ONCE more Bebble Auranic had sunburnt his balls.
It was uncouth for anyone’s name to align with their profession; that carried the suggestion of inherited class. But Bebble Auranic often felt that he had perhaps overcompensated away from the family goldsmithing business by becoming a fisherman.
Astride his catamaran yesterday, he’d forgotten the sun’s reflection off the water, and so burnt the underdangle of his tangle. It had been so sweaty in his linens. Could he be blamed for letting his fruit drop now and then? Everyone in the guild had laughed at him, and he deserved it, he was a damn fool; ten more points on his service exam, he could’ve scored ten more points and escaped the lifelong brand of an oars-mark on his jacket, limited capabilities, restricted responsibility. He could’ve been a maker of unguents. A pharmacist! A—
Something bumped the stern of his catamaran.
Bebble turned. The distant shore and the buildings of Cautery Plat wavered in heat haze.
A whale cruised a circle round his little boat. Water poured off a dark scarred back that curved up to a fin like a great tooth. Sweet virtues, it was an orca! An orca in the Ashen Sea! It must have come up along the Segu coast in the west, through the islands, out of the Black Tea Ocean where no one of Bebble’s race had ever been and returned—
The orca flicked a spray of water across the stern, drenching his lunch of hard bread and smoked fish. Bebble didn’t care. Bebble had just lost his appetite.
The orca’s fin had a blade edge. A cutting surface. Collared there by some strange armsman who ministered to whales.
The whale blew a gout of water through its blowhole and whistled like an elephant miscarriage’s last breath. Bebble screamed. He screamed at the sound and he screamed at the human skull calcified into the huge bony tumor that stared eternally backward into the tumble of the orca’s passage.
The orca curved back toward him. Its eye fixed on him. Its jaw yawned. It had white laughing teeth.
ANNALILA Fortress was invincible.
Annalila Fortress had fallen.
Stripes of black and red dye slashed the white cliffs to confuse the aim of distant siege engines. Hwacha batteries bristled from fortified promontories. Rust-flecked pendulum chains and tanks of vilest acid awaited the call to repel assaulters. Cave harbors guarded squadrons of boats. Annalila Point was not just a weapon but a home of weapons, a place like a beehive, generating and sustaining instruments of hurt.
And yet, without any attack, without even a whimper of resistance, she had fallen. Parliament had cursed this fortress with powerful magic. Barhu could see it even from Ascentatic’s launch, where she rode beside Captain Nullsin. The signal flags abandoned mid-code, the sentry posts where noon light flashed off unwatched telescopes. Sea gates lowered and barred. A lonely officer patrolled the western bluffs, armed with nothing but a spyglass and a rocket pistol as a panic signal.
“She’s sequestered her books,” Barhu murmured to the man beside her. News of Parliament’s fiscal strike against the navy had come in with the mail packets to Ascentatic. “Put all her crew on unpaid leave. They must be in barracks?”
Captain Nullsin nodded quietly. “For now. Probably drunk as rats on watered rum. Payday was yesterday, and Maroyad would’ve had to give them something to keep them calm when they didn’t get their wages.”
“I thought the navy held a season’s pay in arrears, to discourage desertion?” The navy’s officer corps was professional and disciplined, but navy sailors were as greedy, miserable, and prone to desertion as any fighting crew. A hold had to be maintained.
“We do. But that doesn’t mean there’s three months’ pay actually sitting in the vaults. It just means they collect spring’s pay in summer, summer’s pay in autumn, and so forth.” Nullsin tapped his hammer anxiously against his right wrist. “Maroyad knows half her sailors will hop down to the harbor and sign up on a merchant, given a chance. Merchant pay’s always better, since Parliament won’t let us raise our wages. So she keeps them drunk.”
“Baru,” Yawa murmured, in Iolynic, “if Eternal realizes the island is undefended…”
“We can make a show of force when Eternal arrives. That’s all we need. A convincing show of force, to deter attack.”
And if it was not convincing, the Brain would realize she could walk ashore with buckets of Kettling blood and start bathing the children.
