SHE fell down the freeboard of a ship taller than any she had ever known.
But Eternal was not taller than the cliffs on Taranoke, where the divers plunged like herons and came up grinning. She managed to get her feet pointed. The filthy cassock billowed around her, fluttering like moth wings.
Impact.
Seawater flooded her mouth, poured through the split-glass cut in her right cheek. The slap of contact did what all her self-flagellation couldn’t. It made her want to act. The only thing in the world she needed to do was get to the surface and breathe: and that, at least, she could manage.
She scrabbled for the boatwale of Iraji’s dinghy and tried to pull herself aboard. She couldn’t. She fell back into the bath-warm water, just her nose above the surface. It was all right. She would rest here for a moment. It was all right—
Kimbune grabbed her by her wounded right hand and hauled. Baru screamed in pain, unable, for a moment, to understand what force had seized her: her damn blind right!
“Careful!” Baru cried, and then, without warning, found herself on her ass in the shallow bilgewater, aching.
“Are you all right?” Kimbune cried. “I was trying to help you. You went all limp.”
“The ergot’s still giving me seizures.” She struggled up to sit on a thwart. “It’ll pass.”
“Ergot? Who gave you ergot?”
“A madwoman.”
“Which one?” Kimbune asked, nervously, and then began to laugh. Baru, bloody-tongued, helpless, began to cackle along with her.
“Oh Alu.” Kimbune looked out into the dark pool of the caldera. “What have I done?”
“What have you done?” Baru could not believe the others had let her go.
“I’m coming with you to find my husband.”
“Abd?”
“My husband who is in Abd.” Kimbune showed Baru a canvas sack. “I packed a few of your things. Your mask. Your odd little calculator. That boy up there, is he really the Undionash child?”
Iraji! Baru scrabbled around beneath her, searching for some kind of signal, a flare pistol or a lantern, that would make Yawa give up the antidote. There had to be a clue what to do, where to go.…
“Listen,” she snapped. “When I’m gone, you must tell Xate Yawa that the Cancrioth is prepared to release plague in Aurdwynn if you’re not returned safely. Tell her that. Remember to specify Aurdwynn, not Falcrest. Do you understand? You have to protect yourself. That will keep her from hurting you.”
“Gone? Where are you going?” The mathematician clutched the canvas bag to her chest. Lumps of shape betrayed the contents: the arc of Baru’s mask, books, balls of clothing, two heavy cylinders that made dull noises as they struck each other. Kimbune’s long-lashed eyes peered warily over the bag at Baru.
“I’m not going to survive this,” Baru said. It was a liberating thought.
“Nobody will hurt me,” Kimbune said, hopefully. “I’m carrying the most important thing in the world. It’ll protect me.”
There was no flare pistol anywhere, no sign of a signal Baru could send. Yawa wouldn’t just let Iraji die, would she? She grabbed at the oar in her lock, took one haul, and set the boat spinning. There were two oars, damn it! Where was the one on the right?
“What’s that?” she asked. “What’s the most important thing in the world?”
“A proof.”
“A proof?”
“I can’t tell you,” Kimbune said, clutching her bag. “It’s too powerful. The bastard went and died before I could convince him, but it’s true, I’ve finished it and it’s beautiful and he was wrong, five hundred years he was wrong—”
“Wait a moment. Do you mean your husband?”
“Yes!”
“Are you desperate to get to your husband’s soul so you can … win an argument?”
“It’s an important argument!” Kimbune cried. “Don’t look at me that way. Who’s that over there?”
“Who? Where?” Baru stared into the dark. Saw boats silhouetted against wormlight.
“Yawa?” she called. “Yawa, I’m here. Give him the antidote.”
Dark shapes shuffled around, a vague exchange of negative spaces. Then someone stood up in the prow of one of the boats. Raised a lantern.
“Baru? Is that you?”
Not the last voice in the world she had expected to hear: not, after all, Tain Hu’s voice. But precious anyway, as unexpected as a shaft of moonlight in a cave. And Baru saw her on the prow of her boat, coming closer, uniformed, upright, every inch in command, and reaching out to save her.
Aminata.
AMINATA pulled Baru off her boat and didn’t let her go.
Baru squawked and tried to put her feet down but Aminata crushed her close, held her, muttered in her ear, “Hey, you asshole.” She smelled of honest sweat and aftershave. Her scalp beneath the mask was fresh razor-smooth black.
“Hi,” Baru groaned, and for a moment Aminata held all her weight.
“You’ve got some kind of glue on your head,” Aminata said.
“Oh.” The Brain’s glowing ichor hadn’t come off in the sea. “It’s, uh, it’s like jellyfish tea.”
Aminata fussed at the stain. “Can’t you go anywhere without starting a civil war?”
Baru croaked a little laugh. “This one’s really not my fault.”
“I saw you at the embassy—”
“I saw you!”
“—I had to burn the grounds, I thought I’d killed you—”
“—you did the right thing, it was Kettling—”
“—I had to talk to you, I had to know—”
“—I’m here, I’m here, please, but let’s get away, let’s go.”
The marines searched an indignant Kimbune for hidden weapons. Aminata whistled up at the ship that loomed above them. “That’s Cancrioth?”
“You know about them?”
