THE Womb rapped at the door. “Are you modest?”
“No,” Baru called back, irritably, “but who gives a shit?” The existence of a Cancrioth body taboo was academically interesting, but it also meant they’d left her naked in Tubercule as a deliberate humiliation. That stung her pride. “Are we safe?”
“No. I had to make concessions to the Brain to stop the fighting. You will meet with her, alone.”
Excellent. If the Brain was the radical aboard, maybe she had control of the Kettling.
From the other side of the huge bed, Shao Lune whispered: “The Brain?”
“I think they’re all named for … for where their tumors grow.”
“I know that. But wouldn’t a brain tumor cause madness?”
“We’ll see.” Baru raised her voice to call: “I’ll dress. Where is this Brain?”
“We’re not going to the Brain.”
“I thought—”
“She is our very last resort. If you knew what she’d do with you, you would agree.” The huge teak door combed the high notes out of the Womb’s voice. “You will come below with me to visit the Eye. You and Tau will persuade him that our journey is over, and that it’s time for this ship to disappear from history again.”
Baru blanched. “Tau will be there?”
“Of course.” Green light flickered beneath the door. “Tau came here searching for Abdumasi Abd. So did we. Tau will convince the Eye that Abd is lost forever. And you will tell the Eye what will happen if Falcrest captures us. He doesn’t believe the things he’s heard about your people.”
The light faded. Baru covered her eyes and groaned. She would have to see Tau again, so soon after they had been so hurt.…
She couldn’t let herself be dragged down by emotion so close to the prize. So Tau had trusted her, and felt betrayed—fine! Tain Hu had trusted her first. She had to focus!
“Shao.” She got up from the bed. “I need you to—”
The flash of victory in Shao’s eyes at those words, I need you, almost made her change her mind. But would she react any differently in Shao’s position?
“I need you to get out of this room and discover anything you can about this ship. Dimensions, design, port of origin, a list of keel owners, charts—”
“A rutterbook,” Shao Lune corrected her. “I should look for the rutterbook.”
“The what?” She vaguely remembered the term from the federated Oriati navigator she’d talked to last year on the tax flotilla, hairlipped Pan Obarse.
“The Oriati equivalent of our navigational charts. Like all things Oriati, it is secretive, convoluted, and highly personal. Each Oriati navigator keeps their own, often in code, so their secrets can’t be stolen. It could tell us where this ship was built, where it makes harbor. Who provisions and waters it.”
“Good.” Baru rewarded her with a smile. “I want that. But most of all…”
Shao Lune smiled back and turned her finger. Go on.
“I need you to look for signs of conspiracy with the Mbo Oriati. Rocket-powder pistols, federal Oriati uniforms … a source of the Kettling. Parliament will vote on whether to move toward war with the Oriati on 90 Summer. If we brought home evidence that could sway the vote…”
“We’ll be heroes.” An electrum glitter of ambition in her smile, like expensive cutlery before a meal. “I’ll have a post in the Admiralty.”
“I expect you will,” Baru said.
But she knew she was lying. Her women did not survive.
BARU did not exactly mean to get down on her knees and sniff the ship. Her right foot slipped, and the wood made her go the rest of the way.
“What are you doing?” the Womb groaned. “Why are you smelling the timber?”
Baru stroked the grain. Warm brown heartwood, like teak; it had pores like teak. But it didn’t smell like teak. Not oily enough. “You use this lumber all over the ship. In the hull, in the decking, in the furniture. That means you have a lot of it, and it’s easy to work with, and it must last for ages.… It’s beautiful. What is it?”
“Iroko.” The Womb grabbed Baru by the scruff of the neck and put something over her head. “Do not take this off. In case we’re separated and I need to find you.”
“Hey!” Baru protested, and then forgot her anger in fascination. The loop of twine carried a chime of black stone, oily to the light, not to touch. It was the very same mineral that filled the Womb’s magic frog lamp.
“Is this uranium?”
“I won’t name things for you all day, child.” The Womb snapped off a fraying thread from the collar of her cassock. “We are going to the Eye now. Don’t stray. Don’t speak.”
“You were much friendlier on the boat,” Baru muttered.
“That was before Tau explained to me exactly who you are.”
Tau, Tau, why oh why had the Womb cut Tau out of trim? It had been so much easier when Tau was full of life and trust. When they wanted to help Baru out of a powerful ethical belief in her goodness. Maybe Tau would come around.…
“Enough questions.” The Womb’s hands glowed the color of a nighttime lagoon. She saw Baru looking, and folded them in the arms of her cassock. “Let’s go.”
“Could you explain that first?” There must be some sort of substance, a paint, a pigment extracted from those little frogs, which glowed in the presence of uranium.
“No,” the Womb said. “But don’t feel slighted. No one can explain it. That’s why it’s sorcery.”
THE padlock on Tau’s door was different from any design Baru had ever seen: not the old Tamermash pattern but some purely Oriati invention. The Womb unlocked it with a small iron key wrought in the image of a parrot’s head. Had the Cancrioth made that lock and key, Baru wondered? Or did they trade for it back in their homeland? Or was there no single Cancrioth homeland, only enclaves scattered throughout the Mbo? Everything a clue …
“Tau?” the ambassador called. “It’s time now.”
The door opened so quickly that Baru jumped. Tau-indi stood in the wedge of shadow beyond, shoulders limp. Saltwater had ruined their beautiful hair and scratched red rings in their eyes. Enact-Colonel Osa stood uncomfortable guard behind them, trying to check for danger without piercing the cyst of bruised space around their Prince.
“Have they hurt you?” Baru cried.
