The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  Mannerslate’s captain offered her cabin for their meeting. Baru took the map room instead. “Stand here,” she ordered Purity Cartone. “Taller. Can you look more serious? Good.”

  He obeyed, clearly pleased. Cattlson must have ordered him to dog Baru, to prevent any last gambits on her part. But he still wanted to serve her, too. His conditioning demanded that he make himself as useful as possible to agents of the Imperial Republic.

  Baru found the maps she needed and pinned them to the plotting table.

  Ormsment arrived with her retinue, sooty and harried. Her brow furrowed for a moment when she saw Cartone, posed half in shadow, the lamplight illuminating his jaw. “Your Excellence.”

  “Rear Admiral.” Baru touched her brow. She’d dressed in her coat, her chained purse, her white gloves, even the half-mask. “Your crews performed commendably last night. My report to Parliament will make specific note.”

  “Hardly worth a note.” Ormsment chuckled softly, stripping her own heavy canvas gloves. Her aides murmured to each other, barely attentive. “Last night’s visitors were opportunists, Your Excellence, trying to seize a few scraps before the real feast. Just harbingers.”

  “As I’d feared.” She snapped her fingers, calling for attention, and leaned forward across the plotting table. She could guess the path of Purity Cartone’s gaze by the way the aides in the back row stiffened. “What news from Scylpetaire’s scouting? Have we sighted the main enemy force?”

  Ormsment cocked a brow in slow, understated compliment. “You expect pirates to travel in force?”

  “I certainly expect Oriati Syndicate Eyota privateers under false flag, forced north by our new strength around Sousward, dedicated to covert interference in the Republic’s trade, to travel in force.” Baru touched the map, stroking the coastline, the dotted fan of the Inirein’s plume. “They’re sailing up our wake, I’m sure, and in some strength—at least fifteen ships. We can’t turn back for Treatymont without fighting through them, and they’d have the weather gage on us if we tried. A significant disadvantage in naval combat, correct?”

  Ormsment nodded and drew breath to speak. Baru talked over her.

  “We can’t outrace them without abandoning our transports. Similarly, if we wait for them to attack, your frigates will lose the advantage of speed and agility. The tax ships are shackles you can’t afford in a fight.”

  The Rear Admiral crossed her arms, mouth curled in amusement. “They say seamanship runs in the Taranoki bloodline.”

  “I am the Imperial Accountant,” Baru snapped, giving a little rein to real anger. Purity Cartone made some small motion behind her that lifted Ormsment’s chin. “Blood or no, I know how to keep my taxes safe. Here are my orders, Rear Admiral: detach your frigates from their escort. Engage and destroy the force trailing us.”

  The slow exhalation among Ormsment’s aides made it clear they’d come expecting to beg for just that chance. “And if another force of raiders attacks the transports while we’re gone?” Ormsment asked. “If they’re hoping to draw us away?”

  Her first question had been tactical. Not an assertion of her military authority. Not a reminder of Baru’s precarious political stance. A tactical matter.

  Good.

  “We’ll make harbor at Welthony, where the river Inirein meets the sea.” Baru rapped her knuckles against the map. “Duke Unuxekome’s ships and armsmen can provide security until your return. You’ll have the freedom of the open ocean to make your attack.”

  “You trust Unuxekome?”

  Here she would bluff, trusting in Ormsment’s unfamiliarity with Aurdwynni politics and its many species of duke. “With twelve transports of your marines in harbor, and my Clarified to keep an eye on him? I don’t need to trust him.”

  After a moment, Ormsment gripped her corners of the plotting table and bowed her head. “You understand,” she said, “that this is a risk.”

  “I’ll assume full responsibility.”

  “That’s just what I mean. If I’d proposed these tactics—and I would’ve—and they failed, you could feed me to Parliament. I have the backing of the Admiralty and all the allies and favors a long career has earned me. I might stand a chance. But you’re a foreign child already falling rapidly out of favor.” She looked up, speaking softly. “You understand what it will mean for you if something goes wrong?”

  “Rear Admiral Ormsment.” Baru held her cold Falcresti eyes. “I am the Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn, the ranking authority aboard this flotilla. You will execute my will.”

