The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “There’s money to be made.” Behind Ake’s deference, a spark of anger flared. “Do you understand the writs of hereditary hygiene?”

  “Those are the Jurispotence’s business, and the Charitable Service’s. Not mine.”

  “Here,” Ake said, “they are every woman’s business. They cannot be otherwise.”

  She explained how children of impermissible racial mixture were seized, how unlicensed marriages were punished by sterilization or (Baru’s stomach knotted) reparatory childbearing. “So you see? Mothers need Falcresti chemistry, or their bodies will be taken by Falcresti laws. The market—” Ake laughed harshly, shaking her head. “The market is rich for chemists.”

  Reparatory childbearing. Women confiscated and sown like repossessed earth. Baru had known about it, of course—she hadn’t dozed through all those meetings of the Governing Factors. But it was one thing to think on it, and another to confront it.

  And the policy would be implemented on Taranoke. Had been implemented, while Baru sheltered in her school.

  As they went they heard the laughter and the screams of children, but met none on the street. Baru didn’t need to ask why. The Charitable Service’s agents would come for clever children, and anyone could be one of those agents. She had seen the contracts herself: you will be rewarded for children of merit, and rewarded further based on their placement in the service exam in years to come.…

  Muire Lo must have been one of the first. A child promising enough to send on to Falcrest. Whoever had given him to the Masquerade must have been richly repaid.

  He’d never seemed eager to see his family again. Could they have—?

  “There will come a time,” Ake said softly, “when this city will not remember a time before the Masquerade. They will be in our language, and our homes, and our blood.”

  Baru’s ears rang with a strange memory: the sound of Aphalone spoken at the Iriad market, like a new verse in an old song.

  It’s not what the Masquerade does to you that you should fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It’s what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.

  There were other strange things to see in the slums. Falcresti families came here to hire wet nurses, so their children could drink immunity factors from a native breast—a shield, they hoped, against the bitter winters and the plagues that killed so many of their children. Some of them even sought illegal blessings from the ilykari. A whole industry of milk and blasphemy had risen here, complete with its own criminals, baby poisoners, mystic protection rackets that cursed households and demanded gold for the undoing. And other kinds of crime, too, guilds of yellow-jacketed plague survivors who cleared the dead and offered their very flesh as a cannibal inoculant. Graft and corruption and illicit love.

  None of it could be reduced to something as simple as invader and invaded.

  Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom.

  The liquor of empire, alluring and corrosive at once, saturating everything, every old division of sex and race and history, remaking it all with the promise and the threat of power.

  When the sun reddened and fell west, Ake Sentiamut took Baru’s wrist. Her deference had gone. “You’ve seen enough today. The duchess will meet you.”

  “We return to Oathsfire’s estate?”

  Ake smiled, as if at some joke Baru had unwittingly told. “Duchess Vultjag has never rested well under an Oathsfire roof. She will wait at my home.”

  It was one room in a narrow stone building. There were no accommodations for a husband. Tain Hu drowsed on a wooden bench, long and feline, and opened only one eye when Ake led Baru in. “You look like a painted gargoyle. What did you see?”

  “Hope,” Baru said.

  “Oh?”

  “The people can still see their shackles. The Masquerade rules them, but it has not yet made them want to be ruled. The chains are not yet invisible.”

  Tain Hu sat up. “You’ve thought on this a long time, haven’t you?”

  “The hope I see in your city is the hope I hold for all of Aurdwynn.”

  “Your people made this city. The real Aurdwynn is out there with the trees and the hawks. Not bound up here in this awful tangle.” She rolled to her feet. “Tell me what this city makes you want.”

  Here she could be honest. The truth worked to her advantage. “It makes me want to save my home from what has been done here.”

  “Save them? Even from the new sewers? From the inoculations and the futures contracts?” Tain Hu taunting, seeking for doubt. “Is that your endgame—roll back the years? Burn everything the Masquerade brought?”

  “No.” Baru stripped her gloves, finger by finger, considering her words carefully. “I want to steal their secrets. Make them our own. Turn them back against their makers.”