“Yeah. A little. Well, no, not at all, except that they’re some kind of secret society, and the Admiralty wants to know more. Did you come looking for them?”
Could Baru answer that honestly? She had to sort out Aminata’s loyalties, but it was so hard to think.…
“Baru?”
She tried to tally all the ways Aminata might be a trick. Could Ormsment have sent her to lure Baru in? To get to Baru before Yawa did? Or what if she was off Ascentatic, sent by the loyal navy to erase all hints of the Cancrioth’s existence and Ormsment’s mutiny?
Aminata wilted. Her shoulders slumped, her mask tipped down, her hands went limp at her sides. “Baru,” she said, not a question, “you’re not going to tell me the truth.”
“I— I’ve had a hard day—”
“Me too, remember?”
“I know, I know, but things have happened—”
“I’d say things have happened! Baru, I came here to clear your name, but you’ve got to explain—first the Llosydanes, now the embassy, Tau-indi Bosoka caught in the attack—it’s like you’ve been trying to lure Ormsment into battle with the Oriati, so you can blame it all on the navy—”
“Ormsment’s trying to kill me!”
“I know! Captain Nullsin knows! So tell me something to prove she’s wrong! Tell me why you’re not out here to start a war!”
“No,” Baru rasped.
“No!?”
“No, we’re not going to do this. We will not be the friends who refuse to sit down and get the truth out. I’m going to tell you everything that’s happened”—well, almost everything—“it’s just, please, right now someone’s coming for me, and we have to…”
The words fell from her lips. She couldn’t escape. If Baru fled from Yawa, then Iraji would die.
She had to turn herself in for the lobotomy.
“Have to do what?” Aminata’s shoulders squared. Duty held her up like rigging holds up a mainmast, bracing Aminata’s soul under any weight. In that moment Baru loved her as deeply as she’d ever loved a friend. “What do you need?”
“I have to … turn myself over. There’s someone watching us right now. A woman named Xate Yawa.”
“The Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, right.” Aminata nodded as if this made perfect sense. “The prisoners said she was traveling with you—”
“What prisoners?” Baru hissed. “Aminata, what prisoners?”
“The rebels, right? From Tain Hu’s household? Ake Sentiamut and her cadre. I found them on the Llosydanes.” Aminata made a little grin of pride. “A man named Calcanish led me to them, and they said they’d been expecting me. They said they knew that I was going to get a letter from the—”
Tain Shir had used one of those prisoners against Baru. Made Baru choose between the cook Nitu’s life and her own. When Baru had chosen poorly, Shir had cut off two of her fingers.
“Aminata, where are these prisoners, and who exactly has them right now—”
There was a plop in the darkness, and then, a moment later, a splash.
The marine lookout said, softly, “Second boat’s coming in.”
“Who’s that?” Baru whispered. “Aminata, who’s there?”
“I came with another boat,” Aminata whispered back. “She was supposed to be right behind us. When I saw you I ordered us in and she must’ve hung back.…”
“She? Who’s she?”
The second plop was closer, and the second splash was louder. Something alien whistled in the dark: the sound of air forced through a bent flute or a broken bone. A wet chuff and a soft moan.
“Galganath?” Kimbune whispered. “Galganath, is that you?”
One of the marines unshuttered a lantern and turned it toward the sound. The cone of light found huge, grinning jaws. A white patch like a staring eye with no pupil. The cancer whale’s black true eye shone beneath it like a dark star.
But there was another monster in the lantern light.
TAIN Shir.
She crouched on the prow of her boat with spears bundled across her back and a fat fish in her hands. Her face fell in shadow. Two stiff and deferential marines rowed her boat closer. Behind her, in the boat’s belly, canvas swaddled a row of human forms.
Baru edged in front of Aminata to hide her from Shir’s gaze.
“Shir!” Aminata called, butting up against Baru, trying to push past. “I’ve got her. Let’s get her to safety and I can sort out the truth.”
“Yes,” Shir said. “Let’s sort out the truth about Baru.”
She threw the fat fish to the whale. Huge jaws clapped shut on it. The beast whuffled in delight. Shir stooped, grabbed, and hauled someone up from under the canvas. She was a woman in sailor’s slops and a diver’s strophium, her smooth, fat-padded stomach bare. Shir lifted her by the scruff of her neck. The woman was long as a seal and limp as death. There was no expression at all on her face.
She was Ulyu Xe, the diver, very briefly Baru’s second lover. She was here so Baru could order her death. Exactly as Tain Shir had promised, last time Baru had faced her.
The diver will be next. Then your parents.
The stumps of Baru’s missing fingers thrilled with the memory of Shir’s cold machete, falling free, part of her forever separate. She had stared in wonder at the wound even as she screamed.
“The Bane of Wives.” Kimbune sat forward in fascination. “The one who escaped the Renderer. It’s her.…”
How, Baru wanted to cry? How are you here, Ulyu Xe? I sent you home to Aurdwynn! I saved you! How did Aminata find you? How did she bring you here? I saved you!
But her women always came back to die.
“That’s my prisoner!” Aminata cried. She and Baru jostled each other, Baru trying to conceal her, Aminata trying to force her way forward. The marines behind them were muttering in confusion. “Set her down, do you hear me? We don’t threaten prisoners!”
