WATER hammer.
It smashed at Juris Ormsment. It leapt inside her, the guilt and the rage, the storm-loud scream of all the sailors she’d left to drown under Baru Cormorant’s “protection” at Welthony Harbor. She had not been a walking wound, before Baru. She had not been a thin dressing over a gushing cut. She had never considered mutiny at all.
Now here she was, many miles and many lives from her post, hunting Baru. And the water hammer was in her.
She hauled herself up the ropes onto the deck of a warship. Not her flag Sulane or her consort Scylpetaire (detached, now, for the long voyage to Taranoke, to gather Baru’s parents as hostages) but the Emperor’s own frigate RNS Ascentatic.
Ascentatic’s master-at-arms cried out “Admiral on deck!” The ship’s officers snapped to attention. The marine lieutenant struck the chime and the drummers rapped out a salute. Juris almost cried aloud with pride: to see the navy turn out its honors for her, one last time. She was sworn to murder an agent of the Emperor’s Throne, and thus in open mutiny against the lawful authority of the Emperor. She would never receive these honors again.
But Ascentatic’s company did not yet know.
The captain did. She’d made sure of that before trespassing on his ship. Ascentatic’s Asmee Nullsin offered her his good right hand. His left was a prosthetic hammer, amputated after two severed fingers went to rot. A rigging injury. Always mind the sacrifices your sailors have made, Ahanna Croftare had told her.
Juris gave him a firm shake. “Permission to come aboard?”
“Denied, mam.” He waited for the ship’s purser to record that in the log. “Shall we disembark you through the ship’s great cabin?”
“Immediately.” She returned his officers’ salutes with a pointed glance at the deck. Obediently they all looked at their toes, so that they could say, at their court-martials, that the Province Admiral had ordered them to disregard her presence.
Nullsin’s ship was in fine order. The company stood at their action stations, thick-armed men and broad-shouldered women at the lines, nimble girls aloft in the rigging, rocketry mates ready with lenses screwed into their masks at the hwachas and the big ship-killer Flying Fish rockets. Above everyone and everything towered the three masts, foremast and mainmast and aft. The mainmast alone was as tall as Ascentatic was long, built of interlocked lengths of pine, because no single tree could grow that tall and strong. A fleet of Falcresti ships in close company made the highest forest in the world.
The sails were stronger than the masts, though. If the battle frigate Ascentatic put up a full spread of canvas on a strong wind, she would sail her own masts off. The canvas would simply tear the wood apart and fly away. Pulled away from their stations to answer a higher call.
Nothing could ever be built strong enough, Juris thought. Nothing ever went untested.
THEY went inside the sterncastle, to Nullsin’s great cabin. He ordered his steward away and Juris dogged the door shut. “Is anyone listening?”
“Of course not,” Nullsin said, pouring a whiskey, one-handed, then another. “Am I suicidal? I heard from my marines that things went very badly on Haravige. Were you wounded?”
“No,” she said, which was mostly the truth. “They pronounce it Hara-Vijay, if you can hear the difference.”
“I’m a good officer, mam. Trained to listen to blunt orders. Not nuance of accent.”
“I expect you’d like some blunt orders from me?”
“I’m not sure I do, mam, after what you’ve told me.”
She nodded: an honest reply. “What about the embassy staff?” It was the navy’s duty to safeguard embassies, even the enemy’s. “And the Prince-Ambassador?”
“Most of the staff died in the fire. No sign of the Prince-Ambassador.” Nullsin grimaced. “Very bad if Tau-indi Bosoka was in there. We could be blamed, and then…”
Parliament was always looking for an excuse to decapitate the Admiralty and install its own picks. This threat was eight parts fear of what a popular admiral might do (seize the trade, declare herself empress) and two parts dislike of navy women. A bunch of tribadists and anti-mannist bitches, the men in Parliament thought. And the Merit Admirals, the navy’s professional society of old women, were the worst of the litter.
“What the fuck was Tau-indi doing here?” she wondered aloud. Juris had known her—known him—damn it, known them as a cheerful, somewhat zaftig laman who gave clever gifts. They’d presented Juris with a loose-leaf copy of the Kiet Khoiad, with chapters that could be rearranged to change the story. If every last person in the world were gathered up by the archons and offered their heart’s desire in exchange for their soul, Juris had really believed Tau-indi would be the last and most virtuous of the resisters.
Baru had turned them both. Juris to mutiny, and Tau, somehow, to Baru’s side.
People bent. You hit them hard enough and they just bent.
“I’m in open mutiny,” she told Nullsin. She would not carry out a mutiny meant to protect the navy’s good officers by lying to one of those good officers. “I’ve already killed members of the Imperial advisory staff and defied Imperial edict.”
“Queen’s stitched cunt,” he snapped, “do you have to say it? Begging”—he swallowed—“your pardon, mam.”
“Did you know before I told you?”
“We were on the Llosydanes after you. We saw the aftermath of your … pursuit there.” He closed up his crystal decanter with his good hand. “Why haven’t you caught your target?”
“Her ship is fast. She has assets to expend.” And the whims of the unfortunately necessary Aurdwynni brute Tain Shir had interfered. “She used Tau-indi’s diplomatic seals to head us off.”
