The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade

by Seth Dickinson

  She laughs into the wind, touched by the boy’s pretended naiveté. “It would be a cunning stroke, wouldn’t it? To gather all that discontent under the banner of a rebel bureaucrat. And then—and then—”

  The boy looks at her with wide eyes, pretending anticipation, pretending that this is not a test. An invisible hand probing her wounds.

  “And then, in one deliberately timed stroke, to snuff that fire out,” she says. “To send a message: we had you from the start. Baru Fisher was ours. Your rebellion was ours. The next rebellion will be ours, and the next, and the next, even when you think victory is real, even when you spill blood you think is dear to us. The Throne controls all.”

  “A cunning stroke,” the boy agrees, still speaking to the rampart stone. “But, my lady, it is said that all bindings are mutual. To betray them, to lead them knowing that you would betray them, must have wounded you—”

  She takes him by the throat and smashes him up against the parapet. He is taller but slighter, and she has lived a year as Baru Fisher, armored and armed, daughter of a blacksmith and a huntress and a shield-bearer.

  “What do you mean to suggest, little watcher?” she hisses. “That I came to love my comrades, gray-bearded Xate Olake and the duchess Tain Hu? That I wept when I delivered up their armies? That I weep still, and look to old philosophy for comfort?”

  The boy paws at her wrist. She leans in to speak softly. “Do you claim there is treason in my heart?”

  “No, my lady,” he chokes. Now he lets his hands dangle helpless, though he must have been schooled to fight. “No. No. You were loyal all along, and never wavered. They meant nothing to you. I beg your forgiveness.”

  She drops him. “I am blameless,” she says. “I was an instrument. I feel no remorse.”

  “My lady.” The boy lifts his slender chin and bares his throat. “I have overstepped.”

  Baru takes his throat between gloved fingers. His eyes are very wide and very brown with little flecks of gold and she thinks of Tain Hu. He breathes in quick frightened little gasps, and licks his lips, and closes his eyes.

  Baru looks at the concubine’s parted lips, smells the anise he swallowed to freshen his breath, and sees the other test. She has never taken the boy to bed.

  Clever, she thinks, to offer yourself as a test. I should kiss you, shouldn’t I? You and your masters think you’ve found a hold on me. But I could break that hold if I just leaned a little closer. If I looked into Tain Hu’s eyes and made use of you.

  She leaves him sprawled against the parapet and turns to the estuary so that he falls on her right and vanishes from awareness. She knows he must still be there, but her wound swallows him.

  Beyond the circling petrels, there is a red sail on the horizon.

  Mutiny in her heart. Fire in the wreckage.

  “Boy,” she says, hoping that he has not fled. “Go rouse my retinue. I’ll meet them in the cove.”

  * * *

  BARU watches the sea plead with the stone as the red-sailed ship makes harbor. At intervals her chamberlain takes her by the arm and turns her to face the Elided Keep, to remind her it exists.

  I am maimed, she thinks. I will fail this test. It will all have been for nothing.

  And then, mutinously: if I pass, will it then have been for something?

  Taranoke. Falcrest, then Taranoke—

  The red-sailed ship puts down a boat. She beckons for a spyglass and examines its passengers. Oarsmen. Marines. A figure cloaked in black wool, bound wrists to ankles. And Apparitor, with his brilliant banner of hair.

  So the ship came from Aurdwynn. She’d had half a thought (ha) that Aminata might be aboard.

  The boat comes ashore. Apparitor wades from surf to stone, smiling warmly, right hand raised in greeting. “Baru Cormorant,” he calls, over the high protests of the sea birds. “Your ordeal nears its end. The rebellion has collapsed. Lady Heingyl Ri’s passionate love for Bel Latheman gave us a symbol of reconciliation, and with Lady Heingyl—the Stag Duchess, I should say—installed as Governor and Xate Yawa recalled to Falcrest, Aurdwynn is at peace. The banner of the Imperial Republic flies unchallenged.”

  She keeps her left side open to him as if readying to duel. “What word is there of gray-bearded Xate Olake, Duke of Lachta, master of my spies?” she asks, cool, cold, her eyes held still.

