The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  The silent calm of the place came over Baru, and although she did not believe in ancient men and women who had practiced their virtues so perfectly that they subsumed and became them, she found all her knotted-up wariness pressed flat and still. Water, and oil, and light through paper, and somehow the words spoken were true without being dangerous.

  But still she tried to match each sentence to one of the circled faces. Her curiosity remained.

  “I hope for a free Aurdwynn for my daughters. I hope the Taranoki will be the spark we need. I hope—” The ilykari smiled gently, as if moved. “I hope for her hand and a throne. I hope for freedom, and no more. I hope for freedom. I hope for freedom.”

  The wind outside blew against the walls and small clear drops of water seeped in through the roof to tremble against the waxed paper and the oiled cedar poles. The caged light of the lanterns danced and flickered.

  “Some of us are enemies outside this place.” Now the priestess spoke with the wind behind her. “Xate Yawa hunts and kills my fellow ilykari. Baru Cormorant wears the mask of the tyranny in Falcrest. Dukes Oathsfire and Lyxaxu bicker with Vultjag over marriage and land. Duke Unuxekome consorts with the pirates that trouble our waters. If we are to unite in rebellion, we must bind each other close. I have tied that bond between you, and now I will tie another. Baru: come forward.”

  Tain Hu’s dark eyes glimmered gold in the candlelight. Baru had to will herself to move. The stillness of the place had seized her bones.

  “I am here,” she said.

  The priestess offered the ink pot, the pen, the palimpsest. It had been filled with small square provinces of old Iolynic script. “On this palimpsest I have written the secrets offered to me by all those gathered here. Secrets of deadly power. You will offer a secret to me, and I will write it here, so that you too will be bound.”

  “What if,” she said, the smell of olive oil in her nose, her eyes, “I lie?”

  “I will know,” the priestess said, and then, whispering in Baru’s ear, close and soft as clay, “just as Cairdine Farrier knew the potential in your eyes, just as Devena knows the divisions in your heart. I will know.”

  Baru drew away with a start, her spine prickling. Duke Lyxaxu chuckled softly and murmured inaudibly to Oathsfire.

  The priestess held the pen low and tight like a woman gripping a snake. “You don’t know Old Iolynic. But I do. Whisper your secret to me, Baru Cormorant, and Wydd will hear.”

  The secret of secrets rose in her like a rotten thing trying to retch itself up, and just to stop it, to head it off, to do anything but say it or feel it like a pole of obsidian strapped to the curve of her spine, she seized the priestess by the back of the neck and held her close to hiss a different secret, her lips against the ilykari’s small dark ear: “I want to fuck women.”

  Why had she done that? Oh, no, why had she said that—what a fool, what a gullible fool—what desperation could possibly have driven her to vomit that truth up, that truth she struggled every day to hide—

  The pen scratched in short geometric arcs. “Is it enough?” Xate Yawa asked, breaking the silence. “Something of power?”

  “In the Masquerade, it is enough to end her life,” the priestess said. “She will never go back to them.”

  “Good!” Unuxekome, the sea duke, clapped his hands against his knees. “Then we have a rebellion to begin.”

  * * *

  AND so they began: the circle now a war council.

  Xate Yawa spoke first, to claim her primacy. “I stay in Treatymont.” As if this were the simplest and most trustworthy duty. “Play my part as Jurispotence as long as I can. If I learn something vital it will go through my brother.”

  So eerie to see Xate Olake sitting alongside her, those jungle-crow eyes twinned and sharp. What did they see when they looked at each other? Could any secret survive? Was there, perhaps, a sort of compact of vigilance, a mantra or instinct that kept them from ever blinking at the same time, so that one Xate or another always watched—

  But Olake was speaking. “My spies will do their work. We must determine which of the dukes will join us, who will go with Cattlson, and who can be courted. Heingyl is Cattlson’s, of course, but although they were once as brothers, I have hopes we will turn Radaszic—he dwells on the books Lyxaxu gave him, and the ruin Baru Cormorant made of his estate. Now he chafes against his chains.”

  “The Midlands?” Lyxaxu asked.

