“WHAT a pitiful sight.” Yawa swept her spyglass over the Cancrioth boats struggling down the bay. “Hardly immortal for much longer, I should think.”
“You’d be pitiful, too, if you’d been on water rations and pump shifts for weeks.” Barhu turned to wave to her parents, who were waiting with the village shieldbearers. “Bring up the casks!”
“I’d rather keep them thirsty until we have a bargain,” Yawa grumbled. “I’d make them pay for every drop.”
“Believe me, these aren’t the people you need to wring dry. You’ll know those when you meet their leader.”
“The Brain. If she’s so all-frozen important, then where is she?”
The moment Iritain had signaled that they were ready to receive shore parties, Eternal began to launch barges. At first the crowds packed aboard had frightened Barhu: was it an attack? But then she’d seen the Eye, waving a white cloth from the bow of the first boat. A warning against death. He was bringing in his weak, his helpless.
“He’s a snail man,” the elephant-faced matai said, in bemusement. “Are they all snail men?”
“He’s very worried about his people dying,” Solit added thoughtfully. “For an immortal.”
“Of course he is,” Yawa said. “If one of his people dies here, who’ll be strong enough to receive their Line?”
“So sensitive to the foreign faith,” Barhu teased.
“I am a Jurispotence.”
“And a religionist.”
“Hush. That’s a secret.”
An old idea returned to Barhu. “Do you really believe that Himu”—the ilykari virtue associated with energy, excess, and cancer—“was a member of the Cancrioth?” Hesychast had proposed that Himu might have been named for a historical figure named Hayamu raQù.
Yawa laughed harshly. “Not for a moment. The Throne likes to see conspiracies everywhere. The real world never fits together so well.” She made the Incrastic handwashing sign against evil, and then reached into her purse. She had an onion in there. She kept touching it, for Aurdwynni luck.
“What’s got you squirming?” Barhu asked.
The old Jurispotence nodded to the arriving barges. Village shieldbearers waded out to bring cups of water to heat-struck Cancrioth. “Dehydrating people bleed a lot. Cracked lips, cracked skin, open sores.…”
“You think the Brain would send Kettling in one of them?”
“We can’t know. From the moment those people come ashore, we’ve got to treat this entire village as a potential outbreak. No one can leave unless they go straight into quarantine.”
“So we’re trapped here.”
“So we are,” Yawa said.
Durance, Barhu remembered, meant imprisonment.
YAWA had arrived two chimes into forenoon watch, on a heavy bank carriage from Annalila Fortress. She’d passed Iscend Comprine the night before, running back to Annalila Fortress on foot, like some ancient messenger carrying word of battle. “Did you drive her off?” she asked Barhu.
“No,” Barhu said, defensively. “I don’t think so. I— It’s complicated. Did you bring Kimbune and Abd?”
“Yes. They’re in the back.” Yawa lowered her voice. “Helbride’s away. Set out back upwind to Aurdwynn yesterday. Svir sends, and I quote, ‘best wishes for the negotiations, and his most affectionate Fuck Yourself.’”
How fickle the heart could be: here she stood in a village full of her parents and her people, and yet Helbride’s departure felt like leaving home.
“I’m glad to hear he’s still himself.” She frowned at the carriage vault: “You did remember to leave air holes, I hope?”
Yawa’s marines pulled the locking bars back and swung the portable vault open. Abdumasi Abd’s mold-spotted face came groaning out of the gap. “Water! No, not your poisoned canteens, I want fresh well water. Principles, first you won’t feed me, now I can’t get a drink.”
Barhu helped the merchant down from the sweltering interior. He had been on a purely liquid diet, to clean his intestines out before surgery. “You’ll see Tau today,” she told him, hoping she wasn’t telling a lie. “Though I can’t promise they’ll be happy to see either of us.”
Abdu stared up into the first free sky he’d seen in months. “It’s not up to us to decide how they think. Trust them to make the choice. I’ve heard people call Tau naïve; even other Princes. But I have never, ever known anyone to influence Tau’s judgment of character. That’s what makes Tau so strong. They always get to the truth of you, whether you like it or not.”
“Barhu!” Kimbune leapt down from the carriage with excitement shining in her eyes. “He’s in there! I showed him my proof. I showed him everything. I know Undionash took root. He’s really in there.”
“Mzu’s waxing buttocks,” Abdumasi muttered. “I’ve got to take a piss.”
She pointed Abdumasi to a claypit and went over to Kimbune. “Your husband’s in Abd?”
“Yes!” Kimbune preened with satisfaction. “He didn’t believe a word of it!”
“You’re satisfied that your husband’s soul survives in Abdumasi Abd because … he doesn’t believe your proof?”
“Stubbornly, irrationally, against the clearest mathematical evidence! If he were just the merchant Abdumasi, wouldn’t he be simply baffled? But he argued every word of it! It must be him!”
Barhu couldn’t resist prodding at her faith. The possibility of immortality was just too intriguing to leave untested. “Did you ask him to tell you something that Abdumasi couldn’t possibly have known?”
“It’s not like that. Abdumasi was never taught to reach my husband’s memories, so of course he can’t remember me. What he’s got is my husband’s soul.”
“His soul.”
“Yes! His way of being! His stupid, stupid inability to see that I’m right about this!”
Barhu was about to scoff. And then she thought, why, I’ve never asked my illusion of Hu to tell me anything that only Hu could’ve known. Because I know it’s not really Hu.
Aren’t I, though?
You never knew the real Hu;
you knew your mind’s own awareness of her.
Does it matter if that awareness
comes from within or from without
if one is true to the other?
What I carry is the image I’ve made of Hu, my record of her beliefs and the method of her choices. It’s the law of being Hu: and that is enough for me to carry and to tap for strength.
Isn’t that a soul?
“Kimbune,” she said, “I believe you.”
THE Brain did not appear. Negotiations did not begin.
The sun rolled past the zenith, inspecting every shadow for secrets.
There was no sign of the hostages. Not Tau, not Aminata, not Enact-Colonel Osa.