Tain Shir whispered into Ulyu Xe’s ear. The diver twisted hard in her grip, naked abdomen torquing, a meaningless dance, grotesque exhibition. Her face was blank. Shir stared at Baru, as if willing her to grasp some lesson in Xe’s body, in this body Baru had wanted and been wanted by: sex and death, death and sex, together.
Baru felt the most awful, incredible, despicable kind of jealousy. Had Shir fucked her? Had she seduced Xe, had she crouched with Xe’s back arched against her stomach, trembling with effort? It wasn’t that Baru was jealous or possessive of Xe’s body or what she chose to do with it. No, it was that—that—
—that Shir had stolen Baru’s story. Xe was her lover. Shir couldn’t kill her. Xe was supposed to die for Baru.
What a diseased, repulsive thing to feel.
And yet Baru felt it. She undeniably felt it.
“Show her the others,” Shir commanded.
One of her marines yanked the canvas sheet free. Shackled beneath were the survivors of Tain Hu’s house. The herbalist Yythel, who had been Xate Olake’s lover, before he discovered Baru’s treachery, and his twin sister’s treachery, and went mad.
The forester Ude Sentiamut and his pimply adopted boy Run.
Ake Sentiamut, who should be governing half of Aurdwynn by now.
No sign of Dziransi, the Stakhieczi brave man—
“Hey!” Aminata shouted. “You put that woman down or I’ll have words for the admiral!”
“I can’t,” Tain Shir called back. “I’m not in control here.”
The Cancrioth whale whistled softly through its blowhole. There was metal in there, fitted into the flesh. Did it suffer? Baru didn’t know.
“I order you to put her down!” Aminata shouted.
“I can’t,” Shir said. “I have to do what Baru tells me. I am under her command.”
“What?” Aminata whirled. “What the fuck does she mean?”
“I killed her cousin,” Baru whispered. “I sacrificed Tain Hu.”
“Baru?”
“So I could escape the Throne’s control. I sent her to die.”
“Baru?”
“And I didn’t realize,” Baru said, as everything caved in, as she finally admitted what she had for so long refused to coalesce into a single thought, “I didn’t realize why I did it. She’s trying to show me.”
Shir drew a machete and lifted it to Ulyu Xe’s throat. “Do I kill her, or do I kill you?”
“I can’t,” Baru croaked.
“You must. You must choose. One by one. For you to live, you must choose for them to die. As it was with Hu, so will it be here.”
“Please don’t. Please.”
“I don’t control the terms.” Shir had the brutal ghost of Tain Hu’s face, bones and skin the same, but where Hu had painted high cheekbones and tied up long hair, Shir’s face was a naked map of scars, Shir’s hair was hacked off and burnt. “I only enforce your precedent. This is the world you chose to live in. A world governed by your law.”
“Could you kill her?” Aminata muttered to one of her marines. “One shot? Before she could cut that woman’s throat?”
“Hit her? Yes, definitely. But she’d see me aiming, mam.”
No, Baru thought. You can’t kill her. Those aren’t the rules.
The rules say I have to choose.
And it was time to make the right choice.
SHE was alone.
Tau-indi Bosoka had tried to warn her that the Cancrioth would strip away her connections to the human world. And if she wanted to laugh that off as superstition, well, O Incrastic scientist, hadn’t she lost everything? Who was left to her? Her choices had brought doom down even on her own parents.
How was any of this going to help Aurdwynn? Or Taranoke? Even if she brought Kettling to Falcrest, how could she stop it from spreading to the provinces?
How had she in any way lived up to Tain Hu’s trust? Tau-indi alienated, Tain Hu’s companions about to be butchered, Iraji given to the Cancrioth, Xate Yawa here to seize her and take her away, plague and war …
Only Falcrest would benefit from this madness. Falcrest and Cairdine Farrier.
Kyprananoke was tearing itself apart like a dog gnawing at the rot that would kill it. In a month there would be nothing here except fire and gunsmoke and a skullbacked whale gliding through the bodies in the sea. The world had rubbed thin. Something horrible was coming into it.
And it was coming in through Baru. She was the wound.
Farrier had made her so.
“A theory of perfect rule,” said the dead man in the Elided Keep, the one whose letter had greeted Baru on her first day in the Throne. “A means by which the Imperial Republic of Falcrest may be rendered causally closed, so that the sprout of every seed and the turn of every cyclone occurs in accordance with our predictions, and therefore in accordance with our decrees. Thus we may at last achieve the state of ruling without ruling, a self-governing world.”
And then he went on, as the letter had not, in the voice of Cairdine Farrier:
“A self-governing world shall require a self-governing citizen. It will require a woman who can without coercion or persuasion be trusted to make perfect choices to keep the Masquerade strong. Once this citizen can be created, then the Republic will last forever. No force of law will be required. All citizens will gladly perform their own functions, for no reason except the joy of it. This is the great desire of Renascent, the Throne Reborn. And I must prove to her that I am the way to fulfill this desire.”
“And this requires,” dead Muire Lo explained, as the plague swelled his face into an atlas of pus, “that the law of the Republic be written into the individual citizen, and passed down perfectly from generation to generation, more perfectly than the color of the eye is passed. The citizen must become a self-ruling subject.”
