The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

“Of course,” she said, and then, seized by a sudden gratitude: “You did well.”

  * * *

  THE victorious Alemyonuxe column, flush with the glory of the battle on the Fuller’s Road, brought its wounded to a hamlet called Imadyff—Belthyc words, a good grove. When the village healer failed to save a favorite Alemyonuxe son from infection, his grief-mad father, a widower and a hard man, took the healer’s own son as compense—unspooling his bowels through a slit in his belly. Two village mothers shot him mid-act, violence erupted, and the Alemyonuxe Coyotes, hungry and blood-mad, burned the hamlet down. Drunk on war they went south down the road into the nearest Nayauru vale, found storehouses of salt and meat in the village there, and made off with them, killing the guards and the party that came after them.

  The weight of winter and the pace of the forest war had begun to tell. The men were scurvy-mad, starving, exhausted, and they had no loyalty or love for the people of Duchy Nayauru.

  “We cannot turn on the yeomen and peasantry,” Baru hissed, and the Vultjag war council nodded in agreement, looking to the coin-and-comet banner, the open hand. But Tain Hu, eyes dark, shook her head and gave grim counsel. The Army of the Coyote had grown too huge, too hungry for salted meat and beer and blood. There was no forage to be had. In order to fight on enemy land, it had to hunt.

  “There is a balance,” Tain Hu said, “seen everywhere in nature. It takes many prey to support a predator. We have brought too many predators to Duchy Nayauru.”

  And Baru saw the Masquerade’s hand at work. They had sent their woodsmen everywhere, driven out the deer, burnt the underbrush, gathered the forage and taken it into their fortifications. Left the Coyote no prey but Nayauru’s serfs.

  They had a broad eye for war, a willingness to fight not just in the field with horse and spear but everywhere, with everything. They planned for the long run. She knew this, knew it better than anyone else in the rebellion. Knew the secret strength it gave them.

  After the council she went to Tain Hu. Baru twice drew breath to speak, and twice released it, before at last saying: “I’m going to order the Coyote to start demanding tribute from Nayauru’s villages. Food and clothing. Arrows. Goats. Only what we need.”

  “They will do that with or without your orders.”

  “This way,” Baru said, “I can at least pretend to have control.”

  She’d checked her private maps, rolled in horn, guarded jealously. Duchy Nayauru was bright blue. The Dam-builder’s serfs, addicted to Fiat Bank loans, all loved her.

  But the Coyote had to feed.

  * * *

  NAYAURU’S shock columns reached Ihuake’s frontier forts and laid siege. Scurvied, desperate, surrounded by the Dam-builder’s elite siege engineers, Ihuake’s garrisons would not last a month. When they fell, Nayauru would control the border and, by the Belt Road, threaten the Cattle Lord’s capital at the Pen. She could offer Treatymont a safe road north to strike Erebog. Her ultimate victory would be very close.

  (Looking over the maps and reports, Baru frowned at shards of drunken memory, years old—fragments of a soliloquy, a horizon glimpsed through dark eyes, a certain laugh—sprays of light on amber reservoirs—where, why? Was it important?)

  But before the forts could fall, the Army of the Coyote intervened.

  Lyxaxu scouts found a tempting target: a large convoy, heavily guarded, bogged down in the spring mud just short of a river crossing. Oathsfire’s longbowmen burned the bridge and began to hunt the convoy guards, killing the pack animals and horses first, then working on the men.

  The convoy guards might have outlasted the supply of arrows—Oathsfire’s yeomen had been trained to attack in mass, not with precision. But they had no stomach to stand by their wagons and be shot apart. First in a trickle, then in clots, they abandoned the convoy and scattered into the woods. The Coyote raiders saw some of them pillaging their own wagons before they fled.

  In the foundered convoy the Oathsfire Coyotes found sacks and chests of coin. Wages meant for the siege technicians and levies at the front.

  “We’ve won,” Baru said, thrilled by the news. “Nayauru’s fighters already know that she can’t keep their lands and families safe. Without pay they’ll mutiny.”

  “That’s what you said in autumn.” Tain Hu huddled with her in the command tent, helping decode the encrypted Iolynic missives that came to them. “That Nayauru was bound by coin. She surprised us—she may yet again.”

  “She may surprise me. Her fighters won’t. We’ve cost Nayauru her momentum. She’ll make terms.”

