The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  The actress took the empty glass from her and found it a place in the wall. “Ah,” she said.

  Baru, considering the geometry of whiskey-damp glass, the spray of light from the candles and lanterns that refracted through them, made a small adjustment. “Ah?”

  “You told me something about yourself, just there.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “When was the last time you took any notice of a child?”

  “Children pay no taxes.”

  “Can you name a single ducal consort? Lyxaxu’s, perhaps?”

  “I don’t bother with trivia.”

  “Do you know the story of Xate Olake’s marriage to Tain Ko? Could you tell me why Heingyl Ri has only one living cousin, and who it is? Can you name the dukes who lost all their children in the Fools’ Rebellion?”

  Baru brushed the challenge away. “Touching stories, I’m sure. I’m not a playwright. If it mattered, I would learn.”

  “You rule a nation of the bereft. That matters. It changes how we think.”

  “I keep my mind on my work.”

  “You don’t have children, I presume?”

  “No.” Startling how quickly her company had become tiresome, really. “Do you?”

  “I could. I could rule Aurdwynn with them.”

  Baru laughed at the thought. “Mothering your way to empire?”

  The laugh struck something, an edge of pride or defiance. The actress leaned forward, hands on her knees, and Baru found something in her eyes, maybe offered, maybe revealed by the defeat of the camouflage that had kept it hidden: a distant horizon, a movement of wind across an imagined future, not Cairdine Farrier’s mechanism, not so cold or certain—instead a passion, a want, and a powerful will fixed upon that want. Her voice carried the charge of it. “I would get children with the dukes and the sons of the duchesses. I would marry my blood into theirs and hold their loyalty by passion and shared joy. Once I had my heirs aligned, my rivals bound to my flesh, I would tear up the borders and stitch our lands together. I would irrigate the herdlands and make them rich with wheat, I would feed the cattle and make my people fat on milk and beef, I would guard my roads with the broad-backed sons and daughters of women free to love. Against our ancient strength the pale chemistries and mincing edicts of a younger people would be as a child’s tantrum, and they would pass away into the east to be forgotten. I would issue forth a dynasty. And my blood would make a place in the world for the Urun songs to sound again, for the imperial line of the Tu Maia to find its lost glory and in time surpass it. This is the power I claim.”

  The fire went out of her eyes, and the breath from her chest. She looked at the dripping shapes she’d drawn on the wood for a moment, and then back at Baru. In the silence after her voice, she looked terribly young.

  “Sounds expensive,” Baru said, to cover her response. “Do you need a loan?”

  The actress laughed, a wild unbroken sound, and here after the stage-searing monologue and that laugh, Baru had to admit that perhaps she was not safer company than a diver at all.

  “A loan,” the actress said, “of course, who doesn’t? And noble blood, to make the claim I need. So I suppose I’ll stay in Treatymont, pretending to be people I’m not.”

  “You’re very good at it.” Baru meant it: it was a stirring monologue, in its way. “What play was it from?”

  “An original, actually.” She shrugged. “I’m still working on it. I think it risks being called seditious.”

  “It is my Imperial duty to support the arts. I’ll pay your tab.”

  “Truly, the power of coin surpasses all others.” The actress stood, checking the hems of her gown. “I’ll tell my cousin she chooses interesting bars.”

  * * *

  BARU drank and sang and learned some Iolynic and some Urun and sometimes sat alone in silence. On another night, an entirely separate actress, drunk, ample and beautiful in the way that Maia culture preferred, said: “Why do you hide everything? I want to see laughter, or tears, not a second sort of mask.” And Baru thought: if I am going to Falcrest to win the secrets of empire, I must be entirely devoted to it, outside and in. I must be able to hide any emotion, pretend to be anyone.

  If there is rebellion in my heart, a rebellion of huntress mothers with man-killing spears come to find their vanished husbands, well, I must be ready with acid and steel mask.

  But she answered: “I spend too much time with numbers.”

  Passing in different worlds became second nature. First nature, perhaps: what else was she? What loyalty did she really have behind the mask?

  She had crushed Tain Hu’s rebellion in the name of her own advancement. She needed to get to Falcrest. Needed to play the Masquerade’s game in order to reach the top.

