The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  “There’s something I should tell you,” Baru said. It came out a rattle, a hiss, not like a lie would have, no; not smooth, not calm, not confident. Lies on her tongue, grown into the flesh of it, oiled in her blood. Allergic to the truth. “There’s something I have to say.”

  She came so close, and so far. Like the paradox of the man walking halfway down the Arwybon Way, and halfway again, always so close, always a compound infinity from his destination.

  But Tain Hu took her by the jaw, the heel of her gloved hand cupping Baru’s chin, leather-bound fingers across her lips, gentle around the flare of her nose. Measuring her, just as Baru had measured Tain Hu in Cattlson’s ballroom, judging the cut of her cheekbones, her nose, her chin, the markers of heredity, of blood.

  Closing her mouth, so that she could speak nothing, not the lies, not the truth.

  Baru shut her eyes against the force of her own response.

  “Tell me tomorrow,” Tain Hu said. “After the battle. Only then.”

  * * *

  AT dawn the drums began to beat.

  The Army of the Wolf marched west across fertile Sieroch ground and their passage raised no dust. Late in the day they came to the killing ground.

  This was the shape of the battlefield, the crucial shape:

  South was an impassable marsh. North, past the Henge Hill where Baru would establish her command camp, were the plains that stretched up to Duchy Pinjagata, greening in the spring. Cavalry land. The phalanx line would fight between the marsh and the hill, but the horse would swing north, out onto the plain of low flowers.

  And before them—

  Before them the land dropped a little into a shallow bowl divided by the Sieroch Road. Like an arena. Past that little bowl rose the forest, gnarled, ancient, untouched by logging.

  Baru had been terrible at geography, once. But she could learn.

  At the edge of the forest, where the road came out, the enemy’s banners moved in swift disciplined lines. The stag of Duke Heingyl on the wings and, at the center, a mask ringed in clasped hands.

  Cattlson had come.

  Baru watched from the Henge Hill, where she stood with Xate Olake. The spyglass he had gifted her was battered, but she hadn’t seen better optics since her last time aboard Mannerslate. “Stakhieczi, of course,” Xate Olake explained. “Even Falcrest copies them.”

  She watched Cattlson’s army array itself for battle.

  “They’re hurrying into formation. Good.” She lowered the glass. During the march she’d made a feverish review of her books on war. “I was afraid they might just withdraw.”

  “They’ll fight.” Olake snatched a fly out of the air. “No reason not to.”

  “You’re so certain.”

  “Cattlson’s a stubby little prick of a man, but he’s not inept. They know we set a grueling pace to make it here. They know that half our troops are already dying of starvation. And they’re afraid we’ll set the woods alight around them if they retreat.” The Duke of Lachta wore a fall of borrowed mail, carried only a crossbow and a short knife—to cut his beard off, he’d said, in case it looked like he’d be captured.

  “Wise of them,” she said. “The Coyote’s always looking to burn.”

  A patch of color caught her eye. She checked the spyglass again, and found a great banner stretched between two poles: a white mask, antlered, ringed in multicolored hands. Beneath the banner cantered cavalrymen in masked helms, their horses armored head and flank.

  “Cattlson’s here.” She gave Xate Olake a wry smile. “He spent the winter and half his treasury on a new standard.”

  “Vain prick. Can you sight him?”

  “No. His guard, though.”

  On the low ground to her left, in the space between the Henge Hill and the marsh, the Wolf’s first-rank phalanxes settled into a line of battle. Bowmen and reserve phalanxes made a checkerboard behind them. The Mansion Hussacht jagata waited among them, ready to be thrown into the fiercest fighting. Elite reserves committed at the right moment could save a battle—or win it.

  And to the right—

  To the right, out on the flowered grassland, squadrons of Wolf cavalry milled and grazed. Tain Hu had raced them into position, taxing horses already on the verge. Now her signalmen flagged for rest. Too late for some: Baru’s spyglass found dead horses and dismounted men, some walking back toward the line, some grieving by their dead steeds or hesitating to offer mercies to the loyal dying.

  The horses, too, had reserves. Duchess Ihuake, still stewing, rode with them. During the march she had complained about Tain Hu stealing troops she had no need for, giving orders that made no sense. Baru had no time to attend to her pride. Ihuake and the reserve cavalry would stew in the east.

