The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  She seized his horse by the bridle, gloves tangled in the leather tack. “Duke Oathsfire,” she hissed, furious, affronted. “Will you fight at Sieroch? Will you lead your fighters, and in turn be led by those I set above you?”

  “Yes.” He lowered his eyes, in shame, or in resentment. “You are the Fairer Hand. The hope of Aurdwynn.”

  “Good. Then see to your responsibilities, as I will see to mine.”

  She rode ahead, up a gentle rise, and at the crest found herself looking down across the floodplains, irrigation channels shining, the fat river lapping at the levees, stained by the effluent of the army—the enormous camp gathered there, a colony of tent and horse and cattle and banner planted in fertile earth. A painting in steel and horseflesh and sweat.

  The rebellion in Aurdwynn, gathered at Sieroch, waiting for its queen, and for the name of her chosen general.

  * * *

  WHEN the Stakhieczi jagata came to Sieroch, the army was complete. The sight of them raised awe and fear among the Aurdwynni: ghost-pale brave men, leading their cadres of armorer-boys aspiring to one day wear the plate themselves, and grim-faced gray-haired women with ash flatbows, whose eyes snapped like heat lightning.

  The army was complete. So easy to think that. Very swiftly Baru learned the truth was much harder. Duke Lyxaxu had command of the camp and he brought her into his tent with curt alarm: “Plague and chaos. I keep this walking cataclysm bound together only by the most desperate exercise of my learning. We must fight, or they will eat each other like dogs.”

  Baru scanned the ledgers. “You kept fine records.” In truth they were better than fine—Lyxaxu had managed a miracle.

  “I don’t need flattery.” The fox in his eyes snapped at her. “Look at the numbers.”

  The army swallowed bread, beer, and coin at an unsustainable rate. Old resentments bred internal violence and that violence bred new resentments in turn. They were killing each other in brawls, coughing up their lungs, choking up the Inirein with their bloody shit and the sky with the ash of their corpses.

  An army in camp was a terrible thing.

  But Lyxaxu had done the necessary work, dividing the camp into wings, assigning commanders, messengers, procurement officers, treasurers, constables, herbalists, translators, wheelwrights and hunting-wardens and every other kind of specialist. He had bricked together the skeleton of an army out of the bickering and the floodplain silt.

  “They are enough.” Baru set down the papers. “Lyxaxu. You did well.”

  Aurdwynn had its legion, twenty-five thousand strong. Tain Hu, at last, had her wish—yes, that was good, they could use Tain Hu’s name: an Army of the Wolf. Lyxaxu had even arranged for training. It could deploy in a line, send out its squadrons of cavalry, pass simple orders, advance and assault. Probably not make an orderly retreat, that most difficult of maneuvers—but if it came to that they had already lost.

  “I could have managed no more,” Baru told him, profoundly grateful. “What can I offer in gratitude?”

  “I miss my wife and children. I want only a safe future for them, and for my people.” She expected him to remind her of their bargain, but he only snapped his fingers and sent two of his guardsmen for beer. “Duke Oathsfire hoped to speak with you.”

  “And he has.”

  “Ah.” Lyxaxu considered her with level, undemanding eyes. “I see you were unmoved?”

  “I will not marry him.” She spoke to the fox-sign hidden behind all his etiquette. “I know it was your design. I know you supported him. But he does not bring me advantage.”

  “So be it.”

  She held his gaze and wondered. He had such lively eyes, but something had come into them: a weariness, or a shield. “You have some concern?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Oathsfire has tempered his pride. He will accept it. It is only that—well.” When he straightened it was like a willow unbending: she had forgotten his height. “I have a question to ask you, about your future. But allow me to raise it in my own time.”

  “Of course.” She went to the plotting table at the center of his tent. “How long do we have before the battle?”

  “Unless he sends his cavalry forward, Cattlson will be upon us in three days.” Lyxaxu tapped the parchment, tracing the calligraphy of some masterful ilykari scribe. “Coyote scouts hold the woods and roads. We will see the Masquerade’s approach in time to respond.”

  Her Coyotes. Men she had known and led. All of this went forward as designed, as their converging schemes had dictated. She had expected this battle would come, with all its fearful cost—but she had not expected she would care so deeply for Coyote-men.

