The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  Hold. Hold.

  Waiting for the enemy, for their ten thousand collaborator-countrymen arrayed on the flanks, for the blank-eyed center of five thousand Masks with hooked pikes, heavy shields, instruments of breath and fire.

  North, Heingyl’s four thousand heavy cavalry raced in behind Tain Hu’s five. Her formation responded clumsily, erratic, wavering between a westward advance and eastward retreat. The horses moved as if overburdened. The men milled as if cut loose from all command, as if Tain Hu gave them no guidance.

  On the Henge Hill, the Fairer Hand’s banner toppled among the broken stones.

  * * *

  SO this was it—done in by her own idiot trust. She had known Lyxaxu for a clever man. But he had seemed so idealistic.…

  So close to the end. Swallowed up before the precipice could take her.

  “Lyxaxu,” she shouted into the clatter of the oncoming horses. “Lyxaxu! What price did Cattlson offer?”

  Xate Olake stepped between the riders and Baru, an old man in loose chain, flush with anger. “Boy,” he growled. “What have you done?”

  The wedge of horse, fourteen strong, drew up before them. Pale Stakhi-blooded riders looked with wary readiness between her, Xate Olake, and their duke.

  Lyxaxu spurred his horse forward. “Duke Lachta. Your Grace. I know what you’ve done for the cause. Stand aside, and let me save us all.”

  “How did they buy you?” Xate Olake spoke with calm, enunciated menace. “I know the things you love. Medicine for your wife? Free marriage for your daughters? Will they bring you to Falcrest and sit you in Parliament and civilize you?”

  Duke Lyxaxu stared for a moment, and then began to laugh. “You mistake me,” he said, and then, a moment after Baru, recognized the sound behind him, the rising roar of hoofbeats.

  The banners of Duchy Ihuake broke the crest of the Henge Hill. The Duchess of Cattle’s cavalry reserves, and the duchess herself.

  Lyxaxu drew his sword, mouth narrowing, eyes intent. Spurred his charger toward Baru without mercy or hesitation.

  And she drew in reply, Aminata’s boarding saber whispering free of its sheath. The Naval System live in her muscles, in the angle of her arm, the coil of her stance.

  The sword alone would not save her.

  Lyxaxu’s guard, uncertain, hesitated a moment, or turned toward the horsemen rising behind them, toward Duchess Ihuake’s roaring profanity, catamites, cum-drippings off a limp Falcresti cock, cowards all—

  But the duke Lyxaxu swept down on Baru, marten mantle wild in the wind.

  “Shoot,” she said.

  Xate Olake’s little crossbow snapped. The quarrel took his target beneath the jaw. Duke Lyxaxu, the scholar-lord of High Stone, husband and father, fell from his saddle without any final word or expression, without even a moment to know that he had died and to consider the ontology of it.

  “I can’t believe it.” Xate Olake looked at the dead man and shook his head. “I thought he had principles.”

  “I can,” Baru said.

  Ihuake’s reserve cavalry smashed into Lyxaxu’s guard and tumbled them to the earth. The Duchess of Cattle, aloof, skirted the killing ground and trotted her mount toward Baru.

  “Your banner fell,” she said. “Thought I might climb the hill and piss on your corpse.”

  “You’ve rather botched the chance,” Baru said, thinking, I do not want to speak, I want to mourn this man, his widow, his orphans, the thoughts he did not share.

  “Well.” Ihuake shaded her eyes and looked out over the battle. “I saw Lyxaxu’s men coming, bannerless. Never trusted him—he thought too much. In any case, I suspect your creature Vultjag is about to get us all killed, in which case the chance to piss on your corpse will still come around.”

  Baru reached for her spyglass, eyes already going north. But she could not bear to look.

  “Help me raise the banner again,” she said.

  Something near at hand. Still in her control.

  * * *

  THE two phalanxes closed shyly.

  Once battle was joined, once they locked in full shield-press, there would be no easy disengagement or maneuver. The line would be drawn, its center and its flanks set. They would have to stab each other to death until someone broke and ran, or until cavalry swept down on the flank or rear and ended them.

  And the cavalry battle had not yet been won.

  Oathsfire’s bowmen kept up a withering fire, prickling the enemy’s northern flank, killing the poor conscripts drawn from subjugated Radaszic. The Masquerade hwachas fired their last salvos in reply, racks exhausted.

