BARU lay side by side with Tain Hu on the sheer face of the cliff.
The world was tipped sideways so that the golden fields and green pastures of Aurdwynn’s midlands ran up and down like wet paint on a wall. Miles away, south and down, farther than any human eye should see, Treatymont’s broken towers protruded like coathooks from the Horn Harbor. Below that the Ashen Sea curved away into plunging infinity.
“I’m dreaming,” Baru said.
“Hallucinating, rather.” Tain Hu crawled out to the northern face of Mount Kijune’s summit, tipped over onto a ledge. She stuck her arms out over the abyss like she was diving and said, “Ha!”
Baru grabbed at Hu’s ankles, terrified, but this extra security just encouraged Hu to worm her torso out over the drop. “Haaa!” she shouted, waving her arms. “I’m the queen of infinity!”
“Come back,” Baru snapped, and dragged her by her ankles onto solid ground. “I need to talk to you. You’re supposed to tell me something.”
Hu rolled over grinning. “Am I?”
“Yes,” Baru said, frowning, “but I don’t remember what. Come here—”
“No, you come here—”
She ended up on Hu’s lap, facing her, knees astride her hips. Hu wore the six red slashes of her war paint, three on each cheek; nothing else of consequence. She shaved Baru’s scalp down with a straight razor. Baru watched her tongue move in concentration.
“We’ve done well, I think,” Hu said. “So far.”
“Have we?” Baru, afraid to look her in the eye, stared at her crooked nose. “Really?”
“You’ve won great victories, Baru. I swore to bring you victory. So I’m”—she smiled slyly down at her—“quite pleased, thank you.”
“Victories? Where? How?”
“On the Llosydane Islands, certainly.” Smooth, shiveringly delightful razor rasp on Baru’s skin. “I thought that went rather well.”
“Well? Well?” She tried to seize Tain Hu by the shoulders and shake her. Hu, laughing in delight, made it clear she was too strong to be moved by underfed accountants. “I bought half the Llosydane Islands and then I left them to starve! The fires Sulane started will ruin the date crop—if they don’t have dates to sell they can’t import food—Hu, I killed them!”
“Did you?” Hu’s lopsided grin crept up to delight. “Are you sure? When you were so busy trading money and dates and prostitutes on the Llosydanes, I might have … scrawled a few extra orders you failed to notice.”
“You devil!” Baru cried. “What did you do?”
“Our trick there was a currency bubble, yes?” Hu tapped her nose with the dream razor. “In an ordinary year, the Llosydanes sell dates for Masquerade money. They use that Masquerade money to import food. They can’t survive without Falcrest’s markets, yes?”
“And you,” another tap of the razor, straight edge against her brow, making Baru frown, “you wanted to get the attention of the ruling families there. So you caused a currency panic. You crashed their currency, the Sydani ring shell; you made it worthless compared to the Masquerade fiat note. Everyone with a fortune in Sydani money was suddenly a pauper by the outside world’s standards … until you offered to convert their useless fortunes into strong fiat notes.”
“Yes—I needed to talk to the ruling families, I had to learn where the Oriati fleet bought its water—” This was how she’d first met Tau-indi Bosoka, and where she’d discovered the name Abdumasi Abd. “So I made their ring shell worthless and they had to come to me to trade it for fiat notes.”
“And at the end of the crisis…?” Hu prompted.
“I left. I ran away. We burned down half their date crop in the battle and now they’re going to go broke and starve. Oh Himu!” Baru ground her knuckles into her brow, cringing in shame. “Hu, what was I doing?”
“What were we doing, you mean?” Hu rapped her on the knuckles with the flat of the razor. “You sold all your fiat notes for Sydani ring shells! You accumulated a tremendous fortune in their currency, a fortune useful only on those islands!”
“And I wasted it!”
“We did not. We left very specific instructions for the handling of that money.” Hu slid her free arm under Baru’s arms, a hug or a wrestling clinch, and went back to work on her scalp with vigor. “You may not have noticed it, but we established a trust. Our entire fortune has been locked away, under the care of a board of trustees, for a single purpose.”
