JURIS Ormsment staggered up the black beach toward the men with the pistols.
Her crew saved her. Against all her orders and all her fury they bound her to a spar and threw her clear of burning Sulane. She had wanted more than anything to die with them, and they had mutinied against her last command.
They’d done their duty. Someone had to tell the truth about what had happened here.
“Hey!” she called, wading out of the shallow breakers. “Hey, you!” She didn’t speak a word of el-Psubim, but what did it matter now? “What island is this?”
The pistoleers turned toward her. One of them was bleeding from his eyes. “Are you a foreigner?” another shouted. “Do you know medicine?”
Oh, they were infected. Red eyes and runny noses, one man trembling with chills. Flu symptoms. First stage Kettling, except the bleeding man, who was in the terminal stage. Well. Her ship was lost. She would not go to any great pains to protect what little remained of her life.
“Give me cloth.” Taking the mulberry work shirt offered to her, she fastened it around the bleeding man’s head. “The blood is what spreads it, see? You can’t let your blood touch anyone.”
“The Exile Duchess told us it was holy,” one man said, in very clear but very un-Falcresti Aphalone. “She told us that the elected ones would bear the sickness but never grow sick.”
“Do you have a triage station? A hospital?” She looked around for a cone snail or something, anything, to put the dying man quickly out of his misery. They would have to dispose of the body, and then she would rally these men as a work gang, and try to organize a new quarantine. If only Captain Nullsin could be convinced to spare some Burn—but trusting Nullsin had been her downfall.
She thought of Aminata and wanted to cry out. Poor Aminata. Dead on Sulane, with all the rest. Dead because she’d wanted justice, and Juris, thinking she could offer it, had taken Aminata in as her own.
She’d failed. All come to nothing. All the dead betrayed.
“Who are you, anyway?” one of the men asked her, watching her run her fingers through the wet sand, looking for a deadly snail.
“I’m…” Juris began, and didn’t know what to say next. “I know a little medicine. I can help.”
BARHU woke up with a headache.
“It’s fine,” she grumbled, as Ake Sentiamut ignored her. “I’m fine.”
Ake, who was so bright red and burnt that she crackled when she moved, was loading up a canoe for the day’s attempt to reach the Kyprists. “When do we go?” Barhu groaned.
“You don’t.” Ake levered a water barrel into the canoe with her knee. “If Ra’s rebels intercept us, they’ll kill you. So you stay here.”
Ridiculous. Obviously she had to be there to persuade Barber-General Love. “You’ll need me,” Barhu insisted, and tried to get up. She couldn’t.
Ake pushed the canoe into the gentle surf. “Wait!” Barhu spat. “Wait, you’ll—tell Governor Love about the apocalypse fuse!”
Ake pulled away into the channel between islets, paddling badly but with vigor.
“I’ve been abandoned,” Barhu complained. The Morrow-men would be nearby, of course, and they could get her back to the ship.
She rolled over onto her back and stared at the hot blue sky. If the other mind in her head had a plan, and that plan was hidden in Barhu’s recent actions … what part of the plan required Ake Sentiamut to be armed with a letter of authority and sent back to Vultjag?
She’d given Ake orders about trade. So that was a constraint, a way to focus her investigation. The answer involved trade.
And Vultjag was in the north of Aurdwynn, pressed up against the Wintercrests. First to fall if the Stakhieczi invaded. Did she mean for Ake to establish trade with them?
She thought, suddenly, of the black iroko wood on Eternal. It would be an incredibly valuable trade item.…
“Turn your head,” Tain Shir said, from her blind side.
“What?” Barhu grunted.
“Turn your head side to side.”
Barhu did not want to. “Listen, you’ve got to go up el-Tsunuqba. There’s a bomb up there which will cause an avalanche to destroy the entire kypra. I need you to prevent its use. I need time to work.”
“I know. Turn your head.”
“Why does it matter if I turn my head?” Barhu snapped.
“Because you’re nodding while you talk, but you don’t turn your head. Turn your head.”
“Of course I can turn my head, see—”
The pain was so strong it made her double up cringing into her lap.
“What happened to your eye?” Shir snapped. “Weren’t you punched?”
“No—your aunt, she started to lobotomize me—”
“Did she drill a hole?”
Barhu nodded. That hurt less.
“You have meningitis.”
“I do not have meningitis!”
But none of Barhu’s protests could stop Shir from lifting her and carrying her south. After a while she stopped understanding her own protests. She tried to shut up. Her mouth went on moaning.
“WHAT if it’s Kettling?” someone was asking. “What if she gives it to all of us?”
She cried out weakly because her head was an open red sore. Xate Yawa leaned over her, masked, waving a mirror before her eyes.
“Hello,” Barhu said, daftly, as a world of masts and feet and blue jungle-crow eyes orbited her skull. Her aching brain had swelled up and begun to tunnel out her right eye socket. “Saw your niece.”
“Meningitis.” Yawa snapped the mirror shut. “Get her below. If she has Kettling, too, we’ll just have to keep her in quarantine and mind her fluids. It won’t pass to us unless we’re very foolish, or she breaks with the pneumocystic type.”
“I can’t go below,” Barhu protested, “I’ve got to arrange the water truce.…”
“Whatever you want to tell us,” Svir said, appearing out of Barhu’s rightness in a flash of red, “you’d better say it now. You may not be with us much longer.”
“Yes. Yes.” She fumbled through her thoughts. They would not come into any kind of order. “The teak. The iroko wood. I meant to … oh, I can’t remember. Use the water as leverage. They can’t sail without water.…”
“Listen to her,” Ake said, “half dead and she’s still certain she knows what’s best.”
“Ake! Ake, is the truce ready? Is Governor Love ready to negotiate…?”
“He’s infected. His aide’s in charge. She’s busy killing everyone who’s not loyal to her. I couldn’t get through.”
“Try again!” Barhu gasped. “You have to try again—”
A hand brushed her cheek. “Aminata?” Barhu gasped, “Aminata, is that you?”
But the hand closed over her mouth and her eyes, and stilled her for a while.
SHE woke in darkness and screamed in pain.
“Hush,” Svir hissed, “hush. People are sleeping.”
“How much have I missed?”
“Your water truce. It lasted half a day. There are too many Canaat factions, all afraid they’ll look weak if they stop fighting. And the Kyprists are desperate for a chance to break out. Someone always starts fighting again. The truce can’t hold.”
“Because I’m not there. I have to go persuade them.”
“It has nothing to do with you, Baru. You didn’t release the Kettling here. You didn’t push through water reforms that left the Kyprists in control of the aquifers. Or destroy the old compost agriculture. Or force the people into sugarcane planting. Or do any of the things which poisoned Kyprananoke. You did not create these circumstances.”
“The rebels will be blamed,” she gasped. “Because all their evils are done in the open. The Kyprists are worse—they just make their crimes into laws—you must be sure it’s remembered! There was a tree where Canaat dashed children to death. But the Kyprists had jails, jails where they did as much and more.…”
“Stop. Stop. Meningitis is serious, Baru. You don’t want to spend your last words cursing some provincial junta. Or defending those Canaat monsters.”
So much left to do. So little of her mind to do it with. “You can’t use the fuse,” she rasped. “You have to give them a chance.”
“When the wind picks up I’ll have no choice. The ships here may not have water, but they’ll take dehydration over a plague port.”
“You can’t! Take the chance, Svir!”
“You’re an accountant,” Svir snapped. “You understand the logic. Don’t put the blame on me. It’s just the numbers.”
In the grip of fever the numbers crawled on her like ants and she moaned in horror. If even one infected carrier reached the mainland, if the blister number was exactly right and that carrier infected three others … in just eleven generations of infection there would be two hundred and fifty thousand infected. Seven out of ten would die. More than lived on Kyprananoke by far.
“I’ll come by,” Svir murmured, “when you’re awake, and I have news.”
He did. The Canaat seized one of the Kyprist reservoirs in the chaos, but the retreating Kyprists filled it with corpses. The atoll’s summer crops had failed. The locust and cricket farms were dying out. Kyprist cutters were arresting fishermen or throwing them overboard in their own nets for “supporting insurrection.” Ascentatic burned a dromon that tried to depart on sweeps. An overland scouting party sighted Eternal on the southern coast of el-Tsunuqba, putting out fishing boats, scouting desperately for water. A peace offering of lumber had been taken, and then thrown back, and then taken again: all, apparently, by different factions of Eternal’s crew.
