The Monster Page 8

  Then, in the only way that matters, he will be immortal.

  BARU played the Great Game with the man who’d butchered her home.

  Gods of older fire, was she happy to see him? Wasn’t that sick? He’d condoned the rape of Cousin Lao as a medical necessity: keep that ember in your fist, so it always burns. He’d called the plague on Taranoke as inevitable as the tide: keep that tightness in your chest, so you feel it when you breathe.

  But didn’t he want to help her?

  Baru was mostly sure she was happy to see him only because he was useful. She liked useful things. But there was the risk that she simply wanted to be around someone who cared what happened to her.

  He wandered the map of the world that carpeted her morning-room: a bit less than her height, richer, rounder, with a neat beard and deep-set laughing eyes. He wore a dashing short-tailed sherwani. He looked at people with a beaming cleverness that was too charming, most of the time, to seem like avarice. All in all he was like a very self-satisfied raccoon.

  “We’ll play Hesychast rules,” he said, but before Baru could ask, what are Hesychast rules, he huffed and wrung his hands and made a noise of hurt.

  “Your Excellence?” she ventured.

  “Oh, for shit’s sake, Baru, call me Mister Farrier.” His eyes shone. “I just . . . oh, king’s balls.”

  She almost giggled. Instead she arched one eyebrow, severely. “Your pardon? Whose balls?”

  “I just—it’s hard to believe you’re here.” He stamped down on the little black shape of Taranoke. “Twenty-two and foreign born, raised in a hut on a little cove. If I’d gone to Census and Methods and asked them, how will Baru turn out, do you know what they would’ve said?”

  “Housewife, I expect?”

  “Agricultural planning, actually, with an occasional article in the Progress of Mathematics.” He beamed wetly, choked by pride. “And now you’re one of our Emperor’s own! Look at you!”

  The lamps were going out, because there was no one to refill the oil. The housekeepers had fled rather than overhear two cryptarchs speaking poisoned words.

  Baru had been reading the rules of the Great Game. She knew, now, how to manage a few of the rules, how to play as more than make-believe. She had arranged the board to represent a simple confrontation between Falcrest and the Oriati: Aurdwynn tidied away in the north, the Stakhieczi quiescent, nothing looming across the Mother of Storms. Just Old King Poison against the thousand-year Mbo.

  “I’m nothing special, Mr. Farrier,” she said. Play the humble student, Baru, and bait him, bait him till he tells you the truth you have to know.

  Why is Falcrest saved? What have I done that he wanted so badly for me to do?

  “Nothing special!” He set down the pawns of Federal Princes across the Mbo. “How can you think that, Baru?”

  “Well, as you say, there’s the matter of age.” She opened her hand to the empty northwest of the world. “The War Princess Shiqu Si died at twenty-one with the biggest empire in history. And how old was Dautiare when she led the first purge after the revolution? Twenty? And there was her father’s tactician Iro Mave, although I haven’t found many good books on her.”

  Farrier applauded gently. “You have mastered your history. Now, we play Hesychast rules: all character is determined by heredity. No one may disobey their intrinsic nature. Begin.”

  Behind him the southern-facing window, the harbor birds, the glittering wavetops that receded to a white line. The patterns of wave-crest and trough like the lines of a mountain range. Were mountains waves traveling through earth, millennia in their crest and crash?

  On the board she’d marshaled her resources in Falcrest. She, the Baru-piece, had no rules yet in the game, so she had granted herself dominion over trade and commerce on the Ashen Sea, and over Falcrest’s internal economy. No fleets. No votes in Parliament. No laws or judgments. Just money.

  She chose, and played, a currency gambit. Exactly what Farrier had used on Taranoke. She would sell exports to Oriati Mbo—lumbers, spices, textiles, clocks and art especially—cheaply, and for whatever money the Oriati would pay. She would buy only with Falcresti fiat notes. Their currency came out, Falcrest’s went in. Like a straw shoved into the rind of the Oriati economy, and her mouth sucking out all their native money, until they traded only with hers.

  “In Aurdwynn,” she said, thinking of the mastery of history, “a man told me that the future is an edict issued by the past.”

