SHE came back to her parents’ house at sunset to face the carpets. Pinion waited under the veranda, stone-faced, dressed in a sleeveless jerkin and her lucky bark-strip hunting skirt with its woven charms and camouflage brush. Barhu had always thought, as a child, that boar hunting was an ancient and eternal practice. Only in school had she learned that boars were a recent arrival to Taranoke, brought by Oriati traders.
Someone was always changing someone, Aminata had said.
Solit was in his modern smith’s apron, dark with soot. He did not smile, either. Wordlessly he gave her the dive knife in its leather scabbard and Barhu tied it around her left ankle where she would not forget it.
“Is it ready?” Barhu asked.
“Yes,” her mother said. “It’s ready.”
“Come, Baru,” her father said. Taking his last chance to speak her name in public.
The matai waited for her on the town green. There were eleven of them, thirteen with her parents: an indivisible number, Kimbune would point out. The elder potter, the carpenter of trees and of driftwood, the textile maker, the elder navigator, the chief fisher, the canoe-maker, the first shield, the lead drummer, the planner of farms, the birdwatcher, the healer. Solit was the metalworker and Pinion was the huntress. They went to stand with the others, leaving Barhu by a spray of damask roses and hibiscus.
“Baru Cormorant,” the healer aunt said. “We have called you here for the last time. You brought death to our shores for your own profit. You turned your back on your people to lie down with those who made war on us.
“Though you were born among us, you did not live with us. You have filled your own stomach while we were hungry. If you come to us starving, we will give you stone. You have dressed your own skin while we were naked. If you come to us naked, we will shut our doors. You have sailed away while we foundered. If we see you drowning, we will leave you to the sharks.
“As our ancestors cast the water thief from the canoe and the hoarder from the village, now we cast you out. We name you Namestruck. Lie on your belly.”
Barhu knelt on the petal-strewn earth. The uncle who was the textile maker unrolled a bolt of mulberry cloth across her shoulders. Pinion pushed Barhu down onto her stomach and drew the cloth flat over her. Her fingers paused at the hem, half a knuckle’s width from the top of Barhu’s head. She stood and walked away.
One by one they stepped onto her, put the weight of one foot onto her back, and walked across.
Barhu grunted softly with each foot. Her mother stepped on her. Barhu could tell it was Pinion by the way she hesitated, and then landed too hard. Solit was last of all. He chose carefully where to put his weight, and she barely felt his passage.
A year ago this would have killed her. The loneliness and the shame would have crushed her like a hundred thousand feet of water. What you can learn to survive, if you go into it with purpose.
She would never go back to Taranoke, live in a little house by the lagoon, deal foreign currency at the market, and fight with her wives. She had wanted that for so long. It could never happen now.
She closed that door forever.
Someone ripped the cloth from her. Rough hands lifted her and pushed her toward the road out of the village. She caught her right foot on a vine and stumbled. No one helped her: no one could. The word would go out everywhere that Taranoki people lived, even among the plainsiders, that Baru Namestruck had been trampled under her own parents’ feet.
Someone might try to take Barhu’s parents hostage anyway. That was a risk Pinion and Solit knew and accepted. But her enemies would not do it because they thought Barhu loved Pinion and Solit. They would not punish Taranoke to punish her, not unless they were vicious beyond reason.
And it would protect her, too. She would never be tempted by an offer of the governorship. She would never be tempted to go back to a home she had never really known: only loved from afar, loved it for its hidden aspect, the way you love a god.
Her left foot came down hard on the loose gravel. She stumbled. “O Devena,” she whispered, “please stay me on my course. Please keep me from turning back—”
“Last chance,” Yawa said, from out of her blindness.
BARHU tried to twist to face her, and faltered on her bad ankle. She lost her balance and fell on her two-fingered hand. “You were watching?”
“Yes.” Yawa didn’t move. She stood fully masked and robed, shadow raven-roosting upon the mulberry bushes. “The negotiations are done. Abdumasi Abd has gone to Eternal for his surgery. Everything Farrier wanted is possible now. Did you gain the rutterbook?”
“No.”
“Then your trade concern is doomed. You will have no ports in the Black Tea Ocean.”
“No,” Barhu said, laughing a little, “not doomed, just speculative. No one has to know we didn’t get the rutterbook, Yawa. We’ll lie. We’ll say we have it. By the time anyone finds out differently, we’ll own half of Falcrest. Everything we wanted is possible now, Yawa.”
Yawa rubbed something in her gloved palm. It was a scrap of onion skin, for luck. She threw it away. “Have you ever seen a case of penile myiasis?”
“A case of what?”
“Say a man sleeps nude in a house full of flies. One day he comes in to the clinic with bloody discharge and painful lesions on his cock. We look at him, we find a big red blister right on the tip”—Yawa described the shape and the blister with her hands—“so we prod that blister. It squirms. There are botfly larvae growing in his manhood—”
“Yawa!”
She could see Yawa’s eyes through the mask. So bright. As if bleached by the suffering she’d seen. “We made a bargain with the woman who destroyed Kyprananoke. That should feel more repellent than maggots growing from a cock. But people don’t think that way. The thought of maggots in a cock bothers us more than ten thousand dead innocents. So I thought I would evoke the necessary revulsion.”
“Thanks, Auntie Yawa,” Barhu said, queasily.
“Is it too late to alter the terms of our bargain?”