  There had been no other choice.

  In a wharfside tavern, watching merchant sailors pass dice and news, she set eyes on a tall, feline Maia man in a hawk-feather mask. Her interest piqued by his solitary discomfort and the peace-knotted sword at his side, she took her wine and pulled him out of the crowd, not sure what she would do with him but eager to hone her deception.

  “You’re Baru Cormorant,” the man said. He had a smoky voice, not very deep, perhaps affected. “I recognize you.”

  She put him down on one side of a battered table and took the other. “Tonight I’m not,” she said. “Tonight I’m from Aurdwynn.”

  “You could pass for Maia, if you wore a mask.” He rolled his shoulders and stretched, arms hairless and sinewy. Baru did not disguise her interest in this trait. Perhaps it even gave her a little relief. Her occasional dinners with Bel Latheman were colder than Governor Cattlson’s attitude in council (the poor man had seemed utterly lovestruck at first—Latheman, not Cattlson—but Baru decided very quickly that he was, thankfully, lovesick for someone else). “But you’ll need a new name.”

  “I’m open to suggestions,” Baru said.

  “Fisher,” the man suggested. “A forest weasel beloved of commoners, and a play on words.”

  “A play on words?” She frowned, not following the pun in Aphalone.

  “A cormorant is a fishing bird. In Iolynic fisher means a weasel who fishes. They’re a symbol of ykari Devena, the Fulcrum.”

  “Ah. Clever. Baru Fisher, beloved of a forbidden god.” She nodded to his blade. “There are people who want to kill me, you know. Dukes I bankrupted, rebels I frustrated, Parliaments I disappointed. You could collect quite a prize. I don’t even think the Jurispotence or Governor would object, after what I’ve done to the fiat note. Falcrest’s tax ministers are in an uproar.”

  “My blade,” he said dryly, “is knotted, and will take some work to extract.”

  Baru considered him as she drank, judging his accent and voice, his knowledge of woodslore, the crooked set of his nose. A ranger, maybe? He had Tu Maia blood, that much was obvious.

  Or—

  She tilted her head, considered the man’s eyes for a few moments, then reached out and took him by the chin. He did not draw away, even when she squeezed as if to test the familiarity of his bone. She leaned across the table, drawing him in. Saw his lips part, his eyes half-close. Felt his chin lift in her grip.

  Disappointed him, perhaps, by whispering in his ear instead: “Tain Hu. What a determined disguise.”

  Duchess Vultjag laughed huskily. “Spotted at last. So slow! I thought you’d know me by more than my face.”

  “Have you come to kill me?”

  “Your countermove is cast. The fiat note has collapsed. I have no answer.” Her hair, cut so short since last they’d met, brushed Baru’s ear as her head moved. “You’ve ruined yourself to ruin us, you realize. Liberated us from the shackles of the fiat note. Burnt ten years of the Masquerade’s economic conquest to the ground. In a way, I’ve still won.”

  “But I’ve stopped you.”

  “For now. But consider your own future.”

  Baru drew away, fell back in her chair, and drank again. Tain Hu, taking it as the considera
tion she’d asked after, laughed.

  What a strange position they found themselves in. They’d cast their spears, and now they sat together, wounded and bled dry. More than anyone else in Aurdwynn, she knew Tain Hu’s wants and secrets. She had already destroyed them as thoroughly as she could.

  Perhaps that meant Tain Hu could trust her.

  “I have some advice for you,” she said. “A clever idea I read about. Something the Oriati devised.”

  Tain Hu lifted her glass. “Go on.”

  “Every summer you buy grain and fruits for Vultjag, to stockpile against the winter. When the price spikes, you suffer—and all your families, the Sentiamut-Vultjags and the Hodfyri-Vultjags and the others, they suffer, too. When the price is unexpectedly low, the grain merchants suffer. Both of you would prefer a happy middle. So—” She’d drunk enough wine to make drinking more feel like a good idea. “Set up your contracts in advance. Buy next summer’s grain now.”

