“Like—” Aminata had turned her uniform coat inside out, to signal that she was off duty, but Baru grabbed at its shoulder anyway and tugged. “You’re a Masquerade soldier, but you’re Oriati! You help the people who want to conquer your homeland! If there’s another Armada War, you’ll be killing your own blood! How do you feel about that?”
With drunken cunning she thought: they will expect these doubts of me, these questions of loyalty, so they are safe to offer up as chum. Whoever she reports to will eat them, and be satisfied.
“I don’t know.” Aminata’s brow wrinkled. “They’re fair to me. I’m going to be an admiral some day.”
“No you won’t! Look at who you are!”
“Please.” Aminata rolled her eyes. “Seacraft has always been a woman’s game. We’re better at mathematics and navigation, all the hereditary science says so.”
“I mean you’re Oriati! They’ll never give you a chance!”
“You’re an Imperial Accountant, and look where you’re from.” Aminata stood sharply. “Come on, before you get too serious—let’s go upstairs, let’s give you a chance—”
“No, no, no—wait!” But Aminata had already left. Baru followed her unsteadily, surprised by how much the crowd restricted her vision. “Sorry,” she said, deeply upset to be inconveniencing those she bumped into. “I’m so sorry. I’m very drunk.”
Aminata led her up the stairs and into a dim lamplit space, crowded wall to wall with jostling shouting people. There were doors everywhere, and men and women dancing on a raised stage, mostly unclothed. “D’you know how to do this?” Aminata shouted. “You’ve got to tell them what you like.”
“I don’t want to rent!”
“It’s safe! You tie a cap on him and it stops everything from getting through! I’ll show you how!”
Baru, flushed and unsteady, took her by the shoulders. “I know why you’re doing this!”
“What?”
“I said, I know why you’re doing this!”
Aminata frowned at her for a little while, chewing her lower lip. Men brushed past them, jostling, but, seeing Aminata’s inside-out coat—clearly an officer, clearly Masquerade navy, backed by a vengeful syndicate of seafaring women ruthless in their retribution for even small crimes—gave them no trouble.
“All right,” Aminata said, “all right. Look: if it’s really that way I just don’t want to know, okay? Let’s just not talk about it. It’s safer for both of us.”
Baru did not want to be silent, but she could find nothing safe to say.
“Let’s go back to the bar,” Aminata said, tugging on Baru’s wrist, “and try something harder.”
* * *
“D’YOU think they’re going to rebel?”
“Aurdwynn always rebels!” Aminata shouted over the roar of the crowd. “Either the dukes are happy, and the people rebel, or the people are happy, and the dukes rebel, or the dukes hate each other, so it’s civil war. That’s what the Admiralty thinks.”
“So what do I do?” Baru had shouted herself hoarse, and now had to lean into Aminata’s ear to make herself heard. “The Governor’s a spineless romantic and I think the Jurispotence is on the other side.”
“I don’t know! I’m just a lieutenant!” Aminata laughed, as if this were really a joke.
“I want to go home.” Baru slipped on the bar and caught herself on Aminata’s stool. “To Taranoke. I miss it so much, Aminata—”
Aminata helped her back upright. “You can’t go home.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Because it’s gone.” Aminata frowned, finished her drink, and nodded. “You can’t find it again. Even if you go back, it’s not there anymore. That’s history, that’s how it works! Someone’s always changing someone else.”
She was right; she was right, of course, and more fool Baru for not having said it first—the Taranoke of her childhood was gone, had probably never existed; Halae’s Reef had never cut the waves like smooth shark teeth, the water had never lapped that clear on luscious black sand. Pinion had not known the name of every star and Solit had never held her up to count them for an entire night and Salm had—ah, no, better not to think of that while drunk, not at all. And yet she couldn’t seem to help it—
Baru caught sight of a face in the far corner, barely visible, cornered by the mass of an enormous Stakhi woodsman in a leather tabard. The face looked up, icy, speaking to the woodsman, a curse or a threat.
Muire Lo. “Oh,” she said, “shit.”
“What?”
“That man’s my secretary. And probably a spy.”
“So? You haven’t done anything.”
