The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade Page 5

  “Quite, Your Excellence.”

  She traced the facts of stone and water that boxed Aurdwynn, made it small and desirable and impossible to escape—an arena, a cage, a pulpit. Empires had grappled and died here. But whoever ruled Aurdwynn ruled the north of the Ashen Sea, and whoever ruled that piece of sea controlled the seaward approach to Falcrest itself.

  The Masquerade ruled from Falcrest and its rule was like an octopus: stealthy, flexible, smart, gripping half the Ashen Sea—but soft, so soft. It had to surround itself in hardness to armor itself against the Oriati and its other rivals. Taranoke in the west, as a fleet base to check the Oriati. And Aurdwynn to the north, as a bastion.…

  “You were a child when the Masquerade arrived,” she said, running her fingers over the landlord-manors of Duchy Erebog, the clay lands that gave Aurdwynn its pottery and its oldest duchess.

  Muire Lo kept his eyes on the map. The lamplight shone on the perfumed oil in his dark hair. “Aurdwynn has been a federated province for twenty years. I was two when Xate Yawa—she’s the Jurispotence now—killed the old Duke Lachta and arranged our formal surrender.”

  “But there was a—” If it was foolish to mention rebellion, it was more foolish to shy away from it. “A rebellion. You lived through that.”

  “The Fools’ Rebellion gave up arms when I was twelve. Not even a man. I have always been loyal.”

  I’m sure you have, Baru thought. I’m sure those early years involved no tumult at all, in Aurdwynn or in your heart.

  There was no question Muire Lo had been chosen to watch over her. Everyone was someone else’s instrument. But she would have to take him into confidence and use him as a trusted instrument nonetheless. She could afford to make some of her agendas known to Farrier and Farrier’s creatures. Far more dangerous to shut him out and deny even the illusion of control.

  “They want to hold Aurdwynn because it protects Falcrest and the heartlands.” She touched the Wintercrests. “From the Stakhieczi in the north, who could invade by land through Aurdwynn and then east across the river Inirein. And from any rival on the Ashen Sea, who would have to sail clockwise with the trade winds, and follow the coast of Aurdwynn to reach Falcrest.”

  “We want to hold Aurdwynn,” Muire Lo said softly. “Your Excellence.”

  “Thank you.” She drummed her fingers on the map, considering both the map and the loyalties of Muire Lo. Exhilaration rose in her: here, before her, a problem of power, a riddle of empire. A chance to show her worth to Cairdine Farrier, whoever he really was, whatever great designs he hinted at. “What a cauldron. What a trap.”

  Alpine forest and rugged mountain, coastal plain and rich cold fisheries. A land of mineral and animal wealth. An economic dream and a military nightmare: a land of valleys riven by dangerous geography. Cavalry would be king in the lowlands, the key to controlling the Sieroch floodplains and the capital at Treatymont. But in the north, rangers and woodsmen roaming the towering redwood forests would be able to close the roads during summer. In winter there would be no forage to feed an army to chase them.

  And the tumult of the geography was nothing next to the politics. “How many times,” Baru said, leafing through the parchment, “has your home been invaded?”

  “I believe we have lost count.”

  Five hundred years past, Aurdwynn had been overrun by waves of Stakhieczi and Tu Maia armies, invasion and counterinvasion between two great empires at the peak of their power. The warlords and dukes left behind when the empires collapsed (a mystery Baru’s schooling had not touched upon, though one often blamed on unhygienic mating) had settled into uneasy coexistence. A dozen contenders had tried to unify Aurdwynn in the centuries since. A dozen alliances rose to amputate their dreams of a throne.

  On the gates of Lachta, the old Stakhieczi outpost that everyone now called Treatymont, the stone bore ancient words—

  “Aurdwynn cannot be ruled,” Baru murmured.

  “Only the Masquerade can rule Aurdwynn,” Muire Lo said, eyes still downcast in respect. “The Northgate engraving has been amended.”

  Why had the civil service exam arranged for her to go here? Why had Cairdine Farrier wanted his savant, groomed from childhood, thrown to the wolves?

