The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  She began to think she had imagined Farrier’s mysterious influence, his shadowy colleagues with names like Hesychast, his intimations of the apparatus behind the Masked Throne.

  And so it went for the next three years.

  Three years while Aurdwynn’s dukes grumbled in impoverished discontent, and the Fiat Bank bled its hoard of gold back into the Midlands and the valleys of the north, and little dale-rebellions guttered out under acid smoke, and Tain Hu introduced Aurdwynn to futures contracts, and Muire Lo made a theater out of his failure to conceal his letters back to Falcrest, reporting, as he had to, on her successes and missteps. Three years of work and no sign of progress.

  She went to the harbor and drank, scrupulously alone, mindful never to establish patterns, except for the obvious pattern of drinking more and more.

  And then came the day when a ship anchored with news that Taranoke had been renamed Sousward, and while Baru drank away her feelings on this topic, a man with red Stakhieczi hair curled over pale Stakhieczi cheeks came into the tavern and ordered something well beyond his apparent means.

  He came to her lonely table and sat. When she looked at him in irritation, trying to remember where she had seen him before, he smiled brilliantly and said:

  “Do you know the Hierarchic Qualm?”

  * * *

  THE man’s hair was absurdly, outrageously red. Dye, perhaps—or pure Stakhieczi blood in his veins, freckled on his pale cheeks, written in the color of his eyes.

  “The Hierarchic Qualm.” Of all the strangers Baru had met in these taverns, none of them had ever opened with something out of Falcresti revolutionary philosophy, from the old Handbook of Manumission. “I know it. Why?”

  “It’s a test, of course.” The man waved past her, into Treatymont, into Aurdwynn. “Tests behind you, and tests ahead. I’m not sure I believe you know it.”

  “Oh,” Baru said. “I’m crushed.” Her mind circled back, again and again, to the news that had just come: Taranoke renamed Sousward; the Sixth Fleet will be built and harbored there; plentiful lumber and labor available, so long as unrest among the population can be controlled—

  All as she had foreseen on that last day on Taranoke, walking to the harbor and Lapetiare to say good-bye.

  The stranger leaned into the conversation. He smelled of salt fragrance. “Itinerant told me that you were always eager to display your masteries. But that was three years ago, when you still hoped to be a technocrat in Falcrest. Perhaps you’ve wandered from the path he saw for you.”

  Baru set down her cup and regarded the man with cold disinterest, trying to hide the stab of panic he’d aroused, the sick fascination. At last, at last, here it was again—the conspiracy of strangers who watched and judged her, the cabal who made Governor Cattlson treat an undistinguished merchant like a superior.

  “Farrier,” she said, connecting the dots. “He’s the one you call Itinerant. And he mentioned his colleague, Hesychast. Do I have the pleasure, then?”

  “Ha! No.” The northman took one sip of his outrageously expensive drink and made a face of bliss. He wore a stark, loose-fit shirt and a short jacket. He looked a little like a dandy playing sailor, and that might have fooled someone born elsewhere; but he kept his neckerchief in a grief knot, which Baru knew as a sailor’s joke. “I don’t share Hesychast’s preoccupation with the science of who fucks who. They call me Apparitor, which makes me the one they dispatch. And here I am, bearing a message. Now: the Hierarchic Qualm?”

  “The sword kills,” Baru recited, trying to remember the Handbook of Manumission, its arguments for revolutionary zeal. “But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.”

  “Come,” the man who called himself Apparitor said. “Walk with me.”

  They went out and circled the evening harbor where the water murmured on copper and barnacle and quay-timbers and the evening light rusted the white merchant sails with hints of Navy red.