  The cavalry battle would happen on the north flank, the right flank. At the center, the phalanxes would meet. The left flank didn’t exist: it was a swamp for cranes and krakenflies.

  If both centers held, then, Tain Hu’s horse would determine everything.

  “You know anything about battles?” Xate Olake murmured in her ear. Wisely: not a question for the drummers and the bannermen behind them to overhear. “Not war. Battles?”

  “All that I’ve read.” Set-piece battles between armies in the field, what the Handbook of Field Literacy called “meeting engagements,” were rare beyond description. And here they faced one, driven by politics, by logistics: Cattlson wanted to win to please his masters, and Baru needed one clean victory to seal up the rebellion’s future.

  The Handbook also said that the first side to strike usually lost—their infantry line disorganized by the advance, flank opened to the devastation of a cavalry charge.

  But Baru could not count on battle to be as predictable as economics.

  A great voice rose from the enemy center, five thousand in ragged harmony, echoing the words of their officers echoing the words of Governor Cattlson. “BARU FISHER. SURRENDER AND THE JURISPOTENCE WILL BE FAIR. SHOW MERCY TO THE SONS OF AURDWYNN.”

  Above and behind Baru, the coin-and-comet banner she had chosen snapped and cracked in the wind. Taunting Cattlson. Marking her.

  “I wouldn’t worry. Suspect we’ll win.” Xate Olake squinted into the afternoon sun. “A good part of the men on the line over there are Radaszic levies. Heingyl murdered their duke and took them from their families right before planting season. We just need to give them a little push. They’ll break.”

  “You believe that? Even with the fear of Xate Yawa in them, their families under Heingyl’s rule, and their bellies full of Cattlson’s grain?”

  “Certainly I do.” He spat into the hilltop grass. “Spymasters never lie.”

  White light glinted from a distant block of faces. Masquerade regulars, anchoring the enemy center. Drumbeats thundered across the field.

  A rider on a half-dead horse struggled up the hill. “Coyote-men in the forests send word the Mask’s drawing up some heavy equipment.”

  “Hwachas, I suspect.” How puzzling to still feel that little twitch of fascination, even in the face of death. She’d read about hwachas. “Pass the word to all the men: expect arrows, fire, much smoke. Hold firm.”

  “There’s the Coyote,” Xate muttered.

  White smoke rose from the woods behind Cattlson’s position, Coyote-men lighting fires, dumping linseed oil over wet wood. The spring wind off the sea carried the plumes northeast, into the back of the Masquerade lines.

  They’d thought the smoke would cause confusion and fear. Now Baru’s own fear spoke: we are only giving them a cloak to hide their movements—

  The armies stared each other down over shield-rims, each side a great line of fighters, less than half a mile apart.

  “Oathsfire’s bowmen should be firing.” She raised her hand to call a rider. “What’s he waiting for?”

  “Wait.” Xate Olake plucked strands from his beard. “Wait. Trust your commanders. He knows the range.”

  She lowered her hand. Listened.

  Patterns of drumbe
at and silence, all across the field. Baru fell into trance, into the analytic cold. Saw the formations, the phalanx line and the cavalry wing, with an engineer’s eye. Imagined the brace of loyalty and ferocity and discipline that held the soldiers in their places even in the face of barbed spears. Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive.

  A matter of deception, of conviction, of lies made true through performance. Like everything else.

  Through her spyglass, lines of empty steel masks stared back. Blue-gray regulars, Falcresti and Oriati, Aurdwynni and maybe even Taranoki. Shoulder to shoulder in service of a faceless Emperor on a distant throne. Led by a man who wanted to have a good tax season and please a distant Parliament. And around them, filling out each end of the line, the combined phalanxes of Heingyl and Radaszic, fighting for that same distant mask, that same alien Parliament, out of fear and hope and plainspoken duty. Fighting, even, for love of their lord.

  “This is not their home,” she said.

  Xate Olake grunted. “It isn’t yours, either.”

  “No.” She smiled through her fear. “But I have had some years to convince you otherwise.”

