The Traitor Baru Cormorant

  Maybe he read Lyxaxu’s letters. Maybe he found some draft of that question: Do you not fear their gradual return? Do you see any hope for us in five decades, in a century? Maybe he’d understood why Lyxaxu had asked. Maybe he’d realized what her answer had to be, cold cunning Baru Fisher the accountant.

  Maybe he wasn’t sure he believed it. But he came out here to wait. And now, at last, he sees the monster he wanted to make his queen.

  He’ll kill me, she thought. And she felt joy.

  Apparitor drew a device from his saddlebags and raised it above his head. A green-smoke rocket arched up into the dawn. “Ride,” he said, bending over his horse’s neck. “Ride hard.”

  She followed him, an empty mechanism. How had she done it? Until this morning came, she had somehow made herself believe that this morning would never come. She had known but she hadn’t known. How could anyone do that? How could you know something for a fact and ignore it? Antithetical to all rational thought.

  Oathsfire’s men gave chase. She heard the Duke of Mills himself, screaming to her, and then the first bowshots hissing past.

  Maybe, she thought, this has nothing to do with Lyxaxu or grief or understanding. Maybe they all agreed to kill me and Tain Hu and find their own queen. Ihuake, perhaps, married to Oathsfire. Better than two tribadists.

  The whole world a dim play around her. Less real than the memory of Tain Hu.

  New shapes in play ahead, though. Horsemen in red tabards and steel masks, bearing heavy crossbows. Masquerade marines—Apparitor’s marines. Rushing their way.

  “Ride,” Apparitor shouted, his hair astream. “Think of what’s waiting for you! Think of your reward!” He spurred his horse ahead.

  But she hesitated. She did not race for safety.

  Think of what’s waiting for you.

  Think of the Coyote-men, the Wolf, gray-bearded Xate Olake, the loyal guards, the ilykari divers, Tain Hu, Tain Hu, Tain Hu—

  Why did it have to be this way? What had she ever done to bind herself to this outcome? She could have stayed in the camp and ordered a swift march north. She could have fractured her Wolf into its ducal pieces and sent them home, or run away with Tain Hu, fled into the Wintercrests. She could have found some way to betray her own betrayal. She was the key, after all, not the exhausted Wolf or the gathered rebel dukes; ultimately she was the vital weapon.

  But then, of course, nobody would ever save Taranoke—

  An arrow caught her exhausted rouncey in the rump. It screamed and fell, dragging its hind legs for a moment, toppling. She slammed to the earth, shouting, her head smashing around inside the loose-strapped helm.

  A clean spring sky above. A gorgeous dawn.

  If she wanted to die, she did not want it enough. Her body sprang to its feet, checking her sword, taking a few dizzy, spinning steps.

  She looked up to see Duke Oathsfire roaring down on her, sword bare, wild hate and grief in his eyes.

  A crossbow quarrel glanced off his horse’s champron. She had a moment to see him blink in surprise. The second punched through his chest. He slumped across the reins, blood bubbling at his lips, and then fell.

  You will not die at Sieroch. Another lie she’d told. Small, in the counting of such things.

  Good-bye, Baru thought, good-bye, and turned to look for the shooter, the marines riding down to her rescue. Saw Apparitor, hand outstretched, the man who had offered her exaltation at this terrible cost.

  His eyes fixed on something behind her, where her helmet chopped off her peripheral vision. He opened his mouth to call warning.

  Oathsfire’s guardsman rode down on her and his maul smashed the side of her helmet and closed her whole world like a door.

  * * *

  THE Apparitor had arranged his instruments perfectly.

  Duchess Ihuake drank her morning soup, drank the tetrodotoxin the Clarified had used as seasoning, the foreign poison against which she had built no tolerance. Her compliments went to the cook—the new spice has left my lips numb—and then in morning council she slurred and fell and passed into paralysis and died. So passed the Cattle Duchess, who dreamt of a new hearthland where her people could be free.

  Her spymaster went roaring among the cooks. “Who did this?” he cried. “Whose hand killed our duchess?”

  “The hand that moves us all,” a chef’s assistant said, and hurled a pan of boiling oil into the spymaster’s face.

