The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  Trapped between two fires, choking on smoke, leaderless and dismounted, the Western Midlands forces tried to flee on foot, and found themselves impaled on one last treason.

  Haraerod’s own guard phalanxes, citizen-soldiers bought by coin, by sidelong words from the duchess Ihuake, and most of all by the belief that they could fight for the only ruler who had helped them through poverty and winter, filled the gaps between the firebreaks. Nayauru’s exhausted, asphyxiating, dismounted soldiers faced a wall of more than a thousand twelve-foot spears crying, A fairer hand! A fairer hand!

  The survivors of the massacre tried to turn back.

  But the panicked stampede of men and horses behind them, still acting on the order to march for the Belt Road, pressed them forward.

  Oathsfire’s bowmen, firing down into the crowd of targets, ran themselves out of arrows.

  The phalanx did not run out of spears.

  By morning a quarter of Haraerod had burnt to the ground. The Fairer Hand’s men gave the townsfolk stern warning—the mountains of human and animal corpses heaped on the killing grounds would have to be burnt, and all drinking water boiled for weeks to come.

  Those who had lost a family member in the cataclysm would be paid one gold coin per head, and three coins for a ruined home.

  * * *

  BARU would not go near Purity Cartone until he’d been manacled and bound, his wrists and ankles tied to heavy stones, his clothes torn from him and searched for knives or darts or reagents that would mix into killing gas.

  Tain Hu protested fiercely. “Why would you do this? This woodsman saved your life, as he saved Xate Olake before you. He killed for you. What has he done to deserve this?”

  Baru stood in silence, afraid to move or think. Petrified by the Clarified, by the physical danger of his presence, by the greater menace of all the things he was a talisman of. Had he dyed his hair so brilliant red to carry a message? To say—remember—?

  At last, after cold consideration, she spoke. “He is an instrument of Falcrest, a man bred and conditioned to serve as a spy and assassin. He could be here on Cattlson’s orders.”

  “Why would Cattlson order the death of Nayauru? Why would Cattlson send this man to save Xate Olake?”

  “Do you remember when you took me to see the riot? What you told me then?”

  They have a clever technique. A favorite strategem of Xate Yawa, of the Masquerade, of the ruling power behind the Faceless Throne.

  Tain Hu touched her lips with two splayed fingers. “A honeypot. You fear this man was sent to buy our trust, so he could betray us at a key moment.”

  “Just so.” Just so, just so. But why Cartone, a man known to Baru, to Duke Unuxekome? Why not another Clarified entirely? Were they in such short supply?

  One of the guardsmen beckoned. The prisoner was ready.

  “Permit no visitors,” Baru told Tain Hu. She nodded. Of late that simple gesture of respect made Baru uneasy with warmth.

  Baru went down the steps into the yellow lamplit cellar where they had cast Purity Cartone.

  The Clarified looked up at her, face red with acid burn, and began to cry.

  “Command me,” he begged. His face blinked from emotion to emotion in eerie flashes—childish grief, a lover’s joy, thoughtful concern, a string of perfect counterfeits, like the semaphore flags of a burning ship: help, help, help. Through it all he wept clear silent tears. “Make use of me, Your Excellence. Give me use.”

  She looked at him and saw wreckage. Not a person in distress, but a broken machine.

  Perhaps she chose to see this. It was easier than the alternative.

  “Suspire,” she said, hoping the command word still worked. “Tell me your mission here.”

  “I have no mission.” He sat among his limp bindings, hollow. “The Jurispotence punished me for failing to stop you at Welthony. She castrated me, to end my line, and told me that I had been judged a failure. Clarified no more. Cast out.” He rocked gently, an idle movement and yet still somehow wrong, wounded, all his smooth calibrated motions skewed and out of tune. “I could no longer find orders from the Jurispotence or the Governor.”

  Pity seized Baru. This man had been made to serve the Imperial Republic, designed and conditioned even before his birth. And what had they done to him? Acid wash, and worse—

  They had cast him out, and in doing so, they had broken off all their hooks in him. They had given him to Baru.

  Could Xate Yawa have done it by intent? Sent him to Baru as an instrument?

  “You came to me for orders,” she said. “I am the Imperial Accountant, the highest authority left in your reach. You used Xate Olake to find me.”

