The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  And she did, wondering if Unuxekome watched her, considering his own bloodline, his mother climbing in the ropes of her own swift ships, and perhaps some day his children, too. That was a duke’s story, wasn’t it? Noble ancestors, and noble heirs …

  She would need to use all the leverage she could find. But it bothered her to think of Unuxekome like this. He was easy to talk to, dangerously honest. And deep down she liked stories too.

  Up at the top of the mast, arms burning, she realized how she would take the tax ships.

  * * *

  BEETLE Prophet stopped to take on reports on the progress of tax season. Baru read them nervously. She was certain that Bel Latheman had told Cattlson about her tax rider, the innocuous question she’d asked every noble and commoner in Aurdwynn: whom do you love best?

  Muire Lo’s reports were full of numbers, small tiles prised out of a vast buckling mosaic. Unrest sputtered across Aurdwynn—serfs rebelling against dukes, mobs snapping at tax collectors, garrison troops dealing harsh retaliation. In particular there was great tension in the Midlands, where Nayauru Dam-builder and Ihuake the Cattle Lord each suffered terrible raids by mysterious bandits that withdrew back into the other’s territory.

  The weave of rule beginning to fray.

  Baru unrolled a map of Aurdwynn and began to paint it in her secret knowledge.

  Her tax rider asked the payer to divide ten notes between the local duke, Governor Cattlson, Jurispotence Xate, and herself. She pulled the results from Muire Lo’s reports, quite pleased with her instrument, and painted her map in colors of loyalty—

  The red of Imperial Navy sails for towns or duchies that slanted toward the Governor. (Mostly this was Duchy Heingyl).

  Forest green, Aurdwynn green, for areas that kept loyalties to their own dukes. Vultjag’s people loved her, and Unuxekome’s, too; but not those of gentle Radaszic or (hm!) clever Lyxaxu and, most of all, Erebog, the Crone in Clay, all of whom suffered in deep debt.…

  And then blue, great runs of sky blue and sea blue, whatever excited inconstant blue she grabbed from her paint pots, for the areas that loved her.

  No one favored Jurispotence Xate, of course. But her power did not require popularity.

  So Baru had what she wanted: a map of Aurdwynn’s loyalty, as seen through the lens of one kind of power, the power she best controlled. Now all she needed was an empirical test, proof that she could turn the blue on the map into shouting commoners on the streets.…

  When Beetle Prophet came to the mouth of the river Inirein, the mighty Bleed of Light that ran down from the Wintercrests and marked the eastern border of Aurdwynn, she went ashore with Duke Unuxekome and walked the streets of Welthony, his capital. On the map she’d painted it blue and green.

  Word went out through the streets ahead of her, first by whisper, then by shout, then by riders up the river to the duke’s house. She strode up the riverwalk with her chained purse at her side, and the people of Welthony, no friend of Cattlson or the Masquerade, turned out from their labor to cry in Iolynic and Aphalone: A fairer hand! A fairer hand!

  Unuxekome walked with her, smiling, bare-headed, his Maia bones proudly unmasked. “My ship has brought good news,” he told his gate guard. “She’s not here on audit!”

  “I grew up in the sea,” she told the armsmen, invoking Taranoke and her own Maia blood. “But I never thought to meet her groom.”

  And the watching crowd roared approval, as blue as the map predicted, pleased that this foreigner knew the meaning of their duke’s name.

  “Have you found a way?” Unuxekome hissed in her ear, as he drew her in through the gate, as his armsmen closed them off from the crowd. “The tax ships sail soon. How will we take them?”

  “Simple,” she said, clapping him on the shoulder, like a brother, a friend. “I give Cattlson what he wants. I offer to resign my post.”

  * * *

  BY the time Beetle Prophet sailed from Welthony, headed back west to Treatymont, Baru had written and sealed four letters—to Cattlson, to Tain Hu, to Xate Yawa, and the last to Unuxekome himself, who would bear it south by ship to the pirates and Oriati privateers.

  She stood at the prow and watched the dawn, trying to see the curve of the world, to imagine it turning beneath the sun, the great patterns of trade and sickness and heredity and force moving on its face. The very ink and grammar of history. Driven by and made from and ultimate master of hundreds of millions of people. The question and the answer:

  Mother, why do they come here? Why do we not go to them?

