The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  And there in that glance across the ballroom, in the factions and complicities it implied, Baru heard the old carving: Aurdwynn cannot be ruled.

  From all the possible configurations of maneuver and intrigue, feeding on the map and the history she’d learned and the hints Farrier had dropped and the menace in Xate Yawa’s greeting, on Tain Hu’s name and presence and smile, Baru’s intuition plucked the most dangerous scenario and offered it up.

  The rebellion was not coming. It was here, among the dukes, in the very heart of the provincial government. Rising. She had no proof, no evidence, no axis of action. But it was here.

  * * *

  THEY sat for dinner at long hardwood tables heavy with venison and duck and buttered squash, golden breads and dumplings stuffed with veal. Baru fumbled with chopsticks over food her stomach had never met. She ate little, Governor Cattlson to her right, Jurispotence Xate Yawa across from her, pleading caution to each of them—“I’ll need a week to settle my palate and digestion with these new spices, it’s a scientific fact”—and wondering all the while: I suspect no one wants to be the one to tell her, Xate Yawa had said. Tell her what? Something to do with the last Accountant, the one she’d replaced?

  So when dessert came and Governor Cattlson roared for more wine, she asked.

  “What!?” Cattlson bellowed, eyes wide, voice pitched to shout above an absent gale. “You weren’t told?”

  “How curious.” Xate Yawa poured the Governor another glass, her veined hands steady. She had a light voice, untroubled, and she used it without hurry. “One would expect the new Imperial Accountant might be given such important information.”

  “You’re perfectly safe,” Cattlson insisted, thumping the table. “Between the marines and the walls of the House, you cannot be reached. Not like that dockside whorehouse where Olonori worked—we should’ve given up on it after Tanifel, but Olonori insisted he had to be near the ships.”

  “Excuse me.” Baru rubbed the rim of her half-mask where it met the skin. “What happened to Tanifel and Olonori?”

  “His Excellency Su Olonori was murdered.” Xate Yawa smiled graciously, as if in apology for a matter of decorum. “Cut apart in his bed. Please don’t fear, though, our retaliation was harsh and precise. And he was only here because Her Excellency Ffare Tanifel, who came before him—”

  “Was a traitor.” Cattlson’s fist rattled glasses all the way to the far end of the table. “A corrupt and perfidious slattern. Yawa put her on trial and I had her drowned. To think! The Throne’s taxes trickling out into those woods, probably all the way north to the Stakhi in their rat dens—”

  “Oh,” Baru said, understanding. Tanifel, native-born, had gone over to the brewing rebellion, and the Masquerade had killed her for it. And then Olonori (an Oriati name, he would have been a foreigner and harder to corrupt) had refused to go over, and the rebels had killed him in turn.

  Where was Cairdine Farrier? Shouldn’t he have been at the ball? When he had spoken on the docks—our difficulties here—had he known?

  She’d never had wine before. “Jurispotence,” she said, smiling as well as she could manage. “Just one glass, please.”

  Ducal representatives came to greet her, their petitions disguised as compliments. We wish to discuss matters of inheritance law, and the taxation of landlords, Duchess Nayauru’s seneschal murmured, and then some man from Oathsfire, the Duke of Mills, right on her heels asking after transit taxes along the Inirein. Then Duke Heingyl in his hunting garb, cold and plainly hostile except when he introduced his daughter, Ri, a tiny woman with sharp fox eyes and elaborate jewelry who made her father’s hands tighten with some kind of wary protective love. “Your Excellence,” Ri murmured, kissing Baru’s hand. “It is a difficult station for a foreigner. I hope no one will regret your appointment. Least of all you.”

  “You are gracious,” Baru said, rather daftly—the wine made her feel like her thoughts echoed, and Ri’s eyes were damnably disarming.

  “There are worthy young minds in Aurdwynn too. Savants of our own.” The Stag Duke’s eyes smiled whenever he glanced at his daughter, and froze again when they went to Baru. “We hope the Imperial Republic has not forgotten them.”

  Baru had to lift her chin to meet his eyes. “I welcome their correspondence.”