Some of the Eye’s people, restored by water and kind treatment, began to wander cautiously into the market. Canvas awnings had been pitched on the riverside green; Heingyl Ri’s factors waited alongside old Taranoki traders to haggle. Water was free—Barhu and her parents had insisted on that—but everything else was up for sale. The Taranoki offered coffee and tapa cloth, canvas and glass, mirrors, finished telescopes, polished stones, salt, sugar, black pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, Masquerade fiat notes and traditional reef pearl. Heingyl Ri’s factors had brought samples of their goods to Cauteria to impress merchants: fine-spun wool, pine, planks of redwood both coastal and northern, horseshoes, toasted grain, barrels of flour, spear and arrow points, sword blades, cotton and hemp, mint, tin mugs and pots, huge jars of olive oil, mason leaf, hard cow cheese, silphium.
But the Eye’s people had nothing to barter. They huddled by the shore in little knots and took wary turns visiting the toilets. They did not trade.
“When you suggested a trade concern to reach the distant parts of Oriati Mbo with Aurdwynn,” Yawa murmured, “did you ever consider that the Oriati might not want to trade?”
“Uncle!” Barhu called. “Bring out the food!”
The smell of fresh coconut, roast pork, and salt-cooked pineapple began to stir the Oriati. The Eye sent a barge out to Eternal and it returned with baskets of gold, silver, electrum, gems, thunderbolt iron, medallions of jade, ebony and teak, whale ivory, rubber, resin, myrrh, knotted codices, polished chunks of amber, huge barrels of dried tea, whittled figurines of people and of abstract geometrical shapes, bracelets and necklaces and pectorals and torcs. One Cancrioth sailor hauled up an entire bag of his lovingly patterned penis gourds.
After that there was no keeping the three nations from each other. Many of the Cancrioth monks did not know quite how to value their treasure. Barhu saw one cassocked woman buy a banana with a platinum chip.
Barhu brought Abdumasi Abd out of his house and sat him down on a bench to watch. “Once,” she said, sitting beside him, “there were no chairs except thrones. Everyone else in the world sat on benches.”
“And you wouldn’t know it, if not for the histories we kept. What am I supposed to see here?” He was putting on his exhausted old man act. “A bunch of Oriati being defrauded?”
“Trade,” Barhu said, in delight. The whole mess made her want to leap up with a fistful of pebbles and a liar’s grin and go conduct some arbitrage. Trade was a better annealment than alcohol, a sweeter invitation than beauty. You could trade with an octopus, you could haggle with someone who didn’t speak your language. Just look at the things on the table between you, and search for that common place, the notch of agreement, where both sides feel they are getting the better deal, and both are right.
This was how to make a world out of different people. Not Incrasticism. Let them meet and see what they have to offer each other. And if someone tries to take it: all together, stop them.
“Do you really think this is going to work?” Abdu sighed.
“The bazaar? Well, it’s a sideshow to the real negotiations, of course. Once I have my concern in place and monopolized—”
“Not your bazaar. This whole charade. Your pretense that you’re some bright young entrepreneur looking to make her way in the world. We both know you’re an agent of the Throne. We both know what you’re doing. Trying to make me give up my trade contacts, my ports, my routes, my rutterbooks. You’re thinking, why, these Oriati, they do everything by personal association. I’d better bring Abdu over to my side. Make him my personal associate. Then he’ll give me his friends, and they’ll give me their friends, and before you know it we’ll be sailing into far Oriati ports grinning like sharks. Falcrest wins.”
He thought this was another extension of his imprisonment. Another clever game. “It would be worth setting all this up,” she admitted, “to get us into the Black Tea Ocean. It would be worth using an entire island as a theater. Maybe even worth risking the spread of the Kettling.”
His bloodshot eyes widened. His mold-stained brow furrowed till it seemed to crack. “The Kettling? What do you mean?”
“It’s here. In that ship. The Brain brought it to use as a weapon against Falcrest. She already let it out once, on Kyprananoke.” She found it astonishingly comforting to admit this next part: “She wants me to take it and bring it into Falcrest’s heart.”
He swore in Seti-Caho, something about nagana. “And she thinks you can be trusted?”
“She knows the truth about me, Abdumasi Abd. She knows I’d have taken that bargain, not so long ago.”
He almost asked what had changed; did not. “Any truth you offer is bait. I learned that well enough, O Fairer Hand.” He had a knack for bitterness. Barhu wondered exactly how badly his divorce had gone. “I’ll never help you buy my people.”
“Really? You look around”—she waved to the bazaar, the tufa homes, the river—“and you see bait? I see the world the way I want it to be. The way I imagine it could be, without Falcrest.”
“I was fighting for that world when you lured me to my death.”
She thought about telling him that she’d never even known he existed. Decided it would be too cruel. “There are people I’ve lured to their death, Abdumasi Abd. You’re not one of them. Not yet.”
“To Tau I am,” he countered. “I’m Cancrioth. Not human. Dead to trim.”
That hit Barhu low. She had no idea who she would meet when Tau was released. A broken Prince? A vengeful exile?
A corpse?
“Abdu,” she said, “what happened between you and Kindalana? Why did it make you turn your entire fortune to war?”
Deadly anger pierced his eyes. “You’ve already asked me these questions. I told you: it’s between me and Kindalana.”
“And Tau.”
“And Tau,” he admitted.
“And Cairdine Farrier?” she probed.
Thunder rumbled from the bay.
Barhu, blindsided by the noise, looked wildly up into the sky. Abd shot to his feet. The marine sentries didn’t react: they were staring, too, out into the bay.
“King’s dead glans,” one of them said.
Eternal was salvoing her cannon. Smoke and blue-tipped flame pierced her near flank. The whistle of shot reached Barhu but she couldn’t see the target—surely it wasn’t Sterilizer, surely they weren’t idiotic enough to think they could break through the torchship’s sides before Sterilizer turned its siphons on them—
But Eternal was not firing at Sterilizer.
Eternal was firing toward the village.
Round shot struck the beach around the Eye’s barges. Sand geysered. A horseshoe crab’s broken shell tumbled into the waves. Water fountained and fell as the ongoing fire tracked back into the sea, clustered, and then, at last, found its target.
Children stared out from behind rows of pink hibiscus shrubs. The thunder made babies cry.