  “I escaped the Jurispotence once she renounced her authority over me. I sought you out.” He made a perfect face of desperation, a blank skull trying to sign emotion with mastercraft masks. “You still serve the Imperial Republic, and I am still permitted to serve you. By transitivity I may still fulfill my purpose.”

  That old sick joy, her first and favorite drug. Control. “I do serve Falcrest. Fear not: you will serve me. Tell me why you killed the duchess Nayauru.”

  A simpleton’s smile—relief, and pure pleasure. At last he could obey again. “Your spymaster ordered it.”

  Xate Olake overstepping his place. But it had been a wise and ruthless stroke, the class of gambit that had earned him and his sister a duchy and a Jurispotence. “Tell me everything you know about the Masquerade’s strategy for the summer.”

  “Cattlson seeks one decisive battle at the Inirein. He hopes to secure his authority in Falcrest’s eyes by restoring order to Aurdwynn before the next tax season. He has an abundance of food, but also of disease, and no money left to sustain his administration. Principal Factor Bel Latheman, to whom he trusted his finances, has been distracted from his duties by his new marriage to Heingyl Ri, who manipulates him against Cattlson.”

  Xate Olake’s intelligence confirmed. Good. It would have to be verified again, in case Xate Yawa had arranged all this, but there were scouts for that. “What did Nayauru want? Was she there to kill me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who ordered the death of Muire Lo?”

  “I don’t know.” Tears filled Purity Cartone’s open honest eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Hush, she could say, hush, it’s all right. But Cartone the mechanism wouldn’t care. His only comfort was subservience. They had made him that way.

  Instruments of the Masquerade deserved no compassion.

  She stepped closer, to speak softly. “Tell me everything you know about Xate Yawa’s true loyalties.”

  “The Jurispotence?” Purity Cartone recoiled in his bonds, stones shifting against the floorboards. He sat for a moment, gaping, as if astonished by something he’d discovered.

  “She has no authority over you,” Baru assured him, soft, coaxing. “I am Falcrest’s truest servant in Aurdwynn.”

  “Xate Yawa serves the future of Aurdwynn. She cares only for her ability to control that future, to guarantee a distant peace.” The Clarified sighed with inner release. “Through the Priestess in the Lamplight, she thinks she controls the very ilykari she persecutes. Spends them like coin to buy Cattlson’s trust. But she is deceived. The priestess does not serve her. The paramount masters observe Xate Yawa through their agents, and consider her promising. She may be chosen for exaltation.”

  “What?” Forgetting caution, Baru stepped closer, kneeling. “Again! Tell me that again!”

  “The paramount masters. The mind behind the Masquerade. A closed circle, each member balanced against another. Chosen by invitation and test to dictate the Imperial Republic’s grand strategies of policy and heredity.” Bliss in his voice. How forbidden this act of service must once have been—

  “What agents among the ilykari?” Baru set her palms on the floorboards and leaned in to hiss. “Who? Who is the Priestess in the Lamplight? Who among the ilykari serves Falcrest?”

  Purity Cartone smiled brilliantly,
conditioned triggers clattering deep within him, drumming out rewards. “The priestess of Himu in Treatymont. The one whose temple hides above a lamp shop.”

  The secret-keeper. The ilykari who had written in old Iolynic all the things that could destroy the rebels.

  The woman to whom Baru had confessed her second-gravest sin.

  The woman who had recorded it for all eternity on palimpsest.

  “Purity Cartone.” Her voice a serpent’s hiss: later she would remember it with a thrill of unease and triumph. “I have a task for you.”

  * * *

  TAIN Hu and Xate Olake stood with Baru and watched the Stakhi woodsman ride south, his roan palfrey sure-footed, his pace swift.

  “Shame,” Xate Olake said. “I rather liked him. An honest fellow, I thought.” He wrinkled his brow at Tain Hu. “A Clarified, you say? I suppose it could be so. He said Xate Yawa had sent him.…”

  “I found a use for him,” Baru said. “A useful task, at a safe distance.”

  Hoofbeats pounded behind them—Duke Unuxekome and his honor guard. The Sea Groom dismounted in an easy leap, athletic and sure. “I ride for Welthony, to rally the fleet and guard the Inirein’s mouth.” He opened his palm to Baru. “Will the Fairer Hand need my ships?”