“If he saw us go upstairs together, he might think—he might tell someone that we were—”
Do you know what’s done to a suspected tribadist, Baru?
“Oh fuck,” Aminata said, bolting upright. “Do you know who he reports to?”
“That merchant, I think—you know the one, you’ve spoken to him—”
“Do we run?”
“No, we’d look guilty. I’d better go say something—Lo!”
The gigantic woodsman’s bellow carried across the tavern as he took Muire Lo by the throat and pinned him up against the wall. People recoiled, shouting, a clamor of Stakhi and Urun and Iolynic and Aphalone. Baru and Aminata left their stools barely a moment apart, Baru trailing, Aminata shouting in Aphalone to those with ears for it: “Imperial Navy, stand aside, stand aside!”
Muire Lo pawed at the grip around his throat, eyes wide. The woodsman used his other hand to push an interloper away, politely but firmly, and continued strangling the life out of Muire Lo with calm inexorable strength.
Aminata reached him first, still shouting, and when the man raised his spare hand to fend her off she took it by the wrist, pulled it palm-up close to her stomach, turned on the balls of her feet, and tried to throw the man by the sheer pain of the joint lock. He was too big and too firmly set to move, so instead the lock snapped his wrist. He roared and dropped Muire Lo, and before he had time to do anything else, Baru snatched up a heavy mug and clubbed him in the back of the head as hard as she could. He was huge and angry and would probably be a match for both of them even with a broken wrist. She had no choice.
He crashed onto his back on the stone floor, his left arm raised rigid, his right arm flexing at his side. “See that? That’s called a fencing response,” Aminata said brightly, pointing to the way his arms twitched. “You gave him a concussion. Good. I said IMPERIAL NAVY! STAND BACK!”
Muire Lo looked up at Baru from where he’d slumped against the wall, mouth gaping fishlike. The room moved around her like a ship in chop and after a moment she decided to sit down beside him. She was drunk and terrified and it took her a moment to plan out the sentence: “What were you doing here?”
“I thought someone was going to kill you.” His voice was a wheeze and as if that didn’t hurt enough he sounded mortified. “I’m sorry, Your Excellence, I just wanted to keep watch—but I was never very good at this in train—in taverns.”
“And him?”
“Oh,” Muire Lo said, not glancing at the fallen man. “I told him who I worked for and he got angry.”
Baru let that half-answer pass unchallenged. She’d sort him out tomorrow. “What do we do?” she asked Aminata.
“We pay our tab,” Aminata said, kneeling to go through the man’s pockets, “and if you’re willing to explain what we were doing together in a Southarbor tavern to your Governor and your Jurispotence and my captain, we take this man in.”
“He was watching you,” Muire Lo said dully. He touched his throat, where bruises had already begun to rise.
“Who told you someone was going to kill me?” Baru waved off a bystander’s hand. Off-duty Masquerade garrison soldiers had already begun to form a screen around them, their rivalry with the navy briefly set aside in the name of Imperial solidarity. “Muire Lo, who told you?”
“No one told me,” he said, eyes avert
ed. “But I thought if the Jurispotence would try, it would happen as soon as the Governor left to go hunting.”
“Does he have a weapon?” Baru asked Aminata.
“No.” Aminata frowned. “Just a notebook.”
7
BARU woke with her first hangover. Sniffling and cramped, she stumbled around her paneled room, hunting for a goblet of spring water before giving up and bringing a bottle of wine into the bath. The miracle of Masquerade plumbing called up hot water and the memory of drinking from the hot springs on Taranoke.
How far away were those springs? The sky printed in the still water? Dark young stone down in the deep like the shadow of caldera gods? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t manage the geography or trigonometry with her pounding headache. Forever far. Unreachable.
That’s what Aminata had said. You couldn’t go home.
A knock came from the stairway, first tentative, then insistent. Muire Lo, no doubt. “Come,” she shouted, and then, out of deference to local modesty, “but I’m in the bath!”
“Your Excellence, Jurispotence Xate Yawa is in the waiting room.”
Baru groaned.
“What should I tell her?”