It took the Cancrioth gunners nearly twenty minutes to blast the wooden barges to driftwood and twine. By the end they had become shockingly accurate. The Eye’s refugees stumbled down from the bazaar to watch, helplessly, as their boats were pulverized. Barhu ordered Sterilizer to hold at alert: her captain had already brought a brace of torpedoes up on the broadside rack.
The firing stopped.
Then, very deliberately, one gun discharged a shot. The ball landed right in the Rubiyya river beside the municipal offices. The signal was clear. They had taken the range, worked out their gunnery. Now they were prepared to raze the entire village.
Eternal’s sunflash began to blink.
SEND BRU
SEND BRU
SEND BRU
SEND BRU
SEND BRU
SEND BRU
“YOU can’t go out there!” Yawa snapped. She was still in her black quarantine gown, fully masked, faceted and lensed: she chased Barhu down the harborside quay like a bipedal krakenfly. “It’s not just idiotic, it’s bad strategy! You don’t fold to their demands the moment they shoot off a few cannon. They’re dying out there, they’re at the end of their strength. Let thirst force them to come ashore!”
“I can’t.” What Yawa said made perfect sense, if you had not been on Eternal and learned about its inner politics. “If I don’t go, it’ll seem as if the Brain’s spell failed. If the Brain’s powerless, she can’t control her faction of the crew.”
“Good!”
“No, Yawa. If she starts to lose control she’ll kill as many of us as she can and then destroy Eternal. She’d rather die than fall into our hands.”
The judge hadn’t wound up the voice-changer in the collar of her gown. Her words were raw Yawa, the Treatymont accent of a common girl begging her friend not to go out in the winter night. “They’ll take you hostage. They’ll try to use you as a shield while they make demands. Sterilizer will burn you all.”
“You’ve got what you need from me, don’t you?” Barhu leapt down into the rowboat and dropped her gutsack in the bow. “Svir will handle the Necessary King. If Eternal blows up with me aboard, at least you have Cancrioth ashore to take to Hesychast. You can’t lose now.”
“I can lose you,” Yawa said, in a tone of such utter contempt for Barhu’s intelligence that it must cover real emotion. The only woman in the world who knew how much she’d sacrificed. “I need you—I need you for your marriage trick. You haven’t passed your claim to Heingyl Ri.”
“Don’t worry about me.” Barhu picked up the left oar, and then, with a shake of her head, the right. “I’ll be back for my lobotomy.”
“Damn you. You don’t get to joke about that until you’ve given me an alternative!”
“There is no alternative as long as we’re both alive. Only one of us can win. Tain Hu volunteered, you know?” Barhu threw the mooring lines up at Yawa. “She went in with her eyes open. Both eyes open to the end. It was her choice. She knew it was the right way.”
“She’d have torn my eyes out if I ever hurt you, Baru!”
“Take care of my parents if I don’t come back. Tell them I’m sorry—no, tell them I did my best.” Barhu shoved off from the quay. “Make sure Xe gets back to Aurdwynn. She has a child there. Make sure Aminata gets a pardon.”
“For Devena’s sake, Baru, what’s out there worth risking your life?”
“Yomi,” Barhu said.
“What?”
It was an Aphalone word. Hesychast had taught it to Barhu. The art of knowing your opponent’s choices before they do. Either because you understand their inner processes perfectly, or because you have constrained their available choices so narrowly that they have only one option.
“Yomi,” she shouted down the floating wharf to Yawa, who stood with her gown plucked up from the lapping waves. “Think about it, Yawa. We can’t beat our masters, can we? They control the entire board. They have control of the money, the government, the ideology of sex and race. They have control of the context in which we make choices. They’ve written us a script and we have to perform it or be punished: destroy each other, or be destroyed. If we deviate, they will know at once. They have us in yomi.”
“So you’re giving up?”
“No! There are two ways to break yomi, Yawa. One of them is an external factor. Something they haven’t accounted for.” She waved wildly towards Eternal. “And the other one is you! You, Yawa!”
“I don’t understand!”
“Think about the secrets you’ve kept from Hesychast. He knows what you’ve done for him but he’s never understood your motives! It’s possible to do exactly what they require of us, Yawa, but for reasons they don’t understand! That’s how to beat yomi! Conceal our maneuvers inside their maneuvers! They think their yomi is maintained until the moment it is broken!”
“Baru,” Yawa screamed, “this is not the time for your philosophical fucking ramblings! Don’t go out to that ship! Come here and explain yourself!”
“Trim calls me back to Tau!” she shouted back. “There’s a weapon out there. Something I can use. I have to find it. Trust me, please.”
“What weapon? How can Farrier’s secret possibly be—?”
“If I tell you, Hesychast might learn. Just let me go. I trust you. Think about it. I trust you to do what they expect.”
Yawa began to swear at her in Iolynic, calling her a fool, a hot cow turd with a hoofprint in it, a girl poured out from her mother’s gutter, a paint eater, a hairless bloodless dried-out cunt, a carrion bird, a cracked cornerstone, an assface. Barhu rowed out toward Eternal.
When she had some headway she raised a hand to wave.
THE golden ship’s broadside grew each time she looked up from the oars. Became a cracked, filth-streaked wall. A rope ladder tumbled down to her boat. She stood on it and clung with her good hand and they hauled her up the great reach of hull. She noted that the ship was down by the bow and tilting to starboard; the pump crews were losing the fight.
Scheme-Colonel Masako pulled her over the rail. Barhu tried her very damnedest to punch him in the face. “Hardly appropriate,” he said, with seemingly genuine surprise.
“That was for Kyprananoke!”
He blinked at her, as if shocked anyone still cared. “You did that. You did that.”
There was nothing to be gained by arguing. Two of his Termites searched her for gas capsules or needles. “I want to see Aminata.”
“Aminata does not want to see you. She believes the same lies you sold to Prince Bosoka.” He watched her curiously. “I know what it’s like to be a spy. You’re Falcrest’s, through and through.”
“Your master certainly believes my ‘lies.’ Or I wouldn’t be here.”
He flinched. “Don’t use that word.”
“Master?”
“Yes. The Brain does not have to believe or disbelieve you. She’ll know. She’ll pull the truth through the top of your head.”
His soldiers made it gently but firmly clear that she should walk forward. In the spirit of contrarianism, she looked back.