  “Nayauru Dam-builder and Ihuake could fall either way—or both, if their split grows deeper. With Nayauru comes Sahaule and Autr, good soldiers and good salt. With Ihuake comes Pinjagata, and we all know his worth.”

  “His worth,” Oathsfire murmured to Baru, “is that he and all his people are mad bastards who spilled out of a rabid bear already clutching spears.” Baru grinned, remembering her baffling meeting with Pinjagata, and then hid the grin, so that Oathsfire would not be misled.

  Olake set them all aside with a gesture like a bucket poured. “But the Midlands can wait. Your neighbor is the real priority, Lyxaxu. We must buy Erebog to secure our hold on the North—and we must keep her from falling to her own landlords.”

  “Why the North?” Baru wondered, as she spoke, how long and how carefully these plans had been considered. She had come late to their council—in the span of the night, and of years. “You won’t begin by seizing Treatymont?”

  “Treatymont is a trap.” It was Unuxekome who spoke, the Sea Groom’s voice smooth, eager, full of long-checked need to act. “Heingyl Stag-hunter will rally to his friend Cattlson with a frightening count of cavalry. Radaszic may not turn to us. He loves and fears Heingyl.”

  “With or without Radaszic, the move would still destroy us.” It was lamplight that put the hawk-gold in Tain Hu’s eyes, but Baru imagined it as an inner fire. “If we took Treatymont we would be bottled up. Powerless to defend our duchies from reprisal when reinforcements came from Falcrest.”

  Xate Olake’s murmur brought the taste of wine to Baru’s tongue, the memory of maybe-poison. “If we act too suddenly, we cannot untangle the Traitor’s Qualm. We must display endurance … make a case to Nayauru and Autr and Sahaule, to Ihuake and Pinjagata, that we are a safe investment. We need them for triumph.”

  “That endurance depends on accomplishing three tasks before winter.” Tain Hu rapped on the floor, her eyes circling the conspiracy. “First, build a base of power in the North, a place that will tell the people”—her eyes flickered over Baru—“that we can offer them a fairer kind of rule. When the time is right, we will declare open rebellion and drop the bridges on the Inirein. My neighbors and I are agreed?”

  To each side of Baru, Oathsfire and Lyxaxu nodded and made sounds of assent. “The other dukes know they can’t root us out of the woods,” Lyxaxu said. “High Stone itself is beyond siege. Oathsfire’s longbowmen are peerless, and Vultjag—well, we all know the difficulty of troubling her.”

  Unuxekome raised a hand. “My friend Oathsfire here is marriageable again, if we’re desperate to sweeten the pot with Nayauru or Ihuake. They are unwed—Nayauru, of course, keeps the old Maia habits, but she might accept a political marriage so long as it didn’t bind her to one bed.”

  Oathsfire sighed. “My southerly neighbor is always thinking of my happiness.”

  “She’s quite lovely—”

  “And she knows it too well.”

  “I’m sure your heart would win her.”

  “Against Sahaule, it’s not my heart that needs to impress her—”

  “Our second need.” Tain Hu cut them off with admirable curtness. “Our serfs will only leave their families and fight if we can give them food, protection, and salaries. We need money for all of these. Once open rebellion begins, that need will only grow.”

  Everyone looked at Baru. She nodded, offering confidence, feeling confident. This web of money and terrain and treason felt familiar, tractable—easier than sitting in an office drinking wine and folding sedition into polite words. She’d been so pliant
for so long. A joy to act at last. “I can give you the tax ships. With Xate Yawa’s help, I’ll arrange for them to travel back to Falcrest in convoy, where they can be taken together.” She considered Unuxekome, struck by his enthusiasm and by the respect in his eyes. What had she done to earn that? “We only need a fleet to seize them.”

  He nodded. “If you can disrupt the naval escort, my ships can do the rest. But how can you be sure Governor Cattlson will let you have any authority over the tax ships, after—?” He gestured to Tain Hu, to the duel that had thrown Treatymont into havoc. “Surely he suspects your loyalties have wavered. Last time an Imperial Accountant strayed toward the rebellion, he killed her. Why would he let you near the tax harvest?”

  Xate Yawa smiled a thin efficient smile. “Because I won’t let him constrain her. He may not trust his Accountant, but he cannot overrule the Jurispotence without a writ from Falcrest. That writ will be some time coming.”