  Baru thought: I wish I could hear you call it Taranoke one more time. I wish you wouldn’t take this the way you’re going to.

  “Your ships have the finest admiral they could ask,” she said, smiling. “And your ilykari served me well. Look for my riders weekly, and be wary: when Cattlson marches, you will be his target.”

  What she did not say was the thing Unuxekome wanted to hear: yes, I will need your ships—best I go to Welthony, with you.…

  Unuxekome’s eyes tightened: one moment’s disappointment, or hurt. He closed his palm. “May the battle go our way, then.” A touch of aspersion, then, a break in his grace when he spoke the name: “Perhaps Oathsfire’s longbowmen will carry the day.”

  “Your Grace,” she said, the cold already taking her, the numb calculations that had carried her this far. “Wait.”

  He raised his brow in question. A handsome man, certainly, Baru thought; a fine figure, and not unintelligent. She could see no jealous fury in his eyes. No sudden curdle toward resentment.

  But now, from Purity Cartone’s intelligence, she knew that the ilykari could not be trusted. Unuxekome, above all others, was entangled with the ilykari. He had used his diver-priestesses again and again.

  The need to be ruthless would only grow, a rising peak, a steepening precipice tipping toward final cataclysm. She had to harden herself. Remove all weakness.

  Yes. It had to be done.

  Unuxekome had always wanted to be a hero.

  “I would be most impressed,” she said, coyness in her voice, a suggestion of intimacy that drew Tain Hu’s frown, drew from Unuxekome a brief exhalation, “to see the Masquerade’s navy rebuked from our shores.”

  26

  ON a warm wet morning soon after the slaughter, Baru invited the duchesses Ihuake and Erebog to march up the flanks of Mount Kijune and survey the division of their prize.

  In one way this was a kind of escape—she’d breathed enough of Haraerod’s corpse smoke. But she, too, wanted to see the prize divided, the yield of her work, the proof of her most appalling and necessary methods. It would give her confidence for the endgame.

  She sent Tain Hu to whip the Coyote into its next march, and brought the Stakhi brave man Dziransi as her bodyguard instead. This, too, was a kind of escape. It turned out he couldn’t ride. No matter: it gave her an excuse to walk too, sweating, head down, counting and factoring the slow rhythm of her heart.

  When the sun burnt away the mist, they looked out to the west from the broken turrets of an ancient Stakhi redoubt and saw the blue-cream reservoirs and new-tilled fields of the Duchy Nayauru sprawled vast and fertile and already aflame. From such a great distance the movement of soldiers was invisible. But the smoke was its own banner.

  Erebog tsk’d and beckoned an armsman for a parasol to keep off the sun. “Are those your cavalry? Already so far?”

  “My horse. And the Coyote-men.” Ihuake glanced back at Baru. “I told them to burn anything that resisted.”

  “Aren’t you worried for the safety of your new fields?”

  When Ihuake turned her left wrist just so, it rang a bracelet of jade against a band of platinum like a distant bell. “The dead will be good fertilizer.”

  Erebog, shadowed, glanced back to Baru too, and her face was wry—maybe offering shared mirth at Ihuake’s theater, or shared joy at this great feat of treachery. Duchy Sahaule and Duchy Autr were hers now. Her children would inherit more than a bitter clay-pit.

  Baru smiled back, as if to say: see? I can be so very cold.

  Erebog touched the flank of Ihuake’s horse. “Didn’t you bring any shade? Would you like a spare parasol?”

  “You sound like a grandmother.”

  “I am.”

  “Like a grandmother with a lot of stupid, poor children.”

  Baru had to bite her fist to keep from laughing. The Cattle Duchess would not stoop to mere parasols—her men were already assembling a command tent. Erebog, untroubled, plowed on: “Perhaps it is so; perhaps some of them would benefit from wealthy, well-read spouses?”

  Dziransi murmured to Baru, his Iolynic jagged, “Fairer Hand. Speak now?”

  The Stakhieczi fighter wore the breastplate of his armor, a steel ingenuity that no one in Aurdwynn could have made. Baru wanted to peel it off him like a crab shell and take it for study. But the man had worth, too: steady discipline, a sober jaw, a reserve Baru admired, even if it was enforced by language barriers.