Two marine officers (Barhu was amused to spy the insignia of a company captain and a lieutenant commander, doing work that would normally be left to able sailors) hauled open the sea gate to admit them. “Rear Admiral Maroyad’s compliments, Your Excellences, Captain Nullsin,” the captain said. “Please come with us.”
“CAPTAIN Nullsin. Report.”
Rear Admiral Samne Maroyad rose through a cloud of mint-cigarette smoke. Barhu’s first impressions were of a pale brown bastè ana woman in navy reds, long of body but short of limb. There was a thin place at the collar of her uniform where she’d rubbed her admiral’s insignia against the fabric. Otherwise she was immaculate.
This was the woman who’d sent Aminata to find Barhu.
Captain Asmee Nullsin saluted with his good hand. “Mam. It is my sworn duty to introduce the Emperor’s own enmasqued representatives Durance and Agonist. As a servant of the Republic and its people, I have, wherever possible, done my utmost to obey both your lawful orders and the Hierarchic Qualm. But where they conflicted, I—”
“Spare me the legalist bullshit, Asmee.” Maroyad’s eyes flicked between Barhu and Yawa. “I see your mission was compromised. Lieutenant Commander Aminata would be here if it was at all possible, so she’s wounded, or under arrest, or…”
“Missing,” Barhu said, with an uncaring hardness she had to falsify. “Presumed dead. She gave her life to destroy Juris Ormsment.”
Maroyad looked at them across the pine barrier of her desk. Through the windows behind her a swarm of fishing felucca filed out of Cautery Plat harbor, unaware of cholera and cancer, innocent of what the wind brought close.
Barhu watched Maroyad pack up all her hopes and ambitions, stow them away, and make herself ready for the worst. Make a fire list, the teachers in school had told Barhu. The things you must save when you smell smoke.
Maroyad tapped her desk with one forefinger. “I heard that Ormsment had abandoned her post in Aurdwynn. She’s dead?”
“Yes.” Barhu’s blue-tinged polestar mask helped her keep the confidence in her tone: Kimbune had brought it from Eternal, bless her. “Though not before she murdered several hundred Imperial Advisory staff, sacked a Morrow Ministry station, destroyed Oriati diplomatic escorts in battle, and knowingly attacked a vessel with the Oriati ambassador aboard. A matter of significant concern to the Emperor, as you can imagine.”
Yawa leaned corvine on the back of a chair. “Paramount concern. The Emperor Itself has taken personal interest.” It did not take a personal interest in anything, being a lobotomite straitjacketed to a marble throne, but that made no difference. The power was in the Throne behind the throne.
Maroyad stared into the clamshell ashtray on her desk. “Asmee, precisely what happened to Lieutenant Commander Aminata?”
“She died on Sulane, mam. She went aboard to … to be sure it had to be done. When she failed to convince Province Admiral Ormsment to stand down, she begged me to fire on her. And I complied.”
His voice wanted forgiveness. His face said he would never accept it.
Maroyad nodded tightly. “I see. She was an extremely promising officer. I will make personally certain that she receives Parliament’s notice.”
“Difficult to do.” Yawa’s machinated rasp, air blown through ticking gears, made Maroyad grimace. “How can Parliament take notice of circumstances the navy can never admit? ‘Brevet-Captain Aminata persuaded the navy to murder its own flag-ranked traitor.’ That’ll make for a difficult commendation, don’t you think?”
Maroyad flicked her chin to the door. “Asmee. You’re dismissed.” She waited for the door to click shut behind him. “Lock it.”
Barhu turned the steel key. Tiny complicated things happened inside the door. Yawa, ghost-slow in her quarantine gown, descended upon one of the chairs. Buttresses and ribs creaked as she sat.
Maroyad folded her hands on the desk and composed her face. “I have no knowledge of any seditious, mutinous, or provocative acts conducted by officers of the navy.”
“Of course you don’t,” Yawa said. They had agreed she would take the harsher tack. “You were never in contact with Juris Ormsment about her intention to mutiny. You did not conceal a vitally important prisoner from Parliament and the Republic. And you were certainly never in communication about this prisoner with Province Admiral Falcrest, Ahanna Croftare. Making her complicit in your conspiracy to conceal facts material to the Imperial Republic’s safety. None of those things happened, hm?”