Tau blinked listlessly at her. “They have excommunicated me from the mbo which I served and treasured all my life.” A sort of membrane seemed to have closed over their eyes, like the white paper beneath an eggshell. “I told them everything I knew about you. What you’ve done. Why you came here.”
“What about Abdu?” Baru snapped. She shouldn’t snap. Tau just had this way of testing her, and making her feel like she was failing. “You’re giving up on him? These people haven’t given up. I thought you were better than them.”
Tau froze. A terrible shape passed across their rounded body, their expressive face: brittle, bitter, like frost on glass. Baru realized too late how cruel she’d been.
If Abdu was Cancrioth, if he had chosen to become Cancrioth, then he had consciously thrown away his friendship with Tau.
Osa shifted on the balls of her feet. Saltwater dripped from the ropes in her fists and pattered on the deck.
“Tau,” the Womb said, quietly, “you must come with me now. Both our peoples need your help. If we are found here and taken by Falcrest, they will use us against the Mbo. It would mean war. Help me sway the crew to go.”
She was like a mother afraid for her children. Well, she carried lives in her womb, didn’t she? Not quite a mother in the conventional sense, but a woman used to thinking of all the souls in her care.
“Whatever you want of me,” Tau said, bowing fractionally. “My master.”
Baru gasped in horror. In Seti-Caho master was a slave’s word for an owner. You could run through New Kutulbha screaming tunk and burner and cuge and gava and every other racialized epithet imaginable, but the beating you’d get would be a kindness compared to the way the Segu would answer that word master. The Mbo had annihilated slavery a thousand years ago, and a millennium of taboo had hardened on the word like concrete. Slavers were enenen, without trim, one of the only kinds of people still branded with that word.
The Womb’s hands flashed in the sleeves of her cassock. “Tau. Please. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
“Don’t pretend to be anything other than what you are,” Tau said, sweetly.
“Tau. If Falcrest finds us here, if they take us and learn what we’ve done, it’ll be war. Millions of your people will die. Will you help me stop that?”
Baru could smell the threat of sorcery in the air. Something of burnt garlic, and a faint metallicity, like blood in her molars. Thrilling and awful. Osa bristled helplessly.
“I won’t resist,” Tau said. “Everything I do will be your will.”
THEY plunged down narrow stairs that creaked beneath their heels. At each landing the light from the Womb’s lantern was cut by the turn and they had to go on for a moment into darkness. As a mansion, Eternal would have been enormous. As a ship, everything inside her built to smaller scale, she was a labyrinth. Baru tried to keep a map in her head, but every time they turned right she lost her place.
“Who is the Eye?” Osa asked.
“An onkos,” Tau-indi said.
“What’s an onkos?”
“A sorcerer with a highly developed tumor. They are not all fully initiated into a Line. Some are … latent. Awaiting growth.”
A scream like a dying man came from astern. “Pigs,” Baru blurted. She remembered pig screams from Treatymont. “If you’re low on water, why haven’t you slaughtered your pigs?”
“Because certain lives depend on them,” the Womb said, curtly. “Move.”
They spilled into a broad companionway deep below the weather deck. People moved in the dark, sentries whispering salutes to the Womb. Curtains swept aside. Baru smelled compost and rich humus. The Womb called out in the same tongue as that prayer: ayamma, ayamma, a ut li-en …
She made herself break the blister of Tau’s silence. “What is that language?”
“En Elu Aumor. Their high speech. Recorded in the tablets of the Pitchblende Dictionary, deep within the Renderer of Souls.”
“I wish I were a linguist,” Baru said, out of the nervous need to speak.
“You would know more ways to lie.”
They crossed a coaming, a wooden lip where a flood door could seal against the deck. The smell of compost was so thick in Baru’s sinuses that she sneezed.
The Womb’s candlelight fell on a man’s back.
“Virios,” she said. “I’ve brought our guests.”
He was a pleasant-looking man, roundish, black skin, thinning hair. Baru decided he was from Mzilimaki Mbo: he had a calf tattoo of a colobus monkey. He wore a simple work shirt and a knee-length skirt. He had been digging, barehanded, among the mushrooms that grew in a tub of humus.
His shoulders slumped. “I told you,” he said, in deep Aphalone, “that you had to send them away. How are we going to keep the Pale now, Abbatai? You’ve let them see too much.”
He turned. His cancer came into the light.
Osa swore in Seti-Caho. Baru cried out and stumbled back.
“Yes.” The Eye sighed. “You will think I’m distracted, because of the way one of my eyes looks off into nothing. I assure you it is purely a mechanical issue. Speak to my other eye.”
His left eye had a stalk like a snail. Thick, the color of crab shell, longer than his nose and slightly uphooked. The eye bulged from the tip in a tangle of living veins.
“Onkos.” Tau calm as a corpse. “The cancer grows well.”
“Thank you,” the man said, as if complimented on his beard. “You are…? No. No, it can’t be. Abbatai, what have you done?”
“They are excised,” the Womb murmured. “Safer than the alternative. This is Tau-indi Bosoka, Prince of Lonjaro Mbo.”
“Are you really immortal?” Baru blurted. “Do you remember things from a thousand years ago?”
“I am. And I do. Though I was also born in Mzilimake, on Colobus Lake, not more than sixty years ago. Those two lives are in me, together. None of which I want to tell you.” He had a wonderful syllabic accent, the rhythm of his words set by the length of the sounds rather than the points of stress. It was like song. “But it seems the Womb has decided our Pale of secrecy is worth breaking if it gets her what she wants.”
“You speak very well, sir,” Baru said, idiotically.
