The Traitor Baru Cormorant (31 page)

“The Governor commands the
garrison
.” Baru tipped her chin toward the flotilla gathered in the harbor. “Once they set foot on a ship, they fall under naval authority, and once the navy leaves harbor, I'll be the ranking technocrat aboard. That makes them mine. And I don't want an escort.”

Xate Yawa conceded the point with a flick of one gloved hand. “I'll inform the Governor that you declined his courtesy. I took the liberty of having the papers and effects you requested delivered to
Sulane,
but I'm sure they can be transferred.” She paused by one of the garrison officers. “Stand your soldiers down. The Accountant will travel without escort.”

All as they'd planned—Xate Yawa's power used to strip away Cattlson's safeguards, to leave Baru the sole and unchecked Masquerade authority aboard ship.

The Jurispotence took her hand. Whether she gripped with formal delicacy or some meaningful strength, Baru couldn't tell. Their gloves masked too much. “I hope you have not become too rash,” she said.

Baru considered the woman, her flint and cold, looking for some glimmer of assurance or fear or any human response at all. But Xate Yawa offered only composed, polite concern.

She had betrayed one rebellion to Falcrest because she'd believed it would fail. It could happen again.

A navy launch waited to bring Baru out to
Mannerslate
. Word of the Imperial Accountant's departure must not have spread, because there was no riot dockside (although perhaps, Baru thought, she overestimated her own celebrity—but no, she had the numbers now).

Something moved through the crowd. Baru caught the disturbance, a stiffness, a ripple of recoil. Cattlson, come to see her off—?

Muire Lo stepped forward, eyes downcast. He wore his secretarial coat buttoned to the throat and carried a small folio of loose papers in mindless disarray. At once Baru put her heart in ice. “Over here,” she called, preempting whatever he might be planning to do. She'd left him in Treatymont because there was no safe or useful way to include him. She couldn't explain now.

He stepped forward. “I'm sorry,” he said, eyes still hooded. He hadn't washed or oiled his hair. “I tried to draw him off.”

And with a jagged pop of awareness like the first shock of a broken bone she saw Purity Cartone, the remora, the Masquerade instrument, standing at the edge of the gathered crowd, smiling blandly. “He's to be your bodyguard,” Muire Lo explained, and at last looked up. His eyes were like river stones, still and smooth, and perhaps no one but Baru would have seen past them. “Is it true you're going to Falcrest? Leaving me in your place?”

She smiled through her shock, clinging to the necessities of the moment: to seem unconcerned, to give him strength, to succor the splinter of pain in her own breast. His
eyes
—“It's true,” she said. “I need Parliament to sort out this … unpleasantness before I can continue my work.”

“Your Excellence.” He stepped forward with abrupt, unconsidered haste, as if trying to catch something falling. “Is there—is there anything that I can do? Any instruction you'd like to leave for me?”

Purity Cartone's mild gaze followed everything with appalling languid precision.

Baru smiled bravely at Muire Lo, lying, shutting him out, closing him like a book of things already known. There was no warning she could give that would not risk the whole plan. “No special instructions,” she said. “Keep the office in order while I'm gone. I'll write if any business strikes me.”

She thought he might do something rash.

But Muire Lo squared his shoulders, drawing himself up against the weight of everything she hadn't said. “Your Excellence.” The constancy of a clean decision sharp in his voice. “All will be just as you require it when I see you again.”

He watched her launch go out. Purity Cartone sat in the stern, the wave motion of the Horn Harbor rippling through him, as if he were only another medium, another vessel on the water.

 

17

T
HE
Imperial Republic's frigate
Sulane
led the tax convoy east with the trade winds, racing along Aurdwynn's coast.

The twelve transports sailed in a column after
Sulane,
chasing her stern lanterns under aurora skies. High-sailed twins
Juristane
and
Commsweal
ran wary guard abeam.
Welterjoy,
heavy-helmed and formidable, carried astern, ready to raise full sail and ride the westerly trade winds down on any attacker. Around them darted
Scylpetaire,
swift, hungry, a torpedo-bearing sheepdog free to search for trouble and trouble it in turn.