“What?” Baru did not remember this at all.
Hu, razor poised at the nape of Baru’s neck, paused to frown at her. “Come on. I didn’t inherit all the brains when we were split in two. What do you think the trust is for? Where do you think your ill-gotten fortune will be spent?”
“I don’t know.…”
“Oh, don’t be petulant. It suits you when I’m allowed to punish you for it, but otherwise it’s pathetic. Think. Think. How are you going to defeat your masters in Falcrest?”
“By war, I thought … I’d have the Stakhieczi invade from the north, and the Oriati from the south.…”
The razor scraped hair from the skin above her spine. “War? Who keeps telling you there’s going to be a war?”
“Everyone! Everyone keeps saying it! Tau, Execarne, Yawa, everyone’s convinced a war’s imminent.”
“Yes, yes.” She pulled Baru’s head down, brow pressed into her shoulder. “But who really put the idea into your head? Who startled you with the idea that all your work in Aurdwynn had really been designed to lure out the Oriati who wanted war with Falcrest?”
“Wait a moment,” Baru snapped, into Hu’s armpit. “Wait. You can’t tell me that’s not true. It is true. I lured Abdumasi Abd to his doom and didn’t even realize it.”
“Fine, yes, but turn the flank on that idea, Baru. Who told you all your work had been a prelude to war? Who insisted on that framing? Who have you recently realized is a master at manipulating you by forcing his stories into your life?”
“Farrier.…” Baru breathed.
“That’s right. He’s the one who got you thinking about everything in terms of war. He led you, no matter how unwittingly, to this idea that war was the way to destroy Falcrest. Even when you reached Eternal, you thought about everything in terms of weapons, of ways to kill. Tell me, were you educated all your life in war? Have you ever been a general, a warlord?”
“No,” Baru sighed, “I was your accountant.…”
“So why do you think that you’d use war in your great work? When you’ve realized so proudly that power comes not from brute strength but from the control of the context in which strength is deployed?”
Hu rose up to get at the back of Baru’s head, the whole length of her brushing close, hard muscle and soft fat, a map of lost territory. Baru lay her ear against the warmth above Hu’s heart.
“Trade,” she realized. “My life’s mission is the use of Falcrest’s power to end Falcrest. Falcrest conquers by trade. My plan must involve trade.”
“Correct. And therefore the trust you established on the Llosydanes is for…”
“The trust is going to be used to prepare the Llosydanes for trade.”
“Correct,” Hu purred. “To prepare the Llosydanes as a way station between the Oriati Mbo and the Stakhieczi Necessity.”
The idea burst like a clove beneath her tongue. “Incredible,” she breathed, across Hu’s breast. “Let me think … Oriati commerce would land on Taranoke, and then sail north to the Llosydanes. The Sydani would buy goods and send them north in turn, to Welthony Harbor in Aurdwynn, where river traffic could move up the Inirein and the Vultsniada to Duchy Vultjag…”
“To our home,” Hu said, with satisfaction.
“Where it would be sold to the Stakhieczi. And then you could run it all in reverse! You could sell Stakhieczi goods back to the Oriati! Salt and lumber and spices north, metals and glasswork south.…”
And then reality washed down across the wound of hope. “But you couldn’t. It couldn’t work. The Welthony harbor’s not dredged. The river’s full of brigands and seine fishers. And Vultjag is…” Oh, she had failed Vultjag so terribly. “I appointed Ake special governor for Vultjag, but all I’ve done is drag her further and further away from her post. All the links in the chain north of the Llosydanes are broken.”
“So fix them.”
Baru shut her eyes and pressed against Hu’s heart. “I can’t. I don’t know how.”
“You know exactly how. The problems are all in Aurdwynn, so go to the source of power in Aurdwynn. You need an investment from the Governor to get the river and the harbor ready.”
