The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “You’ll join me for dinner. The armsmen will show you the way.” Tain Hu paused at the door, looking back into the little chamber with a curious frown. “Is it true that you duel?”

  She set out her own parchments and palimpsests and books, ignoring the duchess. The notes were in Iolynic, which she could only barely begin to read—but the numbers she understood, and the numbers would do. “Bring me more ink,” she said.

  * * *

  BARU missed dinner. A yeoman brought her candles to work into the night.

  Her first line of attack failed. Duchy Vultjag’s accounts had been painstakingly balanced. The simplest forms of fraud and corruption betrayed themselves here, in the balance of payments, but Vultjag’s payments—on food, on iron, on wages, on interest—had all been drawn from legitimate taxes, sales, loans, and the duchy’s own capital reserves. Tain Hu could manage her own arithmetic.

  But Tain Hu was of Aurdwynn, and Aurdwynn had known of fiat currency and accounting for not nearly long enough to master them. She must have made a mistake somewhere, a mistake that an Imperial Accountant could sniff out.

  Surely.

  Unless there was no treason to conceal. No brewing rebellion in need of coin.

  Baru took a long sip of watered wine and ran a finger down the itemized list of the duchy’s transactions. “What?” she said, and then, setting down her wine, “What?”

  She’d been looking for the fingerprints of rebellion—the use of aggressively loaned fiat money to purchase gems and precious metals, land and goods.

  But Vultjag had done just the opposite. Tain Hu had sold her quarries and her forests for fiat notes. She’d unloaded the gems and gold that her ancestors had stockpiled for generations, all in the name of gathering more paper. And it had been done so strangely, so unambitiously—no sweeping bargain, no great financial maneuver. Just a blizzard of tiny little transactions, chipping her own estate away piecemeal.

  Pieces that added up. Tain Hu had done well in these sales. The rates were very generous.

  But sales to who? The names on the ledger weren’t other dukes, not neighboring Oathsfire, who’d nipped at Vultjag for so long, not Lyxaxu come down from his high hold. No sales to the Fiat Bank or the Imperial Trade Factor, who would be overjoyed to buy productive land. Just a run of little undistinguished names, without title—

  “Oh,” Baru said. “Oh-ho.”

  She opened the Vultjag census and ran through it, and there were the names—the Awbedyrs and the prolific Hodfyri, the Alemyonuxe who had spent whole generations building mills riverside, the bear-coat Sentiamut who had made their small fortune ranging north into the Wintercrests from whence their ancestors had come.

  No nobility here. Just the common families of Vultjag.

  Tain Hu had sold her duchy to her own people. She’d liquidated her estate.

  But where could those commonborn families, hunters and masons and rangers, have found the capital to buy it? Where had they earned enough Imperial fiat notes to purchase Tain Hu’s estate out from under her at generous prices, arming her with enough liquid capital to buy other duchies wholesale, debts and all?

  Money had to come from somewhere. This only pushed the question back a step, from Tain Hu to the people of Vultjag.

  Baru got up and paced the geometry of the room, the carpet dancing underfoot, chargers and spearmen and threaded blood beneath her boots. Why do this? Well, because Tain Hu needed a way to get money that didn’t draw a lot of attention, apparently. Like selling her holdings to her people. But why would they go along with it? What could the Sentiamuts do with a stretch of land in the Wintercrest foothills, or the Awbedyrs with a thousand acres of forest? Sell the land to the Fiat Bank at a slight profit? They were feudal serfs, not the kind of landlords and rentiers who dominated the Midlands duchies. (Alone of the northern powers, Duchess Erebog had allowed landlords to rise, and found that the hardscrabble land made them unbiddable and tightfisted.) No, the Vultjag families wouldn’t know where to begin.

  Baru put her fists on her temples and pressed.

  Why would Tain Hu’s vassals buy her estate from her with fiat notes they couldn’t reasonably have? If they had taken out loans, the Fiat Bank’s records would have noted it. So where had the money come from? And what was it good for, anyway? Tain Hu could not reasonably expect to spend all these fiat notes on things like spears and horses, or even use them for wages during wartime.

  So the money had to be useful before the war.