Up on the second tier of the sterncastle she saw the Womb, hands folded in the sleeves of her cassock, watching Barhu silently. And there beside the Womb was Tau-indi Bosoka. They wore the same cut of cassock, and their small, bright, life-black face was harsh with thirst. All their beautiful coiled hair lay heavy with sweat and oil. There was a line of bruises across their forehead. In that moment Barhu genuinely expected to see light burning on their hands.
Tau was alive. She could know nothing else for certain. But at least they were still alive.
Masako pulled her forward. The rigging blocked her view.
“THIS body is dying. Too young. Too soon. I love it. I don’t want to let it go.”
Barhu couldn’t find the voice. The hutch at the ship’s bow was covered in pitch-blackened canvas. No light at all inside. There was only a sound like the wings of birds: but not that sound, exactly.
“Hello?” she called.
Two soft green lights appeared, like fingers pushed into her eyes. Hands. Then the Brain’s curious dovelike face folded out of the dark. She was alight from brow to upper lip with the uranium fire.
“I call too much of it.” Sorrowful voice, weak as a wheeze. “I bruise, I bleed, I don’t heal. I sleep but I cannot find rest. My liver aches. I fight with the power I have, and I burn all the strength out of my blood, Baru.”
She lifted her hands from her sleeves. The green light revealed the body beneath the ancient armor. Her cheeks were hollow. The hatch in her skull was taut and visible. Her body had been scraped by thirst and hunger: oh, the loose skin hanging from her wrists …
Only the armor seemed to hold her together: dry sticks bundled in a bronze case. But her eyes were alert and intelligent, and the lines that signed her face were clear and wise. She beckoned.
“Brain? I brought you water.…”
“No. Not for me. Not until my people can have it, too.”
Wings fluttered at the edge of her ghost light. Shadows moved through cage bars, across dark dangling shapes, like rats hung by their feet from gallows.
“They’re asleep,” the Brain said, softly. “Come closer. I don’t want to wake them. They hear so well.”
“Bats,” Barhu realized. “Why are you tending bats? They must use water.…”
“I feed them rotten fruit, when we still have it. Now we take turns offering them blood. Though they don’t like mine anymore.” She stroked her bare scalp. Her hand trembled. Anger passed across her gentle face, chased by a deep sadness. “Maybe if I don’t fight the boy so hard … if I don’t fight the Eye and the Womb … maybe if I don’t do those things, I live. But I fight the boy. I fight the Eye and the Womb. Sorcery has its price. So I die. It is very soon, and I’m afraid.”
“But you won’t die, will you? They’ll take a cutting of Incrisiath, and pass it on.…”
“Of course I die. I’m not the kind of immortal who never dies, Baru. Just the kind who lives forever.”
Barhu summoned all her will to push forward. “And you won’t even do that much if you die here, with no one to take your line. Which you will, Brain, if you won’t negotiate. If you keep provoking us with demonstrations like that barrage.”
The Brain knelt in the dark. When she rose again a gray shape clung to her forearm, nuzzling at her skin. Her ghost light shone through the bat’s fine fur.
“Life,” she murmured. “That’s all we are, Baru. The dread Cancrioth. Just life that goes on living. The Womb will do anything to keep her children alive. The Eye will do anything to keep us safely out of sight. They are each good and necessary organs.
“But life needs to do more than just live, doesn’t it? Sometimes we have to risk ourselves … risk death. For our families. For our people. For an ideal. That’s what a brain is, isn’t it? An organ that guides the body against its own instincts. Why do we need a brain, Baru, if the skin and the stomach are enough? A worm has no brain. A worm can still touch what it loves, eat what it tastes, flee from its fears. We need a brain to deny ourselves what we want. Sometimes we must choose hate over love. Sometimes we must choose death over life.”
She looked up from the bat in her arms. “Last time, you ran. Are you ready to overcome that fear? Are you ready to choose death?”
Gray bat-winged absence beat at the edge of Barhu’s sight. She swallowed bile. This must be how Iraji felt, in the moments before he fainted.
“The baneflesh,” she said. “You still want me to take the baneflesh.”
The Brain cupped the bat’s small head. Tiny teeth glinted as it yawned. “In exchange for the flesh that carries the Kettling. Yours to bring to Falcrest.”
Barhu gasped. “It lives in bats?”
“Certain vampiric bats, from certain green holes in the floor of the Mzilimake jungle. The only place in the world it can be found. The Mbo know it’s there. They call it the bushmeat defense. Volunteers eat the meat of these bats, and go to the enemy’s heartland, to bleed out into their water and their crops.”
“And you let these things drink your blood?”
The Brain grinned, a naturalist’s delight: “Ironically, the worst the bite can do is give you rabies. They drink of us, and when the time is right, we eat of them. It’s a sacrament. Do you realize what I give you, Baru?”
She nodded, afraid to speak: she was horrified by how much the Brain had entrusted to her. The Brain had given her the reservoir, the place the disease lived when it was not exploding into pandemic. If you wanted to find a treatment or an inoculation, it was where you’d begin.
“I thought about trying to gather it from Kyprananoke,” Barhu admitted. “Finding someone infected, a sample of the blood … but how could I keep it alive to study, or to use?”
“And now there is no Kyprananoke.”
“I tried to help them. I had nothing to do with their extermination.”
“I do. I cause it, ultimately.” The Brain shuddered. “I make my choice, child. I am born messiah to one people, and only one. They are mine to protect, not any other. If I stop to doubt my choices, I have a thousand years of regrets waiting for me like a labyrinth. There are entire histories that happen if I whisper the right words in the right ears. And some of them, I’m sure, are better than ours. I have no time for those regrets.
“I am making the choice, now, weeks and weeks ago. It is right to give the Kyprananoki a weapon. But I also want to show Falcrest what we can do if they press us. I know it will bring retaliation, but the sheer scale of it astounds me. A whole people wiped away in a day. Not even the Paramountcies were so swift.…
“You see the evil they do.” She raised her burning face to Barhu. “Are you ready to consecrate yourself to their destruction?”
“Must I?” Barhu whispered. “Can’t you trust me without … cancer?”
