WHEN the scream sounded from the village Barhu thought it was just another poor Anagint trying to run.
A man wearing the net and flower of the Pranist’s warband came scrambling out from under the stilt houses with a spear in his back. The end of the spear banged off the wood above him, like a rigid tail. He screamed again, and was intercepted, midstride, by a spear in the small of his back. Baru felt cruel satisfaction: why would he be among those houses if he were not a pillager, or a rapist?
“Go help him!” the Pranist bellowed. A shudder doubled him over, and he screamed at the mud and at the lagoon. “Find out who hurt him! My body is sick at the crime, sick at the sight!”
He vomited green-black blood. It came from his mouth and his nostrils. A trickle passed from his left eye.
People came down out of the village, toward the lagoon. Ordinary people who gathered close to share strength. Some of them were from the Balt Anagi warband. Some of them were not, but they carried fishing spears and machetes anyway. Some of them were the Morrow-men who had been sent to keep Barhu safe. Most of them bled from noses and cracked lips: thick red blood, dehydration blood, not Kettling.
They were singing together: wavering, out of tune, but all together.
“You!” the Pranist screamed, shaking his finger at them. “You’ve killed a brave man, a soldier for humanity! Who do you think you are to do this? Who gave you the—”
He saw the woman leading the attack, and his voice went from him.
“Tsuni el-tsun,” he whispered: god of gods.
And you could see why men would call on gods to stop her. She skipped down the slope like a thistle, all points and no center, obsidian-tipped spears bundled on her back. Bounding from stone to black smooth stone as the atlatl in her hand bobbed to a secret rhythm.
Tain Shir.
The two war parties, Balt Anagi’s defenders and the Canaat raiders, gathered across from each other, hesitating in that long nerving-up time before the first blow. It was not easy to strike first, Barhu had read: that was why so many warriors went into battle drunk. There would be a while of shouting and threatening and working up before—
Tain Shir shrugged and a spear fell out of her bundle into her waiting hand and then home into the atlatl’s notch. The throwing arm made a little zip when it swung. She stepped and half-turned with the throw and the spear pierced the Pranist’s lung and put him on his back in the blood-scummed lagoon, thrashing underwater, the length of the weapon looping in the air.
Ake covered Barhu and held her down in the heliotrope bushes. “Don’t move! Don’t take their attention!” Barhu, paralyzed by terror and fascination, could hardly resist.
The Pranist’s fighters broke. It was astounding how quickly it happened; but this was battle as ordinary people fought it, not the disciplined phalanx-lines of Aurdwynn. Shock and terror won the fight before first blood was shed. When the Pranist’s fighters turned their back to flee it became easier to kill them, even for unbloodied men and women.
Tain Shir moved among them, killing, killing again, impaling the Pranist’s cadre one by one, twisting them by the bowel as if the spears were levers and their bodies were the fulcrums of some ancient door. She did not hurt the youth who had taken the Kettling blood. Barhu was not sure if she was relieved or horrified by that.
“It’s her,” Ake whispered, “it’s her, I saw her poisoned, I saw her go into the water. How is she alive?”
“I don’t know.” As if she had been called back to the world by the massacre here. As if the wall between life and death were too thin. “Maybe the dose was too small.…”
Tain Shir loped through bloody lagoon water to kick the sick old woman over on her back. She fell pitifully and did not come up again. The freed villagers cried out to each other, husbands finding wives, children begging for parents.
“Baru,” Ake whispered, “what if she tries to finish killing you?”
“I know.”
“She’ll do it again—make you choose—”
“I know,” Barhu said. “It’ll be me, if it has to be one of us. I made that choice.”
“I don’t believe you for a moment,” Ake said.
“I know,” Barhu said. She rose from the bushes and called out. “Shir!”
The killing woman turned toward her. Blue unblinking eyes, ragged bloodsoaked body. Like a red-muzzled wolf. She reached back for a spear.
Barhu put up her wounded right hand.
“I have Tain Hu’s soul,” she called. “I’m carrying her eryre. Do you know what that means?”