“Governor Ri?” Baru jerked up in thought, nearly headbutting Hu in the chin. Hu, hissing, got the razor blade out of the way so fast that Baru felt only a steel whisper against the back of her head. “I always forget about Heingyl Ri—”
She remembered what else she’d forgotten.
The gray space inside her, the crown that clamped down on her thoughts, had melted away under Hu’s touch. But now, sensing hope, feeling Baru’s hands on the edge of the pit and Hu ready to lift her out, the gray lunged back:
Kyprananoke.
“Oh no,” Baru moaned.
Hu seized her by the back of the neck, did not shake her, only forced their eyes to meet. “You didn’t do that. You tried your very best.”
“It’s gone, Hu … everything’s gone … I couldn’t stop it.”
“You can’t stop everything. You certainly can’t expect to force your own idea of salvation on every people you meet. If you try to carry everyone else’s mistakes you will break, Baru.”
“But what if it wasn’t a mistake, Hu? What if I’d made the same choice … I might’ve brought down that mountain, Hu, I might’ve killed them all.…”
Hu cocked her head, golden eyes hawk-keen. “Why?”
“Because the plague would’ve spread to Taranoke.” Baru’s courage broke. She hid her face in Hu’s shoulder. She smelled of horse-leather, of grass under a high cold mountain sky. “And Aurdwynn, by the trade ships. And then to Falcrest. Is that what I want? Is that what I need to do? I didn’t take the Kettling when I could’ve … oh, Hu, if I could kill you for advantage, then shouldn’t I be able to damn myself, too? Isn’t that justice? Isn’t that right?”
“No! This whole thought is backward. It’s not what you swore to me.”
“I swore to paint you across history in the color of Falcrest’s blood!”
“You want to paint me in plague blood? I hate plague.” Hu gripped Baru’s chin with her hand, gripped Baru’s eyes with hers, so Baru dared not even blink. “What did you learn on Kyprananoke, Baru?”
“I don’t … I’m not certain…”
“Don’t let your sentences trail off. It’s unseemly for a queen. What did Kyprananoke teach you?”
Baru twisted away bitterly. “That it’s a lot easier to kill people who don’t deserve it than those who do.”
“No. No. Come on, Baru, think. What did you learn from Kyprananoke?”
She had learned how people could disembowel themselves. She had learned about the grove of smashed children, the sinkhole full of corpses, the terrible crimes committed in the name of revolution.
But the savagery and the barbarism were ultimately Falcrest’s. Falcrest had destroyed Kyprananoke’s old laws and agriculture. Falcrest had put merchants and barbers in charge, ordered them to stamp out disease, to maximize profit. Falcrest had erased Kyprananoke’s history and replaced it with a sketch of cleanliness and exploitation.
She looked back into Hu’s eyes.
“Falcrest has us hostage. When they conquer us … they disfigure us.”
“To be disfigured,” Hu warned her, “is not to be reduced. Or to be made evil. That’s an Incrastic idea.”
“No. But it is a way for them to control us. On Taranoke they released smallpox, cut off the old sea trade, and provoked fighting between plainside and harborside. In Aurdwynn they’ve wiped out the dukes and taken control of the food. On Kyprananoke they left behind a ruling class that clung so hard to power it was willing to use thirst as a weapon. They take away what we need to survive on our own, and they erase everything that tells us who we were before them. They want us to need them. If all of Falcrest began to die tomorrow…”
“The innocent would still pay a terrible price. As they did on Kyprananoke.”
“So Falcrest has to be made to … disentangle itself. To shrivel up and withdraw, and to pass its power over to those it has injured.” A question of useful butchery.
“Because if Falcrest dies like a wounded animal, snarling and biting—”
“The burden of repairing the damage would fall upon the damaged. And that’s not justice.”
“Yes, Baru,” Hu said, nicking the back of Baru’s neck, clearly on purpose, to leave a thin clean score like a tally-mark. “I think that’s right.”
