The Traitor Baru Cormorant (21 page)

“What's the Aphalone word for…” She considered. “Rule by secrets?”

“Oh. Hm.” He frowned. “I don't know.”

“Fetch the dictionaries,” she commanded. But she went down to the office with him to help, barefooted on the tiles, laughing with him as they opened volume after volume, papering the floor with their hunt.

But the word would not come. “We're going about this wrong,” Muire Lo said, sitting in a circle of abandoned thesauruses and rubbing his temples. “What should the roots be? If you had to invent the word now, from first principles—what would it be?”

“Crypsis,” Baru said, “for secrets.” She sat beside him, leaning back on her hands. The lamps made their shadows dance. “And the suffix?”

“For rule? -Archy.”

“Crypsarchy?”

“Cryptarchy. And the rulers would be cryptarchs.”

Baru thought of the Masked Emperor, silent and mindless on the throne. Of Cairdine Farrier laughing behind the mask. A chill took her, and she trembled, making a small uncomfortable sound. “A draft,” she said, to explain it and, at Muire Lo's skeptical sidelong glance—“I'm cold!”

“Did you expect otherwise? You're in a nightgown.”

“You're no help.”

He considered her dryly. “I could fetch you a blanket, though it would be patronizing. My other options all seem wholly improper.”

She laughed, and then considered herself through his eyes, sprawled beside him, immodest and foreign and powerful and laughing. It was a strange thing, even after all these years of Masquerade conditioning, to look at herself through other eyes, to think: I cannot act this way, even though he is my ally, my advisor. It will make him feel things I cannot afford.

She drew herself upright. “I'll help you with the books.”

“It's all right.” He stood to bow, and waved her off as she began to gather the scattered dictionaries. “Please, Your Excellence. The draft will make you sick.”

 

W
ARLORD

 

11

A
S
the repercussions of the fiat note's collapse rippled out to Falcrest, Baru's dreams of a career crumbled down around her.

She spent her days on work, managing a tower full of new and untrustworthy staff, fighting to rebuild the books ruined by Olonori's tenure and the economy ruined by her own. At night she retired with her books or her blade. Muire Lo moved into the tower's cellar after someone burned out his apartment—men from Duchy Radaszic, Baru suspected; the cheerful Duke of Wells had seen his wealth gutted by the fiat note's collapse. On some days Baru took dinner with him. On others she made appearances with Principal Factor Bel Latheman, whose reputation she'd destroyed by mere proximity.

But he was a shield, the poor man, a vital shield.

No word came from Cairdine Farrier. No acknowledgment that she had quelled incipient rebellion. No sign that Parliament felt anything but rage and astonishment at her policies. Her letters mostly came from Duke Lyxaxu, one of Vultjag's neighbors, who wrote long articulate opinions about phenomenology and the philosophy of rule that she dwelled on and always
meant
to find time to reply to.

She began to think she had imagined Farrier's mysterious influence, his shadowy colleagues with names like Hesychast, his intimations of the apparatus behind the Masked Throne.

And so it went for the next three years.

Three years while Aurdwynn's dukes grumbled in impoverished discontent, and the Fiat Bank bled its hoard of gold back into the Midlands and the valleys of the north, and little dale-rebellions guttered out under acid smoke, and Tain Hu introduced Aurdwynn to futures contracts, and Muire Lo made a theater out of his failure to conceal his letters back to Falcrest, reporting, as he had to, on her successes and missteps. Three years of work and no sign of progress.

She went to the harbor and drank, scrupulously alone, mindful never to establish patterns, except for the obvious pattern of drinking more and more.

And then came the day when a ship anchored with news that Taranoke had been renamed Sousward, and while Baru drank away her feelings on this topic, a man with red Stakhieczi hair curled over pale Stakhieczi cheeks came into the tavern and ordered something well beyond his apparent means.

He came to her lonely table and sat. When she looked at him in irritation, trying to remember where she had seen him before, he smiled brilliantly and said:

“Do you know the Hierarchic Qualm?”