“I have no information to contribute to these accusations, whether by admission or by omission.”
Barhu slid her chair closer to the admiral’s desk. “Rear Admiral, please. We know you have Abdumasi Abd. We know you warned Juris Ormsment about my role in provoking the Oriati attack on Aurdwynn. We even know you urged her not to move against me.”
Maroyad stiffened. “Move against you? You’re Baru Cormorant?”
Barhu nodded silently.
“You little fuck,” Maroyad hissed. “You drove her to mutiny. And now you’ve killed her, too?”
“Your own loyal sailors killed her. Captain Nullsin and Lieutenant Commander Aminata did their duty to the navy and to the Empire.”
“Oh, I’m sure they thought they were doing the right thing. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? You make us believe we have a duty to die for you.”
Maroyad began to rise from her chair. Yawa tapped her finger threateningly, as if she wore a judge’s steel-tipped gauntlet, but Maroyad did not stop.
“What did you tell Aminata? That she had to die to protect the Republic? Or was it blackmail? Did you have some sealed file on her, a bribe she took, a man she shouldn’t have fucked?” Arctic voice, cold as wind through frozen sails, tearing at iced-up spars. “You’ve been baiting the Oriati toward open war since last autumn. Enticing them to strike Aurdwynn. And for what? So you could tell Parliament they were conspiring against us? ‘War, Parliamins’”—she was baying now, like a preacher or a wolf—“‘war is the only balm for this burn on our dignity. There’s timber to be taken, and mines to be dug, and great reserves of gold, and new crops to be found. Cheap labor, and untouched reserves of culture, and babies, so many babies, to clean and render hygienic! We’ll force our way through Segu Mbo to the Black Tea Ocean and all the islands of spice and platinum beyond! And on that note, we’d better be sure we have the right admirals commanding our ships—agreeable, constructively minded men, men with stakes in the proper concerns, who know how to send the plunder to the right purses—’”
“There’s a Cancrioth ship on its way to Isla Cauteria,” Barhu said.
Maroyad sank hard back into her chair. It was like watching Iraji pass into syncope, except the thing about to obliterate Maroyad’s consciousness was not faint but rage.
“What ship,” she said.
Barhu did not need to explain herself. “We believe that they will negotiate for the return of Abdumasi Abd, who is a member of their secret society. That gives us a chance to reach a broader agreement, one which might avert war entirely. It would entail new trade relations with the Oriati: concessions from their markets to convince Falcrest that war is less profitable than peace. That would be in the navy’s interest, would it not?”
“What fucking ship? How soon?”
“They’ll be arriving tomorrow. Unless they put up more sail, risk a night approach in waters they don’t know. Then perhaps tonight.”
“Fuck,” Maroyad said. “Fuck!” She snatched up the clamshell ashtray from her desk and hurled it at the abstract paintings of sailing ships on the wall beside Yawa. It ricocheted and did not break. “You bring this to me when Parliament’s just castrated my command—those worm-shit fucks!”
The ashtray rattled on the floor, turning around some unsustainable axis, and collapsed. Yawa’s breath ticked in and out through the voice changer.
“Parliament—” Maroyad smoothed her palms on her desk. “Parliament has rendered the navy insolvent. I have operating reserves, but if I expend them, my sailors will know I can’t make good on their back pay. They’ll desert.”
“Leave the money to us,” Barhu said. “We have accounts to draw upon.”
“Is the Cancrioth ship a threat to my island?”
“It’s not your concern, Rear Admiral.”
“It’s my only fucking concern! It’s what I exist for! This is home territory of the Imperial Republic! Will they attack us as they attacked Aurdwynn?”
“That judgment no longer belongs to you.” Barhu wished she would not shout so loud. “You will obey the Emperor’s edict. We have determined that the Cancrioth ship will be granted harbor.”
“And if I don’t obey?”