  Why are they so powerful?

  She hadn’t written to Muire Lo. She hadn’t given him the warning he wanted. If she tried, the letters would be opened, the warning discovered—

  Surely he’d understand. Surely. He would get his family out. He would save himself.

  Everything had a price.

  * * *

  ON the way into the Horn Harbor, following the buoys between the torchship Egalitaria and the burnt towers, Baru picked out the shapes of the tax flotilla waiting to sail. Twelve great ships riding low in the water, heavy with gold and silver, and the escort—five frigates with red sails, their decks lined with marines at drill. The prize.

  The Treatymont garrison was waiting to arrest her.

  They couldn’t call it an arrest, of course. In her letter to Cattlson she’d been careful to define it as a voluntary self-recall. Until she arrived in Falcrest and submitted herself to the judgment of Parliament, she would still be Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn, with all the powers and responsibilities vested in the title. But to Cattlson, the difference was a formality. Baru would be locked up on the tax ships, isolated from mail or money, consigned to the judgment of a higher power. He’d be free to hunt and drink and marry Heingyl Ri to Bel Latheman without the trouble of Taranoki women ruining economies and winning duels. Muire Lo would take command of her office until Parliament could either (ha) return her with her authority reaffirmed or dispatch a new Accountant.

  She’d offered Cattlson a way out.

  As she’d written the letter she’d tried to put herself in Cattlson’s place, to don his obsessions and fears like his wolf’s head cloak, remembering what Purity Cartone had told her—you are not the only player on the board. Cattlson would wonder why she’d given up so soon after her victory in the duel. He would go to Xate Yawa to ask about the legalities of the offer. She would help him understand that Baru had realized her impotence: she had no real power without the Governor’s backing, and the mercy of Parliament offered her only hope for a continued career. Too proud to beg to him for forgiveness, of course Baru would pretend she was going over his head, traveling to Falcrest in search of exoneration rather than clemency. Cattlson, paternalistically merciful, would understand that her pride offered her no other surrender.

  But Cattlson was still careful.

  So he set his garrison soldiers waiting for her at the dockside, seabirds in blue and gray. Xate Yawa stood between them, her lips pursed sourly, the black robes of her station like a trespassing corvid. “Your Excellence.” She gestured to Baru, drawing her in—walk with me. “Perhaps with your departure, Aurdwynn may find some relief from the disquiet that has seized it. The Governor offers these soldiers as escort to the frigate Sulane, which will carry you to Falcrest.”

  Baru followed her down the row of soldiers, minding her carriage, keeping her head high. Only by pretending victory could she pretend defeat. “I will not travel on Sulane,” she said, as they’d planned, as she’d written in her letter from Welthony. “Nor will I tolerate an armed escort. I’ll spend the journey aboard the transport Mannerslate, organizing my papers and preparing testimony for Parliament.”

  “The Governor commands these troops,” Yawa reminded her.

  “The Governor commands the garrison.” Baru tipped her chin toward the flotilla gathered in the harbor. “Once they set foot on a ship, they fall under naval authority, and once the navy leaves harbor, I’ll be the ranking technocrat aboar
d. That makes them mine. And I don’t want an escort.”

  Xate Yawa conceded the point with a flick of one gloved hand. “I’ll inform the Governor that you declined his courtesy. I took the liberty of having the papers and effects you requested delivered to Sulane, but I’m sure they can be transferred.” She paused by one of the garrison officers. “Stand your soldiers down. The Accountant will travel without escort.”

  All as they’d planned—Xate Yawa’s power used to strip away Cattlson’s safeguards, to leave Baru the sole and unchecked Masquerade authority aboard ship.

  The Jurispotence took her hand. Whether she gripped with formal delicacy or some meaningful strength, Baru couldn’t tell. Their gloves masked too much. “I hope you have not become too rash,” she said.

  Baru considered the woman, her flint and cold, looking for some glimmer of assurance or fear or any human response at all. But Xate Yawa offered only composed, polite concern.

  She had betrayed one rebellion to Falcrest because she’d believed it would fail. It could happen again.