“I was considering trade, wasn’t I?” Baru breathed. “No wonder I kept thinking about the wood on Eternal! And about the amount of cargo the ship could carry! If only I’d found their rutterbook, or bargained for it … Falcrest wants access to the Oriati because it can make profit off them. If I could beat them to it, if I could secure that access first, I would have control of the mightiest trade in the world.…”
“You would have control. Not Farrier. Not Hesychast. At last you remember to frame it in terms of your power, your progress. You are a cryptarch unbound! You don’t serve them!”
“Yes…” Baru gasped. “Oh Devena, how did I forget? How did they lead me so far astray?”
Hu began to change. Her face narrowed, her eyes darkened, hair fell away and blew into infinity on a silent wind. Baru giggled. “You’re turning into me.”
“You egotist. You’re so pleased with your ideas that you want to fuck yourself.”
“I do not!”
“Then explain this,” Hu-with-Baru’s face said, poking Baru in the chin.
Baru touched her face. Her nose had been broken and reset—her throat was thicker, stronger—her chin! She had Tain Hu’s chin! “Oh, I’m you!” She set about testing Tain Hu’s arms. They surpassed. “You devil, no wonder you’re always so cocky!”
Hu looked back at herself. “Damn,” she said. “I am a sight, aren’t I. Do you know what I wanted to tell you now? The last time you came and spoke to me?”
“You were going to tell me the difference between acting out Falcrest’s story, and actually obeying it.” Tain Shir had said there was no difference at all— “Please, please tell me!”
“But you know,” Hu said, smiling Baru’s narrow, curious smile, speaking in Hu’s throaty voice. “You taught me. I didn’t understand, not completely, until you exiled me from Sieroch. Then I saw how utterly you had devoted yourself to the answer.”
“But I don’t know, Hu! I call myself the liberator, the secret hope,” she spluttered at her own arrogance, “but what have I managed? What have I done for anyone? Just killed a lot of Aurdwynni and Oriati and Kyprananoki, hardly anyone from Falcrest at all, and I don’t even remember home, I never learned the holidays right, or the gods, or—”
“Shush.” Hu wiped away her tears with Baru’s smaller, finer hands. “You think too much, that’s your problem. You can think up a way to ruin anything.
“Listen, now, listen, here is the difference between serving Falcrest and pretending to serve Falcrest. It is the difference that holds whether you sacrifice a lover to your mission, or a nation: whether you kill one person out of necessity, or a hundred thousand. It is the difference between you and a monster. Are you ready?”
Baru stroked the hard frowning brows of the face Hu had borrowed from her. “Yes. Please tell me.”
“No.”
“Hu!”
“Make me.” She leaned back on her hands, smiling up at Baru: the cocked grin was Hu’s but the face was Baru’s, the body was Baru’s, and for the first time Baru-as-Hu felt the deep feline satisfaction of at last getting the brooding young savant in helpless and willing range of her hands. Oh, wretched field-general Tain Hu! She’d executed a reversal, seized Baru’s accustomed ground, forced Baru to fight on unknown and delightful territory.
Hu twisted from her waist. “Here I am. All full of secrets. Make me tell you.”
“Hu,” Baru complained, “this matters—”
“So does this! You and the women in your arms! You think this doesn’t matter as much as thrones and treasuries? You think you paint a portrait of me with your life if you ignore your heart, your hands? I couldn’t.” She touched her smaller nose, her narrow lie-corroded throat, the small groove down her abdomen where muscles lay against each other like books in a shelf. “This is what tormented me, all those days I couldn’t have you. This is what I saw. Do you see what I saw? Someone worth love?”
“I need the answer, Hu,” Baru whined. “Tell me why I’m better than Farrier—please, tell me!”
“And I need you to keep looking for the answer. I need you to chase that question until the day the whole work’s finished.” She smiled the way Baru might smile: impishly. “We are at a diplomatic impasse. Maybe you need to pursue your policy by other means.”
Baru had never been the bigger one before. It turned out to make very little difference in resisting Hu.
AFTERWARD Baru whispered, with her own lips, “I thought dreams always stopped before the good part.”
“Never dreams about me, I’m sure. I have a reputation to uphold.”