Nullsin offered her one of the whiskeys. His hand was shaking, narrowly and very fast: living through a moment he knew would be questioned and interrogated with his life as the stakes. “I have orders to bring her in for questioning. Out of concern she’s part of a conspiracy to ignite open war with the Oriati.”
The whiskey tasted like a peat bog full of brine. She loved it. “Orders from who?”
“Rear Admiral Maroyad, on Isla Cauteria.” He drank, lunging at the glass, trying to cover his shaking hand with vigor. “We picked up five prisoners from Baru’s old retinue in Aurdwynn. The so-called ‘Vultjagata.’ They led us here. They also told us that you attacked the Morrow Ministry station on the Llosydanes.”
“You believed them?” she said, trying to be wry. “I’m hurt.”
“I believed the wrecks of two Oriati dromon you left behind. I did what cleanup I could before Parliament finds the mess.” He watched her carefully. “With respect, mam, what the fuck were you thinking? Gassing the Ministry station? Murdering Falcresti citizens?”
She hadn’t gassed the station, but it hardly mattered. “Do you really want to know? Do you want that information in your possession when the Parliamentary inquisition is called?”
Nullsin paced over to stare into the oil painting of Admiral Juristane’s flagship bombarding the Oriati fleet in Kutulbha harbor. The artist had captured the slick, oily Burn fire clinging to the waves, floating like grease on a pan. Nullsin drank again, grimaced, and looked back.
“Are you going to ask me to join you?”
“No.” Oh, Nullsin, of course not. He had his duty to his mission and his crew. She would not force her own unforgivable failure on him.
“I refused to let you board,” he said, watching her. “I’d be in my power to ask you to leave now.”
“You’re right. Of course”—she paused, letting him understand that she was about to leverage him, just a little—“if you send me away, we can’t cooperate to manage the situation ashore. Have you seen what they’re doing to each other?”
Nullsin shuddered.
The Kyprananoke archipelago had fallen into democlysm, the word great Iranenna (she’d read her prerevolutionary philosophers, in school at Shaheen) coined for “a chaos made of man.” Nowhere in nature could you find bloodshed like this. Years of surgical punishment and water interdict by the ruling Kyprist junta had finally flashed the islands to fire. The Canaat rebels were boiling out of the west, slaughtering their way across the archipelago with fishing spears and exotic rocket-powder pistols, shooting dead everyone who’d ever spoken a kind word about distant Falcrest. In Loveport, the acrobats’ scaffolds now dangled the bodies of orange-gloved Kyprists.
Some of the rebels were bleeding green-black blood, the telltale symptom of the hemorrhagic plague that the ancient Oriati had named, for the way it boiled up out of certain hidden reservoirs, the Kettling.
“Helbride flashed me an order an hour ago.” Nullsin showed her the scrap of paper where a tactical clerk had translated the sunflash into text. “A command from the Emperor’s agent Apparitor. Prevent any ship from departing these waters, on penalty of destruction by fire.”
Juris sneered: Apparitor was quietly understood to hold sway over the Empire Admiral Lindon Satamine, a young man from the Storm Corps who had been promoted, unfairly, over all the Admiralty’s seasoned fighting women. “Will you comply?”
“There’s Kettling here. How couldn’t I?”
“You’re right,” she decided. “That has to be your priority.”
“Good.” Nullsin drank too long, and coughed. He put the glass down on his writing blotter. “We’re right on the fulcrum here, aren’t we, Province Admiral?”
It was absurd. The state of the whole Ashen Sea balanced on them, here, right now. This plague could kill millions if it reached the mainlands. This civil war could be the first blow of an Oriati attack on Falcrest, the beginning of a war that might (if the worst predictions were true) set back civilization half a millennium.
So much depended on the next few days. They might button it all up neatly and restore the Ashen Sea to sanity. Or the plague might escape. The war might flash over. And in two months every city from Devimandi to New Kutulbha would burn as millions of plague-carrying refugees swarmed like locusts into the Occupation and the Butterveldt.
Once, long ago, the Cheetah Palaces had ruled the Ashen Sea. Their time had ended. Once, not quite so long ago, the Jellyfish Eaters had ruled the Ashen Sea. Their time had ended. Kyprananoke was all that remained of them.
Falcrest ruled the Ashen Sea today. It was genuinely possible that in a few hundred years no one would remember Falcrest at all.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, softly. “I wouldn’t want to manage this alone.”
“I’m not glad you’re here,” he said, smiling ironically. “But since you are, I’m glad you brought a damn fine warship.”
They chimed their glasses off each other, that high thin ping of glass on glass that Juris had first heard as a child, in services at the Cult of Human Reason.
The steward’s door burst open. A tall Oriati woman in a half-buttoned uniform shoved past the steward. She was big, her eyes alert, tall and well-muscled and wide-hipped, near as far opposite the Falcresti ideal of compact beauty as you could get.
“Lieutenant Commander,” Nullsin snapped, “what in the name of virtue are you doing?”
“Sir!” The Oriati woman saluted first Nullsin, then, without pause, Juris. “Lieutenant Commander Aminata, reporting.”