  “Give me the Treaty of Federation.” Baru beckoned and Muire Lo searched his folders for his waxed copy of Aurdwynn’s treaty with the Empire. She scanned it, lips pursed, chuckling again at the flock of Iolynic signatures that crowded the final page—all the dukes and duchesses of Aurdwynn, Autr through Vultjag, gathered to submit their mutual surrender—until she found the passage rankling at her.

  Aurdwynn shall have a Governor, appointed by the Emperor in Falcrest, with power over the legal Imperial military and its garrisons—yes, yes, and so forth—and who shall serve as liege lord to the dukes and duchesses of Aurdwynn by sworn oath. Fine.

  Aurdwynn shall have a Jurispotence, who shall have power over all the courts, and power to review the law, and who shall oversee the dispersal of cults, the teaching of proper Incrastic thought, and the sanitation of heredity. Falcrest’s eye and lash. Not a popular post.

  Aurdwynn shall have an Imperial Accountant, who shall have power over foreign and domestic trade, who shall gather the Imperial tax, and disburse Imperial funds as they see fit. And that was her, the purse-watcher. It couldn’t be much of a station if they would give it to an exam-fresh stripling technocrat.

  Could it?

  She steepled her hands and looked up at the ceiling of the tiny slot cabin. “Aurdwynn is a hive of duchies,” she said. “We’ve installed a governor to keep the dukes in line, which is an extraordinary task. So he must either be a despot, who rules with his garrison, or bound up in their politics. Is that fair?”

  “Governor Cattlson gives great leeway to the duchies, I am told,” Muire Lo said, “though I am also told this is due to their equally great mutual respect. It is said he rides with Duke Heingyl the Stag Hunter, and that together they hope to find a Falcresti husband for the young lady Heingyl Ri.”

  “Touching.” She traced the borders on the map. “And Aurdwynn must be a barking mutt of bloodlines, full of old faiths and heresies. We have put a Jurispotence on top of all that, who cannot possibly regulate the faiths and marriages of all these valley peasants. So she must have given up on her job, or pursued it zealously. Either she’s ineffective and ignored, or effective and despised.”

  “I could not possibly say whether Her Excellence Xate Yawa is despised—”

  “Come now, Muire Lo.” She gave him a cross glance. “You’re my secretary. I command you to be honest with me. Especially if I’m wrong.”

  He raised his gaze from the map and the twitch of his lips might have been a very schooled and very subtle smile. “You’re not wrong,” he said.

  Baru leaned back on the creaking oaken bench, staring at the map of Aurdwynn, seeing Taranoke, all the ways they differed, all the ways they were the same. “The dukes have no foreign trading partners,” she said, “except the Masquerade, and each other—all the other duchies and valleys. Since they have no central bank or common currency, they use our Imperial fiat notes. The value of those notes depends on foreign trade and the policies of the Fiat Bank.”

  And she controlled that trade and that bank. She was the Imperial Accountant.

  “A cogent assessment, I think,” Muire Lo said, quite properly, but she could see in the tightness of his eyes and lips, worried and amused at once, that he had seen just what she had. She controlled not just the pursestrings of the provincial government, but, through the Fiat Bank, the economic prosperity of every duke in Aurdwynn. She could do what the Governor and the Jurispotence could not: keep the dukes in line.

  If she played this game as a good Imperial citizen, she would be an effective functionary in an ineffective government.

  If she played it well, played for herself, she would be the most powerful person in Aurdwynn.

  She made Muire Lo wait while she drummed her fingers on the hardwood and
considered her goals.

  There had been younger queens. There were younger characters in The Antler Stone, in The Handbook of Manumission, youth who had played key roles in Falcrest’s revolution. Perhaps Cairdine Farrier intended to test his Taranoki find on the grandest scale. Perhaps he had offered her exactly what she wanted.

  “Muire Lo,” she said, fingers following the web of duchies through the distant forested north, down the tangle of freetowns and landlords that hatcheted the Midlands, out over the grain-rich coast. “Assume that I was sent to Aurdwynn to complete a task—some great difficulty, some problem of rule. What would you expect that problem to be? The economic waste of sharecropping? The ducal debt crisis? What ails your home?”

  “Aurdwynn has one great habit, Your Excellence, one constant touchstone, no matter who rules.” Her secretary hesitated over the map, his own fingers half-curled, as if of half a mind to draw her hand away from a flame. “Rebellion.”