Tain Shir raised the atlatl with the spear fixed in it.
“I’m telling the truth! Ask your aunt—ask Ake here—”
Tain Shir stepped and twisted and threw.
TAIN Shir kills Baru Cormorant in a thousand ways.
She drives the point of a spear up through Baru’s stomach and out the top of her back. She crushes Baru’s temples until Baru’s eyes swell with blood. She rips out Baru’s throat so that her final words will be the one true utterance spoken only by gouting blood and mortal air. She punctures Baru’s lungs with a short knife so that Baru drowns in her own breath as Helbride’s surgeons fight and fail to save her. They pierce her lying throat in their desperation. They fail.
All these killings are possible.
But in the one true world that denies all other possibility, the spear Shir hurls is blunt, and it knocks Baru windless on her ass among the sweet white heliotrope bushes.
“Fuck!” Baru rolls onto her stomach to beat in agony at the soft earth. “Fuck, fuck, shit.” She has fallen on her wounded back. “Himu fuck!”
“I know,” Shir says.
“What?”
“I know that Tain Hu lives in you. I heard you confess it to Auntie Yawa. I followed you up from the water, so I could kill you if you’d lied to me.”
“Lied about what?”
“About choosing to die. You were ready. I heard you beg her to kill you.”
“Where’s Iscend?” Baru pants. The Stakhi woman Ake is at her side, helping her up, wary eyes on Shir. She is a trifle of flesh with a fierce, bitter spirit in her. Shir imagines she would have the gamey, fear-flushed taste of frightened prey. “Did you kill her?”
“No.”
“Where is she now, then?”
“I don’t care,” Shir says, which is the truth. “Why have you come here?”
“I’m trying to stop the fighting. Organize water distribution and a quarantine. Before the ships can sail.”
“Why?”
Baru gets gingerly to her feet. “So I can contain the Kettling.”
“Why?”
“So these people don’t all have to die!”
Shir considers her as a tracker considers spoor. This choice is not the act of a woman who uses and discards her pawns.
“I came all this way to give you death,” she says. “And I have done it. You are dead and reborn.”
“I never died.”
“You asked for death. That was the important part.”
“To prove I wasn’t Farrier’s.”
“Yes.”
“You escaped Farrier, didn’t you? How?”
Shir moves, a shrug, a shiver. Behold what I am. “I escaped all meaning. You cannot. You are a reader of books and an interpreter of signs. When you look at the stars you see constellations. I only see lights. That is why I cannot be mastered.”
“I hope I’ll never be like you.”
“Of course you do. You need me nonetheless.”
“Why?”
“Because I can escape them, and you cannot.”
And Shir remembers the first day she ever saw Baru Cormorant, a child wandering the Iriad market, poking at the rolls of tapa cloth, leaning in so close to the racks of polished ash-glass that her breath left white smears on the telescope lenses. Shir was Cairdine Farrier’s agent and protégé, undercover as a guard at his market stall; Baru approached her, named her as a soldier, even deduced the existence of a warship moored off Taranoke.
And because Shir was Farrier’s creature, because she’d known at once that Farrier would take interest in Baru, she’d spoken to the child:
Little lark, I know what it means to see strange sails in the harbor. My name’s Shir and I’m from Aurdwynn. When I was a child, the Masquerade harbored in Treatymont, our great city. They fought with the Duke Lachta, and I was scared, too. But it all ended well, and my aunt even got to kill the awful duke. Here—take a coin. Go buy a mango and bring it back to me, and I’ll cut you a piece.
Here’s a coin.
Go buy a mango.
I’ll cut you a piece.
She had given the child a Masquerade coin, so that the child could buy her own island’s fruit, to be cut and apportioned to the child by a Masquerade agent.
She had inflicted Cairdine Farrier’s lessons. What you have belongs to me. What you need will be earned with my coin. What you desire will be divided by my knife.