  Tain Hu frowned. “I suppose that I should say it hasn’t been grown yet, and so we can’t know if the crop will be large and cheap, or small and expensive.”

  “That’s exactly why you set up the contract now—to protect yourselves against uncertainty. The merchants give up the chance at an unusually high price. You’ll give up the chance of an unusually low one. But you’ll both reduce your risk. You’ll be able to budget better and guarantee grain to your serfs. They’ll be able to rely on a solid profit.”

  Tain Hu pursed her lips beneath the feathered fringe of her mask. “Your last economic policy ruined thousands. There are people who’ll starve and die this winter because of you.”

  “Nonsense and hyperbole.” Some venom in Baru’s voice; at night she flinched from these fears. “Only the nobility, the landlords, and the merchant class invested in fiat money. They were the fish the Masquerade wanted to net, and they were the fish I gutted. I am a champion of—” She laughed into her cup. “A champion of the common people.”

  “Yes. I’ve heard that said. Your gold loans have made you a name in the cattle pens and quarries. But you don’t understand Aurdwynn, Your Excellence. When a duke suffers, he extracts the compensation from his people.”

  Baru brooded in silence, her eyes flickering around the tavern, across the sailors, past a man with hair the red of rowan fruit who had just ordered an extravagantly old drink and drawn admirers for it.

  It was Tain Hu who broke the silence. “Tell me about Taranoke.”

  “I can hardly remember,” Baru lied, and then the lie spun itself off her tongue, full of little pieces of the truth. “Just the colors. How dark the earth was, how clear the sea. We were alone with the stars and the waves and I used to think … when I stood with my fathers to watch the merchant ships go out, I used to think the ships would fall off the edge of the world, and we would remain. I didn’t know about harborside, or plainsmen, or currency trading, or masks.”

  “Your fathers. More than one?”

  “We were savages,” Baru said, stomach leaping—just to speak of this was taboo, surely, and now she would have to make excuses. “We didn’t know better. In the Masquerade school I learned—”

  “For sodomites, hot iron; for tribadists, the knife,” Tain Hu recited. “I know the codes of hygiene, the names of sin. They ordered me to post them on every door in Vultjag. They set neighbor watching neighbor.”

  “I had so many aunts and uncles,” Baru whispered. Oh, to speak of this to her foe—so unwise, so poor a move. But this was her weakness: drink, and the chance to pretend she lived in a warmer world, where secrets could be shared.… “On midsummer days, when the stars were bright, we would come out of our houses and join hands. We could make a chain all the way from the sea to—to—”

  Her voice broke with the memory. She decided that silence would be wiser.

  “When we rise,” Tain Hu said, “I’ll make it known that I want you alive, Baru Fisher. I’ve already asked the Phantom Duke to spare you.”

  “You murdered Su Olonori when he came close to stopping you.” The Phantom Duke again, Xate Yawa’s vanished brother. The rebel spymaster? Make note, Baru, make note—Tain Hu lets her secrets slip as well … “Why spare me?”

  “Because you won’t stop us.”

  “I can’t let you win.” Baru shook her head, dizzy with the wine. “You were born to rule your home. I have to win the right to rule mine. I—I have to go to Falcrest.”

  “You will find no power behind the mask.” Cold, rooted conviction in Tain Hu’s voice. “It will wear you. It will eat your face away. You would do more for your home if you tore it all down.”

  “How could I? How could anyone? They rule by coin and chemistry and the very words we speak. Falcrest’s power is vast, patient, resilient. No little rebellion will last.” Baru shook her head. “The only way forward is through. From within.”

  “You will pay a terrible price. You will lose yourself.”

  “Any price,” Baru rasped, each word a debit, a loss in her account books: secrets given for no advantage, for no reason except that her heart moved her to speak them. Her traitor heart. “Any sacrifice. It is the only way to take a piece of their power for our own.”

  Tain Hu sat across from her for a short while, as if waiting for her to say something that had been left unsaid, or take some chance still untaken. But in the wine and the heat Baru could not say or see it, and later she would not remember when exactly Tain Hu had gone.