No one eavesdropping, eh, Nullsin? Probably he hadn’t known. But wait a moment now— “I recognize you. You were at the embassy.” Juris had seen this woman firing her flare pistol, calling in the Ascentatic marines. “You gave the order to burn the grounds, didn’t you? To contain the plague?”
“Yes, mam,” Aminata said, firmly. “I gave that order.”
“You did the right thing.” Her heart cried at that firmness, that discipline. What the navy asked of its young women. How gloriously they answered. “You did your duty.”
“Yes, mam.” A little steel glinted in her eyes: she did not need to be told her duty.
“Lieutenant Commander,” Nullsin said, warningly, “you shouldn’t be here right now.”
Aminata took a deep breath. Her eyes went to Nullsin for a moment, apologetic, and then returned, decisively, to Juris. “Mam, I want to volunteer to lead the attempt to capture Baru Cormorant.”
Nullsin groaned like he’d been stabbed. Was there something between them? No, definitely not. Aminata would use whores, and a man who fucked with officers under his command would not last long in the navy.
“Lieutenant Commander,” he said, “Baru died in that fire.”
“No, sir, she wouldn’t go into that embassy without a way out. I think I have a lead on where she’ll go next.” She recentered to perfect attention, staring at Juris. “But if we go in with a large force, we’ll spook her, mam. Just give me my two suasioners, an assault boat, and a few marines. I’ll track her down. I’ll find out the truth about her purpose. And if need be, I’ll bring her in.”
You thought she was your friend, didn’t you, Aminata. And a part of you still thinks so.
Maybe Aminata could find Baru. But if Juris involved her, she’d be doomed. Attainted as a mutineer. All her talent and dedication wasted.
Unless …
… unless they could bring home such proof to Falcrest as to justify their mutiny.
Unless they could capture Baru, and make her confess to conspiracy to create a war. Then the decision to mutiny to go after Baru would be an act of heroic foresight.…
“Lieutenant Commander,” Juris said, “how much would you do to catch Baru?”
Nullsin set his hammer in his good hand and squeezed it like it could hold Aminata at anchor. Poor Asmee Nullsin: he did not yet know what all captains and all admirals had to learn, that you could not protect your best. They would find their own danger.
“Anything, mam.” Aminata met her eyes. “I have to know the truth.”
“I could use a new staff captain,” Juris said. “My last one went over to Baru’s side. Are you interested?”
“Lieutenant Commander,” Nullsin said, urgently, “if you go over to Sulane you’ll be out of my chain of command, you understand? You’ll be Fifth Fleet Aurdwynn, then. I will have no power to protect you from any Parliamentary inquiry directed at Fifth Fleet.”
“I understand, sir.” Aminata remained at attention. “I want to go, sir. I need to be the one to bring her in.”
“THE Cancrioth!” The boy Iraji filled the little houseboat with his scream.
I had, in my station as Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, learned to hide my love of the divine. If a Ministry of Antiquities stooge brought me a two-thousand-year-old ceremonial oil scrape and asked me to destroy it as an artifact of unhygienic religiosity, I could hardly scream in anguish, could I? I could hardly stand on my toes and beg for Himu’s sky-swift forgiveness. My mission was to protect the living faith, not its dead relics.
So I never betrayed my awe in the face of the sacred.
But when poor Iraji screamed, I heard a boy touched by the numinous. The exaltation in his voice, the power in that word: nothing human. I clutched at Faham Execarne to steady myself, but he had recoiled in shock; we both nearly fell. Two very dignified elders we were!
“The Cancrioth!” Iraji screamed again. “They took Baru in my place! She went in my place!”
He had to scream to get the words out before he fell. His eyes rolled back white. He began to faint.
I lunged at him, pushed his limp body against the wall, trying to keep his blood up by sheer fright. I wore a structured quarantine gown and a black filtered mask, and I knew Iraji would see a spider descending on him. Xate Yawa in her web.
“The Cancrioth is here?” The clockwork voice changer pressed to my throat buzzed like a cloud of flies. “You’re certain!”
“Yes! They’re here! They’ve come to find what they lost!”
“What have they lost?”
“I’m one of them!” he screamed, huge-eyed and horribly beautiful, Apparitor’s Oriati concubine wandered so far from his bed. “I’M ONE OF THEM!”
“Oh,” I rasped.
Did Apparitor know? What mad love for Iraji could make Apparitor conceal the boy from us—when proof of the Cancrioth was the object of this whole quest?
Perhaps he was the one who’d conditioned Iraji to hide the truth from himself.
I wanted to send Iraji back to Helbride and Apparitor. But if Baru found the Cancrioth unchallenged, she would bring home victory for her master. Farrier’s victory would destroy Hesychast. And if Hesychast fell, I would fall with him. I would be destroyed, or imprisoned, or enslaved by Baru.
Then Baru would feed like a hagfish on Aurdwynn, my home.
“Iraji.” As cold as I had pronounced any verdict in the courtroom. “Would you exchange yourself for Baru?”
He nodded tremulously. “Yes. It should have been me.…”
“Why?” Faham Execarne burst out. He was Falcrest’s chief spy and my ally of convenience, a robust old mind who’d seen as many years of human deviance and self-delusion as I. And still he was astounded by Iraji’s choice.