This is why Baru needs her. Baru can play games of strategy with the very masters of those games. But in the end she cannot do what Shir is capable of doing. She cannot reach across the board and cut the other player’s throat. You cannot destroy the masters by mastering them. You destroy them by destroying.
“I will make you a bargain now,” she says.
Baru’s stormwater-brown eyes are full of the exhilaration and the terror of the gambler who has staked everything. “Go ahead.”
“I will guard the trust my cousin placed in you. I will remain above the filth you wallow in.”
Baru opens her mouth to jeer, to remind Shir of all the blood already on Shir’s hands. Who is she to speak of dirtying herself?
And Shir watches Baru realize that Shir has not in recent days ever killed the innocent. Marines and jackals, agents and spies, Kyprists and Canaat. But only those who have consented to stake their lives for falsehoods.
“These are the terms of my reprieve,” Shir says. “Listen well.”
Baru covers the stumped fingers of her right hand, and tries to stay in front of Ake Sentiamut. Ake shifts to hold her distance.
“I will hunt you across the world. I will watch everything you do and I will know everyone you know. I will judge each choice you make by the code of Tain Hu’s life. And when you betray her faith, when you succumb at last to Cairdine Farrier’s plan for you or to your own love of power, I will kill you. I will cut out your heart and prepare it on red coals. I will strain the flesh of your brain into its separate types, the gray and the pink, the stem and the bell. I will skin the meninges from your mind with an obsidian knife and I will knot up the nerves of your eyes. And then I will divide the relics of your mind among the four quarters of the world. Across Falcrest and the Mbo and the Camou and the Wintercrests I will quarter you.”
Baru stares at her. “Is that so.”
“It is so.”
“Do you really think you can do that? Do you really think you can’t be killed, Shir? I could have it done.”
Shir says: “Kill me and you’ll never find your father Salm.”
Barhu enters a kind of paralysis, the absolute stillness of a mouse before a snake, as if she is afraid the slightest motion will betray her to the predator’s teeth.
“Liar,” she says, flatly. “Salm died after the battle at Jupora. He was killed by—”
“He was taken for Cairdine Farrier’s use. I should know.”
“How?”
“Because I was the one who took him.”
She remembers it perfectly. Ambushing Salm as he came back from his toilet behind the perfume trees. His roaring strength, and the soldiers she’d reprimanded for their viciousness in taking him. Much later, Salm had tried to offer her sex in exchange for information on his family. Thinking herself his protector, his advocate, she’d refused him, given him the information anyway. He’d wept over the copies of Baru’s school transcript.
And Shir realized, watching him weep, that even if she had never touched him she was still a rapist. She was the kind of woman who took people prisoner and made them so desperate that they would offer their bodies to win a rumor of their daughters. She had coerced him and then called herself noble for placing limits on her coercion. She had chosen not to rape but she had still kidnapped him and taken him into her power where rape could be inflicted without any hope of justice. The entire situation was therefore evil.
“You took him.” Baru’s voice is clenched up like a stomach wound.
“I know where he is kept now.”
“Where is he?”
“Do you think he would want to see you? After all you’ve done? He will hate you.”
“Your mother never hated you, Shir. Not even at the end. Yawa told me so.”
Shir laughs in delight. What a reasonable presumption it must seem: that Shir is grown like a scar around the day she murdered her own mother on the banks of the Vultsniada.
But Shir knows the world at its fundament, she is a creature of that scoured truth. Her mother was one of many and distinguished from the rest only by sentiment. All those she’s killed had mothers. All of them. None were worth any more or less than hers.
“Go from this place,” she tells Baru Cormorant. “Gather my aunt Yawa and Tain Hu’s house and all the others you cherish. It is not for you to save Kyprananoke. The world is larger than you, and older than you, and full of people who will not obey you.”
“We can save this place!”
“You cannot,” Shir says, for she cannot be saved, and Kyprananoke is now akin to her. “If Kyprananoke is saved it will only be by the Kyprananoki. And they are not ennobled by their wounds; they are not to be pitied or denied responsibility by those who do not share the wounds. They are still capable of evil. Let me show you.”
