted her nose with aquiline pride. “An enemy of disease and disarray. I was brought into the Throne to represent the provincial edge of our Republic. If I cannot do good work here, at that edge, what am I for?”
Svir rolled his eyes. “Durance, you know better than anyone the futility of foreign intervention in a civil war.”
“But we can help!” Barhu protested. “We can distribute water, we can teach them how the Kettling spreads and how to safely bury the bodies. And what if the wind picks up? What if the ships here scatter? We have to keep the islands under blockade!”
“It incubates for forty weeks,” Svir reminded her. “We’d be here for years before we could be sure it was gone.”
Damn it, that was true. “I can’t just let these people die,” Barhu insisted. “I can’t leave without trying to help.”
Yawa rubbed her temples. “Svir, you have to tell her.”
“What? Tell me what?”
Svirakir got up on his toes and then subsided into his hammock again, as if struck by galvanic shock. The muscles of his throat were as blank and slack as open sky. “Baru, have you learned about the apocalypse fuse?”
Yawa shut her eyes.
“No?” Barhu said, with a horrible foreboding.
“We have a set of charges in place on el-Tsunuqba. They are capable of dropping the south face into the caldera and triggering a massive wave. The entire kypra would be inundated. Along with all the ships moored here.”
“Oh,” Barhu said. Her thoughts swelled up like her punctured eye socket, trying to encompass this new variable, this appalling possibility.
“It would wipe out all the infected,” Svir said, “and all the ships which might otherwise carry the Kettling. The death toll will be enormous. But it will not, in absolute terms, be higher than a particularly bad winter in Aurdwynn. And I know both of you survived last winter with your consciences, such as they are, quite intact. So.”
He looked between the two women and his face was empty. You had to be empty, Barhu thought, if you were to condemn an entire people. You had to make yourself distant.
“You two can try to help Kyprananoke if you insist. You can hide from the fact that one of you must destroy the other as long as you can. I am going to watch with my hand on the fuse. And if the Kettling seems ready to escape into the world…”
His hands made a motion like snapping a stick.