  “I have concerns about the stability of the Midlands. Tensions of infrastructure and inheritance between Nayauru and Ihuake.” Ri released Baru’s hand, smiling softly. “Doubtless you will swiftly detect and resolve them.”

  Baru, distracted by Duke Heingyl’s unblinking armored stare, made no reply.

  She should have been attentive. But she could barely understand their accented Aphalone, barely focus on their words when all she wanted to do was look into their eyes and guess—

  Loyalist? Rebel? Or waiting for your chance to choose?

  * * *

  AFTER the ball, Muire Lo returned from the master-at-arms and confirmed what she’d learned. Su Olonori, Baru’s immediate predecessor, had been murdered in his bed by parties unknown.

  Fine. Mortal danger: an incentive to set everything else in order. Her job in Aurdwynn was to make sure tax and trade money went to Falcrest, where Parliament seemed intent on banking for renewed war with the Oriati federations.

  One task at a time.

  At dawn the next morning she dressed, washed, rang Muire Lo for breakfast, and sat down in her new office with a caged candle to sort through the Imperial Accounts. Parliament—or Cairdine Farrier and his colleagues—had given her this high station even knowing Aurdwynn was unstable. Therefore there would be an extensive staff for her, the kind of support that would cushion her youth and inexperience.

  But no—she found disaster.

  Su Olonori had been so eager to clear out Ffare Tanifel’s corruption that he’d sacked the entire Accountant’s staff. Meticulously paranoid, he’d kept his own books, working in incomprehensible shorthand that defied both double-entry protocol and any clear mathematical sense.

  There should have been ledgers for every key entity in Aurdwynn: the Imperial Trade Factor and its all-important Fiat Bank, the Judiciary, the provincial government and its suborgans, and most critically, each duke and duchess. These books would record a web of debt and credit, and from this web she could map out the arrangement of power in Aurdwynn. No ship could be hired, no land developed, no army raised without some money changing hands. These books were Baru’s spyglass, her map, her sword and edict.

  But all that depended on having good books. She could barely sort Su Olonori’s ledgers by date, let alone subject or point of origin. Nor was there anyone to ask for help. His staff ledger listed only a personal secretary and a few housekeepers on the payroll. Before his murder, he had managed the Imperial Accounts alone.

  A scrap of parchment in Su Olonori’s fevered handwriting fell from the records: V. much land sale? Then a run of Oriati text; he had lapsed into his home tongue.

  Someone knocked on the door. She went and opened it.

  “You should just say ‘come,’ Your Excellence. In Falcrest I mastered the ways of doors.” Muire Lo brought the tray of breakfast to her desk. “I’m assembling a cold-weather wardrobe for you—I got a sense of your measurements while dressing you. And the Governor wishes to know if you’ll be joining him for lunch.”

  “I think I will.” She clapped Su Olonori’s master ledger down on the desk. “Find a literate Oriati speaker and hire her. I need these books carted down to the basement and translated into Aphalone.”

  “These are the key ledgers, Your Excellence.” Muire Lo hopped back a half step in a kind of avian alarm. “You can’t conduct business without them.”

  “I’m going to start new ledgers. This will mean a great deal of travel. Find me a carriage and a driver.” She knifed a grapefruit and managed to spray Muire Lo with the juice. “Sorry—and that reminds me, find me Cairdine Farrier and make him an appointment. When that’s done, we’re going to need to start hiring a staff. I’ll nee
d trustworthy people and that means I need the Jurispotence’s advice, so make her an appointment as well.”

  “Your Excellence, perhaps the Governor should approach the Jurispotence—”

  “We are the Imperial Accountant’s office!” she snapped, angry at the mess she had inherited, at the time and effort it would waste to sort it all out, at the distant technocrati who had looked over her service exam and judged this a useful application of her talents. “We will not sit here like schoolchildren and beg for appointments. We control the payrolls, Muire Lo, and that means they work for me. Remind them of that.”

  “That is bluster, Your Excellence,” he said softly, “and they will be quick to challenge it.”