She comes through the water of the lagoon to take Baru by the hand. She draws Baru into the coconut grove. Ake Sentiamut follows warily. Baru’s hand is long and strong, reduced by two fingers, wet with fear-sweat and saltwater. She keeps asking questions. Shir ignores her.
They come to the heart of the coconut grove.
“Behold,” Shir says, and, placing her hands behind Baru’s shoulders, pushes her inside.
At the center of the grove is the mother palm. And upon the trunk of that palm is a stain where the little children with dental work and surgical scars and the babies born of shiqusection were dashed against the wood. Beside that palm is the sinkhole, a deep shaft in volcanic rock, where the corpses of the machete-killed have been stacked almost to the water’s surface. And a thick skim of blood and yellow foam. And black massed flies upon that foam. And the world digesting the dead.
“Chaos,” Shir says. “This is chaos. And it is your purpose.”
Baru slips. Her kneecaps strike on black stone. She does not scream. She does not reach out, even by instinct, to catch herself on Shir: perhaps because Shir is standing on her right.
Baru’s purpose is to bring this to Falcrest. The grove, the meringue of blood and flies, the stain of broken children, the hole full of corpses, atrocity, chaos, death. The world in raw.
To return to Falcrest what Falcrest seeded here.
“PSST,” Svir hissed. “You, with the bony ass. I need you.”
Faham snored. I lifted my cheek from his chest to glare at the impertinent child. Svir, not mollified, beckoned for me. There is no dignified way to disentangle oneself from a man in a hammock. Faham mumbled in his sleep. I had never understood a word of his dreams.
I shrugged into linens and a dress. “Out here,” Svir muttered, and led me to his own little cubby. “I just got a signal from Execarne’s Morrow-men. Baru’s not dead after all. The Morrow-men were able to attract some local fighters to attack the Canaat warband. Apparently Tain Shir was involved.”
“Shir’s alive?”
He grimaced. “Unfortunately.”
“Is Baru coming back aboard?” There were certain matters I’d put in place, before our alliance, which I needed to disclose to her. I had induced in the Stakhieczi brave man Dziransi a prophecy: Baru Cormorant would be the dowry for his Necessary King’s marriage to my protégé, Aurdwynn’s Governor Heingyl Ri. Dziransi was already sailing north. If he convinced the King he saw true, it would put my alliance with Baru in a bind. We would be hard pressed to find an equal dowry to make the marriage work.
Svir growled in frustration. “Apparently not. She’s still with Ake and your mad niece.”
“Doing what?”
“Camping, apparently. Spending the night on an islet near Balt Anagi. She failed with the rebels. So I suspect she’s trying to get to the Kyprists.”
I stole one of his anise pellets, popped it into my mouth, and grimaced at the sweetness. “It’s futile, of course.”
I understood this part better than Baru. She would never convince the Kyprists to give up their power. To convince them she had to persuade Barber-General Thomis Love, their leader. And like any leader of a junta, he was Barber-General because he was willing to fuck over the common people to protect his immediate supporters. This was how kings kept their thrones: by currying the support of those who could threaten them, at the expense of all those who needed their protection.
Svir chewed at his bare red knuckles. “Why? Why did she leave that letter for Shir? Have they been in cohort all along?”
“No. Her eryre did it.” No way to hide that reverence in my voice. “Through her right hand.”
“Why? Why?”
“I think…” I had to laugh. “I think one half of Baru wanted to force the other to confront Tain Shir. Remember, she’s not really Tain Hu. She’s a part of Baru that acts the way Baru thinks Hu would.”
“Conspiring against herself? Typical.”
I spat wet anise on his desk, making him squawk. “What’s this secret Baru brandishes at you, Svir? She has some leverage over you I don’t share.”
He looked at me crossly. I suffered a moment of confusion: he was very beautiful, and after years of case studies, my mind was a compost heap of perversion. I wondered what he looked like in bed with his men.