  Behind Treatymont’s line, Governor Cattlson’s guard cantered under their vast banner. And on the north plain, among the yellow flowers, the jaws of his trap closed on Tain Hu.

  Four thousand riders under Heingyl circled behind Tain Hu from the east. And, now, the other jaw, the hidden stroke at last revealed—two thousand cavalry drawn from Duchies Autr and Sahaule, screaming revenge for their murdered dukes, for the atrocity at Haraerod, broke cover from the edge of the forest. Closed in from the west to crush her.

  A debt! they roared, mocking the accountant who was their enemy. A blood debt!

  The Army of the Wolf had picked the wrong cavalry commander. Tain Hu’s five thousand horse faltered, wavered, circled. The bulk of her armored riders were Ihuake’s, Midlands men with little love for the forest duchess, the brigand bitch of Vultjag. The grueling day march had left their horses tired and dehydrated, eager to bear a lighter load.

  Disorganized, caught between six thousand heavy cavalry, unable to flee to one flank or the other, they stood no chance on horseback.

  So Tain Hu signaled, and they gave up their horses.

  “Trade horse!” Throat after throat picked up the command. Carried it from Tain Hu to the farthest wing. “Trade horse and form line!”

  All the indecisive milling had been a disguise for a different sort of chaos. Positioning. Preparing. Now armored men with spears and longswords gave up their mounts. Traded them to new riders.

  The Coyote-men hidden in the flowers and grass. Skirmishers and bowmen. Ready to ride.

  The rangers had been sent ahead as scouts, and as an opportunity. Tain Hu had given the task to the men she trusted most: fighters from Vultjag, Sentiamuts and Alemyonuxes and the rest. Conceal yourselves. Await the chance.

  Remember: a light horse rides more swiftly.

  The heavy cavalrymen who gave up their horses formed a phalanx, spears up, aimed toward Heingyl’s four thousand heavy horse. For this they were utterly prepared. Dismount to phalanx was a basic task, part of any horseman’s drill.

  Letting skirmishers steal their horses was not. But Tain Hu ordered it, and they obeyed.

  Three thousand freshly invented light cavalry broke south on their new steeds, Tain Hu and her guard riding beneath the comet banner at their head, her white mount spurred to the edge of heart-burst, a comet of its own.

  Behind her the two thousand remaining heavy horse she had given to Ihuake’s son—a fearsome cavalry commander, blooded and eager—peeled away to the west and charged the men of Autr and Sahaule, calling: a fairer hand! For Ihuake Ro had seen Baru Fisher, and had his own hopes for a throne.

  A thunder of hoof and impact rolled down the plain. The battle in the north was joined.

  And a second thunder answered.

  Beneath the Henge Hill, in the shadows of the forest, the two phalanx lines clashed—sprint to contact, a bone-shattering collision of shield walls. Grunting scraping scrum and press. Fighters stabbing, screaming, eyes shut against the rain of wood splinters, the hail of broken spears.

  At the center, Pinjagata’s spearmen met the Masquerade regulars, and the Duke of Phalanxes found himself pressed back. The Falcresti armor turned arrows. Their spears did not splinter. Their engineers hurled acid and gas and fire over the shield wall.

  Their masks stared, white, remorseless, full of alien will.

  Hold, Pinjagata called. Hold! But
this time it was a plea.

  * * *

  THE Fairer Hand’s banner rose again. Cheers answered it.

  Beneath the Henge Hill the lines bent and mixed. On the Wolf right, Ihuake’s hwacha-wracked levies, backed by fresh reinforcements, pressed the Radaszic arm of the enemy phalanx to a standstill. Here the spear thrusts were halfhearted, the gaps wide. No one in the scrum wanted to leap screaming onto a forest of spears.

  On the far left, Lyxaxu’s Student-Berserkers broke themselves against a disciplined Duchy Heingyl phalanx. Drug-mad, blind to pain, they threw themselves into the grinder. But they could not intimidate the twelve-foot spears, could not scream past the wall of shields. Terror came over the Lyxaxu phalanx behind them. The invincible berserkers hadn’t broken the enemy, hadn’t been carried past shield and spear in the fists of ykari Himu.

  They died like mortal men.

  The left wing of the rebel line shifted. Crumbled. Pushed back by Heingyl fighters chanting honor the word!