“I see,” Baru said, into the fortifications of her mind, and she felt a pain and a satisfaction in her cramped bowel like digestion, like the digestion of the whole world, for she did see, she understood. “Hesychast the eugenicist says, we must breed the perfect citizen.
“And against him, Itinerant the trader says, we must teach them to rule themselves.
“So I am his model. A wild-type islander girl taught to govern herself perfectly. Taught to obey Falcrest no matter how terribly she wants to resist. Taught to deny herself the companionship and compassion she requires. I am his proof to Renascent that his method triumphs over Hesychast’s eugenics. I am the one who will always obey, because I can always rationalize my obedience as my own will.”
In Urunoki, Baru gasped: “I am his weapon.…”
REMEMBER the Cold Cellar?
In that pit of Incrastic hygiene, Xate Yawa used simple conditioning to treat marital infidelity. Show a woman her husband, and at the same time feed her a pleasant smell, dose her with a wonderful drug. Soon the woman will learn to associate pleasant feelings with the husband.
Show this woman a man who is not her husband, a man like the men she lusts for. Then make her taste acid, and batter at her ears with a horrible gong. She will learn to cringe away from those men.
This was the technique of simple conditioning.
But there were more sophisticated techniques. One of them was called operant conditioning, or, in clinical parlance, paired-icon behavioral coaxing.
In this paradigm, the subject was always allowed to make her own choices. No external force inflicted stimuli. No handsome stranger or faithful husband, no soft music or crashing gong. The subject was offered the illusion of freedom. The experimenter only controlled the response to her choices.
As the subject explored possible actions, and discovered the planned responses, she was allowed to teach herself the rules of the conditioning.
The rules of the conditioning were this—
When Baru’s mother Pinion and father Salm had gone away to war, Baru had begged her father Solit to let her go to the Masquerade school, so that she could understand what was happening to her world.
She removed herself from her family. The school rewarded her with knowledge and power. How swiftly and quietly she’d transferred her loyalties.…
Then Salm had vanished. Farrier had ordered it, hadn’t he? Of course he’d ordered it. Of course he’d ordered it. Confused by grief, Baru had asked her mother: Was he my father, or was he only a sodomite?
Pinion had cried out in horror at the Masquerade word, and struck Baru in fury. She punished Baru for asking, just as the school rewarded her for inquiry. The pain of Salm’s disappearance became something that Baru’s own mother inflicted on her. Something that the school eased.
Her cousin Lao had come for help to escape a rapist teacher. Baru had befriended Aminata, and used the navy’s influence to get the rapist fired. Farrier had been very angry with her. But he had not taken Aminata away, had he? He had not deprived Baru of the friendship she treasured, for it was not Farrier’s role in the Process to cause pain or hardship.
No. He had tricked Aminata into rebuking Baru, beating her, screaming at her that there was only one punishment fit for a tribadist: the circumcising knife.
Through her mother, and through Aminata, Baru had taught herself that connections led to pain.
And then—
And then—
Farrier had deployed Baru to Aurdwynn.
After years of preparation, Farrier had allowed his student to slip the leash.
Where she obeyed the lessons he’d taught her.
She took Apparitor’s bargain: give up Aurdwynn to gain power in Falcrest. Just as she’d traded her family for the Masquerade school.
She’d used the navy to sidestep Governor Cattlson and insinuate herself with the rebels, just as she’d once allied herself with Aminata to get rid of the rapist teacher Diline.
She’d betrayed and murdered her navy pawns at Welthony Harbor: because hadn’t she learned that the navy could be useful, but also that the navy would never be her true friend?
She’d met a family exactly like her own, a mother and two fathers, Duchess Nayauru with her lovers Duke Autr and Duke Sahaule. And she’d destroyed that family. Just as her own had been destroyed. She’d ambushed them in their traveling camp as Salm had been ambushed in his.
She’d met a woman she loved.
And she’d kept that woman at a distance, despite Tain Hu’s cunning and charisma and devastating presence, despite Baru’s own fantasies. She’d kept that woman at arm’s reach until the very night she knew Tain Hu and all the rest of the rebels were doomed.
Only then had she allowed herself to fall.
When their love could only lead to death.
As she had allowed herself to be with Ulyu Xe only on the night before they were separated.
As she had allowed herself to be with Shao Lune only when drunk and desperate and certain Shao Lune was using her.
She loved women only when that love was deniable and doomed. Farrier had taught her so. How could she have missed it?
What had she told herself even as she chose Tain Hu to be her queen?
I will destroy myself if I choose.
On this one day I will not deny what I am.
In that very moment of defiance she had recapitulated the law that had been taught to her. To confess what she was, to indulge her love for women, meant destruction. She had said it herself! To be what she was was to destroy herself! Exactly as Farrier required her to believe!
Hadn’t her battle in Aurdwynn been a battle of two fronts: one to prove her skill at conspiracy, and one to prove her mastery of self-repression? Hadn’t her talent at concealing her true loyalties from the Coyote been the same talent she used to conceal her true feelings from Tain Hu?
Hadn’t she come to see those two skills as the same?