Yawa leaned forward as if bending to study carrion. “We will use the evidence available to us to implicate both you and Ahanna Croftare in Ormsment’s crimes. You will face charges of permissive mutiny, grand treason by omission, conspiracy, and material aid to an enemy of the Republic. The investigation will taint every woman who belongs to the so-called ‘Merit Admirals.’ Your entire faction in the Admiralty will be purged.”
Maroyad looked as if she might yet clamber over her desk to slit their throats. But she knew her duty.
“I seem to be in your power,” she said, with bitter calm. “You will find, however, that there are principles I will not compromise.”
“We understand,” Barhu said. “You should know, Rear Admiral, that we never asked your officers to compromise themselves, either. When Aminata made her choice, she did it by her own free will.”
“Don’t matronize me. I don’t give a shit what kind of nostrums you’ve boiled up to soothe me. If you had a single short cunt-hair of moral character, you’d be here asking me for my help, not blackmailing me into it.” She fell back into her chair. “Tell me about the Cancrioth ship. No. Wait. I’ll get that from Nullsin, who actually understands ships. Are you serious about bringing them across the Caul for negotiations? What could you possibly negotiate with these … things?”
“You don’t really want to know, do you?” Barhu reminded her, calm and smooth as porcelain.
“No. I suppose I don’t.” Maroyad stared down at her white clenched knuckles. “This won’t go away, will it? The blackmail. You’ll keep on me as long as I’m useful. So I want you to know, right now, that if you continue to push me—”
Yawa laughed. It came out as a blast of tangled steel. “You should consider yourself lucky. We can trust you now, Maroyad. We can trust Ahanna Croftare. Because we have a hold on you. There’s an Empire Admiralty in her future, and a Province Admiralty in yours.”
“Milk from snakes,” Maroyad murmured.
“Oh, don’t play innocent,” Yawa snapped. “You made your choices. No one forced you to conceal Abd, lie to Parliament, and keep silent about what you knew Ormsment might do. Hundreds of people are dead because of her. You could’ve stopped it.”
Maroyad smiled briskly at her. “I’m sure we can spend all day arguing over the moral weather gage here. I just hope you know what becomes of politicians who think they make fine military leaders. I’ll have freedom to choose my own tactics, I hope?”
“Certainly. Although I strongly suggest you put a torchship alongside Eternal when she moors. They’ll respect that threat.” Barhu rose from the chair, careful to turn right so that she would not blindside Maroyad.
“An entire torchship? Do you know how many frigates we could sail for the cost of—”
“Believe me,” Barhu said. “When you see Eternal, you’ll understand.”
“When this goes wrong,” Maroyad said, “I know I’ll be blamed. It’s not a coincidence that you chose a bastè ana admiral to blackmail, is it? Any more than it’s a coincidence the Emperor chose foreigners—and you are both foreigners, I suspect—to execute this little intrigue. We’re all easier to scapegoat.”
“Then let’s not do anything worth scapegoating, shall we?” Yawa rasped.
“Fine.” Maroyad puffed her cheeks and blew: that universal fuck me gesture. “Well. Consider me swayed by political authority. Now, if you’ll make yourselves scarce, I have a ball to cancel.”
“Wait!” Barhu put her maimed hand out. “What ball?”
“Didn’t you see the bunting on your way in?” Maroyad pushed a schedule book across the desk, ragged with inserts and amendments. “Her Excellence Heingyl Ri is hosting the Governor’s Ball tonight, in my Arsenal Ballroom, with half the island in attendance. I was going to panhandle for donations to keep the harbor patrol running. But if the island’s in danger of attack, then I can’t very well hold a social function—”
“You won’t cancel it.” Barhu thought very quickly. Eternal would not be here until tomorrow; they had opened the distance on the approach to Cauteria, and she still had a torpedo wound in her hull. The ball was too good an opportunity to pass up. “Yes. The ball will go forward, and you’ll make only one change.”
Maroyad glared at her. “What now?”
“Tell Governor Ri she’s been supplanted. Announce that Her Excellence Agonist, victorious in Aurdwynn, will be the guest of honor.”
Barhu had a proposal to make.
“I’M so thirsty,” Osa groaned. “I’d peel the rest of my face off for a drink.”
“I thought you were a miserere,” Aminata said.