“Yes,” Barhu said. “Much too late for that.” She held Yawa’s gaze firmly. “The terms stand. Exactly as we discussed.”
“You’re certain?”
“I’ve made my choices. I’m ready to confront Farrier. Just keep Hesychast out of the way.”
“You don’t think you can convince the Cancrioth to yield a sample of the immortata?”
“A living portion of their sacred flesh? You’re the religionist, Yawa. You know how hard it is to convince people to give up their faith.”
“You forget, Baru. I did give up my faith. I crushed the ilykari. I mortified their flesh for Hesychast. I even gave him my brother, Baru. My own brother. He’s here. On this island. Now. Hesychast demands my triumph.”
“Then give it to him,” Barhu urged her. “Yomi. Like we discussed.”
“You trust me?”
“Yawa, I trust you.”
Yawa’s mask nodded in the dark. “Very well. Faham, take her into custody.”
Footsteps closed in from her blind side. Barhu went for her dive knife. A steel cosh smashed her right wrist and when she tried to rise another blow to her ribs took the breath from her. A black bag dropped over her head. The drawstring noosed around her neck.
“Tip her head back,” Execarne ordered. “Hope you haven’t lost any weight, Baru.”
A dose bottle cracked like mouse bone. She held her breath as long as she could. When she gasped, her cheeks went numb, her throat, her chest.
She heard Iscend say, “I have the instruments prepared.”
“She thought it could be faked,” Yawa said, with remote sadness. “She thought I’d find a way.”
AMINATA woke in a hot sweat to the sound of screams.
“Boarded,” she said, and sat upright faster than her blood could reach her head. She grayed out for a moment. And she was back on Lapetiare, leaping onto a pirate galley, with the stink of Burn in her nostrils and the silent mass of her marines behind her and the first man she would ever kill waiting below.
He will be stronger than you, her weapons master had told her. He will have a longer reach and more force behind his blows because he is a man. But you will be unhesitating and precise in your violence. You will have the fatal will that is most of killing.
And failing that, you will have your marines.
“We’re being boarded,” she said. “Iraji? Are you—”
But Iraji was in surgery; they had told her she would not be released until he woke. Fine. She knew what to do. Assess the situation, discover the intent and strength of the enemy force, act with vigor and aggression to destroy the enemy’s cohesion and capability to fight.
She didn’t know which side was her enemy. But she would go find out.
She slid into her slops, double-tied her breasts, donned a canvas tunic, lit the candle in the desk lantern, and went out into the passageway. The crackle of Termite pistol fire sounded below: they were engaged with the boarders. She trotted down the narrow stairs to the deck with the baneflesh pigpen. Dry filth stained the causeway floor: men had come in through the pigpen, moving forward swiftly and in column. She made it for maybe twenty, maybe thirty. Not enough to seize the ship by force.
So it was a raid. They were here for one of two reasons. To take prisoners and intelligence.
Or to detonate the ship’s magazines. To deny Eternal to all those who wanted to use it.
SHE crept through architecture like a palimpsest. Eternal’s original structure had been rebuilt again and again, each transfiguration leaving phylogenetic vestiges: inexplicable nooks, mazes of rooms, secret doors, strange chimneys where pulleys dangled between decks. She tried one door but the fumes from a shattered apparatus of yellow glass drove her back. At another door a dog barked pitifully. She tried to let the poor mutt out, but the warped frame wouldn’t give.
Two frames forward she found the first corpse.
He was Falcresti, rigged in a gray filtered mask and a combat harness too slim and carefully fitted to be navy issue. A pistol had shot a mandala of blood across his chest. No exit wound. The ball must’ve struck the back of his ribs and stayed inside.
“You’re Morrow Ministry,” she told the dead man. “Faham Execarne, what are you doing?”
Burnt-out smoke grenades littered the companionway like discarded tins of fish. She smelled old piss. The Cancrioth had been here, pouring jarred urine on the catchfires. They were moving behind the boarders.
The tracks became chaos—the boarding party driven forward, moving in haste. They dropped smoke behind them to slow the Cancrioth pursuers. The size and organization of the Cancrioth pursuit told Aminata they’d been ready for an attack. How? Execarne knew about the cancer whale. He certainly knew it could report his approach. So why had he walked his boarding party into an ambush?
She found the first Cancrioth body.
Giant Innibarish lay naked and burnt in a mad scrawl of blood. His fists were charcoal-scabbed around a short axe. “Oh,” Aminata groaned, covering her mouth. She’d smelled cooked man before, but always through a mask. He must have stripped his clothes when they caught fire. “Oh, virtues.”
“Aminata…” the corpse breathed.
He was alive. “Oh, kings and queens, Innibarish. What happened?”
He crackled when he moved. “The Brain … she told the Womb they would come. Told her to be ready. The Womb cast spells on us, for bravery, and against pain. I hardly feel it.…”
Hundreds of stab wounds had turned his chest to ground meat. “You’re going to die,” she told him. “I’m sorry.”
“I know. But I’ll live, too, if my people find me in time. Tell them … tell them to cut it out of me, quickly.…”
He’d killed at least one of the enemy. His axe was bloody to the handle. He must’ve chased the Morrow-men through the smoke and flames, probably screaming his lungs out, coughing and hacking, trying to drive them away from the Womb and his friends.
They would’ve seen a monster coming after them. Aminata saw the gentle man who had always treated her well.