“Of course I speak well!” he snapped. “I was raised in a society of knowledge; I speak twelve languages! I’ve seen nations far beyond the edge of Falcrest’s grasping little maps!”
His eye slackened. “No place for pride now, though. Not here.” He wrung out his soiled hands. “I would offer a handshake, as you do in Falcrest. But my hands are dirty. Why were you brought to me?”
“Tell him, Baru,” the Womb urged. “Tell them what you told me.”
She measured out a portion of air, like a draw from a well, and spoke. “I was sent by my colleagues in Falcrest to make secret contact with the immortal rulers of Oriati Mbo.”
“Rulers.” His human eye narrowed. His stalk stared up and off at nothing. “Is that what you think we are?”
“My colleagues believe it. I am here to learn the truth.”
The Eye rubbed his ordinary eye. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. “And you, Prince Bosoka?”
“Baru lied to me.” Tau stood as if all their bones had worn through sinew and ligament to click together like dice. “I was looking for my friend, hoping to bring him home and avert war.”
“Your friend?”
Tau hesitated. Baru felt a gritty little speck of hope. It was the plainest sign Tau had given, since their excision, of caring about anything at all.
“Abdumasi Abd,” the Womb supplied: a mother speaking up for a quiet child. “Tau’s been searching for Abdumasi, Virios.”
“I would rather let the Prince speak for themself,” the Eye snapped. “Tau-indi Bosoka, were you aboard the ship we attacked? The clipper Cheetah?”
“I was.”
The Eye ducked his head in contrition, which had the unnerving effect of aiming his upturned eyestalk directly at Baru. “Then I am truly sorry for what we did to you and your house. I confess I meant to intercept your ship, speak to you, and learn where Abdumasi had been taken. I was the one who sent the signals asking for a parley. I know you chose not to respond, because of the taboo you place upon us, but I never … By the time I realized the Brain’s people were at the cannons, and that they meant to sink you to keep you from escaping, it was too late.”
“You’re searching for Abdumasi?” Tau’s voice was a desert. “Why … why do you want him?”
“He’s dear to me, Prince Bosoka. To all of us. He carries Undionash, one of our rarest lines. It was a gift to show our trust in him.”
The Prince blinked. Their cheek spasmed. They said nothing. A very long way away, on a continent vast enough to hold Tau’s heart, mountains fell.
“Please, Tau,” the Eye begged, “do you know where he is? I never wanted him to go out into the world to make this foolish war. It was the Brain, she’s too full of ideas, she can’t see.…”
Tau made a sound Baru had heard only once before, from the people who died after battles. Whatever hopes for Abdu they had secreted away must be scoured out, now. Ruined.
“You have cannon,” Osa blurted, throwing herself on the silence. “Who was this ship built to fight? Who’s your enemy?”
“We have no enemy,” the Eye snapped. “We are not warriors. The cannon are for protection!”
“But you armed the Canaat rebels,” Osa insisted. “You subverted our embassy here. You conspired with Scheme-Colonel Masako to destroy the Kyprist leadership. And when Ambassador Dai-so Kolos found out what you were doing, you killed them.”
“I did not do that!” the Eye shouted. His voice echoed off the close rafters, faded down intestinal lengths of corridor in Eternal’s huge belly. “The Kettling isn’t even ours! It was never meant to be on this ship! But the Brain conspired—she never wanted to help Abdumasi, she always meant this voyage as the beginning of her war!”
“Virios!” the Womb snapped.
He put up his dirty hands. “I’m sorry. But I never … I never wanted to be entangled in the world’s business. I never meddled in your embassy’s affairs, or in Kyprananoke’s rebellion.”
Disappointment crawled like a roach around the edge of Baru’s thoughts. This man was one of the immortal Cancrioth, secret rulers of the thousand-year Mbo? He seemed just as bewildered and petty as any duke of Aurdwynn. All he ruled was a tub of mushrooms in the dark belly of a ship.
She didn’t want this man. She wanted to speak to the Brain.
“Baru,” the Womb prodded. “Tell him about your people. Tell him we need to leave.”
“Yes. Ah.” Tau’s silent shudders were very hard to ignore. “I have insurance, if I come to any harm. There are two navy warships under my command, and if I do not reach an agreement with you, they are prepared to—”
“She’s lying!” Tau shouted.
The sound shattered in the dark. Baru wanted to scream in frustration.
“What?” the Womb snapped. “What’s that, Tau?”
“She’s lying. The navy’s trying to kill her. You saw Ormsment call her to duel at the embassy, didn’t you? She has no one following her. She’s alone. She’s been alone since she left Aurdwynn and it is destroying her. She’s done nothing of any worth, even to her masters, since she executed her lover. All she does is lead people to ruin. She is a wound!”
The Eye looked between his three visitors with growing astonishment. “She lied? Abbatai, you brought her among us because she said she could get her warships out of the way, and they aren’t even hers?”
“I brought her here because she knew our tongue! She spoke it at the embassy! She showed a picture of a boy—she knows where to find the son of Ira-rya!”
“Does she? Or was that another lie?”
“She does have people searching for her,” the Womb insisted. “They’ll find us, and when they do we must be gone. Virios, please, you can sway nearly half the crew. You control the water caskage, the fogmaking rooms, the kitchens, the preservariums, the fishing locker—everything we need to survive. If you say it’s time to go, then the Brain will have to listen. You don’t understand what she’s done here! She’s turned these islands into her laboratory! She has the Kettling, it’s loose, it’s out there! We have to go home before she brings it to another—”
“I’m not giving up on Abdumasi!” the Eye roared.