  For an instant, breakthrough loomed.

  Mansion Hussacht’s jagata stepped into the gap, cadres ranked behind their shining brave men. Now Heingyl’s men recoiled, faced with the armor of the Masons, the cry of a reborn North.

  But the jagata had been committed too soon.

  By shoring up the left, they abandoned the center, where Treatymont’s masked regulars met Pinjagata’s finest, found them not fine enough. Pushed toward total breakthrough on the wings of Imperial superiority.

  Baru watched the center bend with her fists balled. If she lost—if Cattlson won—if the marines came and found a battlefield in ruin, crows picking at the rebel dead—

  Your errors will be written on your blood and sex. You must be flawless.

  “The north,” Xate Olake said, in wonder, and Ihuake took up the call: “Look to the north!”

  Northwest, two masses of cavalry circled in melee—Ihuake Ro set against Nayauru’s avengers. Northeast, a line of three thousand spearmen knelt, weapons up, and met the charge of Heingyl’s heavy horse, fencing them away from the main battle.

  But some of the Stag Duke’s cavalry had slipped the net. Heingyl had seen Tain Hu’s gambit. Heingyl had gathered his guard and made chase.

  They rode south, quarry strung out ahead in their thousands—a mass of horse, Tain Hu’s white charger at the head, her most talented bowmen firing back at their armored pursuers even as they sprinted for the main line.

  Yard by yard Heingyl’s fresher horses closed on the Coyote-men. Yard by yard the Coyote-men swept down on the phalanx line, on the Masquerade’s exposed flank.

  Exhausted horses stumbled, slowed, fell behind, died on their feet as their hearts exploded. Heingyl’s men overtook the stragglers and murdered them, accelerating now, closing for the kill. A lighter horse rode faster—but a fresh horse was faster still.

  Baru heard herself cry out. Felt the sliver that stitched her heart. The analytic trance had abandoned her. Tain Hu’s great gambit had come so very close to success. But Heingyl’s band would overrun her like a scythe.

  Duchess Ihuake, astride her horse at Baru’s side, spat into the fallen hengestones. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “You dishonored me by leaving me in the reserves, Your Excellence. And yet now I confess you set me in the right place after all.”

  She lifted a hand in command. Her drummers took up the signal.

  Ihuake’s cavalry reserve came down off the Henge Hill in a flying wedge. Smashed into Heingyl’s flank moments before he caught Tain Hu’s main body. Broke his formation, drove them northwest by sheer shock, cast down their broken lances and set at Heingyl’s men with sword and hammer.

  The Stag Hunter killed four men and beheaded a horse, crying honor the word! and then at last one of Ihuake’s fighters opened his black mount’s gut with a long-lance, and he fell tangled in his banner beneath the hammers and the hooves. To the end he fought, honor-bound. But no one could have any doubt his last thought was for his daughter.

  And Tain Hu had her opening, her wide flank. No cavalry screen to stop her.

  She stood in her saddle, gesturing to her riders. Forward. Forward. One last effort—

  Horses frothed and faltered and screamed beneath the desperate spur.

  The Coyote-men swept in behind the Masquerade line. Raked it with bow-fire and javelin-casts, a whirlpool of three thousand horses, a stinging hive. Fighters in Cattlson’s phalanx, bent to the labor of spear and shield, utterly focused on the breaking line ahead of them, found arrows and lances taking them in the back and the neck.

  The Coyote-men scythed them down by the hundreds.

  And Tain Hu, bent over her white charger, leading an echelon of her ranger-knights, charged Governor Cattlson’s personal guard.

  They saw her coming, and charged back.

  Baru found her spyglass, cursing her trembling hands. Lifted it, breathless, heart seizing, trying to focus. Found the unarmored woodsmen, Tain Hu among them in leather and mail, a gull-white bolt galloping toward the cream of Treatymont with their fresh chargers and shining plate.

  “Turn off.” Xate Olake balled his fists. “Hu, you fool. Turn off.”

  The two companies bore down on each other.

  And the Vultjag cavalry turned off. Wheeled away from Cattlson’s charge at the final instant. Cast their spears. Fired their bows. Tain Hu flickered through the tunnel of the spyglass, steering her horse with her knees, taking aim. At her side a man in Sentiamut colors took a cavalry lance through the throat.