But I could not chase away the older fear he called up. I did not know if it was a racial obsession or merely my own. It was the image of a steel avalanche pouring down the Wintercrests, and of grim Stakhieczi soldiers cutting spear-furrows all across Aurdwynn, through grain and people, to the Ashen Sea.
“It’s not a secret,” he said, tartly, “that I have a hostage.”
“But it’s not about him,” I said, meaning Lindon Satamine, his lover. “It’s something Baru knows but I don’t. She only learned you were an agent of the Throne last fall. So it’s something she discovered over the winter, while she was in the North. Closer to your home. Closer to your past. Something you did when you were one of the mountain Stakhi.”
He ignored me entirely. What else could he do?
“We’re going to have to use it,” he said. “The apocalypse fuse. Are you prepared?”
I was afraid that I was. “Are you?”
His jaw twitched, a bestial motion: fury at an entire condition of existence. “I grew up in the Wintercrests. I’ve seen greater waste of life. Entire Mansions eradicated by the pride of a few stubborn men. Kyprananoke is … small to me. Kyprananoke is a little stone in an old graveyard.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt that there was something different about annihilating an entire people, rather than just one part of a greater whole.
“You’ve done worse already, you know,” he said. And I remembered, again, why he was so dangerous: why he of all the Throne’s agents spent so long out at the frontier, in dagger reach of death. “Last winter in Aurdwynn, you killed more people by starvation and sickness than you’ll drown here on Kyprananoke.”
But those were my people. I’d starved in Aurdwynn. I’d hacked cubes of frost from frozen ground to bury little children in the winter. And when spring came again, there was still an Aurdwynn to remember the dead.
There would be no memory of Kyprananoke. Or, at least, no Kyprananoki memory of Kyprananoke. And I was sure in my soul that there was some vital difference between the memory of seeing and the memory of being.
DARK stars and bright sea: the night sky dull with haze, the ocean living green all around. Waves of light stirred the jellyfish and slid up the white sand to Barhu’s toes.
Tain Shir built a campfire out of lumber pillaged from an abandoned house. “Expensive,” Barhu noted, imagining how rare hardwood must be on Kyprananoke. Shir ignored her.
Coconut crabs fled from the fire. Shir loped out into the dark to catch one, returning with a specimen the size of a small goat. “You know how to cook that?” Ake asked her, skeptically.
“I put it on the fire,” Shir said, “until it stops tasting raw.”
“You know what raw crab tastes like?”
“Better than raw snake.”
“When I was starving,” Ake muttered, “I just chewed leather like a normal person.”
Barhu paced up and down the tideline, watching green fire curl around her feet. “Alive.” The word popped under her tongue. “Salm’s alive.” She’d never dared hope! “Ake, have I ever told you about Salm—”
“No,” Ake snapped. On the short crossing from Balt Anagi to this islet she’d been stung on the ankle by a jellyfish. She had her foot in a coconut bowl full of warm seawater, and her fists balled in her lap.
“He was one of my fathers. I thought he’d been killed. My mother was sure he’d been taken. She was right, he’s alive, oh, she’s going to be so smug.”
Barhu whirled to Shir, who was snapping the legs off the crab, a sound like a wrist beneath a wagon wheel. “You sent Scylpetaire to seize my parents. Where will they be taken?”
“Not far.” The crab’s face sheared off under her knife. “Ormsment ordered Captain Iscanine to arrest your parents and transfer them to a navy prison hulk off Taranoke.”
“Well,” Barhu said, fiercely, “I’ll see to that soon enough. And as for Salm, wherever he is—”
“You will not find him.” A grunt, a great ripple of her shoulders. The crab’s legs tore free from its body: Tain Shir’s method of emancipation. “I will find him. You lost the right to rescue him when you gave him up for dead.”
Ake sat moon-pale in the firelight, staring at her balled-up hands. Thinking of her lost husband, who she could never rescue: he was dead of plague in Yawa’s Cold Cellar. Tain Hu had cared for Ake, afterward.
Barhu reached out for her. Ake shuddered away. Barhu, caught with her arm extended, made a vague waving motion, floundered, and withdrew.