Silence, except for Tau’s wounded gasps.
“Fine,” the Womb said, soothingly. “Baru, tell him where to find Abdumasi. Tell him where we should go next. We’ll leave Kyprananoke, we’ll find a way past those ships out there, and we’ll go rescue Abdumasi. Just tell him, Baru.”
“No,” Baru said.
She did not know where Abdumasi Abd had been taken, or even if he was alive. She was not sure she could have shared that secret even if she had it. It would be like cutting Tau’s kidneys out when she had already stabbed them in the heart.
“A ai bu en on na,” the Womb swore, viciously. “Tell him, or we’ll have to make a deal with the Brain to get this ship moving. You’ll have to pay her price. You don’t want that, Baru.”
Any price would be worth it to secure the Kettling and destroy Falcrest. Tain Hu had been willing to die for that goal. Therefore Baru had to be willing to die as well, or she was a coward and a hypocrite.
The Womb’s hands faded palest green as she opened them to the Eye. “If you won’t help get this ship out of here, Virios, I have to go to the Brain. And when I do, don’t you dare come to me with some high-handed protest about how she’s betrayed us.”
“Let her sell herself!” The Eye beat the meat of his hand against the side of the wooden planter. His human eye bulged in anger. “Am I the only one who remembers who we are? We do not meddle in the secular world. We do not act on scales shorter than a human life!”
He turned his back, bent himself over his dirt and his mushrooms. “We should never have let Abd go make his war. We should have kept him safe, with us. Where he belonged.”
Tau began to sob.
THE Womb was so coldly furious with Baru, afterward, that she would only speak to Osa. “You’ll go back to the void cabins and wait. I’ll return when I need you. I have to make sure the Brain’s people won’t kill Baru the moment they see her.”
Baru lagged behind, not feigning her exhaustion, so she could whisper to Tau. “Ormsment has my parents. You heard her tell me she’d sent Scylpetaire to Taranoke. Help me save them.”
Tau said nothing.
“Why can’t you help me? Why are you undercutting everything I do?”
Tau smiled like a melon rind, ghastly and eaten. “I tried. I told you to go into the ring with Ormsment. I told you that if you were true and honest, if your soul was good, your trim would deliver justice to you and all those you loved.”
“I did go into the ring with Ormsment!”
“You did. Do you remember what happened then, Baru? Do you remember what your soul delivered to us?”
That was the moment the infected Canaat had revealed themselves.
“You can’t possibly blame me for the embassy!” Baru hissed.
“Of course I can. I arranged that whole reception as cover for you to meet with the shadow ambassador, didn’t I? You manipulated me into it. You were even going to use Iraji.”
“I didn’t give up Iraji!” Baru snarled, drawing Osa’s grunt of warning. “I could’ve brought him here as a gift for the Cancrioth, but I didn’t!”
“No.” Tau sighed, pushing ahead, after the Womb. “Because you’re waiting for me to give you permission.”
“What?” She’d thought nothing of the sort.
“Tain Hu gave you permission to kill her for your own advantage.”
“Don’t you dare talk about—”
“Dare what? Talk about the woman whose death you use to justify your atrocities? She gave you permission to do a terrible thing. Now she is dead, so she cannot withdraw her permission. But you know her permit only reaches so far: it does not extend to Iraji, or to me. So you’re waiting for me to give you permission to sell Iraji and Abdumasi to the Cancrioth. You want me to say, at least we’ll be together again, damned together in chaos, Abdu and Tau. Really, you’ll be doing what’s best for both of us. Is that right? I think it is.”
“Tau…”
A smile sweet like sugar rot. “You need me to be your little amphora, your bottle of reserve goodness, to shatter and use up. You’ve been dying a slow death since you killed Hu. You need to take another soul to finish your work. Only it’ll never be done. You’ll always need more. And no matter what you do here, Baru, I expect that by some strange coincidence it will end up being what Mister Cairdine Farrier wants. Don’t you think so, too?”
Baru lost her breath.
No matter what exercises she tried, no matter how she crushed her innards and panted like a bear, she couldn’t get her air back. Her fingertips prickled. Her heart stumbled. Dread settled on her like a crown. The green paint on the black ceiling above seemed to slither, like tapeworms dangling from a burnt lilac branch. The things Tau said made such sense—all her curiosity and intellect fastened on them and worried at them—
She felt genuinely as if she were drowning.
“Move,” Osa grunted, and shoved Baru forward.
She wanted a whiskey, a vodka: something, anything, to wipe the running centipede legs off her hands, to fill up the agonizing bubbles in her blood. Her heartbeats hit like hooves, cavalry charge, memories of Tain Hu turning the flank at Sieroch, memories that made the panic deeper.
So. So. This was what it meant to make an enemy of Tau, of a laman with the keenest understanding of empathy and sentiment. She had never been struck so precisely.
Tain Hu had seen the worst of her and stayed loyal.
Tau had seen the worst of her, and now they were telling her exactly what they saw.
BARU sat on the bed and breathed into her hands while Shao Lune told her not to be a fool.
“The Prince is a superstitious, emotionally volatile product of a degenerate civilization. Royalty are always self-centered, Baru. Wouldn’t you be, if your conception had been elected? If you’d been the most important person in the room since before you were even born?”
Shao Lune perched on the stuffed chair by the stateroom desk, straddling it in reverse. Her feet hooked around the chair’s legs, where cheetahs yawned in black bronze.
“Once,” Baru said, hollowly, “there were hardly any chairs in the world at all. I remember that from History of Materialism. The only chairs were thrones. Ordinary people sat on benches.”