  Baru went to the window and looked out at the yawning dark silence of the forest and the valley beneath her, the worthless riches of Vultjag, all this wood and stone that couldn’t be harvested or moved, trapped by distance and the cost of labor, by the cold fact that Duchy Vultjag was good only for providing the resources that others would profit from.

  She closed her eyes and set her shoulders and tried to be Tain Hu, to wear her boots and mount her horse and ride the paths of her duchy thinking: How do I unlock all this and turn it into power, power to use against the Masquerade? I cannot sell my wealth and land to them without feeding them—how do I escape their maze?

  How do I turn this valley into an army at the gates of Treatymont?

  The money had to come from somewhere.

  But the paper trail would end with these little families. Unlike the duchies, they were not required to keep their own accounts.

  Ah. And there it was.

  Su Olonori’s scrap of a note: V. much land sale? He had been on the right track. V for Vultjag. Selling her land.

  The woman Ake Sentiamut, in the bear coat, offering drinks, murmuring that Bel Latheman was blameless—Ake Sentiamut who was liaison to the moneyprinters—

  The money had to come from somewhere. Unless it didn’t. Unless it had appeared out of nothing.

  * * *

  THE next morning, she told Tain Hu that she had concluded her audit. “And all is in order,” she reported, smiling. “Would that all the duchies kept their books as cleanly as you. If you’ll give me a moment to unburden myself of this?”

  She touched the chained purse of her station like it was a dead thing strapped to her belt.

  “You’ll stay a while, of course,” Tain Hu insisted. “I’ve promised myself I’ll teach you to ride before Governor Cattlson has a chance to butcher your technique.”

  The thought of Lapetiare came to mind unbidden, and Baru put it away just as quickly. Aminata’s ship would sail before Baru could return, one way or another. There was nothing to be done.

  She took a long swig of the breakfast wine and closed her eyes to savor the taste, to escape, for a moment, the pressure of Tain Hu’s ceaseless watch.

  “Of course,” she said.

  * * *

  THE duchess taught her to ride, first two to a horse, then Baru on a phlegmatic chestnut mare that refused to hurry even when the winding forest paths carried them into the territory of a few violently displeased crows. Baru found the crows delightful, and tarried a while just to see how far their wrath would go. But after a while the birds decided on an airy unilateral truce.

  “I have a theory,” Tain Hu said, “regarding your attention to birds.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s the only tongue of your homeland that you can still hear spoken aloud.”

  “We spoke Aphalone on Taranoke,” Baru said, and let none of her surprise show.

  “Not before they came.”

  “Before we came.”

  Tain Hu made a face of silent mockery.

  The next day, Tain Hu brought shortbows and taught Baru how to shoot. The components were fascinating—fletching, limbs and riser, nock and fistmele, glue and sinew and horn—but making them work together required coordination that Baru seemed to lack. The same could not be said of Tain Hu. She moved and spoke decisively, sometimes with a certain impatience, as if the world dragged two steps behind her will and she found the friction grating. On horseback or with a bow, she performed with boastful mindlessness, her focus clear
ly elsewhere, on the conversation or the birdsong. But given a challenge—shooting backward from a gallop, answering a question of deep history or philosophy—her brow would furrow and some stiffness would pass out of her, as if she had forgotten, for a moment, to pretend to be someone else.

  For a while Baru didn’t notice how closely she’d been observing the other woman. Perhaps this was self-deception: once noticed, it would have to be controlled.

  In the forest, riding without guard beneath the dark boughs and the impossible towering heights of the redwoods, they came to speak of dangerous things. Religion. Politics, local and foreign. Marriage—Tain Hu was young, but in Aurdwynn, where views on family often echoed the old bicameral Tu Maia ways, a woman of proven fertility could go farther. And, in the end, the Masquerade. First the questions dearest to Baru’s heart—Why do they rule us? Why are they so powerful?—and her best answers: “Chemistry, and finance, and very clever seamanship,” to which Tain Hu replied that the ancient Tu Maia had invented heavy cavalry and the horse-drawn plow, and that it had given them half the known world, but only for a time.