Ulyu Xe swabbed Barhu’s head with a cool cloth.
Yawa talked to her, too. She said Ake was in the east, at Mascanaat, where the rebels let her pass because they’d heard stories of Tain Hu.
“Yawa,” Barhu croaked. “If I don’t … if you end up without my services, please look to my parents. Search for them on a prison hulk off Taranoke. And my father Salm. Tain Shir knows where to find him.”
The pain in her skull eclipsed whatever Yawa said next.
IT happened while she was asleep.
All she heard at the time was a mast-top girl shouting “DECK, DECK, GALLEY ON THE RAM! PORT SIDE!” And the creak of her hammock swaying as Helbride heeled over.
The other captain must have decided there was no escape from Kyprananoke without a ship fast enough to outrun Ascentatic. His dromon closed on Helbride during the night, moving under sweeps in the shallow water. The dark jagged shape of el-Tsunuqba concealed his ship’s outline until it was too late. Before Captain Branne could finish crying out “Beat the crew to quarters!” the dromon was charging Helbride’s port side.
Helbride answered wonderfully to the sailing master; her sheets fell from their clewage with living eagerness. As soon as Branne had steerage, she threw the helm over to port and turned into the dromon, as if to match ram with ram.
It almost worked. She might have slipped past, just feet from collision. But the dromon grappled onto Helbride in the close passage, flank to flank. And the boarders waiting to swarm up the ropes onto Svir’s clipper looked up with grim, determined faces.
Faces stained with fresh, unclotted blood.
“PLAGUE SHIP!” the mast-top girls cried.
“Flee!” the other ship’s griot cried. She leapt up onto the rail, cupping her face, showing them hands of blood. “Flee your ship, or die with us!”
“Abandon your ship,” the dromon’s captain shouted. “Swim away, save yourselves! We want only the ship!”
The Cheetah crew, survivors of Tau’s ship rescued by Helbride, shouted shame in reply: if the attackers had the littlest trim and decency, they would do the right thing and throw their oars overboard, drift away to die in quarantine rather than spread the disease. But there was no chance a self-sufficient crew of yeniSegu sailors would be browbeaten into giving up their lives by a well-to-do Prince-house from the heart of the Flamingo Kingdom.
Very coldly, not a whit of fear in his jaw, Svir stripped off his shirt. He walked to the rail and showed the Oriati his scars: the livid, branching lightning-marks that trailed down his body like the kiss of a jellyfish. In the moonlight they seemed silver and alive.
“I am Svirakir of the Mansion Hussacht.” He put his hand up, fingers splayed like bolts. “I bear the lightning in me. I fear no illness, for lightning has no flesh. Get back before I call down fire from the cloudless sky.”
The captain motioned to his sailors to wait a moment. There was real wonder in his eyes.
“Who are you?” he shouted. “How were you so touched?”
At that moment Helbride’s cook shoved her lord Apparitor down to the deck and leapt onto the Oriati ship with her apron full of Burn grenades.
THE next time Barhu woke, Faham Execarne was at her bedside. “Hello,” he said. “I’ve been putting a little anesthetic in your water, keeping down the screams.”
“Do you know?” she wheezed. “Do you know what they’re about to do?”
“Yes,” Execarne said, sadly. “We’re enacting a quarantine. Exactly like we quarantine any other outbreak. Do you understand the problem of this disease? The long incubation period? They get better for a while. They can travel before they start to bleed. Once it’s out it can’t be stopped.”
“I know,” she moaned. “But…”
But if all the Kyprananoki died, the things they believed in would all be gone. Their gods and holidays. Their food. Their grudges, their gifts. All the things they had made of what they had.
“I can’t remember,” Barhu said.
“What? What can’t you remember?”
“Taranoke. I swear to the caldera gods, sometimes. But I don’t remember their names. I remember plantain leaf and cooked pineapple. Coffee. Iron salt. But I don’t know how to make our food. I don’t remember the right word for the elders. I remember hating plainsiders but not why.…”
“Hush,” he said, blowing smoke. “Hush, you’re rambling. You’re putting confusion in the air. Vital to hold onto our subjective control of reality, with such chaos around us.”
“We can’t do this. You can’t allow this.”
“There are less than a hundred thousand Kyprananoki. Even if we had a ninety percent chance of containing the disease—which is grossly optimistic—a ten percent chance of the Kettling escaping to kill a million people, just a million, outweighs the entire population of Kyprananoke.”
No. That was accountant logic, the logic that had failed her in Aurdwynn. Because numbers alone couldn’t count what Tain Hu had meant to her. She was one life on paper and yet a universe to Barhu. Kyprananoke was more than a tally on a page. They had a heritage, the Jellyfish Eaters and the Scyphu and the Tiatro Tsun. And they had a language. And so many irreplaceable people, people like Ngaio Ngaonic, who she had met at the embassy.
She knew that Tain Hu wouldn’t drop the mountain. Tain Hu had survived plague. She’d lost her parents to it. And doggedly, determinedly, she had gathered the survivors to rebuild. Because she believed that the right of an individual or a people to have a chance, even the smallest chance, was inviolable. That right was what kept powers from rationalizing the destruction of entire peoples as an acceptable cost.
“This is the wrong way,” she said.
“Maybe.” Execarne sighed weed smoke. “It’s certainly not good. But good intentions aren’t enough, Agonist, no matter how forcefully we concentrate on them. The world is big, full of many minds, all hard to change. It is possible to do your utmost and still fail. By the way, they say the odds of you surviving this meningitis are bad.”
“I can’t die,” Barhu croaked. “I have a plan.”
Execarne’s smile crept through the wall of fever. “Don’t we all?”
The meningitis came up around her like the bell of a jellyfish, and Barhu’s mind failed.
IT was the wind that woke her. It came out of the southeast, over gentle wavetops and charred corpses, to rouse the Lieutenant Commander from her fugue.
Awareness returned as a damage report. Throat: burnt. Boots: missing. She’d kicked them off before she leapt. Her whole ass side from her heels to the nape of her neck burnt tender. She was still wearing the rest of her combat rig, and only the wooden spar she laid upon kept her above water. Every breath felt like a chest-cold swallow. The smoke off Sulane must have made her cough until she passed out.
But she was alive. She was alive!
She stuck her head up and tried to get her compass. She’d drifted south toward el-Tsunuqba, and the quickening current had her. Ahead the water frothed up into cream-and-coffee color where it plunged into a narrow black strait that roared like a waterfall. But it couldn’t be a waterfall, there was no elevation change, so—
“Oh fuck,” Aminata said.
Back on Taranoke, she’d gone on an expedition to the autumn whirlpool at Juditu. The other midshipmen had thrown one of the water rescue mannequins into the vortex—Aminata hadn’t participated, not wanting to be blamed for mishandling equipment. The mannequin had been sucked down nine hundred feet on the sounding line, then slammed into the bottom and drawn down-current so fast the line snapped.
She really, really did not want to die that way.
With a cold washing pain as the saltwater licked her burns, she rolled off her spar and began to kick against the current. She had to lose ballast, maybe lose her uniform, certainly get rid of this thing tied to her rig, what was this, a hard metal cylinder—
It was the Cancrioth uranium lamp.
The shroud had dragged open and the oily rock inside was naked as a showboy on officer’s night. Aminata rolled onto her back and tried to get the damn thing off, but the knots were dire. She’d really wanted to keep it. Why would she tie it on so well? Did she think it was worth money? Had she confused it, somehow, for an actual lamp, a beacon for her rescue?
Something massive brushed against her back.
Aminata looked down and shouted in horror.
A human skull with fuzzy spikes of cancer-bone growing through its eye sockets slipped past beneath her. She was still shouting and flailing when a tremendous set of black tail flukes slapped water in her face.
“Ai!” she shouted. It was the Cancrioth orca! It was here to eat her!
