The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  They gathered in the flat lee of the rock, panting, all winded. Ake offered Tain Hu her coat, but the duchess graciously refused. Baru, chilled by the memory of winter carried in the wind, sat with Ake and huddled with her beneath the bearskin.

  Tain Hu set her palms on the rock. “Tell us.”

  “There’s civil war.”

  Silence for a moment, except for the whispering wind. “You mean,” Baru said, “aside from ours?”

  Ake unrolled a weighted map. The Midlands opened before them in ink and sheepskin—the second floor of Baru’s allegorical house, full of craft and cattle. Baru laid her thoughts upon it, the shapes of tension and loyalty. The west was Nayauru Dam-builder’s, Autr and Sahaule at her side, rich with clean water that glimmered in great reservoirs. The east was Ihuake’s. Her herds were vast and thunderous, and she kept her soldier Pinjagata curled up beside her like a fist.

  “Here.” Ake traced a line from Nayauru’s capital at Dawnlight Naiu, to Ihuake’s at the Pen. “Our scouts found tracks in the mud.”

  Tain Hu exhaled slowly. “Whose?”

  “Nayauru’s soldiers. Marching east in great strength.”

  Baru found their own position, north of freetown Haraerod in Ihuake’s heartlands. Haraerod the crossroads, where the merry came to sing, where years ago she had stumbled into Duke Pinjagata on a strange patrol. “Nayauru’s coming for us?”

  “Not for us. For Ihuake.” Tain Hu spidered her fingers across the corners of the map and looked at it balefully. “Nayauru’s always dreamt of rule—but the time is too soon, the heirs unready. She has no child of Ihuake’s lineage to use as an usurper. Why now? Why not give us a chance…?”

  Baru’s stomach turned. She’d insisted Nayauru wouldn’t move. Stared Lyxaxu down and committed herself to it. They would never trust her counsel again. How to absorb this, how to turn this back into a strength—

  A little movement of Tain Hu’s chin said: blame me.

  “Why didn’t we see this?” Baru asked. “Duchess?”

  “I hoped she’d turn to us. I respected her.” Her eyes darkened. “The Fools’ Rebellion swallowed her whole family. Why would she move so rashly? Does she remember nothing?”

  Baru considered the map, raising her eyes once to look past Ake and out across the land. “I know what she’s doing.”

  The two women from Vultjag watched her.

  “Spring is here. Nayauru knows the Masquerade is going to attack us. She must expect Cattlson to march north across her duchy on his way to crush Erebog. She wants to be indispensable to the Masquerade by the time that offensive comes.” Baru cursed herself as she spoke, remembering clues ignored, connections unmade, years of evidence that could have forearmed her against this choice—Bel Latheman pointing to Heingyl Ri, Heingyl Ri’s notion of an inevitable crisis in the Midlands, Pinjagata’s patrol for a woman who looked like young Duchess Nayauru. A whole web of intrigue, Nayauru’s great design for a throne, and Baru had never bothered to tug on any of the threads.… “She knows Ihuake welcomed us into her land. That gives her an excuse to destroy Ihuake and take her herdlands, claim the strike as an act of loyalty to Falcrest, and win Parliament’s favor.”

  And, from there, build herself into queen of Aurdwynn, mother of a lineage that might last the ages. A gambit of terrible audacity—like something from a play, an epic. Baru felt a chill of respect.

  Tain Hu considered this, jaw set, fists balled against the stone. “That magnificent bitch,” she said, using the Maia word for a mother wolf, not the Aphalone epithet. “Ake, if Her Excellence is correct—did the scouts see Masquerade regulars marching in support of Nayauru’s armsmen?”

  “They did.”

  Baru could only shake her head in wordless appreciation. The Coyote had hoped to use Nayauru and her consorts against Cattlson, and now, in turn, they had been used. All Nayauru had to do was claim the Midlands. Cattlson would sweep up her flanks and snuff out the rebels, and she would have her dynasty.

  The same mistake Baru always made. Assuming that Nayauru was hers to court, a playing piece to be taken and deployed. Not a player of her own.

  Ake shivered against Baru’s side as the wind picked up again. “I spoke to the battle captains. They want to send word north. If Erebog, Oathsfire, and Lyxaxu all march their phalanxes south, we can reinforce Ihuake and save her.”