  * * *

  MANNERSLATE’S navigator, a lissome harelipped Oriati man who spent his nights writing an original translation of the Handbook of Manumission, seemed torn between irritation and terror at Baru’s constant presence. But she found the current and wind charts, the tenuous cartography of sea and star, too fascinating to avoid. The circular winds made coastal voyages during the trade season easy, but off-wind or away from the coast, the Masquerade’s navigation corps provided the first and only defense against storm, shoal, and the constant, overwhelming threat of dehydration.

  She’d wanted to be a navigator, if accountancy didn’t work out.

  When the navigator judged them twelve hours from the mouth of the Inirein, Rear Admiral Ormsment’s ships began to split away, red sails close-hauled, heeling as they went against the wind. First Scylpetaire, then Juristane and Commsweal, and last of all Welterjoy and Sulane herself.

  Baru imagined Aminata on one of those ships, snapping at the deckhands, terrifying the crew with stories of what might go wrong if they let fire get to the rockets and torpedoes. Of course Aminata would be far away, on Lapetiare, or at some new post.

  And there would be no fire, no battle. The pirate flotilla tailing the tax ships would try to draw Ormsment further away, then break south, out of the trade circle, and flee. Unuxekome wouldn’t have his moment of piratical glory—not yet.

  All that stood between the rebellion and the tax ships were the marines still aboard.

  The sea changed color as they sailed up the Inirein’s plume. Fishing birds wheeled and dove in silt-rich water. Baru paced the deck and irritated the navigator with questions she could have answered herself.

  Past noon the lookouts called land. Baru beckoned for Purity Cartone. “Pass the word to the marine lieutenant and the other ships. We’ll conduct a formation review in the town square. All our marines will go ashore. So the duke understands what we have, and knows not to give us trouble.”

  He nodded without apparent suspicion and went.

  Baru stood at the stern rail, closed her eyes to the wind, and thought: soon everyone on this ship will be the enemy. Soon Xate Olake’s men will walk out into the Treatymont night with knives and torches for the Unmasking. Soon Muire Lo will—oh, Muire Lo—

  “Cartone,” she called.

  He paused at the stairs to the main deck. “Your Excellence?”

  “What were Cattlson’s orders?”

  “I am bound by higher—”

  She waved him off (and he smiled, even at that small compliance). “Under what circumstances will you need to kill me?”

  He gave her a child’s wide-eyed bafflement. “You serve the Faceless Throne. Why would I kill you?”

  “Perhaps if I ceased to serve it.”

  “How?” He smiled rapturously, some trigger hammering the strings inside him. “The hand of the Throne moves us all.”

  * * *

  FOR all her gentle tides and sheltering bluffs, Welthony harbor had never been dredged of river silt, and her shallow bottom made the deep-draft tax ships nervous. They anchored in carefully selected spots marked on a harbor map, Baru at the captain’s ear the whole while, needlessly micromanaging every maneuver and making strident protest when it seemed they would damage a fishing buoy. Cordsbreadth moored out of formation and Baru insisted she raise anchor and reposition, a dreadful hour-long exercise that required great effort at her oars.

  They had to believe she was controllin
g enough to put the whole marine complement ashore at once. Had to believe the Imperial Accountant cared more about an intimidating parade than the physical safety of her collected coin.

  She should’ve known it wouldn’t hold.

  Mannerslate’s marine lieutenant, red-faced, unschooled in the proprieties of addressing technocrats, came top deck shouting—“and fuck the promotion board!” She listened to him, chin up, nodded in agreement at the end—under no circumstances, of course, could they send the whole marine complement, leaving the ships unguarded. “You’re right, Lieutenant,” she said. “I’d thought we’d need our full strength ashore in case of any attempted indiscretion. But perhaps it would be best to delay the inspection until tomorrow morning. I’ll take the night to visit Duke Unuxekome and get a sense of his disposition. You can put scouts ashore.”

  The lieutenant’s flush receded, revealing a ladder of shaving nicks. He was very young, younger than Aminata, as young as Baru. “Your Excellence,” he said, remembering the honorific at last. “Very good.”

