So long since father Salm had gone. So long since she’d wondered exactly who had done it, and how. Had he been killed? Likely. Could the murderer—murderers?—be an officer now, a garrison commander, a town watchman? Could mother Pinion have tracked him down over the years? Could they be stalking each other now, looking for an opening, a moment to use the boarding saber or the man-killing spear?
Your daughter is one of us, he might taunt. She serves in Aurdwynn. Very poorly.
In the waiting room Muire Lo began to shout.
Baru had an instant to compose herself before Cattlson burst in, wolf’s head cap snarling, trailing armored garrison troops and a slim man whose milky skin barely showed past mask and glove. “Cormorant!” the governor roared. “You’ve done enough!”
“Your Excellence.” She made herself nod and smile, though the ranks of armed guard set her heart racing. What did he know? What could he know? Had Bel Latheman gone to him? “Is there some concern?”
Cattlson waved his guard back and marched down the length of her office in a dull thunder of hobnail on rug. The pale man shadowed him noiselessly. “A duel?” Cattlson roared. “With your own banker? And the first I hear of it is from Duke Heingyl, who tells me everyone in the city, every peasant and franklin between here and Haraerod, has already started making wagers?”
“He insulted my honor,” Baru said, fighting the urge to stand (it would only make her feel shorter than Cattlson). “I had no choice.”
“Your honor? Tax season is almost on us, and you’re making a theater out of your affairs! If you cared about your honor you’d have some mind to overturning the reputation of Taranoki women!” He slammed his fists on her desk. “You are an embarrassment to my government, a catastrophe for our rule—”
Cattlson arrested his rant mid-word and sucked down a few breaths. The pale man took station at his shoulder. Baru found herself trying to cringe, and trying harder not to. It was so hard to beat back the school and the teachers, the etiquette of subservience.
“I care deeply for the opportunities we provide to those of less fortunate birth.” Cattlson tried to smile. He had that easy-smile face. It was somehow sad to see him struggle. “I genuinely want you to succeed in your post. I understand—oh, I, of all people, understand!—that youth is full of passions that may sway better judgment. But if Falcrest takes the slightest issue with this year’s tax season, if you make the smallest error in the harvest, then I will be recalled, and Aurdwynn will fall into the hands of a less generous man, a man who will make Xate Yawa look forgiving. I cannot permit that, you understand? I have worked too long to build an understanding with the dukes. To build a future for their sons and daughters. I cannot allow you to ruin this province. Can you acknowledge that as a peer?”
So this was what it took to rob her of her cool, of the careful deliberation that had carried her through ballrooms and plots and sorties with her enemy. Just a powerful man shouting in her face.
“One duel will not ruin you,” she managed, more defensively than she’d wanted.
“I cannot take further chances with you. You lack the—the gravity your station demands. You are too young.” Cattlson’s wolf’s head flopped as he shook his head. “I’ve been told that you found an intruder in the tower and demanded a change of guard. Here it is, then. Captain Lodepont and his men will keep most vigilant watch as you work in your office. And to guard your person…”
The pale man at Cattlson’s side, the man who was not by his uniform or conduct any sort of captain at all, nodded properly. Small muscles in his neck slithered against each other.
“I have charged one of the Clarified with your personal safety,” Cattlson said. He glanced at the pale man with a troubled disquiet that frightened Baru more than any of his bluster. “He will accompany you at all times.”
No. Unacceptable. She reached for her leverage. “You have no authority to arrest me. If you want an untroubled tax season and a happy Falcrest, you’ll permit me my freedom. And if I don’t have that freedom—”
He threw up his hands in exasperation. “Don’t be petulant—”
“If I don’t have that freedom, I think you’ll find your tax season quite thoroughly disrupted.” She leaned forward, to hide her hands. “You can’t afford to lose me right now.”
Cattlson touched his brow. “I gave you every opportunity. Every chance. But you’ve forced my hand. I must give your duty to a more reliable servant of the Imperial Republic. Perhaps Bel Latheman.”