  Apparitor spoke:

  “What you did to the fiat note three years ago destroyed all our progress in Aurdwynn. We meant to use the province as a tax base for war against the Oriati federations. Now we take losses on Aurdwynn. Half of Parliament has been baying for your blood—and the rest demand the head of whoever installed a Taranoki girl as Imperial Accountant. They had great expectations for Aurdwynn, as a source of easy wealth and a shield against the Stakhieczi invading south across the Wintercrests. But with all the dukes free of their debt and the gold reserves bleeding back into the land, we’ve lost our hold.” He looked at her, the masts of a dromon at his back, its sailcloth a canvas for his exotic color (so pale…), and he smiled impishly. “But the question is, Baru Cormorant, did you destroy the fiat note in service of the Throne? Are you thus blameless?”

  “Parliament doesn’t understand Aurdwynn. I did what was necessary to preserve the Imperial Republic’s rule here.” She’d written no letters to Falcrest in defense of her policy. How could she? They would demand Xate Yawa’s corroboration to prove that Tain Hu had been using the prisons for forgery.

  Apparitor studied her with open interest, and she used the opening to study him in turn. He was young—not much older than she—and slight, but he moved with unhurried confidence and a kind of high-headed pride, a strange subtle cant of nobility. It vexed her, that carriage, because he spoke like Cairdine Farrier, but somehow in a distant way his motion rhymed with Tain Hu.

  He spoke again. “Parliament understands little except its own interest. But we understand Aurdwynn. That’s why we sent you here.”

  “You.” She’d spent so much of the last three years wondering about this. “You and Cairdine Farrier and Hesychast? The power behind the Masked Emperor on the Faceless Throne?”

  “There are others, too. We—we are the Throne. The…” He hunted for words, and Baru thought: this is not something he commonly explains. “The steering committee. We keep our eyes on the horizon while Parliament squabbles over the wealth of empire.” He made a gesture of self-deprecation. “Just a few philosophers and adventurers, delicately balanced, who happen to sign their position papers with the Emperor’s name. Held in careful, mutual check by our shared secrets.”

  “And you put me here? You were behind my placement exam, behind my appointment?”

  “Itinerant championed your potential as a savant. It has occurred to us—” He opened a hand to the distant Wintercrests marching across the horizon. “It has occurred to us that the saying is true. Aurdwynn cannot be ruled. The dukes are a useful way to keep the people in line. But the great problem with these dukes is that they are not all loyal to us, hmm? If a storm comes down on the Empire, some of them will cast their lot with us, and some with the enemy. If that enemy is a united Stakhieczi invasion, or a renascent Tu Maia empire out of the west, or the menace from across the Mother of Storms—well, we cannot risk division in a moment of crisis. So how to draw out the disloyal, we wondered? How to address the trouble of the dukes? How to purge Aurdwynn of its illness, before that illness sickens our Empire? We have a favorite method.”

  Baru understood at once, and the weight of it, the callous crushing sweep of what they were, took her breath away: this quiet committee hidden away in the bureaucracy, plotting out migrations and conquests, transfers of wealth or culture or plague across decades and leagues, with the cold assurance that it was all scientific, all properly Incrastic, that they understood best what prices would need to be paid.

  What price she would pay.

  “Civilization must endure,” the Apparitor said, as if reading her thoughts in her eyes. “At all costs, the Empire must survive. The lives our sanitation and discipline will save, the victories we will win against disease and disorder in the centuries to come—they justify any brutality. We must have control. Control by any means.”

  “I unders
tand what you want me to do,” she said, stunned by her own calm. Perhaps she had always known, since the moment in the cabin with Muire Lo when she had realized the power she had. “But what do I obtain from the bargain?”

  Apparitor clapped his hands. “Ah, now, that’s the good bit. Itinerant and the merit exams are in agreement, Baru Cormorant. You are a savant, a savant not merely at figures but at the understanding and the exercise of power. You are Taranoki, bred from the lineages of the Tu Maia, who ruled half the Ashen Sea, and Oriati Mbo, which produced the finest thinkers of the last millennium. The things you know in your blood are the key to understanding a piece of the world that has so far escaped our grasp. To understand is to master, and it is mastery we seek.”

  “You would make me—”

  “Do this thing for us, survive it, and yes.” The Apparitor’s face became abruptly solemn. “We will give you what you most desire. What you have craved since childhood.”

