“You executed your lover!”
“Are we sentimental people now? Is that the new game?”
“The game? Do you think I didn’t care about that woman? She was my prisoner for weeks, she was brave, she was good—” Apparitor grabbed himself by the skull, his fingers spidered in his hair, his thumbs trembling on his chin. “Farrier taught you to do this, didn’t he? That bastard Itinerant! He made you kill her!”
Baru laughed in shock. Her patron Farrier? How could Tain Hu’s execution possibly work in his favor?
Apparitor was panicking. What a stupid fucking idea.
“I haven’t seen Cairdine Farrier in some years,” she said. “Since my first days as Imperial Accountant, actually. Come along, now. I need you to teach me my powers.”
Everyone had strung out behind Baru like autumn geese, straggling and confused, asking each other what to do. The marines with their polearms, the spies who’d pretended to be Baru’s staff, Apparitor’s little retinue and his gold-eyed concubine boy. All of them began to follow her down the stone ridge, back to the Elided Keep. They were all watching her when she skidded to a stop in shock.
A ship had capsized against her fortress.
Oh—it was Apparitor’s clipper. At high tide the crew must’ve used winches on the Elided Keep’s battlement to tip the ship over, careening it on the beach. She was called Helbride, a ghost sliver of white wood and slim steel. Now the crew swarmed over her to clear the barnacles and foulage.
A gloved and masked sailor at the stern pulled a two-foot-long and squirming shipworm from the keel. Three huge teeth like half-shells flashed in the morning light. They ate ships; a nest of them must have gotten through the copper worm-armor.
That’s me now, Baru thought. The worm beneath the armor.
Apparitor, dully: “She said you loved her.” He was staring at his overturned ship as if he wanted very badly to push it back upright and sail away with the tide.
“Ah,” Baru sighed, “well, I’m sure she had a great many strange ideas about me.”
“She could’ve lived…”
“No. She was guilty of treason. Anyway, you would have kept her in a cell, and tested her to madness.” Baru talked to Apparitor but she was speaking to herself, trying to bargain down her scream. “This was the most humane option.”
Humane. The word you use when you put down an animal. Why would she compare Hu to an animal? That was the wrong word. The wrong word.
“She certainly loved you,” Apparitor said, with terrible resignation. “I’m sure of it.”
“Oh, I slept with her once. Hardly a marriage.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
To lie like this! To lie about Tain Hu, about what lived between them! It was so anathema and yet so necessary: it felt like a razor unraveling her, one cut all the way from her anus to the back of her neck, degloving her whole body and turning her inside out so her secrets were on the outside to become her lies. “I was curious about her, and I always satisfy my curiosity. But of course it didn’t last. Isn’t that the nature of love between women? Unnatural and transient?”
Apparitor slugged her.
She deserved it, she did deserve it, she greeted his pale fist with her cheek and her upturned face. His knuckles tore the tip of her nose and Baru’s body fired Naval System combat reflexes like lines of rocket fuel igniting—brace your back foot! Roll with the hit! Eyes open, Baru, no matter how much it hurts you keep your eyes open.
You watch the strike come in.
* * *
TRUTH, as hard as the fist:
Apparitor had his own lovers. He’d confessed it to Baru: sodomites get hot iron, but we do not envy tribadists the knife. And he remembered his men fondly, too. When she’d awakened from her coma after Sieroch, she’d seen him drawing a beautiful Stakhi man, nude, brooding. He drew men differently than the classicists. He put more thought in their faces.
Apparitor could never have killed his lover.
That was why the Throne possessed him, the way it possessed parents who couldn’t drown their illicit children in vinegar, seditionists who couldn’t recant their books and smash the presses, religionists who refused to abandon their gods.
Falcrest offered its Imperial agents a beautiful poisonous choice: a life of blackmail and control, or the death of your dearest deepest reason to exist.
Damn them. Damn them damn them damn them. Baru called on all the powers she could name for their damnation. Caldera gods, I am your daughter Baru, and I beseech you to awaken your molten stone and burn them. O ykari Himu, and Wydd, and Devena who stands between you, I call on your high virtues to punish Falcrest with storm, and with cancer, and with the excess of moderation which is called weakness.
Tain Hu wanted to live a free life.
Falcrest could not abide it.
So they decided to make Hu’s life into an instrument of control over Baru.
But Tain Hu would not allow it. Tain Hu would not be an armature of slavery.
And now Baru had entered the innermost circle of Imperial power without any hostage to control her.
Oh gods, Hu, I cannot believe what we’ve done. I cannot believe what I must do next. And yet I am … I am exultant. I am so excited to challenge the power that rules us. I am so excited to become that power.
