The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Tain Hu’s jaw moved in a kind of scowl, drawing up her ferocity over whatever else she felt. “My lord,” she said, and was silent for a little while.

  In the strength of her grip Baru felt all the gratitude Tain Hu couldn’t voice.

  Baru could have let the silence go on forever. But after a moment Tain Hu spoke again: “Not Xate Olake. He was the finest of spymasters in Treatymont, but his network is compromised and he needs rest. Not Oathsfire—he has no talent for subtlety. Lyxaxu might arrange it, but he…”

  “Philosophy might impede him.”

  “Yes. An idealist. Erebog terrifies me—so I think the best choice must be Unuxekome.”

  “His ilykari?”

  “Yes.” Tain Hu dared a little smile. “They are accustomed to moving in secret. Certainly they have kept my confidences before—and perhaps yours, too; is it true you called Ulyu Xe to your tent for company?”

  “The diver? I didn’t ask her name.”

  Tain Hu punched her in the shoulder. “You devil.”

  “No!” Baru floundered. “I don’t mean—I called her for counsel, not—”

  “Keep your secrets, my lord.” Tain Hu’s smile passed. “Unuxekome is the best choice. But be very careful.”

  On the way out of the tent, Baru paused and looked back. “I know you could do it,” she said, out of some terrible, unwise loyalty. “I do not doubt your ability, Your Grace.”

  The duchess bowed low, her armor sealed up again, her face wry. “Trust me to know when the best thing I can do for my lord is nothing.”

  * * *

  THE Sea Groom’s guardsmen opened the way for her, murmuring in Iolynic and Urun: justice, justice, the fairer hand. She found him alone at his breakfast, bundled against the morning chill. “I need to ask something of you.”

  He looked up from his maps and papers, smiling out of a troubled frown. “Anything,” he said, not insincerely. “It’s been too long since one of your plans nearly killed me. What can I do?”

  She explained what Xate Olake had discovered, why Nayauru and her consorts would be their undoing, and what she’d decided to do about it. Unuxekome listened, nodding occasionally, pursing his lips once. “You will be told that this is not the Aurdwynni way,” he said, once she’d finished. “That it violates ancient codes of noble conduct. Well, I lived the Fools’ Rebellion, and I saw the worth of noble conduct in times of civil war. All the mortar in Aurdwynn reeks of blood.”

  How differently he reacted than Tain Hu. “You can arrange it, then?”

  “I can, and I will. And if you’ll permit it, I’ll ask for something in return.”

  She grinned, not displeased by his forwardness. “Try me.”

  “I’ll arrange the killing.” Unuxekome put his bread and wine aside and leaned forward, wrists crossed in his lap. “And when it’s done, I want you to come south with me, to Welthony.”

  Ah.

  She’d expected this, in a sort of distant, intellectual way, though perhaps from Oathsfire. Unuxekome had asked her why she wanted to rebel, had said: my maps say Taranoke. He had always been kind and respectful and patient. But he was still a duke, with a mind for power.

  Maybe he had found a story that ended with something he wanted more than a ship on wild sea.

  “Wait, wait. Let me make my case.” He held up his hands. The rope burns around his wrists had faded into a bracelet of scars. “Of course it’s a selfish request. We’re all thinking of the endgame, of who will be king. But your talents lie in administration, and you’ll govern better with access to my ships. A husband and children will legitimize you.” His eyelids flickered, lips quirked, a rogue’s expression, a who-me? play at innocence. “I think it’s the rational decision, Your Excellence. But I’m no accountant.”

  What secret had he given the ilykari priestess in the temple of oil and light? What truth could destroy him?

  Why had her thoughts leapt right there? He was a duke. This was a matter of politics. Not an attack. Not from his perspective, at least.

  Unuxekome watched her with calm confident eyes. She wanted to refuse outright, driven by that same instinctive sense, old as her friendship with Aminata (oh, Aminata—would she have heard, by now, of the traitor Baru Cormorant?) that her body would not be a political instrument.

  Driven, also—and how secondary she had allowed this to become!—by the knowledge that this was not something she wanted. Not someone she wanted.

  But she needed Unuxekome.