“Preening aristocratic ass.” Baru swatted her.
“Guilty on three counts.” Hu was herself again. They had entwined their borrowed flesh and come apart as themselves. “I’m sorry for embarrassing you in front of my cousin.”
“That was you? You made me…?”
“There are only so many ways to speak through the spine, Baru.”
“Ah, it’s all right.” It had been all right. “Do I have to wake up now?”
Tain Hu looked at her across her pillowed arm. For the very first time, Baru let herself remember their time together at Sieroch—not the sex, a memory which she had worn down to rags by running her fingers over it, but the quiet time afterward, when she had decided to measure every dimension of Hu’s arms and legs by prodding them and counting the little white marks left by her fingers. Hu had bruised her ass in the day’s cavalry battle, through saddle and sheepskin pad. Baru ought to have considered the logistics of battle wounds before naming Hu as her consort in sight of everyone on the Henge Hill. Wounds and exhaustion might keep a woman from fucking, and in some eyes this might be their wedding night (what else was it called when the queen named her consort?). It was bad luck to sleep apart on your wedding night.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Hu whispered. “You must wake up. If you don’t, I’m afraid you’ll die.”
“Why? What’s wrong with me?”
“Something touched your brain, kuye lam. Through that hole in your skull. You have meningitis.”
“Oh. Yes.” Baru yawned. Hu covered her mouth and Baru nipped at her palm. “Please, kuye lam, before I go. If you won’t tell me why I’m right to do it, at least tell me what I have to do.”
“You already know. Trade is your weapon.”
“But that’s not a specific plan, Hu. I’ve got this ship full of Cancrioth, I’ve got Yawa and her plans to send me to the Stakhieczi king, I’m supposed to destroy Yawa for the Reckoning of Ways but I don’t want to … somehow I’ve got to put all this together with the notion of trade so I can get out of this victorious. So please, just tell me—”
“It’s not good security.” Hu rolled on her back and stretched. She was one golden-brown coil of power from toe to fingertip; she was a catamount. Baru, intellectually calibrated and mentally awakened to the highest planes of aesthetic and philosophical appreciation, stared at her tits.
“Oh, fine.” Hu smirked at Baru. “The plan has never changed. You’ve known exactly what to do to defeat Farrier and Falcrest since the moment I drowned at the Elided Keep. I don’t mean that in some abstract sense. You have stated, quite clearly, exactly what you plan to do.”
“No, I really haven’t!”
Tain Hu reached over to tap her lips. “Hush. Hush. Your Majesty, my lord, you know your plan. You spoke it as I died. I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.”
“That’s just tough talk—it’s not policy—”
Tain Hu lowered her eyes, offering respectful council to her queen. “Yes, it is, my lord. You were quite specific. First, you will write my name in the ruin of them. My name will be recorded in Falcrest’s destruction. My name will play a central role.”
“Tain Hu?”
“I have another name.”
Vultjag, of course. The little duchy in the woods. How could tiny Vultjag bring down Falcrest? Would the Stakhieczi invade through Duchy Vultjag? Would someone from Vultjag—perhaps Ake Sentiamut—lead a vital rebellion?
No. This was the wrong way to think about it. Whatever her plan might be, it would proceed from her strengths. Armies, fleets, and diseases were not the center of her strength. Money was the center of her strength.
But Vultjag was so poor, so far from the center of the trade circle, that it could not possibly be a financial player—unless—
“The trade route,” she breathed. “That’s why I said I’d paint you across history in the color of Falcrest’s blood.” On the night she’d slept with Hu she had seen the Empire Itself in her dreams. She had seen the sea become steel and porcelain, a web of roads and plumbing, circulating the empire’s blood from Taranoke to far Falcrest … and in that blood there had run currents of molten gold.
“Money. Money is the empire’s blood.” She frowned. “But there was regular blood, too. What does that mean?”
Hu stroked the skin between Baru’s eyes, smoothing out her frown. “Do you really think a proper Incrastic hygienist would agree that there’s such a thing as ‘regular blood’?”