*   *   *

T
HE
man's hair was absurdly, outrageously red. Dye, perhaps—or pure Stakhieczi blood in his veins, freckled on his pale cheeks, written in the color of his eyes.

“The Hierarchic Qualm.” Of all the strangers Baru had met in these taverns, none of them had ever opened with something out of Falcresti revolutionary philosophy, from the old
Handbook of Manumission
. “I know it. Why?”

“It's a test, of course.” The man waved past her, into Treatymont, into Aurdwynn. “Tests behind you, and tests ahead. I'm not sure I believe you know it.”

“Oh,” Baru said. “I'm crushed.” Her mind circled back, again and again, to the news that had just come:
Taranoke renamed Sousward; the Sixth Fleet will be built and harbored there; plentiful lumber and labor available, so long as unrest among the population can be controlled—

All as she had foreseen on that last day on Taranoke, walking to the harbor and
Lapetiare
to say good-bye.

The stranger leaned into the conversation. He smelled of salt fragrance. “Itinerant told me that you were always eager to display your masteries. But that was three years ago, when you still hoped to be a technocrat in Falcrest. Perhaps you've wandered from the path he saw for you.”

Baru set down her cup and regarded the man with cold disinterest, trying to hide the stab of panic he'd aroused, the sick fascination. At last, at last, here it was again—the conspiracy of strangers who watched and judged her, the cabal who made Governor Cattlson treat an undistinguished merchant like a superior.

“Farrier,” she said, connecting the dots. “He's the one you call Itinerant. And he mentioned his colleague, Hesychast. Do I have the pleasure, then?”

“Ha! No.” The northman took one sip of his outrageously expensive drink and made a face of bliss. He wore a stark, loose-fit shirt and a short jacket. He looked a little like a dandy playing sailor, and that might have fooled someone born elsewhere; but he kept his neckerchief in a grief knot, which Baru knew as a sailor's joke. “I don't share Hesychast's preoccupation with the science of who fucks who. They call me Apparitor, which makes me the one they dispatch. And here I am, bearing a message. Now: the Hierarchic Qualm?”

“The sword kills,” Baru recited, trying to remember the
Handbook of Manumission,
its arguments for revolutionary zeal. “But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.”

“Come,” the man who called himself Apparitor said. “Walk with me.”

They went out and circled the evening harbor where the water murmured on copper and barnacle and quay-timbers and the evening light rusted the white merchant sails with hints of Navy red.

Apparitor spoke:

“What you did to the fiat note three years ago destroyed all our progress in Aurdwynn. We meant to use the province as a tax base for war against the Oriati federations. Now we take losses on Aurdwynn. Half of Parliament has been baying for your blood—and the rest demand the head of whoever installed a Taranoki girl as Imperial Accountant. They had great expectations for Aurdwynn, as a source of easy wealth and a shield against the Stakhieczi invading south across the Wintercrests. But with all the dukes free of their debt and the gold reserves bleeding back into the land, we've lost our hold.” He looked at her, the masts of a dromon at his back, its sailcloth a canvas for his exotic color (so
pale
…), and he smiled impishly. “But the question is, Baru Cormorant, did you destroy the fiat note in service of the Throne? Are you thus blameless?”

“Parliament doesn't understand Aurdwynn. I did what was necessary to preserve the Imperial Republic's rule here.” She'd written no letters to Falcrest in defense of her policy. How could she? They would demand Xate Yawa's corroboration to prove that Tain Hu had been using the prisons for forgery.

Apparitor studied her with open interest, and she used the opening to study him in turn. He was young—not much older than she—and slight, but he moved with unhurried confidence and a kind of high-headed pride, a strange subtle cant of nobility. It vexed her, that carriage, because he spoke like Cairdine Farrier, but somehow in a distant way his motion rhymed with Tain Hu.

He spoke again. “Parliament understands little except its own interest. But
we
understand Aurdwynn. That's why we sent you here.”

“You.” She'd spent so much of the last three years wondering about this. “You and Cairdine Farrier and Hesychast? The power behind the Masked Emperor on the Faceless Throne?”