“I can kill you,” she whispered, “if you want.…”
He tried to answer but it sounded as if his lungs were collapsing. His chin twitched. No. Not yet.
He was trying to keep his tumor alive as long as he could.
SHE passed a compartment strewn with pots, each full of carefully sorted shards of human bone. The dark beyond smelled powerfully of glue. She raised her lantern. Light fell across something the size of a boulder, jigsawed together from curved pieces of bone. It was a tremendous human skull, half-made, unfinished from the jaw down except for two mounds of glue where a lower jaw might hinge. Hundreds of teeth grinned in a white arc, incisors and canines and molars grouped together, tribes of allied bite.
“I hate this fucking place,” she said. But she was lying. What she really felt was a kind of outraged protectiveness. She had been on this ship first! She’d worked so hard to keep the crew alive! How dare Execarne just bull in here and ruin everything!
She chased the sound of battle forward. And found slaughter. Eternal crew lay with their blood sticky across the engraved teak, with their gaping throats smiling up at snuffed candles, with two gouged wounds into their kidneys. Most of the dead were so dehydrated that they couldn’t have fought. They would have split like paper.
What had happened to break discipline? Why were the Morrow-men suddenly berserk killers?
She checked each corpse with her heart in her throat. Not Iraji. Not Iraji. Not Iraji—
Something tickled at the hand she’d braced on the deck. She snatched it away. Nothing there. Just a little gap in the caulking between planks. She thought she’d felt a roach, or a rat.
She lowered the lantern to the gap to check for movement. And saw the faintest trickle of smoke coming up from below.
The ship was on fire. She sniffed the smoke. It didn’t smell like burning wood, or paint, or navy Burn. It smelled like … like what? A little like sex, some kind of heady sweetness, like whorehouse flowers: but over that a bitter, foul, oily stink, like grease dripping in reverse, climbing up her nose.
The ship’s great alarm groaned into the hull. It made her fingertips tremble. She had a sudden sense of unreality. She was farther down the causeway, but didn’t remember moving. Had she gone into rower’s trance? “Shit,” she muttered.
What had she smelled in that smoke?
A fat green cockroach ran across the passageway, blinking its light at her. A pistol cracked somewhere forward and below her.
She heard Iraji scream.
“I’M coming, Iraji!” she bellowed, against all tactical sense. Her heart stammered and leapt as she plunged down the narrow stairs and ladders, chasing the sound of Iraji’s pain.
She was so thirsty. Her tongue seemed cemented to the roof of her mouth. The lantern bounced wildly in her grip, cutting nonsense slices from the dark ahead. She put her left hand out to shield her and pushed forward.
She was beginning to think she’d been drugged.
Her hand met something warm. Someone warm. They gasped: “Aminata? I heard you.”
Aminata raised the lantern. “Your Federal Highness?”
“Tau will do, thank you.” Tau-indi clasped her around the waist, panting for breath. “Aminata. Something’s desperately wrong—”
“I know. The ship’s been boarded by—”
“Morrow-men, yes. Faham Execarne is with them. Strange to see him out in the field; like meeting the Minister of Agriculture out tossing hay. He must trust no one else.” Tau laid their head on Aminata’s breast, as if they were dearest friends. “His party was ambushed. They took Iraji and Abdumasi from the surgical theater as hostages. I told Faham they couldn’t be moved, but he wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t even look at me. Like I wasn’t there.”
“Iraji’s still alive?”
“Not for long. He and Abdu are held together by silk and glue. And the datura will pull them toward death—”
“Datura?”
“Yes. Can’t you smell it? The Womb’s people are burning it down below, filling up the ship, so their magic will be stronger. Datura. Archon trumpet. It’s terrible. It will take anyone who suffers it to the bottom of their soul.”
She couldn’t focus on the words. They felt round, skittering away, marbles on glass. “I’m already dosed.”
“I can feel it. Your heart rate’s up. You’ll get a dry mouth soon, and become aroused.”
Her mouth was already very dry. “Doesn’t it affect you?”
“I’ve had every drug you can imagine, Aminata. Datura is one of the worst, but I can ride it.” Tau inhaled across her skin: it felt like spiders stepping. “We have to stop Execarne. I think he might blow up the ship.”
The thought of Eternal detonating in a clean blast of fire, swallowing Aminata and Iraji and Tau and everyone else aboard, simplifying them into ash, made Aminata profoundly horny. So there was the next symptom Tau had predicted. “Virtue fuck,” she snarled, “how much of this stuff are they burning?”
“Heaps of it.” Tau kissed her softly on the bottom of the chin. She moaned, pressed closer to their small warm body, and then, catching herself, growled in irritation. Tau looked up at her from several feet away, where they had gone without moving. “What do you think I just did?”
“I’m hallucinating.”
“Datura doesn’t cause hallucinations. It causes delirium, which is much worse. You won’t remember that you’re drugged. Listen—if Execarne is trapped aboard, if he cannot use the hostages to get out, he will set fire to the magazines.”
“Virtues, why?”
“He came to find the Kettling. He fears it, and he may in the end destroy himself to destroy it. We have to stop him.”
A pistol discharged nearby: the sound became a spike like a whaler’s harpoon, fifty or sixty feet long, pale eel of no color. It fell on the deck and squirmed. Aminata looked away. “Did you bring Osa? Can she fight?”