She’d read about settlers way down in Zawam Asu who’d learned to fish in cooperation with orca pods. She’d read about orcas rescuing fisherfolk. Or playing with them. Sometimes the play involved dragging them into the water. Dragging them down.
The maelstrom shrieked ahead. She was caught betwixt a whale and a whirlpool.
The orca breached. Those huge white eye-spots. Tiny eyes below them, the true eyes, only she’d never heard of an orca with glowing eyes before, green like tide-fire. There were rings of paint around the eyes, as if the whale had been smeared with a substance like jellyfish tea.
The orca swam toward her, yawning. Its teeth were curious and huge. The glowing rings round its eyes brightened as it came.
Aminata looked at the uranium lamp and thought, oh, fuck me.
WHEN human hands pulled her from the whale’s back, when rough ropes hauled her up a cliff of golden film and black wood onto the deck of a ship, she was still aware enough to begin the Mantra Against Captivity.
“Aminata isiSegu. Brevet-Captain. RNS Ascentatic. I will not break my silence except to repeat these truths, my name, my rank, my ship, Aminata isiSegu…”
Someone squeezed a trickle of freshwater onto her lips. Someone else shouted in protest. Rough hands tore the uranium lamp away from her body.
They’re squabbling, she thought, they’re squabbling over me. Am I about to be killed? I suppose that depends on who wins the squabble. Should I tell them I gave them the way through the minefield? Should I tell them I saved their ship?
No. Don’t admit you helped them. No one loves a traitor. No one trusts a sneak. And it’ll just convince them they can turn you, if they try.
When she woke up again she’d been moved.
Cold sediment-gritty water slapped across her face. Her heart throbbed in panic: a drowning response, she thought, to make her alert before the real pain—
Something lashed against her cheeks, slimy and sinuous. Her eyes popped open. A squid grabbed at her, a squid with its beak open in panic, with arms that looked like raw meat. She cried out and tried to pull away, but she was shackled to the wall, naked to the linens, her burns screaming. Something made a sound like a nail drawn down glass. She screamed back.
This went on for a long time.
Aminata knew what was happening because she had done it herself. This was the resentimente, the brutal false beginning of torture. Soon they would send someone to rescue her, to pretend to take care of her, and she would fasten on them with desperate gratitude. That would be the real beginning.
Every time she began to sleep they hit her with cold saltwater, squirming tentacles, and a nail scratched into glass.
When something changed, she thought she might be hallucinating. “Pig,” she grunted, and then, hastily, she’d opened a hole in her armor, “Aminata isiSegu. Brevet-Captain. RNS Ascentatic.”
The pig whimpered. Something was wrong with it, Aminata thought, someone should help that pig.
A bristly stinking face pressed up against her neck. Hot breath went up her nostrils.
“Look,” a woman said, “look—”
Aminata opened her eyes. A piglet dangled before her, illuminated by the green glow of the hand that held it. The piglet’s skull had ruptured from within. Its trotters jerked. The open brain was infested with glistening cysts, bloody with capillaries, scabbed and broken and scabbed again—
“This is what happens to you,” the voice said, “if you do not answer our questions. Where is Abdumasi Abd?”
“Aminata isiSegu. Brevet-Captain. RNS Ascentatic.”
A thin knife appeared and cut one of the tumors from the piglet’s head. Blood welled up to pool in the ruined skullscape. The knife and the tumor lifted toward Aminata’s mouth. She gagged. The questions did not stop.
“Where is Abdumasi Abd?”
“What has been done to the mathematician Kimbune?”
“How many ships are stationed at Isla Cauteria?”
“Are there supply depots on islands closer than Cauteria?”
“Is there good lumber on any island closer than Cauteria?”
“Where are the minefields defending Isla Cauteria?”
The pig’s stink—hot blood stink, not septic death but swollen life, the cancer, a ut li-en, the cancer grows—she was aboard Eternal! The Cancrioth whale had taken her home!
“Aminata isiSegu!” she shouted. “Brevet-Captain, RNS Ascentatic!”
They forced her lips open. “Where is Abdumasi Abd?”
Aminata had enough freedom to dart forward and bite the tumor right off the knife. Cold steel taste, hot iron blood, and the fatty slimy fullness of the cancer, like snot. She spat it at the glowing hand that held the pig. “Fuck you!”
Rough hands slammed her up against the wall. “Let’s begin everting her,” the interrogator’s voice said. “One slit across the abdomen, please. Bring a laundry rack. We unpack her guts for her to consider. It’s a remarkable thing to watch your own digestion.”
“Fuck you! Fuck you!”
A knife dimpled the skin of her belly.
“You won’t touch me,” she panted, “I know what you need to know, you won’t hurt me,” shut up, Aminata, you’re giving them too much, “Aminata isiSegu, Brevet-Captain, RNS Ascentatic!”
“We can hurt you,” the voice said, with some sorrow, “in ways which render you useless at your work, now and for the rest of your life. You are tsaji, a collaborator, a traitor to your people. We think it fitting that you should be denied all means of connection: sight, voice, hearing, even smell. Touch will take the longest. But when the baneflesh has its way, you live in a skin of rubber, and all that remains to you is that nameless sense which tells you when you are sick. And you are sick, Aminata isiSegu. You are never well again.”
The voice left her panting in the dark for a moment. And then, again: “Where is Abdumasi Abd?”
“Baru loves me.”
There was a silence of a different kind. Not, Aminata thought, a choreographed one.
“You know Baru?” the voice asked, quietly. Its whole character had become wary, thoughtful, interested.
“Know her? I’m her sworn protector. I’m her knight! The Duchess Vultjag made me her knight! Fuck with me, and you’re fucking with Tain Hu!”
“Do you know her purpose?” the voice asked.
Purpose? Baru hadn’t even known her own purpose. And when Aminata had asked her, can you tell me the truth, Baru had said, I don’t know.
What would Baru tell the Cancrioth her purpose was? Would she pretend to be a rebel again? Possibly. But she could just as well pass herself off as a loyal agent, a Parliamentary representative-on-mission, a Judiciary invigilator, even an openly acknowledged agent of the Throne.…
“Of course I do,” she lied, as loudly as she could.
“Tell me.”
“Very weak attempt,” Aminata sneered. “She trusts me to keep her secrets.”
The shadows of hands moved faintly in her vision, dark squid in a gray-green sea. Her interrogator, surprised at last, thrown off her impassive script.
“Come on!” Aminata screamed. “Where’s that disembowelment you promised?”
“Where is Abdumasi Abd?”
“Up your ass.”
“Where is Abdumasi Abd?”
“Hey, navy girl,” Aminata began to sing-sob, “here’s waking up to you—”
AFTER a long time there was a new voice.
Hands undid her restraints. No matter how she blinked she could not get her eyes to focus. At last someone unhooded a light and she seized on it, blinked and grimaced until she could resolve it into a lantern. She raised her eyes to the man holding it.
He had an eyestalk.
She boggled at him in exhausted horror and he said, wearily, “Yes, I know.”
It was a tumor, of course. She’d seen stranger in the wards of hospital ships. But it was surreal to follow him like he was some officer’s steward, like he was an ordinary man. Call it Incrastic fastidiousness, but she found his deformity frightening. Evil. The character expressed itself in the flesh, didn’t it?
He led her silently up narrow stairways, to a long black corridor with many doors, and, through one, into a stateroom without any engravings on the floor.
“You may wash,” he said, in a rich basso voice.
“Are you going to wait outside?” she asked, and then saw, to her astonishment, that the stateroom had its own bath chamber. This room alone, with its bed and couches and study, was preposterous! How could they have room for an attached bath?
“I will, if you want. Just wash, please.” The stalk-eyed man looked very tired. “You’ve been in that filth too long.”
Her burns were mostly superficial, but she absolutely had to wash them or risk fatal infection. There was no chance in stigma that she was going to do that with this man sitting here controlling her only exit.
“What the fuck are you?” she demanded.
He sat on the end of his bed, politely turned away from the washroom. There was dirt under his fingernails. Bright, faceted jewels glinted in the flesh of his tumor.
“I am an onkos. I bear an old line. My name is Virios, but you will call me the Eye.”
“You’re … you’re cancer. Aren’t you.”