The navy would not give up Falcrest's due.

And what a due. The gems and precious metals aboard these ships—excised, resentfully, from Aurdwynn's dukes, the treasuries of distant Erebog and cattle-rich Ihuake and briny Autr and all the rest—could finance seasons of open war.

Baru Cormorant was at last, however briefly, on a ship to Falcrest.

She took dinner with Rear Admiral Ormsment aboard
Sulane
on their first night out of port, and found it, at least at first, oddly pleasant. Ormsment was an urbane Falcresti woman with a limitless and apparently genuine curiosity about Taranoke. “What concerns me the most,” she said (the topic of the new name had come up, that ugly word
Sousward
), “is just this—that in making your culture ours we have overlooked some strength, some primal vitality that might have bettered us. What use a republic of nations if we make them all the same?”

“It's practically incestuous,” Baru agreed, taken in, for a moment, by the notion. Perhaps she would find this sentiment popular in Falcrest. Perhaps the Parliament would realize that Taranoke could offer more to the Masquerade on its own terms, as a partner rather than a conquest—

But she wasn't going to Falcrest for a long time. And Ormsment, for all her charm and authority, seemed more fixated on
primal vitality
and treating Baru like a wayward daughter than answering her questions about astronomy.

And in any case, it proved impossible to relax with Purity Cartone smiling behind her.

*   *   *

T
HE
first pirates struck too early.

Baru had taken a bunk on the lead transport,
Mannerslate
. Instead of an office (what had she expected?) they gave her a hammock down among the stinking swearing marines who guarded the cargo. The papers she'd brought as a pretense of business proved impossible to keep out of the damp, and although she could have let them rot, years of school habit brought her up to the deck to try to dry them in the sun. Frigate birds taunted her.

Two days from the mouth of the Inirein, two days before the arranged time, she woke in the night to bells. Fought her way up onto deck through swarming marines and shouting crew to see:

Distant fireworks. The arc of rocket flares falling into the sea. Sharp sunrise flash as
Scylpetaire,
in the middle distance, fired two more. Light on the water like a drowned moon.

And a pair of ships pinned in the glare, their lateen sails taut, straining. Oriati-pattern dromon galleys. Bannerless.

Two raiders closing from astern, riding the weather gage.

Maybe they'd thought to slip into the formation and take one of the transports in silence. More likely they'd sighted one of the transports and one of the escorts, and—thinking that the tax ships would sail one by one, as insurance against a devastating early storm—they'd assumed the escort was out of position, and made an attempt.

Scylpetaire
had caught them.

Fireworks popped above
Scylpetaire,
then
Sulane,
red, blue, white white white: signals passed to the flagship, orders relayed on to the rest. Baru watched in anxious fascination while
Mannerslate
's captain brayed for calm and a steady course.

The navy frigates made dark avian forms in the night,
Scylpetaire
shadowing the raiders as they turned off, cutting sails to go against the wind. Day-bright for an instant as she launched volleys of flares to keep the raiders in sight.

And then
Welterjoy
's sails caught the aurora light, running full on the wind, crashing through the wavefronts as she raced to intercept. She sailed dark, trusting
Scylpetaire
's flares and
Sulane
's signals to guide her in. Baru, engrossed and exhilarated, lost in the mechanics of wind and chase, pointed and called to the crew. They shouted to each other in the rigging, excited. Only the marines kept their silence.

Light kindled at
Welterjoy
's prow. Two white rockets leapt forward like exocet fish. The wind grasped them and smashed them into the water astern of the fleeing raiders.

“They'll have the deflection now, Your Excellence,” Purity Cartone murmured. Baru leapt in surprise.

Welterjoy
fired again: eight rockets at a more confident angle. One of the fat steel tubes tangled in the lead raider's rigging and, after an instant of furious incandescent sputtering, popped into a shower of grease fire.