“No. Too much danger to her trim. Listen, Aminata, there’s something you have to know—a special danger to you—you are bound by trim to Baru, and to Kindalana, who—”
“Oh, king’s balls,” Aminata groaned. “Not Baru again.”
“Listen!” Tau was above her, suddenly, looking down at her from a mighty altitude. Aminata could not understand how they fit inside the ship. “Those bonds would protect you powerfully. But not here. Not among the Cancrioth. This is a place raw to the world, unordered by human design, inhabited by older power.”
“So?”
“The things that happen here are meaningless. Your destiny has no power at all to save you. The most beloved woman in the world, a woman protected by the gratitude and obligation of whole nations, might step on a nail and die of tetanus. A son might break his father’s brow with an opening door. This is a place for senseless hurt, Aminata. Iraji and Abdu are in the most danger they have ever been. And so are you. If Abdu dies, all is lost. And if you die, Baru is lost.”
“Who gives a shit about Baru?” Aminata snarled.
“You do, child. You do.” Tau smiled down at her. “But it’s Iraji and Abdu who need us at the moment.”
“Your Highness,” Aminata said, feeling, maybe for the last time, that old spark of duty-pride, “what can I do to help?”
“Find Execarne. Tell him I’m aboard. Tell him to surrender. Tell him if he doesn’t, I’ll be killed with everyone else.”
“That’s it?”
“I think so. Faham’s my friend. He wouldn’t blow me up.”
“All right. Take this—where’s the lantern?”
“I have it.” Tau showed it to her. “You were swinging it about.”
“Take it abovedecks. Signal to Sterilizer. Just do three fast blinks, over and over. It’s the signal for enemy aboard, send urgent reinforcement.” Aminata covered her eyes against the lantern light, to save her night vision. “With any luck at all, they’ll send marines.”
“How will the marines help?”
“They’ll convince Masako and the Brain to let Execarne go. They’ll convince Execarne he has a way out.”
The moaning alarm trembled through the deck below her. She could hear words in it, now. She was very afraid that it would say her name. She understood, suddenly, that she was meant to die here.
“Aminata?” Tau whispered. “Are you all right?”
“Go. Go above. Be safe. Send the signal.” She pushed the Prince behind her, and faced the squirming dark. “I’m going to save Iraji.”
SHE knew exactly where Execarne would barricade himself. He would look for a holdout near the magazines where he could triage his wounded and regroup: somewhere with chokepoint entrances and plenty of room inside.
He would find the Brain’s ampitheater.
Space shattered and knotted around her. Compartments and passageways tangled like intestines. The datura smoke was a thick ground fog now, and things like centipedes rose from it to taste her ankles. Silhouetted fighters screamed at each other in fury. She was not afraid. This was battle: seven parts trying to find out where to go and what to do, two parts shouting, and one part horrific, irrevocable violence.
A Termite’s pistol fired like a disembodied thing, backflash silhouetting half a man, light shining through the thin webs between his fingers. She felt the skin of that hand between her molars, and the light like grains of dirt in her eyes. The husk of a smoke grenade crushed under her foot and she looked down. It was the body of the burnt boy she’d found on the Llosydanes. A charcoal star of limbs around a powdered center. Tiny rats with Baru’s face swarmed past, chattering their plots.
Tain Shir walked alongside her. Blood dripped from her white mouth where shark teeth grinned into the chum-clouded sea. The first man who had ever told twelve-year-old Aminata that she looked like a full-grown woman gave her a flower and asked her to smile. He was a post captain now, somewhere. Shir’s vast shark shape drew back a lance and hurled it into Aminata’s heart.
She pinched the lobe of her ear, stabbed two fingers into her left hand between thumb and forefinger, and kept walking.
“Iraji?” she shouted. “Execarne? Anyone? I’m with Tau-indi! Don’t shoot me!” The diplomatic protections of an Oriati Federal Prince fell like an itchy blanket over her, and then unraveled, became caterpillars, crawled away useless into the chaos.
A grenade blew up in the fork of the next intersection. Shrapnel chipped the teak. A big piece spun like an axehead past her. She crawled up to the intersection to look, and, in the cross-corridor to her left, saw something move in the lantern light: the thin white line of a rapier blade, red at the tip.
The rapier turned toward her. A man called out a challenge in Takhaji battle language.
“I’m with Tau-indi!” she shouted back.
The rapier became a shining white point coming straight at her face. Fighting spirit, what her old instructors had called death liquor, blew up in her drug-quickened heart. The man holding the rapier was slim and tall, he wore the shoulder flag of a fighting Oriati soldier, he looked faintly bemused—Masako. It was Masako.
She jagged right without thinking, old Naval System knife defenses waking up. He will kill you if you cannot control the weapon. She lunged in along the rapier’s length and grabbed for Masako’s wrist but he flicked the rapier sideways and cut a long shallow tunnel of pain up her left arm.
She screamed in challenge and threw herself on him, inside the rapier’s range. He staggered back around the corner. She smashed her whole body left, into the rapier’s blade, and to her glee the long thin sword bent over the hardwood corner and cracked.
The man tackled her and threw her down on her back. His fist cocked back.
She lost a moment.
Then she was on her back on the deck, and Scheme-Colonel Masako was battering her face into her head. Her nose was broken, her thoughts gray. He pulled his fist back for another hit. She drove her forehead right into his oncoming punch. Fuck you, Masako, who taught you how to punch? A fist to the face is little bones against one big bone, and the big bone wins.
