The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  “Did Cairdine Farrier train you personally?”

  He considered her over the rim of his wineglass. “I met him on Taranoke. When he attached me to your service, he was satisfied I’d been thoroughly prepared.”

  “Good.” She approved of both his training and his canny deflection. “The moment we’ve found an effective staff, I’m going to ask you to gather some information for me. You’re wasted on this—” She gestured to the ceiling and her chambers. “Housework.”

  “It has its charms.”

  “So there’s nothing to you but your service.” She chuckled, just to take the edge off her words. “Nothing I can dangle as a prize. You want only what I want.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to understand where power comes from,” she said, without any hesitation. “And how it can best be used.”

  It wasn’t what she’d said when drunk with Aminata. But being drunk did not, she thought, really make her more honest.

  “I went out on the streets while you were in Vultjag. Walked the Arwybon Way and talked to the fishmongers and dockworkers. Everyone’s whispering sedition.” A clinical cast to his voice and Baru thought: he was trained for this, to listen, to report. “They whisper that their husbands and wives are going to be taken away. That Duchess Vultjag’s going to murder Duke Heingyl in a duel and kidnap Heingyl Ri, so she won’t have to marry Oathsfire herself. That Xate Yawa will put her on trial and have her lobotomized.” He took another sip, his eyes cast over her shoulder, through the bay window. That watchful cold went out of his voice. “I was here during the Fools’ Rebellion, when sister killed brother for collaboration and fathers disowned daughters for fratricide. I don’t want to see Aurdwynn return to that. So”—he smiled self-consciously—“if you can learn anything about power—perhaps put a finger on the scales for me.”

  “You do want what I want.”

  “A secretary must consider such things. My mother was a loyalist during the Fools’ Rebellion; so was my father, although his loyalist was the other kind. They both called themselves loyalist, you see. What I mean is—” He frowned at his wineglass. “What I mean is that I became very talented at considering the wants of others.”

  She drank, sifting the dark dry wine between her teeth. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I’m going to go to the Fiat Bank, and I’m going to stop Tain Hu from starting a rebellion.”

  “Just so?”

  Baru grinned at him. “You doubt me? Cairdine Farrier’s precious savant?”

  “It’s just that—” He set his glass down and grappled, briefly, with some gesture he couldn’t quite complete, a caution, a care. “In matters of rebellion, I always expect a price.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes.” She was warm with the wine, with the shape of the plan she’d begun to form, and could not keep the merriment from her voice, the joy of reaching out into the world and altering it. “There will be a price.”

  10

  THE plaza and the Fiat Bank swarmed with soldiers.

  Baru dismounted, purse and papers rattling under her left arm, heart in her throat. “You!” She pointed to the first garrison officer she saw. “What’s all this?”

  “Honor guard, my la—Your Excellence.” He bowed at the waist. “The Jurispotence is visiting the bank.”

  “Well, so’s the Imperial Accountant. Spread the word.” She gave him a moment to step away before she allowed herself to panic. Xate Yawa here now? Coincidence or countermove? Impossible to know. No matter, though, no matter, no matter. She just had to walk in and pass the orders that would defeat Tain Hu. How could Xate Yawa prevent that?

  She went in through the ranks of blue and wave-tip gray, her head high, wondering if the soldiers would respect her more or less if she’d worn her sword. “The Imperial Accountant!” an officer bawled, announcing her, betraying her. The doors of the Fiat Bank opened for her and she passed through into the hall of clerks and stag heads. Then left, along the wall, toward Principal Factor Bel Latheman’s office—

  Where Xate Yawa waited, sipping from a tin mug. And the Principal Factor, who looked up crossly and began to say, “My secretary will—” But his eyes fixed on her purse, her face, and recognizing Baru he sat back in his chair with ill-concealed despair, his hands checking his high collar.

  “Your Excellence!” Xate Yawa cried. “Please forgive me if I don’t rise. It’s such an unexpected pleasure to find you here.”

  “Likewise, Your Excellence. Perhaps more unexpected, in my case, as this is a bank rather than a court.” Baru took her hand and kissed it. Her eyes, those jungle crow eyes—impossible to avoid. How practiced she must be at staring into guilt.