She smiled and made a sound of doubt and tried desperately to think what his next move would be. “I’m a merit appointment. I’m not yours to remove.”
“You will be given every chance to display your merit.” Cattlson’s grip made something in the corners of her desk creak. “But if you proceed with this rash and ill-advised duel, you will be—injured. Your physical and emotional health will fail in the wake of this whole affair of wounded passion. I will have no choice but to appoint Latheman as Accountant for the season.”
“Oh,” she said, not displeased. “Injured? You have great faith in Bel Latheman’s swordsmanship.”
Cattlson tugged at his jacket and shook his head with the air of a man unable to believe in the state of his world. “Bel Latheman has designated a second to stand for him, as the codes permit. A second who will better satisfy the requirements of peerage, and one who will assure the people of Aurdwynn that my government supports Bel Latheman’s union with Heingyl Ri as an honorable and proper alliance between the technocracy and a noble line. Aurdwynn loves to see a test of arms, and if you insist on going through with this pageant, well, I must ensure that the outcome is constructive.”
Baru mapped the plot in her head as Cattlson spoke. The Governor would back Latheman in a gambit to steal her station, and back Latheman’s marriage to the daughter of Cattlson’s closest ducal ally and friend. A move to consolidate his control over the Accountancy, and to bring the loyal dukes closer to him. A good play. She wondered who’d given him that advice.
“Who will I face, then?” she asked, to play for time.
Cattlson squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. “You have one week. Then we’ll meet in the plaza outside the Fiat Bank at noon. No armor. To first blood.”
“But who will I—” Abruptly she understood, and clapped her mouth shut to hide her surprise.
“As I said.” Cattlson shook his head with paternal regret, the heaviness of a man who believed he was the only stanchion of sanity in sight. “We’ll meet.”
* * *
THE pale man attached himself to her like a remora and could not be removed.
She tried to talk to him, but he was mute. She tried to work, but although he kept a discreet distance, she found herself certain that he was watching—and besides, it was impossible to focus with the ruin of everything she’d hoped for so near ahead. Muire Lo practically tiptoed around the remora man, seized by the same fear (or, perhaps, by some secret knowledge of his capabilities and loyalties).
When the sun set and Baru went up to her quarters, the pale man followed her. She crossed her arms and blocked his way, and he spoke for the first time. “I cannot harm you.” He had a soft and reasonable voice. “I am an instrument. I have eyes for danger and a mind for tactics. Nothing else.”
“I won’t have a strange man in my rooms,” she insisted, voice thick with frustration—because how had this happened? Hadn’t she felt, just yesterday, that she could bend even the unexpected to her will, that she was on the verge of a new and precipitous journey? How could Cattlson march in and smash it all in one conversation?
What was the power of purse and coin worth if she couldn’t keep an utter stranger out of her own private quarters?
“I am not a man,” the Clarified said patiently. “I am an instrument, conditioned from birth by drug and bell. I must obey my purpose.”
His purpose allowed her not even one moment’s privacy, not to bathe, not to change. She hadn’t been naked in front of a stranger sinc
e physical exams at school—ah, no, there’d been the washes on Lapetiare, but at least there it had been a raucous crowd. Not one watchful stranger who barely seemed to breathe. As she changed into her nightgown she wanted to issue some proud defiance, some assertion of Taranoki immodesty—it is my body; so? But shame had come into her over the past few years and she could not even face him naked.
But she tried to consider it pragmatically: clothed or unclothed, he did not seem to look at her any differently.
He stood silent guard. Eventually she fell asleep.
On the next day, she tried to go out, and Captain Lodepont’s guards would not let her. For her protection, Lodepont insisted, she should remain in her tower until the mysterious interloper could be arrested. Even the technocrat’s mark wouldn’t move him, although he looked contrite. The frustration made her want to fence. She performed exercises on her office floor instead of working, grunting out her exasperation under the empty watch of the Clarified man.