  And she was right. The Duchess Nayauru sent riders to Ihuake to arrange a council, and to beg her to call off the Coyote loose in the woods.

  In turn Ihuake sent riders to the Duchies Erebog, Lyxaxu, Oathsfire, Vultjag, and Unuxekome, petitioning the rebels to send emissaries to the Midlands, asking for the counsel of the Fairer Hand. A summit between the rebels and the great powers still uncommitted.

  From Treatymont there came no word.

  The rebels would sit in council with the Midland Dukes. The Traitor’s Qualm stood poised to break.

  * * *

  AS they marched back east into Duchy Ihuake, moving toward the council in stealth, Baru found herself writing it as if it had already happened, as an extract from the future history the rebellion wanted to make: The Council of the Midlands would be remembered as the first great turning point, the triumph of the Army of the Coyote’s winter strategy, the moment that Aurdwynn broke the Traitor’s Qualm and made the rebellion real.

  Foolish and naïve. But so hard to stop. It was the way Unuxekome would see the future—as a story, a saga coming toward its climax.

  They would meet at Haraerod, on Ihuake’s land, in the shadow of Mount Kijune. So they came:

  Unuxekome and Oathsfire together, marching west from the Inirein, sniping at each other about money and women and matters of pride as they crossed the Sieroch plain. Oathsfire brought ten companies of elite scouts and bowmen to stand sentry. Unuxekome came with a coven of ilykari from his harbors and diving towns, armed with the knowledge of truth and falsity, ready to sniff out treachery. Duke Pinjagata joined them on the road to Haraerod, marching utterly alone, confident that his duchy’s strength at arms made him more valuable as an ally than a prisoner or corpse. He put a stop to the two men’s bickering: his soldier’s tongue proved a match for both of them, and they judged it better to withdraw.

  Haraerod’s merchants and brewers and clothiers welcomed the business, the lanky bowmen wearing Oathsfire’s millstone tabards and the keen-eyed laconic mothers with a taste for mason leaf.

  Next came Erebog and Lyxaxu, the Crone and the philosopher-duke, and if they remembered years of cold rivalry in the bitter north, well, they were wise and sagacious, and set those years behind them. From the high pass by Mount Kijune they saw the coming of the Dam-builder Nayauru: a glorious stream of armored cavalry pouring in from the west, Nayauru white-gowned at their head, her posture unbreakably proud. To her left rode Autr Brinesalt, broad and mighty, hammer-armed, loam-skinned, and to her right Sahaule Horsebane, who carried a spear caked in dark blood.

  “She certainly has a particular taste,” Lyxaxu remarked, watching the column through a spyglass. “Men with certain names.”

  “You have a Maia name too, boy.” Erebog cackled at his reaction. “Your blood could go into Nayauru’s great dream. Just tell your Mu it was a matter of state—she’ll be forgiving.”

  “The Incrastic breeders would say the old blood of the West is thin in me. Diluted and made pale by so long marrying north.” Lyxaxu lowered the glass. “I don’t think it matters. We whisper about Nayauru, but the whispers lead us astray.”

  “Tell me your great theory, O sage.”

  “Nothing so sagacious.” Lyxaxu folded up the spyglass with delicate care. “Only that she loves them, and they love her. That is what we miss.”

  Erebog looked away, eyes hooded. “Foolish to love a noble consort. Gets in the way.”

/>   Lyxaxu didn’t press her. Telling, the way she’d lowered her gaze: avoiding Lyxaxu’s eyes, of course, but the horizon too. Like the distant Wintercrests might cut her.

  Duchess Ihuake arrived two days later in a column of warhorses so torrential in its passage it had to be followed by a roadwork gang. She and Nayauru made a guarded exchange of peace gifts. With the Midlands and the Rebel North gathered, the council waited only for the Fairer Hand and her field-general … or for word of the Masquerade army and Duke Heingyl’s cavalry riding up the road from Treatymont to kill them all.

  The Army of the Coyote came through the woods, scattered in its columns, wary, feral.

  Baru, Tain Hu, the Stakhieczi brave man Dziransi, and their armsmen came to the bluffs above Haraerod and looked down on a valley flooded in color: a tartan of duchies, a glorious and voracious mass of horse and tent, the speartips of the drilling Haraerod guard phalanxes cutting the sunlight.

