The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Chest by chest they fixed ropes and buoys, and chest by chest they began to raise them. Some came up by pulley and muscle, hauled by boat teams. Swarms of divers went after the rest of the easy targets, descending with bundles of air bladders weighed down by rocks, fixing the bladders to the chests, and cutting the ballast free.

  Baru itched to go down to the harbor, to help make a tally of the recovered wealth or count the dead, to pin her sick anxiety to some real number. But they’d agreed that she would pretend, for the moment, to be Unuxekome’s prisoner. Keep up her charade a little longer, in case her authority could still be used.

  Purity Cartone’s boots had been found drifting in the harbor.

  “The divers,” she asked the duke. “Where do you get them all? There must be hundreds.”

  “Devotees.” His surgeon had bound his wound with linen. “Every coastal village in Aurdwynn has its divers, and among those divers are many ilykari—with the discipline of the body comes discipline of the soul. Mine are the finest. They have always been a strength of Duchy Unuxekome.”

  Baru watched another pod of divers leap from a fishing sloop, trailing ropes and bladders. “Mason leaf to help the vision. Clips and cotton on the nose and ears for the pressure change. But the pace, the depth, the cold—”

  “The ykari give them strength.” Neither of them had slept, but Unuxekome managed a wry smile. “Believe it or not. I do.”

  “Ykari Himu,” Baru guessed, thinking of the temple convocation, of oil and light. “For vigor.”

  “And Wydd, for patience of breath. Devena, to balance pressures and keep them from losing the surface. In matters practical, it’s good to invoke all three.” The duke yawned, and looked briefly appalled with himself. “Pardon me.”

  The clatter of footmen bringing a late breakfast came from the stairs. “I hope you haven’t pinned the rebellion on help from your gods,” Baru said.

  “Not gods. Aurdwynn has known too much war and change to want gods. We believe in the transcendence of human virtue.” He smiled, a strange, peaceful strength in his face. “They’re old, you know. The ykari were Belthyc. They lived here long before my ancestors or the Stakhieczi began their invasions and counterinvasions. And they still endure.”

  “The Masquerade would see it otherwise. Would see the ilykari exterminated.”

  “And the woman charged with that task is one of us.” His smile flickered, as if the thought of Xate Yawa had reminded him of the other conspiracies now underway, the distant gears in motion. But he spoke with quiet hope: “See? They find their ways to endure.”

  * * *

  DUKE Oathsfire, Duke Lyxaxu, and Tain Hu all sent barges down the Inirein to gather shares of the plunder. They would take the gold and hide it in the Wintercrest foothills. The rebellion would have its northern stronghold, its winter nest.

  Two days after the massacre in the harbor, the frigate Scylpetaire’s sails broke the horizon. Baru rejoiced at the timing: she knew Admiral Ormsment used Scylpetaire as a scout and advance guard, and since she had taken two days to return, Ormsment must have chased the pirates deep south before turning back.

  Scylpetaire sent up signal fireworks. No one in Welthony, Baru included, knew how to read them, so Baru ordered Duke Unuxekome to take her down among the few Masquerade prisoners they had fished from the harbor. Among the caged survivors, Baru found Mannerslate’s captain, a round-cheeked matronly woman with bloody fingernails. Unuxekome held a knife to Baru’s throat, and Baru, playing along with the charade, tremulously ordered the captain to translate the fireworks.

  Enemy routed. Six destroyed. No losses. Returning at best speed: eighteen hours. Report.

  “Tell us how to reply,” Unuxekome demanded.

  Mannerslate’s captain straightened her uniform and, after some consideration, spat. They debated sending a message, or a prisoner, or a corpse. Scylpetaire sailed too soon, concluding, perhaps, that the silence and the empty harbor screamed disaster. Duke Unuxekome ordered his fleet into hiding along the coast, hoping that Ormsment would sail her frigates into the remaining Oriati mines, or come too close and let herself be surrounded. But when the other frigates arrived, they kept a cautious distance. Scylpetaire broke away from the rest and sailed west, toward Treatymont, carrying the news.

  The rebellion’s first success touched off a string of disasters.

  In Treatymont, Xate Olake’s operatives struck—ilykari cultists, pirates, rogues, fanatic convicts plucked from his sister’s Cold Cellar, all executing the long-whispered Unmasking. Garrison soldiers were already thin-stretched and exhausted. Many of them burned or suffocated in their beds when a laundry chemical fire swallowed the dockside barracks.