No wonder Farrier had celebrated when he learned that she’d executed Tain Hu. No wonder he’d cried Falcrest is saved! His process had worked. He had educated a bright young foreign woman to become a perfect self-governing subject. He could send her anywhere, on any mission, and she would continue to rule herself by Falcrest’s law. He could leave her with the most desirable and interested woman in the world and Baru would find a way to deny her own want unless it was paired with that woman’s extinction.
Cosgrad Torrinde the Hesychast had his Clarified, people like Iscend Comprine, who were born and raised in Metademe conditioning. Hesychast believed that Baru would never overcome her own nature. The flesh mastered the mind, and Baru Cormorant’s flesh could never kill Tain Hu.
But Hesychast was wrong.
Baru was Farrier’s monument, his exemplar, his masterpiece. A degenerate child molded into a brilliant Imperial agent. A tribadist who, even when dispatched into rebel woods to consort with warrior duchesses, enforced her own chastity until the night before the end. A traitor who would voluntarily return to Falcrest, to her own repression and to Farrier’s control. Because she believed she was a savant, a hard woman, someone who sacrificed what she must in order to do what was necessary. Someone who had to be alone.
Behold the chains he placed on you.
His law lived in Baru. Everything she accomplished was tainted by it.
If I show you favor, woman, then you will die.
And through that death I will progress.
She wore an invisible mask: the laughing face of Cairdine Farrier, carved into the skull of her soul.
“AMINATA.”
“Baru?” Pushed up against Baru’s right shoulder, she must’ve felt Baru go rigid. “What is she doing? Why is she saying these things?”
Ulyu Xe dangled limp from Tain Shir’s arm. Her soul had withdrawn from all contact with the world. Baru hated to imagine the things Shir had whispered to her in the dark: the truth about Baru.
“Aminata,” she said. “Did Cairdine Farrier ask you to beat me and scream at me?”
“I—what—?”
“In school, Aminata. It’s important. When you called me a tribadist. Did Farrier ask you to do that?”
“Yes, he said you needed a good fright from a friendly face, so you’d watch yourself and not get into worse trouble later—”
Baru nodded. “All right, then. Aminata, listen. I can’t explain it all. There’s no time. Just know—please—that I did it all for my parents and my home. That isn’t a lie. That’s the truth. I thought I was helping my home.”
“Baru, what’s happening?”
Tain Shir spoke in Maia Urun, the ancestral tongue of Baru’s home; spoke as if she could taste Baru’s thoughts. “Farrier is your secret master, for his mastery is secret from you. He has concealed it within your pride. He has dominated you through your conviction that you secretly resist him. There is no difference between pretending to obey Farrier and committing yourself utterly to his control.”
Something cried out to Baru—something she’d heard—a sword, and a throne, and a voice, Tain Hu’s loving voice, saying,
She’ll make you worse, if she can. Don’t let her. I always tried to make you better.
Listen. Listen. There is a difference between acting out their story, and truly obeying their story. Do you know what it is?
Baru could not remember the answer. She could not bring it to mind. It was lost in the darkness of her right.
So she made her choice.
“I want to be free of him,” she said. “I want that more than I want anything.”
Shir dropped Ulyu Xe down into the arms of the marines behind her. She smiled, no, she grinned, a big happy grin, like a proud friend.
“You understand,” she said. “You understand now. Be free.”
She shrugged loose a spear and fitted it into her atlatl.
“Shoot her!” Aminata barked.
But the marine marksman hesitated. He was looking up at Baru with eyes full of hate and fear. This man was Ormsment’s, and he could not bring himself to save Baru’s life.
Tain Shir cast her spear.
Aminata shoved Baru out of the way.
“NO!” Baru screamed, as Aminata went down with the spear in her breastbone, as Kimbune screamed in fear and the marines bellowed in confusion. No, Wydd, no, take it back, not Aminata, not for her, not for her—
“Ah,” Tain Shir said, with some satisfaction. “She did truly believe she was your friend.”
She reached to draw another spear from the bundle on her back.
A needle went through her hand.
IT happened so fast that Baru thought she’d had another seizure. A narrow steel shaft, finned like a crossbow bolt, through and through Shir’s palm: and Shir already yanking the dart out, whirling, her reflexes faster than Baru’s thought as she turned to meet—
Iscend Comprine.
Baru had learned her own egocentric weakness, her habit of forgetting about the other players on the board. She’d resolved to think about people more, to remember their inner lives.
What did it say about her, and her idea of the Clarified, that she’d not spared more than one thought for Iscend tonight?
Iscend was Clarified, born from the choicest eugenic material and raised in Hesychast’s Metademe, conditioned from birth to put the well-being of the Imperial Republic before all else.
Baru had never expected to see her again.
The Clarified woman stood loose-kneed on the prow of her own launch. Her body soaked up the tremor of the waves, compressing and relaxing. She held a pistol crossbow, the sort that was always loaded with poison bolts. And, in her off hand, the segmented red shape of a Burn grenade.
“I’ve poisoned you,” she said. “It’s curare. You’ll stop breathing in five minutes unless you do exactly as I say.”
“Gaios!” Shir barked at her. “Stop!”
Iscend froze, except her face, where there should have been a smile. Gaios was her Clarified command word. It should pull her mind around like a leash.
Instead she frowned. A tremendous warping grimace that broke her perfect high-boned mountain-fox face in two.
“No,” she said.