“The blood of each race is of a distinct character … the races have distinct and specialized uses!”
“Correct. That is the cornerstone of Incrastic eugenics.” Hu slipped a hand behind Baru’s head, fingers digging into the muscle of her shoulders. “How could you paint me, an Aurdwynni duchess, in molten gold and Incrastic blood? How could Vultjag’s name be linked to Falcrest’s downfall in those specific colors?”
It was a very simple riddle. “I would need to use the flow of money and of blood, namely Falcresti’s trade and their programs of eugenics, to record your name as a duchess … but that doesn’t make any sense. Even if Vultjag was important to trade, I don’t see how you would ever be central to Incrastic eugenics.”
“What if your status as my consort is involved? You are, in a sense, the inheritor of the line of Vultjag.”
“But Falcrest doesn’t have aristocracy. The line of Vultjag could never hold an aristocratic seat in a republic where the only elite are merchants, politicians, and philosophers.…”
“There is one aristocrat,” Hu said. “One whose power you already wield.”
Baru turned the thought over in her mind. Then she laughed in wonder.
“I’m a genius,” she said. “It’s that simple.”
“Yes,” Hu sighed. “To my constant bewilderment, you really are.”
She leaned over, put her warm lips on Baru’s, and exhaled.
HELBRIDE sailed north and east on a gentle following sea.
It was the worst case of meningitis Yawa had ever seen, she told Baru between spoonfuls of oat mush. But it was also the worst she had ever seen anyone survive. “How you screamed and screamed, Agonist. Quite the lungs on you.”
“I picked a good name,” Barhu croaked. “It invites pain, and survives it.”
“Ai!” Yawa slapped her wrist. “Don’t say that. Something will hear you and make it true.”
“Magical thinking, Jurispotence?”
Yawa hid her smile behind her breath mask.
Four times a day Barhu received visits from the woman who had saved her life. Iscend Comprine wore a cotton surgeon’s smock over baggy sailor’s slops and she made it look like high Heighclare fashion. She cleaned Barhu’s bedsores, fed her spicy soup that made her sneeze and cry, and read poetry that convinced even the ship’s angry seagull to cock its head and listen.
Barhu studied her in consternation. Iscend had come back from the dark water of el-Tsunuqba utterly unchanged: her calm medial-folded eyes, mountain-fox cheekbones, the lithe (yes, lithe, here if anywhere Baru felt the word belonged) poised armature of her body. Like a dancer executing the choreography of her entire life.
“What did you do?” she finally asked Iscend. “How did you cure me?”
“Oh, I can hardly take credit. And it was only a treatment, not a cure. The Metademe’s test panels discovered that certain Oriati honeys serve as powerful anti-infectives. I found one of those honeys among the supplies we took off Cheetah. A vintage called Zawam Asu Southern Tea-Myrtle.”
Cheetah made her think of Tau. “You fed me honey?”
“I diluted the honey in distilled water, luxated your right eyeball, and trickled the solution through the punctured bone into the inflamed tissues behind. After aggressive irrigation of the wounded area, you began to improve.” She lay a concerned hand on Barhu’s wrist. “When you went into convulsions, I was afraid I’d killed you.”
“Don’t try to take the credit,” Yawa growled. She was in her plain linen peasant’s dress, hands chafed and cracked from too much soap, sorting through the detritus beside Barhu’s hammock: a glass chemistry set, a bladder for tsusenshan or opiate smoke, a dry sponge. “It was the meningitis that would’ve killed her.”
Iscend, undeterred: “The treatment will make an intriguing monograph!”
“Yawa,” Barhu croaked. “How’s the ship?”
“Well enough, I suppose. Captain Nullsin’s frigate is escorting us northeast, back to the trade ring. Svir’s lonely and snippy.”
“Where is everyone? I remember it more crowded.…”
“We had to transfer the Oriati from Cheetah over to Ascentatic. They kept demanding to know what happened to Tau-indi. It broke Faham’s heart to lie to them.”
“Kyprananoke?” Barhu asked, quietly.