  There had been time enough for Tain Hu to alert her that Baru was on to them.

  “I’ve been running down these degenerate ykari cultists. Bel Latheman has been invaluable.” Xate Yawa smiled at the Principal Factor, who ducked his head in respectful reply, eyes twitching between the two of them. “They need property to set up their temples, after all, and every piece of property has its owner. The guilty and the negligent alike must be held to account.”

  Baru favored Bel Latheman with a smile. Cosmopolitan, Falcresti, and—by the curl of his lip, the sweat on his brow—clearly unhappy with his position. Perhaps she should’ve had a dinner with him before raiding his bank with marines. “I’m glad my Factor could be of assistance. Please, never hesitate to come to me directly.”

  Her Factor. He must be remembering: the last two Imperial Accountants he’d served under hadn’t survived.

  “Of course I’ll come to you! But your secretary told me you’d gone to Vultjag.” And Xate Yawa winked outrageously, as if Vultjag were a brothel or an assignation, rather than the heart of her own conspiracy. “I’m sure you have business with the Factor. Will it need privacy? I can wait for these records out on the floor.”

  “Oh, no,” Baru said, desperate to avoid the appearance of secrecy. “Changes in monetary policy, loans to approve—just housework.”

  “Should’ve sent your secretary,” Xate Yawa clucked. “That’s what he’s for.”

  Bel Latheman had spoken not one word, and his grotesque pasted-on smile nearly sent Baru into a fit of nervous laughter—just how I feel, she wanted to say, just how I feel. But she drew the orders out of her purse, sealed with the Accountant’s mark, stamped with signs for urgency and secrecy. “Your Excellence,” she said, extending them to Latheman. “Please see that these are implemented at once.”

  He smiled cautiously as he took the letters, and she saw hope—that it was not another search, not another esoteric order from an Accountant wrapped in intrigue, but a simple chance to show his capability. “At once,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Does that mark say secret?” Xate Yawa set her mug down delicately. “And urgent? Your Excellence, anything worth those marks should be discussed with the Governing Factors, and I certainly haven’t been part of any such conversation. Has Governor Cattlson approved these orders?”

  “Ah, well.” Baru smiled and screamed inside. How had she seen? The marks were miniscule. Those eyes—“The Governing Factors don’t meet for nearly a month, and I’m afraid the mess left by Olonori and Tanifel can’t wait that long. Word will need to be ridden out to all the ducal branch banks, you understand.”

  “It must be quite a sweeping policy change, then.”

  “Purely of technical interest, I’m certain.” Baru tried to turn away but Xate Yawa’s eyes caught her. Perhaps she had looked at Ffare Tanifel that way, as she watched the old Accountant drown.

  “As a judge, I take great interest in technicalities. Please.” The Jurispotence tried to rise, pretending infirmity, and obliged both Baru and the Principal Factor to reach out and help her up. Her grip on Baru’s wrist felt warm and dry, perfectly relaxed. “Let’s review these orders together. If Cattlson objects, you’ll have me as an ally.”

  Baru’s heart thundered in her chest.

  She had two choices. She could order the Princi
pal Factor to keep the letters sealed, insisting that any review of her missives required written and court-reviewed authority from an Imperial Justice. Xate Yawa would point out that she could issue this authority, so surely they might as well review the orders now. The Principal Factor would resent being trapped in the middle. Certainly Xate Yawa would go to Governor Cattlson and alarm him with stories of Baru Cormorant’s secret orders.

  Or she could say: “Of course. Please—unseal them. Secretary!”

  Ake Sentiamut, the woman who had stolen the fiat note patterns for Tain Hu’s forgers, leaned in through the door. She was not wearing her bearskin. “Your Excellence?”

  “Lock the office and permit no visitors. Secret business.”

  The Principal Factor unsealed the two envelopes with visibly trembling hands. Xate Yawa craned over his left shoulder. “To the Principal Factor of the Provincial Bank,” he read to her, “from the Imperial Accountant, Baru Cormorant, assigned to the Federated Province of Aurdwynn—”

  “Yes, thank you, Bel.” Xate Yawa clasped his shoulder. “Just set the pages down and I’ll read them myself.”