In the boat with Baru, Aminata arched and yelled. “It’s in the jack! Get it out!” The fishing spear had penetrated her combat harness, but stopped against the layers of steel and fabric beneath. One of her marines pounced on her, put a boot on her rib cage, and pulled.
The bent heads of the prisoners flashed through Baru’s awareness—there was Ake, pale hair strung across an exhausted pale face; there was Ulyu Xe, limp in Ake’s embrace; the boy Run crying in silent fear and anger as Ude, his bearded guardian, tried to cover him. The herbalist Yythel huddled in the stern with sour displeased exhaustion on her face.
Above them all Tain Shir loomed, reaching up, drawing one of the spears bound across her back.
“Gaios,” she repeated to Iscend. “Be still. Be still.”
Iscend’s boat glided closer.
Iscend grinned, as if she’d just had a brilliant idea.
And she said, “Gaios. I will not.”
She had used her own command word. Impossible.
“Kneel.” Shir reached for her as her boat came closer. “Kneel, gaios, kneel and comply.”
“Gaios. I refuse.”
“You will not harm me. I know your word.”
“You do know my word. But I have a purpose here and I do not serve by departing from it.”
“What is your purpose? Gaios. Tell me.”
Iscend’s smile went impish, perversely sly: what could perversion mean in the mind of a Clarified woman? She was bending her own programming, and it delighted her.
“I am here to protect Baru,” she said. “She is necessary.”
“To who?”
“To Durance. To my master Hesychast. To me.”
Shir said, low and slow, “Gaios. Kneel.”
“Gaios. I refuse.”
“You will obey your word!” Shir bellowed. “Gaios! Kneel!”
Iscend trembled with the force of the command. Her wavering legs nearly pitched her backward. Her body corrected her balance with automatic perfection, and as she came back low and centered she said, silently, gaios, and the motion of that automatic balance became a twitch in her finger, and the crossbow fired.
The needle bolt went through Shir’s other hand as it passed before her face, and pinned that hand to the spear beneath. Shir grunted without inflection: neither pain nor surprise. Curare again, no doubt. Something melancholy about the sight of a monster so awful and primordial brought low by merely rational means.
Iscend’s boat bumped up against Shir’s. Shir lunged without expression, thrusting down from overhead, like a fisherman, into Iscend’s chest, roaring “Gaios!” to freeze her there: and Iscend grimaced at the word, the grimace became a shiver, the shiver became a movement, a sidestep, catching the haft of that spear and pulling, Shir growling as the spear tore itself from her grip and yanked the crossbow bolt out of her hand. Iscend threw the spear away and leapt from her boat to Shir’s, who grabbed at her collar, her belt, her hair, any point of leverage that would let her grapple the smaller woman. But Iscend slipped through her hands like she was greased. Close inside Shir’s guard, she kneed the bigger woman in the groin and went for her throat. A blur of violence as they grappled: Iscend’s fluid efficiency and her smile of delight, as if she astounded herself with every maneuver, and Shir as inelegant, as brutal as a shark breaching with a seal in her jaws, battering it to death against the rocks.
One of the marines rowing Shir’s boat grabbed for Iscend’s legs.
She leapt his grip and kicked him, backward, in the face. But Shir got Iscend’s arm, outthrown for balance, and with a roar of effort she extended it so far Baru was sure it would pop from its socket—
Iscend whirled with Shir’s pull. She saved her arm but could not get out of Shir’s reach. One bloody hand closed over her face, clawing at her eyes.
Shir grunted like a bear and dug in.
Iscend’s free arm tucked the red shape of the Burn grenade into Shir’s waistband.
“Gaios!” Baru screamed, terrified for Ulyu Xe and Ake and all the others, all those who would burn with Shir, “NO!”
Iscend’s finger hooked through the grenade’s rip-ring.
The Cancrioth whale bumped its head against the boat.
Not even Clarified were trained to include cancer whales in their kinesthetic choreography. Iscend tipped backward and Shir, still clutching her face and throat, went down with her, both together, into the dark water.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” Aminata shouted. She grabbed Baru by the shoulder and hauled herself upright. “Stand down, stand down, police your weapons! I’m in command here! Marines, as Ormsment’s staff captain, I’m in command until we figure out what the fuck is happening! Stand down!”
For a moment it was going to be all right.
Then a beam of light pinned them all in place. A point of chemical fire cupped in a focusing mirror, bright enough to blind.
“Put ’em up,” Faham Execarne called. “I want hands right up. We have a hwacha trained on you, and a barge full of angry men behind it. Bows down, hands up. You too, Agonist. You especially.
“In the name of the Morrow Ministry of the Imperial Republic, by the authority of the Jurispotence-at-Large Xate Yawa, you are all under my arrest.”
“WHERE is my niece?” Yawa’s mechanical mask ground each word like a coffee mill. “Where is Tain Shir?”
The Morrow Ministry agents cinched Baru’s straitjacket tighter. “She went in,” Baru gasped. “She was shot in the hand, poisoned with curare. Then she fell into the water.”
“Where is Iscend Comprine?”
“In the water. You didn’t know she’d do that, did you? You sent her to keep me alive, but you didn’t know how far she’d go. Oh, Yawa! Your women keep trying to die for me.”