This is my life’s work and at last now it has begun in earnest.
Baru turned her stinging face to Apparitor, and the man flickered back into her awareness, like the memory of some childhood embarassment springing up uncalled-for, as he passed across her midline from blind right to living left.
“I’ll forgive that,” she said, calmly, “on account of your masculine passions.”
“You don’t believe it,” he snarled. He’d hurt his hand on her face and now he was wringing it pathetically. “You don’t really believe all that Incrastic nonsense about degenerate mating—you can’t really believe it? A woman from Taranoke?”
“You and I,” she said, spitting blood, grinning at him red-toothed, “you and I will be great colleagues, don’t you think?”
“Tell me,” he said, pleading now, “that you don’t believe it?”
“Raise the corpse,” Baru ordered. “Chop up the meat and scatter it for the gulls.”
Apparitor pulled her around so hard she almost fell again. Her blindness—half the world, her entire right hemisphere, hidden from her awareness by a blow to the brain—swept south and then east, blotting out the ocean toward Taranoke her home, and then Oriati Mbo, and at last Falcrest, the heart of the Imperial Republic. Baru imagined her emptiness covering them, spreading, down past Oriati Mbo through the barrier jungles to Zawam Asu and out then into the sky and across the stars.
Apparitor started to shake her, wide-eyed and furious, that pale freckled face of his high with blood-color. He smelled of fresh laundry. He said, “She deserves a funeral!”
“Traitors don’t get funerals.”
“Then an autopsy! Surely her traits should be recorded—”
“We’ve nothing to learn from traitors. Cut her up for the birds.” When the marines hesitated, Baru spread her hands, palms up, who am I, have you forgotten? “I said cut her up!”
Not even in death would Tain Hu serve Falcrest: not even as a pickled specimen or an entry in a catalogue of mental deformity. Baru would never let them map the rot of her body, never let them say, decomposition began in her liver, which had struggled to contain her sin.…
No. Let Tain Hu be laid to rest the way Baru’s parents taught her. Let the birds scatter her across earth and sky. That’s how the Taranoki give their beloved dead back to the world. Ah, Baru, do you remember the ragged pink guts of your grandmother Pahaeon, carved with shell knives, salted with the iron salt, scattered across Halae’s Reef for the gulls and the colorful fish? You were a little girl when Pahaeon died, and you didn’t understand: that, more than loss, made you sob.
But a cormorant called to you across Pahaeon’s funeral, and you stopped crying.
Baru remembered. She remembered all her dead.
“I’m going back to my keep,” she told Apparitor. “Bring me a map of the world and the laws of my new power. And your boy, to write down my orders.”
“Your orders?”
“Of course.” She showed him her perfect bloody Incrastic teeth. “I’m not finished with Aurdwynn.”
* * *
IT was her fucking fortress: they’d told her so when she arrived, the exiles and condemned intellects who staffed this gray redoubt. For the duration of your stay, you are lord and master of the Elided Keep.
“What are you all waiting for?” she barked at the crowd of clerks and housekeepers peering through the bars of the tall, narrow portcullis. “The traitor’s dead. Now we work!”
A murmur rushed through the masked assembly. Dead? How could she be dead? She was the hostage.…
Was it, Baru wondered, the very first time a candidate had refused the bargain? How often had these walls of sloped granite looked down on mothers who begged for the lives of their bastard sons? Had the fortress stared, angular and indifferent, as candidates for the Throne admitted every kind of guilt to every sort of charge—the authorship of seditious texts, the exchange of illegal monies, adoption of a forbidden child, a murder of passion, an addiction to narcotics, religious rapture, royal ancestors, incest, incoherence of thought, the scars of self-abasement, profit off a great disaster, predatory moneylending, a taste for violence, perjury, perversion of a trial, visions, seizures, unfulfilled vengeance—
How many newcomers had stood at these galleries? Falcrest had destroyed King IV Asric Falkarsitte a hundred and thirty years ago. Had the Throne existed ever since?
The keep didn’t remember. She was sure of it. These walls had been washed by time and chemistry, stains of gray acid, laundry effluent, bleached mortar, burnt stone from ancient siege—scoured, again and again, of their history. Maybe this place predated the Throne. Maybe it had been a redoubt of the old royalty, the House of Antlers, before Lapetiare’s revolution destroyed them: a retreat on foreign shores.…
But she was certain this place didn’t know. It only had a ringing antimemory, the opposite of a past. It was used to make futures now.
She came through the small door (no one had moved to open it for her), among her watching staff. They stared at her.
“Go on,” she said, gently. As if they were the ones she’d hurt. “I want breakfast for two in the morning room, and space cleared for a floor map.”