“It’s all gone,” Xate Yawa said, as she sorted the glassware, clean and dirty, thick and delicate, light safe and dark stored.
Well. Well. That was an intractable, a fact. Barhu couldn’t alter it. There was no sense chewing on it like a dog with pika, cutting her teeth on the broken stone. No sense. The jellyfish pens and the cricket farms and the coconut groves and the bright blue lagoons, the Canaat who wanted their freedom and the Canaat who had gone mad to gain it, the orange-gloved Kyprists and their jealous reservoirs, all gone together.
Yawa lay a polishing cloth over the surgical lenses. Her long slim fingers trembled faintly. “Baru, Svir and I agreed … it had to be done. The mathematics were clear. But we never gave the order. She,” looking to Iscend, who did not react, “set the fuses herself.”
Of course it had been Iscend to execute the decision. Who else would act so swiftly and fecklessly in service of the Republic? In a sense there had been no decision at all. Iscend was the hand by which the power of Falcrest had reached out and pulled that mountain down. She had acted in service of the Throne. In the Throne’s eyes she was blameless. And it was through the Throne’s eyes that she regarded herself.
“So be it,” Barhu said, resolving to accept what could not be changed, but to never, ever forget it. She had her course. Now she would sail it to its end. “Tell me, please—where’s the Cancrioth? Where’s Eternal?”
“TWO more,” Aminata muttered. “Let them pass.”
She pushed Iraji back into the shadow of the ballast block. Eternal’s bilge was a pond of ankle-deep water that sloshed around monumental bricks of quarried basalt. Aminata figured they were dampers, installed here to keep the ship from swaying in rough seas. You could hide down here, if you were desperate.
Feet splashed past. Aminata held her breath, and held Iraji, and hoped that he could hold his breath as long as she.
They had been in the dark. Navigating by touch, sneaking abovedecks only to steal freshwater, sleeping on the narrow wooden platforms that had once stored water casks. Eight days ago the Brain’s faction had seized the ship. Aminata had only just worked up the courage to approach Iraji again, asking him to show her a domed planetarium, where pinpricks of glowing green paint mapped out constellations she didn’t know. Tau’s warning had kept her away from him: Iraji was one of them, bred to host this ancient Oriati taint. But she noticed, anyway, how his arms and shoulders glistened with sweat in the half-dark of the lantern, how his lean hips curved into an ass like that. And at the same moment as she ogled him, in maybe the same exact watching part of her mind, she noted Eternal’s every groan and sway, imputing her dimensions, her armament, the strength of her crew.
The coup had struck while they were in the planetarium. The Brain’s people cordoned off the foreigners’ staterooms with Tau, Osa, and Shao Lune inside. The Eye’s entire faction was rounded up into the deckhouse; some were given parole to help sail and repair the ship, and the provision of food and water to the rest was conditioned on the parolees’ good behavior.
The Brain, born to the signs of eclipse and burning whirlwind, had taken Eternal. Now she was making it ready for war.
Aminata figured it was inevitable. The Cancrioth crew had nearly seen their ship destroyed by one Falcresti frigate; days later they’d seen Falcrest drown an entire nation. When people were threatened, they closed up their hands into fists. It had happened on Eternal like it would happen in Falcrest. After that first moment of terror, when the enemy’s power became apparent, the war faction became almost overnight the common-sense default. After that it was only a matter of time before they did what all war factions do: expunge foreign influence, arrest sympathizers, and prepare a first strike.
She figured they were sailing northeast, for Isla Cauteria. Where else? They didn’t have the water for a long crossing south, to the northern Oriati coast and the trade winds that would bring them west and home. If they tried to cut southwest across the Kraken Still, past Taranoke to Segu Mbo and access to the Black Tea Ocean, they would die in the Still’s bad winds and wandering maelstroms. And a breakout to the southeast, through the Tide Column and out to the Mother of Storms, then a long journey south along Devi-naga Mbo and around the horn of Zawam Asu, would be purest suicide. They would never make it through the Tide Column, never mind the perils of Cape Zero.