Why would this beautiful young man go into the enemy’s lair for the sake of a woman who’d kidnapped and abandoned him?
Iraji had been a spy in Baru’s entourage, in the days before Tain Hu was brought to her for execution. Had Baru tricked him into believing that she truly loved Hu?
“Because it would be…” He wavered like a drunk. “It would be good for my trim.”
Twenty years younger I might have laughed in disbelief. Twenty years aching for my own redemption in the sight of the ykari I pretended to hate and persecute silenced that laugh.
“She’s playing you, child,” Execarne warned him.
“Is she?” the boy said, quietly. “I’ve saved her life twice, on Helbride and at the Elided Keep. She saved mine, too, on Cheetah. And I am sure that I am the closest thing she has to a friend. We are bound together.”
“That’s how she lies to people.”
“No,” Iraji whispered. “It’s not a lie. No matter how much you both want it to be true, you and her … you’re wrong.”
Faham Execarne’s clothier, the operational leader of his Morrow Ministry cell on Kyprananoke, came in from the deck outside. “We have the trail. South into el-Tsunuqba. That isn’t Canaat territory. Someone else has her.”
We had flushed Baru from Helbride, away from witnesses, so that we could destroy her without taking the blame. We had to act now.
Iraji was so young. What a waste to spend him here.…
But Aurdwynn needed me to triumph. My brother needed me to triumph. Hesychast needed the Cancrioth’s secret and immortal flesh, balm for all his eugenic troubles—needed it to win the Reckoning of Ways. And if he failed, then I failed, and I had done everything for nothing! Decades of paranoia and self-denial, persecuting my own people, betraying my own brother, wasted because upstart Baru Cormorant beat me to a cult of cancer worshipers!
Yes. It had to be this way. I would have her tonight. By dawn I would have her dead on my lobotomy pick, and a gentled new woman cut to life in her body. Then she would go north as living dowry.
“Take Iraji to the boats,” I ordered. “He’ll be our leverage. Have the tactical surgeon prepare my lobotomy instruments. I’ll operate as soon as we have Baru.”
AMINATA’S boat crunched across a corpse.
“Sorry, mam,” the boatswain called. “That big ol’ burner snuck right up on me.”
A hush fell over the boat. Burner was not just slang for burnt corpses but, after the Armada War, a particularly vile epithet for Oriati people.
That wasn’t what got to Aminata. She was used to racialism. It was the triple meaning, the ironic reversal, that made her grunt in pain. She was the burner. She was the one who’d torched the embassy at Hara-Vijay with everyone inside. Even the children.
She had made that corpse beneath the keel.
Her tongue found a stinging sore where she’d bit down on a spark. On that thrill of pain she shouted her orders. “Up, up and search, I want her alive! Fat Kyprananoki woman with an arrow in her ass! She can’t have gone far!”
Of all the people at the embassy reception, she could remember only one who’d definitely spoken to Baru and definitely escaped. The woman had been shot in the ass going over the wall, but she’d made it.
Maybe Baru had told her something.
Aminata jackknifed over the boatwale, down into bath-warm water and scattering fish. The cormorant feather tucked into her collar brushed against her chin.
Hey, bird. I’m gonna find out what the fuck is going on with you, and I’m not going to let anyone hurt you until I do. Not even the Province Admiral, so help me. She gave me some pins. Breveted me up to captain, temporarily.
I really want that promotion to stick one day.…
But first, Baru, I have to know what you’re doing here.
The Kyprists triaged survivors of the fire here on the pavereef, a concrete-filled ring of coral around the embassy. An exhausted old woman in Kyprist-orange gloves ran the triage station. The nurses carried a wretched thing up to her, the wreckage of a person screaming through a red hole. The old woman shook her head: too many burns across too much skin. The right decision. The nurses used their hands to close off the arteries in the victim’s throat: a blood choke, fatal if applied long enough. Aminata wished she could blood choke whoever had released the plague.
The patient died.
Then the nurses lifted the next burnt body from the gondola, and it was like the screams had just found a new throat.
She would never wake up in a world where she hadn’t done this. From now until the day she died, she’d be the woman who’d burnt these people. The Kettling couldn’t be allowed to spread—she knew that—she’d seen the bleeding faces—but look at what she’d done. Crispy red-black skin everywhere. Crispy like the meat you dropped into the fire and fished out laughing. The smell of burnt hair, and the sea clogged with jellyfish around them— And the screams—
She threw up into the reef. The taste of bread and vinegar. “Oh, kings,” she groaned, and splashed water from her canteen to rinse.
“Mam,” her subordinate Gerewho Gotha called, “are you all right?”
“It’s the smell,” Aminata grunted.
“Mam?” Faroni oyaSegu called. “Mam, I’ve found her.”
THE ass-shot woman lay on a plank with wet seaweed pillowed under her forehead. Her daishiki was hiked up, revealing the fresh crossbow wound in her left ass cheek. No one had had time to dress it. She groaned as Aminata and Faroni approached. “Here to finish me off?”