A sigh: he hated explaining this, clearly. “I share my body with the souls of those who held the line before me.”
“Are you the captain of this ship?”
“I wish I were. I wish we had a captain. The woman who tortured you wants to lead us, and I think soon she will succeed. I stole you away from her only because she wants you treated kindly, Aminata, and she does not want her followers to see her doing it.” He smoothed the bedcovers, and then, seeing dirt streaked on the sheets, snatched his hand away. There was an innocence to that gesture which made Aminata like him. “Will you wash, please? I want you covered.”
She went into the washroom. The bulb-shaped clay vessel there was full of water almost to the brim. “This,” she said, loudly, “is too much.”
“Is something wrong?”
“You can’t spare all this water.” Mariner’s ethics: “So I can’t use it.”
“Consider it an act of hospitality,” the Eye called. “I want to welcome you as proper Oriati would. Please, wash and dress.”
She dry-scoured her body, laved her wounds, succumbed to the temptation to sponge herself. She remembered the squid lashing at her face, and, shuddering, looked for soap. There was only ash.
At last she came back out, dressed in knotted linens and a heavy cassock, to find him waiting patiently: just a man, a round and fatherly Oriati man with dirty hands and nice thick hair.
“What’s happening?” she asked, warily.
“Too much. You’re a sailor, yes? A navy woman? We haven’t the water to make the long journey southwest, back to our home. Our ship is hurt and leaking; we desperately need to make harbor. The Brain is working to convince the crew that the best way to find a port is to take one. By force.”
“She’ll get you all killed.”
“I know,” he said.
“You don’t look much like…” She tiptoed around the word slavers. “Like an aristocrat.”
“No.” He shook his head; Aminata was terrified his blind eye would be flung from the end of its stalk. “I was born common. When I took the immortata, I vowed to grow it as a sacred trust. Not a weapon, not a tool of bondage. The Cancrioth’s purpose is to explore the immortata and its marriage with the human body. We are not warriors. The Brain, in all her messianic delusion, has lost sight of that. And so I need your help.”
Aminata, who had been waiting for this, the gentle request from the reasonable man, shocked herself by wanting to say yes: if only to have something to do, some duty to chase.
“What do you want?”
The Eye smiled softly. “Iraji, will you come in, please?”
A rustling of silk from outside.
“Oh!” Aminata said.
The boy stood in the doorway, naked to the breech under a silk robe, beautiful as anyone she’d ever seen. He was Oriati and his eyes were brown and gold and fixed on hers. She was having trouble keeping her own eyes fixed in return. He walked like a pinstep dancer, each step happening in all the muscles of his calves, his hard hips, his lean and girdled core.
Aminata grinned stupidly at him. “Hey,” she said. She felt suddenly very glad to be alive.
The boy bowed like a very expensive whore. Aminata thought about what kind of habits she had, to see this man, not a boy, and to call his grace whorish. She corrected herself forcefully. The man had bowed with class.
“Iraji oyaSegu,” he said, “recently off Helbride, now an initiate into the mysteries of the—the Cancrioth.” An odd pause there, as if he were expecting to be interrupted. He put a hand out to hold the doorframe. “May I bring you anything?”
Anything at all, she thought, as long as you bring it. “My uniform and a boat back to my ship.”
“I’m afraid I cannot possibly release you without throwing our crew into another mutiny.” The Eye got up from the bed, groaning a little, and went to Iraji. “I think she’ll be more comfortable with you, child. Please think on what I told you earlier. Please—just consider the good that could be done, if Tau could be brought back to us.”
He squeezed the boy’s shoulder and left.
“So,” Aminata said. “You’re new here, too?”
Iraji shut the door gently behind the Eye. “They’re short on water, the crew’s understrength, and Sulane’s torpedo damaged them so badly they’re afraid they’ll founder in a storm. The Eye wants to go home. The Brain’s convinced she can awaken Oriati Mbo against Falcrest, and usher in a new age of restored Cancrioth rule; she wants war. The Womb takes care of the ship and its crew but won’t assert herself directly. That’s what I know. What about you?”
Aminata blinked at him. More than a pretty face, then. “No more than you, if you saw Sulane destroyed.”
He nodded. “Take off your cassock. I need to see to your burns.”
If this was part of the interrogation games, if he was here to confuse her between her duty and her desires, well, they’d picked the wrong woman as a target. She shrugged out of the Oriati cloth like it was dripping acid.
“What does the Eye want us to do?” she asked, debating whether to lose the strophium, too: would she come on too strong?
“To prove that we’re people.”
Aminata blinked. “Is that in doubt? He seemed perfectly polite to us.”
“Not to him,” Iraji said, with a quiet fear she could not understand. “Not to the Brain, either. Someone else here. Someone who’s alone.”
“Who else is here? Aside from the Cancrioth, I mean?”
“Oh,” he said, “quite a menagerie, actually.”
SHE had to be kept hidden from the crew, Iraji explained. This part of the ship was sanctified for the protection of guests. The Womb watched over it; she had, Iraji imagined, roughly the same authority over the crew as a mother—not someone who followed you everywhere and gave you orders, but who was, in her own domain, invincible.
“Have you got my sword?” she asked him.
“You had a sword?”
“It’s not really mine anymore, I gave it to Baru, but it’s a good blade.…”
“Oh! Yes. Baru’s boarding saber.” He made an apologetic curtsy at her, upsettingly graceful. She was starting to think they could be friends, which made his beauty an unaffordable distraction. “I’m afraid the Brain insists foreigners can’t have weapons. The saber must be in an armory somewhere— Oh no. Hide!”
He pushed her out of the corridor, into the shadows of a cross passage. “Don’t move.”
A woman passed the intersection—a woman in an Imperial Navy uniform. Kings, look at her, look at that perfect carriage and contemptuous distance! It was Shao Lune! Shao Lune who’d been at Baru’s side in the embassy! She’d opposed Ormsment’s mutiny, too, hadn’t she? They had that in common.
“Staff Captain?” Aminata called.
Iraji groaned.
“Ah.” Shao Lune turned crisply to block the intersection. “You’ve been released. What are you doing back there, Lieutenant Commander? Come out. And you’ll address me as mam while I’m in uniform.”
“I’m a brevet-captain, actually, we’re equivalent in—”
“The loyal navy does not recognize ranks bestowed by traitors. And in any case, a staff captain is senior to a brevet rank.” Shao Lune looked her over critically. “I’ll excuse your appearance on account of circumstances. But see to it the tunks don’t defame your reds.”
“Yes, mam,” Aminata said, feeling as if she’d ordered water and been handed brine. Tunks, eh? At least she hadn’t said the other tunks.
“My objective is to gather information about this vessel, in particular signs of political contact with the Oriati federations, as well as any form of chart or rutterbook that indicates this ship’s home port. Somewhere in Segu, no doubt. Or western Mzilimaki.”
“Yes, mam. Can I assist, mam?”
Shao Lune frowned at the way Aminata stood with Iraji. “Your orders are to remain in strictest isolation. Due to your heritage, you’re in danger of regression aboard this ship. As we have seen in Iraji’s case.” She smiled nightshade at him. “I’ll need you to report on whatever contact you’ve already had with the Cancrioth leadership—”
“She’s relentless,” Iraji whispered, “you’ll never get away from her.”
“Is that clear, Lieutenant Commander?” Shao Lune barked.
“Yes, mam!” Aminata snapped a salute.
“Very good. I’ll be in my cabin, taking measurements. Report to me before end of watch.” Shao Lune swept away with perfect confidence.
“We’ve got to see the Prince-Ambassador.” Iraji pulled her in the other direction.
“But the staff captain ordered me to—”
“You can’t seriously want to listen to her!”
“She’s my commanding officer,” Aminata said.
Iraji sighed and crossed his lean arms. Interesting things happened in his bare shoulders. “Fine. As an agent of Apparitor, who acts in the name and image of the Emperor, I second you to my service, and do detach you from all other duties in consideration of the Emperor’s own work.”
Now she could allow herself to call Shao Lune a cunt, if only in her head.
“When you say we’ve got to see the Prince-Ambassador, do you mean the Prince-Ambassador…?”
He did.