“Oh, child,” the Brain sighed. “I wish I could. Nothing can be trusted in Falcrest. You could be seduced. You could be bound to them in ways you do not even know. When we first meet, we speak of the brain, and of the thoughts that veil the true world around us. The baneflesh is part of that true world. It has no thoughts. With it in your body, with its soul in your soul … you are beyond corruption. You are as full of devastation as I am full of the souls of the line of Incrisiath.”
And the strange thing was that she was right. The baneflesh had revealed the secret chains upon her. Barhu had fled the choice, fled Eternal entirely, into Tain Shir’s waiting maw. And only then had she realized how Cairdine Farrier dominated her life.
If she had taken the baneflesh and the Kettling on that night, she might have made it to Falcrest. She might have unleashed the pandemic. It might even have been enough to shatter the Imperial Republic. But it would not be the future Tain Hu had wanted for her.
Light gathered in the lines of the Brain’s face. Like it was flowing over her, slow as wax. It made green wells out of her pupils, and a shining ring out of the torc around her shrunken neck. “I bind you to this purpose, Baru. On the deck of Eternal, as you fall into the caldera. I call you back here to complete our pact. You and I are akin. Born to one purpose, messiah and mask-bearer: salvation for our people. So doom yourself, as I am doomed. Take Alu Skin-eater into your body, and the Black Emmenia into your custody, and in our death, we will lead Falcrest to its end.”
Barhu took a deep breath. It smelled of hot fur and droppings.
“Actually,” she said, “I have a different proposal.”
SHE laid it all out, with a written prospectus, with notes and a small map, with pawns to shuffle about in the light of the Brain’s trembling hands.
“The controlling entity will be invested in Falcrest. I will put in place a board of governors and a proper Falcresti man as face of the organization. It will be a joint-stock concern of the unlimited liability mode—this means that shareholders are responsible for paying the company’s debts, if the company itself fails. This will be done partly because people think unlimited companies are more powerful, but primarily to assure lenders that they will recover their loans even in the event of a collapse.
“The Emperor of Falcrest will grant us a special total monopoly to pursue trade with the western Oriati coast and the Black Tea Ocean beyond—your homeland. Mister Cairdine Farrier, my patron, will be coerced into using his considerable financial and nautical resources to give the concern some starting capital. Falcrest’s navy will be induced by political means to supply ships and security. Tau-indi Bosoka, Kindalana of Segu, and Abdumasi Abd will provide the diplomatic and mercantile influence required to arrange passage through the Segu archipelago. You will provide rutterbooks and pilots to lead Concern shipping to viable ports.
“As a subsidiary, a second, limited-liability concern will be invested in Aurdwynn. This Vultjag Trading Concern will handle movement of cargos north and south along the river Inirein, particularly trade with the Stakhieczi Necessity.
“I’ll call your attention to the numbers here, at the top of the prospectus. This is my estimate of the annual raw revenue generated by the concern, not accounting for loans, our own investments, leveraged futures, and other financial instruments. I assure you it’s quite accurate.
“This adjacent number is my estimate—a conservative one, I might add—of the percentage of total world trade, by value, which would fall under this concern’s monopoly. I know that thirty-five percent is a very large number. Again, I assure you it is realistic.
“And here is the percentage of Falcrest’s total economy which I believe we could ultimately entangle in the well-being of our concern. I expect we will pass the fifty percent mark within ten years.
“Once we have made our initial stock offering, I anticipate a frenzy of speculative trading: This speculation will be driven by the basic soundness of the concern’s position—we have a monopoly on a highly profitable trade, after all. I will drive speculation by issuing credit to investors, allowing them to buy stock through an installment plan. Details if you want them.
“This is where we begin to get tricky. Financial power means we’ll have considerable access to the Twelve Ministries and Six Powers. We’ll be able to buy our way into Parliament and raise our own merchant navy. But my ultimate goal is complete capture of Falcrest’s wealth, and to do that, we need to access the personal fortunes of the Suettaring elite.
“To secure that access, I plan to make my trading concern into a tax haven. The wealthy will not want to pay a share of their hard-won fortunes to Parliament. I will offer them a simple way to avoid it. Moving the money into my concern, and from there into Oriati Mbo, will place it beyond taxable reach. It can be invested in various assets there, and they can recover it whenever they want thanks to the, ah, fluidity of the Oriati hawala trust-banking system.
“It won’t escape your notice that moving this money into Oriati Mbo places it in range of your use. We can skim, launder, and misplace funds to meet whatever requirements you have. You will be able to buy all the metals, materials, and supplies required for an effective war. In effect, the total wealth of Falcrest will become your personal lending bank.
“And when the time is right, when I send the signal, you will strike. Not at Falcrest—a land invasion across the Occupation would be disastrous, a crossing of the Tide Column suicidal—but at the trade.
“There will be no Oriati civil war. No second Armada War. No Kettling. No democide and disaster. Let me make a bubble. Let me fill it with all Falcrest’s strength. And then help me burst it.”
THE Brain’s trembling hands clasped together. Darkness fell, except in the pool of uranium fire around her face.
“You want to be a tyrant,” she said.
“I prefer the term tycoon,” Barhu suggested.
“No. You will be a tyrant. You will be a creator and protector of tyranny. Do you understand what Falcrest does to us, if they have the access given by trade? Trim is outlawed. Family land is bought up and turned to cash crops. Children are worked in the fields. Men are killed and their killings blamed on their own conduct. Women are stripped of their children and brought into prostitution. Their sons are soldiers. Their daughters are sent as maids to the houses of the rich. You are asking me to open our doors to a pack of rabid dogs.”
“Trade is a spear you can wield, too! Trade is a vital part of Oriati history! Don’t you remember White Akhena and the Mzicane, the time of unrest? How did she hold the Ivory Stool once she had seized it? Control of the riverine trade in Mzilimake! Control of the exchange of coastal ivory for inland minerals!”
“White Akhena has a will. White Akhena chooses to conquer. Her new methods of war send the conquered fleeing into new lands and they become conquerors in turn. She devises these methods. One woman with a will, and the people who choose to follow her. I am there, and I watch her change the world. And if she isn’t terrified of creating an heir who will supplant her, she creates a dynasty. But she is.”
King’s balls. Barhu was arguing history with an immortal.