There was a torpedo wound in the ship’s prow, a bleeding hole too large to repair with scrub timber from any passing island. They needed a proper yard and good trees. They needed what Isla Cauteria could offer.
The Brain was going to attack. And if that destroyed her, and her ship, and any chance of peace, then all the better. The way Iraji explained it, the Brain feared peace with Falcrest much more than she feared death.
“There are more of her,” Iraji told her, “all over the world. Part of the same Line. She doesn’t see herself as someone who can die. She’s like a memory, Aminata. If one person who remembers her dies, the memory will go on in the others. It’s the same for all the lines. Even Undionash, the line I’m meant for.…” He had wavered for a moment. “But Undionash is precious. There are very few hosts left.”
Now, in the darkness, the searching footsteps passed away. Aminata’s fingers found the bundle of tendons and nerves beneath Iraji’s wrist.
“They built their ship too big,” he whispered. She filled in his grin from memory.
“Yeah,” Aminata muttered, while the part of her that was and always would be a navy sailor chewed on this. What was this ship built for? There were no locks on most of the doors. No organized marine detachment or posted guards. She’d heard pistol discharges during the coup, and shouts of fury and surprise … but there had been no cries of agony afterward, no surgical screams, no wet pleas from the dying.
Maybe the pistols were loaded only to frighten. Maybe life was sacred aboard Eternal, and so they didn’t hurt each other, not even in the extremes of their wrath. Not even with the whole ship out of water and dehydrated to the edge of white death.
“Iraji,” she muttered. “There’s something that’s been on my mind.”
“Is it me?” he murmured.
It was not even innuendo: he had been willing to talk about his past more openly. In these furtive days her casual lust had softened into fondness, and trust, and a sort of awkwardly racialized camaraderie. In Falcrest’s eyes, she and Iraji shared a single Oriati body, scrutinized for its beauty and sexuality, condemned for its indulgence and its melancholia.
“It’s about Baru. Tau said that she was…” She swallowed. Repeating the words of a Federal Prince felt obscene. “Tau said that Baru was trying to destroy the Republic. Is that true?”
“What would you do if it were?” Iraji whispered back.
“I swore an oath to defend Falcrest. If she means us harm, I … I made a terrible mistake helping her. If she means us harm, Ormsment was right.…”
Iraji made a thoughtful sound. “How much could Falcrest change before you considered it destroyed?”
“What?”
“If Baru’s purpose is to change Falcrest, is that the same as—”
“Iraji?”
A voice called in the dark, echoing among the towering ballast stones, splitting and rejoining: “Iraji? Miss Aminata? You’re down here, aren’t you?”
“It’s Tau!” Iraji gasped. “That’s the Prince!”
“Miss Aminata,” Tau-indi Bosoka called, “there’s a man here who says he’ll shoot me in the gut if you don’t come out. His name is Scheme-Colonel Masako. He says that if you aren’t moved by my slow death, he will have to use Cancrioth magic to draw Iraji out. He doesn’t want to do that. But he will.”
“We have to go to them,” Iraji gasped.
“What?” Aminata whispered. “Why? It’s not real. There’s no magic. They can’t do anything to you.”
“Tau-indi is important. We can’t let Tau-indi die.”
“If this is some trim bullshit,” Aminata hissed, “something about Baru and Tau and spells and all that—”
“It’s not that,” Iraji insisted, “well, it is, but not only that. Tau knows something. I’m sure of it. Every member of the Throne has a secret—Tau might know—and the Eye said Tau was important!”
“The Eye’s just a gardener, Iraji. He doesn’t know anything.”
“Iraji,” Tau-indi called from above. “I need you. I need your help. Please come out.”
Iraji tried to take a step. Aminata tried to pull him back. They struggled for a moment. His foot came down too hard and made a splash.
“Shit,” Aminata hissed.
For a moment there was nothing in the ballast hold except the quiet echo of that splash.
And then that echo multiplied, returned as the sound of footsteps, closing in from all around.