She was so tired. But there was no time to sleep now—Yawa’s forces could be here any moment—why was she sitting down? Why wasn’t she doing something? She wanted to claw her own skin right off, peel back her fingernails and prod the soft places beneath until pain made her move—stop pulling at your own fingers and get up! Get up!
She could not get up. Tau had shattered something vital inside her. What they’d said about Tain Hu kept repeating itself in her head. A wound like a mouth.
“You were born on Taranoke,” Shao Lune said, soothingly. “A land ruled by family elders. Pleasing those elders is a compulsion written in your blood. That’s why you’ve panicked.”
What a stupid Incrastic explanation. But maybe it would be useful to believe it for now.…
“Think about this rationally!” Shao urged. “Identify your weaknesses”—one long finger counting off points on the seams of the chair leather—“act to counter them, and then do what has to be done to achieve your goal. You remember our goal, don’t you?”
“Get off this ship,” Baru muttered. “Bring home what we learned.”
Bring home the Kettling. Kill Falcrest. Make Hu’s death worth it.
“That’s right.” She smiled impishly at Baru. O Wydd, she had such huge, cruel eyes. “Would you like to know what I learned?”
Baru’s mind seemed to have been reefed like a sail: she just couldn’t catch the wind long enough to stay with a thought.
“Baru.” Shao snapped her fingers. “Baru, listen. I snuck out to explore. I saw such things, Baru. Monstrous skeletons shaped like people—I don’t mean the skeletons of people, I mean skeletons with bone skin, bone muscles, all their flesh turned to bone. Rooms full of old machines. Weapons, surgeries—oh, kings, the surgeries I saw! But do you know what else I found?”
“What,” Baru said, dully.
“I saw tunks in white blouses.”
White blouses. Scheme-Colonel Masako, the man at the embassy who’d let the rebels in … he’d worn a white blouse.
“Oriati secret service. Termites!” Shao rocked the chair in excitement.
“Termites are like Jackals?” Baru did not quite remember.
“Jackals are the professional fighters. Termites are the ‘armed diplomatic corps’ they use as spies. If they’re aboard, we have the proof of collusion! We can take it to Parliament, prove the Oriati federal forces are in bed with the Cancrioth, and win the Emperor’s eternal thanks! But we have to act now, quickly, before Yawa reaches us, before she takes all the glory—”
“I know that!” Baru shouted. “I know we have to act!”
And, to her own horror and shame, she began to weep.
She couldn’t do it anymore. She just couldn’t do it. Tau had been so kind to her. Iraji had been her friend, played Purge with her, sparred with her when she wanted to be hurt. And she’d had to harm them both to reach this moment, the moment of crux, the goal she’d worked toward all her life. The harm she’d done should make it all the more urgent to go forward, to complete the task. She had the weapon to end the Masquerade.
And for no reason except that she was pathetic and stupid and worthless, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t get up.
Everyone was counting on her. Ake Sentiamut and all the Vultjagata, the members of Tain Hu’s household who’d survived. Her parents and everyone else on Taranoke. In Aurdwynn, the sodomites and tribadists and bastard children and mothers out of wedlock who would be erased by Incrasticism. And Tain Hu most of all. Baru had been given every opportunity to deserve her trust … and so there was simply no one to blame but herself for failure.
Sulk and drink and fail, again and again and again and again—all she’d done since the Elided Keep! Drink and fail! Drink and fail! Chased off one island after another in a stupid tragicomic cycle without any progress or achievement except to drink and fail!
“Baru,” Shao said, with a sudden, unadorned concern. “Why are you crying?”
She ground her eyes into the back of her arm. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
Shao Lune got up. Baru expected the other woman to come over and siphon off her tears with a little eyedropper, for use in some perverse cosmetic or tincture: despair of a young Souswardi woman, purified with alcohol, for clear and shining skin.
But instead Shao dismounted her chair, moved to the bed beside Baru, folded her hands in her lap, and said, not soothingly, but without any particular contempt for Baru’s state, “I found a pantry.”
“A pantry?”
“I stole as many drugs and sanitary supplies as I could. I even stole things to build a fluid level. You like figures, don’t you? I measured the ship’s roll period. I think the ship’s overstabilized. She rolls quickly, which means…”
A matronizing silence. She wanted Baru to answer, and being a school-taught fool Baru couldn’t help but do it.
“A high metacenter of roll,” she said, sniffling, “so the ship is hard to capsize or flood. But quick to tip in waves and therefore uncomfortable to sail.”
“Right. Out on open sea she must pitch like a three-legged horse. So we know they’re not exquisite shipwrights, by our standards. We know they buy their medicines from abroad—”
“They do?” Damn Shao for being so useful.
“They do. Look, here’s proof.” Shao produced a small velvet pouch, cinched shut with a golden cord. “Recognize this?”
“Mason dust.” Some curiosity stirred in her. It was a powerful stimulant, made in Aurdwynn from the treated extract of the Stakhieczi mason leaf. The government chemists sold it at a premium, often illegally, because there was no other source: the process to make it was an Incrastic secret.
Baru stroked the thickly piled velvet of the pouch. “When I was at dinner with Bel Latheman, back in Treatymont … I would see rich people carrying their doses in bags like this. They would pour the dust onto their hands to sniff. Here, at the break box.” Her fingers brushed over the two tendons below Shao’s thumb, finding the bones there, radius and scaphoid: the break box. “So these drugs came from Aurdwynn. Maybe Hesychast was right about Cancrioth agents there.…”
Shao’s full lips made a satisfied catenary arch, pleased by Baru’s interest. “A telling find, I think. They stock their pantries with our product. They cannot make it themselves. So the fabled Cancrioth are not advanced beyond Incrasticism. Just another jungle cult, Baru. A jungle cult with very big ships.”