  Baru found a seat and waited.

  “Curious.” Xate Yawa frowned at the letters. “You’ve ordered the Bank to print a new run of fiat notes in order to fund a series of loans to the dukes. And you’ve authorized the ducal branches to make small loans directly to private citizens … but only in gold and silver.”

  Baru nodded, not trusting her tongue.

  “Well, it’s all very irregular, and quite against what I understand of the Imperial Republic’s policy.” Xate Yawa straightened without any pretense of age or infirmity. Fury, Baru thought: she is furious. “But you’re the Imperial Accountant, and allegedly a capable mathematician, so you must know what you’re doing. I recognize that when it comes to matters beyond the names and varieties of sin, I have little authority.”

  And with that she left, her gown swishing in her wake.

  The gasp of relief Baru made might have been audible. Across the desk, Principal Factor Bel Latheman stared at her in bewilderment. “Do you understand what you’re doing?” he hissed. “Does she? I cannot let these orders stand.”

  “Oh, yes, I understand.” Baru gripped the lion-headed arms of her chair. “I’ve just destroyed the value of the Imperial fiat note in Aurdwynn. I’ve set us back ten years, ruined the provincial economy, and bankrupted most of the dukes.”

  Her orders would be catastrophic. The Bank would print more paper fiat notes than it could possibly back with gold and silver. That money would enter the market through seductively generous loans, new wealth conjured from ink and paper. The dukes would claw over each other just to sign first.

  The Aurdwynni dukes probably didn’t know the term inflation. Didn’t understand that a glut of money supply would kill the value of the currency. But when the Aurdwynni woodcutter found that the duke’s mill could now purchase his entire stock with the windfall of a generous loan, he’d raise his prices. So would the fishmongers and the miners, the quarrymen and the estate dealers, the hunters and tanners. Everyone who worked for a wage would face those rising prices and demand a raise in turn, just so they could still manage to buy food.

  The purchasing power of the fiat note, the amount of anything real you could buy with it, would plummet as commodity prices skyrocketed. It was monetary suicide. Confidence in the fiat note would collapse, and in short order, Falcrest’s favorite weapon would be useful only as toilet tissue.

  Which meant that all those loans and debts Tain Hu intended to leverage to build alliances—loans issued and debts held by the Fiat Bank, in fiat notes—would be worthless.

  So would her own counterfeits.

  Everything measured in fiat money would be wiped clean. There was nothing Xate Yawa or Governor Cattlson could do to stop it.

  Tain Hu’s rebellion would die along with the debts.

  And in the meantime, the gold that the Fiat Bank had been stockpiling for all these years would be loaned out in little parcels. Not to the dukes—Baru had made sure of that. The gold loans she’d authorized would go to the olive farmers and fishermen and woodcutters. The masons with their chalk-dust sons.

  Aurdwynn would slide back into its preinvasion economy, driven by gold and commodities. Except that the gold would now be in the hands of the commoner. She’d watched the Masquerade remake Taranoke’s economy, and now she would do precisely the opposite to Aurdwynn.

  And every one of those gold loans, those loans that would save a hundred thousand serfs from starvation and debt, would be signed on paper that read BY THE GENEROSITY OF THE IMPERIAL ACCOUNTANT, BARU CORMORANT. Every one.

  Most Aurdwynni serfs couldn’t read. All the better. Someone would have to speak the contract aloud. By the generosity of Baru Cormorant.

  Remember her name.

  “We should be seen at dinner,” Baru said.

  The Principal Factor goggled at her. “Excuse me?”

  “My work leaves me no time for courtship. I need an ornamental man to shield myself against unseemly whispers. We have a professional relationship to hide behind, which will make the affair all the more believable. Are you married?”

  “No,” he said. His shoulders slumped with profound fatigue. “But—”

  “That’s a shame. It would be a more convincing scandal. But we’ll make do.” She smiled and clapped the desk. “Write my secretary. He’ll make arrangements. Oh—and—”

  He put his head in his hands. “Yes?”

  “Your secretary in the bear coat. She’s a Sentiamut? Down from Vultjag?”

  “Ake? Born Hodfyri. A Sentiamut by marriage. Though her husband is in the Cold Cellar for sedition.” His eyes widened. “No! She’s indispensable.”