  Tain Hu went past her, to Ake Sentiamut. The Stakhi woman lowered her eyes, but it was Tain Hu who knelt.

  “Ake,” the duchess said. “You have given me enough. Go home.”

  “Your Grace, you will need me.”

  “I will need you in Vultjag. You have burnt enough of your life in this pit.” Tain Hu kissed Ake’s slender, translucent hand with regal courtesy. “Go back to the forest. The other Sentiamuts will welcome you. Nurse your strength, and I will call on you there.”

  Her lips curled as she rose and looked to Baru. “Perhaps I will come with a guest. Perhaps not.”

  * * *

  BARU came back to her bedroom in the Oathsfire house to hear two men speaking inside, their Aphalone accented, northern, hushed.

  “Vultjag’s had her ear too long. She’s been poisoned against me.”

  The second voice was softer, the accent less pronounced. A man of letters. “Then you will draw the poison out.”

  “I don’t have your charm.”

  “Or my wife, or my wit, or that, or this. You’ve spent too much of your life telling me what you don’t have, friend. Why not look to your strengths?”

  “A mountain of coin? Though Himu knows the Cormorant woman nearly poisoned that, too. What if I have no strengths she respects? What if Vultjag told her about my failed suit?”

  “Out,” Baru ordered, noticing their wolf-trimmed silks and half-capes too late. She halted, boots sliding on the ceramic tile, startled and unready. They were high nobility.

  “Certainly,” said the duke on the right, straightening from the doorframe—a rugged knoll of a man, bearded and armed, his eyes indiscreet but at least not lingering in their attention. “At once.”

  “But we’d be pleased to have your company when we go, Your Excellence.” The taller duke was a pale man with a narrow mouth, a mantle of red marten skin, and calm eyes. He had the smoother and more educated Aphalone. “Tain Hu is satisfied with your character. It’s time we invited you in.”

  “Oathsfire, Duke of Mills, at your service. I hope you’ve enjoyed my home in the city. I paid for it in spite of your best efforts.” The bearded man bowed deep. “Our leaders have called a convocation, and you’ll be the toast of it.”

  “The reason for it, too, I should say,” his redwood-tall companion added. “I am Lyxaxu, Duke High Stone, Vultjag’s westerly and more mannered neighbor. I hope Duchess Vultjag has been kind to you?”

  “She’s notoriously—” Oathsfire made a flapping bird wing with his hand. “Mercurial.”

  “Not about you, though.” Lyxaxu’s eyes sparkled.

  “No, she’s always been quite steady there—”

  Baru found them immediately exasperating, and resolved not to be charmed. “I need a few more weeks as loyal Imperial Accountant before I begin anything. Go tell your convocation to wait.”

  “Cattlson is hunting you. Dangerous to leave this waiting.” Lyxaxu peeled himself off the wall and checked his gloves for
bits of plaster. “Dangerous both spiritually and practically. The siblings Xate—”

  “—May we be spared forever from their attentions—”

  “—feel that it’s time to bind you to the rest of us.”

  “We’ve every reason to distrust you, you understand.”

  Lyxaxu frowned at his companion. “Are you really going to list them?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, go on, then.”

  Oathsfire rapped his knuckles against the wall, a slow martial beat. “Foreigner. Populist. Masquerade technocrat. Secretary a known Falcresti spy.”

  “Ruined me quite thoroughly,” Lyxaxu added, smiling wryly. “Even worse than Radaszic. I’d bought so much of that idiot paper…”

  “Hard assets, my friend. I really did advise hard assets.” Oathsfire reached up to clap him on the shoulder. “So, Your Excellence, you have the rare favor of our neighbor Vultjag, the thorn of the North. Come with us, and we’ll tie you into our great sedition.”

  “Wait, wait, old friend. Let’s not be shy about our purposes.” Lyxaxu stepped between Baru and his bearded comrade. “We’re here to speak to you before you go through with this. I know Vultjag must have mentioned us—our personal histories, perhaps, or our predatory attitude toward her little vale?”

  Baru crooked an eyebrow, taken aback by his directness. “She’s hardly mentioned either of you.”

  “Oh,” Lyxaxu said, his brow furrowed. “But she’s usually so—”

  “Plainspoken.”

