The Traitor Baru Cormorant (13 page)

“Your Excellence—”

“Please, Aminata.” All those stolen hours in the larder making codes. They must still count for something. “You can still call me Baru.”

Aminata crossed her arms, cocked her weight on one hip, and smiled insouciantly. “I don't know if it's to your taste, Baru, but this is a seaport, and sailors don't take leave in an office with a glass of wine.”

“Oh,” Baru said, her stomach not relieved, her heart quite uncertain when and how to beat.

Cairdine Farrier had spoken to Aminata. Cairdine Farrier was here. Cairdine Farrier was watching her through these deep open eyes. And all it would take to save herself would be one phrase:
mind your familiarity, Lieutenant
—

But—one way or another, she would know more at the end of this night than she had at the beginning.

“I'll get my coat,” she said.

*   *   *

“T
HIS
one tastes like piss,” Baru said.

“How would you know what piss tastes like?”

She laughed into the mug. “I'm a savage, from a savage land.”

“Please. If anyone drinks piss in this midden of a world it's the Aurdwynni.” Aminata tapped the bottom of the mug, mischievous. “Go on, go on, finish—good! You want another?”

Baru considered the bottom of the mug and tried to deliberate. Instinct, for perhaps the first time in her life, felt easier. “Yes,” she said. “Immediately.”

“You're paying for all this,” Aminata said, leaning across the bar, “because you have unlimited money.”

“It doesn't work like that.” Baru frowned deeply, certain she should be concerned about open discourse on certain topics, not quite sure if money was one of them. “There's inflation to think about, you know—and I haven't even written purchase orders for pens and ink—there's so much to
do,
Aminata! I thought it'd all be complicated figures and simple duties, but it's the opposite.”

“Nothing's complicated for you.” Aminata belched and took another pair of mugs from the barman, who shared his Falcresti fashion sense (apron, bare shoulders, loose-laced sport corset, striking makeup) with the exasperated Principal Factor Bel Latheman of the Fiat Bank. “You're brilliant, you know that?”

“I'm glad you think so.” Baru considered the geometry of her upraised forefinger. “I am drunk. I think this is the first time.” It would be important to remain cautious, even drunk, and say nothing that could betray her, like: “I missed you, you know.”

“Don't get weepy, bird, we're barely past midnight. And I think we need to find you—” Aminata leaned in and bounced her eyebrows. “Company, hmm?”

At close range, Aminata's face became a geometric proof in bone and flesh, clean angles and perfect concentric topologies of sclera and iris and pupil. Baru braced herself on the bar and remembered her paranoia.
The Jurispotence is always watching.
“I don't know,” she said, pleased by the subtlety and reserve of her own facial expressions. “It's just good to talk to someone. Everyone's listening to me—everything I say—but they're not—I can't—”

Aminata listened intently, nodding. Behind her a scar-faced woman shouted to a hushed table about her intent to murder Duke Sahaule the Horsebane, who'd done something terrible, presumably to her horse.

“I don't know,” Baru said, choking on her own habits of silence.

“No, no! Tell me more! I'm leaving soon anyway, it doesn't matter!”

“I don't even remember how I was before I went into that school. I don't even remember being allowed to have feelings!”

“Like what?” Aminata shouted over the rising roar.

“Like—” Aminata had turned her uniform coat inside out, to signal that she was off duty, but Baru grabbed at its shoulder anyway and tugged. “You're a Masquerade soldier, but you're Oriati! You help the people who want to conquer your homeland! If there's another Armada War, you'll be killing your own blood! How do you feel about that?”

With drunken cunning she thought: they will expect these doubts of me, these questions of loyalty, so they are safe to offer up as chum. Whoever she reports to will eat them, and be satisfied.

“I don't know.” Aminata's brow wrinkled. “They're fair to me. I'm going to be an admiral some day.”

“No you won't! Look at who you are!”

“Please.” Aminata rolled her eyes. “Seacraft has always been a woman's game. We're better at mathematics and navigation, all the hereditary science says so.”

“I mean you're Oriati! They'll never give you a chance!”

