The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  * * *

  THE warleaders gathered on the Henge Hill at sundown. Duke Oathsfire, bereft, looked on with hollow joyless eyes, and the others left an empty space beside him where his friend would have stood. “How?” he had asked, pleading. “Why? He was so wise. He had no reason.…”

  But in spite of all his grief, in spite of Pinjagata’s rasping lung-burnt coughs, they stood in circled council heady with the same joy that drummed the Sieroch around them. Cattlson and Heingyl were dead. Falcrest was very far away. Treatymont would fall. The common people of Aurdwynn rose in love of Baru Fisher and her gifts of coin and grain, her loping lean Coyote, her triumphant red-jawed Wolf.

  Baru stood at the highest part of the circle, balanced on the tumbled stone of the ancient henge, sweat-soaked, exhausted, her boots worn, her gloves frayed. All eyes on her, but for Vultjag, looking out across the battle plain, her broadcloth cloak wrapped at shoulder and hip against the cold.

  “The Fairer Hand will be acclaimed queen,” Xate Olake said. His beard had suffered terribly in the battle and now he looked a little motley. “Can there be any question?”

  “My landlords spend her coin,” Ihuake said. She had given up her riding gear for ducal finery and rich rings, not out of any practical need, perhaps as a silent scream of joy. “I cannot deny the power of that claim. And I think she will rule well.”

  “Aye,” Pinjagata rasped. “My people sing her name. She could give us peace.” At that thought he smiled, and for a moment his breath seemed easier.

  “Who then will be king? There must be a dynasty to unite Aurdwynn.” Xate Olake opened his hands and turned to her. “I think it best to look beyond our borders. Will it be the Stakhi king? Or some Oriati man, whatever royalty they maintain?”

  Ihuake lifted her chin, thinking, certainly, of her son. Pinjagata covered a long, dry cough. The question roused not a flicker of interest in Oathsfire’s hollow, distant eyes.

  Baru stood above them all on the toppled henge stone, like a premonition of a throne.

  Who, then, will be king?

  She could have lasted a little longer. Seen it through to the end, and saved herself. But today was for defeats, for triumphs, for great efforts to come to victory or ruin, and she did not have the strength.

  Baru let the truth fall.

  “I called on one sword,” she said. “When offered the quiver, I always chose the same arrow. I put the harshest weight on a single back. And she has carried us here. She has raised us up. She is worth a legion to me.”

  She knelt on the fallen henge stone. Lowered her hand in offering.

  Tain Hu, eyes afire in the twilight, reached up and took her wrist. Drew herself up onto the stone to stand at Baru’s side. The wind caught her cloak and whipped it once, a soft utterance, before she drew it still—a sharp, sure motion, like a pull on the reins.

  They stood together, Baru breathless, giddy, the hero of Sieroch a warmth against her side, a dry murmur in her ear:

  “I had dared to hope.”

  Silence in the circle.

  “What does this mean?” Oathsfire asked.

  “It means,” Xate Olake said, “that we know why she rebelled.”

  Pinjagata squinted. “I don’t see the dynasty. Less I’ve made a mistake.” His voice roughened with a kind of wry affection. “You never did tell me if you were a man.…”

  “We should go,” Oathsfire uttered, voice thick. “She has chosen. Leave them to their council.”

  Unspoken, there: and leave us to ours.

  “She is our queen,” Xate Olake insisted. “There are still ways for her to bear. This is no disaster.”

  “Quiet, Lachta,” Ihuake said. There was a thickness in her voice, though it was not anger. It might be gladness, even, for she smiled. “Our questions will wait for tomorrow. For now, let them be.”

  The dukes turned away, leaving Dziransi standing, befuddled, until Pinjagata took his wrist and drew him off down the hill. He looked back at Baru in enormous confusion. Behind him she heard Ihuake laugh in unfettered delight.

  Now they stood alone on the high hill and the sea wind cried between the ancient henge stones in the dying light.

  “Imuira,” Tain Hu whispered, an Urun word, a breath under the rising wind. Her voice trembled with things left long unsaid. “Kuye lam.”

  Those words Baru knew. They were the same in Urunoki, on her childhood home.