“What’s a miserere?”
“Little daggers they used in Old Falcrest to mercy kill the survivors of royal torture. I think.”
“I’m not a little dagger.”
“It’s figurative, Osa. For people who think life is about enduring pain.”
“I suppose I think that,” Osa said, “except I like to complain, too. Knife now.”
Very carefully, Aminata passed Shao Lune’s sharpened haircomb down to Osa. There would be no retrieving it if it fell. Nothing beneath them except the bumpy white tongue of Eternal’s wake.
She and Osa had climbed down the stern of the ship from the windows of their prison. Not ten feet below them, where the hull cut away to make room for Eternal’s mighty rudder, a fence of rusty nails jutted from the wood: hasty measure to keep divers off the hull.
The Cancrioth were not seasoned soldiers, and they were not expert prison-makers, either. Aminata had discovered that the windows of the stern sunroom could, with some trickery, be undone. Then, if you trusted your clambering skills, you could descend to the deck below, stick a knife between the rattan shutters, and saw through the piece of cord holding them closed.
This would be the first, inglorious step in retaking Eternal.
“They keep the pigs down there,” Osa said. “Tau told me that. I guess they didn’t want to waste glass windows on a pigpen.”
Now Osa wedged Shao Lune’s haircomb into the windowjamb, hammered it in with the heel of her hand, and began to saw at the rope.
“Get Iraji now,” she grunted.
“You’re sure you’ll be ready?” Was she even ready? This was all Tau-indi’s plan, especially the insane and sorcerous parts. Why was she going along with it? Because the alternative was waiting to die with everyone else aboard when Eternal attacked Isla Cauteria.
“I’ll be ready,” Osa said. “Don’t drop him.”
Aminata pulled herself back up. Iraji waited, curled acrobatically in the window. “Hi,” Aminata said, cheerfully: she liked seeing him there. “Get on.”
Last night, when the tension and the guilt of staying away from him had become too much, when she’d driven herself round like a one-oared boat wondering if Tau’s “war magic” would drive Iraji permanently mad, she had asked to see him, alone, in one of the other staterooms. Innibarish had allowed it.
She’d apologized to Iraji for avoiding him. She’d apologized for checking the cuffs and collar of her scratchy half-washed uniform instead of looking at him. Apologized for pretending that they had not hidden in Eternal’s underbelly together, both afraid for their lives. Apologized most of all for pretending that they had not become friends in the process.
Iraji had kissed her.
Aminata had made a face. “Weird,” she’d said. “That’s not what I came for.”
“I’m sorry,” he’d said, his own face rather stubbly, not at his usual sleek finest. “I thought, after all the things Tau’s been teaching me, that you might … you might think I was wrong, somehow.”
“No, not that, just—well, a little of that,” she laughed, oh, how would she explain this navy thing to Iraji, “but you and I, we went through some action together. So it’s like you’re my shipmate now.”
“And thus off limits?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” he’d said, frowning intently, except at the corner of his smiling eyes. “Well, we’d best fix that.”
And through a little laughter, and a surprising mutual comfort, they had come to hold each other, kissed each other upon neck and wrist and breast (not mouths: it seemed too sentimental), until they came together, kneeling, her legs parted across his just like she’d imagined it would be. Aminata had moved upon him quietly, warmly, looking him in the eye when she had her eyes open at all.
“You’re brave,” she’d told him. “Coming back here for Baru. Taking that poison. You’re so brave.”
“You’re brave. That ship—they said you were on Sulane when it burnt—you saved everyone here.”
And they had gone on like that, whispering praise to each other, things they might have been too abashed to say, if they were not so carnally bashed: you’re magnificent, you’re good, you will do it all so well.
Afterward, washing him off her stomach, she’d asked, “Was this some kind of … spy thing? Because you work for the red-haired man? Is this like the homme fatale in the books, where you keep me loyal by…”
“No, no.” He’d looked at her upside down, his head thrown back over the edge of the bed, arms dangling, shoulders magnificent, every cord and swell of muscle glistening with sweat. “I only meant it as … I like to give things to my friends. Are we friends?”