“You’ve done well. Discovered a great deal.” And it only made Baru loathe herself more.
“I have. Have you?”
Baru shook her head. “I talked to one of their leaders, but he was useless. Head buried in compost.” How could she fall apart now? How could she collapse with the end in sight? Just get the Kettling, get the tainted blood, and go.…
Shao sighed. “Do you know the story of Auroreal and Purpose?”
“No.” Baru groaned. Doubtless another missing stone in the mosaic of proper Falcresti womanhood.
Their hands were still touching, through the velvet of the pouch. Shao did not let go. “Auroreal and Purpose were two ships built in the arctic yards in Starfall Bay. They were meant to reach the lodepoint. The northernmost edge of the compass, where every direction becomes south.
“As in any good experiment, each ship received a different treatment. Purpose was assigned an elite crew, tested by schooling and sea service. Their provisions were calibrated by starvation studies in prisons. The Storm Corps designers calculated the ship’s layout to preserve a core of warmth and comfort.
“Auroreal, on the other hand, was crewed with survivors. Sailors who’d straggled home from failed expeditions. Officers who’d led their boats across leagues of open ocean and pack ice. The Storm Corps sourced their provisions from traditional bastè ana techniques. Of course, Auroreal fell behind Purpose when the expedition set out. Purpose had the better design, the better crew.…”
“But it was Auroreal that returned,” Baru interrupted, impatiently guessing the moral of this little qualm. “Will and grit proved more valuable than finesse and talent.”
“Not at all.” Shao showed her white, white teeth. “Auroreal vanished into the north. It was Purpose’s elite that returned.”
“They reached the lodepoint?”
“No. They gave up. When things began to go wrong on that exquisite ship, there was no tolerance for error in the design, no patience for mistakes among the crew. Everything was made to work perfectly; nothing was made to survive imperfection. So they concluded, very rationally, that they had to turn back. It was Auroreal that pressed on, irrationally, courageously, into the north.”
“Please, Shao, what’s the moral?”
“There are two kinds of people, Baru. One kind is like Auroreal. They just go on and on, no matter how awful the circumstances. But you’re like the other kind. You’re like Purpose. You are a precision instrument, intolerant of damage. You must be calibrated.” She took Baru’s hand, inspecting the bandaged stubs of the two fingers Tain Shir had cut away. “You’re brilliant, but you break so easily.”
“I thought I was strong.” Baru could barely make herself speak. “I thought, after what I did in Aurdwynn, that I’d be … harder.”
“You can’t change who you are,” Shao said, Shao Lune the perfect, coiled ideal of Falcrest womanhood, who would never need to change. “And that’s why it’s good I’m here with you. Because”—she folded Baru’s hand between hers—“I can tell you the truth. Which is that you’re being weak, and sentimental, and stupid. It doesn’t matter if you feel bad. It doesn’t matter if you’re tired or sad. You need to work.”
Baru’s hand complained at the leverage on her wrist. She was stronger than Shao, but she let herself yield. If Shao made her do it then it was not really her fault.…
“You’re going to go back among them,” Shao murmured, “and do whatever it takes to get us safely out of here. Stop tripping over your sentiments about Tau. Stop trying to protect the Iraji boy. Don’t tell me you can’t let them go. You can. You executed that traitor duchess, didn’t you? So you can do this, too.”
She lifted the velvet bag again. The mason dust inside made a sound like fine dry sand.
“This will help,” Shao said. “Have you ever dosed before? No? Let me show you.”
FARRIER’S cloth leaves alcohol on her skin. It evaporates like a cool mountain morning. Flesh and sweat sublimate into clean chemistry and vapor: as he would have the whole world, if he could.
“This is marvelous,” he tells her. She has just paused in her account. “This is better than I could’ve hoped. The whale! Unbelievable! The size of their ship! And the restraint you showed with Shao Lune, the exquisite discipline, no matter how you were tempted…”
“A little tempted,” she murmurs. “She was very beautiful. I always wonder what beautiful women will look like in the throes of the act … do you? Is it the same for men?”
“I suppose it must be.” He’s on her blind side, but she can detect the uncomfortable catch. He darts, minnow-quick, to another topic. “We should sell this as a novel, shouldn’t we?”
“But it’s all true.”
“Exactly why it should be a novel! The frame of fiction allows the reader to … adjust their comfort. If they want to trim away a few of the more extreme points, write them off as artistic exaggeration, well, we give them permission. And if they want to imagine things went further, that we are hiding the juicy bits … well, we equip them to imagine.”
“You’re suggesting,” Baru says, edging toward playfulness, “that you’d like to imagine things went further?”
That strikes so well that Farrier ignores it completely. He dabs behind her right ear, careful around the thin flesh of the lobe. Not to damage the instruments, now. “The novel is a young form, did you know? Compared to the poetic epic, the philosophical treatise, and the paean … still young and full of promise.”
“Like I was,” she says.
“Like you are, I was about to say.”
“I know something’s happened to me. Please don’t lie to me, Mister Farrier.”
His inhalation tugs at her hair: premonition of words, detected by the scalp. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“But you did. You lied to all of us. Apparitor and Durance and even I. You told us you were sending us on a vital mission. You said we were going to determine the future of Incrasticism.”
The cloth goes back to its careful attentions, as if Farrier means to tidy up not just her skin but whatever mess he can find in the brain below it. “You think I lied to you?” Recentering the question on her opinion, rather than on his actions.