Muire Lo came to her bearing salvation. “A letter, Your Excellence. From—ah, from the urgent mail stack.” His eyes flickered to the pale man. The sense of scrutiny that rolled off him was incredible, oppressive, a one-man panopticon. “For your eyes only, the mark says. Captain Lodepont went to great pains to confirm this.”
She unfolded the cheap rag paper and read:
They are bred and conditioned in Falcrest. They came on the same ship that brought news of Sousward. They are the governor’s, but I am given my own words of authority over them, as a check on his power.
This one’s word is “suspire.” He will not break his orders, but with that word, he will listen to you.
We need to speak. Find a way.
Baru read it again twice, nodded, and passed it back to Muire Lo. “Destroy it. I’ll have a reply soon.”
They came on the same ship. The remoras were in Taranoke, too. Hunting sedition, perhaps. Sniffing out disloyal mothers and their sodomite husbands.
* * *
THE remora followed her up to her quarters for a second night. She’d considered saving the word until some key moment, where it would have the strength of surprise—but what was the point? Cattlson had locked her up, powerless to do anything but send letters and read accounts.
She drew a breath and spoke. “Suspire. Tell me your name.”
“Purity Cartone,” he replied, unhesitating. His stark black half-mask could have been printed on the cream of his skin.
“Tell me what authority I have with this word.”
If the sudden fact of her command startled the remora, he gave no sign of it. “You may command me within the bounds of law and conditioning. You may not negate orders from Governor Cattlson.” And then, like a sail tearing under a brief and powerful wind, he smiled. “You may loosen or constrain my freedom to speak.”
She perched on the corner of her bed, fascinated and a little thrilled. What had they done to this man in Falcrest to make him respond like a puppet to a single word? Was it a code of honor, the secret creed of some chivalric order dedicated to Imperial service? No, that hardly fit the Incrastic philosophy. They would want a scientific hold on him, some treatment or condition, some surgery or plague from foreign lands.…
A new and obedient race, bred in Falcrest, specialized for service. He was the face of the destiny of the Empire, and there was no question in Baru’s mind that Cairdine Farrier and his ilk had a hand in his making. Hesychast: it meant one who makes a temple of the body.
What could she do, she wondered, if she had her own race of men like Purity Cartone? What justice could she pursue? And then she felt a little sick at the thought, at the thrill she’d felt. There were such secrets to be had in Falcrest—
She tried to question him about his orders from Cattlson. After that she asked every question she could imagine about men named Hesychast and Apparitor and Itinerant, about the Faceless Throne, about secrets of the Imperial Republic. But he refused the questions with a simple phrase. “I am bound by higher command.”
But he’d smiled at the mention of his own constraints. She tried a different tack. “I revoke any limit on your speech and expression not explicitly bound by higher command.”
The remora (was it his paleness, his plain features, the slow serpentine way he moved, that made her still think of him that way, instead of by his strange name?) inclined his head in gratitude. “You are a ranking servant of the Empire in Aurdwynn,” he said. “I am grateful to be allowed the chance to serve you as well as Governor Cattlson, where that service does not explicitly conflict.”
How could she bend this new instrument to the task of getting out of Cattlson’s cage? She’d planted things—the tax rider, the duel, the greater purpose behind them—that desperately needed tending. “Stand for me in a duel,” she ordered.
“I cannot.”
Damn. Well, if that wouldn’t work—“Will you carry messages for me?”
“Yes.”
“Will you read them and report the contents to the Governor?”
“Yes.” He smiled broadly at that, and after a moment spent in consideration of that eerie awkward expression, she understood: by revoking the limits on his expression she had allowed him to signal his pleasure and displeasure to her. Perhaps he was not so loyal a creature—or, no, that was the wrong way to think of it. He was a literal creature, eager to obey the letter of orders. Given his own way, he would seek to satisfy as many authorities as he could.