  “Devena,” breathed Tain Hu, and fell to her knees in awe. “See the Aurdwynn of old. See our ancient strength. Your Excellence—” She raised herself up on her haunches, balanced on her toes and one gloved fingertip, and looked back in wonder. “Look what we have made,” she said, smiling, her red-slashed cheeks dimpled. “Look at the spring our winter planted.”

  They walked down into the valley, the coin-and-comet banner flying on a bent pole. The Duchess Ihuake sent her cavalry out as escort, and then Nayauru, not to be upstaged by her rival, sent her own, and Oathsfire rode out to them with horses for Tain Hu and Baru Fisher, but she refused to ride while her guards walked, so he dismounted to walk with them. His beard had flowered again with the spring and he spoke with profane good cheer.

  They went into Haraerod through a roar of hooves and cheers. But it was a fearful adoration, Baru thought, uncertain, troubled.

  They had gathered too much strength here. Charged the valley with too much power, uncertain of its loyalties.

  23

  “IT would be an error of rigor,” Lyxaxu said, “if we didn’t press Her Excellence on this point. She put great confidence in Nayauru’s willingness to wait. She was wrong. That’s all I mean to say—”

  Tain Hu snapped over him. “That’s not all you mean. You’re undermining.”

  “Vultjag.” Oathsfire, glaring over the rim of his beer. “You’re not pissing in the woods anymore. This is a council of peers. Show some respect.”

  Tain Hu’s mailed arms made an angry carillon on the arms of her seat. “Baru Fisher braved scurvy and starvation while you wasted her treasury on bowmen and fur. If you had a fraction of her courage or conviction you’d say what you want plainly—”

  “We all want the same thing.” Lyxaxu, laughing, raised his hands. “Vultjag, please.”

  “Is that so? Is that right, Lyxaxu?” Tain Hu came halfway out of her seat as she pointed to Erebog, as if the gesture came up out of the earth like a quake. “Let’s check for an error of rigor, shall we? Erebog—you want what he wants? You’d like to palm the Fairer Hand and take her back home to hold until she’s useful for kingmaking?”

  Erebog sniffed at the inelegance of the question. “I share Lyxaxu’s concern. Her Excellence misjudged Nayauru’s intent. But it’s clear to me that we owe our good position to the actions of the Coyote, and I understand that credit lies with her.”

  I wish, Baru thought, that they would all just shut up and do as I say.

  The rebel dukes had all agreed to meet in a Haraerod longhouse to take counsel. Tomorrow they would need to speak to Nayauru and Ihuake with one united voice. Tonight—

  Well, tonight they made Baru despair of the very possibility.

  “You mean,” Oathsfire said, “you owe your good position. There were Stakhieczi fighters in your land, weren’t there, Erebog? This man Dziransi, emissary of the Mansion Hussacht, come south from their hidden fastness to speak with us at long last—how did he come to be there? Who would you have turned to for protection, if the Coyote hadn’t come to open your roads and clear out your bandits? Would the Duchy Erebog be the Mansion Erebog now?”

  Not without a certain sharpness, Oathsfire.

  Lyxaxu shot Oathsfire a warning glare—cautioning him not to play that angle yet, perhaps.

  No need: the Crone ignored him. “Immaterial. What matters now is that we court Nayauru away from Treatymont.”

  “Court her away?” Unuxekome laughed low in his belly. “We all know Nayauru. She’ll get in bed with both sides, and then continue doing whatever she pleases.”

  “Tsk.” Erebog flicked a speck of lint from the sleeve of her gown. “You mistake her appetites for her politics. If I’d had Autr and Sahaule as neighbors in my youth, I’d have gone hunting, too.”

  “We could have had Oathsfire’s child in her by now. That would tie her to us.” Unuxekome opened a hand to Baru, as if to pull on the rope of her regard. He’d greeted her like an old shipmate, and stayed late to hear her war stories. “It’s not too late to arrange an alliance by marriage.”

  “You’re as eligible as I am.” Oathsfire scowled. “You think marriage would bind her? She’d get a child on me and set him in my place.”

  “Perhaps,” Erebog said silkily, “you should be the last one in this council to speak to the trustworthiness of marriage.”

  Baru missed the ilykari priestess, her ledger of secrets, her hushed temple drowned in olive oil and perilous lamplight. This damn conspiracy was missing its keystone. All that remained were the unsteady arching ambitions of the dukes.

  Ah, but—hadn’t she volunteered to be that keystone, at that river house, on that bloody shore? Hadn’t she declared herself the Fairer Hand?