Masako’s fist hammered her head back against the deck. Her forehead broke his hand and folded it down limp beneath his wrist. He roared in pain.
Aminata saw and felt only red, but she didn’t need to see, didn’t need to think, she was fighting from her spine. She wrapped her legs around Masako’s waist, put her forearms in front of her face to block his next blow, and threw all her weight to the left. Use your legs, her master-at-arms whispered, use all your body, or die.
He fell off her, shrimping up around his broken hand. Rolled across his back. Came up crouching. Where was his broken rapier? She needed a knife, a piece of shrapnel, anything—she kicked frantically at his shins to keep him away—
He looked baffled, as if he were not quite sure what was going on. A datura erection tented his slops. In the dark behind him, in the place they’d first met, children crawled through the fire of the embassy Aminata had burnt.
“Tsaji,” he said, thickly. “Collaborator!”
He kicked her in the head. She curled up against the blow and took his steel-tipped boot right to her kidney, screaming like a cat in the night. He kicked her again, maybe even killed her, if he’d hit the kidney bad enough. It would just take her a while to bleed and die.
She spat and rolled onto her stomach. He got her again, right in the same place. She reached out blindly into the dark and found nothing to help her. No one coming. No one to save her. But he was alone, too, or she’d be dead already—
He kicked for her head again. She rolled over in time to grab his calf and take the hit right in the chest, thump of steel against her diaphragm, everything in her lungs coming out in one hot gasp. No air, no breath, but who had time to breathe anyway: not Aminata, clawing his belt, pulling. He fell across her. The fucker was laughing. He had never believed anything could go wrong. All a fucking game to him. Kyprananoke and all of it. Even this fight.
She wormed out from under him, clawed her way up the wall, one of her fingernails snagging on a protruding treenail and bending halfway back. They didn’t even have proper metal nails for her to fight with.
“Fucker,” she gasped, spilling bile and blood from a split tongue. “You’re dead now. You’re fucking dead.” As she backed away from him time stuttered in reverse, looping her words, fucking dead dead dead dead dead dead.
“Constant aggression,” he said, through broken lips. He got back to his feet with only a little weariness. “The instinct of the body facing violence is to withdraw and contract. You must expand and fill up space. You must claim everything around you so that the enemy cannot. Even your voice must assert victory. I read your fighting manual.”
She kicked a burnt-out grenade at him. He stepped out of the way. Burning lilac branches showered down across him from out of Hara-vijay, weeks past. The ship moaned.
“I’m trying to save your life,” she snarled. “Get out of my way.”
“Tsaji.” He panted for breath. “It means plunder. They plundered you, Aminata. They took you from us and I’m going to take you back—”
She rushed him, head down, shoulders tight. It was the worst thing she could have done against a bigger faster man because it meant committing to the grapple. He caught her, stumbled back to absorb the impact, beat at the back of her neck—and she got his broken wrist and twisted. His laugh gurgled into agony. She grabbed for his balls and found a thick undercloth in the way: settled for punching him in the dick as hard as she could. He kept hitting her in the back of the head and with each hit she would go blind for a moment. She kept punching him in the dick.
“I did the right thing!” he bellowed. “I did the right thing! I did it for my children! My child, my child, why do you fight—”
Idiot, she thought: if you want to kill me you have to want to kill me.
She tried to bite him in the throat. He grabbed her chin, forced her back, and they fell together, grappled, hissing, spitting, dripping blood and bile on each other. He was winning. Once he got on top of her he would hold her down and choke her.
She stopped striking back.
Save your strength, Aminata. Take the knee he slams between your legs. Take the punches to your kidneys that make you gag. Keep your hands up, lock your thighs around his waist, keep him in your guard and don’t let him go.
She could not outmuscle him. She could not outrun him. But she would bet her life that she’d had the shit beaten out of her more often than some prissy spy.
And finally he fell back on his haunches, panting, wringing out his one good hand. She could see his elbow shaking with fatigue.
“Are you done?” he said. “Are you finished? These people, these masks, they don’t care about you. They use you to torture your own kind. They use your body for war and sex because their own bodies aren’t good enough. They want you to be a citizen, but you’re a queen, Aminata, you come from the line of kings and queens. We’re the humans, Aminata. We’re the race. They’re just vitiated pale leftovers—”
He had no guard. His one good hand was down. She crunched with her waist and lunged and she had him in a front guillotine choke before he could do more than grunt. She counted while he thrashed and punched her stomach. The blood choke worked within ten seconds, usually. He went limp at twelve, and fell across her. She held him like that for a minute.
“Baby killer,” she grunted, and left him among the burning lilacs, in the blood-soaked embassy courtyard where the children crawled.
She staggered in the direction where the grenade had exploded, shouting, “I’m navy! Lieutenant Commander Aminata, Imperial Navy! Don’t shoot!”
A gray wraith came out of the smoke and pulled her into the light ahead.
“AMINATA,” Faham Execarne bellowed. “Welcome! I don’t suppose you’ve brought the navy to reinforce me?”
He wore a fighting harness. The left arm of his shirt was cut off at the shoulder, exposing a pink machete wound straight down to the bone. Small tufts of grass grew from it; Aminata couldn’t remember if that was normal. She wiped blood from her lips. Her kidneys might be ruptured. She might be bleeding to death from the inside. But that was all right. She knew her purpose.
“No, Your Excellence,” she said. “I’m here alone. I’ve sent Tau above to signal Sterilizer. I think you’d better surrender.”