  A navy launch waited to bring Baru out to Mannerslate. Word of the Imperial Accountant’s departure must not have spread, because there was no riot dockside (although perhaps, Baru thought, she overestimated her own celebrity—but no, she had the numbers now).

  Something moved through the crowd. Baru caught the disturbance, a stiffness, a ripple of recoil. Cattlson, come to see her off—?

  Muire Lo stepped forward, eyes downcast. He wore his secretarial coat buttoned to the throat and carried a small folio of loose papers in mindless disarray. At once Baru put her heart in ice. “Over here,” she called, preempting whatever he might be planning to do. She’d left him in Treatymont because there was no safe or useful way to include him. She couldn’t explain now.

  He stepped forward. “I’m sorry,” he said, eyes still hooded. He hadn’t washed or oiled his hair. “I tried to draw him off.”

  And with a jagged pop of awareness like the first shock of a broken bone she saw Purity Cartone, the remora, the Masquerade instrument, standing at the edge of the gathered crowd, smiling blandly. “He’s to be your bodyguard,” Muire Lo explained, and at last looked up. His eyes were like river stones, still and smooth, and perhaps no one but Baru would have seen past them. “Is it true you’re going to Falcrest? Leaving me in your place?”

  She smiled through her shock, clinging to the necessities of the moment: to seem unconcerned, to give him strength, to succor the splinter of pain in her own breast. His eyes—“It’s true,” she said. “I need Parliament to sort out this … unpleasantness before I can continue my work.”

  “Your Excellence.” He stepped forward with abrupt, unconsidered haste, as if trying to catch something falling. “Is there—is there anything that I can do? Any instruction you’d like to leave for me?”

  Purity Cartone’s mild gaze followed everything with appalling languid precision.

  Baru smiled bravely at Muire Lo, lying, shutting him out, closing him like a book of things already known. There was no warning she could give that would not risk the whole plan. “No special instructions,” she said. “Keep the office in order while I’m gone. I’ll write if any business strikes me.”

  She thought he might do something rash.

  But Muire Lo squared his shoulders, drawing himself up against the weight of everything she hadn’t said. “Your Excellence.” The constancy of a clean decision sharp in his voice. “All will be just as you require it when I see you again.”

  He watched her launch go out. Purity Cartone sat in the stern, the wave motion of the Horn Harbor rippling through him, as if he were only another medium, another vessel on the water.

  17

  THE Imperial Republic’s frigate Sulane led the tax convoy east with the trade winds, racing along Aurdwynn’s coast.

  The twelve transports sailed in a column after Sulane, chasing her stern lanterns under aurora skies. High-sailed twins Juristane and Commsweal ran wary guard abeam. Welterjoy, heavy-helmed and formidable, carried astern, ready to raise full sail and ride the westerly trade winds down on any attacker. Around them darted Scylpetaire, swift, hungry, a torpedo-bearing sheepdog free to search for trouble and trouble it in turn.

  The navy would not give up Falcrest’s due.

  And what a due. The gems and precious metals aboard these ships—excised, resentfully, from Aurdwynn’s dukes, the treasuries of distant Erebog and cattle-rich Ihuake and briny Autr and all the rest—could finance seasons of open war.

  Baru Cormorant was at last, however briefly, on a ship to Falcrest.

  She took dinner with Rear Admiral Ormsment aboard Sulane on their first night out of port, and found it, at least at first, oddly pleasant. Ormsment was an urbane Falcresti woman with a limitless and apparently genuine curiosity about Taranoke. “What concerns me the most,” she said (the topic of the new name had come up, that ugly word Sousward), “is just this—that in making your culture ours we have overlooked some strength, some primal vitality that might have bettered us. What use a republic of nations if we make them all the same?”

  “It’s practically incestuous,” Baru agreed, taken in, for a moment, by the notion. Perhaps she would find this sentiment popular in Falcrest. Perhaps the Parliament would realize that Taranoke could offer more to the Masquerade on its own terms, as a partner rather than a conquest—

  But she wasn’t going to Falcrest for a long time. And Ormsment, for all her charm and authority, seemed more fixated on primal vitality and treating Baru like a wayward daughter than answering her questions about astronomy.