  She touched Hu’s shoulders, her high cheekbones, hesitant, conditioned, trembling against more than a decade of fear and repression and rigid self-control. Her skin felt transparent, burned raw. A sudden gust made her shiver.

  Tain Hu’s eyes were wide and close and utterly aware. She had been chewing anise and smyrnium. Baru could smell it, clean, sharp.

  Fuck them, Baru thought. Fuck them. They can all burn. I will destroy myself if I choose.

  On this one day I will not deny what I am.

  “Forgive me,” she said. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “Such an ascetic.” Tain Hu chuckled warmly, and in that warmth Baru heard the life she had never had, would never reach. “Fear not. I am practiced.”

  “So many conquests,” Baru said, trying to tease. But Tain Hu did not let her finish the sentence.

  30

  SHE stood on the peak of Taranoke with mother Pinion at her side. The island of her childhood—plots of sugarcane and black coffee, black beaches. Sea the color of deep sky lapping at the coral. The smell of iron salt and cooked pineapple. Endless stars.

  Taranoke had its own politics, its own trade, its diseases and dismays. But to a child it had seemed perfect and solitary and whole.

  Empire came on tempest wind.

  The harbor choked with red sails. The forests fell and rose again, incarnated in tarred hull, incarcerated in main and mizzenmast. Plague swept the mountain and the plains and they tumbled the mingled dead into the caldera. Children slept in tufa schools, learning to love and marry by a foreign creed, laboring in the shipyards, socialized federati, class one, no distinctions.

  The masks killed husbands with fire-stoked iron, and the screams were a reminder: the old ways were not hygienic.

  “How grateful we must be,” her mother said, that childhood voice, that vein of utter unquestioned truth. “To have soap and sanitation. To watch our children survive and grow and learn all the names of sin. How fulfilling our lives must be, now that we labor for a greater purpose. Did you know that we died of tooth abscess, child? It was very nearly the foremost cause of death. How grateful we must be for dentists.”

  Baru watched it all and with an accountant’s mind made a table of the credits and the debits, a double-entry ledger, hot iron for the sodomites against soap and dentists and a greater purpose.

  Pinion took off her smiling mother-mask and revealed herself as Cairdine Farrier, the jovial merchant, the portent with an engine in his eyes. “You had a question for me,” he said, as in the distance the waves began to freeze, became steel and porcelain, a web, a road, a sluiceway that ran with blood and molten gold. From Taranoke east to the heart of things. “About the nature and exercise of power.”

  Cause and effect. Credit and debit. The world bound together, one system, one constellation. But she could not see the shape of it. She did not have the master book: second cousin Lao carried it away from her on a road of gloved hands.

  “We have all the answers in Falcrest,” Cairdine Farrier assured her. “Everything has been cataloged and assigned its rightful place.”

  “Even the rebellions,” Baru said. “Even the rebels.”

  He lifted to his face a white porcelain mask blank of all expression and she knew his name was Itinerant. “We will extend our control,” he said. “When the work is complete, when our hegemony is total, no one and nothing will act without our consent. By volition will be a synonym for by decree. The law of the Empire will live within every soul and cell. There will be no more pain or waste. Only harmony.”

  “What if Aurdwynn broke
free?” She wanted to taunt him but she was full of gears and she could only offer it as a premise, an orphaned shard of logic, a rhetorical device deployed to enable a crushing rejoinder. “What if they could not be ruled?”

  The mask looked on her with empty idiot eyes and drool puddled beneath its chin. The Emperor on the Faceless Throne.

  “They have only the strength of rebels,” he said, and his voice was a chorus. “Only conviction and ferocity and animal outrage. We have all the might of empire, virtues of coin and persistence and size, sinews of record and law and conscription and industry. Our strengths are of a higher order. We will return. We will buy them out and breed them down and lure them with joy and Aurdwynn, too, will wear the mask.”

  Fire smoldered in the Taranoke caldera as its people married flat-nosed foreigners or marched down to the ships to labor and fight abroad.

  The mask said: “We always win in the end. We own the future.”

  “I knew this,” Baru whispered.