  Until this conversation, she’d thought of him more as friend than an instrument. Dangerous. Stupid. Foolish—the test was so close. But if she rejected him, if she seemed intent on giving her hand to someone else, how would he react? Oathsfire had been Vultjag’s rival for years after just such a rejection … and Baru could afford no mistakes, no errant pieces, no matter how gallant and good.

  She would have to be more and more ruthless as the end approached.

  Baru smiled, eyes a little hooded, voice a little low. “You’ll understand, I hope, if I hear the other offers. Take some time to consider.”

  “I’d expect nothing less.”

  She should make a joke. Laugh throatily. Lift her chin or hold his gaze, to say: keep your hopes high.

  “I want them all dead,” she said. “I want it done tonight.”

  25

  NAYAURU ruled the second day of council.

  Baru made no effort to defeat her; perhaps she couldn’t have, even if she’d summoned all her faculties. With Autr and Sahaule guarding her rhetorical flanks, the Dam-builder made a powerful and articulate case that the Masquerade could not be defeated, that Treatymont’s patient silence had to be read as mercy—a chance for the rebel dukes to repent and commit to the one course that would earn them clemency.

  That course, naturally, was turning Baru Fisher over to Xate Yawa and Cattlson.

  Even knowing what was to come, Baru could not resist one last plea. “Why do you hold to your loyalty when they see your couplings as anathema?” She marked Autr and Sahaule with a gesture, but her eyes were all for Nayauru, for the young woman who could—by appearance, or ambition, or will—have been her kin. “Incrasticism would dictate the fathers of your children and the future of your line. Why hold to this loyalty?”

  “Because the Masquerade will remain whether I am loyal or not.” Her anger at the Army of the Coyote seemed genuine, fierce, and it colored every word she spoke. “I have other ways to fight. Methods with a chance of success. No one in the world has any hope of tearing Falcrest down from outside its walls. Even if we win, even if we drive them into the sea, they will return with honey and with wrath. We would be stronger within them, learning how to make our protests heard.”

  Nayauru’s resemblance to mother Pinion went no deeper than her choice of partners, two men who were nothing like Salm and Solit, nothing at all. This was a terrible thought, and more terrible still was the defense Baru found herself deploying—the proof of strict limited inheritance, one mother, one father, and it made her ill to take comfort from it, but she could not stop.…

  She lapsed back into silence and watched Nayauru, thinking: you are proud and fierce, and noble, and that will be the end of you. I have found your blindness, as you found mine, and it is the same, it is the power of blood.

  You are noble and I am not. I am unbound by noble law. We respect each other, now, and so you will not believe I am capable of this.

  But I am.

  Outside, in Haraerod, in the camps and longhouses, the ilykari passed the word, to the siege engineers, the longbowmen, the riders. On out into the forest, where the waiting Coyote roused itself and began to circle.

  Slaughter them tonight.

  The council broke.

  Baru left the chamber with singing nerves and a dry throat. Guards waited with horses for Baru and Tain Hu. She rode through Haraerod’s pitted streets, clumsy and unsure on horseback, heading for her camp.

  Twice Tain Hu signaled: first that they should break from the road an
d enter the forest, and second that they should summon more guards, perhaps Dziransi’s jagata with their shining plate and long reach. Each time Baru shook her head. Nothing could be permitted to seem out of the ordinary.

  She hadn’t even made eye contact with Unuxekome during the council. The time and shape of the massacre was up to him.

  Ake Sentiamut came out of the Coyote camp to meet them. “Riders came for you. The Duchess Nayauru requests an urgent audience. They’re waiting to convey your response.”

  Baru thought, in Aminata’s voice: oh fuck. “Of course. Inform them that I’ll meet with the duchess back at the Hill House.”

  “You can’t go.” Tain Hu seized her shoulder, gloves ringing on mail. “Where is all your calculation? Think of the risk.”

  “She’s probing for a trap herself.” Baru looked down the valley, across the spangle of Haraerod proper, to the distant firelights of Nayauru’s camp. Tain Hu’s touch was a trouble and a comfort all at once. “If I refuse, she’ll know what’s coming.”

  “Then lie. Send word you’re on your way, and make for the woods.”

  “She did not come so far through foolishness. No, I imagine we’re being watched.” She took a breath against the pounding of her heart. In the west, the sun had just begun to set. “But you’re right—this is dangerous ground. Find Xate Olake. Ask his advice.”