  “All I have is bluster.” She swore at the grapefruit and tore a dripping length of meat from it. It came apart into sticky ruin in her hands. “These books say nothing. The Fiat Bank could be printing money and loaning it to the dukes as toiletry and I would be blind to it. I cannot prosecute with that two-faced Jurispotence in control of the courts, and after Olonori’s death I cannot even sleep easy in my own bed—”

  I don’t want this! she almost shouted. I want Falcrest and telescopes, proofs of geometry and the fluorescence of certain sea life! I want to know the world, not these sordid little people in their shattered little land!

  I want to save my home!

  But she bit down on her own temper and wiped her palms on the hips of her gown. Muire Lo grimaced pointedly at that—a kind of charming little puncture in his deferential composure. “You are, at the very least, an officer of the Imperial Republic, masked and armed with the technocrat’s mark. Not a provincial auxiliary.”

  “So?” She pushed his suggestions around in her head, trying to put them together in some useful way. “I am a ranked officer and can request the aid of Imperial forces. I suppose I could use them to make a show of strength. But Governor Cattlson is the legal commander of Aurdwynn’s garrisons. Why would he give his troops to”—she slipped into self-pity here, for one or two brief syllables—“an untested islander girl?”

  Muire Lo offered a linen napkin for the grapefruit. He’d folded it into a perfect triangle, like a lateen sail. “Our frigate Lapetiare is still in port,” he said, “and will not sail for a week.”

  “Oh,” she said, straightening. “Oh.”

  5

  SHE wrote a letter to Lapetiare’s captain, and then—impatient now, eager to pursue this new avenue—went to her scheduled lunch with Cattlson.

  He had a beautiful dining room, flooded with light through walls of small paned windows set in redwood. With the light she expected warmth, but no: she sat shivering. Aurdwynn was cold. The cold made her want to move. She wanted to get back to her office, or to the harbor, and keep constructing her plan.

  It was only when Cattlson had finished his third glass of wine that she realized this, too, could be part of that plan.

  “We’re here to help them,” he said, staring at his hive of windows, at the huddled city beyond. “I write it in every report to Falcrest. I see it in all the statistics from Census and Methods. The wealth we feed the dukes to keep them happy drips down to their peasantry. We’re helping them. But we could be helping them more.”

  She drank politely. “Should we be pressing Parliament for a policy change?”

  “Parliament.” He snorted. “Parliament is a theater for the mob. The Throne sets these imperatives.” He stood abruptly, going to the windows, leaving Baru alone at the wide table.

  The Throne. The Masked Emperor. Could Cairdine Farrier be the sovereign, unmasked? No. Absurd.

  “It’s the burden of empire.” He touched the window glass, hand splayed. “We know how to help them best … and sometimes we have to help them a little less right now, so that we can help them a little more later. Does that make sense to you, my fellow Excellence?”

  “No,” she said, trying to bait him into seeing her as a student, a daughter. “Everything the Masquerade brought to Taranoke helped us.”

  “Taranoke!” He laughed. “I hear all sorts of things from itinerant Cairdine Farrier—boasts of warm winters and easy women.” At this he frowned sharply, as if he had just delivered a rebuke, or reined in a bothersome new mount. He had a square face, a strong jaw, skin the color of weathered oak, and Baru quibbled for a moment over the feeling that this man chosen by Parliament had no design to conceal, no machinations to guard—just a plain honesty, too naked to last. That could be a clever camouflage.

  He continued. “If you’ll forgive me, my lady, I mean no slight. But this is not Taranoke, you see? This is a cold and grudging land. Every valley’s got a duke, and a lot of starving muddy serfs rooting in the earth for their shallow livelihoods. Their children die—the polymaths tell me that they’re all used to losing one in three, and assure me that as a result they don’t love them at all. But I’ve seen the mothers weeping. One in three! In a good winter!”

  She didn’t know how to answer this. Child rearing on Taranoke had been safe, communal, full of fathers and warmth. She took another short drink and listened.

  Cattlson set his shoulders and raised himself erect. His wolfskin mantle gathered in troubled bunches. “I want to teach them sanitation. I want to extend the roads, give them better crops, send a hygienist to every village. I want everyone in Aurdwynn to have a bar of soap. But if the peasants are happy and safe, the duchies will not fear rebellion. If the duchies do not fear rebellion, we cannot rule them. And if we cannot rule the duchies by fear of rebellion, Parliament asks, what shield will we have if the Stakhieczi come south over the mountains again?”