“I think,” she says, as the alcohol evanesces into mist, carrying part of her away to infiltrate other bodies, other places, “that you wanted the three foreign-born cryptarchs out of the way while you … finalized the situation in Falcrest.”
This time Farrier does pause. The cloth lingers on the back of her neck. “You’re right,” he says, finally. “I can’t deny that. Hesychast and I agreed that it would be best to keep the arena clear while we conducted our, ah, final contest.”
He really does respect her. Good.
“But your mission was vital, Baru. You had to find the Cancrioth. We knew they were out there, spending money, moving ships. The Oriati Mbo has been asleep for a very long time, and we needed a cold spur to awaken them. We had to make contact with the Cancrioth. Hesychast had his reasons as much as I did. That’s why he sent Yawa to…” He looks away. She can tell by the way the aspect of his voice changes. “To hurt you. He was terrified of the fact that you didn’t have a hostage. He had to destroy you before you reached Falcrest and came into the fullness of your power.”
“And you let me go with her anyway. Knowing what she’d try to do to me.”
“Of course I did.” He says it so softly and so earnestly. He is reassuring himself as much as her. “You were my greatest find. You could do anything. And you did. You won.”
She tips her head back. The hardwood chair digs pleasantly into the nape of her neck. She lays down the next stone on the path, the road that Farrier thinks he is leading her down. That’s the trick, she thinks. You let them choose which road to follow.
But first, you have your people build the roads.
“Abdu,” she says, dreamily. “He’s the one who taught you that the Cancrioth could break them.”
“Pardon?”
“That’s what you saw at Lake Jaro, isn’t it? Nothing in all the time you spent there gave you a hint about what might render two hundred million Oriati digestible to Falcrest. Nothing until the Cancrioth came.”
FEDERATION YEAR 912:
23 YEARS EARLIER
UPON PRINCE HILL, BY LAKE JARO
IN LONJARO MBO
THE eight hunters who came up the south side of the hill were not Cancrioth.
Tau would learn this later, when investigation and rumor uncovered how these shua hunters, professional pelt-takers, became adherents to a power that offered them strength in a time of helplessness. On that day Tau saw only their wounds. They had abased their flesh with bracelets of thorns, and mortified their bodies with sorghum vinegar and black pepper oils. Now they walked up Prince Hill jagged with blood and prickle.
“Stay away from us!” they cried, making their own sort of irita, their alarm call. “We are charged with the old power. Stay away, and save your trim!”
Their sweat ran bloody. Their flesh had swollen and puckered around the thorn wounds. They looked, Tau thought, like suicides.
Among those eight hunters walked a robed woman. She raised up a hand at Padrigan, and in the shadow of her heavy sleeve, her fingers glistened.
“No,” Tau gasped.
Cairdine Farrier cocked his head like a bird.
At Padrigan’s side, the tribal guards’ speartips wavered. The woman’s head lifted, and too many shining eyes glowed beneath that hood.
“Test me,” the woman said, in a low carrying voice, fine southcountry Uburu, as horrifying in its ordinary timbre as anything Tau had ever heard: they are here, they live among us! “You will do no harm. I am outside the jurisdiction of steel.”
Cairdine Farrier drew his little pistol bow, which he kept, despite Tau’s discomfort, for protection against “animals.”
“Pardon me,” he called. “Are you a sorcerer?”
“Farrier,” Padrigan shouted, “get back, they’re here for you, go!”
“Then I am right to defend myself,” Farrier said, and he shot the sorcerer. The little bolt puckered the cloth just below her right clavicle.
The sorcerer did not react.
Farrier, his mouth open in a little half-oh of shock and fascination, worked the mechanism to draw another bolt from the magazine. The sorcerer looked at him with green abstract eyes whose number Tau could not make themself count. Farrier shot her again. The bolt went into the woman’s cheek and stuck there, driven into bone, quivering. Her head moved a little, as if pushed.
“You are not welcome among us,” the sorcerer said. “You will never be welcome in this land or among these people. You are a botfly and your words are nagana. And I have come to cut you out.”
She turned her glowing fingers on Cairdine Farrier. “You will know your ruin,” she said, between strings of some forgotten Cancrioth tongue, between Tau’s horrible shuddering breaths, a full-body soreness and sickness, pounding as if their lymph would spray from their eyes and ears, “you will know your ruin well. You will put yourself into it as you have put yourself into us, thinking that it is your will. But it is your doom that moves you thus. And your flesh will be filled with ruin, as you have come to bring ruin into us.”
She closed her fist. A gush of wet white light jetted from her hand and fell like semen to puddle on the ground. The spearmen shuddered back. Cairdine Farrier fumbled for his notebook with trembling hands.
“Kill them,” Padrigan cried, hoarsely. “Kill them all before she speaks again!”
Yes, Tau’s heart shouted. Kill them! There is no trim here—these are not people—just erase them, destroy them, silence them and sweep away their footprints! For the principles’ bright sake, kill them now!
But even Padrigan’s tribal guard, Segu’s famous impi, did not know how to kill the undying. For this you needed magic, and they had none.
“Let us past,” the sorcerer said, “or I will cut you all with my uranium knife. We want Cosgrad.”
Her thorn-laced men stepped forward, and Padrigan and his spearmen stepped back.
“Run,” Tau whispered, and then, shouting, “Farrier, run, run!”
Padrigan broke with his spearmen: they fled up the hill, and Farrier, at first bewildered, then moved, even he, by the animal terror of the rout, came running with them. Tau broke only when Farrier was safely past. The sorcerer’s cry chased them, words like hornets, aching in Tau’s spine, stinging their thighs.