  INTERLUDE:

  CRYPTARCHS

  THAT next night, Baru finished a book, a history of revolutionary Falcrest, the days of The Handbook of Manumission and The Antler Stone. Regicide days; days when old bloodlines ran across Commsweal Square or burned out in the bitter mouths and ungrown gonads of royal children fed sterilizer. Days of terror, as the uprising turned on itself in a glioma of constant cannibalistic treachery.

  It had been a nightmare, of course, a self-perpetuating atrocity. But it had also been an opportunity. Those who had survived the bloodbath had set the course of the Imperial Republic, and the world.

  How would she have done it, if she’d been there? She sat in the dark, chin in her hands, and wondered—how would I have weathered the revolution?

  Trust, like money, needed a guarantee to back it. She would need allies with secrets. Secrets that she could hold over them. If she wanted to build a web, well, she would make it out of people already full of hooks.

  Yes—that would do it. Everyone poised to destroy everyone else, and thereby held in check. A trust governed not by love or simple fear, but by the assurance of mutual ruin, by the delicately balanced threat of certain annihilation for anyone who stepped out of line. Mutual blackmail.

  It was the power Xate Yawa had come so close to holding over her.

  “Muire Lo!” she called. He had been staying late to oversee the work of rebuilding the books, and sometimes fell to napping in her office. “Lo, come up here!”

  He peeked warily around the banister. “Your Excellence?”

  “What’s the Aphalone word for…” She considered. “Rule by secrets?”

  “Oh. Hm.” He frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “Fetch the dictionaries,” she commanded. But she went down to the office with him to help, barefooted on the tiles, laughing with him as they opened volume after volume, papering the floor with their hunt.

  But the word would not come. “We’re going about this wrong,” Muire Lo said, sitting in a circle of abandoned thesauruses and rubbing his temples. “What should the roots be? If you had to invent the word now, from first principles—what would it be?”

  “Crypsis,” Baru said, “for secrets.” She sat beside him, leaning back on her hands. The lamps made their shadows dance. “And the suffix?”

  “For rule? -Archy.”

  “Crypsarchy?”

  “Cryptarchy. And the rulers would be cryptarchs.”

  Baru thought of the Masked Emperor, silent and mindless on the throne. Of Cairdine Farrier laughing behind the mask. A chi
ll took her, and she trembled, making a small uncomfortable sound. “A draft,” she said, to explain it and, at Muire Lo’s skeptical sidelong glance—“I’m cold!”

  “Did you expect otherwise? You’re in a nightgown.”

  “You’re no help.”

  He considered her dryly. “I could fetch you a blanket, though it would be patronizing. My other options all seem wholly improper.”

  She laughed, and then considered herself through his eyes, sprawled beside him, immodest and foreign and powerful and laughing. It was a strange thing, even after all these years of Masquerade conditioning, to look at herself through other eyes, to think: I cannot act this way, even though he is my ally, my advisor. It will make him feel things I cannot afford.

  She drew herself upright. “I’ll help you with the books.”

  “It’s all right.” He stood to bow, and waved her off as she began to gather the scattered dictionaries. “Please, Your Excellence. The draft will make you sick.”

  WARLORD

  11

  AS the repercussions of the fiat note’s collapse rippled out to Falcrest, Baru’s dreams of a career crumbled down around her.

  She spent her days on work, managing a tower full of new and untrustworthy staff, fighting to rebuild the books ruined by Olonori’s tenure and the economy ruined by her own. At night she retired with her books or her blade. Muire Lo moved into the tower’s cellar after someone burned out his apartment—men from Duchy Radaszic, Baru suspected; the cheerful Duke of Wells had seen his wealth gutted by the fiat note’s collapse. On some days Baru took dinner with him. On others she made appearances with Principal Factor Bel Latheman, whose reputation she’d destroyed by mere proximity.

  But he was a shield, the poor man, a vital shield.

  No word came from Cairdine Farrier. No acknowledgment that she had quelled incipient rebellion. No sign that Parliament felt anything but rage and astonishment at her policies. Her letters mostly came from Duke Lyxaxu, one of Vultjag’s neighbors, who wrote long articulate opinions about phenomenology and the philosophy of rule that she dwelled on and always meant to find time to reply to.