  Tain Hu returned at a hasty gallop, reining her white charger to a noisy stop. “He knows a man who he says can see any treachery. A Stakhi woodsman who saved his life. He’s sent the man ahead to the council house as a sentinel.”

  “Good.” Baru coaxed her mare back toward the Haraerod road. “Let’s go.”

  “Keep the camp quiet,” she called to Ake. “The usual vigilance. I expect no alarm tonight.”

  * * *

  TOWNSPEOPLE with scurvy-red eyes and wary faces, bent over the last work of the day, watched Baru, Tain Hu, and their guards come back in to council. In the dying rustle of near-dark their hoofbeats seemed profane, disruptive.

  Somewhere out there, Unuxekome’s plan loped toward the smell of blood.

  They came to the cobbled square, the council house, its windows full of lamplight. Tain Hu chose two of her riders. “Go ahead. Look for treachery.”

  Baru, itching and uncomfortable on her cantankerous mount, imagining all the ways Unuxekome could fail, chewed a bloody flap off the inside her cheek.

  “Easy,” Tain Hu murmured. “The spear is cast. Let it fly.” Baru nodded slowly, counting her breaths, and spared Tain Hu a grateful glance. The duchess touched her shoulder in reassurance.

  The report came—nothing amiss. Nayauru and her honor guard waited inside the house. There was no sign of Xate Olake’s man.

  “Let me go in your place,” Tain Hu said. “Let me spring the trap.”

  “You?” Baru stuck her jaw out, scowling a serious Vultjag scowl, and rolled her shoulders in mockery. “Who’d ever mistake you for me?”

  Tain Hu’s grin passed in a blink. “Be serious. She’ll take your life.”

  “She’s marked me as an equal. She won’t resort to treachery.”

  “You don’t know that.” Vultjag’s voice dropped. “I vowed to die for you—don’t make a liar of me.”

  Baru inhaled deeply, remembering dinner on the River House’s balcony in Welthony, waiting for the harbor to begin exploding. She had done this before, and survived. “We go together. Ride with me.”

  They crossed the square in the rising dark. Great black clouds moved to the west, shadowing the sunset.

  Movement flickered in the Hill House. Dark shapes occluded the lamplight—a sudden agitation of shadow, an eruption of violent incomprehensible angles. As if a caldera god had come up out of the earth armed with ash and obsidian. Baru froze, expecting bowmen in the windows, from the rooftops, or the detonation of Oriati explosives buried beneath the square, or quicklime to blind and burn—

  The doors of the longhouse opened. Duchess Nayauru stood in a wedge of lamplight, her billowing dress soaked in luminance.

  When, Unuxekome? When?

  The Dam-builder stepped forward into the square. Light fell across her face, her proud Maia nose, her oiled hair, across the bubbles of white froth that sputtered and popped on her lips and beneath her nose.

  Whatever she meant to say, fury or hate or regret, came out as a gurgle. Her last breath left wet and desperate.

  She fell facedown onto the cobblestones. The crunch of bone carried.

  “What?” Tain Hu murmured, as the Vultjag guards cried out to each other. “What?”

  Through the open doors Baru saw the council chamber, the circled chairs and the eleven glorious banners. Full of corpses in Nayauru’s colors. They had died in agony, clawing at each other, trying to get to the doors.

  Looking at the fallen woman, at the noble dream dead on the paving stones, she felt not the littlest triumph.

  Tain Hu hissed in warning.

  Out of the massacre walked a man, a wet rag wrapped around his face, his hair long and brilliant red. (Could it be—!? No, no, not here, not him—) He wore filthy woodsman’s garb and walked with a hunched, painful gait, folded up around his chest.

  “Xate Olake’s woodsman,” Baru guessed, raising a hand to hold back the guards.

  Tain Hu’s voice, tight with alarm: “What happened here?”

  The agony of the dead said they’d been killed by gas, the kind of war-poison whispered of in stories about Falcrest’s Metademe. But how would a Stakhi woodsman arm himself with a weapon so—

  A Stakhi man? Could it be?

  No. Surely not.