THE Prince’s door was guarded by a stanchion-thick Oriati woman with fighting ropes around her fists. She marked Aminata with obvious dislike, but stood aside graciously for Iraji. The cabin inside was as vastly luxurious as the stateroom the Eye had given Aminata.
But this one had been destroyed. The teak had been scratched, the furniture dragged over the wood in some furious attempt at erasure. A red wine stain marred the wall. The place stank of sick.
“I don’t want company,” a thin voice said.
A short, slouching laman with wide hips and giant bruised eyes came out of the washroom. All rotted grandeur: the flaking ceremonial paint, stained khanga, thick cracked lips and small empty mouth. The bright Prince she’d seen in the embassy had gone. Tau-indi Bosoka was a clay amphora emptied out and smashed.
Iraji bowed deeply. “I’ve brought a guest, your Federal Highness.”
“There are no guests here. We’re all strangers to each other.” What shocked Aminata was how little this sounded like whining. Tau-indi said it with such simplicity: these are the conditions of our estrangement.
“Nonetheless. May I present the Burner of Souls, Aminata isiSegu.”
A flicker of interest crossed the laman’s face, neither hateful nor solicitous. “Hello,” Aminata said, wary of this royal ruin. It was important, in Oriati etiquette, to establish some shared point, some bond … all she could think of was the disaster. “I saw you at the embassy on Hara-Vijay. I’m glad you escaped.”
“You ordered the burning of the grounds.” Tau scratched behind their ear. “You murdered all those people. No wonder you’re here. You belong among us.”
Aminata looked at Iraji. Iraji did not react.
“What’s wrong with you?” Aminata demanded.
“Ah. I’ve been cut out of trim. I cannot be connected to other human beings. The Womb did it to me.” Tau wiped their finger on the wall. “Say what you came to say and go. I want to sleep.”
“Your Federal Highness,” Aminata said, feeling that she stood in the dead beacon of an abandoned lighthouse, that she had some responsibility to kindle it again, for the sake of diplomatic relations if nothing else, “the Eye asked us to speak to you. Iraji and I. I don’t know why, but here we are.”
“Abdumasi Abd,” Iraji murmured. “Tell them about Abd.”
Oh. So that was the game. What a roundabout way to get at the question. But then again, she would have been just as subtle. And she’d almost fallen for it.
“Please,” Iraji whispered, “if you won’t trust me, trust Baru.”
What did Baru have to do with this? “You know her?”
“Of course I do,” Iraji said, loudly. “She saved me on Cheetah. She saved me again on this ship.” A very slight swallow, delicious action of the throat and lips, but all covered in grief. “Is she gone?”
“I don’t know. I hope not.” Aminata had to laugh: “She’s hard to kill.”
“Yawa didn’t lobotomize her?”
“No. She and Yawa seemed to be friends. I wouldn’t be here at all”—don’t let yourself turn bitter, Aminata, you face your duty whatever it might be—“except that Baru came up with a plan to go to Ormsment together—”
Tau-indi’s head snapped up from their chest. Aminata heard joints pop with the violence of the motion. “Baru asked you to bring her to Ormsment?”
“Sure,” Aminata said, warily, “she used herself as bait to get me aboard Sulane. So I could see this ship safely through the minefield.”
“No.” Tau-indi impaled her on a glare like a vivisection knife: an instrument deployed, for seemingly the first time in Tau’s life, without any consideration for its target’s comfort. “That’s not why she did it. She did it because I told her that she had to confront Ormsment to heal the wound. What happened?”
“Well, uh”—Aminata thinking suddenly of Shao Lune’s warning against contamination, of Oriati superstitions infecting and thriving in her blood—“Baru surrendered herself, and Ormsment ordered her keelhauled. I didn’t see her after that. I thought it was a stupid risk … if I were Ormsment I would’ve slashed her tendons.…”
“Ormsment couldn’t have done that,” Tau said. “No more than she could’ve ordered a lobotomy. To diminish Baru would have diminished the reason for everything she’s done.” Iraji was smiling and Aminata didn’t know why. “And after that, Sulane attacked Eternal, and was destroyed? I saw that.”
Aminata nodded hesitantly. What would Shao Lune think? Was she answering Tau’s questions out of some hereditary weakness? Had Iraji addled her with his beauty?
“Her actions returned to her,” Tau murmured. “Baru turned back to confront her enemy. Ormsment refused to change her own path, and was destroyed by it. Was there anything strange about Baru? Any sudden change in her behavior?”
“She surrendered herself to save my life,” Iraji said, brightly.
“I saw her volunteer to die in another woman’s place,” Aminata added, simply because it irritated her to hear Oriati nobility disparaging Baru.
Tau’s eyes narrowed. “And what happened?”
“I took the spear meant to kill her. Right here”—thumping her chest—“I was wearing armor. It was just a fishing spear anyway.”
“I see…” Tau-indi breathed.
Iraji’s hands clenched in excitement. “Your Highness?”
An awful brittleness in Tau’s voice: like ice on the verge of melting, warming but losing strength. “I think it is possible that the Womb’s spell of excision had, ah”—their voice cracked—“had effects she could never anticipate. Baru Cormorant was a wound in trim, an upwelling of grief, a hole. All those who knew her would find only abandonment and regret.
“But when one bond is cut, Iraji, the loose thread may fasten on another. I was cut loose. There were many, many threads seeking a place to fasten.…”
“Baru’s not a wound,” Aminata snapped. How dare the Prince castigate Baru in this superstitious way? “She was honest with me. We worked together to save this ship and save your life—”
“Really,” Tau said, with vicious sweetness. “She was honest with you? Did she tell you what she wanted this ship for?”
“No,” Aminata said, tersely. Of course Baru had a reason to keep her tactics secret.…
“She didn’t tell you that she came here to find a way to destroy Falcrest? I think she wanted to gain the Kettling as a weapon. But the price the Brain asked of her was too high.”
Ridiculous. Just ridiculous. After all Baru had done to secure Aurdwynn for the Imperial Republic? “You’re lying.”
“And you are hopelessly gullible.” Tau turned their sharp smile on Iraji. “Is she soft for you? Have you told her what you really are?”
Iraji swayed. His eyes rolled back for a moment. “What?” Aminata asked, hapless and humiliated. “What is it?”
“He’s Cancrioth,” Tau said. “The cancer wants him. His flesh was made ready for it. Remember that if you take him to bed, Segu-woman. The seed he yields is—”
“Enough!” Aminata shouted, and some part of the Prince cringed back in shame. “You won’t tell me about my bed.”
That beautiful boy. Of course he was a lure. She wanted to scream.
Just then someone hammered on the door. “Open up!” Shao Lune shouted, and then, in echo of her, the Oriati bodyguard woman, “Prince Bosoka, please, open up!”
Iraji lunged for the door. “What? What is it?”
“There’s something wrong,” the Oriati soldier panted. “You’d better come up on deck.”
“We can’t go on deck,” Iraji said, “there are too many of the Brain’s people out there—”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Shao Lune said. “No one will be looking at us.”
“THANK you,” the woman said to Juris, “thank you for the water.”
With a groan of effort she leaned forward off the birthing cushion to grip her husband’s neck and whisper, “Mind my mother, love. She’ll need you. Pran Canaat.”
After a while the blood stopped pumping from her. Her stillborn lay in her husband’s arms as he wept thick mucus down a face like a sagging bag of blood.
Juris Ormsment took the mother’s corpse by her armpits and dragged her into the pile for the next charnel boat. Kettling blood and bloody diarrhea soaked her all down her chest. The mothers hemorrhaged like artery wounds when they miscarried, but it was merciful how quick they went. Those who did not bleed out had to linger on, festering with blood blisters, shitting and vomiting green-black bloody fluid. Water just made them shit more; but if you stopped watering them, they died of thirst. Juris had tried treating the disease like cholera, giving one strong man water every half hour. He had rallied for a while. But the fever had killed him in the end.
She wiped her hands on her trousers and walked into the warm sea to get the blood and shit off.
“You lost her?” the chief barber asked. She was a Kyprananoki woman the color of sparrow plumage, her patient warm eyes offsetting a fierce hooked nose. She had first-stage symptoms.
“I lost her,” Juris said.