  “I might call her tactless, even.”

  “You’re boring Her Excellence, old man.”

  “Ah. Yes.” Lyxaxu cleared his throat. “There’s a topic we want to broach. Seeing as you’re a woman—”

  “I concur, seems plain—”

  “Shut up, Your Grace. Your Excellence, I have daughters.” Lyxaxu straightened to his full height. “As does my friend here, in fact. I’m married for love, and he’s divorced for lack of it. We’ve no desire to see our children bound up in the Masquerade’s breeding plans. We’re not all occupied with hunting and honor like that idiot Heingyl, you understand? Some of us have a mind for philosophy, for children, for other such—”

  “Womanly things,” Baru enunciated, startled by her own iciness. Was she irritated by the way he’d brought it up, sidelong, like a shameful thing? By the possessiveness of it—we’d hate to see our women under their control?

  Oathsfire again: “What he’s dancing around, Your Excellence, is a certain argument we’ve had. What would it mean if Aurdwynn looked to a foreigner for its salvation? How could we reject all the Masquerade’s notions of heredity if we needed foreign blood to free ourselves?”

  She’d wondered this herself. Imagined some Oriati Prince liberating Taranoke, smearing himself in the volcanic earth like he’d been born to it. How would mother Pinion take that? “Some might say that Aurdwynn is a land of foreigners, a scar carved by invasion after invasion. Surely one more foreigner would make a fitting liberator.”

  “A fairer hand!” Lyxaxu cried, in imitation of the chanting crowd. “A hand too busy to answer all my letters, though.” He laughed. Baru, by student’s reflex, felt immediately contrite.

  Oathsfire did not join Lyxaxu’s laughter. His beard hid his mouth, but his expression spoke to marshaled will. “When this is done, this rebellion that you and Vultjag push us toward, we will be victorious or we will all be dead. If we are victorious, Aurdwynn will have to stand united. That will mean one ruler, set over all the dukes. That was how the Stakhieczi repelled the Tu Maia—one Necessity to unite the mansions. It’s how we’ll repel the Masquerade, when they come again.”

  Lyxaxu nodded solemnly. “One king. Or queen. This is the unspoken prize that preoccupies us all. Nayauru Dam-builder is closest, and hungriest to rule—she has gotten children on Autr and Sahaule, and if she can marry those heirs to Ihuake’s or produce a child from one of Ihuake’s sons, she may be able to usurp the Cattle Duchess, claim old Pinjagata, and unite five duchies under one throne. With her reservoirs and Ihuake’s herdlands at last combined, she would have enough good food to feed millions—enough to build a kingdom that might trouble even Falcrest. But we would stop her, you see? There lies the key.”

  “We’ve had centuries to build up our hates, after all. Decades to engrave our little squabbles in bone. When one of us rises, the rest grow jealous. A foreign-born queen, without stake in Aurdwynn’s grudges, might be the only one who could command us all.” Oathsfire looked to Lyxaxu, seeking some shared memory, a ghostly scar of troubles past, or an understanding of those yet to come. “The Midlands Alliance will break soon. Ihuake fears Nayauru’s fertility and ambition. In the North we have made our own mistakes. Lyxaxu here bickers with Erebog. Erebog has given her landlords too much power, and cannot wrest it back. And in my greed for land and stone I’ve found my hands full of Vultjag’s quills. We need someone to unite us.”

  Baru blinked at him. “You’re asking me to be queen of Aurdwynn. When we haven’t even started a rebellion.”

  “Nothing so hasty, really!”

  “We’re just suggesting possibilities you might pursue.” Oathsfire offered an open hand. “Offering our conditional support.”

  Lyxaxu cocked one eyebrow. “A foreign queen would profit from an Aurdwynni king. It’s indisputable.”

  “Shame he’s married.” Oathsfire chuckled. “I know he’s prettier.” He went past her, to the door, his boots clattering on the tile. “If you’ll come with us, Your Excellence, the convocation waits.”

  Baru caught tall Duke Lyxaxu’s eyes. “I read your letters,” she said. “All of them. I always meant to reply. But there was so little time—”

  “I understand.” He held up his hands. “Praxis must come before philosophy.”