  She frowned down at the map, hunting the weighted banners and pinned lines of yarn that marked the motion of troops. “Look at Cattlson’s march. The deployment of his scouts and skirmishers. His southern flank is naked.”

  “Yes. Nothing guards his force from a naval landing, or an attack from Welthony.”

  “Do they not fear Duke Unuxekome?”

  “I sent word to him this morning.” Lyxaxu studied the map with troubled eyes. “I fear what we may learn.”

  * * *

  WORD came with the next sunrise. Duke Unuxekome the Sea Groom, friend to pirates, implacable enemy of the Empire of Masks, supplicant for the throne of Aurdwynn, beggar of stories, had gone to war.

  While Baru rode with Oathsfire alongside the Inirein, the combined ships of Duchy Unuxekome and the pirate Syndicate Eyota struck at Province Admiral Ormsment’s Fifth Fleet. It made for a terrific story, the germ of a legend: the greatest naval battle since the Armada War.

  Unuxekome led forty-three ships, lateen-sailed dromon war-galleys armed with rams, mines, siphon-fire, even the latest Oriati torpedoes, in an attack on Treatymont’s Horn Harbor. His target was the Masquerade marine flotilla. He meant to pin the defenders against their arriving marine transports, burn them all, mine the harbor, and set a blockade.

  (Baru had told him: I would be greatly impressed to see the Masquerade’s navy rebuked from our shores—and she had known, she had known what he would do.)

  Any good story about a swashbuckling sea duke needed a worthy foe. Admiral Ormsment, Baru’s dinner companion the autumn past, ascended now to command of the Imperial Navy in Aurdwynn, turned out to stop him with seven frigates—Scylpetaire, Juristane, Commsweal, Welterjoy, Stormbreed, Dominaire, and her flag Sulane. Behind the frigates she held her great torchships Egalitaria and Kingsbane. Her nine stood against the rebel fleet, transports strung vulnerable at their back. Kingsbane still suffered from the rudder damage done in autumn by the ilykari diver attack.

  Unuxekome circled west to gain the weather gage. The stories reported his calm commands, beaten from ship to ship by the drums: Marines to the rails. Ready oars. Prepare to sand all fires. Form line abreast.

  Charge.

  The rebel fleet swept down on Ormsment, wind at their backs.

  Nine against forty-three and Ormsment could manage her figures: her frigates broke and ran, south and east, out to sea. The two huge torchships rowed north for harbor in desperate asynchronous strokes. If they could not save the transports, these maneuvers said, then they would flee and fight another day. And they couldn’t save the transports: great clumsy ships full of marines, naked now, ready to die.

  This was the story Ormsment told Unuxekome.

  Reports of drumbeats from Unuxekome’s Devenynyr suggested he might have seen the trap. But the momentum of his hungry forty-three could not be broken. The Syndicate Eyota ships stooped on the line of transports.

  In the pirates’ story they were a prize.

  In Ormsment’s battle plan they were a wall.

  There were no marines aboard. Instead the transports carried torpedoes in wooden racks. The twin-tailed copper eggs were inaccurate, unreliable, their rockets prone to drowning as they skimmed along the surface of the water. But the transport crews, drilled and disciplined, could fire a salvo of ten every other minute.

  Smo
ke and spray tracked the torpedoes across the waves.

  Syndicate Eyota’s sailors were seasoned, the captains alert. Cries of torpedo, torpedo! went up. They broke off to the south and east, away from the Horn Harbor, leaving their lead ships holed and foundering.

  And found Ormsment’s frigates crashing back down on them across the wave tops, ranging rockets shining.

  To the north, Kingsbane and Egalitaria opened their sails and hooked west, then south, behind Unuxekome’s fleet. Ormsment’s desperate retreat had only been a way to scatter her ships—position them to box Unuxekome’s force. Now the trap was complete. The torchships were the western wall, the frigates the southern, the torpedo-rigged transports the eastern. To the north was the Horn Harbor and the shore.

  Syndicate Eyota’s privateers ran aground or burned. The Falcresti warships danced their gruesome steps, closing to barrage with incendiaries, pulling back out of range. The Oriati had a three-to-one numerical edge, strengthened when fresh-minted Dominaire caught her own sails aflame and had to withdraw. They fought like wolverines. It didn’t matter. Ormsment had Masquerade seacraft, Masquerade hulls, Navy crews, and the Burn.