“I’m very sorry, mam. We were trying to prevent any infected persons from escaping.” Aminata checked the wound: deep but narrow, not lethal unless infected or poisoned. “You should be all right. Just report to a quarantine if you develop any illness in the next few weeks.”
“I’m a man,” the ass-shot person said. “You’re confused, because I haven’t got my things on, so you see a woman. My name’s Ngaio.”
“Well, Mister Ngaio”—Aminata obeyed the navy’s unofficial protocol for handling presanitary confusions of gender—“we came to ask you some questions. You were down in the embassy courtyard before the, uh, the confusion, correct?”
“To my regret,” he groaned.
“Did you speak to the woman in the expensive green mask?”
“The one your admiral wanted to kill? Yes. I’ll tell you, too, if you just”—he gasped, resettled his weight—“get me water, bandages, and a crutch. I have to get to my ship. The Canaat will kill me for collaboration. I’m a Balt, you see. It’s not safe for us now.”
Aminata had no idea what a Balt was, but she assumed Kyprananoke, tiny as it was, had its own tribes with their own grudges. “Faroni, find something for him to lean on.”
The younger Oriati woman saluted and trotted off. Aminata helped Ngaio upright to drink from her canteen. Gerewho frowned, worried, probably, that Ngaio might be infected. Aminata waved him off to find bandages: the Kettling passed by blood, and she would get rid of the canteen.
“Anything you can remember. Please.”
Ngaio gasped and wiped his mouth. “The woman in the green mask called herself Barbitu Plane. We talked about Prince Tau-indi Bosoka. Barbitu liked them. We talked about Prince Kindalana of Segu, and her plan to join Falcrest and Oriati Mbo together to avert a war. Barbitu was with a woman, a Falcresti woman, who asked me about the plague, and, well”—Ngaio laughed like a sob—“the plague turned up. Which led to … well, you certainly know, don’t you?”
“This Falcresti woman, she was navy?” That would be Staff Captain Shao Lune, who had abandoned Ormsment in favor of Baru.
“I suppose. She was in a uniform. She said she was Barbitu’s slave.” Ngaio grimaced, in distaste as much as pain. “Slave jokes. I don’t like them.”
Neither did Aminata. “What happened when Admiral Ormsment arrived?”
“She said Barbitu was really Baru Cormorant, and also Agonist, whatever that means.” Ngaio threw back his head to finish the water. Her tits bobbed with the motion—his tits, damn it. Aminata didn’t understand why he thought he was a man, but as an interrogator (the infamous Burner of Souls, torturer of her own Oriati race-kin) she knew better than to alienate the subject for no reason.
Ngaio went on. “Then the Prince Tau-indi Bosoka made it clear this woman, Baru or Agonist or whoever, was under their protection.”
Shit. Baru was under explicit and sacrosanct diplomatic protection. Any harm done to her would be an act of war against the Oriati. “What did Admiral Ormsment do?”
Ngaio laughed, and shouted a little at the pain. “She called Baru to duel.”
Shit. She’d broken diplomatic right. That would convince half of Parliament the Admiralty had gone berserk. There were files in the Parliamentary offices right now, signed and sealed, waiting only to be brought to the proper attention to destroy the navy woman named in the neat label on the back.
“Why? Why did she ask for a duel?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. The other navy woman, Baru’s companion, she called Ormsment a traitor. Then Juris said she’d sent a ship to take Baru’s parents hostage.”
“What?”
“That’s what she said. She offered to fight Baru, woman to woman. Baru spoke to Tau-indi for a few moments, and then she came forward as if to duel … and then”—Ngaio shuddered—“someone said ‘I’m thirsty,’ and it all went mad.”
Aminata had seen Baru wielding Aminata’s old saber, the one she’d gifted to Baru in Aurdwynn. If Baru had kept that sword close at hand she must still care about Aminata—she must be worth more respect than a woman who would take Baru’s innocent parents hostage—
Or she’d just held on to a good saber.
“Did she mention anything,” Aminata asked, in desperation, “about a duchess? A Duchess Tain Hu?” The mysterious Tain woman had sent Aminata a letter, entrusting her with Baru’s safety on the eve of her own death.…
“No,” Ngaio said. “Nothing about that.”
Oh, none of this made any sense. Right before the plague and the massacre, Shao Lune had given a navy signal: I’m drowning, throw me a line. Who was she afraid of? Baru? Or mutinous Juris Ormsment? Or both of them? Kings and queens, there were so many questions—
And that was why she had to be the one to find Baru first. She had to know, once and for all, if Baru …
If Baru what, exactly? Served the Republic in all she did?
Or cared about Aminata, even a little? Deserved the trust that the Duchess Tain Hu had expressed in her?
Where did her duty lie?
“There was the poem,” Ngaio said.
“What? What poem?”
“Barbitu—Baru, I mean—was trying to find a boy’s parents. She had a sketch of the boy. Oriati, younger than you, very beautiful. She said he knew this rhyme: ayamma, ayamma, a ut li-en…”
A frisson took Aminata: two entirely separate things coming together. “Gerewho, listen. Do you recognize those sounds?”