Shir laughed at her.
“Oh, fuck off,” Barhu muttered. “Shir! Shir. You were Farrier’s—his protégé? Yes?”
“I was what you are now.”
“And when did you … free yourself?”
Shir worked at the fire. Her hands did not seem to burn. “During my travels.”
“Where?”
“I went to Mzilimake Mbo to stir up civil wars for Farrier. The far south, where the jungle grows around the lakes. Then I went to the Occupation, to teach the Invijay tribes to kill Oriati. I sailed on a pirate ship. I became a monk in Devi-naga, in an austerity squadron. I got dysentery. I went insane. I cannot remember the order. I married three women in a sahel tribe because the only way to power there was to gather younger wives. Many women did it. My wives all divorced me, though. The Mzumauli, the moon worshipers, they divorce each other by shouting their old names five times.” She blinked as if astonished, an expression Barhu had never seen on her before. “I don’t tell stories often.”
“And you must have seen so much of Farrier! Do you know his secret?” She could not resist guessing at the leverage that bound Farrier into the web of the Throne. “Is he a pedophile? Is that why he’s always so proper with me? Why he was angry when I had Diline dismissed?”
Shir was silent.
“Tell me!” Barhu commanded her. “Tell me about Farrier’s secret—”
The woman Barhu spoke to, the maker of fires and cooker of crabs, was just gauze across a wound. The thing unmastered rose in silence and the crab’s huge shell in her hands made a groan like a cracking skull. Barhu did not flinch away: only looked up in wonder and horrified awe at this unnameable unorderable Object that loomed above her like the black wreck of an eclipse moon.
Barhu gave up her breath, had to gulp it back to speak. “All right. All right, I won’t tell you what to do.”
Tain Shir went back to the crab meat on the fire. “Farrier is more than what you see of him. He is always presenting one face for you. Other aspects for others in the Throne. Countless faces.”
“Not countless,” Barhu corrected her. “Six faces. Three here. Yawa, Svir, and I. Plus Hesychast, Stargazer, and Renascent in Falcrest. Seven if you count him.”
“You know the Cryptarch’s Qualm.” Shir chose a claw and tested it with her knife. “What does it tell you?”
The Cryptarch’s Qualm. Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. To use your power you must touch the world. To touch you must be touched, to be touched is to be seen, to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish.…
Barhu straightened in thought. The tightening wound across her back complained at the shift. “I suppose it tells me that … that the most powerful cryptarchs would be the most secret. Like Renascent.”
“If you know her name,” Ake said, crossly, “do you really think she’s the most secret?”
“I know them all, there aren’t any others—”
Shir laughed like a jackal. “You think you know every cryptarch? There are more of them in Falcrest. There are many cells.”
“No,” Barhu insisted, “there were many cells once, before the Throne was purged and rebuilt, and now there is only one—”
“Wrong. They needed you to do provincial work, out here on the Empire’s frontier. So they gave you a provincial’s knowledge of the truth.”
Barhu hated this thought. But the worst part was that it made sense. If the Throne was a miniature model of the Imperial Republic … wouldn’t the provincials, Barhu and Yawa and even Svir, be excluded from the true core of power?
Didn’t it have a certain logic?
Damn it, she had to talk to the eryre. If it was in there, if it was somehow guiding her, it must have a plan. It must! And if it didn’t—
If it didn’t, then she should’ve taken the baneflesh, and the Kettling.
Shir ripped off the coconut crab’s bulbous abdomen and bit into it. Thick yellow oil stained her chin like yolk. “Good. Tastes sweet. Like coconut.” She offered the bulb to Ake. “Try it. It’ll make you want to fuck.”
Ake barked a laugh. “After today? I don’t think so.”
Shir shrugged and took another drink. “I’ve seen worse.”
“In the jungle?” Barhu asked.
Shir shook her head. “In Falcrest. On raids.” She swallowed another gulp of buttery fluid. “You’re wasting your time going to the Kyprists tomorrow. To get to Governor Love you’ll need to pass through waters held by Unuxekome Ra’s faction.”