  Pinjagata, the Duke of Phalanxes, reviewed his troops before the march, and though he labored to breathe through his battle-burnt lungs, they stood in their ranks and took pride in his nods. A pale smiling man in the first row dropped his spear and stepped out to knife him up under the chin. “Baru Cormorant keeps her own accounts,” he said.

  The spearman duke died on his feet. He never saw his country at peace.

  Chaos in the Wolf camp as the warhorses fell paralyzed.

  Blood and smoke in the streets of Treatymont, as Admiral Ormsment’s soldiers stormed into rebel safe houses, poured acid into secret rooms.

  In distant Erebog, where the Crone climbed her tower’s steps, weary and heartsick from her war against Autr and Sahaule, dreading the news from Sieroch, burdened by the memory of love gone cold and silent, a workman spilled stinking caustic oil all across her. She rushed to wash and at the first touch of water the oil caught spectacular fire, unquenchable, a furious sparking blaze, a killing flame. So passed winter-eyed Erebog, the only lord of Aurdwynn ever bold enough to reach north.

  The Clarified meant for the duchess Vultjag could not find her target. Exiled, the duchess’s grim armsmen said. Gone north with Xate Olake. By order of the Fairer Hand.

  Panic erupted in the Wolf camp. Word spread of a terrible plot—Oathsfire and Vultjag, secretly promised to each other, would overthrow Baru Fisher and rule Aurdwynn together. No! The Stakhieczi under the Necessary King were already marching down the Inirein, intent on completing their centuries-old conquest.

  The Wolf looked to its master. Messengers scrambled. Deputies and lieutenants shouted, red-faced.

  But Baru Fisher could not be found.

  The decapitation was complete. The rest of the design was the harvest—a great many seeds to be scattered to the wind. The real prize, after all, was the legend of Sieroch, the secret knowledge revealed here. The knowledge of how the Masquerade might be defied, and to what result.

  A red rocket went up from the peak of the Henge Hill. The Clarified concealed there raised spyglasses to watch the result.

  From the mists of the swamplands to the south, their flat-bottomed pole barges abandoned miles behind, their pupils still wide with the mason leaf that had let them navigate the night, the first marines rose from ambush cover and began to march.

  They chanted as they closed, as the sentries scrambled to raise the alarm or stood in paralyzed horror, a booming chorus, practiced on the ships, on the barges, rehearsed without understanding—for who among Falcrest’s marines spoke Iolynic?

  SHE WAS OURS.

  FROM THE BEGINNING. FROM THE FIRST DAY YOU SPOKE HER NAME.

  FLEE TO YOUR FAMILIES. RUN TO YOUR HOMES. CARRY THE WORD: WE LOOKED OUT FROM BEHIND THE MASK OF HER. WE WILLED THE REBELLION’S BEGINNING. AND NOW WE WILL ITS END.

  BARU CORMORANT IS AN AGENT OF THE THRONE.

  * * *

  SHE came back to consciousness in the stifling cabin of a navy warship, somehow convinced that she was asleep on a cushion of nothingness. Apparitor looked up from his chair, setting down a pen, closing a book in his lap. She caught a brief flash of a drawing: a man, slender, frowning, beautiful, his neck burnt. Unfinished.

  Memory struck like a maul. The past is the real tyranny.

  She had kindled the rebellion knowing she would snuff it. She’d promised herself her heart would not be drawn in.

  But she had not made herself a fine enough machine.

  “You can weep, if you need to,” Apparitor said. “I wept when I earned my own exaltation. I wept for what I had betrayed.”
r />   She lifted herself on her hands, head swimming, staring down at the sheets tented over her breast and toes—and as Apparitor passed off to her right, he vanished. Not hidden from sight but gone.

  Apparitor and his book and his chair and the whole right side of the cabin. Utterly absent.

  By astonished reflex she looked to where he had been. The moment he crossed over to the left side of her face he came back, a discontinuous arrival, an apparition.