  16

  THE rebellion in Aurdwynn began in a hidden temple, a place built of paper and oil and old faith.

  Baru dismounted the carriage into warm summer rain and followed the two dukes into a lamp workshop. The storerooms smelled of olive oil and clay. They walked between rolls of hemp and half-washed pottery kilns left to air in the dark. “Closed until the riots are over,” Lyxaxu explained. “Up these stairs, Your Excellence.”

  Some small sentinel in the back of Baru’s head ticked through a list of fears: a trap, a honeypot, Xate Yawa’s means of disposal, Cattlson’s revenge, a trick of the Cold Cellar—

  She wished for Muire Lo’s company, his shy pragmatism. She never should have taken him for granted.

  At the top of the stairs, a plump Belthyc woman in white who smelled pungently of onion guarded the door. Her smile was full of warmth. “Ykari Himu welcomes you,” she said, her Aphalone liquid but still clear. “This is a temple to the Three Virtues. You’re dressed richly, Your Excellence, and should therefore be careful, as the oil will stain.”

  The woman—an ilykari, surely, one of the outlawed priest-emulators of the Virtuous—unlocked the door with two small shining keys.

  Baru shivered at the cold, and at a stab of awe.

  The second floor of the workshop had been an office. The ilykari had knocked down the interior walls and made an airy space of white partitions and cedar poles, golden with lamplight cast through paper. Everything paper: the meditation cells, the little side rooms, the dividing walls that sectioned the space into small energetic arrows, as if demanding the visitor move somehow, act with vigor.

  It all reeked of olive oil. She stripped one glove off and touched the nearest cedar beam. Her finger came away slick.

  “So we can burn it in an instant,” the ilykari woman said, still smiling, “if they find us. Come.”

  In the central space, on a ring of mats, waited the other conspirators.

  Xate Yawa and Xate Olake, steel-gray hair and beard, Jurispotence and Phantom Duke side by side like two roosting doves. Tain Hu, in her riding costume, the longsword she’d used to defeat Cattlson scabbarded on the floor beside her. Another man in noble finery—Baru caught her breath
in pleased surprise. It was Unuxekome, the Sea Groom, the coastal duke who owned a full quarter of Aurdwynn’s privately held ships and yards, and was furthermore rumored to be a financier of pirates. He looked back and smiled.

  No one spoke. Behind Xate Yawa, a small trickle of water ran down a waxed paper chute and into a silver bowl. Baru knelt on a mat as Oathsfire and Lyxaxu took the positions beside her.

  The weight of the risk here pressed the breath from her lungs. Everyone gathered in one place, under Xate Yawa’s eyes—and in an ilykari temple, at that. It would take only one whisper to set the garrison on them …

  Perhaps that was why they had done it. All the conspirators bound together under the imminence of ruin.

  The ilykari priestess went to sit in the center of the circle, sandaled feet whispering. She carried a small pot of ink and a palimpsest in a cedar frame, stretched taut by cord. “In our silence we exemplify Wydd, who gives us patience to endure. In our will to act we exemplify Himu, who drives us to war. In acting now, when the time has come, we exemplify Devena, the middle course, who tempers these extremes.”

  Baru caught Xate Yawa shifting in subtle impatience, her lips drawn down. She hadn’t thought the time had come, had she? She wouldn’t be here at all, given her way. But her accomplice Tain Hu had acted, and she had been drawn along.

  Surely she was too old and canny to go in without a fallback.…

  “I will read now from the missives I have been given, anonymous and unsigned.” The priestess lifted the palimpsest and Baru saw old Iolynic characters, columned and incomprehensible. She spoke with apparently infinite calm. “Let me serve as a conduit for the fears and hopes of all those gathered, that we may hear what they cannot voice. This they have written:

  “I fear this Taranoki woman is an instrument of the Masquerade. I fear the people’s love for Baru Cormorant may outstrip their loyalty to us. I fear we will not have the strength to overcome the Masquerade, even with her. I fear we will fail to act, and that the opportunity will never come again. I fear her youth and rashness.”