  Most of the Syndicate Eyota sailors had lost ancestors to the Armada War. Now their children would know the same grief.

  Unuxekome led his ships in a charge back up the weather gage, a glorious hell-bent attack on the torchships. Those of his ships that came through the rockets and the hwacha barrages, those crews who poured enough sand on the fires, those captains who kept order through the poison smoke and the impossible shrieks of men drowning and burning alive at the same time, met the bane of Oriati Mbo, the dread arbiter of the Armada War—the Burn siphons of torchship Egalitaria.

  In Treatymont, the crowds gathered harborside caught a wind full of incinerated screams.

  Torchship Kingsbane’s replacement rudder failed in a turn. She drifted out of her formation, siphons far off target. Somehow Devenynyr got abreast of her, burning furiously, and the last sign anyone saw of Duke Unuxekome alive was his banner raised to signal boarding. Masquerade marines waited on the rail to greet him, firelight reflected on their speartips, on their white steel masks.

  On Egalitaria they waited breathless for the fire to spread to Kingsbane, for the Burn stores to go and turn the whole torchship into a crematorium. But naval discipline and naval damage control fed by bunkers of piss-soaked sand quenched the blaze.

  Devenynyr was still burning, white and sputtering, when she slipped under. So went the ending of the story of Duke Unuxekome.

  Ormsment’s story went on a little longer—through the empty transports and the marines who should have filled them.

  The real marine transports landed at Welthony that evening, barely two days’ march from Sieroch. They knew how to pass the minefield into the harbor—as if an agent among the ilykari divers had marked a safe passage.

  Falcrest’s white-masked elite came ashore.

  28

  THE last council. Pinjagata and Ihuake. Lyxaxu and Oathsfire. Dziransi. Xate Olake. Vultjag.

  The Fairer Hand.

  The others spoke of the new disaster, but she sat in a cavernous silence. Tabulating her victims. Duke Unuxekome. Muire Lo. The Duchess Nayauru, the dukes Sahaule and Autr. The citizens of the village Imadyff, of Haraerod, of Duchy Nayauru, all of whom had loved her as the Fairer Hand, all of whom she had fed to the war. The man her guards had accidentally killed—who was he? Ola … something? Ola Haerodren? He had put it down in the well, whatever that meant. Now no one would ever know. Baru had snatched up his story and put an end to it.

  All of them grist in the gears of her machine. The machine she had built, or become.

  And father Salm. Taken by nameless Imperial soldiers for the crime of sodomy. Perhaps they had killed him in the prescribed way. Perhaps he had been brought to a hidden place for treatment.

  Ground under the gears of another machine: the empire in Cairdine Farrier’s eyes.

  An empire she had to change. Whatever machinery it took.

  Sousward.

  You are a word, Baru Cormorant, a mark, and the mark says: you, Aurdwynn, you are ours.

  They changed the name to Sousward.

  The dread in her stomach felt like falling. She thought of Taranoke, of the caldera, of the fire sleeping down there. The precipice.

  Everything would go forward as it must.

  “We march at first light,” she said. “West across the Sieroch plain.”

  They’d been arguing over how to blunt the marine attack from Welthony, how to save their southern flank. Tain Hu understood first. “We attack?”

  “We meet Cattlson in the field before the marines can link up with him. We overwhelm him completely.” She looked to weathered wary Duke Pinjagata, famous for the discipline of his fighters. “Only shock can save us.”

  “You aren’t listening,” Lyxaxu snapped. His anger startled her—Lyxaxu, of all of them, in panic? “They knew Unuxekome would attack. They were prepared. Someone betrayed him to the Masquerade. Someone let the marines through the Welthony minefield, so they could land on our southern flank. There is a spy, or a network of spies, among us.”

  “I know who it was. I’ve already taken steps.” And that was true. Somewhere out there Purity Cartone smiled in happy obedience, hunting his assigned quarry, maybe already thinking back on the kill. Unuxekome’s fleet movements had been compromised by his own ilykari, but Baru had identified the spy back in Haraerod and dispatched her own.

  Nothing could be left to chance.

