The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  So be it, then. She could go forward only with what she absolutely needed.

  “You won’t be coming,” she told him, unsure how he would take it. “I need you here.”

  The word need made him smile, not unpleasantly.

  * * *

  TAIN Hu sent a carriage and a column of horse, twenty riders carrying the comet banner. Baru expected to ride alone in the carriage, the duchess aloof on horseback. But when she stepped up into the cab she found Tain Hu waiting within, sprawled along the length of one passenger bench like a satisfied cat.

  “Yours.” She gestured to the other bench.

  Baru set her bag of papers and palimpsest down carefully. “Your Grace. Thank you for attending to my request so promptly.” Her lips really did look a little like a recurve bow, didn’t they? Always drawn in mockery …

  “I’m not unaccustomed to Masquerade scrutiny. They send their creatures to keep the North reined in.” Tain Hu wore riding breeches and there was mud on her tall boots. She had the noble height, raised on good meat and citrus; Baru was glad to almost match her. “I’m sure we’ll make an occasion out of it. Aren’t you bringing anyone? Where’s your little chaperone?”

  It was hard to read Tain Hu’s age: older, clearly, but not much older, which made her contempt all the more grating. (How young had she inherited Vultjag?) She could remind the Duchess Vultjag of the appropriate honorific, but it would only seem petty. “I don’t need any staff,” she said, smiling back. “I expect the audit will go smoothly, and I am assured that your men-at-arms can provide the finest security on the road. The safety of your estate, of course, hardly needs praise.”

  Tain Hu drew herself upright with slow control. “Aren’t you afraid,” she said, the corners of her mouth and eyes drawn ever so faintly, “that if you find something wrong with my finances, I’ll cut you apart and bury the pieces in the woods?”

  Yes I am, Baru thought, but she let none of that thought into her face. “Am I afraid that you’re a fool? No.”

  “Su Olonori was killed in his bed. The murderer was never brought to justice.”

  “You will have to protect me even in my bed, then.”

  Tain Hu sat back against the bench and considered her with what seemed like genuine bemusement. Her reset nose was a little crooked from the front, which seemed a good flaw to fixate on. “Why are you here?”

  “Simple. If I’m to do my job, I need to know where the money goes.”

  “Money isn’t everything.”

  “I’m an accountant.” Baru offered a wry shrug. “As far as I’m taught, it is.”

  Tain Hu set her hands on her knees and leaned forward, her lips parted over her incisors, disgust or challenge or something else in her eyes. “As far as you’ve been taught. And now you want me to teach you the rest?”

  She heard the memory of their last meeting, her own words thrown back at her. All the paradoxes of Aurdwynn bound up in one woman. I think I could learn a great deal from your lessons, Tain Hu.

  “Would I be here if I didn’t?”

  “Then watch. Understand what you’re part of.” Tain Hu reached behind her and opened the driver’s shutter. “Take us to Northarbor before we leave the city. I want her to see the purge.”

  * * *

  IN Northarbor, where dockside architecture gave way to the arches and arcades of old Stakhieczi stonework, they found a riot underway.

  The sound reached them first, a roar, a surf that wouldn’t ebb. Then they met lines of Masquerade regulars in blue and gray working in cadence to move barrels of diluted acid. And, last—from the vantage of a rooftop, because neither Tain Hu nor her armsmen were eager to press deeper into Masquerade lines—they saw the riot itself.

  The mob wore iron-mordant green. Baru had expected to see them on the attack, pressing on prison gates or carrying torches for a tax collector’s home.

  But it was the garrison that had cornered the riot, cordoning that roaring mass against the north edge of the square, where they stood in defense of a lime-washed warehouse without window or label except the Aphalone script NORTHARBOR SPICE. Baru strained to hear their chant, but it reached her only as a desperate thunder.

  “It’s a secret temple,” Tain Hu murmured in her ear. “To Wydd. Defended by its followers.”

  “A god?” Little in her studies had mentioned faith in Aurdwynn except as a political problem.