  Red rowan-fruit hair curled out from behind the porcelain. “You knew it from the start. In the long run, Aurdwynn would be ruled.”

  Ashy smoke made her hoarse, made the words falter in a burning throat. “And what pointless waste, those cycles of revolt and reconquest. What blood and labor would be squandered in decades to come. How much more merciful to find a shorter way. A sooner peace.”

  “A higher purpose,” the mask said, in one voice now, a mocking harborside voice, the voice of the man called Apparitor. “So you became a special instrument, for an exalted design.”

  I will know the secrets of power, she told herself, clinging to that pillar. Knowledge is control. I will turn that power to my own use and I will save my home.

  It has all been for Taranoke.

  She found that in the dream, at last, she could weep.

  * * *

  WARMTH.

  She tried not to take it apart.

  Warmth around her. The tent. The furs.

  Stop, she thought. Go back. Sleep. Don’t think.

  Warmth in the circle of her arms. Pressed beneath her chin. Warmth in her heart.

  “Mm,” Tain Hu said. “Hello. Your Excellence.” The contented slits of her eyes closed again. The weight of her body had made Baru’s left arm numb. She turned a little, so that they would fit together more perfectly, and pressed her nose and lips into the join of Baru’s neck and jaw. Her breath went out in a long sigh.

  For one more moment: bliss.

  And the engines woke, the scalpels and the geared schemes, peeling the now apart into what had been and what would come, a vivisectionist drawing out organs of consequence, smooth dripping links of plan and outcome and risk and catastrophe.

  The accountant waking inside the woman.

  Remembering her test.

  Baru Fisher set her chin on the smooth cap of her lover’s head and howled in silent grief.

  There was no way out. The conditions had been set, the mechanisms primed, in distant cities, on docksides, in plotting-rooms, a covenant written in ink, in coin, in blood. This was the endgame.

  There was no way out.

  * * *

  HOW long had she—?

  There was power in Tain Hu. In her axe-carrying armor-bearing brawn, in her voice of edict and defiance. Even, by the rules of aristocracy, power in her blood.

  What else would Baru ever desire? (And she had desired, base forbidden carnal want, in the ballroom, in the forest, from the very first glimpse.) What more could Baru find in her but that strength, that power?

  Much more, it seemed. There was so much more to Tain Hu. So much left to be discovered. An inner sky, constellations barely hinted at, waiting to be mapped.

  Tain Hu slept in open-lipped repose, her beauty not the permitted beauty, not the mother-fat of Urun carving or the purebred architectures of Falcresti art. A woman and a fighter and a lord, a nation alone.

  So much more to know. The accounting could go on forever.

  But time had run out.

  * * *

  HOW to draw out the disloyal, we wondered?

  She dressed in linen and long tabard and trousers, buckled on Aminata’s boarding saber, and went out into the morning cold. The guard around Duchess Vultjag’s tent had been posted wide. All familiar faces, Tain Hu’s favorite armsmen from home. Discreetly inattentive.

  Baru went through them, face averted, and up the slope to the place where the porters had brought her baggage. Found the ceremonial purse. Chained it to her side.

  We have a favorite method.

  She walked through the morning fires and the half-naked fighters hunting themselves for ticks, the smell of curries and coffee, the intersecting songs of Iolynic and Urun and two kinds of Stakhi. The men and women she had brought to Sieroch, in her own name.

  She had made the Wolf—knowing all the while how it would end—

  “Xate Olake,” she called.

  The old spymaster rose from his fireside, propped on the shoulder of an herbalist. “Your Excellence?”

  “I have a task for you. A hard thing.”

  Was that sorrow in his bright jungle-crow eyes? Did he think he understood?

  What she tried to tell herself was: when this is finished, I will remake the world so that no woman will ever have to do this again.

  But in her heart she felt the pain like a swallowed razor, like glass dust in her cup.

  “Go to the camp of the Vultjag fighters,” she said. “Bring horses and a few men you trust—Dziransi and some of his jagata. Tell the duchess Vultjag that I have stripped her of her station. Tell her that today I cast her out.”

  Xate Olake waited, drawn and weary, ready to execute the orders of the queen he had helped to make.