  “What will we be, if you have your way with us?” Tain Hu asked. Around them the forest moved in the twilight, ancient, vast.

  “You will be remade. Your blood inoculated. New ways to be wealthy and useful introduced. Your marriages will be—” Baru struggled briefly with the Aphalone words. “Adjusted. So that your children and all their descendants may serve the Republic best.”

  “We will be bred like cattle.” Tain Hu bent to rub her horse’s flank, as if in apology. “It’s already begun. They have set quotas—no fewer than so many marriages between Stakhi and Maia bloodlines, no pure Belthyc marriages—”

  “The first steps of the Incrastic program seek to quantify the natural strengths of the racial types and their various hybrids.”

  “And what do you think of it?”

  “I am an accountant. Heredity is not my concern.”

  “You will never rule anything,” Tain Hu said icily, “if you limit yourself.”

  “What?” Baru said, just to buy time against the chill of hearing Cairdine Farrier here.

  “Money is only one kind of power. Faith is power, too. Love is power. Slaughter and madness are both roads to power. Certainly, symbols are power—you wear one wherever you go, that purse you carry. And you wear others when you decide how to dress yourself, how to look at men and women, how to carry your body and direct your gaze. And all these symbols can raise people to labor or war.” Tain Hu looked down at her with regal distance, with no anger at all. “And you are a symbol. Look at yourself. Taken from one conquered land because you were young and bright, and set to rule another. How can you be anything but a challenge? A commonborn girl, given authority over a land of old noble men? You are a word, Baru Cormorant, a mark, and the mark says: you, Aurdwynn, you are ours.”

  “I am Baru Cormorant,” she protested, “accountant, and I earned my place by merit. I am a mark of nothing except myself.”

  “As long as you believe that is all you are, you will never be anything but a piece of the machine.”

  “A piece can change the whole. It may take patience, or sacrifice, but—”

  “This machine? Better to break it, and build something new.” Tain Hu spurred her horse on ahead.

  * * *

  LATER, on a high stone outcropping where the horses moved only gingerly, they watched the sun set. Tain Hu had not taken them home.

  “You found it, didn’t you?” Tain Hu asked. “In the books. You told me that all was in order, but it was a lie. You realized I’ve been forging fiat notes. Maybe you even understand the scale of it.”

  Baru could have lied again, and been caught in it. Instead she told the truth, because she thought it was what Tain Hu would respect. “Yes,” she said. “I found your trick. You could kill me here, and make it look like an accident.”

  “And what then? They would send yet another clever foreigner, one less pleasing as a houseguest?” Tain Hu shook her head, braids scattering. “No. It was never an option. You protected yourself too well.”

  Baru bowed in her saddle. “I’m honored.”

  Tain Hu looked out into the forest. In the distance an owl called. “You won’t be able to do anything to stop it. The rebellion will begin. Your helplessness against it will be an indelible failure, marked on you as surely as a scar. And for that I am sorry. You must have your own wants, and this failure will destroy them.”

  She would have been young during Aurdwynn’s last rebellion. She spoke of no parents, no siblings. Perhaps she understood the cost of revolution well. “And what do you want, Tain Hu?”

  Duchess Vultjag considered her estates from the high stone. “I am of noble blood, and like all nobility it used to be that I only wanted to rule, to be separate and above my people. Just as you now rule us.”

  “And now that we rule you?”

  “Now the Masquerade has taught me the weight of the saddle. Now Xate Olake, beloved husband of my lost beloved aunt, has opened my ears to the cry of the commoner.” She lifted her hand to cup her mouth and called back to the owl, a soft and perfect imitation. “Now I want to make my people free.”

  “Treason,” Baru chided softly.

  “Tell the Jurispotence, then.” Tain Hu laughed.

  “It was clever, using your own serfs to launder the forged money into your books. But there’s one thing I’m curious about.”

  “Just one? You’re so easily sated?”