  The assassins who went after Governor Cattlson met two Clarified disguised as maids. None of the assassins escaped. (No maid in the Governor’s House ever suffered disrespect again.) The team intended for Bel Latheman couldn’t find him; by odd coincidence, the Lady Heingyl Ri had gone traveling to call on the duchess Nayauru.

  Worse misfortune came in the Horn Harbor. Here a team of ilykari divers set out to destroy the two torchships moored outside the towers. They would carry incendiary grenades into the perilous Burn stores, setting both ships alight and annihilating the navy’s core strength in Aurdwynn.

  But Province Admiral Croftare, unnerved by “the smell of the air,” ordered her most precious ships to reanchor a mile offshore. Some of the divers made the long cold swim anyway, using mason leaf to navigate in the night. The first woman to reach Egalitaria began to climb. Grief befell her. Egalitaria’s captain, a veteran of treacherous Oriati harbors, had ordered the hull studded with broken glass.

  The diver cut her fingers and fell. The splash tipped off an alert marine, and flares went up. One diver, shot by crossbow from Kingsbane’s stern, fixed her grenades to the ship’s rudder and burned it. Another climbed Egalitaria’s anchor rope and actually made it belowdecks before a disregarded challenge got her stabbed.

  Scylpetaire arrived at a city in an uproar. The garrison couldn’t contain the riots; Falcresti citizens were murdered nightly. But the navy still held the harbor. Any hope of a blockade by Duke Unuxekome’s ships had died in the crib.

  Governor Cattlson met Scylpetaire and received the news that the taxes had been lost and Baru Cormorant taken hostage with weary credulity. “I wish,” he told Xate Yawa, “that I’d been even a little surprised.” He ordered the frigate to wait before sailing for Falcrest, hoping to learn whether Unuxekome’s mutiny would gutter out or spread.

  It spread. But not as the rebels might have hoped.

  * * *

  THE closest Dukes to Treatymont were Heingyl, Cattlson’s constant companion, and Radaszic, the fop.

  The Duke Radaszic sent a letter to the Duke Heingyl, as a way to explain his choice. Xate Yawa’s agents intercepted and copied it. Later Baru read the intercept, and understood a little of what had happened, even as she wanted to tear it apart in frustration.

  To the Duke Heingyl, Lord of Stags.

  (This had been written with a broad space behind it, as if Radaszic wanted to include more honorifics, or something else—Heingyl’s personal name, perhaps.)

  I will write this plainly, as you prefer. By now I’ve broken my oath of fealty, declared rebellion, and marched on Treatymont. You will not read the words of oathbreakers, so I ask that you give this letter to your daughter, whose perfect character, we will both agree, cannot be stained or diminished by the understanding of traitors. She will find a clever way to tell you the rest. May she one day rule all of Aurdwynn, as I know you desire.

  You are my brother—I said it enough while drunk; now I will say it sober, and in writing. Your family raised me when mine could not. Even after we were men you kept me close as kin. In the Fools’ Rebellion it was your counsel that kept me from the drowning pit. I remember making arguments to you, pleas for uprising, and so, too, I remember your constant reply: we swore an oath.

  The rest of the Radaszic line chose revol
t, and was extinguished. I alone remain. That is to your credit. My life is an honor to you. My errors are my own.

  I am a duke known for grain, and excellent cheer, and debt. I want to leave my sons a name that means more than bread and excess. You have what I want, foster brother: a name that makes men think of conviction. I want that class of name. So in recent years I have taken to books of philosophy.

  In these books, emperors and learned women speak of Truth as a high star beyond the rule of any lord. Foster brother, I believe that if you swore an oath to a lord in a porcelain mask, and if that lord told you that the sun was black, you would walk blind in summer light. You deserve a better lord. The sun is good and golden. That is truth, to which we owe our first and highest loyalty; and if I hope to be a man of any worth to anyone, that is the loyalty I must now obey. They will say that treason is in the Radaszic blood, and must be bred away, like spots from a dog. But that is a lie too. Truth does not need a mask.

  Thus I ride on Treatymont, so that my children will never stumble beneath a black sun.