  Tain Hu rose from her crouch, her scabbard whispering across the flooring as she moved. “Our third objective follows from there. Once we seize the tax ships, Cattlson will call for reinforcements. They’ll come sailing against the trade wind and the currents, hoping to put down the rebellion quickly, but they’ll be racing the end of summer and the storm season. Duke Unuxekome, your ships will be the only means we have to head them off. Can it be done?”

  The sea duke’s confidence suggested to Baru that perhaps he knew very little about the Masquerade navy. But then again, she knew very little about him. “My ancestors sailed this coast for centuries. We know every inlet and harbor, every trick of current and wind. There are pirates coming north, driven out of Taranoki waters, and we have gold to offer them. Yes, I think we can make a fight of it.”

  Tain Hu looked to Xate Yawa. “You doubted the time was right.”

  Xate Yawa shrugged slightly. “Soon all doubt will be erased.”

  They all stood together, Baru missing whatever silent signal brought the meeting to an end. “We leave separately,” Oathsfire murmured to her. “At intervals.”

  “I can’t imagine why.” She stepped away from him, irritated by his condescension, her irritation springing from some deeper restlessness, an eagerness to begin. “Unuxekome, Your Grace. A moment.”

  The Sea Groom walked with her as she stepped away from the circle. Above his gloves the black cords of his lower arms were raw with rope burns. He’d spent time sailing rough waters, not long ago.

  “You called them Taranoki waters,” she said. “Not Souswardi.”

  “My maps say Taranoke.” He had a comrade’s smile, wry with the knowledge of shared suffering. “As long as I rule, they always will.”

  “I’m grateful.” And she was.

  “Is that why you’re doing this?” The candles behind him moved softly in their glass as the wind hissed outside. “Because of what happened there? The pirates told me how Taranoke fell.”

  She felt the test, and hesitated. He spoke into the silence: “I dreamed of liberating and ruling Aurdwynn, you know. I think we all did, in the years after the occupation began. I had the ships and I had the hate. But I couldn’t find the way. It was all so—” He grasped at something, gloves tight, like an invisible knot in windblown rigging. “So complicated.”

  “I want to show you that way,” she said, seizing on that hope, that truth. “I have been a servant too long. I want to help make something free.”

  He bowed his head in acknowledgment, perhaps in gratitude. Behind him, Oathsfire watched their conversation with hooded eyes.

  * * *

  CATTLSON’S retaliation fell swiftly, in the shape of a letter, copied to every organ and factor of the provincial government.

  It was Unuxekome who slipped her away—out of the Horn Harbor on a little mail ship called Beetle Prophet, past the burnt towers, between the torchships, and east toward his home at Welthony, where the river Inirein joined the sea.

  “Tell me a story,” the duke Unuxekome said. They stood at the prow, early in the afternoon. Baru was reading her letters.

  “A story. Hm. There are riots in Treatymont.” Duel riots—Baru’s riots. The cauldrons of Little Welthon and the Arwybon finally spilling over as all the rage of poverty and stolen children boiled and flashed into steam. Garrison troops swarming to the Horn Harbor to protect the shipping. They’d left too much unguarded: a cadre of woodsmen in green wool had led a mass breakout at the Cold Cellar.

  “That’s not a story, Your Excellence. More of a report.” He stood balanced on the ship’s bowsprit, hands light on the ropes. “It’s hard to find good stories now. I can’t read Aphalone, you know—really I’m a very poor—”

  An exocet fish leapt from the bow wave and Unuxekome lunged, trying to catch it by its silver wings. Baru snatched for his tunic to pull him back, startled, thinking already: the idiot, the child, they’ll say I pushed him—

  But the duke kept his footing, bare toes curled on the wood, hands spidered in the rigging. The exocet glided away. “Ah,” the duke sighed, and then, turning, “You thought I’d fall?”

  She hid her embarrassment. He was maybe ten years her senior, salted and authoritative, a captain on any ship he cared to sail. She would have to match him. “I planned against the eventuality.”

  “And here Vultjag warned me you thought only of yourself.”

  She permitted a soft ha. “Even so. Cattlson would’ve been pleased to charge me with the murder of a duke.”