“Oh, Tau’s not here.” Execarne waved dismissively. “I’d never wish this place on them.” A trickle of blood spiraled down his arm to his glove and vanished into the lining. “You know, I always wondered if this was possible. Reality completely distorted by the power of the will. They’re remarkable, these sorcerers. I knew their whale was away spreading cholera, yet somehow, still, they sensed me coming. Sensed it in time to deny me my prize.”
“What did you come for, sir?”
“The Kettling, of course. So we could find a cure. But the roosts are empty. The bats are gone. I had to take us below … to the magazines.” He sighed heavily. “Did I ever tell you I have a perfect memory? So I am cursed to remember everything I saw. There’s a room down here, Aminata, where they cast living people in molten bronze. The flesh remains, beneath the cooling metal. There’s some art to it, to keep the body from burning away.…”
He shuddered, and took a deep breath. His pupils were huge and black. The datura smoke seemed to climb his body.
“Your Excellence, Tau is here. You mustn’t detonate the—”
“The world here has been broken open and rendered subject to our wills!” Execarne barked. “I do not perceive Tau aboard, and thus Tau is not aboard! Do not disrupt my subjectivity! My calm remove is the only thing holding existence together!”
“Your Excellence, there’s a drug in the air, it’s called datura—”
“Of course there’s a drug. Drugs amplify the mind’s power over reality. Which makes it all the more important that I keep Tau away from this ship.”
“Tau is right above us, on the weather deck, waiting for you to come out—”
But Execarne was no longer listening to her. He had snipped her neatly out of his consciousness. Now he was murmuring with some of his Morrow-men, pointing at compartments on a map of Eternal’s underbelly.
If they went for the magazines, Aminata did not think there was anyone on this dehydrated ship who could stop them.
Aminata found Iraji and sprang up the pews to his side. He was swaddled in a litter made from two spears and a roll of bloody canvas, She checked his pulse (fast and thready) and his breathing (shallow and far too quick). She dared not pull the bandages off his sutured back to check the wound.
“Iraji,” she whispered, “can you hear me?”
He shivered under her hands and moaned.
“He can’t,” a man said, grimly. “He’s quite drugged.”
Abdumasi Abd lay on the pew above. His pain-squint eyes were level with hers. Aminata had been his torturer so long that she wanted to flinch away—do not let him see the face behind the mask! But he didn’t recognize her, of course. He had no idea what she’d done to him.
“Are you in pain?” she asked him: a triage reflex.
“No,” he said, “but I can’t feel my legs. Something’s wrong. I could be bleeding out my asshole for all I know. What about you? You look like you’ve been trampled by a bull.”
“I got in a fight.”
“Anyone worth fighting?”
“I hope so. Do you know what’s happening?”
“Not sure. I’m high as stars. Something in the air.” A strained laugh. “You’ve got two centipedes coiled up in your eye sockets right now, guarding those little yellow babies they hatch. Lucky those mask fucks gave me so many drugs I’m used to it. Who are you, anyway?”
“I’m the one who gave you all those drugs.” She just told him: there didn’t seem to be any point to lying.
“What?” he said.
“I was your torturer. I planned—everything. Everything they did to you.”
“You.” He tried to recoil and something in his body did not respond the way he wanted. Claustrophobic flicker in his eyes—a man trapped in a coffin with a stinging jelly. “You’re Oriati? They gave me to an Oriati woman?”
“Yeah. I know. I look just like Kindalana.”
“You don’t look a fucking thing like her!”
“That’s not what Cosgrad Torrinde told me,” Aminata said, and prayed, yes, actually prayed, that the human connection Tau believed in would do something to make Abd listen.
Abd stared in horror. “How the fuck do you know Cosgrad?”
Why not go all in on Tau’s nonsense? “Trim brought us together. Kindalana couldn’t be here, so trim brought me in her place. To save you.”
“This is a trick.” Abd tried to get away from her and his legs wouldn’t work. He pushed at the litter with his arms, weakly. “This is another trick, I’m still in the fungus room, I’m hallucinating—”
“It’s real.”
“Nothing you’ve ever told me is real!”
“We’re really here, Abdumasi Abd. I know because I told Masako where to find you. I know because I’ve spent weeks and weeks trapped on this ship, losing my career, losing my only friend to these cancer people, and now he’s dying right next to you. That man over there is real. He’s about to detonate the ship’s magazines. We’re all going to die here. Tau’s going to die. Unless you can stop Execarne.”
“How can I stop him? How?”
“It’s easy, Abdu.” And in the grip of the drug, where the whole world changed to obey the changes in your mind, it really did seem simple. “You’re like him, aren’t you? You were both lured into an ambush. You were both cornered, and drugged, and driven halfway mad. But you made it out, Abdumasi. You made it back to Tau. So I’m going to carry you over to Execarne. And you’re going to tell him what you’d tell yourself, if you could go back to that day. That it was all going to turn out all right.”
He stared in silent fury. Aminata knew she had him.
“Please, Abdumasi Abd,” she whispered. “Tell him it’s worth surviving. Tell me what someone could’ve said to you, while your fleet was burning in Treatymont Harbor, to make you live.”
“I should be dead. I should’ve jumped into the fire. I was just too fucking—” His voice cracked. “Too scared. I didn’t want to burn.”
“You had to live. You had to live so you could be here today to save Tau.”