“You're an
Imperial Accountant,
and look where you're from.” Aminata stood sharply. “Come on, before you get too serious—let's go upstairs, let's give you a chance—”

“No, no, no—wait!” But Aminata had already left. Baru followed her unsteadily, surprised by how much the crowd restricted her vision. “Sorry,” she said, deeply upset to be inconveniencing those she bumped into. “I'm so sorry. I'm very drunk.”

Aminata led her up the stairs and into a dim lamplit space, crowded wall to wall with jostling shouting people. There were doors everywhere, and men and women dancing on a raised stage, mostly unclothed. “D'you know how to do this?” Aminata shouted. “You've got to tell them what you like.”

“I don't want to rent!”

“It's safe! You tie a cap on him and it stops everything from getting through! I'll show you how!”

Baru, flushed and unsteady, took her by the shoulders. “I know why you're doing this!”

“What?”

“I said,
I know why you're doing this
!”

Aminata frowned at her for a little while, chewing her lower lip. Men brushed past them, jostling, but, seeing Aminata's inside-out coat—clearly an officer, clearly Masquerade navy, backed by a vengeful syndicate of seafaring women ruthless in their retribution for even small crimes—gave them no trouble.

“All right,” Aminata said, “all right. Look: if it's really that way I just don't want to know, okay? Let's just not talk about it. It's safer for both of us.”

Baru did not want to be silent, but she could find nothing safe to say.

“Let's go back to the bar,” Aminata said, tugging on Baru's wrist, “and try something harder.”

*   *   *

“D
'YOU
think they're going to rebel?”

“Aurdwynn always rebels!” Aminata shouted over the roar of the crowd. “Either the dukes are happy, and the people rebel, or the people are happy, and the dukes rebel, or the dukes hate each other, so it's civil war. That's what the Admiralty thinks.”

“So what do I do?” Baru had shouted herself hoarse, and now had to lean into Aminata's ear to make herself heard. “The Governor's a spineless romantic and I think the Jurispotence is on the other side.”

“I don't know! I'm just a lieutenant!” Aminata laughed, as if this were really a joke.

“I want to go home.” Baru slipped on the bar and caught herself on Aminata's stool. “To Taranoke. I miss it so much, Aminata—”

Aminata helped her back upright. “You can't go home.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. Because it's gone.” Aminata frowned, finished her drink, and nodded. “You can't find it again. Even if you go back, it's not there anymore. That's history, that's how it works! Someone's always changing someone else.”

She was right; she was right, of course, and more fool Baru for not having said it first—the Taranoke of her childhood was gone, had probably never existed; Halae's Reef had never cut the waves like smooth shark teeth, the water had never lapped
that
clear on luscious black sand. Pinion had not known the name of
every
star and Solit had never held her up to count them for an
entire
night and Salm had—ah, no, better not to think of that while drunk, not at all. And yet she couldn't seem to help it—

Baru caught sight of a face in the far corner, barely visible, cornered by the mass of an enormous Stakhi woodsman in a leather tabard. The face looked up, icy, speaking to the woodsman, a curse or a threat.

Muire Lo. “Oh,” she said, “shit.”

“What?”

“That man's my secretary. And probably a spy.”

“So? You haven't done anything.”

“If he saw us go upstairs together, he might think—he might tell someone that we were—”

Do you know what's done to a suspected tribadist, Baru?

“Oh fuck,” Aminata said, bolting upright. “Do you know who he reports to?”

“That merchant, I think—you know the one, you've spoken to him—”

“Do we run?”

“No, we'd look guilty. I'd better go say something—Lo!”

The gigantic woodsman's bellow carried across the tavern as he took Muire Lo by the throat and pinned him up against the wall. People recoiled, shouting, a clamor of Stakhi and Urun and Iolynic and Aphalone. Baru and Aminata left their stools barely a moment apart, Baru trailing, Aminata shouting in Aphalone to those with ears for it: “Imperial Navy, stand aside, stand aside!”

Muire Lo pawed at the grip around his throat, eyes wide. The woodsman used his other hand to push an interloper away, politely but firmly, and continued strangling the life out of Muire Lo with calm inexorable strength.