  “No weeping? I see. Practiced at detachment, I suppose. The army gathered at Sieroch scattered, as we intended. Your work is done. Now others begin their tasks.” He held up his pen, frowning, making a mark in the air. “We suffered a troubling loss in those final days, you know. An agent among the ilykari priesthood, vital to our project in Aurdwynn. She was a master-of-secrets for the entire rebellion. I suspect Xate of sniffing her out and killing her. Did you find any hint that—what are you doing?”

  Baru moved her nose left and right while he watched with furrowed brow. Left, right, left—and each time he crossed to the right side of her nose, he blinked out of existence.

  “Bring me your doctors,” she croaked.

  * * *

  THEY have a clever technique. A favorite strategem of Xate Yawa, of the Masquerade, of the ruling power behind the Faceless Throne. The honeypot. Suspect sedition and unhygienic thought? Give it a warm place to gather. Let the word go out. See who scurries out to take the bait. See who offers them support, who launders their money, who hides their secrets.

  But a favorite becomes predictable. New techniques must be developed. The science of rule must be extended.

  Why wait for an inevitable rebellion? Why accept the risk of betrayal at a key strategic moment? Aurdwynn cannot be ruled. All its dukes and faiths and bloodlines present a terrible puzzle. A sick system, unprofitable, unwilling to change to meet the demands of Incrastic development.

  If you want to avoid a great fire, burn the deadwood. You only need a suitable spark.

  A spark who understands that a quick and failed revolution now would be more humane than a bloodbath in ten years. Someone who looks to a more distant horizon. Craves a higher power, even at terrible, unanticipated price.

  And next time Aurdwynn sees that spark, next time it raises its hands toward the heat, it will remember: last time, we were burned.

  In Falcrest, in the Metademe, they condition prisoners just so: permit escape. Offer a rescuer, a collaborator. Slip a key in with the food. Let them come close to freedom, let them feel real triumph—they would not let me this far! This is the crux: give them the taste of victory, the certainty that this cannot be part of the game.

  And then snatch it away. The collaborator betrays them. The key will not open the outermost door.

  With enough repetition, most prisoners learn to ignore a key, an open door, a whisper to run. Led out onto the street, they will wait to be returned to their cells.

  After a time, they begin to teach new prisoners the same.

  VICTORY

  BARU Cormorant’s wound swallows half her world.

  The surgeon aboard Sulane cannot explain it. The frigate carries her east with the trade wind to another red-sailed ship, Helbride. Apparitor puts her aboard with a terse farewell: “I have more work in Aurdwynn. Frayed ends that need binding. When I am done I will return with your last test. See to your condition.”

  It’s grief, Baru thinks. It’s treachery. She cannot escape the logic of it. She’s put all her memories of Aurdwynn, all the things she cannot bear, into that side of the world. And she closed it off.

  But why, then, can she still remember? Why does she stand at the rail, watch half the birds circle half the sky, feel like half a person? Why does she reach out in the night for the company of an absent woman?

  Too far, she told the priestess in Haraerod. I’ve come too far.

  She accepted the bargain without understanding the price. A terrible mistake, for an accountant.

  The crew of Helbride venerates her. They aren’t Navy. Your Excellence, they call her, the same old honorific but with a certain hush, an awed inflection.

  They bring her to a secret place. A castle on the shore of a slate-sky land where seabirds call and the waves crash on the rocks. For the use of the Throne’s agents, they say, the Throne, the hidden council. They call this place the Elided Keep.

  For the duration of her stay, she is its lord and master. The stewards and servants tell her that they shipped her personal effects from Aurdwynn, although they could not find anything dear to her, so instead they brought banners and signs and trophies.

  Good, she says. Put the ducal heraldries up on the south wall of the throne room. (There are burnt torn banners from the battle at Sieroch, banners of Oathsfire, of Lyxaxu, of Pinjagata and Ihuake, of Vultjag. Banners of her own.) Put the blades and pikes up there, too.

  And on the north wall she hangs the signs of her loyalty: sheepskin palimpsests, marbled cream paper, her chained purse. A pristine Imperial seal from the Governor’s House in Treatymont, the one Cattlson designed, with the stag antlers.

  The surgeons at the Elided Keep have a diagnosis.

