The Traitor Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Snarling in defiance, he leapt out from under the sailcloth, his rapier loose in his right hand. “Abdumasi!” Zee cried in mad delight, and behind him the dromon Bred For Laughs exploded in a huge crack of powder as Falcrest fire found her store of mines. The thunder drowned out Zee’s words—Abdumasi saluted him with the rapier, and leapt up onto the ship’s fighting rail to plunge to his death.

  “You’ll never take me alive!” he roared, and then he made the awful mistake of looking down before he leapt.

  The sea burnt beneath him.

  Blue-hot chemical fire simmered on the waves, vicious, viscous, burning everything, cooking up a saute smell of seawater and charred lumber and boiled fat bursting out through blistered dead skin and incinerated hair, popped eyeballs, chips of toenail off bloated feet; the mortal remains of forty-one shipfuls of Abdumasi’s crews tossed into a fucking wok and stir-fried—

  Abdumasi couldn’t jump into that.

  Not even if he imagined Kindalana shoving him, not even if he pictured Tauindi down in the flame urging him on, not even then could he jump. Call him a coward and a traitor to two hundred million people, but there are limits to courage, there are footnotes to the code of bravery, and fire is the first of them.

  “Death and glory!” Zee shouted, waving his battle flag, and caught up in among madness he jumped up alongside Abdumasi and leapt over the rail.

  “No!” Abdumasi screamed, “Zee, wait!”

  But too late, gravity had him, a graceful dive and Zee went down through the gel and came up again coated in flame, the Burn sticking to him everywhere as if it smelled Oriati flesh and hated it, and it burnt even underwater, it fed on the air in his clothes. He screamed soundlessly because the fire was eating all the air that came out of him. He screamed with his face tipped back to the sky, and the Burn went down his throat.

  With a sob of shame Abdumasi fell backward off the rail and fled into the burning mess of his war-dromon’s deck. He was too scared to die like that, and fuck the griots who’d blame him for not jumping, they weren’t staring down into that hell, were they?

  “You’ll never take me alive!” he wailed, trying to think. He couldn’t see anyone else up on deck who might be convinced to kill him—and anyway they loved him too much, the poor fools, they believed in him. There was no time for poison. He could hang himself. Or he could fall on his sword, if he could aim it right—

  Or he could die in combat, like a proper champion.

  Abdumasi raised up his head and looked for the enemy.

  Tall redsailed Falcrest frigates circled the burning slick of Oriati meat and charcoaled mast. They looked like bloody gulls, lazy on the wind, greedy for carnage.

  Abdu held out his rapier and apologized to it. “Well, Kindalana, you were right. It was a trap. I love you, I’m sorry, and please give Tau my apologies.”

  So much for his plan to help liberate Aurdwynn. So much for Baru Cormorant, the great hope of the people. So much for the seed of immortality growing in Abdu’s back. It would never carry his soul down through millennia.

  He’d sold his body to that hidden power for nothing.

  Oh, it wasn’t fair! Of course the world could be cruel, but couldn’t it at least be equitable in its cruelty? If you gave up your soul, if you abandoned those you loved to secure a greater freedom, weren’t you owed a reward?

  “Sir!” someone roared—the renegade jackal soldier, Prepare-Captain Minubo of the House Burun. “Mister Abd, sir, they’re coming aboard!”

  She stood by the stern rail, pointing with her sword into the inferno—and there through the fire came a Masquerade frigate. It had an abstract human body as its figurehead, carved of facets and planes, the body a wedge, the eyes two candle-flames. The smoke parted around a complexity of ropes and sails that Abdumasi couldn’t comprehend: mystic geometries of canvas and hemp, receding into the smog.

  “You’ll never take me alive?” Abdumasi said, hopefully.

  And he raised up his rapier Kindalana, named, because of its keen point and difficult grip, after his ex-wife.

  Up on the frigate’s bow, red-masked figures turned a hwacha on its pivot to point at Minubo. The mechanism sparked and smoked and, with a hideous buzz like a very troubled hornet, the hwacha fired a quarter of a hundred rocket arrows at the poor prepare-captain, who leapt for cover, and died with steel through her neck and chest. And then Abdumasi was ready to die in defiant battle because fuck them, fuck their smug mechanisms and their neat little ambushes, fuck the impudence of those who believed they could trick and control the thousand-year Mbo, and fuck them in particular for shooting down the prepare-captain, who had given up her career to follow Abdumasi, like she were just a mangy dog.