“Make clever conversation for ten minutes. I’ll be down.” She put her head under the water and tried to drift, but the bath was too small and she was too long. After a moment she sat up rigid with a terrible thought.
Perhaps Xate Yawa was here to arrest her, as she had Ffare Tanifel. To drag her away and have her drowned. But if Xate Yawa was with the rebellion, surely she would have protected the traitor Accountant—
She says she cannot protect me, the note had said.
Perhaps Xate Yawa had discarded Ffare Tanifel to prove her own loyalty. Safeguard herself. Perhaps Cattlson had made a better offer.
* * *
“I came to apologize.”
Jurispotence Xate Yawa looked across the desk without a hint of judgment, her eyes and shoulders formally set, gloved hands flat on the redwood. Baru, barely presentable in a collarless laced shirt still loose at the wrists, tried not to squirm. Just as she’d noticed on the docks, Xate Yawa’s eyes were the blue of a Taranoki crow. Baru was certain Yawa knew everything that had happened last night—the who, the where.
“Apologize?” Baru played for time, smiling, trying to figure out what she wanted. “For what?”
“For the man I had watching you. For his conduct toward your secretary.” The Jurispotence straightened her gown’s collar with absolutely convincing formality, a manner-perfect mime of what she was saying: things between us are slightly out of order, and I will set them proper.
So the Stakhi woodsman had been hers. The notebook had been hers. She knew that Baru knew what the man had been up to, and had decided to concede the play before it could go against her.
“I’m young,” Baru offered. Beware, she thought to herself, beware the years she has on you, the games she’s played. She used the Masquerade’s invasion to gain herself high station and her brother a duchy. Beware that steel. You can’t win. “I’m foreign. My two predecessors have come to a bad end. If I had some moral failing that you overlooked, and it damaged the welfare of the Imperial Republic in the province of Aurdwynn, you would be guilty of negligence. If you sent that man to watch me, then you were only doing your duty as the guardian of Aurdwynn’s moral hygiene.”
Xate Yawa slumped for just a moment in clear relief, hiding it almost before it showed. The acting was immaculate. “You’re so wonderfully pragmatic. We waste too much time on politics here.”
“I’ll have the woodsman released and returned to you. If you trusted him with this job, he must be very useful to you.”
“I’m grateful.”
They smiled at each other in mutual respect and admiration for a few moments. Baru thought fixedly about Aminata and nothing else, because it seemed the best way to keep that smile glued convincingly on.
“I’ve heard you’re performing audits,” Xate said. “Have you found anything … untoward? I fear that some of the northern duchies are funding ykari cults. Oathsfire has grown obscenely rich on Inirein trade, and his friend Lyxaxu indulges in thoroughly regressive philosophy.”
“The moment I locate an irregularity, I will be in your office, shouting for a warrant. I promise.”
“Beautiful.” Xate Yawa offered a hand. “Oh, this has been so much easier than I’d feared. Please—don’t think I did this out of anything but a sense of duty to the Imperial Republic.”
“Of course. A good day to you, Your Excellence.” She kissed Xate Yawa’s hand and smiled all the way until Muire Lo opened the office door for her, let her out, and let himself in.
“If you’re going to listen at the keyhole,” Baru suggested, “you should pretend you don’t know she’s leaving until she knocks.”
Muire Lo’s flush rose above the ring of bruises around his throat. “You’re letting him go? Just like that? You didn’t even ask why he—”
“He attacked you because you told him that you’re a Falcresti spy, which makes you a grave danger to the rebellious plot Xate Yawa is involved in.” She waved away his protest and clapped a hand on her desk for attention (he twitched visibly at the sound). “Listen! Did you hear how directly she played everything? How honest she was? She’s afraid of me—she’s only putting the strictest truths into play, so I don’t have room to turn anything back against her. She knows I have Falcrest’s favor, she knows I’m closing in on something that could harm her, and those two things together are a real threat to her. The man who attacked you isn’t important. His notebook is. Do you understand?”
“If she had the book, she’d have the notes he took while watching you.”