  “A human being. Someone who practiced a virtue completely enough to become the name and the trait. To speak of acceptance or obedience, winter or pneumonia or erosion or time, is to speak of Wydd. Wydd stands across from Himu and Devena stands between them.” Tain Hu touched her brow, in reverence, or just after an itch. “Not that anyone of worth believes these old forbidden superstitions, of course.”

  “They don’t look very accepting to me.” Baru searched the garrison lines and found the barrels of acid, passed hand over hand toward the front. Sappers waited with spades and gloves and rag-stuffed masks to pry them open.

  “They are very poor followers of Wydd, it seems,” Tain Hu said dryly. “Perhaps Himu moves them today.”

  The sappers opened their barrels and drenched the crowd in acid with slow underhand throws. Screams reached them on the harbor wind. “Don’t be too concerned,” Tain Hu said. “Pacificant-process acid only burns the eyes and membranes. On skin it leaves an itch and a red rash. Blindness is rare, but the burns will mark the guilty for days to come, so they can be rounded up. A just and gentle method, I’m assured.”

  A lock of Tain Hu’s hair had come free from her braid and set itself wiggling in the breeze. Baru fixated on it, preferring it to the chaos below. “Why build a temple to Wydd in a warehouse? Why defend it?”

  “The ykari cults are illegal. They speak to the transience of worldly authority, you understand, and thus promote anarchy and dissent. So—” Tain Hu found the loose lock of hair and tucked it absently away, her eyes still on the crowd. The garrison had advanced behind the acid, dividing the mob. “You have a clever technique. You permit the ilykari to build a quiet little conclave in a hidden place. You permit word to spread that the faithful may gather for worship or divination. Sometimes, I think, you start the cults yourselves.”

  “A honeypot.”

  “Just so. Why stamp the cults out in their infancy, when you can watch who comes, who overlooks the gatherings, who accepts the bribes to permit it, and then sweep them all up at once?” Tain Hu gestured to the spread of rooftop all around them. “Down there, in the streets, other soldiers are making arrests. The ilykari will be imprisoned or drowned. Their cultists and accomplices will face the judgment of the Jurispotence and her kind. She will be busy tonight, and for weeks to come, with all the acid-washed guilty brought before her.”

  Baru remembered glances in the ballroom, suppositions of conspiracy. Foolish to say it too directly, but foolish not to probe at their alliance: “You know the Jurispotence’s methods so well.”

  “Xate Yawa does what she believes must be done to hold her power. Her techniques are quite sophisticated. She tells me that in Falcrest—did you know this?—in Falcrest prisoners are permitted to escape their cells, permitted to reach the streets, only to be recaptured. Again and again. So that they will learn that escape is always an illusion.” Down in the square, a second wave of acid barrels moved to the front. “So, then—look on this. Do you believe that this is what must be done?”

  “I am an accountant.” Baru wished she could close her ears to the screams of the sectioned, smoking crowd. “I deal in costs, not faiths.”

  “But you are part of this.” Tain Hu was a little taller and she moved with purposeful force. Her words, no matter how soft, were not unintimidating. “This is a cost. This is the cost we pay for broad roads and hot water, for banks and new crops. This is the trade you demand.” And there was no doubt who she meant, for she used Aphalone’s singular you.

  “This resistance is meaningless,” Baru said. “If they want change, they must make themselves usef
ul to Falcrest. Find a way up from within.”

  “A people can only bear the lash so long in silence. Some things are not worth being within.”

  “Order is preferable to disorder,” Baru said, speaking words she had mocked on Taranoke, under the dark hangings of the school beds.

  Tain Hu turned away.

  * * *

  THEY went north across cream limestone blocked over beds of shattered pot and concrete, over gravel and lime and pounded Aurdwynn earth. There might come a day, Baru thought, when the Empire’s roads were made of Taranoki tufa.

  Tain Hu rode with her armsmen and left Baru to work in the carriage. She struggled to focus on her papers, battling a rising unease she couldn’t name. Maybe the memory of the riot. The thought of those acid-stained desperates vanishing into the Cold Cellar. Or the knowledge that Tain Hu could kill her and dump her body for the coyotes and she would never be found.