  From the rigging of the enemy frigate, Falcresti marines swung down onto Abdumasi’s ship.

  Abdumasi of the house of Abd put up his rapier and advanced. Behind the marines their sleek ship caught on fire: a wave had splashed some Burn up onto the deck. Masked and hooded sailors ran around pouring jars of their own stale piss on the catchfire.

  “That’s right!” Abdumasi yelled, banging his rapier’s hilt on the steel bands of a smashed barrel. “Some navy, fighting with your own bottled piss! I bet you drink it, too! I bet you gulp your own piss down and beg for seconds! Come on, take out your little knives! Have at you! Have at you! I am Abdumasi of the House of Abd, master of ships, champion cat gambler, and I challenge you to mortal up-fuckery!”

  Six Masquerade marines stared back at him. Red masks stuffed with chemical filters against the smoke. Armored bodies webbed with grenades and devices. Eyes invisible behind dark inhuman lenses as omniscient and indifferent as krakenfly eyes. Abdumasi beckoned to them, joyful, light with the promise of a swift end and a long rest. He could take them on one by one until at last they had to shoot him with their crossbows as they’d shot poor Minubo. Abdumasi had ten years under a swordmaster and four years of real combat—first in the deep Mzilimake Mbo jungle, then out on the Mothercoast, where Falcrest had given the Invijay ships to use for piracy, and Abdumasi had sailed to hunt them down. He might have been born a merchant, but he’d learned how to make men bleed.

  The marine with the black slash of an officer across his mask yanked a gas grenade off the rip ring at his chest. The mechanism failed. The grenade’s chemicals didn’t burn, nothing happened.

  “Good one!” Abdumasi jeered, leaping over bodies, kicking aside splintered wood, nimble and free with his rapier. He’d dance around these brutes, he’d poke them to death, quick-footed, hadn’t Kindalana loved the grace of his dancing? “Can’t start your fire? Don’t be embarrassed! Happens to the best of us! Come on over here, I’ll show you a weapon that always works! I am Abdumasi of the house of Abd, of Jaro the Flamingo Kingdom, of the Einkorn Crop of Lonjaro Mbo the Thirteen-in-Three-in-One, and I came to kill cuge like you!”

  The marine officer shrugged. He said something in Aphalone so muffled by his mask that Abdumasi heard it only as a low sinister diagnosis: the patient is dead.

  The rest of the marines walked straight at Abd, shoulder to shoulder, crouched a little against the roll of the ship.

  “Sophisticated Masquerade tactics!” Abdumasi bellowed, as a huge sheet of fire roared up across the sea behind him, a slick of leaked cooking oil catching alight. “Come on, form an orderly queue, who wants it first, my blade is lined with moral fiber and if I prick you you’ll realize what a thug you are! Form a—”

  The first marine proceeded straight onto his sword.

  Abdumasi stabbed him in the eye and the point of his faithful rapier skittered sideways off the marine’s steel-masked cheek to stick in his shoulder rig, where the man grabbed the blade in his glove, hooked it on knuckle claws, and twisted till the rapier bent.

  “Fuck,” Abd said, in bemusement.

  He went for his belt knife. The marines were too quick. The first studded punch hit like a shot of tequila and Abd went down on the pitching deck under stamping feet and steel truncheons. For a few moments he
felt like the lead drum at his own funeral. Flesh pulped. Bone cracked. Abdumasi crawled inside himself like a turtle and tried to dream of sunny days on Lake Jaro. But the lake boiled, and the imaginary cranes impaled him on their beaks, and then the marines beat the memory right out of him.

  When they let up he threw his last defiance at them.

  “Ayamma,” he whispered, and then, shouting into the face of the man cuffing him, into the indifferent red masks and the sea of burning corpses and the whole tyrannical fucking design of Falcrest and its faceless Emperor, shouting with the terrible bargain he’d made because it was all he had left, “I am a thousand lives, you poor fools, it grows in me, a ut li-en, I have the immortata, the cancer grows!”