  “Two, then,” Baru said, thinking back to her audit of the Fiat Bank, the terrified Principal Factor, and to Ake Sentiamut, who had brought her beer and protested that her beloved Factor had never bent a rule in his life. “I know how you got the pattern and the seals to forge the notes—the Sentiamut family is truly daring. But where did you find the labor talent? To copy one fiat note is an enterprise. To do it in such quantity, without detection…”

  Tain Hu took up her reins and looked toward the perilous descent. “I have heard it said that the greatest love of the ilykari priests who worship Wydd and Devena and Himu is the study of their sacred manuscripts. And those manuscripts are very beautifully illuminated, whether the originals, or the copies they make. Some have even been taken to Falcrest, to be shown as art.”

  “Ah,” Baru said, understanding. Xate Yawa’s Cold Cellar was full of ilykari awaiting trial, and they could be set to work.

  They found the path again as the forest fell into darkness. But although the stars here were foreign to Baru, they were not to Tain Hu, and she guided them with ease.

  9

  BARU went south again, back to Treatymont, back to the snake pit. Racing against time and the rebel plan. There might still be a chance.

  On the road north of the crossroads freetown Haraerod, in the fang-shaped shadow of Mount Kijune, a band of soldiers blocked her way: a filthy phalanx bristling with steel. Vultjag’s escorting armsmen muttered, sullen but not worried—“It’s Ihuake, taking toll on her roads … thinks we’re all cattle, really, just another kind of herd.…”

  Likely not assassins. Not here, not now, not by this means. Vultjag’s armsmen would have done the job themselves.

  Baru dismounted, put on her mask, and marched straight into the teeth of the phalanx with a scowl and a mind to sow terror. Today was not a day for delays. “Stand aside,” she called, raising one white-gloved hand. “Imperial business. I don’t pay tolls.” And then, when the wall of spearmen did not stir: “The Duchess Ihuake pays me tribute! Do you want to spend the rest of your lives eating slop in her pigpens?”

  One of the fighters in the phalanx put down his long spear and shield and walked out to meet her. He was an old man, leathery, untroubled by the burden of his armor and helm. Angry years had worked his face with scars.

  “Afraid they don’t speak Aphalone,” he said, and made a good case for his own honesty—his Aphalone was awful. He’d painted black makeup beneath his eyes to fend off sunglare. “Let me get a look at you
now. Hm.”

  Baru drew up at an arm’s reach, baffled. The old man squinted at her, working his jaw in a sort of disgruntled loop, and then shook his head in disgust. “Well, you look just like her, but she’s a better rider. Take off the mask, then. I’ve got to be sure.”

  Curiosity beat out indignation. “Just like who?”

  “The Duchess Nayauru. Word came she’d been sighted in disguise passing through Ihuake’s territory. Young woman, very clever, round about your height. Possibly intent on seducing Her Grace Ihuake’s son and usurping her lineage, or so Her Grace has warned me. Have you been seducing the Cattle Duchess’s heir?” The infantryman noticed the chained purse at her side and his brows knit. “Ah, shit. Are you the Imperial Accountant?”

  “I am.”

  The man chewed on this for a second and then spat into the road-stones. “Well. Duke Pinjagata, at your service. You’re Ffare Tanifel? We met at the—that damn affair in the big house, you recall?”

  Baru did her absolute utmost to look unflappable in the face of compounding absurdities. The Duke of Phalanxes turned out on foot to patrol for illicit lovers—it was like something out of a prerevolutionary romance. Or one of Muire Lo’s monographs. “Ffare Tanifel’s dead.”

  “Fuck me, that’s right, Xate got her. So you’re Su Olonori, the replacement. I don’t think we’ve met.” Pinjagata extended one gauntleted hand. “I also thought you were a man. Or—are you? I know the Oriati are flexible on that point. No place of mine to decide; just tell me which you prefer.”

  “He’s dead, too.” Baru took his hand and gave the best impression of strength she could manage through the mail. “I’m here to repair the situation.”

  “Dead too? Is that right?” Pinjagata eyed her with a kind of bemused respect. “So you came up here to unfuck the situation between these two?”

  “Between Ihuake and Nayauru? That’s not a priority now.” Xate Yawa could solve the hereditary bickering of the great Midlands duchesses. Tain Hu’s maneuver had to be countered. “I have urgent business in Treatymont. Move your soldiers and I’ll forget this inconvenience.”