The Morrow-men were going now, leaving Baru alone, straitjacket bound to metal, Xate Yawa looming over her.
“Never again,” Yawa said. “You’ll never hurt anyone I treasure ever again.”
The dawn rose through the skylight behind her. They had hauled Baru away from the others, onto a makeshift landing and up an ancient lava tube. Maybe no one had been here since the Day of Thunder Capes, when Mount Tsunuq blew itself apart. On the day of that eruption, some ancient Jellyfish Eater, a liturge from the Tiatro Tsun come to watch the dawn, might have stared down through the skylight above Baru to see the fire surging below.
The gods of fire had passed through and gone. Only burnt stone remained.
Baru felt the sore crown around her head, that ring of hurt which marked her worst days of ennui. She was ready to close her eyes for a while.
You spent all you had. And there was no one left to draw a loan from, no more divers on the soft grass, no more officers with sly cruel faces, no more gentle Tau-indi or sweet Iraji or even Apparitor to shout at you.
You were spent.
She wondered what would happen to Kimbune. Faham Execarne had fixated on her, although Kimbune was pretending not to speak Aphalone. “The Cancrioth!” he kept shouting, as if volume could get his point across. “Are you really the Cancrioth? Amazing. Amazing! King’s balls, we can’t let Parliament know about this. Where’s Tau? They must be a dreadful mess right now, I’ve got to reassure them—”
Baru did not have to care about any of that anymore.
She closed her eyes and sighed. A cool wind blew up the lava tube. Here inside the volcano the air smelled exactly and wonderfully like Taranoke.
“Yawa,” she said, “will you tell Admiral Ormsment that I’ve gone, please? So that my parents will be safe.”
It was done now. She could rest.
The Cancrioth would never find Abdumasi Abd. Falcrest would drive Oriati Mbo to civil war and lay its eggs in the wounds and pillage the whole continent. Vultjag would remain a poverty-stricken hamlet, unless the avalanche of Stakhiecz invasion wiped Tain Hu’s home entirely away. Iraji would live out his life incubating cancer. Svir’s lover, the Empire Admiral Lindon Satamine, would be murdered by a Parliamentary purge during the war. And Tau-indi Bosoka would die bitter and alone, all their faith in trim destroyed.
But it didn’t matter. She was going to die. Nothing would be her problem any longer.
How badly she’d wanted to stay in that moment when she woke in Tain Hu’s arms. How terribly she’d wished that she would never think another thought. The first time in her life, maybe, that she’d wished for ignorance.
“I’ll fetch my instruments,” Yawa said, and disappeared into Baru’s blindness, to make the lobotomy ready.
Tain Hu’s ghost hand cupped the right of her face.
Go away, Baru thought. I’m bruised. You’re hurting my eye.
But the hand would not go.
Baru lifted her face to the dawn that came down glorious through the skylight. The morning birds were rising, rising, thousands of them singing to each other, tens of thousands, lifting from the black slopes of el-Tsunuqba, voice of the mountain, Taranoke, Taranoke, I am the burnt and unpeopled husk of Taranoke, I am your home as you deserve to find it, I am the true and empty shape of your heart.
And the birds called out in their tens of thousands, and their wings shadowed the dawn, and Baru wanted to know how many, how many exactly, and how much of the sky their wings could blot out, and how much of el-Tsunuqba their shadows could darken, and all the rest.
She began to count.
IT was a hot, wet spring day in Falcrest, the City of Bleach and Sugar, when Parliament summoned the empire admiral to entertain his own doom.
The day’s casualties were already severe; the empire admiral noted the harborside birds, huddled beneath the piers as if the sun had beat the strength from them. A few diving anhingas gathered smugly on pilings to dry their outfanned wings, but the humidity left them bedraggled, and they retreated, protesting hoarsely, to the shadows of the boardwalk. A pair of soaring ibises came in off the Sound of Fire, looking for thermals. But the thick, wet air soaked them out of the sky and they came down on a freshwater pond to ruin the hopping-lily paths made by the jacanas.
The Empire Admiral Lindon Satamine watched all this from gridlocked water traffic, his dark formal eyeliner saving him from only the worst of the glare, as his barge languished in the circulating pool at Meshnet. The Narrow Way to Parliament was right there, just a minute’s swim away.
But the Judiciary, may their cocks be knotted off at the tip and left to blacken, had a traffic checkpoint blocking everything.
“I have a summons, damn you.” Lindon waved the silk-paper letter at the Judiciary ravens blocking his way. “I’m the fucking empire admiral, you plucked-ball chickenshits! Parliament demands my attendance! Now!”
Out on the Sound of Fire and anywhere beyond he was power incarnate. He could burn an island to the bedrock or blockade a whole nation into eating their dogs. But here, in the watery intestines of Falcrest proper, he was just another man in traffic.
And without Svir’s political support, he was just another toy for Parliament to disembowel and bat around.
Not for the first time, Lindon thought that the principle of cordoned power had been enshrined in the Republic’s law entirely and exclusively to fuck him over.