  “Dead,” says Apparitor. “Burned out of his hole. I tracked him into the Wintercrests myself. We natives know them better.”

  She remembers holding the boy concubine’s throat between gloved fingers. Trembles with the memory of it, the want to grip until his lying throat gave. “Well done,” she says, smoothing her trousers against her hips. “Xate Olake was not easily outwitted.”

  “Easily enough, as it happened,” the Throne’s man says. He tips a hand as if putting the memory of old rebels into the harbor. “We are all eager to complete your ascension, to deliver your reward.”

  “The gift of a province leaves you in my debt,” Baru says, cocksure, confident, secretly ablaze with the desire to turn and put this man and all he has asked of her to her blind right.

  “The deal stands, of course. You stoked and quelled the rebellion, and in exchange, we raise you to sit behind the Faceless Throne.” He gestures to the beached boat, the wool-wrapped prisoner. “Just one test. To be sure you did not play your part too well.”

  She wants to look at the boat, to rule out her worst fears, but she cannot show weakness by breaking eye contact. She lifts her chin. “I have given no cause for doubt.”

  Apparitor laughs. “The Throne doubts all loyalties, Baru Cormorant. The Throne, above all, desires control, and it does not control you yet. Though there are whispers—”

  He steps closer, and Baru feels her chamberlain and her whole retinue draw away as if acknowledging their real master.

  “It is rumored that you took no lovers for all your time in Aurdwynn,” the Throne’s man whispers, grinning a sly secret grin. “It is rumored that you are the daughter of a blacksmith and a huntress and a shield-bearer, two of them sodomites. Some say that this is the way all children are born in your homeland: to a mother and many fathers.”

  “How barbaric,” she says. “How fortunate that I was taken away, to be raised in a school and to know the names of sin.”

  The man named Apparitor takes one step closer, ducks his head cobra-quick as if to bite at her, and suddenly—is not the Throne’s man anymore. He looks at her with a kind of fierce, desperate honesty, and she almost, almost, trusts it.

  But she remembers her own honesty with Tain Hu. What it hid.

  “Fortunate indeed,” he says. “Control, Baru Cormorant, control, by any means the Throne can secure. Give them no rein! Sodomites get hot iron, but we do not envy tribadists the knife. Are you ready to live with the yoke of that threat?”

  Empathy begs from the bottom of her brain but she gives it no audience. Clever, she thinks, to send this man as a living warning—he is as you will be. “Is that a confession?” she whispers through the left side of her mouth. “Do I control you now, by threat of iron?”

  He laughs in her face. “Your test, my lady!” he cries, and beckons to the launch, where his soldiers lift yards of wool from the shackled ranger-knight of Vultjag, the brigand bitch, the duchess Tain Hu.

  * * *

  SHE was supposed to be safe. Off the board.

  But of course she came back, to face death, to try to save her home. What else did she have?

  Baru always forgets: there are other players.

  * * *

  SHE waits in the cellars beneath the Elided Keep for an audience with her general.

  Her parents cursed her with a hungry, disquieted mind, a mind for accounting, for the census of birds, for treason. Now she turns that disquiet on the traits of her wound. How far does it reach? Will it worsen? Will there be a day when she stands in the surf, the sea to her left, the land to her right, and forgets that there is a world beyond the waves?

  She has clung
to Aminata’s boarding saber through all this. Now she works it from ward to ward, high left to low right, the ox and the fool and the rest. When she crosses over to her right side, the sword steals itself away. She can still feel the hilt, the weight, the play. Her body still works, over there. But the blade is a ghost.

  And if there really is no wound? If she has locked up in that blind hemisphere all the offal of her treachery, all the loves and cares she gathered?

  She shakes her head. Cuts right to left, opening the gut of a phantom foe. The way Aminata taught her.

  “Your Excellence.” The concubine with the anise breath beckons from the inner door. “The prisoner is ready for you.”

  She gestures with the blade, signaling her impatience. “Clear the room. I’ll speak to her alone.”