  * * *

  SHE had seven more weeks to prepare as Lapetiare leapfrogged up the coast, taking on fresh fruit and meat, exchanging mail and passengers. At sea they ate salted fish and drank beer even in dinners with the captain. The crew submitted to brusque exams from the ship’s doctors, a pair of southern Falcresti who kept fanatically to the Incrastic creed of sanitation. Twice a day they all washed in salt water without care for modesty, sailors all hooting and hollering at each other and throwing sponges, as untroubled by each others’ nakedness as any Taranoki. What attention Baru got was practical: one woman marine asking after her exercises, a sailor telling her she looked as sleek and mean as a tiger shark, and finally the boatswain, who challenged her to a rope climb (she lost, but loved it).

  “Cover your cocks,” the men sailors sometimes joked. “They’re always hunting sodomites.”

  “What do they do to sodomites?” Baru asked.

  They looked at her with some astonishment. “Hot iron,” one said. “Hsssssssssss.”

  “Thought you would have seen it plenty on your home,” another muttered.

  Baru shrugged indifferently, to hide the pain of the thought that took her: father Salm dying just that way.

  When they harbored, Baru took Muire Lo ashore and dictated diligent notes on everything she could find. In a harbor called Chansee, where the people were astonishingly pale northerners, gregarious and welcoming, they visited a cancer ward. Cairdine Farrier walked the beds, examining melanomas and conditions of the skin, apparently common among the Stakhieczoid racial type in these latitudes. “A troubled line,” he said afterward, brow furrowed in concern. “We will have to mate them with themselves, and see if their best traits can be reinforced. Perhaps they can be specialized.” He turned on her with sudden enthusiasm. “The Aurdwynni are a mixture of these Stakhi types, Imperial Maia blood, and the fragile Belthyc natives. Perhaps you will have a chance to arrange an experimental marriage. My colleague Hesychast is always looking for new bloodlines to Clarify.”

  Baru took note of his interest, troubled in her heart. She found his games of heredity and eugenics queasy, invasive, deeply frightening. When he spoke of Incrasticism, she heard Aminata’s warning, the terrible fate that awaited the sodomite and the tribadist, and thought: I am a part of this, but I do not have to love it. I only have to play my role. Survive long enough to gather power. Gather enough power to make a difference.

  The Masquerade had taught her all the names of sin. But her parents taught her first.

  And she knew in her heart, in the habits of her eyes and thoughts, what she was.

  The air chilled. Storm petrels paced them as they turned northeast. She went through her notes again and again, committing personalities and legalities and tongue-breaking family lines to memory, dukes and duchesses.

  What would it be like to meet these people, stare them down, inflict her will on them? Could she confront the dukes Oathsfire and Lyxaxu, one short and stout as a badger, one tall as redwood, and tell them she would tax their river trade? Would they go whispering to their old northerly rival Erebog, the Crone in Clay, and arrange some revenge? What courage would she need to write to Nayauru Dam-Builder and Ihuake the Cattle Duchess, saying: ah, yes, hello, Nayauru, young and proud and most beloved of your people, and greetings to you, Ihuake, lord of all milk and wool, whose might is a stampede. I see you have worked diligently to divide the rich Midlands of Aurdwynn between you, and to build a great alliance, with three proud dukes as your clients. But no matter that, noble ladies. I have been appointed on grounds of merit, and in the name of distant Falcrest I am here to take your wealth.

  She risked the wrath of those born to power.

  And, too, there were strange gaps in her notes. The Phantom Duke of Lachta, who ruled Treatymont in name alone—nobility without power or presence. Who was he?

  Why, too, did she have the names of the previous Imperial Accountants, Su Olonori and Ffare Tanifel before him, but no reason for their dismissal? Why was there no mention of existing staff waiting for her? Surely there would be a staff—the Imperial Republic ran on bureaucracy and a bureaucracy needed staff—

  “What does the Empire of the Mask fear most in Aurdwynn?” she asked Cairdine Farrier.

  He looked pleased. “Parliament, as ever, fears a poor tax season.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “But those who see farther remember certain … troubles our regime has encountered. Difficulties that may not yet be wholly mastered. Aurdwynn has such a deep and fractious history … it is difficult to fit those pieces together into something that will not break again.”