  Steady drumbeats down the Army of the Wolf line. Hold. Hold. Hold. The first-rank phalanxes waited, spears raised in a terrible forest, for orders to march, or for a charge to set themselves against.

  “Look!” Xate Olake hissed. A cry went up from the bannermen and drummers on the Henge Hill, echoed all down the line.

  A red rocket arced up from the center of the enemy line. Erupted in a starburst, a heart-tripping thump.

  The masked ranks parted. Like ghost roads opening.

  Stag banners moved in the smoke.

  “What is it?” Xate Olake muttered. “What’s he have for us…?”

  Columns of chestnut horses and plate-armored riders cantered forward between the Masquerade infantry. Baru, dry-mouthed, found Duke Heingyl’s guard among them, their mounts shielded by crinières and spiked champrons. And there he was—the Stag Hunter himself, offering words of courage to his young retainers from his black charger.

  “They put their cavalry at the center.” She frowned and tried to remember if that had been in the Manual. “Have you ever heard of a general putting his cavalry in among his infantry? What does he intend? A charge into our phalanx?”

  “I hope so.” Xate Olake wound another white strand of beard around his fist and tugged. He made a small grunt of pain. “I hope he charges right across that little valley and up the hill into us, the stubborn honor-bound prick. Unless they disrupt Pinjagata’s line with all those longbowmen they neglected to bring, they’ll murder themselves on his spears. Then Tain Hu can meander in from our right and sweep up the infantry at her pleasure.”

  All those longbowmen they’d neglected to bring—

  Oh.

  “Drummers,” Baru called, breath coming hard. “Signal down the line: brace shields for volley.”

  She bit her cheek, tasted blood.

  And as if in answer, out across the field, Cattlson’s hwachas began to fire.

  * * *

  FALCREST’S hwachas fired two hundred steel-tipped rocket-propelled arrows in one burning instant. The first solitary shots found the range and wind. Siege engineers tracked the sputtering flares, adjusted their aim, and opened the battle at Sieroch.

  In the first second they fired more than six thousand arrows.

  The valley glowed with the sparks of their ascent. Darkened beneath the shadow of their flight. Madness seized a few Wolf fighters, a hypnosis of terror and firelight. They watched the arrowfall in rapture.

  The drums beat: shields, shields.

  Duke Pinjagata, who fought on the line without guard or banner, set his shield into the upraised wall and nodded to his huddled neighbors. “Don’t piss on me,” he said.

  The hwachas killed the poor.

  The soldiers of rich or war-seasoned duchies, Oathsfire with all his coin and Pinjagata with all his veterans, had shields of quality. But impoverished Lyxaxu and Vultjag levies found Masquerade steel punching through shield-rims and centers, feathering their arms and hands and thighs, toppling screaming men and women and leaving their neighbors exposed, naked, dead. Ihuake’s best craft went to her cavalry—her levies, treated like chaff by her battle doctrine, suffered worst of all.

  (Baru saw the patterns of death and understood their reason without the need for thought. This was her gift, her savantry.)

  Fire and tumult bloodied the Wolf. Cattlson gave no quarter. The second unit of hwachas fired while the first reloaded.

  And in the air behind the rising salvo, another red signal rocket cracked.

  Duke Heingyl’s cavalry cantered forward. Gathered their lines, made their spacings firm, lowered their lances.

  Blew their horns.

  “Well, I’ll be fucked,” Pinjagata told his neighbors, huddled under their upraised shields. “I think he’s charging.”

  And so Heingyl’s cavalry charged. Accelerating downslope beneath the firefall, rising from trot to canter to full gallop, hurling themselves into the huddled, wounded tortoises of the Wolf phalanx. Even a warhorse could only gallop a little ways. But that little way was far enough.

  “Hold,” Pinjagata growled, trusting his fighters to pass the word, trusting them to fear it more than they feared the arrow or the onrushing horse. “Hold or you’re dead. You and everyone you love.”

  The hwachas would let up before the cavalry struck. There would be a few moments to raise spears, to brace against the rush.

  The line just had to hold.

  * * *

  I wish, Baru thought, that we had had time to plant stakes.

  Xate Olake ripped out a patch of his sweat-soaked beard. “Stakes,” he said. “Where are our stakes?”