  And in any case, it proved impossible to relax with Purity Cartone smiling behind her.

  * * *

  THE first pirates struck too early.

  Baru had taken a bunk on the lead transport, Mannerslate. Instead of an office (what had she expected?) they gave her a hammock down among the stinking swearing marines who guarded the cargo. The papers she’d brought as a pretense of business proved impossible to keep out of the damp, and although she could have let them rot, years of school habit brought her up to the deck to try to dry them in the sun. Frigate birds taunted her.

  Two days from the mouth of the Inirein, two days before the arranged time, she woke in the night to bells. Fought her way up onto deck through swarming marines and shouting crew to see:

  Distant fireworks. The arc of rocket flares falling into the sea. Sharp sunrise flash as Scylpetaire, in the middle distance, fired two more. Light on the water like a drowned moon.

  And a pair of ships pinned in the glare, their lateen sails taut, straining. Oriati-pattern dromon galleys. Bannerless.

  Two raiders closing from astern, riding the weather gage.

  Maybe they’d thought to slip into the formation and take one of the transports in silence. More likely they’d sighted one of the transports and one of the escorts, and—thinking that the tax ships would sail one by one, as insurance against a devastating early storm—they’d assumed the escort was out of position, and made an attempt.

  Scylpetaire had caught them.

  Fireworks popped above Scylpetaire, then Sulane, red, blue, white white white: signals passed to the flagship, orders relayed on to the rest. Baru watched in anxious fascination while Mannerslate’s captain brayed for calm and a steady course.

  The navy frigates made dark avian forms in the night, Scylpetaire shadowing the raiders as they turned off, cutting sails to go against the wind. Day-bright for an instant as she launched volleys of flares to keep the raiders in sight.

  And then Welterjoy’s sails caught the aurora light, running full on the wind, crashing through the wavefronts as she raced to intercept. She sailed dark, trusting Scylpetaire’s flares and Sulane’s signals to guide her in. Baru, engrossed and exhilarated, lost in the mechanics of wind and chase, pointed and called to the crew. They shouted to each other in the rigging, excited. Only the marines kept their silence.

  Light kindled at Welterjoy’s prow. Two white rockets leapt
forward like exocet fish. The wind grasped them and smashed them into the water astern of the fleeing raiders.

  “They’ll have the deflection now, Your Excellence,” Purity Cartone murmured. Baru leapt in surprise.

  Welterjoy fired again: eight rockets at a more confident angle. One of the fat steel tubes tangled in the lead raider’s rigging and, after an instant of furious incandescent sputtering, popped into a shower of grease fire.

  The raider’s rigging and deck began to burn. Whatever the crew tried as an answer only spread the inferno. The mainsails and the masts burst into sheets of fire. Baru watched, not horrified, thrilled on some fundamental level to witness at last the Navy Burn, the Masquerade’s chemical edge. The wind carried the smell: acrid, ferociously artificial, a cremation of linen and hemp and flesh.

  When Welterjoy had finished with the other raider (the fire burned even when wet, spread across the water, a less gentle aurora) a string of fireworks went up from Sulane. “No aid to survivors,” Purity Cartone read, eyes gleaming with reflected starburst. “Resume formation. Convoy proceeds.”

  They couldn’t have been Duke Unuxekome’s ships. Not two days early. Not in such paltry strength.

  But it didn’t matter, did it? Unuxekome’s flotilla would never take the tax ships, not with a two-to-one advantage, not four-to-one. The navy couldn’t be beaten on the open sea.

  It would be up to Baru to win the battle. And to do it with Purity Cartone fastened to her flank.

  * * *

  BARU called Rear Admiral Ormsment aboard Mannerslate before Admiral Ormsment could invite her to Sulane. For this to work, Baru would need to command—not only in title but in practice. Ormsment had seen her as a Taranoki, a daughter, a troubled careerist fighting for vindication against a hostile authority: all appealing to a flag officer who’d come up in the naval culture of women officers tutoring their young protégés.

  But Baru didn’t need Ormsment’s maternal advice. Baru needed Ormsment to pull her escort from the tax ships. Baru needed to be one of the three most powerful technocrats in Aurdwynn, not a troubled Taranoki daughter.