  You are not half-blind. The wound runs deeper than that. They touch the side of her head, where the maul struck her helm.

  Your brain can no longer understand that half of the world. The left hemisphere of your vision is your entire universe.

  She can stand in the center of the throne room, turn on her axis like the world making a new day, and change who she is. Ducal standards and rebel blades. Or coin and purse and mask and ink.

  A traitor either way.

  Are you hungry?

  Her bed rest has taken some of the strength from her shoulders and arms. She is voracious. The doctors set a plate of veal before her and she eats it too quickly. “More,” she says. “I am weak.”

  You have only eaten the left half of the plate. They turn it half a turn and somehow it is full again. Do you see?

  She tries to draw a clock, as a test. You have crowded all twelve hours between six and midnight, they say.

  She begins to laugh, a wild, sobbing, lunatic sound. What else can she do? It’s just blind chance. Just a maul to the brain, a bruise on the mind. It doesn’t mean anything at all.

  But it’s so elegant.

  There are stocks of chemicals in the castle, whole armamentaria of poisons and drugs. Stalking the midnight halls, paced by the ghosts of her victims, by the absence in her bed, she contemplates an end, a suicide, but in the end settles for swallowing salt, vomiting until she feels purged.

  She has come so close to everything she wanted when this all began.

  But now she knows she will not stop there. What she said to Tain Hu—If they want change, they must make themselves useful to Falcrest. Find a way up from within. The woman who said that is dead, the woman who heard the answer:

  Some things are not worth being within.

  At least she saved Tain Hu.

  A month passes in the salt and the stone.

  * * *

  A letter comes for her.

  Your efforts in Aurdwynn achieved six decades of forecasted progress in a single year. The power of the ducal aristocracy has been shattered, Governor Cattlson’s unpopular regime swept from power, and the people made ready to accept a single, charismatic, progressive ruler. You drew out a Stakhieczi agent and gathered critical information on their resurgent monarchy. With the threat of rebellion defused, we can complete our goal of restructuring Aurdwynn into a fortress and resource base against the Stakhieczi threat.

  A great deal of curiosity centers on you. We have had a native-born Stakhieczi representative for some time. An Aurdwynni candidate of Imperial Maia blood may soon complete her own ascension. But these racial types are well understood by Incrastic science. You will be the first Souswardi to step behind the Throne, bringing the mingled heredity of the Tu Maia empire and the stubborn Oriati federations.

  You have proven yourself a worthy asset. All that remains
is to complete your ascension. We will send one final test.

  Regards,

  Itinerant

  Hesychast

  Renascent

  Stargazer

  (absentia) Apparitor

  They do not miss the soldiers and the Governor they sacrificed. Those lives were a fair price: fire to burn away the deadwood, teeth to draw the poison out.

  A fair price.

  She feels well enough to dare the keep’s battlements: not the seaward wall, but the stonework that looks over the estuary. The clouded sky is steel and lamplight. A boy concubine follows in attendance. By old habit she tabulates the birds in the river and the marsh, a census of grebes, petrels, frigate birds, wading jacana.

  “Are you an educated man?” she asks the concubine. “You must be. The Throne does educate its spies, doesn’t it?”

  “Your Excellence?” His acting is impeccable, his dark Oriati skin flawless, his build an acrobat’s. Whoever sent him made a calculating choice. Almost the right choice. Not nearly the right one.

  How much older can she be than him? Three, four years? She feels ancient.

  She turns to face him. The estuary and the birds sweep off to her right and she loses them, even the calls, even the sound of surf. “Do you know the Hierarchic Qualm?”

  The battlement drops into the outer yard behind him. He takes a nervous step forward. “Of course I know the Qualm,” he says. “‘The sword kills, but it is the arm that moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder, then? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath, and only does its duty, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.’”

  She waves him off. “Good enough.”

  “Does the Qualm console you, my lady?” he asks.

  She watches a jacana as it walks on leaves. “What grief would I need consoled?”

  The concubine edges closer, wrapping himself in his arms as if suddenly conscious of the sea wind. “It is said that you raised all of Aurdwynn in rebellion, but that in truth you served our Throne.”