“She’ll let me pass,” Ake said. Somehow she could hold Shir’s eyes without difficulty. “She hates Xate Yawa. My husband died in Yawa’s cellars. So we have some common ground.”
“You think you can talk your way past?”
“Yes,” Ake said, without hesitation. Barhu glanced at her in surprise and respect.
Shir offered her the crab’s dripping abdomen. “How do you know that?”
“Because,” Ake said, accepting the goblet, “I was Tain Hu’s friend and regent. I never betrayed her. And Unuxekome Ra knows that Tain Hu was her son’s true and faithful friend.”
SCREAMS and pistol fire came dimly out of the night. The Kyprists on the reservoir islands fighting off another assault, maybe. Canaat swarming up beaches barbed in broken glass.
Barhu knelt in the shallows, in a mass of interested wrasse fish, to hang up her clothes on the low branches of a dead pandanus shrub. She was thinking, in sleek runs of harnessed idea that came apart and crashed like cavalry on a wet descending slope, about her plan to end Falcrest.
She was confident that she had a plan, and that the details of it were hidden not only in her blind side, but in the things that she had done since the Elided Keep. Money games on the Llosydanes. Ake’s letter of governorship to rule Vultjag. Sniffing the deck on Eternal. It all meant something …
But what? What?
“Your wounds,” her blind side said.
The Thing named Shir stood, silhouetted in the distant firelight, in the shape of a broad dark woman holding a severed crab limb as long as her arm. A bark-cloth satchel dangled from her breechcloth; otherwise she wore saltwater and fire soot. One of her breasts was cut almost in half.
“Why didn’t the Cancrioth whale attack you?” Barhu blurted. “Because you were throwing it fish?”
Tain Shir gave a roar of delight. “That’s good. I like that. The whale is my friend.” She held up the satchel. “Your wounds need tending. The sutures on your back are dirty. And your hand should have a fresh dressing.”
“What, you use medicine now? You don’t just slap mud on your wounds? You and your—” An inchoate wave at the whole concept of Shir. “Your barbarism?”
The great brown head, dark as Hu was dark, cheekbones as strong, brow heavy, nose unbroken and curiously smaller, flatter, wider than Hu’s, and the eyes like pits: all of it inclined in curiosity. “Is that what you see? A barbarian?”
“I’d struggle for a better word,” Barhu admitted.
The Object descended on her, claiming nothing, possessing only itself, as transiently and enormously present as a mountain cat padding through the forest: beast-hot, sinuously alive.
“You want something of me,” it said.
“Not that,” Barhu said, laughing sharply.
“Not what?”
“Not—never mind. I want to know if you know a way to…” She waved at her own head. “To reach across yourself. To ask a question of … the other half of yourself.”
Tain Shir stared down at her impassively, waiting for her to make sense.
“I’m split!” Barhu snapped, in frustration. “There’s two of me in my brain, and the one you’re talking to—she needs to know something the other one’s thinking.”
“I see,” Shir said, and came closer.
Barhu was suddenly aware that she was kneeling. She began to get up. Tain Shir pushed her down on her folded legs and, with all the focus of a cat, began to clean the wound across Barhu’s back. The Kyprist alcohol wash stung, but cleanly. Like a ghost’s caress, receding. Barhu sighed.
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “You were trying to kill me.”
“You accepted death. There was no denial or deception left in you. So you can live.”
“I don’t understand you at all.”
She took Barhu’s injured hand now, unwrapping it gently, the very same hand she had cut on the Llosydanes. Barhu felt absolutely corporeal, her whole awareness rising and falling with the surf against her thighs and the uncoiling might of Shir’s body breathing at her back.
“But you need to find things you can’t understand,” Shir said. “Who would you be if you understood everything? Finished.”
The linen came off her injured stumps. Shir prodded the wounded remnants, which made Barhu hiss and curl up stiff against her.
“Too much bone in there,” Shir said. “It should be reduced. Not now. In a surgery.”