  “Historical contingency.” Farrier nodded. “The notion that the shape of tomorrow depends, by fixed laws, upon the shape of today. Quite radical, in the days when kings claimed absolute rule. People were executed for claiming that history had power over the monarch. Ah—what’s this?” Reading Baru’s orders now: “Ah, I recognize what you’re up to.”

  “The man who told me that . . . he was trying to say that he loved me.” Baru roughened her throat and half-closed her eyes, dangling the bait, come on, Farrier, will you sniff at the hint that your student loved a man? “Historical contingency. It’s terrible, isn’t it? Like everyone’s an arrow, already in flight. I killed them all with that idea.”

  “Mm,” he said, moving a couple pawns, checking his little handbook of Great Game rules. “How so?”

  “Well—the Duke Unuxekome grew up on stories of brave sea captains. So I sent him to make a brave stand at sea, and he went, and he died.”

  “The Oriati won’t stop using their currencies,” Farrier said, apologetically. “Under Hesychast’s rules, the Mbo coins—we call them the lonjaro, the segu, the mzili, and the devi—are so much a part of their traditions as to be fixed in their blood. I know, it’s quite absurd, isn’t it?”

  Baru found, to her horror, that she couldn’t stop confessing. “And Oathsfire, he wanted to be part of something idealistic, so I made myself an ideal of freedom, and he loved me. And Lyxaxu hated himself for the winter his people starved: so I convinced him I could feed his duchy, and he gave me his treasury. They were like clocks, and I found their keys, I turned the hands—”

  “Baru.” He looked up from his work at the crop calendar. “You’re grieving. I’m sorry to—” He chuckled, suddenly and self-deprecatingly. “—to tell you how you’re feeling, but I know, I know you have walls inside you. Trust me, please. You’re going to have to take time to mourn.”

  “They were traitors,” Baru growled, looking at her feet. “I don’t want to grieve them. It’s a waste of time.”

  “You loved them, though. I know you did.” He showed her his book. “I’m afraid the Oriati currency pool is so large that, in your efforts to replace all their money with ours, you’ve printed so many fiat notes they’re now worth less than their paper.”

  Hate. Hate like deepest pressure. Like diving until the water crushed her ears and burnt her chest. Love! Tell me about love, Cairdine Farrier. Tell me that you understand my pain. How wrong you will be: how terrible for you when at last I make myself known.

  But she wanted his comfort. Counterfeits could be useful, couldn’t they? Print me a little counterfeit comfort, Farrier. Print it for me.

  “An inflationary crash,” she said, stiffly, “like I caused when Tain Hu was counterfeiting notes.”

  “You loved her,” Farrier murmured, with eyes of shining sympathy. “I know you did. You loved Tain Hu.”

  She was utterly still. That name in his mouth.

  “Baru, I’m so proud.”

  She put the bar of her arm across his soft throat and slammed him into the windows. The whole great hive of glass shuddered at the blow. It was the first time she’d ever touched him in anger. He was looking up at her in alarm and hateful glee, I can move her, that’s what he was thinking, I can still provoke her.

  Baru snarled in his face, “She was a traitor!”

  “Yes, quite,” he choked. “An archtraitor. And you executed her for it. Will you give me an inch to speak, please? Thank you. She’s on file attesting to your illicit, ah, experimentation. And you execute
d her anyway. A great credit to your discipline. May I breathe now?”

  Baru retreated two steps, back foot, then front. The ringing! The ringing! In Aurdwynn they beat the dirt out of their laundry with huge wooden clubs. Baru had helped, because it was fun to smash clothes clean. But Devena help you if you struck the club against a tree, or a rock. It would leap and quiver in your hand with a thrum that conducted itself, instantly, up your arms and into your jaw. And, with your teeth buzzing, you’d drop the club and swear.

  Now Baru felt that same hum in her bones and brain and she wanted to come apart, her joints electing to unclasp each other, her sinews unbound, spilling her across the marble in a fan of gore.

  “What are you going to do?” she said, breathing hard. “Try to circumcise me?”

  “No, Baru, no.” He looked up at her with glittering wit, and pride, a hideous paternal pride that claimed credit for all that it honored. “Don’t you understand? I’m glad. So glad. I told you, Falcrest is saved. You’ve saved us all.”

  “Why?”