He had been conditioned to take pleasure in obedience, like a dog. He had no preference for her or Cattlson, but inasmuch as she could offer him more freedom to obey—to obey her and Cattlson, rather than merely Cattlson—she could work him.
“You’re bred and trained for intellect,” she ventured. “Yes?”
“For all the capabilities my mission requires.”
“And you prefer to exercise that acuity in service of the Masquerade?”
“The Imperial Republic, please,” he said, a flash of pain crossing his face, the discharge of some conditioned trigger. “I prefer to serve the Imperial Republic in all possible ways. I am made to advise and inform as well as protect and obey.”
“Judge me,” she said, instantly curious. A man of intellect, without ego or agenda of his own: how could she resist knowing what he saw? “Tell me what I am, so I can better serve.”
“A woman of Sousward. As a woman you are disposed to abstract thought and numeracy, but weakened by potent emotions and hereditary maternal instincts that soften judgment.” She let that bit of Incrastic doctrine pass unchallenged. “As a Souswardi, your bloodline carries the factors that promoted Tu Maia imperial success, but also the inherent promiscuity and savagery of the same race, exacerbated in recent centuries by unhygienic mating practices.” He smiled as he spoke, a less broken smile, one of quiet satisfaction at the exercise of talent. Observation made him happy. “You are a measurably gifted mathematician, a potential polymath, and a prospective Imperial-grade savant in disciplines of control. Your dedication to your work and the utilitarian nature of your few known social relationships indicates a useful degree of pragmatic instrumentalism, but also the risk of full-blown sociopathy. You are likely, but not certainly, a latent tribadist, which may require corrective conditioning.”
She found herself fascinated by the litany, and a little infuriated—infuriated enough that it slipped out of her sidelong in a meaningless demand: “Taranoke. Call my home Taranoke.”
“I cannot.”
Stupid of her. No reason to waste time on triviality. “Tell me what mistake I’ve made. Tell me why my authority has been hobbled.”
“Your tactics are self-centered. You have forgotten that you are not the only player on the board, that inherent talent speaks for no more than experience, and that others around you seek to expand their authority and constrain yours. Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.”
So eas
y, so satisfying, so sickeningly sweet to use him like this. To find in her hands this pale and pliant oracle, this man who would speak with authority and intellect on any topic she pleased without demands of his own. And hadn’t his jaw relaxed a little? Hadn’t his breath smoothed and deepened like a man on opiates? He had served her by informing her, by using his talents to help. It had brought him real joy.
Was it really slavery if the slave was grateful? If that gratitude had been hammered into the alloy of his being?
Deep in her heart she suspected that the Masquerade sought to make the whole world in Purity Cartone’s image. To breed a future of grateful human automata. They had crushed their own inbred aristocracy, crying poison in the heredity, weakness in the germ. But even after the Old Lines died, that obsession with better blood had carried on. In the Metademe they had determined that behavior and experience altered the hereditary cells. Hygienic behavior bred clever disciplined citizens—and social sin bred licentious, hedonist parasites.
“And my next move? What do you suggest I can do to secure my position?”
“Take a lover.” His expression betrayed no lechery, no particular interest at all. “Arrest on charges of unhygienic behavior is the most powerful weapon that can be used against you. My word to Governor Cattlson that you had a male lover would be taken as fact in any Imperial court. You would be secured, at least a little, against these allegations.”
Her stomach filled with a seasick buzzing not very different from what she had felt when she realized her authority over him—a powerful sensation, but utterly unlike lust. Maybe that was what made her dismiss his suggestion at once: her body did not agree with it, for all his composed Falcresti looks, for all her queasy interest in the thought of someone doing anything she ordered. Or maybe it was something more intellectual, inherited from her conversations with Aminata about the navy: a stubborn and recalcitrant sense that using her body as a political tool, in even the slightest way, was a form of surrender or compromise.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade Page 18