“Banuile is still alive.” The water rose, slapped against them, receded. “She lost the baby but she’s strong.”
They had accepted Juris at the mother’s ward because she was competent and not yet sick. She cleaned up diarrhea and sponged water into cracked bloody mouths. There was no time for her to think of anything but the rows of dying mothers on beds of bundled kelp. She was not happy, exactly. But for the first time in months she had no heart to spare for her own hurt.
“Good,” she said. “Good. I hope Banuile lives.”
“I wonder where it came from,” the barber said, for the tenth or twentieth time Juris had heard. “The Camou, maybe? Isn’t there always plague in the Camou? With all the ships that make harbor here, who can say?”
It came from the Oriati, Juris wanted to tell her. They keep it hidden somewhere. That’s why it’s called Kettling. Because it’s waiting to boil over, like hot water in a pot. And the mad duchess Unuxekome Ra would rather see you all dead than alive under our rule.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could’ve come from anywhere.”
The barber ducked into the next wave. A plume of filth came off her. “A short rest, I think. Then we’ll bring more water for Banuile.”
Yes, Juris thought. Keep trying. Keep finding wrongs, and naming them, and trying to make them right. Never stop. Even now.
“Will you tell me about Kyprananoke?” she asked the barber. “What it’s like here?”
That was when she felt the sound. It was too low to hear. It rattled her long bones and set her teeth clicking.
“A quake.” The barber frowned at the tossing trees. “That’s odd. The almanac said there’d be no quakes for twenty years.”
Juris looked north. The swarm of ships moored around Loveport was beginning to break apart, putting up canvas, catching the strengthening wind.
She looked south, wincing inside, toward el-Tsunuqba and Sulane’s wreckage.
What she saw made her laugh.
She recognized it. She knew it like a lover. It was coming at last. Coming for her.
The water hammer—
SHIR uncovers the old hatch. If there was meant to be a ladder then it is missing. She braces herself between the walls of the shaft and descends to the fuse station. She is careful to put her hands and feet in the right places, obeying the codes she memorized so many years ago. Like the tombs of the ancient Cheetah Palaces, the fuse station will kill those who do not know the way.
She expects to find sockets like dead elephant eyes, mounts where the correct levers must be fixed like huge keys and turned in the proper sequence. Pistons will drop into waiting shafts. Shir has come here to destroy the sockets. To prevent them from ever firing. She prefers the chaos of plague to this shrine of calculated sacrifice.
But the levers are in place. The sockets are turned. The timers are set.
Someone else reached this place first.
Shir goes for her knife. The woman behind her gasps explosively, releasing the breath she’s held for five minutes or more. The mechanism of her little pistol bow creaks in warning.
“I can’t miss,” Iscend Comprine says. “It’s poisoned. This isn’t a capture dose of curare. This time it’s kratom opiate and aconite.”
“Slow,” Shir says.
“But very, very certain.”
“Gaios. Lower your weapon.”
Iscend Comprine speaks right over her. “Gaios! I will not!”
“You’ve turned from your purpose. Your conditioning’s broken.”
“I have a higher purpose.”
“Is that purpose the destruction of these islands?”
“That serves my purpose. You came to do the same.”
“No. I came to stop it.” Plague can murder millions, but it cannot mean to do it, and it cannot profit from the death.
“It cannot be stopped now. Even if you shattered the mechanisms here, the fuses below are in motion.”
“You’ve killed Kyprananoke. You’ve killed them all.”
The quiet sound of parting lips: Iscend’s smile in the dark. “The moment we learned there was Kettling here I knew it had to be done. When you and I fell into the water together I knew it was time. My masters believed I was dead, so they would no longer predicate any vital actions on my presence. I was free to come set the fuse.”
Very slowly, Shir turns to look at her. “Gaios. Tell me who commands you.”
“The good of the Imperial Republic commands me.”
“Gaios! Tell me!”
“The difficult thing about being Clarified,” Iscend says, “is that you cannot disobey the paramount masters, even when they make the wrong choice, even when they cannot order you to do what must logically be done. Imagine if, ah, gaios, gaios,” she winces, “imagine if one of the paramount masters could be rendered supreme, uncontested, so that her orders would be untainted by any interest but her own. She would of course have Clarified to advise her on her interests. So the Clarified would advise her, and she would make orders, and give them to the Clarified to execute, and the circle would be closed. And it would be as if the Clarified commanded themselves.”
“And these are the commands you would give? Do you know how many people you’ve just murdered?”
“Of course I do. I also know how many I’ve saved.”
“Do you think this will greaten Baru? Is that why you did it? You want her done with Kyprananoke? Off to richer fisheries?”
“I work for the betterment of my masters. And my masters work for the betterment of the Imperial Republic.”
“She will never be yours,” Shir promises. “I will peel her brain apart at the gyres before I let you rule her.”
“I like contests,” Iscend says. “I like to win. Are you protected? Or shall I kill you now?”
“I have her parents.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Can you take the risk? She is so very fragile.”
“Go,” Iscend says. “I left myself enough time to reach Helbride. If you move quickly you might find a ship in time to survive the wave.”
“You deserve to die for this,” Shir says.
“Deserve? Aren’t you and I beyond such illusions?” Iscend’s teeth barely touch when she enunciates: the force in her jaw is so exacting. “The most conditioned, and the least?”
AMINATA took the stairs down off the sterncastle two at a time. No one paid her the slightest attention: for the first time she could remember she was one Oriati among many.
“Look north,” Shao Lune shouted after her. “North!”
Aminata saw Ascentatic and Helbride first. The frigate and the clipper were running out southeast on full spreads of canvas. The only other ship in open water was a barque with Devi-naga flags; it had already cleared the islands and turned northeast for the trade ring. The Kyprist positions on the reservoir islands had obviously collapsed. Skiffs and whaleboats were ferrying water out to the moored ships: but there were also launches and canoes full of Canaat fighters, looking to take prizes.
Iraji spidered up a shroud net. He looked up at el-Tsunuqba. His eyes opened wide.
“What?” he said.
Aminata climbed up after him.
El-Tsunuqba’s north face had turned shaggy. A cloud of ash and dust blurred the lines of the mountain, swelling into gray fruiting bodies that dropped threads of debris to the ocean. But the really confusing part, the part that turned Aminata’s brain right over, was the horizon line. The world had sorted itself wrong. The cloud of dust and the limb of el-Tsunuqba seemed to be in front of the ocean. That was wrong. There was supposed to be sky behind the mountain. It was like the ocean had turned perpendicular and climbed up toward the moon—
Her mind at last resolved the wave.
It was so preposterous that she kept trying to divide it into more sensible pieces: a squall in the distance, a dark fogbank up close, a fire upon the mountainside. But it was not a fogbank or a rain squall or a pall of smoke. The wave was one thing, in the ocean, of the ocean, a mass of water in unstoppable motion.
She checked the waves against ships’ masts for scale and produced a figure.
It was a four-hundred-foot mountain of water.
El-Tsunuqba’s face had avalanched into the flooded caldera, and the water displaced by the avalanche had gathered in the cup between the east and west ridgelines, fired like a bullet from an Oriati pistol. And that water had only one way to go, north, north across the shallows where the kypra islands and all the reefs waited. The wave was slumping, spreading, but oh, the speed of it—
Trees on the crest, like grains of rice.
Tau-indi Bosoka cried out hoarsely below her. “The wound!” They were laughing, weeping, tearing at their hair. “The wound is real!”
“Is it coming this way?” Iraji cried. “Is it going to hit us?”
She could not tear her eyes away. The sea everywhere, scraping at the bottom of the sky. A great godly shrug. Nothing behind it. All the ships, the houses, boardwalks and promenades, fishing buoys, locust farms and jellyfish pens, all picked up and carried, to be strewn, like seeds between fingers, across miles of open sea.
She took Iraji’s hand and showed him how to cling to the net.
THE King stood upon his high fastness and watched his whole life’s work go wrong.