Aminata reached him first, still shouting, and when the man raised his spare hand to fend her off she took it by the wrist, pulled it palm-up close to her stomach, turned on the balls of her feet, and tried to throw the man by the sheer pain of the joint lock. He was too big and too firmly set to move, so instead the lock snapped his wrist. He roared and dropped Muire Lo, and before he had time to do anything else, Baru snatched up a heavy mug and clubbed him in the back of the head as hard as she could. He was huge and angry and would probably be a match for both of them even with a broken wrist. She had no choice.

He crashed onto his back on the stone floor, his left arm raised rigid, his right arm flexing at his side. “See that? That's called a fencing response,” Aminata said brightly, pointing to the way his arms twitched. “You gave him a concussion. Good. I said IMPERIAL NAVY! STAND BACK!”

Muire Lo looked up at Baru from where he'd slumped against the wall, mouth gaping fishlike. The room moved around her like a ship in chop and after a moment she decided to sit down beside him. She was drunk and terrified and it took her a moment to plan out the sentence: “What were you doing here?”

“I thought someone was going to kill you.” His voice was a wheeze and as if that didn't hurt enough he sounded mortified. “I'm sorry, Your Excellence, I just wanted to keep watch—but I was never very good at this in train—in taverns.”

“And him?”

“Oh,” Muire Lo said, not glancing at the fallen man. “I told him who I worked for and he got angry.”

Baru let that half-answer pass unchallenged. She'd sort him out tomorrow. “What do we do?” she asked Aminata.

“We pay our tab,” Aminata said, kneeling to go through the man's pockets, “and if you're willing to explain what we were doing together in a Southarbor tavern to your Governor and your Jurispotence and my captain, we take this man in.”

“He was watching you,” Muire Lo said dully. He touched his throat, where bruises had already begun to rise.

“Who told you someone was going to kill me?” Baru waved off a bystander's hand. Off-duty Masquerade garrison soldiers had already begun to form a screen around them, their rivalry with the navy briefly set aside in the name of Imperial solidarity. “Muire Lo, who told you?”

“No one told me,” he said, eyes averted. “But I thought if the Jurispotence would try, it would happen as soon as the Governor left to go hunting.”

“Does he have a weapon?” Baru asked Aminata.

“No.” Aminata frowned. “Just a notebook.”

 

7

B
ARU
woke with her first hangover. Sniffling and cramped, she stumbled around her paneled room, hunting for a goblet of spring water before giving up and bringing a bottle of wine into the bath. The miracle of Masquerade plumbing called up hot water and the memory of drinking from the hot springs on Taranoke.

How far away were those springs? The sky printed in the still water? Dark young stone down in the deep like the shadow of caldera gods? She couldn't remember, couldn't manage the geography or trigonometry with her pounding headache. Forever far. Unreachable.

That's what Aminata had said. You couldn't go home.

A knock came from the stairway, first tentative, then insistent. Muire Lo, no doubt. “Come,” she shouted, and then, out of deference to local modesty, “but I'm in the bath!”

“Your Excellence, Jurispotence Xate Yawa is in the waiting room.”

Baru groaned.

“What should I tell her?”

“Make clever conversation for ten minutes. I'll be down.” She put her head under the water and tried to drift, but the bath was too small and she was too long. After a moment she sat up rigid with a terrible thought.

Perhaps Xate Yawa was here to arrest her, as she had Ffare Tanifel. To drag her away and have her drowned. But if Xate Yawa was with the rebellion, surely she would have
protected
the traitor Accountant—

She says she cannot protect me,
the note had said.

Perhaps Xate Yawa had discarded Ffare Tanifel to prove her own loyalty. Safeguard herself. Perhaps Cattlson had made a better offer.

*   *   *

“I came to apologize.”

Jurispotence Xate Yawa looked across the desk without a hint of judgment, her eyes and shoulders formally set, gloved hands flat on the redwood. Baru, barely presentable in a collarless laced shirt still loose at the wrists, tried not to squirm. Just as she'd noticed on the docks, Xate Yawa's eyes were the blue of a Taranoki crow. Baru was certain Yawa knew everything that had happened last night—the who, the where.