  “Oh? But you’re already a wanted traitor, aren’t you?”

  “No. Suspected seditionist. It means—” She grappled for a moment with the exactitudes of Masquerade law. “He doesn’t have the power to arrest me without the Jurispotence’s backing. But if he marks me as a seditionist, he gains the power to review all my orders, which lets him counterplay them. And if he still had me in Treatymont, he’d lock me in protective custody.”

  “Hmm.” He rested his head in the rigging, as if the ship were all his hammock, and stared up at the circling shearwaters. “Still sounds more like a report than a story. Needs a hero.”

  “An illiterate duke captaining a mail ship?”

  Unuxekome looked at her like he’d been stabbed, and then laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I must seem like a vain bastard, preening up on the bowsprit.”

  “I’d never question the bloodline of a duke of Aurdwynn.”

  “Oh, no, please do. I used to dream I was a bastard. My mother sailed with the Syndicate Eyota, see? All those dashing Oriati buccaneers, raiding and adventuring…” He rolled his neck, squinting in the noonday sun. “Better than a father who loved harbor dredging and river trade.”

  Baru had an idea what had happened to the duchess Unuxekome and her consort. The same quiet disaster that had left so many duchies in the hands of young people with sparse families and graveyards full of noble bones. But she didn’t ask about the Fools’ Rebellion. “You may go buccaneering yet,” she said. “If I have my way.”

  He lifted himself a little ways off the ropes to watch her intently. “And will you have your way? Can you possibly arrange for the tax ships to be taken, even with Cattlson dogging you?”

  Cattlson had tried to countermand Baru’s order to the Admiralty—that vital order, the key arrangement: sail the tax ships to Falcrest in a single convoy, for security. And that might have been the end there: but Xate Yawa protected her. Baru had won a legal duel, after all, without any firm violation of Imperial law. The protocols of that same law gave Cattlson no cause to relieve or countermand her. He needed the Jurispotence’s consent to destroy Baru’s authority. And she would not give it.

  “Let her manage the remainder of the tax season,” Xate Yawa had counseled Cattlson (or so Muire Lo reported). “She’ll work to excel in her duties so she can look better than you in Falcrest’s eyes. It won’t be enough. By midwinter, Parliament will order her relieved.”

  No need for Unuxekome to know how close it had been. Baru brushed his concern away like a circling fly. “The tax ships
will go where I want them. I have the law on my side.”

  His jaw hardened, as if to bite. “You have Xate Yawa on your side, in the same way I have the sea on mine. The sea takes no side. Be careful about pinning all your plans on her.”

  “I’m pinning all my plans on your fleet, Your Grace.”

  She meant this as reassurance, even flattery. But Unuxekome rose from the rigging and walked down the bowsprit to her, swaying against the wave motion. “And I’m pinning my hopes on you, Your Excellence. Tell me how to take these ships. Tell me where they’ll be, and with what escort. I will see to the rest. If you trust anything, trust in me. But give me what I need to do it.”

  And he really thought he would, this barefoot sweat-soaked duke of waves. He had shown Baru something vital, trusting or uncaring (perhaps this was a habit of the nobility, born into power, unconditioned to secrecy and meticulous self-containment—a habit of those who never had to earn their station). Unuxekome loved stories. He loved them much more than plans. If he could be the saga-captain sailing into death and legend, he would.

  But Baru had heard stories of her own. Aminata’s boast: a single Masquerade frigate can fight four Oriati war dromons and leave them burning.…

  The Imperial Navy ruled the Ashen Sea. Unuxekome would never take the tax ships by main force. Not even with the help of the pirates he’d call up out of the south. Baru had to arrange for his victory.

  But how?

  Everything she sent to the Admiralty in Treatymont would be opened and read. Every order she gave would be scrutinized for some excuse Cattlson could use to reject it. She had to betray the tax convoy to the rebels without betraying herself first.

  How?

  Unuxekome watched her closely, waiting for her to share her great plan, the masterstroke of manipulation that would give him his chance at heroism. She smiled at him, an easy confident smile laced with secrets, a smoke-screen smile, and said, “I think I’m going to climb the rigging. I need exercise, and space. Would you take my coat down below?”