His name was Atakaszir, born to the Mansion Hussacht, Necessary King of the Amustakhi Mountains and protector of the High Fells. From the peak of his mountain Karakys he could see more than a hundred miles down over Aurdwynn, over the forests and dales of Duchy Vultjag, the stony fells of Duchy Lyxaxu (he felt a weird stirring of excitement and hatred at that enemy name, that Maia name, the same kind of name as Nayauru Aia). He could see all that food and lumber and wealth, and the river Sieroch that pumped it away to the sea. The land his people had dreamt of conquering for five hundred years. The land of warm milk, olive oil, and toasted grain.
He’d tried to lead his people to that future.
But to get to the future you had to get through the present, just as you had to risk the jagged slopes to get to those warm fields below.
And the present had its strangling hand round his throat.
Directly beneath his royal overlook was the col, the saddle of naked rock that joined Mount Karakys and neighboring Camich Swiet. And down that col, down the road that passed through the terrace farms and to the famous Gate of Screams, his army marched to die.
Morning sunlight gave the column’s steel-armored brave men and long-speared phalanxes a ghostly halo. Light the color of frost. As if they were already dead.
“I am a fool,” he said, in the Iolynic that Aia had been teaching him. “We have been given the best chance we will ever have to escape the cage of our history. And we are throwing it all away, as we always do, because we cannot stop chewing at each other long enough to fucking act!”
Aia’s hand brushed his wrist. It was a brotherly touch, not something a Stakhi woman would do: warning a comrade against his own passion. “You’d be a fool if you did otherwise, Your Majesty. The army had to march before autumn, or they would’ve wintered here. Your Mansion’s stores wouldn’t have lasted two months. In the spring Hussacht would be a dead Mansion and you would be a fallen king.”
“I know,” he said.
“Politics is the art—”
“Of staying in the arena.” He sighed. She said that a lot. When it came out of her mouth—unbound by manly honor, unconstrained by the fear of procht—it made sense. He glanced at her long enough to quirk his lips in gratitude, and tried to look away before his boyish heart thrilled at the sight.
Nayauru Aia had come to his court to offer him her hand in marriage. She would give him a claim to her dead sister’s Duchy Nayauru, and he would give her the soldiers she needed to retake her home. She was not as good a match as Baru Cormorant, who might have been queen of Aurdwynn entire—but Baru Cormorant, may frost crack her spine from her body, was an oathbreaker and a living lie.
And still Baru tormented him! Even with the whole rash of her treachery revealed, she’d still sent him an emissary, this eunuch Ketly Norgraf. Norgraf had promised to return Atakaszir’s own lost brother to his house! The hubris of her! To betray him, to destroy his reign, and then to send an agent sauntering into his court as if she had done nothing wrong. It was the conduct of the worst kind of liar. A woman lost to procht, the sickly thought of schemers.
She did not have his brother Svir. It simply couldn’t be true.
He caught himself glancing back to Aia, a cad’s double take. She was no beauty, by Stakhi standards; too full, too fat, faintly obscene in a land of tall women, narrow tunnels, and starvation. She looked exactly like the kind of whore Atakaszir would have sought when he was traveling covertly in Aurdwynn. And, worse, she had none of a whore’s concern for his gaze. For a woman who wanted his hand, who had so far been frustrated in her attempts, Aia was utterly self-possessed.
It was Ketly Norgraf’s fault that he’d fallen for Aia (and here in the mountains they knew very well the dangers of falling). Norgraf had offered Atakaszir something he’d craved all his life, his brother’s return; something Ataka could not possibly accept. He’d turned to Aia for advice and confidence. She had no allegiance to Mansion or clan, no interest in tearing down his kingship or judging it Unnecessary. She and her companion, the horseman Ihuake Ro, were, as scheming foreigners, ironically the easiest for Ataka to trust. Even his suspicion that Aia and Ro were some kind of perverse Maia lovers had been assuaged by Ro’s constant absence. The unhorsed horseman was out exploring the Wintercrests, testing himself in the thin air.
So in the course of their conversations the King of the High Mansions had fallen in love with dark-haired, brown-skinned, fierce-nosed Aia.
This was not unexpected. She was the only woman in his world who was not subject to his power, and, anyway, he had always fallen quickly. But no matter how much he wanted her, he was a Stakhieczi king, and self-denial came as easily to him as thirst. Love maddened him, made him stupid—but so did starvation. And like starvation it would pass in a few months.
What was far stranger was that they had become friends. Her implicit reserve, her sense of not yet, created a barrier that Atakaszir found easy to respect: like a tunnel architect’s rules about where to cut stone and where to leave it be. When he was away from Aia he imagined her nakedness. But when he was with her, his thoughts were entirely occupied with answering hers. He found her strangeness and acuity refreshing, and her acceptance of politics as something necessary (rather than perilously close to procht) made her a better councilor than his bannermen.
“Aia,” he said, watching the army of the gathered Mansions pour down the slope, shining brave men in steel plate surrounded by their armorer boys, gray-cloaked women with ash flatbows, all the mountains’ might on their way to fail, “what else could I have done, after Baru betrayed me? She knows we’re prepared to invade. She destroyed the dukes and duchesses in Aurdwynn who could have joined us.”
He paused for breath. He had explained to Aia once that in the mountains you never interrupted a man who had stopped to breathe.
“When I heard about the disaster at Sieroch, about Baru declaring herself for Falcrest … I thought I would have the crown cut from my head. How could we invade now, with the enemy forewarned?
“But if I told the army to disband, I might as well throw myself from Karakys. I’d be dead by day’s end. To gather all those fighters here, to take them from their homes and crops, and then to send them back with nothing? I had to let them march. I had to.”
“You could have married me,” Aia said, without petulance. “Then at least you would have claim to one ally in Aurdwynn. Someone to provision your troops and open the way to the coast. The Masquerade spent the last winter killing bureaucrats, emptying granaries, and thinning out forage. That means no one to pay you tribute, no game to hunt, and no choice for the tenant farmers except to fight to hold their fields. Your army will bog down shattering village phalanxes and chasing horsemen before it even reaches the Midlands. And then I think they will do what Stakhieczi do when they are threatened.”
“Build forts on the high ground, settle in, and start fighting each other for spoils,” Ataka muttered. “And then the Masquerade will set the plague loose. And our forts will be our catacombs.”
It was the first time he had spoken these doubts aloud. To admit them to his bannermen would be to arm his Mansion Uczenith foes with rumors of a cynical, defeated king.
“Marrying you wouldn’t have changed that, Aia. You’re a duchess without land or influence. If I’d taken your hand, they’d all know I’d settled for the least I could get.”
“Better than nothing,” Aia murmured. She never allowed herself to react to the cold up here, but now Atakaszir could tell she felt the chill. “Which is what you have now.”
“I promised them the Queen of Aurdwynn as a bride! If I come before the clans with the exiled sister of a dead duchess instead—I might as well drag in a mummified goat!”
“Marry an Uczenith, then,” Aia suggested, dryly. Atakaszir laughed. The Uczenith were the worst of his enemies, as diffuse and leaderless as a cloud of gnats—they had no proper Mansion lord, Kubarycz the Iron-Browed having vanished into exile with all his heirs.
The thought of Mansion Uczenith stuck in his mind like a stone in a boot. He kicked at it a few times. It would not go.
Something was wrong. He had been waiting for something to happen and it had not happened.
“Oh, zish,” he swore, invoking unholy tetanus. He raised his spyglass to sweep the marching column for something he knew he wouldn’t find.
The Mansion Uczenith fighters marched to war with iron ingots as their banners, raised on poles of Aurdwynni redwood. It was a defiant symbol of their exiled lord’s crime—Kubarycz’s conspiracy to secretly marry an Aurdwynni duchess, unite their realms, and undermine the other Mansions.
That banner was nowhere in sight.
The Uczenith hadn’t marched with the army. Their jagata were still encamped on the lake bed outside his Mansion.
His first instinct was to halt the column and recall his own Hussacht forces to defend his home. But if he pulled his jagata it would be the death of his Mansion. Had King Atakaszir, first of his name, lost faith in the invasion? They’d all turn back, and by sundown Mansion Hussacht would be a pillaged husk.
But if he did nothing, the army of Mansion Uczenith would have free rein to squat in his court. And courts did not prosper when they were full of armies.
“Your Majesty?” Aia asked, softly. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s the Uczenith,” he said. No more needed.