  Duchy Radaszic fell northwest of Treatymont. He had grain, and horses, and a great many farmers rioting in support of the unrest in Treatymont, all crying: A fairer hand! A fairer hand! He had never mentioned in his letter that his people were sharecroppers, that he had taxed them dry trying to pay down his own debt, and that gold loans had been their best relief from starvation. But perhaps this was also part of his guilt, his desire to be more than a duke of bread and revels and famine.

  Radaszic took all his armsmen and his rioters and marched on Treatymont. Xate Olake asked him to go east instead, to conquer Heingyl and link up with Unuxekome, bringing almost the whole coast under rebel control. But he would not strike at his foster brother.

  At Finnmoelyrd Henge, sacred to the ilykari, nestled among the orchards and the beehives, his column paused to graze their horses. There Duke Heingyl found him, Duke Heingyl with all his heavy cavalry, and although Heingyl hadn’t seen the letter, it hardly seemed to matter, because he had to come to do his duty and that was all there could be.

  Heingyl led the first charge, which killed Radaszic’s sons and drove into the heart of the column. And there upon a lance tip, maybe Heingyl the Stag Hunter’s lance tip, maybe not, the line of Radaszic ended, and went into the ground to feed the flowers that would feed the bees.

  With Radaszic died the rebellion’s best ally on the coastal plains. Heingyl spent one day at the henge resting, surely not in meditation with ykari Wydd, as that would have broken his oath to Falcrest.

  Reading all this at Unuxekome’s River House, where the swarming divers still battled debris and cold to raise more coin, Baru felt Xate Olake’s specter at her side: the Traitor’s Qualm. The rebellion seemed disorganized, incoherent, doomed. No Midlands duke would declare for them—not Nayauru, who could command Sahaule and Autr by will and by the children she had gotten on them, or Ihuake, who could bring Pinjagata and his spearmen, and her own vast herds of cattle and cavalry. That meant no easy access to grain before the winter. No cavalry to ride south in the spring. They would be bottled up in the North with no way to break out.

  The rebellion needed a focus, a central hope. It did not need the pretense of a hostage Imperial Accountant.

  It needed the truth of a turncoat, a renegade prodigy, Falcrest’s very finest gone over to lead Aurdwynn’s native-born.

  But before she could find a way to do this best, to ignite all that blue on her map like one of the Oriati mines, Tain Hu came down the Inirein and interrupted her.

  * * *

  “YOU should’ve gone north already.”

  Tain Hu spoke in Baru’s ear and the force of her presence snapped Baru from her work trance in a galvanic jerk—the coiled weight of her bent over the chair as if to draw Baru away from her writing, one arm braced like the preface to strangulation or embrace.

  Baru managed not to gasp aloud. “Duchess Vultjag. You weren’t announced.” Perhaps Unuxekome’s guards outside the study had assumed Tain Hu was expected.

  “Cattlson won’t believe you’re an innocent hostage. He’ll send his Clarified to kill you. You’d be safer at Vultjag.” Tain Hu circled the desk, her hawkish profile bent in curiosity. “What have you been writing?”

  She’d been writing drafts, a whole midden of scribbled parchment, now mostly torn up in frustration. All of it in Aphalone, at least, which Tain Hu could speak but not read. “I’ve been trying to figure out disbursement plans. For the money we’ve seized.” She began to gather up her papers, trying to look finished. At least she hadn’t had the loyalty map open. “Just an accountant’s habits.”

  “I may not know Aphalone script—” Tain Hu pinned one rag of parchment beneath her splayed fingers. The gold darkness in her eyes startled Baru. “—but I know the signs for your name. You’ve written them too many times for mere accounting.”

  “You know the signs for my name?” Baru leaned back, to project insouciance, to escape those eyes. Why had Tain Hu come? Why hadn’t Unuxekome announced her arrival? Surely the conflagration swallowing Aurdwynn would have called her elsewhere.… “What a curious place to begin an education.”

  For a moment only the candle fire moved.

  Then Tain Hu came around the chair, her hobnailed boots clattering on the hardwood. Baru began to rise, and the duchess took her by the throat and hooked a heel behind the leg of her chair and threw her down thunderously on her back. The chair splintered beneath her.

  Tain Hu drew her sword.

