“Absolutely.” Baru scuffed her boots on the marble, tugged her belt, adjusted her collar, and shot her cuffs. “It’s time to reward them for their return to our care. Ease off the lash. Give them a little”—slack on their chains—“honey for their table.”
What was his name anyway? Irashee? Irama?
“My lord suggests a map that will show you the full span of your new dominion.”
“Does he?” Baru stretched her locked hands over her head, and yawned mightily. She was pleased, a little, when the boy’s attention wandered down her jacket and waistcoat: not because she cared about his tastes, but because his dark gold-flecked eyes were like Tain Hu’s. “What map is that?”
Iraji. That was his name. Iraji of the oyaSegu tribe.
“A map of the world, my lady,” Iraji said. He blinked at her, softly, and she saw that he had a mind for spying, a polite and empathetic cunning which could be turned to wound or weal. “You are exalted now. You must consider the mosaic, not the stone.”
2
INCARNATION
SHE came into her morning-room, where, before the ship and Tain Hu and the test, she’d read and written and then torn up all she wrote. Hard morning light came down through the hive window: teeth of fine thick glass in an iron truss and a clear scouring luminance, Incrastic, virtuous. Like the chimes of the proctors at the Iriad school, calling the girls out for dawn inspection.
Baru went into the little pit commode and vomited in grief.
When she came out, rinsed and empty, wanting strong whiskey to clear the taste off the back of her tongue, a map of the world had been laid out across the smooth dry floor.
She circled it in awe. Wine and no sleep gave her a singing headache: she felt brightly, tenuously alive. “Taranoke,” she said, determined to keep that name alive and spoken. “Taranoke … there you are.”
Beginning at her home, she surveyed the map.
And for the first time in her life the world revealed itself to her. Not the ring of the Ashen Sea, which you could see in any gazetteer, but the full sweep of the globe from end to endless end. Baru gasped in delight, and covered her mouth.
“It’s so blue,” she said. “I thought there’d be more land.”
Apparitor spoke from her blindness. “Eight parts water and two parts land, we think.”
“Has Falcrest surveyed it all?”
“Not all. Not the poles, though the ana-folk say you can walk across the ice all the way to the lodepoint. And the south? Who knows. The Oriati, maybe. We’ve never managed an expedition past Zawam Asu, into anterior seas or the western oceans. They sell us charts but it might all be fancy. Whale queendoms and the like. Creatures with tongues as long as kraken arms.”
“We used to think,” Baru whispered, “on Taranoke, I mean—there was a blue hole, that’s like an underwater well—”
“I know them,” he said. “Horrifying pits.”
“I swam in it,” Baru protested. “We called it the Navel.”
“Pit seeks pit, I suppose.” But he was staring at her. Wondering, maybe, where the executioner had gone.
She said, in a rush, “And we’d say the Navel was the lowest place in the world. That’s why all the rivers converged on the Ashen Sea. And if you went out far enough in any direction, eventually the mountains would rise up to the sky.” And then, with defensive pride: “Although we know, always knew, the world’s really a globe.”
“I’ll be outside,” Iraji said. Apparitor gave him a quick squeeze, not looking, absentminded gratitude. They were friends. Baru touched a coin with her mind, a disc with Duke Oathsfire on one side and Duke Lyxaxu on the other. The coin was proof that she could betray people even if she saw their dearest friendships.
Cold currency, of course. But valuable.
She gathered her attention on the known world, the Ashen Sea and its surrounds. Apparitor mistook this for disappoinment: “I’d like to fill in the more tentative edges,” he said, protectively. “It’s my passion, exploration. There’s trouble raising ships and money, with war so close, but I still have my ways.…”
“How does it work?” Baru said.
“Eh?”
“This. Our world. How does it work?”
The Ashen Sea was a lumpy ring, and the world, Baru’s theater of play, was a misshapen cross around that ring. North was Aurdwynn and the Wintercrests and icy mesa beyond; left-which-was-west was the Camou Interval, a great plague-ridden unknown, grasslands and mountains full of scattered people as unknown to Falcrest as Taranoke might once have been. Between those two arms a fan of steppe reached out northwest, into the fallen Maia heartlands.
It struck Baru as very odd that so much of the map was fallen empire, fallow territory, forgotten land. As if the tide of humanity was going out, all across the world.…
“I can’t tell you how the world works,” Apparitor said. “If I knew that, would I be scurrying around on the Throne’s errands? Would I have to put up with you?” And something about Tain Hu, which Baru jerked her attention away from: it vanished into her right-blindness.
“I have a theory,” Baru said. “About the world.”
“Of course you do.”
“The fundamental concern of all our history has been access to the Ashen Sea trade circle—”
“Did I say I wanted to hear it?” he snapped.
Baru still thought she must be right.
On the southern limb of the cross the Oriati Mbo jutted like a long tooth at the bottom of the Ashen Sea, coast and savannah and desert and sahel and jungle, all the way to Zawam Asu where the whales gathered for their fabled quorums. A gristly mass of land connected the Mbo northeast to Falcrest, belted by the strait called the Tide Column, which linked the Ashen Sea to the titanic Mother of Storms.
And north of the Column, on a pudgy potato-shaped subcontinent jutting (Baru had to wave her head to remember the direction) rightward, eastward, was Falcrest. Not central. Not remarkable. Nowhere you would choose as the seat of power if you saw the world like a high hawk.
“We’re so small,” Baru squeaked. She had to swallow to get her voice right. A terrible vindication was in her, and she wanted it out: the notion that any crime could be pardoned for a chance to glimpse these world secrets.
“I take it,” Apparitor said, “that you’re not used to feeling small?”
“No,” she said, and then realized he was calling her an egomaniac.
“You never got high and lay down on your back on a mountainside? And watched the sky until you were afraid you’d fall up into it?”
“No…”
“Tain Hu did,” he said, “she told me about it.”
Her name like a thorn in the tongue. Baru glared at him. He grinned and waved a bottle: The Grand Purifier. “I needed an excuse to be rude,” he hiccupped, “so I stopped by Helbride and raided my vodka stash. Clear as spring melt! Here, for your health—”
“I’m not drinking anything you pour.” Baru took one last guilty, yearning glance at the map.
From the Mothercoast the map swept east: hundreds of miles of open ocean, barren islets, wild currents. The Mother of Storms. Baru’s eyes crossed the distance like a ship, imagining thirst, hundred-foot waves, maelstrom, thirst and thirst and desperate salty thirst. At last she came to a coastline complicated by inlets and fjords and interior lakes. Smoking volcanoes issued clouds of thin paint.