The House Bosoka rose ahead—Tau staggered past the termite colony—they looked back and there was a silent man with strips flayed off his face in the shape of grief marks, not two arms lengths’ away, reaching out—Tau screamed, grabbed the mallet from the greeting-plate at the south entrance, and hurled it into the man’s legs. He leapt over it, came down hard, stumbled, fell behind.
Tau shoved into the compound, screaming for help—someone came bursting from the south breezeway—oh principles, no, it was Cosgrad Torrinde! Cosgrad, still half-mad with meningitis, shouting, “Tau, I understand! I see! I know!”
Kindalana scrambled out behind him, the chains of her regalia swaying, and tried to tug him back inside. “Farrier!” he shouted, raising his fist at the other Falcrest man. “Farrier, you bastard, I know how the mangroves grow!”
“Mangroves?” Tau gasped. Cosgrad had been obsessed with the mangroves that grew in the frettes down south. He couldn’t understand how they survived without saltwater, and this terrified him: maybe Oriati Mbo truly was magical, and he would never learn its logic.
“I know how the mangroves grow,” Cosgrad said. His lean, vain body swelled and settled with hard breath. Kindalana had her arms around his waist, pulling like she was trying to keep a dog off a cat. “It’s not magic after all. There are minerals in the basins atop the mesa. The rainwater fills up the basins and carries the minerals downriver, to the mangroves. Thus they flourish without saltwater. That is the rule.”
“Cosgrad,” Tau screamed, “hide!”
The compound gate swung open. The thorn-lashed men lunged in. The sorcerer walked between them, wet light dripping from her mouth, light burning in her too-many eyes, dark blood pooled beneath the crossbow bolt in her cheek.
Cosgrad Torrinde, feverish and disheveled, gaped at her. “What?” he said. “I solved the mangroves. What now?”
“Ah,” the sorcerer said, in that desperately ordinary voice. When she smiled her mouth was just a place of different darkness. “The other tumor. Like knows like, Cosgrad.”
“You know my name,” Cosgrad said, unsteadily. “Gossip. Shepherds and water women.”
Kindalana ran down to Tau. They seized each others’ hands, eyes meeting like summer sun through a loose slat. “We stand?” she whispered.
“Yes. If you’ll stand with me.” They would die here if they had to, before they let their guests be killed.
“Excuse me,” Farrier shouted, from the far side of the compound: he was waiting by another door, damn him. “Excuse me, mam. Are you a member of the Cancrioth? No one will tell me about you. I’ve asked. Will you tell me, please, where I could learn more.”
The sorcerer ignored him. Cosgrad raised his trembling hand and pointed to her. “You will be understood. Do you hear me? I will know your law. If I know the law, I can master it. First the mangroves and then the rest. Even you!”
“Death first,” the sorcerer said, with the fire of her words spattered down her chin. “Death before we let you into us.”
“Even you,” Cosgrad Torrinde panted. “I will know your law. I will find a way.”
“Never me,” the sorcerer said. “You will try. But you will find only ruin. A ut li-en: let it be so now and ever.”
And speaking a word of power, gesturing sharply, she immolated herself.
Tau gaped in horror. Cosgrad Torrinde stared in fascination and abominable curiosity. Cairdine Farrier bellowed, “Why!?” and stumbled back, falling on the heels of his hands, scrabbling away: as the burning woman, her garments and her skin alight, began to walk, calmly, gracefully, in no apparent pain at all, forward to embrace him.
The fire was no illusion. The grass around her smoldered and caught.
It was just then, at the height of the sorcerer’s cataclysmic power, as Cairdine Farrier cowered in that flaming shadow and Cosgrad Torrinde trembled with meningeal visions of secret force, as the thorn-men who guarded the sorcerer screamed in grief and victory, that Abdumasi Abd barged in with his mother’s mercenary guard. Padrigan followed with a few of his rallied tribal guard, crying out, “Kindalana! Run! Tau, child, run!”
“Fuck me,” Abdu exclaimed. “What is this?”
And then he saw Tau and Kindalana, holding hands, trying desperately to ward away the burning woman as she advanced. Trying, and failing, with all the dermoregalia and all the garments of their Princedom, to resist this alien enenen power.
That was when Abdu realized the Cancrioth could give him something Tau and Kinda could not.
But on that day he saw his friends in danger, and he shouted to his mercenary shua, “Charge!”
CAIRDINE Farrier watched the awful mêlée with the exhilarated horror of a man overseeing a poisoned banquet. All at once the Oriati were chopping each other to meat before his eyes.
When it was over the thorn-men lay dead in pieces. The sorcerer smoldered in the grass, eyes shut, chest shuddering, heart still beating. The eyes in her face had gone out, as if her soul had left the house of her body to fly away. She had reached out to Cosgrad Torrinde with her burning hands, and Tau, who had never even thought about hurting a person before, who still had not ever thought about hurting a person, struck the sorcerer in the back of the head with a paving stone.
Kindalana cried out in horror.
Her father Padrigan screamed in the grass. He’d pulled Abdumasi back from the mêlée and one of the thorn-men had cut Padrigan with a machete.
“Daughter,” he gasped. “You look like a Prince. I’m so proud.”
Abdumasi stood, fists clenched, frowning over the corpses of the thorn-faced soldiers. He was thick with anger and confusion, but also with a fascination Tau did not at the time detect.
This, Abdumasi was thinking. This is what we become when we are desperate. We grow thorns from our skin, we shout ancient words, and we beg our people to stay away from us. For we cannot be bent from our purpose, which is revenge.