  “You loved her, in accordance with your nature.”

  Baru shrugged: the hardest lie so well-practiced it was easy now. The hugeness of Tain Hu’s trust and love was all that made it possible to conceal that trust, that love: like a sail it could be folded up inside itself.

  “Just one night,” she said.

  “But that’s everything. That’s everything. You were out beyond the Republic’s reach, where you could have done anything you pleased. What would you have done if Hesychast’s rules were right?” He held up his hands. “Baru, he thinks you obey your nature. You could’ve run off with your duchess into the mountains and been with her. And yet you came back. You obeyed our laws. No one believed you could do it, Baru! No one but me!”

  Falling: the world is falling. Nothing below her. Apparitor was right. That bastard Itinerant. He made you kill her. It was all part of his plan, everything, even the kiss, even the words kuye lam, even the drowning-stone: and thus she is lost.

  But wait a moment. Wait now.

  So what if Farrier expected you to kill me?

  Wasn’t that the point?

  To do as they required,

  and so deceive them?

  “You’re the end of history,” Cairdine Farrier whispered. His eyes glimmered in awe. “You’re the proof I needed, Baru. The foreign-born sinner taught to become a perfect citizen. He said I couldn’t do it. He said the sin was in your flesh and germ. But look at you. You policed yourself. You have the discipline. I taught it to you and you learnt.”

  Behind him waves crashed against the harbor bluff, and cataracts of spray burst up into rainbow arches and collapsed.

  “Baru, he’s lost, we’ve won.”

  She remembered her dream on the morning of betrayal. Farrier-who-was-Itinerant behind the blank mask of the Empire. And he had said to her: when the work is complete, no one and nothing will act without our consent. “By volition” will be a synonym for “by decree.”

  “Oh Himu,” she croaked. “That’s what you want of me. I’m to disprove Hesychast’s theories. I’m to ruin him and ruin his work and . . . and then . . .”

  She looked at the world beneath her feet.

  “And then,” Farrier said, softly, “we play the Great Game by my rules. The rules that work. For they made you, and you work perfectly.”

  She managed, against the weight of the avalanche, the avalanche that was knowing she was just a single stone in his tumbling design, to ask: “How long until he comes?”

  “He’ll be here within the month.” Farrier still stood against the glass, but the gravity had swung to him: he was silhouetted against the ocean and the world, with all the light behind him, and Baru stood in darkness. “First you must survive his examination. He will search you for signs of madness. You didn’t do what he expected, so your body must be broken somehow. Easier for him to believe that than to accept that he’s wrong about the causes of behavior.”

  “And then?”

  “Then,” he said, “you win control over the expedition. And you ensure the rewards go to us, not him.”

  “What expedition?”

  A wink. A smile. “Wait and see.”

  THEY played the Great Game every day, until Baru dreamt of Oriati demographics swarming like honeybees in a continental hive. Woke to find herself tracing Ashen Sea currents on the silk sheets of her cold, lonely bed. When she was not in training (and it was training) with Farrier she drank rare whiskeys and read secret histories and tried to imagine exactly what would come next.

  Expedition? What expedition? Would Farrier send her east, across the Mother of Storms? No. He needed her close.

  Then where?

  Apparitor had vanished. Probably he was afraid of Farrier. She saw less of his people, Helbride’s crew, in the keep, except that Iraji kept popping up in the oddest places—fitting clean sheets in her chambers, resetting the pawns on the Great Game map, inventorying the whiskeys in the cellar she liked to sample.

  “He’s spying on me,” she told Farrier.

  “Of course. And you’d be wise to let him.” He sat cross-legged on the map of Falcrest, covering the divisions between ancient cantons and shrievalties. “That’s how we trust each other. A cryptarch you cannot spy on is a cryptarch you must fear. Agents are very good proxies for trust.”

  But Iraji’s golden eyes followed Baru with a quiet nervous intensity she couldn’t blame on surveillance alone. “I wonder if he’s soft for me.”

  Farrier was suddenly very busy with his pawns. “Couldn’t speak to that,” he said airily. “Today we play Farrier rules. You will be the Mbo. I will play Falcrest.”

  It was the first moment of genuine uncertainty, unplanned weakness, she’d seen in him since he appeared. He was off-balance! She did not pause to analyze: she struck as Hu would’ve struck, by instinct.