The syllables made her young suasioner rock back on his heels. “Yes, mam, I think so. From the … that last interrogation, before we sailed.” They had interrogated Abdumasi Abd, the special prisoner taken from Aurdwynn. They’d been told to ask him: What is the Cancrioth? He’d given up Baru’s name, setting Aminata on the hunt. But he’d given up something else, too. A string of syllables that had frightened Gerewho viscerally. Those syllables.
Was Baru actually searching for the exact same Cancrioth that Aminata had been tasked to find? Were they on the same side?
“But I don’t understand,” Ngaio said, with as much exhaustion as pain in his voice. “Why does any of this matter? Isn’t this Baru woman dead? I didn’t see her come over the walls.… She’s gone, isn’t she?”
“No,” a new voice said.
That no pulled Aminata around like a hook in her earlobe. It was the way it was said, somehow. It scared the shit out of her. That no might have negated anything. A question or a life.
A big woman ambled up the reef toward them. In one hand she held a crude spear-thrower, an atlatl. In the other a jellyfish, its arms trailing from her fist. She had been eating its bell.
“Who the hell are you?” Aminata snapped.
The woman’s eyes flashed blue in the setting sun. “You’re from Ascentatic.”
“Not anymore. Lieutenant Commander Aminata, RNS Sulane, now seconded to Province Admiral Ormsment—”
An expression of indecipherable appetite. “Aminata. I know that name. Did Baru Cormorant ever pretend to love you?”
Aminata blinked at her. “What?”
“I can bring you to her,” the woman said, and the hunger in her voice made Aminata flinch. “I am Ormsment’s hunter. I find Baru wherever she goes. But before I bring you to her, you must tell me this. Did Baru pretend to love you?”
All Aminata’s instincts said this woman was a killer. A pirate or a cutthroat. She didn’t want to give this “hunter” anything. But if it meant finding Baru …
“We were friends, once,” she allowed.
“Would she hesitate if it came to a choice between her life and yours?”
The same question Aminata wanted to answer herself.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Come, then.” The big woman beckoned and smiled. “Come. I need to gather something from your old ship. And then, together, we’ll go to Baru.”
Ngaio Ngaonic hobbled away across the coral and concrete, as fast as his wounded ass would let him. Aminata had meant to ask him why he and Baru had discussed the Federal Princes, Tau-indi Bosoka and Kindalana of Segu. Too late now.
FEDERATION YEAR 912:
23 YEARS EARLIER
UPON PRINCE HILL, BY LAKE JARO
IN LONJARO MBO
“KINDALANA!” Tau-indi hammered the door plate with the greeting mallet. “Kinda!”
A groundskeep opened the way. “Your Federal Highness, remember there’s a taboo against burrowing things today—”
“Go tell my mother that a mob’s coming for the hostages!” Tau bolted across the compound, coughing on charcoal dust, until they smashed through the door and ran right into Kindalana’s arms.
“Tau!” She caught them and they almost fell together on the welcome mat. “What is it?”
“There’s a mob from Jaro on the lake.” She smelled of smoke and the touch of her hands yanked up a dizzy memory of swimming with her, Kindalana kicking off their thighs, Kindalana whispering in Tau’s ear that mother Tahr would come back okay.
Tau had been so ashamed that Kindalana thought they were just a child afraid for their mother. But Kindalana was right, in the end. Tahr did come back okay.
Kindalana blinked at them from two finger-widths away. Her eyes were wide-set and keen, like buffalo horns. There was a little dimple at the base of her throat, marked at each side by her clavicles. Everything seemed to move with her breath.
“A mob?” she said, Kindalana demanding that the world clarify itself, so she could fix it. “What do they want?”
“They want Cosgrad and Farrier. They made enenen totems.” How precious it was to be this close to her. The mask of her power, prince-power, beauty-power, broke down into simple facts: the little ridges between her nose and the top of her lips, shaped in the echo of her throat. “We have to stop them.”
“Oh,” Kindalana gasped, probably a gasp of panic, probably a little excited, too. Kinda did love a chance to command. “We have to talk them down! But I’m dressed like—”
“You look like a gardener and I look like a clerk.”
“We need our paints, the declaration paints—”
“—and jewels—”
“—and silks; one of my old saris might fit you—”
“—there’s a taboo on burrowing things, maybe we can use that—”
“—what, Tau, should we shove Farrier and Cosgrad down a hole, is that what you mean to do—”
Laughing: “It might work!”
They ran into the inner rooms, watering and oiling the paint pots, yelling at a scorpion they found curled up in a bolt of cloth, arguing over whether it was a burrowing animal, smashing it, arguing again over how much paint they had time for as they unwrapped each other and dabbed warm water and scents on flesh and hair. Just the bold striped throat and chin highlights of a Prince out on function? Yes, that would do, the important thing was to look authoritative, but wait (Kinda scrubbing furiously at the earth on Tau-indi’s feet, Tau trying to strip leftover paint from the night before off her brow and cheekbones), wait, wait, they had to be recognizably the Prince Bosoka of Lonjaro the Thirteen-in-Three-in-One and the Prince Kindalana eshSegu, so Tau would do gold Segu stripes on Kinda’s clavicles while she did green star points on Tau’s larynx and brow. There was no time for their hands or legs.