At least he wasn’t under arrest. If they wanted to arrest him they’d do it quietly, like that time Mandridge Subahant had forced through a writ of assisted self-critique and sent two field judges to detain Lindon while he ate dinner at the Charred Hull. They hadn’t dared arrest him mid-meal, making enemies of the owners and patrons alike, so Lindon had saved himself from their tender attentions by ordering course after course of meats and sweetbreads and whiskeys, maintaining his appetite long enough for Svir to overturn the writ and recall the judges. Afterward Lindon had nearly died of meat shits.
Why was Parliament wasting time by awaiting his presence, when Parliament’s audience was so notoriously impatient with delay? (Parliament was of course open to the public, and the public loved to vote for those who put on the best show.)
He tried to recite a mnemonic to fortify his patience. “Breast Heel, Moonmount Shadow, Goblet-of-Ants, Poison Dart Ford, 121 Streams, Lily Lake, Uranium Gorge, Colobus Lake, Tantamount, Lake Akhena,” chanting out the names of all the confederacies in distant Mzilimake Mbo, “Hops River, Grey Eclipse—”
And then, from among the post-revolutionary rooftops that filled the skyline ahead, he saw a white flare climbing up into the hot blue sky, shot directly up through the oculus of the old reservoir where Parliament sat in session.
Lindon could not speak for fury. His hands worked at the rail. Something in bone or wood creaked.
“Sir?” his clerk-lieutenant asked, reminding Lindon of her existence: he fired his clerks regularly, since they were all Brilinda Vain’s spies. “What’s that flare, sir?”
“My man in Parliament. Something’s happened. Something he thinks I need to be warned of right away.”
Lindon saw it all now. The emergency summons, so they could say they’d tried to solicit his advice. The Judiciary pickets to ensure he did not make it in time. Parliament waiting with pantomimed patience while they let the audience simmer in resentment of the Empire Admiral’s tardiness.
And, finally, the vote. We’re sorry, Admiral, but we just couldn’t wait any longer. The people do not stoop for the navy’s pleasure. Rather the converse, don’t you know.…
“It can’t be anything new,” he whispered. Parliament absolutely couldn’t extend its powers over the navy without granting the Admiralty time on the floor. “It must be an exercise of an existing privilege, something procedural, something routine, it must be … what?”
If Svir were here he would’ve sniffed it out. He would’ve known a month ago. But Svir was not here.
Whatever Parliament had done today, it was the first link in the chain to purge. For more than a hundred years, the navy had viciously fought off all attempts to put a civilian ministry over them, and that gave the navy power and discretion … but it also meant that Parliament’s methods to control the navy had to be extreme. More than one Admiralty had ended in the basement of the Bleak House.
And Lindon was as vulnerable as he’d ever been.
The moment his barge bumped up against the fenders of the navy dock, a messenger came bursting out of the coatroom arch. “Sir!” the girl shouted. “Sir, two anonymous notes from the floor, sir!”
He tipped her double and unfolded the finer paper first. From his agent. It contained a sketch of the actions Parliament had just approved.
“What?” he breathed, frowning at the calligraphy. “What’s this?”
“May I see, sir?” his clerk offered.
“Fuck off,” he snapped, glaring at the summary. Appropriations, funds, lists of affected accounts … so they were fucking with the navy’s money, the slice of the tax pie paid out to the Admiralty each year … but that wasn’t possible. The quantities were fixed in each year’s budget, and could only be increased, never decreased, by emergency appropriation. It was written in law. The navy’s sacrosanct need to plan operations in distant seas, subject to many weeks of travel and delay, demands absolute confidence and clarity in the available budget.
Parliament couldn’t get at them that way.
Then he saw it. It was so brutally simple that he actually grunted a laugh.
“Fuck,” he said in admiration. “Fuck me.”
Parliament had finally had enough. Province Admiral Ormsment was missing from her post in Aurdwynn. There were reports of Oriati ships destroyed off the Llosydanes, including an ambassador’s clipper. Brilinda Vain’s Censorate was still hemming and hawing and refusing to declare exactly who had been behind that pirate attack on Aurdwynn. War seemed imminent, and the navy was acting unreliable.
Parliament had decided to show them the garrote. And they had done it very cleverly. They had simply converted every note granted to the navy from a payment to a recoverable outlay. The navy now owed Parliament one note, plus interest, on every note it spent.
It would probably not stand up in an impartial court. But the Judiciary was not impartial.
“Go directly back to the Admiralty,” he ordered his clerk. “Prepare an all posts bulletin for my seal and signature.”
“The message, sir?”
“Order all ships to return to port, all outfitting and refitting to cease, all navy accounts frozen. Not one note spent. Pay salaries from liquid reserves on hand, go to local banks if you have to, but do not draw from navy accounts. Do you understand?”
“Sir, you’re asking for … for the whole navy to return to port.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Given the situation with the Oriati, sir, especially at our southern outposts—”
“I know!” he snapped. “Go!”
The second anonymous note came on cheap paper, in a very level, very large hand. The kind of writing you might practice if you needed to scrawl messages on heavy seas.
Lindon,
I’ve secured an investment from the Tuning-Spear Concern that will keep First Fleet operating through end of year. To be repaid out of our prize shares. Someone has to be ready when the war begins, after all.
Good luck panhandling for funds, sir,
PAAC
“You venomous cunt,” he said, with the most profound respect.
Ahanna Croftare, Province Admiral First Fleet, had taken her ships quite unofficially private.