“Friends. Yeah. I think, uh”—she’d waved her hand between them—“we probably needed to get this out of the way.”
“Yes. I could tell.”
“I’m not sure if I’ll want to do it again.”
“That’s all right.”
She’d paused, struck by that thought. “Iraji,” she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever fucked anyone I really liked before.”
He’d beamed innocently. “First time for everything.”
ETERNAL’S bow dipped into a trough. The tall stern came up. Aminata’s stomach rose with the whole ship. In the windowsill above her, Iraji yelped and clung to the sill.
“Come down!” she called.
“I can climb after you—”
“No chance, landlubber,” Aminata said, for although Iraji was probably nimbler than her on land, he’d never been a mast-top boy. “Hup hup.”
He lowered himself by his fingertips (the showoff) until he could curl his legs around her waist and fasten his arms over her neck. “Got me?”
“You’d better hope so.” Finger by toe she carried him down to the open shutters and the pigpens. “Are you really sure you want to do this?”
“If I think about it, I might faint, and then you’d drop me.”
“Not fair.”
He dismounted, jackknifed in through the window. Aminata got her calves and thighs inside, ducked under the windowframe, and slid to the floor.
The pigs screamed at her.
They lived in the dry filth of pens left too long unwatered, their dark dehydrated urine puddled beneath sunken bellies and blue-tinged skin. They trembled. They raised their trotters like prayer or jerked on their flanks in seizure. And from their tiny heads the baneflesh grew in fat tubules, bulbs, fans, shining red-black nodules, craters and strings, films like fungus across parched membranes of destroyed scalp.
This was what Iraji would have to put in his mouth.
There are no laws of magic, Tau-indi had told Iraji. There are neither rules nor calculations. Magic is akin to the human soul, and also to the cataclysms of the deepest earth, and also to the stars. It is like the enigma which separates a dead rock from living coral. I mean, very plainly, that magic is akin to the questions we ask, not to the answers we possess.
You cannot calculate or determine what magic will do. You cannot use magic to answer a problem.
But you can use magic to ask for a solution.
And most basic of all solutions is the apotropaic spell.
Iraji found a piglet. “Knife,” he called.
Grim-faced Osa gave him the sharpened comb.
I do know this, Tau-indi had said. Those who know magic most powerfully are also those who most powerfully suffer its effect. I cannot arm you with the radiant hands of a Cancrioth sorcerer, or allow you to burn without pain. I cannot make you giant like Innibarish, or unlock the secret strength of your body so that you can run five days without rest.
But I can teach you what you must know to confront the Brain and free the Eye. I can teach you the annulment of power. What spell is more common than the ward against bad luck? The aversion of malign influence? Everywhere but Falcrest, the common farmer knows and casts this spell.
I can teach you this spell. And you, Iraji, you in particular, can make it powerful beyond denial.
Iraji began to cut at the pig’s flesh. Aminata’s gorge came up hard but she knew he had it worse. When at last he rose with the baneflesh-swollen brain of the piglet in his hand, she had to catch him and steady him. “Are you all right?”
You, child, Tau-indi said, are a powerful tutelary, by which I mean a soul associated with a place, power, or idea. You are of the Cancrioth but you removed yourself from them. Do you see?
You have associated yourself with the estrangement of their power. You faint when the idea of the Cancrioth strikes you. You collapse their power into nothing. You do it in your mind, in your brain.
But the Brain will not fear you, for you have no immortata, no power of your own.
So you must claim one. Only with flesh to fuel your magic will they respect your threat.
“I’m fine,” he said, and then fell face-forward into Osa’s arms.
“Catch it!” Osa shouted, and Aminata, crying out in disgust, lunged and got the bloody mass of brain as it slid from Iraji’s hands.
Osa clapped the boy on the back as he moaned and squirmed. “Get his feet, will you?”
My life is a joke, Aminata thought. She kept the wet brain in her fist and scooped up Iraji’s legs on her forearms, so that they could stretch the boy out horizontal and force blood to his head. He came back with a jerk that nearly pulled him free. “I’m here! I’m here. I’m sorry.” When he saw Aminata holding the pig’s tumor-riddled brain, he made a face of the sweetest guilt. “I can hold that now.”