  “No!” Tain Hu and Baru shook their heads together. “We can’t give them a target,” Tain Hu said, as Baru pointed to Treatymont and the forces gathered there—Cattlson and Heingyl, waiting for the Coyote to present itself for extermination.

  “My lords.” Ake bowed her head. “All winter you’ve told us—no disloyalty intended, my liege, Your Excellence—that we would win the Midlands dukes to our cause. Now we find Nayauru turned against us. Where she goes Autr and Sahaule will follow. If we do not stand against them, then what? If Ihuake falls, the Masquerade rules the coast and the Midlands both. We will starve.”

  Tain Hu looked from her ranger-knight to Baru and waited.

  “Give me a palimpsest,” Baru said. “And ink.” She needed her weapons.

  When Ake found them both in her rucksack, Baru blew on her hands and explained her orders as she wrote them. “We will stop them ourselves. The Army of the Coyote will cross into Duchy Nayauru north of her march, cut south, sever her supply lines, and threaten her soldiers’ homes. Nayauru’s army will crumble without a single battle. See that the word reaches all our scattered columns.”

  “Winter left us ragged,” the duchess cautioned. “The men need to rest their sores and eat away their scurvy. You would throw them from one ordeal into another.”

  “There will be no rest. The Coyote marches.” Baru held her gaze. “There will be death before we take Treatymont. Let us make a companion of it.”

  On the way back down the Kijune Trail they stopped once more, at Tain Hu’s request. “The air is clear up here,” she said, “and I will miss the stillness.”

  Baru squeezed her shoulder, comrade to comrade. For a few moments Tain Hu leaned against her, in acknowledgment, or to get a little warmth.

  * * *

  NAYAURU’S soldiers marched east to conquer Ihuake.

  The Coyote began its answering maneuver.

  A column of Oathsfire’s yeomen-archers led the march into Duchy Nayauru. They shot dead a party of woodsmen, and found them carrying both Masquerade coin and ominous orders bearing Cattlson’s seal: Flush the woods. Kill the game. Burn the underbrush. Leave no forage.

  “Why?” Baru frowned, and looked to Tain Hu, the letters taut in her grip. “They can’t expect us to starve now that spring has come. They must know that the people will feed us wherever we go.”

  Tain Hu oiled her blade with expressionless purpose. “They don’t mean to starve us,” she said. “They mean to make the people feed us.”

  Behind the Oathsfire longbowmen, the Vultjag columns raced west, then south, scouts reporting with breathless awe the strength and concentration of Nayauru’s forces: cavalry and heavy infantry, supplemented by siege technicians and blue-gray companies of Masquerade regulars. The Dam-builder had hardened her armies into a thunderbolt. They moved with frightening speed and precision.

  But their supply trains failed to keep pace. Wagons and mules bogged down on muddy roads. Spring rivers washed out the crossings.

  Baru smelled weakness. Nayauru fought with a mix of professional soldiers and levies taken from their families before the crucial spring planting season. They might be powerful on the field—but they had to eat, they had to be paid.

  She set her Coyote-men to feast on the supply train.

  The Alemyonuxe-Vultjag families struck first, bowmen targeting horses and captains, making sport of killing the second man in every column. Nayauru’s messengers, bogged down by the muddy roads, could not organize retaliation. When she sent her own rangers into the woods to strike back, the cunning Awbedyr-Vultjag hunters ambushed them in turn. Oathsfire’s longbowmen, glory-hungry, attacked the re
ar of the main force itself, setting fire to the camps of the reserves in the night.

  Nayauru had an army designed to win battles. The Coyote had learned how to win wars.

  Then, entirely by accident, there was a battle.

  Tain Hu, Baru, and the Sentiamut-Vultjags turned south too early, blundering into the friendly Hodfyri-Vultjag and Lyxaxu columns (all underforaged and hungry). This led to a day of great confusion, and on the next morning, misty and warm, some of the Hodfyri hunters walked right into the flank of Nayauru’s northernmost column: a screen of the Dam-builder’s skirmishers and bowmen, and behind them a full company of Masquerade regulars.