  In Aphalone the marine asked his officer, “What the fuck is he saying?”

  “Tunk superstition, I suppose.” The officer opened a cloth sack. “He’s their leader. He goes straight to Province Admiral Ormsment for debriefing.”

  Desperately Abdumasi pronounced the words of ruin. His friends had told him these words were a curse, they’d tried to keep him from this lonely fate, why hadn’t he listened—because he couldn’t watch as his home was rotted away by cowards and quislings—and so he said the words that would sever him from the human community for all time and make him into a seeping wound of grief and horrible lonely power.

  “Ayamma,” he whispered, “ayamma, ta ao-ath onvastai-ash e ser o-en incrisiath—”

  The marine officer put a bag over Abdumasi’s head. He heard the crack of a dose bottle, and then the marine poured a cold sweet chemical through the sack. Abd’s nose tickled and went dead as rubber. Was it ether? Tsusenshan? He didn’t know, he couldn’t remember how to breathe to fight it off—

  An octopus-kiss of absence crept over Abdumasi. He fumbled around, trying to find his ruined rapier, so he could hold something named Kindalana, but his hands wouldn’t answer.

  He hadn’t managed to die. He’d let everyone down.

  At least it wasn’t the fire. At least it wasn’t the fire.

  ACT ONE

  THE FALL OF THE ELIDED KEEP

  1

  IN THE RUIN OF THEM

  AT sunrise Baru shackled the prisoner for her drowning.

  The Duchess Tain Hu smelled of brine and cold stone and the onions of her last meal. Last night they’d made their covenant. Until the dawn hours Tain Hu had whispered hoarse strategy to Baru: the names of her agents, and the shape of her plans. She gave Baru her arsenal, and her hope, and her faith.

  “Remember. Remember the man in the iron circlet, and the ledger of secrets.”

  “I will remember,” Baru hissed through raw-bitten lips. “I will.”

  Now Baru came close to offer her the manacles that would kill her. And the air between them shivered, like steppe grass under silver cloud, with the charge of their grief and their resolve.

  Tain Hu shrugged into her chains. Tested the steel. “Good metal.” She rolled her shoulders. “It’ll hold.”

  She grinned and Baru couldn’t stand that grin on that fierce unbreakable face. She stepped closer, quick, like an assassin gutting the duchess, and with her right hand she grabbed a fistful of Hu’s hair. Into her ear Baru whispered one word in Urun, the tongue of Tain Hu’s blood. Piercing. Like an eagle’s kiss. Her lip brushed Hu’s earlobe and they touched for the last time:

  “My general.”

  And with grim joy Tain Hu whispered back: “Long live the queen.”

  “Congratulations on your victory,” Baru said, and she spread her hands a little, as if saying, look at me, I am your victory, are you pleased?

  “I wish you’d done it sooner,” Tain Hu murmured.

  And everyone but Baru misunderstood her, everyone but Baru saw Tain Hu wishing the betrayal had come more quickly, and not the kiss. Only Baru saw the bitter love behind the bitter smile.

  The Elided Keep’s silent marines took Tain Hu down to the drowning-stone and chained her up for the judgment of the moon and stars. The tide would come in, like history, and swallow the traitor. Just as Falcrest would in time swallow the world—unless Baru Cormorant kept Tain Hu’s faith, and disemboweled the empire from within.

  Good-bye, Baru thought. Good-bye, kuye lam. I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.

  * * *

  THE duchess of Vultjag went down roaring defiance.

  She fought the rising tide with her chains wrapped up around her brawny arms and battlehacked fists. She wrestled the eyebolts and the pulleys drilled into the black rock. And she roared defiance against the Empire of Masks, the Imperial Republic of Falcrest, the Masquerade that pronounced death by drowning upon the traitor. The surf swallowed her. Still the chains groaned with her might. Still the sea frothed with her bellows.

  She chose when and where she would die. She chose the meaning of her death, and she chose the method. Rare is that gift, isn’t it? Rare is the choice to write the end of your own story.

  So the end of her story is the beginning of another.

  Not the story of Baru Cormorant, the girl who watched Masquerade merchanters coming down the reefs off Taranoke, and wondered why her fathers were afraid. Not the story of Baru Cormorant, the brilliant furious young woman who accepted the Masquerade’s bargain: join Tain Hu’s rebellion, gather all our enemies together, and betray them to us. Then we will give you the power to rule your own home.