  Somewhere in the past hour, her retinue abandoned its pretended whisper and gossip. Their silence as they file out admits to discipline. Apparitor comes last. “You will not do it in private,” he warns. “There will be no tender words, no secret mercies. You will not give her the privilege of death by your own hand. You will order her execution, your men will drown her in the surf, and her body will go to Falcrest—so that we may know she died in pain, and not by some arrangement.” His eyes crack. Something in him feels for her. Perhaps he did this himself, once. “I’m sorry. But it must be this way.”

  “She is an enemy of the Throne,” Baru says coolly. “Why would I grant mercy?”

  The crack of feeling in him seals itself. “Your ruthlessness will carry you far,” he says. But it does not sound like praise.

  He goes out, the concubine who is his spy scuttling before him. The outer doors whisper shut on fish-oiled hinges.

  Baru turns to the inner room, trailing her blade like the leash of a hunting dog.

  * * *

  TAIN Hu sits across a narrow oaken table, shackled to a high-backed fir chair. Her jailors have stripped her of her salted leathers and gowned her in silk and iron. Her gyrfalcon face—broken nose, bronze cheeks, brown eyes—is unmarked. But all the might has gone from her body, all the armor-bearing brawn. She has been starved.

  Baru tries to speak, to strike first. But words abandon her. There is too much to say, or only one thing to say. And no way to say it.

  In the silence, Tain Hu lifts her eyes. “Your Excellence,” she says, and bows her head, as if she were still field-general, and Baru still the Fairer Hand.

  Baru sets her blade down between them like a little wall, just below the wine her servants left, and sits in the other chair. She wants more than all else to smile, and to answer the last thing Tain Hu ever said to her, that smiling sleepy greeting: hello.

  Hello yourself, imuira. Kuye lam. In an orgy of self-punishment, between swallows of salt, she looked up exactly what it meant, to be sure of her memory. It brought her as close to the edge as she has ever come.

  But it would only be mockery.

  How could you let this happen? she asks herself. How could you let it be, knowing who you were, what role you were to play? You could have turned away, and spared yourself.

  But she did not. She never could have.

  Tain Hu watches her with desert eyes. “Are you here to kill me?” she asks.

  Death may be the greatest hope she has left. “No,” Baru says. “That happens tomorrow. You will be drowned by the rising tide, so the Throne may say the moon and stars judged you. Falcrest loves to align itself with such laws.”

  “I see.” Tain Hu nods as if this were a right and proper thing. “Will my death bring advantage to Baru Fisher, my sworn lord?”

  Baru pours red wine with a steady hand, filling one cup, then the other. She wants to beg, to rage: stop it. Abjure me, repudiate me, call me false, curse my name. Give me anything but this loyal calm.

  “It will bring me advantage,” she says. “It is the last test of my loyalty to the Throne.”

  “Let me propose a toast, then,” Tain Hu says, and there is no sarcasm in her eyes, no hint of anger to soften the blow. “To your unshakable loyalty.”

  Baru looks left, so that Tain Hu blinks away for a moment. Out of vision, but not out of memory, gone from sight but not from the vanguard at Sieroch, her charger galloping white in a run of chestnut. Bloody face lifted toward Baru’s spyglass, mailed fists clutching Cattlson’s banner in triumph.

  Her accountant’s mind makes note: turning away hides the woman but not the pain.

  Perhaps Tain Hu has snatched up the blade on the table while she looked away. Perhaps death is coming down through her blindness, and she will never know it.

  But a moment passes and no strike comes.

  Baru turns back to the table, back to awareness of Tain Hu. Her field-general watches her in silence. Baru moves a glass of wine across the table, crosswise. “I wanted to explain,” she says. “So you would know what you’ll die for. I thought I owed you that.”

  Already she sounds like one of them. A Falcresti creature. A traitor to her own childhood.

  Tain Hu takes up the glass in callused hands, straining her shackles’ play. “You owe me nothing. I swore to die for you.” She shrugs precisely. The wine in her glass barely moves. “So it will be.”

  I see your strategy, Tain Hu, Baru thinks. I see the order of battle. You go to your death with exquisite loyalty. I measure my treason against your faith and it eats me up, now and for the rest of my life. It is the most hurt you can manage.

  It will work.