  Heingyl’s charge streamed down the enemy slope, hit the valley floor, and began to climb, pounding toward the junction where the phalanx line met the Henge Hill. Where Ihuake’s levies with their rotten shields struggled to re-form.

  Four thousand horsemen cast like a killing spear against an untested phalanx in complete disarray.

  The hwachas did not cease fire. The next barrage fell into the reserves instead. Drums pounded among the Stakhieczi jagata, a rallying tone. Longbowmen hid beneath wicker screens.

  Oathsfire, Baru thought. Oathsfire, you idiot, you bearded ass, start shooting—

  “Oathsfire,” Xate Olake grunted, “you stupid fuck—”

  A call from down among the screams: loose!

  And at last Oathsfire’s longbowmen began to fire. Arching salvos over the line. Direct shots down from the Henge Hill, raking Heingyl’s charge.

  Ah, Baru thought. He didn’t want the hwachas to know where he’d deployed. Not so stupid—

  “Ihuake’s moving!” one of Baru’s staff called.

  Behind them, to the east, steer-headed banners rose. Ihuake’s cavalry reserve charging forward. “Too late to matter now,” Baru said. It would come down to the clash of horse and spearman.

  Or—

  What was this?

  Heingyl’s cavalry hooked sharp north, abandoning the charge. Longbow fire from the Henge Hill swept their flanks. Chargers tumbled, reared, screamed. Armored riders fell.

  The horn of Heingyl’s guards sounded again and again, calling to his company. The mass of armored horse moved north, an endless run of cavalry, snorting and frothing, pounding the earth. Racing parallel to the Wolf line. Not a charge but a—what?

  They could’ve broken through. They could have pierced the line, opened a hole for the infantry behind them. So why—Baru’s mind raced—why break north—

  Because one breakthrough in the center, thick with reserves, would not decide the battle. Disaster at the flanks, among the Wolf cavalry, would.

  “Signal Tain Hu.” She spun, roaring to the bannermen and drummers gathered on the hilltop. “Raise fla
gs to Tain Hu! They’re coming for her!”

  After the battle, Tain Hu had said. Only then.

  So many things meant to happen afterward.

  On the flower plain, the duchess Vultjag’s cavalry moved west, banners streaming. Just a cautious probe, checking for traps before she charged the Masquerade flank.

  She hadn’t seen the mass of Heingyl’s horse. Hadn’t noticed the armored pincer that would cut her own retreat.

  “Get her back!” Baru shouted to the signalers. “Draw her back!”

  Across the valley, another rocket thumped its signal. The Masquerade phalanx began to advance.

  Baru wheeled back to the bannermen and drummers to demand another signal, calling Oathsfire to shift his salvos—and something caught her eye. A group of Wolf bowmen and a handful of riders, climbing onto the Henge Hill. They carried no banner. Their simple gear made them Lyxaxu’s, but he should have been deployed on the far left, holding the swamp flank with his Student-Berserkers.

  Why had these bowmen come? And—there, on horseback, Duke High Stone himself. Lyxaxu, tall as the Wintercrests, the fox aspect burning in his eyes.

  Gesturing to his bowmen: ready fire.

  “Duke Lachta.” Baru took the old spy’s arm, putting all her iron into her voice. “We have a complication.”

  Lyxaxu’s bowmen fired into Baru’s drummers, into the bannermen. They fell and screamed and the bowmen rushed forward to cut their throats.

  I shook your hand, Baru thought, against all reason and practicality. I shook your hand! I promised you!

  The Duke Lyxaxu and his riders came for her.

  29

  BEHOLD Sieroch:

  The Wolf phalanx. Spearmen out of five duchies and two nations guarded by their neighbors’ shields. Wreathed in smoke. Wading through beloved dead. Banners burnt away by hwacha-shot. Rising, now, under the only colors left to them, the only fire still their friend.

  Evening light on twenty thousand spears.

  They stood their ground, blood pounding, terrified and exhilarated and urine-soaked and drug-crazed each to their own degrees, stirred by the drums, by Pinjagata’s relayed words, by the longbowmen still firing over their heads even as hwacha fire closed in return.