  Baru pressed her lips together and tried not to scream. The inspection had been a trap, of course, a key element of the plan. But it had been a trap meant to save lives. They couldn’t get the wealth off these ships while the marines were still aboard.

  Duke Unuxekome, tacitly experienced in piracy, had warned her it wouldn’t work. He’d been right.

  She took a launch ashore at sunset, Purity Cartone rowing—guard enough, she’d insisted—until they got halfway to shore and her nerves overwhelmed her. “Go sit in the prow,” she snapped, and took up the oars herself.

  Duke Unuxekome and a lightly armed honor guard met them dockside. Salutations were curt and tense, as they’d agreed, though Baru suspected Unuxekome hardly needed to act. He stared in undisguised alarm at Purity Cartone.

  “One of the Clarified,” she explained, following his gaze. “My bodyguard.”

  Unuxekome, his wrists freshly rope-burned by recent acts of seamanship, frowned. “Some Falcresti order? I’ve never heard of them.” His gaze flickered to her, back to Purity Cartone. “Is he well? He seems … remote.”

  “Don’t worry,” Baru said, not daring to make even the little sign they’d agreed on to mean a complication. Cartone saw too much. “He’s loyal.”

  Maybe Unuxekome would understand. Maybe he would have some way to pry the remora from her side before the sun set and Cartone realized what she had planned.

  But no: they were still at dinner when the transports began to explode.

  * * *

  THE mines had come from Oriati Mbo—from Segu, specifically, naval weapons meant for blockade against a Masquerade invasion, smuggled out by Syndicate Eyota privateers and then brought to Aurdwynn. Oriati chemists had never matched their Falcresti rivals, never replicated the vicious Navy Burn or the whispered breeding factors of the Metademe.

  But they could, given a large enough casing, make a prodigious bang.

  The mines had been tethered to the harbor floor at the last low tide, their lift bladders and wooden casings straining for the surface. Now Unuxekome’s divers, women hand-picked from loyal pearl and spear families, oiled and nose-clipped and racing the sunset, only—only!—had to cut the right mines free, the mines beneath the anchored transports.

  Baru had studied the designs, particularly the firing mechanisms, the spring-and-spike systems that would spark detonation when the mine pressed up against a ship hull. She believed they would work. Masquerade torpedoes were more complex and temperamental, and—allegedly—they worked.

  Maybe it would have been easier to board the transports. But Baru wanted no part of a plan that required a successful attack on a shipload of marines. Even outnumbered, they could hold the transports until their water ran out. Ormsment and her frigates would return long before then.

  If the marines couldn’t be drawn off the transports, they would have to take the transports out from under the marines.

  The duke’s River House, upstream and upslope, looked down on the harbor. The duke’s men had served dinner on a seaward-facing balcony.

  They had a clear view when Mannerslate buckled in half and began to sink.

  Purity Cartone, seated with his back to the harbor, reacted first—seeing, perhaps, some shock in the duke’s face, some sign of surprise or fulfillment that had not even had a chance to become action. He turned and looked at the harbor: nothing more.

  Baru trusted herself only enough to say: “What?”

  The mines were designed to detonate directly beneath a ship’s hull. The blast was too weak to lift or crack the vessel—at best, it could punch a hole in the copper jacket and the wood beneath. It did, however, displace an enormous amount of water.

  The same water that the ship’s hull usually displaced. The same water that supported a transport’s vast weight.

  Mannerslate did not so much explode as fall into the void that had opened beneath her; did not so much suffer a blast as break under her own oaken mass. The sound that reached them on the hill was soft, a low cough, a distant splintering. The ship’s masts began a graceful crumple into the harbor.

  “What’s happening?” Unuxekome said, keeping up the bluff. His armsmen were already raising their weapons to kill Cartone.

  But he was Clarified.

  Purity Cartone drew a knife and leapt up onto the dinner table in one run of motion as easy and natural as a diver falling.

  Behind him in the distant harbor Cordsbreath rolled sharply to starboard.