  “Guards!” Baru shouted, head ringing, sight a red glare. “Guards!” She felt, more than anything else, a strange childish outrage—had she not whispered in the ear of the ilykari woman? Had she not bound herself to the other rebels in trust?

  The blade that had opened Governor Cattlson’s scalp tickled her brow. “You gave us too much,” Tain Hu said, her voice distant, thin, agonizing, like a glass cut. “I saved you from Cattlson so that we could bargain with you, and you gave us too much. Do you understand?”

  “You still need me.” The duchess wheeled in Baru’s sight, an osprey circling. How had she forgotten? How had she made the same mistake? A game of dukes and nations, decades of occupation, centuries of betrayal and realignment, a ledger filled with the transactions of power, and she had thought she could be the center of it—that she could step in and rearrange the pieces and not in turn be played. “The tax ships aren’t enough. We still need to break the Traitor’s Qualm.”

  The tip of the blade pricked her skin. “I spent years listening to Xate Olake plead the Traitor’s Qualm. Years bowing to Xate Yawa’s protestations that it was too soon to act. Now the time has come and Aurdwynn will rise. Tell me why—” The blade trembled with her mocking shrug. “Tell me why we need you. Why we would not all be safer without a Masquerade technocrat among us.”

  “The fisher,” Baru said.

  Tain Hu’s blade stilled. She looked down at Baru and her lips parted for one curious breath. “What?”

  “The name you gave me. On the docks, three years ago. Baru Fisher, the Fulcrum, beloved of ykari Devena.” Baru pushed herself up, pushed herself into the sword fighting screaming instinct, and Tain Hu drew the point away. “Has the word reached you? Have you heard Radaszic break the gates of Treatymont? Seen the red sails burning in the Horn Harbor? No! You never will. The rebellion is stillborn—the other dukes won’t join us. Nayauru and Ihuake will watch us drown and divide our land and riches. But listen, Tain Hu, listen to your serfs calling—”

  “A fairer hand,” the duchess Vultjag murmured. “Even the Sentiamuts in the foothills know the chant.”

  Baru had never killed anyone face-to-face. Never faced real, imminent death—Xate Olake’s poison had been an invisible game, and she’d been saved from Cattlson and the duel before the moment of reckoning. The slaughter in the harbor had been a trial of her stomach, not her heart.

  So now she found herself trembling as she drew herself up the side of the desk. Her hands shook as she t
ried to seize the papers, to lift them and offer them to Tain Hu. A coward after all.

  “I will lead the rebellion,” she said. “In name if not in deed. I have ruined Aurdwynn’s dukes once already—they fear and respect me. I have taken up the sword against the Governor and made myself beloved to the people. I will break the Traitor’s Qualm. Do you see what I have written? Do you see the signs for my name? I am Baru Fisher, the Fairer Hand—”

  “And what,” Tain Hu hissed, “if that is what I came to stop? This rebellion must be Aurdwynn’s.”

  “The dukes are not Aurdwynn, Vultjag! The dukes have failed Aurdwynn again and again! I am the commonborn, the foreigner, the newborn hope!” Baru struck the table, rustling the parchment, the still-wet ink. “I am your last and solitary chance!”

  Duke Unuxekome’s voice came from the door. “Enough, Vultjag. She’s right.”

  The smoke in Duchess Vultjag’s voice spoke to all the things Baru had forgotten, had hidden from behind the schoolyard walls—the rage of a nation brought low. “Once she is in us we will not get her out. She will be like a tick. She will grow fat on us and we will never dig her free.”

  “She’s earned her place.” Of course Unuxekome would speak up for her—they had sailed together, taken plunder together. They were comrades now. “She wants what we want. And she only has to be a symbol, Vultjag. Nothing more.”

  The tip of Tain Hu’s blade described one small analemma in the air, and Baru remembered her words, three years ago, spoken into the forest, into the birdsong and the silence: Symbols are power. You are a word, a mark …

  And it pierced Baru’s heart to realize that no matter what Tain Hu chose in this moment, she would regret it to the end of her life.

  “So,” Tain Hu said, sheathing her sword, suddenly wry. “Have you already joined the court of would-be kings, Unuxekome? My bearded neighbor in the north is all atwitter. He’s finally found someone less interested than me.”

  The Sea Groom smiled in shared mirth. “I think Oathsfire’s wealth makes his solitude more lonely.”