He went down the spiral stairs from his high fastness, and met a man coming up. The last man in the world he had ever expected to see again.
The other man fell at once to one knee. “Your Majesty,” he murmured, and genuflected. “I am sorry for my late return.”
“Dziransi?” He caught the man by shoulders so gaunt they felt like a boy’s. “Dzir, is that you?”
In that first moment of reunion, when the man who’d been swallowed up by Baru Cormorant’s treachery raised his eyes to his king, even he did not seem sure of the answer.
“Your Majesty.” Dziransi laid his brow to the stone, his king’s stone. “I have had a vision from the hammer. I come home to you, across the sea where glaciers die, to tell you what you must do to hold your crown. You must marry Heingyl Ri, Governor of Aurdwynn. She will bring you a dowry. She will bring you Baru Cormorant, powerless and bound. Then no one will deny you are the King of Mansions, whose long arm reaches across the world to punish all betrayal. I saw it in the stars. I saw it and I came home to tell you.”
“YOU cannot do this!” The weatherwoman caught at the king’s elbow as he bent to his telescope. “You will be the king of all fools if you try to take another bride from Aurdwynn! The Masquerade governor? How could you even entertain the offer?”
Atakaszir glared at the hand on his sleeve, usurper in the place Aia had touched. The weather witch, face blasted sleek and dry by years of mountain wind, seemed to realize, all at once, what he saw in her: something old, withered, vitiated of power, like the mummy she would become when she died.
She snatched her hand back and sniffed.
“Dziransi saw it,” he told the witch. “He had a dream from the hammer. A woman with stars for eyes told him that Governor Heingyl Ri would be the bride of the mountains and save us forever from the Old Foe. The hammer struck it into him, Ochtanze! It’s all he can speak of! Somehow he escaped the Masquerade and returned to us just in time to save us from defeat. How can you explain that, if he is not hammer-marked? If the stars themselves didn’t guide him back to us?”
He bent to look into the telescope again, to search for the glitter of distant mirrors. Ochtanze slipped her hand between him and the eyepiece. “The Masquerade let him go. They know you were fool enough to believe in Baru, they know you’ll be desperate to repair your mistake, and now they think they can play you again—”
“I’m the fool? I’m the fool?” The same words he’d spoken freely to Aia infuriated him coming from the witch. “You’ve been coddling Baru’s eunuch like a stray dog, letting his lies pervert your council. You nag at me to consider his offer—but his words come straight from that scurve-hearted bitch herself! You speak from your nose, woman.” Aia had laughed at that expression, but for all Ataka’s life it had meant someone with two voices, a dissembler.
“We care for the eunuch,” Ochtanze snapped, “because he knows secrets no one else can tell us.”
“That’s procht! I told you to leave him on the summit to die!”
“Do you want that power now, Your Majesty? The power to decide who dies by exposure? Shall I bring our children before you, and make you choose who will go out on the shelf?”
That he did not want. Wanted it less than anything. The thought of it pinned him to the stone with dismay.
Ochtanze would not let go of his telescope. “Your Majesty,” she said, calmer now, retreating into that pool of age and enigma all the old weather witches seemed to possess, “I serve the Mansion Hussacht, and so I serve you. As Necessary King, as Lord of Hussacht, and as a constellation man, you must reward those who have supported you.”
“I know that,” he growled. He hated it when she made sense.
“If the Mansion lords do not receive some repayment for trusting you with the kingship, they will look to this invasion as a chance to recoup their commitments by plunder. There will be no ordered conquest of Aurdwynn. No farms. No brine. No fresh crops to ward off scurvy. It will all fail. You must show them some fruit from your kingship.”
“Even if it’s Baru’s fruit.”
“Even so.” And now the witch, as constant as the moon, would tell him once again: “You should accept Baru’s offer to return your brother. The worst she can do is fail, and you will be no worse off. Also—” She raised her eyes skyward, warning against bad weather. “If it is known that your brother is coming home, the Uczenith will hesitate to move against you. They of all Mansions know the importance of succession, having lost their noble line entirely. If they knew Svirakir might return, entitled to the crown, demanding the heads of those who murdered his brother … they would never dare harm you.”
He picked at his chapped lips, thinking. He wanted Aia. Some of his bannermen had joked that when they went to Aurdwynn they would get their own Aias, Maia women who needed things from Stakhi men, Maia women who would do anything to get it. “I’m tired of mouths raised on yak butter and mint,” Hecztechate had joked. “I want to know what pepper and cinnamon feel like!”
Ataka had snapped that Aia might one day be his wife, and did they want to speak of his wife that way? The bannermen had looked at him strangely, and said nothing, and afterward, somehow, he had felt the fool.
“Your Majesty,” Ochtanze said. She was offering him a thimble of yak butter for his lips. “Do you really believe Dzir’s dream came from the hammer?”
He looked at her sharply. “Yes. Do you?”
“If it’s true, Your Majesty, and not a Masquerade lie, then … you face a choice. Your brother is the reason you are king. The kidnapping of a Mansion prince made the clans recognize the Necessity of unity against the mask. If you return your brother … you will, in a way, have justified your entire kingship.”
Atakaszir scooped a fingertip of butter and pressed it to his lips. Somehow Baru knew. Somehow she’d found another way to torment him with false hope.…
“If,” he said, “Baru really can send him home. And won’t turn it against me, somehow.”
“Yes. But once you had him, nothing could take him away again. There would be no uncertainty in your victory. What is this alternative Dziransi offers? Somehow marry the Masquerade governor? Promise the Mansions that she will deliver Aurdwynn and an heir? And hope, hope against all sense, that the Mansions will wait patiently for years … instead of laughing this off as another trick played on a gullible king. You would have nothing to show them now. No victory for this summer.”
He looked up sharply at her. “You don’t know?”
Old Ochtanze, who chose which babies would go out into the cold to die, narrowed her eyes in warning. It was unwise to challenge a weatherwoman’s knowledge. “Know what?”
“The marriage to Heingyl Ri comes with a dowry. Dziransi has promised it. There will be no need to wait for an heir to secure my power.”
“What dowry?”
“Baru Cormorant,” he said, and had the satisfaction of the weatherwoman’s astonished gape. “Yes. She’ll be brought to me, Dziransi says, by the Governor Heingyl Ri. And then I will hang her upside down in my court, and flay her scalp from her skull, so that all her blood pours out through the soil of her thoughts. The whole world will know that to betray me is to forfeit all hope.”
IT’S been a long time since Cairdine Farrier interrupted her story.
He’s washed her hair. He’s fed her a solution that tastes mildly of mint and milk through a straw that tastes the way bleach smells.
Mostly he sits beside her, murmuring thoughtfully, as she tells him how she used her knowledge of the Cancrioth to prevent Yawa from lobotomizing her, how she moved against the protests of the other cryptarchs to destroy Kyprananoke and contain the Kettling, how she succumbed to meningitis at the vital moment when she meant to bait Eternal into following her toward Falcrest.
She’s discovered she can open her eyes into narrow, eyelash-visored slits. The straitjacket prevents her from touching her face, but she feels a cool, dry wash around her swollen eyes. Someone has been swabbing them against infection.
“Is this from meningitis?” she asks him. “Is that why I feel so strange…?”
“No, Baru.” He looks for an instant as if he is about to sob, and then, for a longer instant, as if he is about to leap up and drive a fist through the window of the morning room. “I told you. Xate Yawa did this to you.”
“But she didn’t lobotomize me … I convinced her that I was working with her.…”
He lifts the glass bottle with its reed to her lips. While she drinks the sweet, mint-flavored medicine he asks, gently, as if afraid it will upset her, “Did Tain Shir ever come back?”
“After she tried to kill me? And I hid behind Aminata?” Baru frowns intently. “I don’t remember.…”
“Never mind, Baru. She’s just a woman with a spear. She can’t do you any harm.” He strokes her brow, fingers gentle around the swelling, as if he has found in the bruise some echo of his own deep-set and inaccessible eyes. “Just tell the rest of the story as you remember it. I won’t interrupt after this—except—that story you told Yawa, about the tulpa of the duchess from Aurdwynn. Was there any truth to that?”
“No,” she says.