  “Cartone! Wait!” Baru ordered, trying to stand, the table banging her hips. He was so fast—

  Cartone hooked a plate (stuffed pheasants in hot butter) with his foot and flipped it into Unuxekome’s face. The Sea Groom fell onto his back and Cartone leapt down onto him, expressionless, blade already descending.

  Baru threw her knife at him. It spun wide. She had never thrown a knife before.

  A mine bobbed to the surface and exploded with a booming thunderclap.

  Purity Cartone’s knife cut into Unuxekome’s throat and then one of the ducal armsmen shot him right in the chest, the feathers of the crossbow bolt abrupt and absurdly colorful, hunting-bright. Cartone reared off the fallen duke, blood and butter spattering from his hands, and leapt from the balcony, straight down into the river.

  “Find him!” Baru shouted, hoping the duke’s men would listen to her. She tore at Unuxekome’s collar, his stubbled neck slick with blood and cooking oils. He deserved better than this—not how he would have wanted to die, far from a ship, flat on his back, with pheasant in his face—not any kind of story worth a duke—

  One selfish part of her noted: Cartone didn’t go for me—he didn’t know I was part of it—or he did—

  “Mail,” Unuxekome rasped. “The mail turned the knife.”

  Baru’s fingers found the duke’s armored collar. The blade had skipped off it and made a shallow but bloody cut all the way up to his ear. She stopped the gush with a linen napkin. “Clever,” she said.

  He smiled up at her with an incredible kind of delight. “I am not a duke of fools.”

  Armsmen shouted around them. Someone fired a crossbow down into the river. In the harbor the transport Inundore snapped like kindling. One of her masts broke halfway and speared the deck as it fell.

  “It’s begun?”

  She helped the bloodied duke to his feet. “It’s begun.”

  Unbidden, she thought of the harelipped navigator and his beautiful charts.

  18

  THE slaughter in Welthony harbor ran through the dawn.

  Aurdwynni spearmen patrolled the shore and, laughing, cast from boats at the sailors in the water. Most of the Falcresti drowned before they made it to shore. Others swarmed up the nets of the four surviving transports—spared by mines that missed or failed to detonate. Duke Unuxekome’s archers took their own sport with them. Pitch arrows started fires on the decks and rigging, but disciplined Masquerade crews with sand, knives, and jars of old urine kept them from spread
ing.

  The harbor’s collective shriek—the victors, the dying, the bells and drums of Masquerade officers trying to rally, a desperate atonal music—carried to the ducal house.

  Mannerslate had exploded first. Baru obsessed over it, probing the fact like a sore. She’d sailed with Mannerslate’s crew knowing they were all going to die. She’d lied to them, a terrible kind of lie, a nothing unusual will happen lie: the treason of banality. She’d acted as if all were as it should be.

  And she would have to do it again, and again.…

  She’d mapped out her schemes from here to Falcrest. Everything had been put into its place, every detail considered. So why had Mannerslate exploded first? Why not second? Why not third? It had to mean something—

  Of course it didn’t.

  Baru tried to exhale the whole tangle. Chance, coincidence: they would have their say. She had to remember that.

  “They’ll try for a breakout,” Duke Unuxekome murmured.

  But there was no way out. Unuxekome’s dromons and tartanes, waiting in coves and inlets nearby, had blockaded the harbor mouth.

  Cordsbreath, one of the four survivors, took on water and eventually sank. Unuxekome’s elite dive sappers—middle-aged women in loincloths, chewing young mason leaves to dilate their pupils—swam out into the starlit harbor, crying prayers to ykari Himu. The handheld mines they planted brought down two more transports.

  The last tax ship tried to run the blockade, hit another Oriati mine, and sank prow-first.

  When the sun rose on a harbor bloated with wood and corpses, the recovery began. The whole plan came down to one differential: marines could drown. Precious metals couldn’t.

  Eight transports had—as planned—split in half, spilling cargo across the harbor floor. The chests were bright red, heavy but designed to be moved long distances on land, by foot if necessary. Divers (still all women—coastal Aurdwynn held to the Tu Maia tradition of diving as a woman’s work) went down into the harbor with ropes and stones. Some vanished into the wrecks for heart-stopping minutes.