  “What happened to the prior Accountant, Su Olonori?” she asked. “And Ffare Tanifel?”

  He smiled tauntingly. “Nothing a wool merchant would know.”

  And then, on the scheduled morning, they came to Treatymont harbor. Baru came on deck to see stern stonework and blackened iron, towers set against far white mountains that scraped the bottom of the sky. Caged beauty.

  The Horn Harbor waited for them, its two sentinel towers burnt and shattered by the Masquerade navy twenty years past, left to stand like dead men. A pair of great torchships in Masquerade red guarded the harbor mouth and from them came the clamor of bells, welcoming Lapetiare to port, congratulating her on making good time, beating out some code spoken only by captains and admirals: riots ashore, perhaps, or pirate waters, or all well.

  She stood at the prow of the ship while Muire Lo fussed over her. “They prefer women gowned. You could pass as native, you know. You have good Maia skin, if not the Maia nose. But if you want to make a statement—well, the trousers will do—”

  She let him tug at the cuffs and buttons of her jacket. She’d abandoned her practice blade, thinking it childish, but the symbolic chained purse strapped to her side did not pair well with an empty scabbard.

  “Lieutenant Aminata,” she called.

  They hadn’t spoken at any length since embarkation. Baru had avoided her studiously during the riotous bathing-times. Aminata approached with a sailor’s rolling, casual gait, her uniform jacket loose in defiance of the cold. “Your Excellence,” she said, without apparent sarcasm. “Can I help you?”

  “I need a blade. One suitable for—” She gestured to the city spread before them, its narrow stone streets. “Such close conditions.”

  “The officer’s boarding saber, Your Excellence.” Aminata drew her own sword and offered it, head inclined, eyes politely downcast. “Single-edged. Falcrest forged. A symbol of Imperial power. Will it do?”

  Baru considered the woman and the sword, her expression carefully neutral, mind racing through permutations of etiquette and plot, trying to sense some meaning here: was it a traditional gift between lovers? Some insult in her ancestral Oriati Mbo? A reminder of where her loyalties had to lie—or a question of the same? Had Aminata and Cairdine Farrier spoken since Taranoke? What could it mean if she took the blade, or if she refused it?

  Aminata waited, head bowed, legs braced against the slow rock of the ship, the blade balanced between her two open palm
s.

  “It will do,” Baru said. “Thank you, Lieutenant.” She took the saber and sheathed it. Too short for this scabbard, but no matter. Other scabbards could be had.

  “Good luck, Your Excellence,” Aminata said. She turned smartly and returned to her duties.

  * * *

  MUIRE Lo went first, to see to the handling of luggage and papers, and then Baru took the second skiff ashore and presented herself. Her stomach bobbed with the harbor chop. She was eighteen, foreign, a woman—and here in Aurdwynn they did not even pretend that this was not a disadvantage to the ambitious. She was alone.

  The proper place of a Taranoki, she imagined Cairdine Farrier saying, looking back on the disastrous failure of the Imperial Accountant in Aurdwynn, is among a large extended family, in a restricted environment, where her natural limitations can be overcome—

  She stood and went to the front of the skiff, defying the spray and the roll of surf, and set one booted foot up on the prow. If she was going to throw up, she decided that she would do it now; and when nothing came she resolved to believe it would not happen at all.

  They came to the quay. Baru caught a ladder and lifted herself up before the sailors had even roped the skiff. The waiting party looked at her in surprise as she clambered up like a common sailor, purse and sword banging awkwardly beneath her.

  They stared at her for a moment and she felt them measuring her, this savant they must have been warned of: just a tall usefully built islander girl with warm brown skin and dark eyes (intent, Pinion would say, always so intent), competent and strong in her motions and yet always, Aminata had complained, so impatient.

  “Gentlemen,” she said, because she’d given no one a chance to announce her, “and ladies: I am the Imperial Accountant.”

  The governor of Aurdwynn looked like his portrait in the books: tall, muscular, pale, chin a jutting prow. The kind of man they respected here. “Your Excellence Baru Cormorant,” he said, taking her hand, beaming out from beneath an awful or majestic (she wasn’t sure) wolf’s head cap. “A pleasure. You are certainly vigorous.”