“You can’t think Akhena could have succeeded in her conquests if she had nothing to gain by conquest!” Her voice climbed to that old plaintive cry: why doesn’t the universe know I’m right? “Why is Lonjaro the greatest power in the Mbo? Because it controlled the Tide Column and the gold-for-salt trade with Mzilimake! Why did the Armada War strangle the whole Mbo, if not for loss of the Tide Column, the end of sea commerce between Devi-naga and the western nations? The material conditions of trade dictate the movement of power!”
“In the ideology Falcrest has taught you.”
“In objective reality!”
“I’ve lived long enough to hear all sorts of ideas called ‘reality.’” The Brain sighed. “Baru, I fear Falcrest’s subtlety, and their ways of perverting your intent. We lose everything by opening ourselves to their trade. You see it happen to Taranoke. Why would it be any different now?”
“Because this time I’ll be in control. We’ll turn Falcrest’s strength back on them!”
“You are the one in control. One woman. And if you die of appendicitis? If you trip and fall and lose your memory?”
“I won’t,” Barhu sputtered. “Listen, the best way to break a mill is to jam up the machinery!”
“The best way to break a mill is to burn it down, Baru.”
“Not if you want to keep building mills and making flour! The reason Falcrest is winning is because its ways are stronger! I can steal that strength!”
“But it is still Falcrest’s strength. It is still that monstrous pillaging force which treats people like coin and coin like people. And if you try to wield it you are seduced by it. Take Alu into your body instead. Consecrate yourself into my trust.”
“Damn you,” Barhu hissed. “I can do so much more than carry a plague and die young. Don’t you see? The concern that rules this new trade could be mightier than the Republic itself! And I will own it all! I can force Falcrest to give justice to those it’s conquered!”
“Nothing you own by Falcrest’s means is owned by anything but Falcrest. When you think you possess them, that is when they possess you.”
“You sound like a woman I know,” Barhu said, thinking of Tain Shir.
“Yes, I do, don’t I?”
“Money.” Barhu tried to press the desperation from her tone. “A trade route so fertile it’ll make the old Lonjaro gold markets look like a tin scrap exchange. You’ve seen nothing like it in a thousand years. You never had the ships. You never had the chemistry to keep the crews alive. You never had the power to dredge the harbors or to secure the trade circle for your use. I can do these things for you. I can put you on the same financial footing as an empire. Let me make this wonder for you.”
“Why do I want a bank? I come unto the peoples of Oria to fulfill our promise. The prophecy that we would return when they needed us most. Does prophecy need wages?”
“I told my secretary once”—poor Muire Lo, who she’d abandoned—“that any rebellion not built on pure faith or rabid hate needs money. Maybe you can operate on pure faith. Maybe your followers can operate on rabid hate. But what about the people whose loyalty you need to earn? The Princes of the Mbo, the artisans who make your weapons, the merchants who keep your armies fed—you know all this, damn you! You know the world won’t just answer to your will!”
“But it shall,” the Brain said, with a smile that put Barhu’s soul to ice. “The world does answer to my will, Baru. You know it soon. You see me at the head of mighty armies, and emblazoned upon ships, and clasped at the throats of the fearless dead. I am many places at once and I do not need one single coin or gem to do it. There are things more powerful than money in this world. I am born to the signs of whirlwind and geyser, black moon and cicada scream. I do not pay to become messiah. The world makes me so.”
“You fool, have you ever known a great leader that didn’t have wealth behind her? What are you going to do? March hordes of your starving believers across the Mbo to Falcrest? How will you cross the Tide Column with no boats? How will you cross the Butterveldt without supply trains? Falcrest will burn down every field and forest in your path and watch the vultures finish you. Didn’t you tell me that Falcrest scared you? Didn’t you fear their ability to capture the future? I am giving you a piece of that future! Here! A chance to place me, a woman who despises Falcrest, in command of the greatest trade Falcrest has ever seen. And all I want from you is a map, an agreement, and a chance for both of us to leave this place alive!”
The Brain listened quietly. When Barhu was finished, she asked a question.
“Can you name one difference between your plan and Falcrest’s total victory, except that in your plan you are in charge?”
“Of course I can!” Barhu sputtered. “My plan uses trade to benefit everyone, not just Falcrest!”
“Isn’t that precisely what Falcrest says when it comes to trade? Isn’t that what they say when they come to your island?”
“If we are going to deceive Falcrest, then of course our plan needs to seem like it benefits Falcrest until the crucial moment.”
“And if you are not there for the crucial moment? My plan doesn’t require a mastermind, Baru. I believe in the Oriati people. All I do is to give them a symbol, and a choice. Something to remember when Falcrest comes slithering out of the grass with promises of ease. Something that says: do as I did. Choose death over surrender. Save your souls from bondage.”
“Choose death? Is that what you want? You won’t outlive this voyage, so no one can?”
Her ghostly face showed Barhu pain, exhaustion, rapture. “I outlive this voyage as long as I am remembered. Even if the line of Incrisiath goes extinct, the world knows I stood against Falcrest.”
“No one will remember your ship disappearing on some faraway island! My plan lets your people live! Not just the people on this ship but everyone who would die in war, and in outbreak, and in retaliation! If you love your people, then save them!”
“I will not save my people to live in slavery.”
“I’m not offering slavery! I’m offering an end to Falcrest’s power! I’m offering to butcher their empire, and to do it right!”
The Brain was silent. Her left hand caressed the lines of her trepanation hatch. She stood like that, in thought, while Barhu panted like a dog.
Then the Brain turned to the darkness.
“Well?” she called. “Do you believe she’s telling the truth? She truly opposes Falcrest?”
And Aminata’s voice came back, hollow with grief:
“Yes. I do. She does.”
FEDERATION YEAR 912:
23 YEARS EARLIER
IN KUTULBHA HARBOR, BESIDE RUINED KUTULBHA
IN SEGU MBO
THAT night, as the party on Kangaroo Principle smoldered on into the sordid after-dark hours, as the ash sky roiled over the ship full of Oriati Princes and the Falcrest guests who had received their surrender, Tau did what they thought Kindalana would want them to do.
What Kindalana would actually have wanted them to do was to put serious critical thought into the way the Princes managed their grief by holding a party to “repair the cheer of their generation” on a luxury palace-ship, while the common people ashore picked through wet ash for the bones of their children.