  Worrying at a palimpsest, she tried to focus herself. Tain Hu’s estates at Vultjag would have their own accounts. She would open the books and search for signs of seditious behavior—enthusiastic loan taking, aggressive investment in old coin or hard resources, purchases of weapons or grain to feed and fight a rebellion.

  And if she found something? If Tain Hu believed she’d found something? What then?

  If she vanished or died on this excursion, surely it would be obvious that Tain Hu had killed her. Surely Tain Hu would know this.

  But as Baru studied the passing olive orchards of Duchy Heingyl, squares of silver and green and black rich earth, wood and oil already machined into money and influence in her mind, she found her eyes drawn to the rising land ahead, the redwood sentinel forest that stood guard over the valleys and crow-colored Mount Kijune and the high white peaks beyond. This was Aurdwynn, the wolf land, and perhaps here the rules were not the same. Perhaps here cleverness was not a strength at all, compared to the knife. (Perhaps, a wary part of her whispered, Muire Lo had maneuvered her out here, to be disposed of.…)

  They made camp that night beneath cold stars, a sky of tilted foreign constellations. “Are you uneasy?” Tain Hu asked.

  Baru drew her cloak around her and watched the duchess across the campfire, uncertain whether to take the question as a threat.

  Duchess Vultjag opened her hands to the brush around them, the shadow of the looming forest, and smiled. The firelight gilt her eyes like an eagle’s. “All I meant to ask was: isn’t this the farthest you’ve ever been from the sea?”

  * * *

  BY the day they reached Vultjag, Baru understood why Parliament was so greedy to own Aurdwynn. More than just a shield against invasion, it was an asset of incalculable worth—forests, fisheries, coastal farmland, stone and mills, and even its feudal craftsmen, whose technique had been folded and hammered by years of ducal war.

  Aurdwynn would be good for the Empire. Aurdwynn would also be very, very profitable to whoever controlled it.

  But the dukes and duchesses kept the land divided. Their jealous tariffs and guilds prevented free commerce and created vast inefficiency. Baru found herself wandering across an imagined map of the land, smoothing out the borders of the thirteen duchies, erasing the keeps, making an Aurdwynn without lords and tabulating the results.

  What could she do with her own rebellion? Tear it all down and rebuild it? Would the daughters of Aurdwynn look on her with the same curious awe as she had looked on those sails rising off Halae’s Reef?

  The road climbed up through high forest and came to the crest of a pass. “Ride ahead to the fellgate, and have it opened,” Tain Hu ordered, and brought her charger alongside the carriage. “Come with me. Look on my land.”

  Baru took her hand, glove in glove, and with some difficulty sat astride Tain Hu’s horse, gripping the back of the saddle rather than the rider, as her books had taught her. The horse moved beneath her in a way that was utterly unlike a ship.

  “Easy. Keep yourself relaxed.” Tain Hu brought them forward, through gates of stone and redwood, between sharp-eyed armsmen with shortbows and comet tabards, and then they looked out over the dale, over Vultjag.

  The forest filled it, wall to wall, and the shadows of the clouds shivered on the treetops as the wind moved through the boughs. Down the center like a crooked bolt ran the river Vultsniada, white and racing, and along its banks crowded mills and villages and—to the north, on the lowest steps of the mountain—a limestone keep which bridged the torrent and admitted, through open sluice gates, a great waterfall.

  But for all the beauty of it, Baru’s eyes went to the crows and hawks and harriers soaring on the thermals, high above meadows and clearings of stone, the birds gathered in towering kettles that seemed to stretch from canopy to cloud.

  She had not even begun to make a count when Tain Hu cried a word in Urun and spurred her horse onward, plunging down the steep road and into the forest, her armsmen carrying her banner ahead and behind. Baru held herself against the saddle, clinging to safety and dignity, trying to stamp on her sudden inexplicable joy.

  8

  BARU spent one cold night in her guest quarters in the waterfall keep, listening to the mountain wind howl through the towers. Then, after a breakfast of smoked salmon and watered wine, she went on a horseback tour of the Vultjag estates and determined at once that there was corruption afoot.