And Abdumasi Abd did what he had never done in all those days of torture. He gave in to her suasion. He broke.
He surrendered to the possibility of hope.
“Take me over there,” Abd grunted. “Carry me over to him. I’ll convince him Tau’s here. He’ll listen to me.”
“That’ll be enough?”
“If Tau was on my flagship, I would’ve surrendered before the battle even began. I would’ve done anything to protect them. Now carry me, damn you.”
AFTER that point her dosage was so high that she began to lose time. The points of emotion stuck in her memory: the rest washed away.
She remembered the Womb’s voice giving them gentle instructions, telling them to put down their weapons and come out peacefully. The Morrow-men obeyed as if hypnotized: which was to say, not well. The drug had wrung the sense from them. Men clung to their weapons and whimpered at shapes in the smoke. She thought: those filter masks don’t work too well, do they?
She remembered telling Execarne: “Baru will flay you alive for this. You fucked with her trade concern.”
“No, she won’t,” Execarne said, vaguely: the datura was still taking him down, spiraling into the void below the soul. “She’s finished.”
“What?”
“Yawa’s going to lobotomize her. She told me. I didn’t tell her I was going to do this … not very good of me … she’ll be cross, quite cross…”
She remembered meeting the Womb in the dark and the smoke. Her hands burned with the uranium power, and in the nimbus around those hands, in the whorls of drug smoke, Aminata saw the whole scripture of the Cancrioth, every word linked, pouring out from the Brain through the timber of the ship and the sea and the world beyond.
All words were sorcery. If enough people believed in words, in a language or a treaty or an Antler Stone, then the words could change the whole world. Faster and further than fire.
“Tell me,” the Womb said, in a voice like tremor, a rumble through the whole ship’s frame, “how this happened. Is the treaty betrayed? Have we lost our way home?”
“No. No, this was a mistake. A rogue spy. You have my word as a navy officer.”
“That means nothing to me, Aminata. I want your word as an Oriati woman. A daughter of the isiSegu.”
But I’m not that, she wanted to say. I’m a navy officer. That’s who I chose to be.
She had chosen Falcrest but Falcrest had not chosen her. She had no uniform. She had no career waiting for her ashore, not with Shao Lune tuning up a court-martial. She had nothing but her body and her blood to swear upon.
“You have my word,” she said, “as a daughter of the isiSegu.”
“Then you may go free,” the Womb said.
And she produced the long, curved scabbard of a navy boarding saber. Aminata’s saber, the one she’d given to Baru in Aurdwynn. “Your sword. Baru insisted that it be returned to you.”
“I’m free to go?”
“You are free to go, Aminata.”
Then she was running up the stairs toward the weather deck, coughing in the thin drug fog. Two red raw holes where her kidneys should be. She thought maybe she was going to die soon, bleed into herself until she was done. She just wanted to get back up into the moonlight first. She wanted to make her report to Maroyad. Let her die in uniform. Let her die knowing who she was and needed to be. And let her die knowing the truth about—
Fuck you, Baru. You can’t be lobotomized. You can’t die until you explain yourself to me.
She heard Tau-indi calling out above, and the heavy tramp of marine boots. Sterilizer’s boats had come alongside to take Execarne and his Morrow-men away. Sterilizer’s marines would obey orders.
She’d saved the ship. She’d saved the peace. She was a hero. She groaned in agony and pulled herself up the steep steps on two feet and one hand, the saber tight in the other. Baru wanted her to have it. Aminata was sure she was going to give the saber back; she was only unsure which end she would lead with.
“Secure the egress!” an officer bellowed. “Make way for men coming abovedecks! Don’t shoot any Falcresti, you rat fucks! Beware the drugged, they’ve gone berserk down there!”
Two masked marines flung open the hatch at the top of the stairs.
Aminata opened her mouth to hail them, to call out her name and rank and posting. Aminata isiSegu. Brevet-Captain. RNS Ascentatic.
And saw herself as if from outside. Filthy, wild-eyed with drug, out of uniform, clambering up the stairs on two legs and an arm. A madwoman. A savage with a sword.
It would have hurt less if she hadn’t seen it coming.
“Burner!” one of the marines shouted.
And the other marine, without hesitation, shot her.
The bolt struck her straight in the breastbone, exactly where Tain Shir’s spear had landed. But she was not wearing armor now. The steel bodkin point went through her canvas shirt like fog. A broadhead or a spring razor would have punched a five-inch apple core into heart and lungs. The bodkin was meant to go through armor and when it struck her breastbone it split it like a gemstone along a clean line, pierced the fatty sweetbread-meat in her thymus below, and came to rest just above the top of her heart.
She fell back down the stairs to the landing. The saber landed pommel-first against her stomach. Her head struck the teak flooring and all the bruises left by her fight with Masako exploded. Queen’s cunt, she thought. I’ve been shot. What did she do now? She had to want to live. That was what separated marines who survived disembowelment from marines who died of a scratch. The will to live.
But her own marines had shot her. She’d called for them to save her and they’d shot her. At least it wasn’t a gut shot. But the bolt would be poisoned, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it? And her kidneys … there was no point struggling.
No! She wanted to live! She wanted to live!
She’d given her word as a daughter of the isiSegu. And the navy had killed her for it.
Meaningless, Tau had warned her. Senseless.