  Governor Cattlson, mask enameled red, swept down on Tain Hu. The Duchess Vultjag dropped her bow and grabbed for her sword.

  Smoke from the burning wood drifted up to cover her.

  “No,” Baru croaked.

  “The wind will change—” Xate Olake was watching too.

  The south end of the Masquerade line broke first. Duke Heingyl’s levies, pressed by Mason spears and the sound of screams, fled before the Hussacht jagata.

  Then the north end snapped, demoralized Radaszic soldiers crumbling, unwilling to die in a battle they had no stake in. Even as the center pressed forward, the wings of the enemy phalanx peeled away under pressure from the front and death from the back.

  “We’re winning,” Xate Olake breathed. “We’ve won.”

  Baru kept her eye on the spyglass. Found a rift in the smoke.

  Dead horses everywhere. Two shapes moving on foot. A red mask—a wolfskin cloak. Cattlson, sword at the ox guard, leaping forward to strike. Tain Hu bare-armed and whirling, slipping on blood and intestines, clawing for room.

  The smoke closed again.

  “Your Grace,” Baru said, her voice papery. “We win when I am satisfied we’ve won.”

  Suggestions of action, between drifts of wet smoke—a spearcast, a mighty overhead blow, a brilliant flash of light as two blades threw sparks.

  A kneeling execution.

  She kept her eye bolted to the glass, as if she could make it a part of her.

  A white charger burst from the smoke. Rider a cloaked figure, draped in white. Wolfskin, Baru realized. The cloak was wolfskin.

  Cattlson. On Tain Hu’s mount.

  The rider raised eyes toward the spyglass. Lifted mailed fists.

  Showed Baru the banner those fists trailed, the great mask and antlers, torn from its mounts, cut free. Not wolfskin at all.

  Cattlson’s standard, in Tain Hu’s hands.

  The fighters on the line saw it. Screamed in exultation, a thousand throats, ten thousand. Vultjag! Vultjag!

  At Baru’s side, Xate Olake choked: “I wish she had been my daughter instead.” And he began to weep with joy.

  * * *

  THE army of Treatymont broke. Surviving cavalry disengaged from the flower-plains and pounded away southwest. The Masquerade regulars beat a bloody smoke-shrouded retreat. Panicked levies bolted alongside the fire-spooked deer, or surrendered, or burrowed into bear caves and gullies to hide and weep.

  Give no pursuit, the order came. Re-form. Make camp.r />
  The marines on the Inirein could be on them in a day. There were wounds to treat, shields to mend, dead to mourn. Traitorous Lyxaxu’s men had to be disarmed and cast out.

  But no discipline, no storm, no menace could keep the Wolf from celebrating its victory. Two decades groveling under the eyes of the Mask, breathing the acid fumes of Incrastic law, breeding to the dictates of the Jurispotence.

  At an end.

  Mansion Hussacht jagata laughed and drank with Ihuake riders, though laughter and beer were their only common tongues. Rival families out of Oathsfire and Vultjag reconciled decade-old grudges in tearful clinches. Invocations to the ykari and old illegal songs rang off the Henge Hill.

  Wandering the ruin of the battlefield, a lonely pair of Pinjagata infantry, worried for their distant starving families, found the Masquerade’s abandoned stores of signal fireworks. “I’ll sell them,” the first man told his friend, but she, frowning, replied that on any other night they could be mercantile—but tonight the fireworks would be free.

  A great mass of Wolf fighters built a bonfire of wet wood, linseed oil, and masked corpses. Some protested that it would stink, but lo, there was corpse-lore to manage that, and it would be the stink of victory. Some even knew that the fluid of the spine and brain could be burned as sweet musky incense.

  At sunset they lit the pyre, and as it drew in scattered companies it became the center of things, the axis around which their world, in brief defiance of astronomy and the dicta of Charitable Service schools, turned. Soldiers stood to tell their stories, to dance and drum, drafting the first layer of the Sieroch legend.

  In a way, that legend was the real prize of the battle: a spark of defiance, a little gem of freedom reddened in winter and cut to shine on the Sieroch plain. Everyone here would carry the understanding home, that secret hard-won knowledge—that if they stood united together beneath a rebel queen they might defeat the Masquerade in all its fury.

  By word and song they would tend that legend all across Aurdwynn, and it would grow strong, passed to friends and to their children. They would again remember: Aurdwynn cannot be ruled.