  Tain Hu swore once, vilely, when runners came from the front of the column with news that they had found and accidentally attacked a force of nearly a thousand men on the Fuller’s Road. “Tell the Hodfyri captain—” She glanced once at Baru, brow furrowed, and then looked away, as if seeking and then abandoning her input. “Tell him that the enemy does not know our numbers and intent. Tell him to throw fighters as far out to each flank as he can, and to set fires.”

  “The wood is wet,” the runner protested, “and they have no way to start them—”

  “Tell them to soak the wood in linseed oil. We want smoke, not fire. A screen for our movements.” She whirled on Ake Sentiamut. “The Lyxaxu column must make all possible haste to join us. When the enemy sees the smoke they’ll form an answering skirmish line. We will throw all our force against their left flank and see if we can get past and surround them. Send your best bowmen forward to kill their scouts. Keep them blind.”

  The runners scattered. Tain Hu gestured and a man brought her a shortbow.

  “Will it work?” Baru asked, nervous, trying to tally their forces, the count and capability of the fighters. “Do we have the numbers?”

  “Numbers won’t decide this battle.” Tain Hu hooked the bow behind her calf and bent to string it. “My aunt called it jagisczion. Forest war. The battle is won with confusion, deception, and ferocity. We will make them think that the woods are full of us and that they will surely die unless they flee. I need to be close to the line, with the reserves, so I can strike at the tipping point.”

  Baru, uncertain, heart in her throat, lifted a hand. “I’ll march forward with you.”

  “No.” Tain Hu raised the bow, testing the draw, throwing back her wool cloak. She did not look at Baru. “You’re too valuable.”

  Baru couldn’t argue. “Your Grace,” she said, and then, haltingly, “Be cautious.”

  Tain Hu raised a hand in salute, and perhaps to silence her. Then the duchess Vultjag whistled and beckoned, turned, and at the head of a column of ragged red-eyed men, trotted away through the brush.

  * * *

  BARU’S guard found a fulling mill by a nearby stream. They brought her there to wait.

  The terror that took Baru came from the deepest part of her soul. It was a terror particular to her, a fundamental concern—the apocalyptic possibility that the world simply did not permit plans, that it worked in chaotic and unmasterable ways, that one single stroke of fortune, one well-aimed bowshot by a man she had never met, could bring total disaster. The fear that the basic logic she used to negotiate the world was a lie.

  Or, worse, that she herself could not plan: that she was as blind as a child, too limited and self-deceptive to integrate the necessary information, and that when the reckoning between her model and the pure asymbolic fact of the world came, the world would devour her like a cuttlefish snapping up bait.

  The millwheel had been uncoupled from the machinery and it turned in useless creaking circles.

  “Come,” Baru ordered. “We’re going forward.”

  They walked downslope, between the towering redwoods, through thin mist that thickened into acrid smoke. Distant shouts reached them, surging and receding, as if the rest of the world had begun to oscillate on a storm tide.

  A man rushed at them through the smoke, shouting in Urun. One of the Sentiamut rangers shot an arrow over his head and then another took him in the gut. Baru, frozen by the man’s scream (continuing, now, in new surprised tones), did not even draw her blade.

  The man fell in the wet brush.

  She thought of what would be said about this moment and, hoping to be courageous, went to the fallen man. Two of the rangers had already reached him. He screamed and screamed and clutched with huge strong hands at the roots around him, hammering his head into the mud, trying to draw himself away, or drown himself in the dirt, or somehow get free of the arrow in his gut. He’d tried to pull it out and its barbs had torn.

  “Shit,” one of the rangers said, speaking Stakhi simple enough for Baru to understand.

  “Is that Ala Hodfyri?”

  “No, he didn’t have so many teeth—maybe Ora?”

  “His cousin?”

  “Brother, I think—”

  “Ora always did get lost.”

  The fallen man’s eyes bugged in shock. Perhaps, Baru thought (full of an empty resonance, a cavity like the hollow of an excavated eye), he had discovered a new variety of pain, a permutation of fear previously unimagined. His bowels stank beneath him.

  “One of ours,” she said.

  The ranger who’d shot him doubled over to vomit. Baru watched this with expectancy, but nothing of her own came. He straightened, spat, and said: “Wish he hadn’t called out in Urun. I don’t speak much Urun.”