  “Take her north under guard. Tell her to ride onward until the Wintercrests swallow her. Tell her that if she ever returns to Aurdwynn, she will face death.”

  “There must be a dynasty,” Xate Olake said, with a terrible understanding, a sympathy utterly misplaced. He had spent so long moving the pieces, striking down any threat. He thought he understood. “Even at such great cost.”

  We will give you what you most desire. What you have craved since childhoood.

  And as Baru walked away, Xate Olake said one more thing, a perfect, unintended blow: “I’m sorry she made this necessary.”

  * * *

  AND that was that. The time was now, the terms exact, the bargain perfectly clear. She’d faced it, accepted it. She’d said: I understand what you want me to do.

  Even now the rest of the clockwork would be striking the hour: now now now.

  No reason to hesitate.

  Baru put her face against her horse’s flank and bristled her face, her eyes, with the hair and the stink, trying to weep again, to break open and run into the grass like pus. Nothing would come. Her heart had clotted.

  I have committed a terrible crime. So terrible that I feel I can do anything, commit any sin, betray any trust, because no matter what ruin I make of myself, it cannot be worse than what I have already done.

  And here it was. The crime had been committed long ago. This was only the reckoning.

  She had said to the pearl-diver priestess: it has all been for Taranoke.

  Baru saddled her rouncey and rode it east under no banner, out through the camp, unrecognized, unlooked-for, the drums of the morning call-to-march drawing groggy protests around her. She wore woodsman’s gear, to hide from attention, and a helm, to hide her face. The bargain had never set an exact place or time—only conditions for the ending, a qualm broken, a victory won. And then a plan for extraction: get clear, and trust us to be ready.…

  Without any outward sign or motion, in the wreckage of herself, she donned her armor, made it firm around her heart. Raised her mask: a cold discipline, a steel beneath her skin.

  Grow comfortable, she told herself. It will never come off.

  Baru, you fool. You arrogant, callous monster. You should have stopped this. Somehow.

  On the eas
tern edge of camp a Stakhi man with long red hair waited on horseback, a grief-knotted neckerchief bright above his coat. The man who had come to her harborside and said:

  Do you know the Hierarchic Qualm?

  “It is time,” he said. “Now, at the moment of victory, when we can be sure that even the most cautious traitors are unmasked.” He grinned, a thrill of danger or victory or bloodlust. “You did well, bringing them to Sieroch, arranging a tidy victory. You did well.”

  “Stop!” Baru screamed at him. “Undo it! I changed my mind!” And in her fury she rode on him, beheaded him, trampled his corpse; turned back into camp and raised—

  She did none of that. It would save nothing. The alarm might, in the short run. But the short run hardly mattered.

  Her silent regard must have troubled him, for after a moment, the man named Apparitor looked away. The ghost that crossed his face might have been sympathy. “Come,” he said. “I arranged the rest of it. The jaws are closing. We should be well clear.”

  Baru began to twist in her saddle, to look behind her, but Apparitor’s hiss seized her and made her still. “No! Don’t look back.” His eyes were not as hard as his voice. “There is nothing behind you. You understand? Everything lies ahead now.”

  Together they rode east, through the sentries. Out across the Sieroch and toward the great roaring Inirein, the Bleed of Light, where the Wolf would march to meet the marines they expected, the marines who would never come.

  For a while they passed in silence except for morning birdsong and the sound of water against rich earth. Baru closed her eyes, wiped away the world, and filled it with the memory of beautiful crimes.

  The accountant in her said: you made a good bargain. And that had been true, for the woman at the dockside, the frustrated technocrat enraged at Sousward, desperate to find another way to Falcrest.

  But that woman had not understood.

  Someone shouted. A great thunder of hooves closed on them from the north—a file of armored horse, waiting in ambush behind a copse of incense cedar. Apparitor looked at her in incredulous amusement. “Sloppy,” he said. “Very sloppy.”

  It’s Oathsfire, she thought. He sat through the whole night, drowned in grief, gnawing on his friend’s treachery, and when the sun rose he understood why Lyxaxu, most thoughtful and farseeing of all of us, would turn on me.