“Can you do magic? Or will you faint?”
“Yes, just, you’d better, ah, carry me around like this. Keep my head low.”
So off they went to retake the ship, carrying Iraji like a plank, with the piglet brain cupped in his black-inked hands.
THEY went forward belowdecks.
“I remember this,” Aminata said, thinking of how Masako had brought her to see the Brain. “Next frame we need to—”
From the stairway ahead emerged a funereal procession of men and women in white robes with domed hoods like a beekeeper’s. They took one step at a time, agonizingly cautious, and between each step they stopped to readjust their footing and their distance from each other. An escort of Masako’s rapier-armed Termites followed them at a careful distance.
In the papooses slung across their chests, the white-robed people carried cylinders of brown spotted glass.
Before Aminata could bellow halt or Imperial Navy, get on the floor the nearest Termite threw up his hand in desperate warning. Everyone behind him froze.
“Death,” he said, in Aphalone, very clearly, very slowly. “Do you understand? If one of them breaks, if it gets out…”
Oh kings and queens of anguish. They were carrying plague up to the rockets. Dysentery, cholera, typhoid, buboes—it could be anything. It could be the Kettling itself. Aminata thought that she could see tiny shapes moving behind the grown glass, like dirt in turbulent water, like fleas or gnats.…
“Excuse me,” Iraji said, in soft, polite Aphalone. “In my hands I bear the baneflesh, with all its fearsome appetites. If those people carrying the glass are Cancrioth, and I think that they are, they will be very frightened to see it. They might drop something.”
The Termite looked at the brain in Iraji’s hands, at the fans and tubules of cancer grown between his fingers.
“I want no part of this,” he said. “You do your magic with the magicians. I’m bringing these vivariums up to the deck.”
“Where is the Eye, please?”
“I won’t help you.”
Iraji lifted the brain. The Termite said, quickly, “In the deckhouse, amidships.”
Afterward, Aminata muttered, “I don’t know who was more relieved to see the other go.”
“They were more afraid of us than we were of them.” Osa’s silent tears of pain sheeted her burns. “The worst they could’ve done was kill us. Our boy here could murder their souls.”
She settled Iraji’s shoulders higher in her grip. They climbed steep, narrow stairs, up into the palace deckhouse.
Here the Brain’s faction had tiled the floor and the walls with red clay tablets, covering up the patterns in the teak below. There was nothing engraved on the tablets. They were blank. Apotropaic magic, Aminata supposed.
They came to a short corridor, and a door covered entirely in tablets. The armed Termites guarding it could have been for any prisoner—but those tablets were cladding to keep the Eye trapped.
“What happens now?” Osa whispered.
“We go and open that door,” Iraji said.
“What about the guards?”
“Well,” Iraji said, shifting in Aminata’s grip, “I will have to cast a spell.”
He stuffed the piglet brain into his mouth. The worst of it, the sores and shiny blackseed spots and thick flesh tubers, protruded through his lips. He made a soft gagging noise but did not faint.
“Oh kings,” Aminata moaned.
Iraji rose from Aminata and Osa’s arms and went down the saltwater-warped floor of the deckhouse corridor toward the Eye’s cabin. He put his black-inked hands up in warning.
The guards saw him coming.
It wasn’t the first magic Aminata had ever seen. The Oriati pirates she’d fought commonly used sorcery, the sympathetic destruction of Falcresti flags and uniforms and the use of spirit circuits to hold back fire. But this was the most violent, the most sudden, the most appalling in its effect.
He screamed at them through the cancer, and when the Termites heard that wail, when they saw the moaning man coming at them with cancer in his teeth, they all began to shout and to pull at each other, a diffusion of fear, so they would all have the excuse of someone’s else tugging arms to explain the retreat. “Incrisiath!” one of them screamed. “Incrisiath! A sorcerer!”
The door to the Eye’s suite opened. The clay tablets rattled. One fell and shattered.
The Brain came out.
She looked more human than the shadow Aminata had seen. She had crow’s-feet and bruised tired eyes. Her body was wide and peasant-strong, but her feet dragged. She looked exhausted.