  “I could use a concubine with a little softness,” she said, pacing at the window. “It’s cold here. Maybe that woman who stands sentry on the east tower. I see her up there in the morning, alone, looking out to sea all flinty and intent. And I want to bring her a coffee and a quiet word for good work. What do you think? The climb must keep her firm, I like my women firm—”

  “Remember,” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken, “that under my rules, behavior is not fixed. A child raised under Incrasticism will behave Incrastically. Shall we begin?”

  Curious. Very curious. Obviously he was displeased by her openness, but now that her tribadism was a fact of record, wasn’t it to his advantage? She’d proven she could control herself.

  She began to move pawns.

  Baru played the Mbo the way the Mbo played history. Open-armed, enormously affable, embracing invaders like eager guests. Farrier’s wheel of trade ships unloaded masterworks of craft and literature onto her shores, but the Mbo’s griots copied them, mingled them, made their own tributes, and sent them back to Falcrest inflected with a thousand years of dizzyingly various tradition.

  Wherever you went in the Oriati Mbo you found culture layered on culture, like a palimpsest never fully scraped. Take one of the four great federations, Lonjaro: it had its Eleven Gates and One City and Thirteenth Crown, but even if you memorized every kingdom from Jaro the Flamingo Kingdom to Jejuje the Otter and Unkinde the Female Lion, you would still need to learn the Three Cereals, Brown Millet and Rice and Einkorn, which were social rates left over from the tax structure of the ancient Cheetah Palaces, and then you would have to study Mana Mane, who united the Thirteen-in-Three-in-One with the saga called the Kiet Khoiad, which was why the Great Seal of Lonjaro bore the letters MKMK, Mana Kiet Mane Khoiad, sometimes extended to 13MK3MK1: only it was not actually clear that Mana Mane was from Lonjaro at all, they might well have been from Mzilimake to the south, home of the moon god Mzu and the gray parrots who lived as long as a man, and anyway no study of Mana Mane could explain Lonjaro’s great stelae, hundred-foot-high obelisks stabilized by underground counterweights, designed ages before they shoul
d have been possible—the point of all this not being the need to memorize many Mbo facts, but that the Mbo was far too complicated, too lively and old, to understand.

  “Why,” she asked Farrier, astounded, “don’t they have better banks?”

  Banking was the most powerful weapon in the world, because people stored their wealth in banks, and the banks could loan that wealth out to fund great labors. You could tax your people dead to fund your armies, and they would hate you for it. But give them a bank and a fair interest rate and they would give you everything they had and let you do what you pleased with it and ask only to have it back when you were done.

  Barring a sort of informal hawala system, the Mbo did not have large organized banks. When a Federal Prince wanted funds, they had to raise them personally.

  “It’s because they have a poorly developed idea of property,” Farrier explained. “Too much of Oriati society is a shared commons. You don’t own the pasture where you graze your sheep—your village takes care of it together. If you don’t own the pasture, you can’t post it as collateral for a loan. If you can’t take out a loan, why have a bank?”

  “How primitive,” Baru said, because she thought he’d like to hear it.

  But he frowned. “Don’t dismiss them so swiftly. Watch . . .”

  He attacked Oriati Mbo with all his powers. Schools to seduce the young. Banks to issue loans, loans to put the Oriati into debt, debt to give him an excuse to seize their land and property. He built toll roads and canals for exclusive trade. He gave his allies inoculations against disease. He brutalized the Oriati currencies with counterfeiting and debasement, flooding their continent with fake money so they would turn to the stable, reliable Falcresti fiat note as their trade coin.

  It was precisely how he had captured Taranoke.

  It failed utterly.

  The students in his schools could not be isolated from their families and communities: they rejected Incrasticism. The banks could not repossess the collateral of failed loans, because debtors’ neighbors bailed them out. The toll roads and canals were captured by local governments and opened to free trade until they were as crowded and slow as all the rest. Inoculations worked well, except that the inoculated were shunned and shamed for not sharing their immunity. When one of the four Oriati currencies foundered, another grew more valuable, as if the currencies were rabbits and foxes and wolves, one’s misfortune another’s opportunity.