  “Enough.” Baru leaned forward into the circle of redwood chairs. “I’ve read the ledgers—”

  “At least I divorced mine,” Oathsfire hissed. “Instead of arranging for a quiet disappearance far away north, in the mansion of someone I decided I loved more.”

  “I said enough!” Baru’s voice set Oathsfire back in his seat and drew a little twitch of the lips from Erebog. “It’s true that the winter ate our treasury. But we invested well. Our coin bought food and arms for thousands. The Coyote’s efforts in the Midlands saved tens of thousands more from starvation. We have a commanding position. Now we need to leverage our gains.”

  All the dukes watched her in sharp attentive silence. Baru felt the greatest pressure from Lyxaxu—and Erebog, who had never sat in council with her before.

  There was nowhere in the world, Baru thought, no collection of lords or lovers, that did not have its own politics.

  “You know these dukes better than I.” She would give Lyxaxu a little here, a sidelong acknowledgment of her error. “How can we set Nayauru and Ihuake at peace, and win them both together? Will their clients follow them?”

  Control of Aurdwynn now balanced on the Midlands in every way that mattered: geography, trade, strength of arms. To win the summer, the rebels had to turn the Midlands against Treatymont, against the shadow of distant Falcrest and its rising retaliation.

  “Not with our treasury, it seems,” Tain Hu murmured. Oathsfire rolled his eyes.

  Unuxekome rubbed his wrists. “She’s right. We don’t have the bankroll left for a long war, especially if it comes to siege at Treatymont. The sea lanes are open—they can bring in relief by ship.”

  Baru had been gnawing at this problem. They needed revenue, and that would mean either harsh taxation—killing the very popular support that had brought her here—or pillage. Pillage would work in the short run, but it went against Baru’s goals in the long.

  “We must show our strength.” Erebog’s kindling-crackle voice touched on memories of Iriad elders in whispered council, in times before plague swept Taranoke. “Before Falcrest’s ships arrive. A demonstration of force that will swing Ihuake and Nayauru to us.”

  “We have cavalry,” Oathsfire said, and then, with a grudging glance at Unuxekome, “and many ships. Perhaps a sortie on the Horn Harbor—”

  A cry of alarm
came from the longhouse’s door. Baru leapt to her feet almost as quickly as Tain Hu. Two of Unuxekome’s ilykari, seal-shaped women in iron-mordant green, had seized an old man in the broadcloth cloak of an Ihuake ducal levy. They called out in Urun to their duke; Baru did not know the words.

  Lyxaxu let go of his knife. “Well spotted. A talented disguise.”

  The gray-bearded man began to laugh. “Too talented,” he croaked. “Harried all the way from Treatymont, hounded through wood and vale with but one loyal man to spot me, and for this? I should have stayed!”

  He began to cough, a dry aspirated sound, not so different from his mirth. Baru recognized the cough with a thrill of fear.

  “Xate Olake,” Tain Hu breathed.

  Baru reached the old man first, Tain Hu barely a step behind her. “Release him,” she commanded the ilykari. “He’s ours.”

  The spymaster-duke of Treatymont, twin brother to the Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, stumbled forward into the rebel circle. Exhaustion had carved the lines around his eyes deep, runes of mirth or fury.

  I wonder, Baru thought, if you killed Muire Lo; and the thought had teeth.

  Duchess Erebog leaned forward in her chair. “Olake? Is that you, you old fox? I thought you’d died three years ago.”

  “I would have died three days ago, if it weren’t for that Stakhi cripple Yawa sent to guide me. Never seen a finer woodsman. The Phantom Duke, foraging and bolting like a deer!” He leaned on Baru and, pulling her along like a cane, limped toward a chair. “I lost Treatymont. Cattlson’s given birth to a brood of these demons he calls Clarified. They ripped my network up by the roots. Like they could smell a spy just by a sniff of his breath.” He collapsed into Baru’s seat, drawing his cloak around him. “Yawa decided to ‘arrest’ me before they could. She tipped me off in time to flee. And—” When he smiled his eyes glittered like winter gems in the hair of his face. “She sent me with a gift.”

  From beneath his cloak he drew a drinking horn, uncapped it, and poured a stream of dark beer onto the floorboards. “This,” he said, reaching into the horn, “is the fruit of all her subterfuge. Cattlson still believes she’s loyal. Her cruelty is all the proof he needs. And that keeps her in his inner circle.”