“Hold still,” Kindalana snapped. “No, actually still!”
“Mmf.” The application tickled. “Mmp.”
“All right.” She bared her throat in turn. “Quick. Oh, principles, can you hear them? I think I can hear them.”
“Maybe they’ll tear us apart, too,” Tau-indi said. “Maybe they’ve been talking to that awful satirist, the populist one who thinks we’re spoiled.”
“We are spoiled, Tau. We don’t work fields or carry water or make bricks. The shua resent us, you know?”
“What?” Tau loved stories about the shua, the self-taught warrior societies who guarded the realm. “Why?”
“Don’t you read any history? The struggle between the power of the Federal Princes and the local authority of the shua? Oh!” Kindalana shivered and made a small sound. “That does tickle.” Her throat moved lightly under Tau-indi’s circling thumbs.
“I missed touching you,” Tau said. It was a stupid thing to say, but the paint had to get done, and it was a better topic than Kindalana showing off. “As, you know, just a … not like Abdu, but I missed it.”
“I know,” she said.
“We haven’t been right.”
“I know,” she said.
“Oh.”
Her breath ran in and out like seasons. Her hips brushed Tau-indi’s thighs and she rearranged them awkwardly to keep a little distance. “You didn’t want things to be right,” she said. Tau-indi cleaned their fingers in the pot of stripper and got the paint for her clavicles. Her bones trembled when she spoke. “You wanted to be alone. You wanted to be hurt. You think you have to be miserable alone, so everyone will know you’re too noble to put your misery on them. But you want us to know you’re miserable. Your favorite thing in the world is to be too hurt for anyone to help.”
She adjusted Tau’s head a few inches and began to star their brow. Her hands were stiff, her motions sharp. “You told me I had to take care of Abdumasi. You told me you wanted to go off and be a Prince.”
“I was proud. I didn’t want you to think I was a child.”
“Let me talk.” Kinda finished the star and swept two clean lines along Tau-indi’s cheekbones. “You’ve always been the one people trust. When your mother left, your house trusted you. When Falcrest captured her, my father came to talk to you. He never talks to me, because he just sees my mother. You saw the war coming before anyone else—”
“I didn’t!”
“Why did you send me to Abdumasi, then? Why were you so convinced you had to be a Prince alone?” Her eyes followed Tau-indi’s motion for motion and they couldn’t look back, they had to finish the paint. “Why did you want the three of us at war?”
She was very warm, this close. Tau bared their throat for the green Lonjaro star, painted on the larynx. Kinda’s fingers were quick and hot.
“Do you love Abdu?” Tau-indi asked.
“Maybe right now,” Kindalana said crisply, her two fingers moving down-sideways-down-up-down, “maybe right now, I suppose I do, half of me is thinking about him all the time, but Tau—” She rinsed her hands and they both went for the saris; they wrapped each other up. “Tau, in Segu women marry late, and people will question your womanhood if you haven’t had lovers before. There’s a … it’s a tenuous thing, being a Segu woman. You have to prove yourself to other women, and part of that is your ease with men. I thought I could learn some of that by practicing on Abdu, like the grownups do, like our parents, we’d just fuck and be friends—”
“Our parents are in love, Kinda.”
“No.” Kindalana smoothed the sari down over Tau’s shoulders, and then her own. “My father’s in love with your mother. But not the other way.”
They turned around each other like serpents, checking knots, and both bent to lace their sandals. Outside the sentries yelled and beat their fists against the bird-cymbals, sending up irita, the alarm cries that would rouse nearby farmers to help.
“I guess, when you start fucking, you can’t skip over the childish part, the part that feels like love.” Kindalana caught Tau-indi by the earlobe to swipe paint from the side of their chin. “Or I can’t, at least. You left us alone, Tau, and what were we supposed to do, with you taking charge of everything? You took all the burdens on yourself, your house and your mother’s trim, and then you took Cosgrad, too.”
“You wanted to seduce Farrier! I wasn’t the only one who—”
“You’d already seduced Cosgrad, hadn’t you?”
“Not like that!”
“You befriended him. I don’t make friends easily, Tau. That’s your gift.”
“You make me sound so mighty.”
“You’re a Prince.”
“Everyone knows you’re cleverer.”
“And everyone knows you have better trim.”
“That doesn’t seem to do much good,” Tau said, a little bitterly.
“Of course it does,” Kindalana sighed. “People listen to you. I know all these things, I’ve figured out so much, but who wants to listen to me? You’re strange with women here in Lonjaro, did you know that? Not hateful, but particular. Women have certain jobs, certain roles. You don’t like it when we go beyond them.”
They fumbled together in the keepsake chest for the jewelry. Kindalana took a locket for her breast and chains to link her nose and ears. Tau-indi gauged their earlobes, grunting at the stretch of the skin, and found four Aurdwynni bracelets to chime on their wrists.
Kindalana lifted her arms and turned around once. “Am I proud?”
She was a vision. Tau-indi’s heart stopped up. “You’re proud,” they managed, voice wobbling. “Am I proud?”
“You’ll do,” Kindalana said, and then, with an obvious and powerful effort to say more, give more, “Tau, you’re beautiful.”