  “There is no Emperor upon the Faceless Throne,” she says. “Behind the mask and the figurehead is a committee, a closed council. Each member—”

  “—holds a secret that could destroy another,” Tain Hu says. “So the Throne’s members are bound to each other by fear. And you were offered a seat, at the price of a dangerous service, raising false rebellion in Aurdwynn so the Throne could weed out the disloyal. You believed the Masquerade would inevitably reconquer Aurdwynn, and you thought you could ease the cost in blood. I know.”

  “How?” she whispers. “How could you know?”

  “Your red-haired handler thought it safe to explain these things to a dead woman. It was a long journey east.” Again Tain Hu shrugs. Again her wine lies still, as if boasting of her precision in all things. “I wanted to understand the woman behind the mask I knew. I spoke with him at length.”

  Baru closes her eyes. She must have known what she was giving Apparitor in exchange, just as she knew what she was doing at Sieroch, at the Fuller’s Road. Of course she knew. Of course she knew.

  “And what did he ask in return? What was it safe for a dead woman to tell?”

  Tain Hu’s mouth does not move but her eyes tighten in a little smile.

  “Tell me.” Baru leans across the table, across the blade. “Tell me what secrets you gave the Throne. Or does your play at loyalty not extend so far?”

  Tain Hu does not flinch. “What secrets could I know about Baru Fisher? What truth did you ever give me?” She laughs quietly. “You were wise. You trusted only yourself.”

  “There was one,” Baru says, her voice terrible to her own ears, burdened with the memory of crimes more beautiful and dear than rebellion or treachery.

  Tain Hu looks at her own hands. She sets her glass down on the table, motion by motion, as if in awe of the working of her joints. “There was that.” She nods thoughtfully. “But I wondered: Should I mention it? Would he care to know a lie? How would knowing a lie serve the purposes of the Throne, which seeks to bind by truth?”

  There was that. That one night, and everything it acknowledged.

  “It was no lie,” Baru whispers.

  “I wondered that, in the long nights after Sieroch,” Tain Hu whispers in return. “I wondered if you could be fool enough to fall that way, even knowing what you were meant to do. I wondered if all the things you whispered in the night could be real, instead of a clever act, a way to blind me. I did not think you a fool, Baru Fisher, but of course I did not think myself a fool either, and yet I was.”

 
; She leans forward, palms flat, the sandy ruin of her close-shorn hair still damp with seawater. Her nearness summons sedition in Baru’s chest.

  “So I told him,” she says.

  So the Throne has its secret. Tain Hu has her small revenge. Hot iron for the sodomite, and for tribadists, the knife. Not now, of course, not while she is loyal. But if Baru Cormorant ever turns, ever slips, ever becomes a threat—the knife.

  “I have counsel for you, now that we’ve both struck our blows,” Tain Hu says. She leans forward on arms still corded with the memory of strength, and Baru remembers her leaning across the map table at Vultjag, pointing to weakness, here, there. “As your general.”

  Look where your counsel has taken you, Baru thinks bitterly. Why should I listen?

  But Tain Hu did not defeat herself.

  “Speak,” Baru says.

  Tain Hu’s broad shoulders tighten. “You should kill me. To defy the Throne and secure your power.”

  “Have you heard nothing?” Baru snaps. “Did their man confuse you? I prove my loyalty by killing you, Hu. It would be no defiance.”

  “You will fail,” Tain Hu says. “They know it. They hope for you to fail.”

  In the lamplight the wine between them looks as clotted as old blood. “I need only give an order,” Baru says, and then, with a taunting spite she does not feel: “I can give hard orders, Duchess.”

  “You need to watch it happen, unflinching, unmoved. And you cannot.” Tain Hu looks into the empty distance, watching her own death. “You will see the tide rising and you will beg for them to spare me. They will agree. They will grant you your ascension, and they will keep me as a pet, knowing you will do anything to keep me from harm. I will be their hold on you.”

  A flicker like the ghost of a smile at the edge of her lips. “Better for you,” she says, “if you had let me die at Sieroch. Better if you had never tried to save me.”

  Baru wants to protest but it chills like truth. It has been in her dreams these past months, as she wondered what her final test would be: spare her, spare her; I will do anything to spare her. “But they have the secret they need,” she protests. “You gave it to them. They have a hold.”