What Tau-indi did, instead, was offer their hand to Cosgrad Torrinde in marriage.
“Oh, child.” Cosgrad put a hand out between them, to secure the space, and his other hand covered his mouth, his laugh or frown or absolute disgust. “I can’t marry you!”
Tau-indi had not very much expected to be laughed at. They had just rescued Cosgrad from a shouting match about the merits of maggot treatment, where his accent and his ignorance of nagana made him sound like a fool, and lured him off into a guest cabin with whiskey and the promise of nasty gossip about Cairdine Farrier.
“It’s not a love match,” Tau-indi said, sitting in the stuffed chair, arms crossed, legs crossed, very practical, very adult. “I’m not a child, Cosgrad. And it’s a war tradition from centuries ago, actually, when the Maia took spouses from our royalty. Those spouses became ambassadors.”
“You’re very good at helping me understand,” Cosgrad said. His face was, actually, closest to panic—an expression of oh no, why me, why now! “But I can’t. It’s impossible.”
“If you’re unattracted to me, that’s all right. You can have anyone you want. I don’t mind.” Cosgrad was actually very beautiful, in spite or because of his strange severe build and his flat face. But he was older, and a guest, and Tau-indi had seen him very sick, and all that made the thought of sex weirdly impractical: like an itch they didn’t have. “The important thing is the diplomatic connection we’d represent.”
“But we’d have to get married here! Right away! With—with Farrier as a witness, or someone else from Falcrest, to sign the papers. And you’d have to leave your family!”
“Why?”
“Because I’m leaving for Falcrest now!”
“I didn’t know that,” Tau-indi said, stung. “You never told me.”
“I’m going back with the fleet.” Cosgrad fussed guiltily over his shirt. “I have to get to Falcrest as soon as I can. There’s someone waiting for a report on my success.…”
“The woman who sent you here.”
“Yes. Yes. And I have to reach her before Farrier. I have to convince her that Oriati Mbo has vital things to teach us in its unaltered, pre-Incrastic state.”
“What things?” Tau asked, warily. “Things about jellyfish? The wet origins of life? Those kinds of things?”
“Things about the body. About the way a thousand years of peace have changed you.”
“Then I’ll go with you to Falcrest, and help you with your work. Mother Tahr can come, too.” Tau-indi took Cosgrad’s wrists. “Please, Cosgrad, if we’re going to stop this, we have to learn about each other.”
Cosgrad’s eyes narrowed. He was furious: not at Tau-indi, but it still burned them. “Tau-indi. Your Highness. Please.” His hands wrapped around their own, hard and fine, certain of their strength. “I love your home. I love this place. It taught me so much. But do you understand that some of your world is just a useful lie? A construct, invented by your ancestors to stabilize society? Even you, Tau-indi … even lamen.”
Cosgrad! The man was like lye, he helped you and then he slipped away when you pressed him. “Trim is real. I’m real.”
“Trim is an ideology of compassion. It’s wonderful. I want to spend a lifetime learning it, finding all the ways it’s altered your bodies. But there are people coming for you who care nothing for your comfort or your peace, understand?” Cosgrad squeezed as he spoke, surely not meaning to, but it hurt, it bent Tau’s hands. “They want to make you want to be slaves. Trim will not save you. Trim might lead you right into them.”
“Cosgrad, take me to Falcrest with you, and I’ll learn how they think.”
“If I had an Oriati bride in Falcrest, and you would have to be a bride,” Cosgrad said, and his voice trembled on the words, “the Judiciary would take me in for reconditioning. You don’t understand what it’s like. I can’t even think about these things. The thoughts will go into me! This is unhygienic!”
And he spoke over whatever Tau-indi tried to say. “Oh, Tau-indi, I wish you could see. Your ancestors were a little like Farrier, in a way. Farrier believes he can fix the world by teaching everyone the right lies. But that’s not the way! That’s not a good true world! A good world is true like a sparrow wing, like a termite mound, like the little cells in a beehive. Its form is its function. It never has to lie. It is the way it is because to be otherwise would be less useful. Less good. That is the measure of a good thing.
“I won’t let Farrier win, you understand? I won’t let him sway Parliament and the Throne. I’m going home to Falcrest to save Oriati Mbo and the whole world from his corruption.”
Take me with you, Tau-indi could say. I want to help.
But Cosgrad didn’t want Tau-indi’s help. Possibly Cosgrad did not even believe Tau could help at all.
Possibly Cosgrad did not even believe Tau-indi was a healthy, properly formed person.
“You’re drunk,” Tau-indi said, so that they would both have an excuse to forget this conversation. “I understand. We’ll talk later.”
Someone spoke. Tau-indi didn’t understand the words, but they recognized the voice. Cosgrad looked up, eyes wild, queue whipping behind his head. Cairdine Farrier stood there in a red waistcoat, shorter than Cosgrad, softer, his eyes deep pits shadowed behind a slim white mask.
Cosgrad said something short and sharp in Aphalone.
Farrier spoke in reply. He pointed at Tau-indi and his voice rose in question and then fell in threat. In his right hand was a notebook, half-open.
Cosgrad, snarling, pushed past Farrier and stalked away.
Farrier looked at Tau-indi and smiled wearily. “Sorry,” he said. “Remember. That man is insane, and an enemy to every kind of peace, except the stupor of the well-kept herd.”
“Cosgrad’s my friend,” Tau-indi said.
“Cosgrad is no one’s friend. He doesn’t see people. He doesn’t believe in civilization, or charity, or progress by education and enlightenment. He only believes in meat. If he gets his way, every marriage in the Mbo would be decided by an equation.” Farrier knelt, so that he was a little shorter than Tau. “Be wary of him. He is the worst of us. The worst thing Falcrest ever made.”
Tau-indi answered the masked man as a prince should answer a foe. “He helped us make this peace. He is bound to us and us to him.”
The mask tilted, and Tau-indi recognized the expression in the eyes behind it. Avarice. Curiosity, yes, but also deep, deep avarice. “Cosgrad Torrinde came to live among you,” the mask said, “so he could dig out your ancient sins, and find in them the key to his own immortality. Do you know what he saw when that sorcerer came burning to your door? When she walked toward him afire, without pain? He saw a power he must possess.”