“Why did you cut my fingers off?”
“You define yourself by what you sacrifice. So the sacrifices had to begin coming out of you. Not from others. You yourself.”
“Is there a way to speak to the rest of me, Shir? Is it possible?”
She neither moved nor spoke but there was a sudden concurrence of shapes between Shir’s overarching body and the bend of Barhu’s naked back. A sense of nestedness, like one bowl beneath another.
“The spine lies beneath the brain,” Shir said. “Perhaps the answer is in your spine.”
“Don’t break my spine!”
“Let me teach you something. A way of being in yourself, in your own flesh. This will oppose Farrier. He despises the flesh as he despises all of unconditioned existence.”
“What do I—”
“Be still. Let your thoughts out into the water. Let them drift.”
A weight lay on Barhu, not unpleasant but massive: her mind’s awareness of Shir behind her. She knelt in the warm rushing water, conscious of the hard power in her core and the ache of tired thighs, her beating heart and swelling lungs, all of these not separate from but part of her thoughts. The engine of her body-mind turning, the experience of the world like a river passing through her, powering her but not overwhelming her. And the more fiercely that world raged through her, the stronger she would build the mechanism, to convert the passage of events into thought and force and desire.
Oh Himu, I am alive. I want to be alive, I want to want things, I want so much. I choose to live.
Her spine was half an inch from Shir’s chest. Tau-indi was right. There were wounds in the human world, and Shir was one of them. But Barhu would not turn away. She would not fear. The less she understood, the more she wanted to know. And there was no other living woman in the world who had done anything as intimate to Barhu as chopping off two of her fingers.
“Now,” Shir murmured, “listen to yourself. Let yourself speak.”
She adjusted the arch of her body and Barhu found herself flowing into an echoing posture, hard to hold. Her arms columned outside Barhu’s, breath hot on her scalp. The bestial tension of Shir’s core almost brushing Barhu’s naked back. Do not think. Do not consider. Only listen.
Shir rose up minutely away from Barhu and Barhu had to lift herself a little on her knees, tighten her thighs and her stomach and her aching back, to keep the same distance. And Shir breathed. And Shir breathed. Barhu trembled with the strain of holding the posture. Her breath quickened in time with Shir’s.
Are you there? she thought. Are you there, Hu?
I’m here.
Are you there?
I’m with you, Baru.
Are you there, please?
Can’t you hear me?
Give me a sign, please, somehow.
If I can find a way.
I need you. I need you. I need you.
I’m here! Listen!
She was breathing quickly now, faster than Shir. Aware of almost nothing but Shir’s body behind her and her own desperation for a sign. Her thighs and core were trembling with tension, her calves cramped, her arms shaking. Her spine was sore, a dull rod drawn like a longbow. And Barhu had the strangest feeling that it was burning like a fuse: that something inside her was reaching down to grip her vertebrae, this road they shared.
Is that you? Is that you, imuira?
I love you, Baru.
Suddenly one thing happened, and then another, without any movement on Barhu’s part. “Huh,” she grunted, in surprise. It was quick and violent, like breaking a fist, finger by finger. She grunted again, and exhaled, in wonder. She had not known that was possible.
“Is your question answered?” Shir asked her, without any sign of mockery.
“No,” Barhu said, a little breathlessly. “But I feel … I feel better.”
“Then I think it was answered.” Shir got up. Saltwater poured down her calves. “A curious reaction. You have knots inside you, woman. You pull them as taut as you can, and think that gives you relief. Learn to untie yourself.”
“Wait! Wait, was that not—not meant to happen?”
“I taught you how to ask a question. Your body answered. If you are asking me what should’ve happened to you, then you have learned nothing at all.”
And Shir wandered off into the groves, leaving Barhu in the water beside her airing clothes. The crab leg, folded on the satchel in the sand, smelled deliciously of fire. She took it up and ate.
That, she thought, had been strange. But this was a place for strange things. And if Shir frightened her, if that had aroused her, well, at least she knew her own perversions better.
All the tense crouching left her neck sore.