The raider's rigging and deck began to burn. Whatever the crew tried as an answer only spread the inferno. The mainsails and the masts burst into sheets of fire. Baru watched, not horrified, thrilled on some fundamental level to witness at last the Navy Burn, the Masquerade's chemical edge. The wind carried the smell: acrid, ferociously artificial, a cremation of linen and hemp and flesh.

When
Welterjoy
had finished with the other raider (the fire burned even when wet, spread across the water, a less gentle aurora) a string of fireworks went up from
Sulane
. “No aid to survivors,” Purity Cartone read, eyes gleaming with reflected starburst. “Resume formation. Convoy proceeds.”

They couldn't have been Duke Unuxekome's ships. Not two days early. Not in such paltry strength.

But it didn't matter, did it? Unuxekome's flotilla would never take the tax ships, not with a two-to-one advantage, not four-to-one. The navy couldn't be beaten on the open sea.

It would be up to Baru to win the battle. And to do it with Purity Cartone fastened to her flank.

*   *   *

B
ARU
called Rear Admiral Ormsment aboard
Mannerslate
before Admiral Ormsment could invite her to
Sulane
. For this to work, Baru would need to command—not only in title but in practice. Ormsment had seen her as a Taranoki, a daughter, a troubled careerist fighting for vindication against a hostile authority: all appealing to a flag officer who'd come up in the naval culture of women officers tutoring their young protégés.

But Baru didn't need Ormsment's maternal advice. Baru needed Ormsment to pull her escort from the tax ships. Baru needed to be one of the three most powerful technocrats in Aurdwynn, not a troubled Taranoki daughter.

Mannerslate
's captain offered her cabin for their meeting. Baru took the map room instead. “Stand here,” she ordered Purity Cartone. “Taller. Can you look more serious? Good.”

He obeyed, clearly pleased. Cattlson
must
have ordered him to dog Baru, to prevent any last gambits on her part. But he still wanted to serve her, too. His conditioning demanded that he make himself as useful as possible to agents of the Imperial Republic.

Baru found the maps she needed and pinned them to the plotting table.

Ormsment arrived with her retinue, sooty and harried. Her brow furrowed for a moment when she saw Cartone, posed half in shadow, the lamplight illuminating his jaw. “Your Excellence.”

“Rear Admiral.” Baru touched her brow. She'd dressed in her coat, her chained purse, her white gloves, even the half-mask. “Your crews performed commendably last night. My report to Parliament will make specific note.”

“Hardly worth a note.” Ormsment chuckled softly, stripping her own heavy canvas gloves. Her aides murmured to each other, barely attentive. “Last night's visitors were opportunists, Your Excellence, trying to seize a few scraps before the real feast. Just harbingers.”

“As I'd feared.” She snapped her fingers, calling for attention, and leaned forward across the plotting table. She could guess the path of Purity Cartone's gaze by the way the aides in the back row stiffened. “What news from
Scylpetaire
's scouting? Have we sighted the main enemy force?”

Ormsment cocked a brow in slow, understated compliment. “You expect pirates to travel in force?”

“I certainly expect Oriati Syndicate Eyota privateers under false flag, forced north by our new strength around Sousward, dedicated to covert interference in the Republic's trade, to travel in force.” Baru touched the map, stroking the coastline, the dotted fan of the Inirein's plume. “They're sailing up our wake, I'm sure, and in some strength—at least fifteen ships. We can't turn back for Treatymont without fighting through them, and they'd have the weather gage on us if we tried. A significant disadvantage in naval combat, correct?”

Ormsment nodded and drew breath to speak. Baru talked over her.

“We can't outrace them without abandoning our transports. Similarly, if we wait for them to attack, your frigates will lose the advantage of speed and agility. The tax ships are shackles you can't afford in a fight.”

The Rear Admiral crossed her arms, mouth curled in amusement. “They say seamanship runs in the Taranoki bloodline.”

“I am the Imperial Accountant,” Baru snapped, giving a little rein to real anger. Purity Cartone made some small motion behind her that lifted Ormsment's chin. “Blood or no, I know how to keep my taxes safe. Here are my orders, Rear Admiral: detach your frigates from their escort. Engage and destroy the force trailing us.”