  This was what she saw:

  In the first of a string of villages along the river, she met hunters bringing deerskin to a tannery, their cheerful Iolynic banter instantly silenced when they heard her speak, her tongue betraying her where her face and skin had not. They would not answer her questions, but she made note of their numbers, and the size of the tannery.

  At the quarry, the workers and their families turned out to cheer at the sight of her carriage and its ducal banners. But by the time she walked among them some word had gone out, and she heard the whispered Iolynic mask, mask, mask as they scrambled to hide their children from an agent of Treatymont, a pawn of Falcrest hunting social sin. She passed through them in stiff silence, observing their brawn and skill.

  They were not all afraid of her. A few were willing to give interviews, in rough Aphalone or through a translator. “My family has worked the stone for a hundred hundred years,” a pale green-eyed mason told her, passing her squalling son off to a wet nurse. “My ancestors tunneled out mansions for the Stakhi and now, just this last year, I finished work on the duchess’s new keep. Look at the boy—he’ll draw more chalk dust than milk from me, and probably turn out better for it.” She spoke with love, unafraid of winters, of dead sons.

  Armsmen drilled in their village square, long spears and gleaming shields and great bearskin coats, a disciplined phalanx. “The Sentiamuts,” she was told, “a family known even in Treatymont for their faithful service to our duchess. They guard the pattern of those bear coats jealously.”

  Ah, she thought. I know that family.

  All of these things Baru fit into the greater riddle, the puzzle of Tain Hu’s estates. The puzzle was this: there was no famine.

  Vultjag had a quarry, and quarrymen needed food to stay strong. But the valley could not feed itself. The forests could be hunted and foraged, the river fished and the take salted for winter. But that would only be enough to feed a few villages. Without agriculture or livestock, the craftsmen and masons and their families would starve.

  So Vultjag would need to bring grain and olives and fruit upriver from the great Inirein (beautiful name for a river, Baru thought—it meant Bleed of Light), or overland through the narrow pass, which probably closed during the winter. To do that, Tain Hu and her serfs would need to barter or buy. They could barter stone, lumber, gems, hawks and falcons, and pelts taken from hunting the forests. But barter was inefficient and unreliable, so, more likely, Tain Hu bought her food wholesale, praying every autumn for a kind market and easy transit.

  And to buy wholesale, she would use fiat money, money she raised by selling her stone and lumber and gems and hawks and falcons and
pelts to her westerly neighbor Oathsfire, who would in turn move it down the Inirein to the coast and sell it at a profit. Vultjag had to use Masquerade fiat notes because she had to deal with Oathsfire, who had to deal with the coastal dukes, and those dukes needed fiat money to turn the best profit. The whole system was built to guarantee it.

  So it went like this: the people of Vultjag worked their valley to create goods, and they sold those goods for food. So Vultjag should have been poor, a subsistence economy, getting by season to season. Masquerade economics taught Baru that real wealth came to those higher up the production chain.

  And yet she saw development.

  Money changing hands everywhere. The snap of paper fiat notes in the village square markets and the stables, at the mills and the lumberyards. New walls and fences going up around the riverside villages. Bucket gangs paid to bring sewage to the river instead of dumping it in the streets. Where, Baru kept asking herself, where does the money come from?

  Vultjag was richer than she should’ve been. New mills? New barracks for new quarry labor, and wages for them? An entire new limestone keep, built with ambitious daring around the waterfall itself?

  And when Baru returned to Tain Hu’s house of stone and clear water and asked for the ducal accountant to be brought before her, she found another thing that was not as it should have been:

  “I present the ducal accountant,” said Tain Hu, her hair unbound on the metalwrought shoulders of her tabard, her boots loud on the stone; and she bowed mockingly low.

  “You?”

  “The law says each duchy must have an accountant. Nowhere does it say that the accountant cannot also be the duchess.” Tain Hu carried a leather-bound book under each arm. “And I am literate, if only in Iolynic. An uncommon talent here, Your Excellence.”

  Baru took the books and opened them in silence, silence because she wanted to smile or laugh at the woman’s cheek, or stand up from the little redwood desk and demand to know what would happen when she found the cheat, the hole in the books.