  And above all else, he represented a hidden power.

  “Come.” She took him by the shoulder and guided him away from the duchesses, to the crumbling wall. “What is it?”

  He looked west with strange green eyes, like barite fire. “Very beautiful. Very flat. Rich land. I do not know land like this. Mansion Hussacht—carved from mountains.” He drew a pattern in the air, like steps. “Waterfall engines. Terrace farms.”

  She ventured a few words of Stakhi. “Your people—come south? Trade. Marry. Warmer land.”

  Dziransi stared at her for a moment, his jaw quaking with desperately repressed mirth. Baru, embarrassed, went back to Iolynic. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Soon I will tell you what we want.” He settled his weight on the haft of his long spear. “Soon I will be ready to ask. In the right place, under good stone. Tell me now: what will happen to—” He reached west, toward the rich burning colors of Nayauru. “Flat land?”

  Baru tested the strength of the ancient stone and leaned up on it. “Ihuake’s siege engineers will go to Dawnlight Naiu and threaten to open the dams. Facing the ruin of all their holdings, Nayauru’s landlords will revolt against her loyal lords and sue for peace. One of Nayauru’s surviving children will be married to one of Ihuake’s, and then Ihuake will rule the Midlands. Erebog will get Nayauru’s clients.”

  “Erebog.” The Stakhi word came easily to his tongue, like brickwork. “Erebog asks me dangerous questions. In Stakhi, Mansion-tongue Stakhi, not Aurdwynn accent—she asks about man she loved. Clan lord she loved.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  Dziransi touched the masonry with one gauntleted hand. When he found a loose stone he frowned at it. “I tell nothing. Silence is stronger. But I know he fell. Mansion Uczenith lord—he fell.”

  Precious insight. Baru grasped for more. “He overstepped?”

  “He wanted to bind his mansion to Erebog. Get flat land to make himself a king. But he was not necessary. We only accept necessary kings.” Dziransi rapped at the loose stone and it tumbled out of the wall. “Now the Mask comes at us. Now we make Necessary King. He looks for advantage, as Uczenith did. But he is greater. You understand? His hand is broader. He—” Dziransi gripped at the air. “Constellation man. Wide eyes. Long arms. He mak
es himself strong. Flat land is very strong.”

  “The Necessary King sent you south,” Baru said, but got the chance to ask no more: Ihuake and Erebog, dismounted now, came sweeping over. Erebog snapped something in Stakhi and Dziransi’s face closed up in stern indifference.

  Ihuake drew a naked platinum circlet from her left arm. “Your hand.” When Baru offered her right hand, Ihuake slid the circlet over her wrist, up her arm until it cut into Baru’s strength.

  “For what you did to Nayauru,” Ihuake said, hand still on Baru’s arm. “It was a venal act, an ignoble thing. But it got me what I want, and that I value above all else.” She turned the circlet and it slipped on the sweat of Baru’s arm. “You think you’ll be my queen now?”

  Baru remembered kneeling to Ihuake, common-born and desperate. “I think I’m going to win another war for you,” she said, chin high.

  “You couldn’t win a pissing contest without my cavalry.” Ihuake looked over Dziransi with cold assessing eyes. “But you’ve gathered a curious strength, coyote woman. Himu breathes through you. If you get your throne, remember this—I was hungry. I used you to kill Nayauru and take everything I wanted. I am fed now. Keep me sated, lest I grow hungry again.”

  Erebog rolled her eyes. “Listen to yourself. You sound like a milk cow, lowing for blood and land. At least Nayauru had a vision.”

  “I want exactly what Nayauru wanted.” Ihuake’s voice rolled over the Crone like the breaking of a dam. “I want to make a new empire for my people. I want to reclaim my blood and history from the interloper out of Falcrest. I differ from Nayauru in one great respect: she is dead, I am ascendant, and my children are going to fuck her name out of every song and book of noble lineage. And yours too, Erebog, yours too—which is the best you can hope for, you poor wretch.”

  Erebog laughed at her, and might have said something cold and distant and very old. But Baru held up a hand to silence whatever might have come next. “I value one thing more than your cavalry, Ihuake,” she said, “and it is the same thing that permits me to trust you. You’re very honest.”