  Baru raked the gathered dukes with all her cold. “Our only hope is to defeat Cattlson and Heingyl on the Sieroch plain, then wheel and meet the marines coming up the Inirein. They may be Falcrest’s finest. But they have no cavalry. Do you understand? If we defeat Cattlson tomorrow, we will have time to rest the army before the marines arrive.”

  “She’s never led us wrong.” Oathsfire considered the lamp at the center of the circle. He spoke with a new strength, grown in spring—a force of conviction or belief that told Baru, somehow, that he no longer had his own status first in mind. “Not in my estimation. Not yet.”

  Ihuake eyed Baru in quiet consideration, her nobility drawn about her like an iron cloak. “Never led you wrong? Has she ever led you in battle? Even once?”

  “I slaughtered three dukes for you.” Baru showed the Cattle Duchess her canines. “I gave you all your hungry dreams in one night.”

  “Bluster,” Xate Olake murmured. “Careful.”

  “I am done with care.” Baru rose. “I will go across the Sieroch alone if I must, and face them with only the dawn at my back. But I will go.”

  “I will go with you.” Tain Hu stood, her smile wry, hungry, and almost—almost—met Baru’s eyes. “Cattlson will remember the last time we two challenged him.”

  “Tomorrow on the Sieroch.” Oathsfire looked to Lyxaxu. “Rare is the man who chooses where to die, my friend.”

  “Terrible choices,” Lyxaxu breathed. Where was the fox in him? Where was his own conviction? “Every way we turn.”

  Pinjagata spoke at last, leather-tongued, flinty. “We march at dawn. Set a quick pace all day. Strike with fading light, worn horses, exhausted men. So be it. But who will command our newborn Wolf? The camp wants to know. Who is our general?”

  The circle looked to Baru.

  “I will give the phalanx line to Pinjagata. The bowmen to Oathsfire. Dziransi, you will lead your phalanxes as reserves for Pinjagata—Xate Olake, tonight you must be sure his jagata fighters understand our drumbeats. The Coyote-men can choose one of their own to command the scouts and skirmishers.”

  “But the van.” Ihuake’s voice like plains thunder, like the hoofbeat of her herds. “The other places are secondary. Everything depends on the action of our horse. Who will lead the cavalry? Who will call the charge that breaks their line?”

  “I have only one field-general,” Baru said.

  From her place in the circle Tain Hu raised her eyes and he
r face shone gold in the lamplight.

  “No. She has no ducal cavalry of her own.” Ihuake crossed her arms. “No feel for the momentum of it. I could offer better. My son Ihuake Ro.”

  All this was true. But Baru had weighed the factors, and decided.

  “Tain Hu has what matters,” she said, her heart rejoicing, her throat full of glass. “My trust.”

  * * *

  WHEN she was alone again Baru snuffed out all the candles and thus hidden from herself she tried to let herself weep in fear. Still it would not come. She had built the dams too strong, polished the gears too perfectly.

  Bargained too well.

  She sat in the dark and fell through the hollow of herself for a time. But helplessness came uneasily to her. After a while she rose and went out to walk the edge of camp, through huddled fires and the smell of roast and sickness.

  Stone-curlews wailed to each other across the dark. Another sort of bird whispered past above. Nightjar, Baru tallied, or nighthawk. She couldn’t tell. Her census had slipped.

  She found herself walking uphill, seeking the highest stone promontories to the north. It might have been some Taranoki islander factor, something in the blood. Or she might have known where she would find Tain Hu, sitting cross-legged, looking out over the galaxy of campfires on the Sieroch below.

  “Your Excellence.” Tain Hu bowed her head.

  “Vultjag.” Baru wet her lips.

  “I am honored by your trust. I will not fail you tomorrow.”

  More than anything else in the universe, more than the power to dictate law at Taranoke, more than the knowledge of the count of stars in the sky, Baru wanted in that moment to speak the truth.

  But she had no tongue for it. She had burnt all her truth away. Alloyed it into the machine.

  Her voice came husky, choked. “I don’t deserve this. I haven’t earned it.”

  “The honorifics? The deference? The army and all its followers camped before you?” Tain Hu rose to a crouch, to her feet, in a single powerful uncoiling. A mantle of starlight glinted on her broad mailed shoulders. A disquiet gleamed in her eyes. “What would you have me call you, then? My friend? My sister? You are my queen, or you are not. I swore an oath. When you doubt yourself, you doubt me. Do you doubt me?”