“There are others, too. We—we
are
the Throne. The…” He hunted for words, and Baru thought: this is not something he commonly explains. “The steering committee. We keep our eyes on the horizon while Parliament squabbles over the wealth of empire.” He made a gesture of self-deprecation. “Just a few philosophers and adventurers, delicately balanced, who happen to sign their position papers with the Emperor's name. Held in careful, mutual check by our shared secrets.”

“And you put me here? You were behind my placement exam, behind my appointment?”

“Itinerant championed your potential as a savant. It has occurred to us—” He opened a hand to the distant Wintercrests marching across the horizon. “It has occurred to us that the saying is true. Aurdwynn cannot be ruled. The dukes are a useful way to keep the people in line. But the great problem with these dukes is that they are not all loyal to us, hmm? If a storm comes down on the Empire, some of them will cast their lot with us, and some with the enemy. If that enemy is a united Stakhieczi invasion, or a renascent Tu Maia empire out of the west, or the menace from across the Mother of Storms—well, we cannot risk division in a moment of crisis. So how to draw out the disloyal, we wondered? How to address the trouble of the dukes? How to purge Aurdwynn of its illness, before that illness sickens our Empire? We have a favorite method.”

Baru understood at once, and the weight of it, the callous crushing sweep of what they were, took her breath away: this quiet committee hidden away in the bureaucracy, plotting out migrations and conquests, transfers of wealth or culture or plague across decades and leagues, with the cold assurance that it was all scientific, all properly Incrastic, that they understood best what prices would need to be paid.

What price she would pay.

“Civilization must endure,” the Apparitor said, as if reading her thoughts in her eyes. “At all costs, the Empire must survive. The lives our sanitation and discipline will save, the victories we will win against disease and disorder in the centuries to come—they justify any brutality. We must have control. Control by any means.”

“I understand what you want me to do,” she said, stunned by her own calm. Perhaps she had always known, since the moment in the cabin with Muire Lo when she had realized the power she had. “But what do I obtain from the bargain?”

Apparitor clapped his hands. “Ah, now, that's the good bit. Itinerant and the merit exams are in agreement, Baru Cormorant. You
are
a savant, a savant not merely at figures but at the understanding and the exercise of power. You are Taranoki, bred from the lineages of the Tu Maia, who ruled half the Ashen Sea, and Oriati Mbo, which produced the finest thinkers of the last millennium. The things you know in your blood are the key to understanding a piece of the world that has so far escaped our grasp. To understand is to master, and it is mastery we seek.”

“You would make me—”

“Do this thing for us, survive it, and yes.” The Apparitor's face became abruptly solemn. “We will give you what you most desire. What you have craved since childhood.”

She wanted to laugh, and call his bluff: This is what you offer me, in exchange for collapsing the fiat currency? Or, perhaps: why not let me rise through your bureaucracy, season and prove myself? You're lying, lying to make me do this thing for you, to use me as an instrument, foreign-born and expendable.

But she had known, these past three years, that she would never rise up through the bureaucracy. She had ruined too many with the inflation trick. Ruined herself.

She remembered Cairdine Farrier's favorite declamation, the value of merit and merit alone, and realized what he had been trying to prepare her for.

“So.” The Apparitor straightened his neckerchief and smiled. “Will you execute the will of the Throne?”

*   *   *

T
HE
next day she visited Census and Methods, the bones of Imperial power: ream upon ream of records cataloging everything valuable in Aurdwynn, stone and gold, salt and lumber, flesh and blood. Demographic projections of the available workforce. The tax base and the export rate. The relative concentration of Stakhi, Belthyc, and Maia blood.

The department fell under Xate Yawa's purview, and the Jurispotence's eyes watched Baru as she worked, as they watched Baru on the street, in her tower, in the meetings of the Factors. She did not so much as dare to make eye contact with women here. Ffare Tanifel had been brought down on charges of licentiousness—an unacceptably overt fondness for men. Baru carried higher sins.