A cook dusted her floured hands on her apron, and a great puff of powder shot up into the sunbeams. The motes danced. “My lady,” she said, “we had it set for three, shall we clear the third place?”
Baru nearly shattered. Shall we clear Tain Hu’s place? No, she would say, no, leave it, leave her empty chair: she would stand there weeping silently while they watched her and understood. “I lied,” she’d tell them, “I wanted to be free of your control, so I had her executed, oh, what have I done?” And they would comfort her as they brought the poison cup, the blade, the slim garrote.
She said: “Leave the prisoner’s seat. It’ll make an interesting conversation piece. I have the sense, from your reaction, that I was meant to fail this test. Will anyone confirm that for me?”
No one would.
“Then go!” she snapped. “And serve me fresh code seals with breakfast. I have letters to write!”
They scattered in silence. One more time she wondered: how many of her predecessors had vowed, in secret, to defy their masters? None had succeeded. Or, worse, they had all succeeded, all of them defiant, all of their defiance expected and incorporated into the Throne’s victory.
Baru had only one weapon they’d lacked.
Tain Hu.
Remember that name. Pronounce it in a special way, so that it repeats itself: Tain leads to Hu and Hu leads to Tain, and you never forget her, she loops through your mind like a cant of resistance, now and always she is chained starving and ferocious to the rock-face of your memory and she heaves you forward by the manacles of her death.
Tain Hu.
You will destroy the Imperial Republic of Falcrest. You will liberate the world.
Tain Hu wills it.
And something rushed at Baru from her blindness—
* * *
SHE whirled, desperate, doomed—how had they decided so fast—the assassin came at her swift, elusive, a flicker of bird-wing shadow in twilight, the Throne’s answer for the cryptarch who refused to be bound—she tried to run, she tried to draw her boarding saber and stop-thrust the phantom through the breast—but she wasn’t wearing her sword, and as her turn and her failed draw put her off-balance she tripped on her cloak and fell on her ass.
No one there.
Baru groaned and rolled onto her stomach. With willfully bleak humor (probing the wound, trying to pinch shut the vein) she thought, oh, I am glad Hu can’t see her last hope now.
“My lady Cormorant?”
Baru yelled and spun on her ass. It was only Apparitor’s little golden-eyed Oriati concubine, coming in from the shore and the harbor. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, irritably, “that depends on you, really, are you here to try to seduce me again?”
He protected his throat with a soft calfskin glove. Yesterday Baru had pinned him against a stone battlement and choked him. “No, my lady. My lord Apparitor sent me to ask you which map you want prepared in the morning-room.”
Oh, the poor boy. She shouldn’t lash out at him (had to learn, immediately, how to wield her power carefully). He’d probably been torn away from friends and family, initiated into service as a boy, dragged around the world on Apparitor’s missions—rather like Muire Lo.
The flinch she felt at that name got her to her feet. “The map, yes. We’ll be discussing Aurdwynn. Get one of the full-rug maps, the sort we can walk on.”
“Aurdwynn, mam? You’re certain?”
“Absolutely.” Baru scuffed her boots on the marble, tugged her belt, adjusted her collar, and shot her cuffs. “It’s time to reward them for their return to our care. Ease off the lash. Give them a little”—slack on their chains—“honey for their table.”
What was his name anyway? Irashee? Irama?
“My lord suggests a map that will show you the full span of your new dominion.”
“Does he?” Baru stretched her locked hands over her head, and yawned mightily. She was pleased, a little, when the boy’s attention wandered down her jacket and waistcoat: not because she cared about his tastes, but because his dark gold-flecked eyes were like Tain Hu’s. “What map is that?”
Iraji. That was his name. Iraji of the oyaSegu tribe.
“A map of the world, my lady,” Iraji said. He blinked at her, softly, and she saw that he had a mind for spying, a polite and empathetic cunning which could be turned to wound or weal. “You are exalted now. You must consider the mosaic, not the stone.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SETH DICKINSON’s short fiction has appeared in many publications, including Analog, Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and on Tor.com.
He is an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers, winner of the 2011 Dell Magazines Award, and a lapsed student of social neuroscience. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is his first novel.
Visit his Web site at www.sethdickinson.com. Or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Map
Epigraph
Accountant
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Warlord
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Autarch
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Victory
Letters
Excerpt: The Monster Baru Cormorant
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE TRAITOR BARU CORMORANT
Copyright © 2015 by Seth Dickinson
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Stephen Youll
Cover design by FORT
Map by Jon Lansberg
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8072-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-7512-8 (e-book)
The Traitor Baru Cormorant Page 46