“THIS will be a bilateral frontal lobotomy to correct recurrent epileptic seizures,” I dictated. “The patient is a twenty-two-year-old Souswardi woman—”
“Your Excellence,” Iscend whispered, “someone’s coming. The guards haven’t stopped her. I think it’s Governor Aurdwynn.”
I ducked out of the surgical tent and jerked the curtain shut, just in time to hide the grim tableau from Heingyl Ri. Tearstains made her face shine like lacquer.
“Yawa.” She stared up into my mask as if it were my real face. “You killed him.”
“Oh, Heia.” I reached up to unbuckle my mask. “I wanted to tell you myself, but—”
She slapped me. The mask slammed shut on its hinges and boxed my nose. I made a sound of contempt, purely by reflex, and she slapped me again, so hard my ear crushed against the hard ceramic.
“You killed him,” she cried, “and you’re going to lie about it? After everything we did together, you decide to lie now?”
“Breathe,” I begged her, which was the Incrastic advice, and she took it as the patronizing nonsense it was.
“Why would I breathe? Why would I be calm? You murdered my husband! He was in your way so you killed him and now you want me to understand?”
There was only one thing I could do. And if she took it as a lie she would think me lost beyond all hope of redemption.
“I swear on Himu and Devena and Wydd, three virtues for one good life, that I had nothing to do with Bel’s murder. I’m glad it happened. I might have ordered it myself, in time. But I did not do this. Do you hear me? I did not kill Bel!”
She twisted there in front of me, breathing in hitches. And then the fury went out of her like pus from a wound. She believed. She knew I would never take the ykari in vain, and now it was even worse. Because if it was not my fault, then it was either—
“Baru.” She bit the word off so hard I heard her teeth click. “She’s done this.”
“No.”
“She has, she’s murdered Bel, she hates him and she wants me—”
“Heia,” I sighed, “look in here.”
I showed her the arrangement inside the cabin.
Heia gaped at me. “But she was your … she was like me, your student.…”
“No,” I said. “She wasn’t like you. I would never do this to you.”
And I watched poor Haradel Heia, Ri-daughter of the Stag Duke, understand that what had happened to her husband was her own fault. She’d kept her father’s guard in her employ. Three of them had tried to murder her. Still she’d kept her father’s guard close. And one of them, tormented by an omen of stag and catamount, had killed her husband.
“Oh, Devena,” she moaned. And she was out the door before I could even offer comfort.
I closed my eyes. She would survive it. She would do her duty. I knew she could do it, because she could do anything I could do.
I fastened my mask and went back into the surgical tent. Iscend Comprine waited with her instruments. She would prepare the maniple to perform the cuts, so Hesychast would know there had been no error or deception. I would supply the telescoping orbitoclast I favored for its precision.
“If you killed him,” I warned her, “don’t tell me.”
“Your Excellence,” she said, “I do not know what you mean. Shall we begin again?”
“THIS will be a bilateral frontal lobotomy to correct recurrent epileptic seizures,” I dictated. “The patient is a twenty-two-year-old Souswardi woman with a history of Oriati emotional disease, hemineglect complicated by epilepsy, and self-managed tribadism. The patient holds an Imperial-grade savant mark in abstract reasoning and self-discipline, and a polestar mark earned by paramount service to the Throne. It is my sincere hope that after a period of recovery, the patient will recover the full use of these distinctions.”
Iscend recorded my words in her memory house. As Clarified she was considered a faultless witness in Imperial court.
“Begin,” I ordered.
“Commencing left frontal insertion.” She turned the handle that drove the orbitoclast into the bone behind Baru’s left eye. I had brought my sarcophagus in from Helbride, a full-body conditioning tool which held Baru so securely that not even her toes could move. A light tsusenshan anesthetic kept her from struggling. That was against lobotomy protocol, which required a conscious patient, but after thousands of trials on prisoners I thought I could be allowed some deviation in the name of keeping Baru still. An error as small as a hair would be catastrophic.
I did not intend to err today.
“Depth,” Iscend said, as the orbitoclast pierced Baru’s eye socket and entered her brain. “Ready for cuts.”
I made one last inspection of the maniple. Then, with Iscend watching every move, I extended the telescoped inner needle to its full length within Baru’s brain.
“Ready?” I asked Iscend.
She nodded. “Ready.”
“Commencing left frontal lobotomy.”
I triggered the maniple to begin its sequence of cuts. By pivoting the stylus around its point of entry, the device would cut certain connections in Baru’s brain. The first cut was a dramatic sweep upward, against the bones of the orbital roof.
I watched the maniple do exactly that: and then all the rest of the careful, subtle intercisions I had programmed. I was completely confident.
“Movements complete?” I asked Iscend.
“Movements complete,” she verified. “I saw the maniple perform the correct series of motions.”
“Withdraw the orbitoclast.”
She extracted the stylus from Baru’s eye socket. Her eyeball settled back into position, sealing the wounded bone away from the world.
But when the orbitoclast emerged, slick with blood and fluid, I saw that it had snapped off during the maniple’s movements. Only the T-shaped base and the larger bone-piercing needle remained. The telescoped inner needle was still lodged inside Baru’s brain.
“Shit,” I sighed, and then, wearily, “gaios, don’t transcribe that.”
“I shan’t transcribe that,” Iscend said.
“Well, it’s sterile. It’ll keep in there. No sense fishing around and risking damage.”
I fixed a second orbitoclast and prepared to perform the same operation on Baru’s right eye. “Commencing right frontal insertion.”