  The man on the ground was still screaming. Baru found all the guardsmen looking at her. She made a gesture of command, commanding nothing, knowing nonetheless what she had ordered.

  “You want to do it, Ude?” a man asked.

  The ranger who’d vomited took out his knife. “Ah,” he said, looking at it. “No.” And then, as if it were important: “He’s got a beard.”

  “It’s down in the well,” the dying man rasped, then began to scream again, pounding at the earth, desperate, his eyes fixing on the men around him, beseeching them to understand. “I PUT IT DOWN IN THE WELL!”

  They held him down and cut his throat.

  “Who’ll tell Ala?” the vomiter asked.

  “I will,” Baru said. The smoke had begun to thin. Through the trees she could see a canyon of light—the road, the battlefield.

  “We shouldn’t have come,” she said. “Back to the mill.”

  * * *

  FOREST war:

  Nayauru’s column saw smoke all along the treeline, a confusion of fog and bowshot. Captains roared command: Line of battle! Get in line, you dogs! The white-masked Masquerade regulars took the center, Nayauru’s skirmishers the flanks, and their bowmen behind.

  The Hodfyri Coyote-men took shots from the smoke and the trees, trying to fix the enemy in place. Tain Hu’s battle plan was idiot-simple. It had to be: there was no other way to communicate it to all her scattered, confused war parties.

  The Stakhieczi jagata charged first. Tain Hu’s least-trusted command—but her toughest. Dziransi led his Mansion Hussacht fighters down on Nayauru’s flank, pale, red-haired, roaring and shining with bitter steel plate. They struck Nayauru’s levied hunters as ghosts. No one in Aurdwynn—commoner or duke—had forgotten the fear of a reunited Stakhieczi empire, an avalanche of steel down out of the Wintercrests. Now that fear came screaming at them.

  They were the only line infantry Tain Hu had. The only Coyote fighters capable of standing in the open and trading blows.

  But Nayauru’s captains didn’t know that. Nayauru’s skirmishers with their leather jerkins and short spears saw an army of long lance and unbreakable plate. So they did what any sane fighter would’ve, the predictable thing, the ruinous thing—

  They drew in toward the Masquerade soldiers at their center, and let the flank bend.

  Tain Hu and her Coyote-men sprang through the gap. Bolted across the road, firing as they went, and got into the woods behind Nayauru’s line. With them came another column, naked of shield, painted in red, trembling at their leash. Lyxaxu’s Student-Berserkers.


  Tain Hu gave them their word.

  They screamed axioms of nihilist self-negation as the drugs in their blood peeled their eyeballs open. When they got in among the unarmored Nayauru bowmen the sound and spray that rose was abominable.

  Nayauru’s fighters, shot from ahead and behind, circled in screams, routed.

  The Masquerade regulars held, shields up, boxed against the arrow fire. With grotesque determination they began to withdraw. But the light-footed bowmen harried them until Tain Hu, worried about running out of arrows or being drawn into reserves, ordered an end to the hunt.

  She came to the mill and to Baru at the head of a cheering throng, and presented to the Fairer Hand a gift: a masked and severed skull, the steel of the helmet distressed where it had stopped arrows, one blue-fletched shaft protruding from the temple where it had not.

  “We have prisoners,” she said. “Shall we leave their heads to be found?”

  “Tell them to go home to their families,” Baru commanded. “Tell them to bear word to Duchess Nayauru: come over to us, and we may still be merciful.”

  “A fair fate for the fighters of Nayauru.” Tain Hu lifted the head in offering. “But what of the men of Falcrest, the men in masks?”

  “Slash their tendons,” the Fairer Hand ordered. “Let Cattlson drown in his own cripples.”

  22

  THAT night in camp, beneath the deerskin of her tent, Baru woke from a dream of a bird with an arrow behind its eyes and wings of blue fletching, circling the Iriad market, calling down to her: I left it in the well! From the dead peak of Taranoke came thunder and fire and she looked up to find the slopes covered in red sailcloth, rolling down on her, a scream in the air, a panic in the earth.

  “My lady,” murmured the armsman who had shaken her awake. “My lady.”

  “Ai.” She caught his wrist. “What news?”

  “You cried out.” He averted his eyes, and she realized, with shame, that she did not know his name. “I thought you might prefer to be woken.”