But she wore ancient bronze armor, and her hands dripped with fire. The green uranium power shone in the creases of her palms and ran down the web of her fingers to spill on the floor. At the sight of Iraji, her arms clenched, and the light gushed incontinent onto the deck like a dog marking.
Iraji screamed at her. Speak through it, Tau-indi had told him, speak so your voice becomes its hunger and when she hears that hunger she will feel her own immortata rise to answer it. It is the nightmare of all the onkos to be devoured by their own immortality, and for their Line to end in malignancy. Worst of all for the Brain, for her tumor is in her thoughts.
The Brain’s hands flew to her head. She fell to her knees on the clay-tablet flooring, and Aminata saw, distinctly saw, that there were tears of pain in the Brain’s eyes.
The magic worked.
At that sight she felt a cold twinge of migraine behind her own right temple. “No,” she said, out loud, “no, not me.” But she could feel it, she could feel the scream in her head.
It worked on her, too. The magic worked on her too.
Suddenly the Brain seized the first two fingers of her left hand in the fist of her right. Then she cracked the fingers straight back at the root. Aminata gasped and cringed at the sound.
The Brain held up her mangled hand and screamed in hurt. Her own pain gave her focus, and a shield against the pain Iraji sent to her. It gave the Brain will enough for words. She spoke them like a whip.
“Iraji. Son of Ira-rya e Undionash. Bow down to me.”
And what could he do? What had ever triggered his faints, if not the memory of his birth? It was the name of his mother that beat him.
He went down on his knees, too, quivering, trying to hold up his head. Spit and blood gushed out around the tumor. Aminata tried to go to him but Osa grabbed her and held her back. “Not us,” she said, with grim certainty. “It’s not for us.”
“Who is teaching you to do this, Iraji?” The Brain hid her wounded left hand behind her back, and raised the uranium star of her right against him. “Whose weapon are you?”
Iraji looked up at her with the cancer bulging between his lips.
“Spit it out,” the Brain urged. “Slacken thy jaw and spit.”
Come on, Aminata thought, do something, I don’t know what and I don’t want to know what, but do something, Iraji, don’t let her—
“Sleep,” the Brain commanded. Her burning hand swept low metronome arcs before Iraji as she used her command of thought to force an idea into him. “You are at ease. You are at rest.”
Iraji’s head fell to the clay. There was a moment when he was gone, his whole body empty, and if you had told Aminata that the cancer in his mouth was the only thinking thing in him, she would have believed it.
But his head had fallen lower than his heart. And that was enough to rouse him.
He bit down.
Brain and tumor and gore parted between his teeth and with his festering tongue protruding from his mouth he looked up at the Eye and groaned like a beast.
“I’ll eat you,” he slurred. “I’ll eat you from inside.”
She was the Brain: she was as ancient as thought. She had known her whole life the awful appetite of the baneflesh, and the power of a child who repudiated his mother. Not with all her will and all her pain could she stop herself from knowing those things.
The Brain clutched at the trepanned hatch in her scalp. Aminata saw the special nausea of a woman trying to keep a piece of herself from erupting out of her skull.
“Let us in,” Iraji slurred, as the tumor drooled out of him. There was blood and cancer on his lips. “Let us inside. Or I will swallow it.”
“You are massacring yourself!” the Brain cried. “You call that power into yourself, to eat all the eternity that is your birthright? You don’t know the price you pay!”
“I never wanted to be one of you.” Iraji rose shakily. “I deny you. I deny your power. I will open that door and nothing you have will stop me.”
There was a chance, even then, that the Brain might have refused him, and fought. One of the Termites might simply have shot Iraji. But there were people watching: the Brain’s people, her navigators and sailors, the educated folk who believed hard in her and in the terms of her power.
If a Termite dared interrupt this confrontation, then the Cancrioth would see sacrilege. And if the Brain did not yield, then her people knew, the way all believers know what they believe, that she would be struck down. Her tumor would swell up and drive her mad.
And she knew they knew it, in the way that one brain considers the knowledge of another.
“I yield,” she said. “I grant you passage.”