  She wanted to laugh, and call his bluff: This is what you offer me, in exchange for collapsing the fiat currency? Or, perhaps: why not let me rise through your bureaucracy, season and prove myself? You’re lying, lying to make me do this thing for you, to use me as an instrument, foreign-born and expendable.

  But she had known, these past three years, that she would never rise up through the bureaucracy. She had ruined too many with the inflation trick. Ruined herself.

  She remembered Cairdine Farrier’s favorite declamation, the value of merit and merit alone, and realized what he had been trying to prepare her for.

  “So.” The Apparitor straightened his neckerchief and smiled. “Will you execute the will of the Throne?”

  * * *

  THE next day she visited Census and Methods, the bones of Imperial power: ream upon ream of records cataloging everything valuable in Aurdwynn, stone and gold, salt and lumber, flesh and blood. Demographic projections of the available workforce. The tax base and the export rate. The relative concentration of Stakhi, Belthyc, and Maia blood.

  The department fell under Xate Yawa’s purview, and the Jurispotence’s eyes watched Baru as she worked, as they watched Baru on the street, in her tower, in the meetings of the Factors. She did not so much as dare to make eye contact with women here. Ffare Tanifel had been brought down on charges of licentiousness—an unacceptably overt fondness for men. Baru carried higher sins.

  She worked in silent, taut fury.

  She’d had enough. Enough of compliance. Enough of quietly playing her role. As far as Parliament was concerned, collapsing the fiat currency had marked her ineptitude not just on her permanent record but on her very heredity. Her dream of Falcrest, of telescopes and academies, of the Metademe or the Faculties or even Parliament itself, was dead. There might be recriminations against other Taranoki in the Imperial Service. They might even have punished Pinion and Solit.

  She would not save Taranoke by excelling as the Imperial Accountant. She would never be a technocrat or a scholar or a member of Parliament.

  But another way had opened.

  The power of the Imperial bureaucracy lay in its ability to quantify and understand the world, so that those quantities could be turned into the wise expenditure of money and armies, the optimal extraction of tax and treaty.

  Baru wanted to know how to quantify what the people of Aurdwynn thought about her.

  She combed the census riders, the simple poll questions the Governor—and sometimes the Imperial Accountant—could attach as a way to pretend to care about public opinion. Frowning in frustration, she read: census riders shall be reviewed and approved by authorized factors of the Governor.

  There was no way to get the information she wanted out of the next census without alerting Cattlson.

  She made a show of frustration in her exit. Later tonight, someone in the Jurispotence’s employ would read the report: Baru Cormorant displeased, as usual.

  At the Governor’s House, climbing through the many murmuring rooms of her tower, she hit on the solution to her census problem. “Muire Lo!” she called, sweeping past his deck. “My office!”

  They’d had three years to fall into a routine with each other, a routine that had to fit all the things he had been to her—nursemaid, guide, tailor, functionary, notebook, ineffective watcher—and all the things that she had done to him: his ongoing solitude, his cramped little quarters in the base of the tower, the ill-hidden discomfort that they both felt at his reports to a distant man in a distant city, the sharp dislike he had taken to the “unforgivably rude” Principal Factor Bel Latheman.

  “Your Excellence?” He closed her office door, for privacy, and made a theater out of pouring wine, chiming glass against glass. “Another bank run?”

  She went to him. “I want to add a little annex to this season’s common tax form,” she murmured in his ear. “It should tell the commoner that ten notes of their tax will be allocated among their local duke, Governor Cattlson, Jurispotence Xate, and myself, for use in our own personal projects. It’s up to them to decide how to split the ten.”

  “What possible reason could I give?” Muire Lo looked at her in bewilderment.

  “They’ll invent their own reasons, I’m sure. What’s important is that Cattlson has to approve the census rider—but he never reads the tax form.” She clapped him on the shoulder. “See to it.”

  “And shall I make arrangements for these ten-note distributions?”