  What similar calculus did they make on Taranoke? Had they let the plagues run rampant, saving inoculant only for the children they planned to steal away? Had they—but she could dwell on this later. She’d had time enough to obsess over it in school. “Rule demands harsh arithmetic.”

  “Arithmetic.” He chuckled joylessly. “Do you know what I want from my station? I want to see the children of Heingyl and Radaszic at hunts, not funerals. I want to find a good husband for Heingyl Ri, observe the resulting bloodlines, present a nice report to the Committee on Incrastic Thought. Instead I hear: keep them divided and afraid, so they need us. Do you know how I made a loyal brother of Duke Heingyl? I showed him I could give his children the world. But Parliament says—let the children rot.”

  He would take bad news poorly with his temper up, but she went ahead anyway, hoping to make him angry about something smaller. “Our master accounts have been poorly kept. I’ll have to rebuild them from local statements. With your understanding, I’m going to begin at the Fiat Bank, to be sure the trunk’s solid before we move on to the branches.”

  “Whatever you please.” He leaned his brow against the windows. “You’ll see to the arithmetic Farrier says you’re so talented at. Xate Yawa will chase their little ykari cults and drunken sodomites like a mad dog. And I’ll send the letters home: we are helping them.”

  “I’m concerned about the possibility of revolt.”

  “You’re new.” He sounded impossibly weary. “Aurdwynn threatens revolt the way a jealous mistress flirts. You’ll grow accustomed to it.”

  Baru could not permit herself to feel sorry for the man. He was close to her, and weak. “This is dangerous talk,” she said. “It could harm you, in the wrong ears.”

  She’d made a threat, hadn’t she?

  He stiffened, drew breath to speak, and was silent. “Cairdine Farrier was right,” he said, after a time. “You are precocious.”

  “Your Excellence, I must attend to business at the harbor.”

  “Go, go.” He did not turn. “I’m leaving tomorrow to hunt with Duke Heingyl.”

  “We’ll have to ride together when you return,” she said, trying to be patient, to offer him a salve for his pride. But his shoulders slumped: shame, or something enough like it that he would not answer.

  * * *

  SHE had already sent word ahead to Lapetiare, sealing the missive with her t
echnocrat’s mark. When her carriage came harborside she found the marines already ashore, ranked in red like a leash of foxes come up out of a forest of salt and mast, faceless in their enameled steel masks.

  Gulls called over the soft whickering of her carriage team as she dismounted. To her limited surprise, it was Lieutenant Aminata who took her hand and helped her down from the carriage. “Your Excellence. We await your command.”

  Baru took a breath of salty harbor air and put thoughts of home out of her mind. “Is my authority clear?”

  “The captain recognizes your authority. Without direct orders from the Province Admiral, we report to the highest-ranking Imperial factor ashore.”

  “Good. Unless we meet the Governor or the Jurispotence, your orders come from me—and if we do, you bring them to me and I make myself clear to them, understood?” She tugged on the wrists of her woolen overcoat, itching at the heavy fabric. Aminata waited in silence as she checked her belt, first the symbolic chained purse, then her sword.

  One last breath. “Fall in, then. I’ll lead the way.”

  Every bit of power she wielded in Aurdwynn stemmed from money. Most of that money was now Masquerade fiat paper, backed only by careful monetary policy. Any idiot at the provincial Fiat Bank could ruin the value of the fiat note by printing too many or too few, and without her ledgers, she had no way to keep that idiot in check.

  “Where to, Your Excellence?” Aminata fell into step beside her, and on her heels the column of marines snapped into easy cadence.

  “We’re going to the Fiat Bank,” she said, “to conduct an audit.”

  “And you need marines for that?”

  She allowed herself a little smile for Lieutenant Aminata’s benefit. “I don’t need marines for the audit,” she said. “I need marines to tell them not to trifle with the auditor.”

  And to demonstrate to the eyes watching from Treatymont’s alleys and stone arcades that the new Accountant had full command of her powers.