They went out the back gate together, to face down the mob.
THE ferries had landed. The mob came up in their silent hundreds, ash-streaked, grim-faced, bowed by the weight of what they had to do. There were potters, weavers, wheelwrights, all sorts of craftspeople from the city; there were shua warriors of both kinds, professional hunters and renegade vigilantes; there were clerks, administrators, drummers, gamblers, braggarts. Tau felt a profound empathy for the mass of them, and for the grief that ran like floodwater between the reservoirs of their bodies. This could be the whole Mbo, soon. The whole great people raised to war. And what a terrible waste it would be, what a betrayal of a thousand years of work.
“Shall we?” Kinda murmured.
“Yes.”
The mob saw them. The comic griot raised the totem of the two dead men as if to call down lightning. “They are enenen. They owe us a blood price, and they cannot pay it in gold. Give them to us.”
“Stop!” the Princes cried, Tau and Kinda together. “Stop and listen!”
And Tau saw (in a gasp of joy ragged as wind through reeds) that the people were not too far gone from trim to hear.
Kindalana told them of the foreigners who had come to Lonjaro Mbo to learn. She was a guest in Lonjaro, too, for she was a Prince of Segu, and did they not recognize the obligations of hospitality that bound guest to host? Tau’s mother had been taken by Falcrest, and returned safely. Would they not reciprocate? Would they be the first to snap the sacred circle of trust?
Then Tau-indi spoke beside her, the laman with the round hips and the coiled hair, telling the mob in a voice like the monsoon drumming on mangrove leaves that Lonjaro’s principles had already visited revenge on Cosgrad Torrinde.
“He was paralyzed by a frog,” Tau-indi said—Kindalana puffing up her cheeks like that frog—“and he waded among leeches”—Kindalana plucking at her calves—“and then the frog seduced his tongue, and he had dreams of the defeat of his homeland, dreams out of the mangrove forest”—Kindalana touching her wrists, her throat, making the comic griot who led the mob smile helplessly—“and then his bowels were emptied by the waters of Segu, and his bones were bent by the rust of Devi-naga, and the heat of Mzilimake burned up his mind!”
Tau wondered what all the misfortunes Cosgrad had suffered meant about Cairdine Farrier’s trim.
“They might burn our ships,” Kindalana bellowed; she must have practiced that low-in-the-gut roar, “they might ask us to answer blood with blood and fire with fire, but we are mbo. We do not want! We give, and we are satisfied! Falcrest will come to us to get what they want, and we will bind them to us, and in the end they will be mbo, too! Will you kill these men who came to learn from us? Or will you let them learn, and yield?”
The mob faltered. They could have stormed a line of house guard, a company of local shua, or even Falcrest’s masked marines. Against two bright young Princes in their regalia they had no chance at all.
The comic griot set down the totems. “I was wrong,” he said. “It is not in my power to declare anyone enenen. Do you all hear me? I was wrong!”
After that there was nothing to do but go back to the ferries.
Kindalana turned to them grinning like a fed tiger. “Tau, that was amazing.”
They grinned stupidly back at her.
At that moment the sentries guarding the southern approach began to scream.
TAU ran until their gut cramped. Clots of gardeners and groundskeeps stumbled past, fleeing for the House Bosoka.
“Stand with me!” Tau cried to them. “Stand for your house! Tell me, someone, what you saw!”
But not all the paint nor all the jewelry of a Prince could arrest the sentries’ fear, and they fled inside the compound.
“Good morning, Tau. Mind taboo.” Cairdine Farrier jogged up easily, fresh from helping in the gardens: there was dirt on his hands and somehow he had gotten clay on his nose. Unlike Cosgrad, he had adopted Mbo clothes, but he wore them in his own way, a short khanga wrapped rakishly around his shoulders and puffy linen trousers cinched into Falcrest boots. He was a deep-eyed, thoughtful man who never showed too much, like a fashionably dressed clam. “What’s all the alarm?”
“A mob,” Tau panted, “come to kill you. But we turned them away.”
“Ah,” Farrier said, thoughtfully. “From the city, I expect? A manifestation of urban resentment against your principalities’ agrarian ways?”
Tau stared at him. “I said they were here to kill you!”
“But to kill me, they must be angry enough to ignore your authority, yes?”
Tau expected the reasons were much less abstract than urban resentment, and much more to do with the hundred thousand Oriati dead. “The mob’s gone, but now everyone’s running. I heard irita to the south.”
“Really now.” Farrier ambled off downhill. “Let’s go see what has everyone spooked.”
“Cairdine, wait! It’s not safe!”
Farrier trotted cheerfully down the south road, fishing out his notebook. The raspberry bushes clasped at his shirt as if trying to hold him back.
There were men coming up the road, onto Prince Hill. Kindalana’s father, Padrigan, blocked the way with a file of eshSegu tribal guard. Oh principles, they had their spears raised to kill. Who was coming? Lonjaro had a proud warrior tradition—nearly every farmer and hunter trained as a shua fighter—but even in the skirmishes that sometimes erupted, no one ever raised sharp spears.
“Go back,” Padrigan called. “Go back now, and we’ll forget we saw this!”
Tau saw, and would never forget.