  The man loped away from the council house with eerie smooth steps. Baru shivered in some kind of corporeal recognition. It was not who she’d thought, not at all.

  But—

  He unwrapped the rag from his face (it came away sticky, rank with chemicals) and took a slow breath. Lifted pale features, skin reddened by a terrible acid burn, toward the fading sun.

  Tiny precise muscles moved in his neck.

  He looked to Baru.

  “The Fairer Hand,” he said in Stakhi, and then, in heavily accented Aphalone, a perfect counterfeit: “The work is done. Tell Xate Olake I did not fail him.”

  He coughed wetly and touched his chest, where the crossbow bolt had wounded him and sent him into the river.

  “Who is this?” Tain Hu asked. It had grown dark enough to see the fires that ringed Haraerod behind her, towers of dirty light to the west and southwest, where Nayauru and her allies had camped.

  Baru stared in paralyzed silence at the Clarified remora, at Purity Cartone.

  * * *

  THE ilykari killed Nayauru’s allies with their own horses.

  Disguised as maidservants and laborers from Haraerod, the ilykari passed unchallenged through the Nayauru bloc’s camp and the forests beyond. A phantom army buried in the social context, marking sentries, passing messages in the careful steganography of the persecuted.

  At their direction Oathsfire’s siege engineers moved into the woods to the southwest and the town to the northeast. Began to set firebreaks with quicklime, naphtha, and oils.

  Smoke would start the bloodbath. Poison would seal it.

  Nayauru’s forces had brought warhorses: a show of strength, and a weapon of deterrence, mighty in battle. They needed to be fed.

  While the dukes sat in council, the ilykari poisoned the warhorses’ feed.

  Just before sundown, the Sea Groom signaled and the word went out. Engineers set torch to oil.

  When the fires began, when the wet forest smoke and furious heat of the burning Haraerod outskirts rolled down on Nayauru’s camp, the sick frightened warhorses broke discipline and bolted, first in clusters, then a stampede, trampling and whinnying, shitting in diarrhetic clots. Chaos erupted, a roaring stinking mess of collapsing tents.

  Autr Brinesalt heard the uproar and knew why his gut had been knotted in dread all day. Sahaule Horsebane heard the alarm and, before any other thought,
wished that he had taken a moment more to hold Nayauru and whisper his love.

  From the forests, from the Haraerod rooftops, Duke Oathsfire’s ten companies of elite longbowmen opened fire.

  Nayauru’s dukes had not been complacent. Duke Autr’s own engineers and scouts, able and alert, had spent two days proofing their camp against fire. Sahaule boasted men of extraordinary discipline. But their sentries had been deployed too widely, hunting for the Coyote in the woods. Their best spies had gone to the rebel camps or into Ihuake’s court to listen for treachery, and so missed the ilykari entirely.

  Nayauru had counseled her consorts and advisors to expect betrayal.

  They had looked for the signs. Drilled the troops. Arranged their pickets. Against the cunning of the ilykari, who had sent Falcrest’s riches to the bottom of Welthony harbor, their vigilance failed them.

  Sahaule’s loyalty cost him his life. He gathered his guard and rode for the Hill House, hoping to save Duchess Nayauru. Oathsfire’s bowmen spotted his column and devastated it. Sahaule crawled out from under his dead horse and made it nearly half a mile on foot, staggering forward, cursing the name he bore and the vengeance it had earned him, before a certain vengeful Ihuake levy found him.

  What happened between them was the end of a different story.

  Mighty Duke Autr went out into the chaos to rally his camp. An ilykari slipped close to strike at him, met the Salt Duke’s spymaster, and lost the duel of blade and poison. Autr used drums and trumpets to pass the word—march northwest, rally on the Belt Road.

  He might have rallied a retreat. He might have calmed the chaos.

  But Lyxaxu’s howling Student-Berserkers entered his camp and began to rope themselves in the entrails of disemboweled men and horses. Somewhere in the whirlwind, Autr’s spymaster bled to death from her knife wounds and a second ilykari, still shadowing the Salt Duke, avenged her mother.

  Autr Brinesalt died calling out to his orphaned son.

  Trapped between two fires, choking on smoke, leaderless and dismounted, the Western Midlands forces tried to flee on foot, and found themselves impaled on one last treason.