  Not even the story of Baru Fisher, the rebel queen who was, for one bitter winter and brief spring, Tain Hu’s lord and lover.

  No.

  This is the story of Agonist.

  Baru Cormorant as a cryptarch: secret lord of the Imperial Throne.

  * * *

  THE pale man with the rowan-red hair oversaw the execution. He had a stylus and a varnished writing-board, and a form clasped in a steel folio, a form for Baru to sign after she screamed for mercy. His name was Apparitor and he was there to answer when Baru begged. Let the duchess live! Please, I love her, let her live!

  Then he would show her the writ of deferment.

  I, Baru Cormorant, do order a stay of execution for the traitor Tain Hu,

  And I do acknowledge that I order this stay in defiance of Imperial law, granted only by the extraordinary privilege of the Emperor, whose name cannot be known.

  And I remand Tain Hu to the Emperor’s custody, where her execution shall remain in abeyance so long as I provide faithful service,

  And I do consent to whatever operations and interventions the Emperor sees fit to improve the prisoner’s well-being.

  Signed—

  But there would never be a signature. Baru never cried out for mercy, for mercy was not in Tain Hu’s battle plan. Thus Baru drowned her beloved field-general in the morning tide.

  This will be her legend. Listen, listen, do you know?

  No living thing ever defeated Tain Hu in battle. Only the tide could fight her. Only the moon and the sea together could bring her down.

  * * *

  NOW only the rush of the waves and the cry of the shorebirds.

  Baru closed her eyes and felt the slam of the surf in her ears and heart. There were birds above, a great whirl of them, as if in her passage Tain Hu’s soul had called up a maelstrom of wings.

  Baru wouldn’t look at the damn birds. Red-haired Apparitor paced and fretted behind her, and Baru thought he was waiting for her to look up from Tain Hu and count the birds. He thought it was Baru’s tell. A sign that she was lying.

  He wanted Baru to betray her horror.

  Well, she’d vomit on him before she looked up.

  “All right, then!” Baru clapped her hands, twice, briskly. There was a high ringing inside her, like a bell struck with steel, not quite hard enough to shatter. When Hu was giving her riding lessons she’d fallen and hit the stone, breath crushed out of her, a giddy emptiness, something huge has happened but I can’t feel it yet.

  Oh, my lady Vultjag, how will I do this? How can I carry this
weight?

  “All right?” Apparitor croaked. “All right what?”

  She looked at Apparitor sideways, slyly. She had to pretend to be untouched by the execution, so that she could be untouched by the execution. For what, in the end, was the difference between pretending perfectly to feel something, and actually feeling it? If you acted the same way, truth or lie?

  “All right,” Baru said, “I want to start learning my new powers. And issuing some edicts: I like edicts. Let’s do it over breakfast.”

  “Breakfast? You’re hungry?”

  “Yes?” She offered him a gracious arm. “Will you walk with me?”

  Apparitor burst into rage.

  “You killed her! I can’t believe you killed her!” He ripped the handkerchief off his neck, and the grief-knot at his throat came undone at the slightest pull, which a grief-knot should, that was the whole reason sailors called them grief-knots. He waved the silk at Baru like he was trying to wipe her up.

  “Baru Cormorant, you fucking asshole, do you realize what you’ve done?”

  Oh, I realize, oh gods, I realize nothing else! I killed her for political advantage! She could have lived and I did not let her live! What am I, Apparitor, what slithering beast could do this thing I’ve done?

  Her mask almost slipped. She almost stared at Apparitor wild-eyed and screamed a high meaningless note. But it would not do. It would not do. She couldn’t grieve now, she couldn’t let herself be sorry. Tain Hu was counting on her. When you are disemboweled in battle, you tie your guts up tight, and you keep fighting. Later the wound can kill you. Once you’ve won.

  Baru set off toward the Elided Keep. Listen: her boots crushed snail shells into the rock. When things break underfoot, you know that you are going forward.

  “I know what I’ve done,” she said. “I executed a traitor to the Imperial Republic and an obstacle to the progress of humanity.”