“And written evidence is everything. If she had a reliable eyewitness account of me vanishing into a brothel with a beautiful woman”—his flush said so many different things—“I would be one mistake away from a terrible and permanent fate. She controls the courts. Given reason and motive, she can destroy me. If she’s with the rebellion, she has that motive. If she had the notebook, she’d have the reason. Could she have that woodsman fabricate a copy?”
Muire Lo nodded along, sharp and engaged, apparently not on unfamiliar ground. He had been trained, Baru thought. “Not without a lot of trouble. She’d have to get forged seals and time stamps. He’d miss telling details. Review would detect it.”
“Good. The woodsman was an urgent option, an expedient. That means her plan is happening too soon for her to take more subtle measures.” Baru let herself go, trusting the analytic trance to spot riptides and shoal water. “So her next step could be murder. She has power over Aurdwynn’s criminals. She could turn them loose on me. It worked on Olonori.”
“We should move you back aboard Lapetiare, then.” Muire Lo turned to the door. “They’re above her reach.”
“No. If I’m locked up on a ship I might as well be dead—I won’t be able to hunt for the rebel gambit.” Baru put her steepled hands to her mouth, her brow, the back of her neck, thinking furiously. “I need to be somewhere where it’s too risky to strike at me. Somewhere that would unavoidably link my death to her or her allies. Can I move my office to the Cold Cellar? No—no, she’ll see everything I do, it has to be far away from her—”
“Tain Hu,” Muire Lo said.
“What?”
“Vultjag. The Duchess of Comets—Tain Hu.” He grinned, excited, caught up in his own idea. “Tain Hu’s late aunt was married to Xate Yawa’s brother, Xate Olake, the Phantom Duke of Lachta. Everyone knows Tain Hu was the first to challenge you, out on the ballroom floor—everyone knows she’s the one who tried to draw out your sin where Xate Yawa could observe it. If you were close to her, and you were killed, everyone would see Xate Yawa’s hand in it.”
“If I were close to Tain Hu…” Baru traced the logic. Tain Hu, clearly seditious, could not kill Baru without drawing Cattlson’s full wrath. Xate Yawa would want to keep attention away from their connection—
; It was perfect in every way, except that it would put her right in the grasp of a woman who might not share Xate Yawa’s subtlety. Who might reach for a knife instead of a writ.
But she had told Cairdine Farrier she would stop the rebellion. Cairdine Farrier was the way to Falcrest.
She would accept the risk.
Baru began to open drawers. “I’ll get all the records I need to keep working. Find Tain Hu and inform her that I’m going to her estates in Vultjag to look over her records. Tell her that I would be more than honored by her company.”
* * *
WHEN Muire Lo had gone to make arrangements, Baru went back up to her rooms to find country clothes—riding jodhpurs, heavy coats, hard-soled boots. While she worked she thought, trying to be remote and cold about it, calm and deliberate. But it hurt her heart to consider these things, and soon she found herself tearing clothes from her cabinets, piling them unfolded like a child in a snit.
She sat on the corner of her bed and put her head in her hands.
Even on the best roads, by the best carriage, Tain Hu’s Vultjag estates were hundreds of miles and many days to the north, up the long causeways through Duchies Heingyl and Ihuake. Lapetiare would sail long before Baru could make the trip and return. She would lose the marines aboard, her only trustworthy hand in Aurdwynn. She would lose Aminata, her only friend.
She could order the ship to delay its passage, and bring Aminata and some of her soldiers along as security. But that would be sentimental and, worse—so much worse—stupid. She couldn’t ignore the fact that Aminata had brought her to that tavern, had drawn her upstairs on drunken pretense with one of the Jurispotence’s men watching. It might have been unhappy coincidence. Or Aminata could have been thinking of her career, and all the ways that the favor of a provincial Jurispotence could help it.
When Muire Lo returned later, he said, “All the arrangements have been made. Will you need me to carry any messages to Lapetiare?”
She wrote a terse and official set of orders, commanding vigilance during her absence, ordering the ship to sail on schedule. She couldn’t risk reaching out to Aminata, couldn’t even offer a formal good-bye. It would only provide more evidence of some unsavory connection.
The Traitor Baru Cormorant Page 10