  “Oh, no.” She went to the stairway door up to her quarters, pleased with herself. “No need for that. I just want their answers.”

  She would make a map of Aurdwynn’s loyalties. A map of the new road forward.

  * * *

  BARU sat at the window with her knees tucked under her chin and considered the city.

  If she did this thing, this would be the last moment of real peace she’d have for a long time—perhaps for the rest of her life, and no telling how long that would be. She’d been comfortable here, for all her failures, for all the currency she’d debased and merchants she’d ruined, all the letters from Duke Lyxaxu she’d left unanswered. She had a room in a high tower with a hot bath and a clever secretary. She could rise every day and set her eyes to the parchment, testing all her wit and learning against the unending disaster of Aurdwynn’s financial collapse.

  Had she been happy, all this time? Had the endless meetings of the Governing Factors, the men explaining her own job and policies to her in slow simple words, been a fair price for a taste of power? Had all the harborside nights, disguised in the dress of another woman with another homeland, another accent, another taste, been a delightful game, a proper challenge?

  Beneath her window, a squad of garrison soldiers made a sweep of the streets, masked and gloved, checking the beggars and petitioners for signs of plague. Xate Yawa maintained a sanitarium on the eastern edge of the city, outside the walls, where Masquerade doctors of the Morrow Ministry studied the effects of ailments foreign and domestic on Aurdwynn’s races. Some marked it as the finest experimental clinic on the Ashen Sea. Those with natural resistance would be bred widely—in this respect, men were preferred, as they could conceive more offspring in less time. Especially virulent carriers would, it was whispered, be whisked away on special ships to Oriati Mbo, where they could be released into the enemy’s cities in the event of war.

  You are part of this. Tain Hu’s voice, three years past, still close enough to make her shiver.

  Hadn’t she wanted to be able to change things, at the beginning? Hadn’t she looked at the red-sailed ship in Iriad harbor and begged mother Pinion to explain?

  But she’d had so long to learn since then—how could she forget all those lessons in Incrastic philosophy and directional history? She’d been made to understand that the Imperial Republic was a new and better mode of civilization, dictated by rational rules, rules that recognized the different and specialized abilities of the sexes and races, rules that could sniff out unhygienic behavior in the halls of power and the cribs and bedrooms of distant lan
ds, before that behavior could crawl into the hereditary line and derange the blood. The libraries of the Imperial Republic brimmed with enough knowledge to make the hundred thousand stars of Taranoke’s sky seem like a child’s scrawl, a dim wonder from a less masterful world. The Justices and Incrastic scholars had named more varieties and consequences of sin than the children of Taranoke could ever have imagined.

  How could she forget that? How could she weigh cousin Lao and Father Salm more heavily than the fate of nations?

  Surely that would be irrational. Surely it would be better to walk the narrow, safe path. To remain an Imperial Accountant, rather than daring everything on this incredible gambit.

  Her thoughts ran in cannibal circles. She rang for Muire Lo.

  “Your Excellence?”

  “If I want to change something,” she said, “but I don’t know what, exactly, or how—what is the logical way to proceed?”

  “Emperor Unane Atu Maia, The Dictates. In the absence of direction, claim and expand the freedom to act as you will.”

  “Good,” she said, reassured somehow that they were in accordance, that he would understand: get more power, so that you can remake the world. “As I thought. I need you to make me an unusual appointment.”

  She would go through with it, bind herself to this gambit, swallow this secret of secrets. This would be the first step down the new road.

  She would give up her place in the Accountant’s Tower, and take an awful chance.

  Muire Lo had given her the connection three years ago, when they’d expected revolt at any moment. Tain Hu’s late aunt was married to Xate Yawa’s brother, Xate Olake, the Phantom Duke of Lachta.

  The man who’d killed Su Olonori.

  “I need to speak to the Phantom Duke. To Xate Olake,” she said. “Wherever he is, find him and bring him to me.”

  Muire Lo looked at her in silence for a little while, bowed, and left.

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