“And what did you come here to do?” Tau said, bitterly. “To help your people burn cities?”
Farrier’s eyes were as dark as secrets. “We ended the war here, in one blow, when it could have dragged on for decades. You’ve seen how we can hurt you, Tau. Now I have to show you how we can help. I have to convince you that, together, there’s hope. It’s the only way. Or in a century there will be nothing living around this Ashen Sea worthy of the name human.”
“What would a man from a young place like Falcrest think to teach us about what will happen in a century?”
His eyes lit with delight. This was a question he loved. “How could the whole Oriati Mbo spend a thousand years in peace and contentment, surrounded by riches, and achieve so little? You have no eugenics. You have no hygiene. You have not eradicated disease or poverty. You are trapped. You have gone up the wrong road and you cannot turn around. All I offer is a chance to be better.” Farrier slammed a palm on the deck and the crack of noise echoed in the little guest cabin. The silks ruffled. “Everyone dies, little Prince. Everyone. But if we die to make tomorrow better, it’s worth it! That’s what I say to the ruins of Kutulbha. That’s what I say to Abdu’s dead mother. That’s what I tell myself, when my guilt runs up my throat and fills my nose.”
“Cosgrad says that you’re a liar. You want the whole world to run on lies. Why would I want your schools? Your progress?”
“Because in a school you can change your own thoughts according to what you learn. Cosgrad would fix you in your place before you are even born. Like a farmer separating the beef cows from the milk.” Farrier stood, and sighed, and smiled again. “This war was just a greeting. A way to open ourselves to each other. The things that happen after a war, the repositionings and reconstructions, are so often ignored by history. But they are more important.
“Now. Would you like to come up to the high deck with me? I can introduce you to my colleagues.”
LATER that night, under the silk pavilions of the palace-ship’s air deck, Tau-indi saw Cairdine Farrier in his fine jacket and sleek trousers, demonstrating tricks of dance to admirers. Kindalana was his partner, painted and chained, and she whispered things into his ear, or put her arm around him with casual confidence between sets.
Farrier looked off his keel, uncertain how to react. When Kindalana drew away to make a pass by a group of Prince’s attendants from Segu, shy young men who’d been eyeing her invitingly, Farrier excused himself and went to find a drink.
“What are you doing?” Tau-indi muttered.
“Unsettling him,” Kindalana murmured. “The whole time he lived with me, he was scrupulously modest. This is a chance to touch him, to make him look a little foolish, to diminish him and make him want my approval as repair.” She leaned up on the rail, arms outflung, and eyed Farrier with amusement. “Look at him. He’s so confused.”
Farrier spent a while mixing his drink and reading the labels off a Falcrest bottle. His motions were swift and confident, and he made jokes to passers-by. He was acting nonchalant, and acting hard. When he was alone he scratched at his beard.
“Spent his whole youth traveling the world, plundering everywhere he went,” Kindalana murmured, “and yet he’s still a Falcrest man. Someone taught him that the male of the species is always brightly plumed and forthright, and the female’s dowdy, studious, and cold. He has no idea what to do with me.”
“I…” Tau-indi grappled with their feelings. “I’m not sure this is right. I mean, you’re both very powerful people, but … on the day we signed a treaty of surrender, it seems unfavorable. And he’s older than you … three years or more, depending on whether he gave us his true age.…”
Kindalana squeezed their arm. “Have you read their laws on women? The etiquettes of sanitary courtship?”
“No,” Tau admitted. “Are they very strange?”
“Among other errors, they insist that women are predisposed to use sexual unavailability as a technique of manipulation. He doesn’t understand why I make my own pursuit. He can’t read me.”
“But you are manipulating him, aren’t you? You’re trying to lure him into some kind of mistake.” Tau-indi felt prudishly hung up on Lonjaro mores, the kind of mores that had kept their mother and Padrigan off each other for years and years. “It just seems to me that if he’s expecting barbaric, lustful women, you’ll only be confirming his thoughts.…”
She shrugged, untroubled. “So I confirm his thoughts. It doesn’t make them true.”
“Does this actually work?” The idea of taking this friendly, warm, intimate thing and making it a tool …
“I don’t really know. But I’m willing to try.” Now Farrier was headed back toward his admirers, carrying drinks. Kindalana gave Tau a dashing white grin. “Wish me luck, then!”
“Luck,” Tau said, meaning that, although not sure what form they wanted the luck to take.
TAU would not learn what had happened that night until much later. Not between Kindalana and Farrier (though it was nothing). And not what happened far away on Prince Hill, in the cool undercroft of the House of Abd, where someone lived who should have died.
The sorcerer woman had been burnt everywhere, her fingers ruined, her lungs scorched. Her eyes like cooked yolk in a mask of scar. She was dying of infection even as she wept brown fluids from the blistered carnage of her skin. Abdumasi brought her water, but nothing for the pain. She gave no sign of feeling it. That was why Abdumasi wanted to keep her alive. The thought of being impervious to pain …
She could not speak, or grip a coal to write. But she could focus on Abdu when he visited, and respond to his questions with blinks. She could even smile, though she had no lips.
At first Abdu told himself that he came to see her to get away from the empty tooth-socket feeling of Prince Hill without Tau and Kindalana or his mother.
But on that day, the day of the surrender, when his grief and his rage seemed to have infested him and made a home out of his soul, he came down to the sorcerer with water and honey wash and a question on his lips.
“How do you bear it?” he said, in a frightened whisper. “How can you bear hurting so much?”
She smiled at him and shrugged. Something crisp brushed against something wet.
“Can we stop Falcrest? Next time they come?”
She nodded, once.
“How?”
The sorcerer curled a finger up toward her own face, and, with her other hand, made the suggestion of a fist. Abdumasi understood:
Us. My people. We will be ready.
“You’re the only thing I ever saw them fear,” he whispered.
She opened her hand to him. There was something on her skin, a dark unfading glow, that shone over the light of his own candle like soap on water.
She beckoned him closer.
WHEN Kindalana returned to Prince Hill from her time in Segu Mbo and her state visit to Falcrest, she and Abdumasi were promptly married. It had been more than a year and a half since she departed. He did not tell her about the woman who had lived for a while in his undercroft. She did not tell him about the girl who had lived for a while in her.