  “Fire her,” Baru ordered.

  * * *

  WHAT happened next was simple economics.

  “It’s my fault,” Baru told the actress. “I did all this.”

  A fence of shot glasses divided their territories at the bar. The actress had spilled water or whiskey on the redwood, and as she listened she drew rivers between the droplets with her bare fingers, so that they would flow together.

  “You can’t have,” she said. She had a rich Urun accent and she wore a fine damask gown in red and gold. “All those dukes and merchants ruined? How could one woman do that?”

  Spring had turned to summer. For a little while, Baru’s new loans made the market euphoric. Then the economy gorged itself on a glut of fiat notes and finally began to choke. Prices spiked. Inflationary collapse kindled in the dockside markets and rolled out like paper thunder.

  Baru’s counterplay. Tain Hu and Xate Yawa held in check.

  And all it had cost was this breed of devastation—

  “Entirely my work.” Baru set another empty crystal glass in the dividing wall. “The poverty. The riots. The curfews that came from the riots. The merchants dumping their fiat notes in the harbor because they’re not worth their own space in the cargo hold. The columns of starving people leaving the city. All this—” She laughed, meaning to sound hollow, regretful, but it came out a husky boast. “All this was by my craft.”

  The actress exhaled softly, surprised or impressed. The rivers of whiskey in her territory trembled in their candlelit course.

  A careless observer might have taken the actress for Baru’s sister—a little shorter, a little less severe, untrained by Naval System exercise or day labor, but close enough that Baru felt she could use the similarity as camouflage. She had presence, too, a kind of wordless needless authority, torchlike, contingent on no approval or loyalty. That might have drawn Baru to speak to her, if she hadn’t come to Baru first. She was new to this tavern—a recommendation from her cousin—and maybe she had seen something of herself in Baru, too.

  Baru spent too much time in bars now, to be drunk, to be near the sea. She wore sailor’s garb, and if the curfew patrols challenged her in the streets, she showed them the technocrat’s sign. Tonight she had gone to a plac
e near Atu Hall, to get away from the divers who drank harborside, long-legged swimmer women with ankle knives and instincts keyed up on mason leaf. They were dangerous in too many ways, and damnably distracting. Actresses were safer.

  “So you have more power than, say, any given duke.” The actress made a decisive finger stroke, connecting two beaded reservoirs of liquor. Her eyes weighed Baru sidelong, curious. “That’s your claim?”

  “They only rule by blood. My claim is higher.”

  “Ah—such noble blood, though.”

  “Is it?”

  “Every day Duke Heingyl rides patrol with his cavalry to save the refugees from banditry. Truly an honorable man.”

  “They say Duke Radaszic rides patrol, too, to save the refugees from Heingyl’s company. Noble in his own way.” The actress laughed, delighted and affronted. Baru put a coin on the bar and beckoned for another drink. “What use is noble blood to them? I only needed one letter to destroy their wealth, and I am—” She touched her own cheekbones, the bridge of her nose. “Vulgar.”

  The actress raised a hand, gestured with two fingers, a motion of decisive negation. “No. They still have wealth.”

  “Not in my books.”

  “Then your books are incomplete.”

  Baru put one finger down on her side of the wall, as if to pin something invisible to the wood. “Show me the error. Show me Radaszic’s secret wealth.”

  “Radaszic is a fop—to think the Duchy of Wells is ruled by a man who doesn’t understand irrigation! But he has sons. Duke Heingyl will never be anything more than Cattlson’s dog, but his daughter is brilliant. Have you read her monographs? Duke Lyxaxu and Duke Oathsfire both have daughters. Duchess Ihuake has a son and a daughter, and badly wants more.” The actress touched the wall of glasses between them, selecting one, then another, correcting their alignment. Her eyes followed Baru’s, guarded, intent, trying to offer something, or ask for it. “They have family. They have heirs. The line is secure. No trick of ink can take that from them.”

  Baru took another shot of rough whiskey. It went down hard. “More mouths to feed,” she said, looking for a gap in the wall to fill. “If Xate Yawa doesn’t take them. If the Charitable Service doesn’t send them to Falcrest.”