The Traitor Baru Cormorant (35 page)

She touched the coastal farmland directly to the west of Heingyl's duchy. “Radaszic is dead. We needed him, his horses, the food he could have offered us. But he leapt too early.” She slid her hand to the northwest corner of the map, imagining the miles racing beneath her, the land fracturing as it rose toward the Wintercrests. “Duchess Erebog, the Crone in Clay. Lyxaxu's neighbor to the west. With her alliance we'd have the whole North, from Erebog in the west to Oathsfire and the River Inirein in the east. If Treatymont keeps her, they'll be able to turn our flank, maybe even send troops into the Wintercrests to envelop us. If she doesn't declare for us before winter, we'll be lost.”

They stared expectantly. “And the rest?” Unuxekome asked. “The five in the Midlands? Nayauru Dam-builder, Autr Brinesalt, and Sahaule the Horsebane? Ihuake of the thousand thousand cattle and Pinjagata Spear-forest? Nayauru can't keep two lovers and expect to be a friend of Cattlson or Falcrest. Ihuake's too proud to accept anyone's rule. Surely they'll come over.”

“The Traitor's Qualm,” Baru and Tain Hu said together. They made apologetic looks at each other, began to speak again, and—Tain Hu shrugging—finally Baru continued. “Just as Xate Olake thought. Until we prove we have a real chance, they'll hold back and pretend loyalty.”

“What if they don't?” Lyxaxu cocked his head in curious challenge. “Nayauru's ambitious. Defiant. She wants a throne. She might take the chance for her own gambit.”

“I'm confident she won't.” Lyxaxu's intellect was useful, dangerously sharp, but sometimes it led him into useless abstraction. “Nayauru's every bit as bound by finance and logistics as the rest of us.”

“Her bloodline is rich, her consorts strong—”

“Her bloodline means nothing. She doesn't have the coin for war.” Baru held Lyxaxu's eyes, facing down thirty-five years of study and all the weight that carried, until he blinked. “We have time to court Nayauru and the rest. The Midlands dukes will wait out the winter before they move.”

“Send Oathsfire,” Unuxekome said.

“What?” said Baru, as Oathsfire huffed, as Tain Hu grinned and chuckled.

Unuxekome shrugged and put his hands behind his head. His shoulders bunched impressively (Oathsfire glared). “We need Nayauru. We lose the war in the spring if we don't win the Midlands to our side, and Nayauru is half of that alliance. So send her what she treasures. Another noble father for another heir.”

Oathsfire bristled. “I am not a brood stallion.”

“She's quite lovely,” Tain Hu offered. “Exactly your type. Your new type, I mean.” Unuxekome made a little choked sound of mirth.

“Perhaps I'm not the best choice. Whoever we send will have to distract her from Autr and Sahaule. Someone with a laborer's build.” Oathsfire adjusted his gloves. “A sailor might do. If we can find one with a working cock.”

Unuxekome shrugged with his upraised elbows, as if to offer the shape of his arms in answer to the jab. He'd never married. Baru supposed that was Oathsfire's target. “Whatever the Fairer Hand prefers.”

Save her from noble men and their games of position. “What I
prefer
is that we leave the Midlands be until spring. Winter is our chance to make our case to them.”

“We need a bold victory, then,” Unuxekome said. “A raid. Before the autumn storms lock my fleet in harbor.”

“No. We need to withdraw.” Baru set her palm on the map, fingers aimed north. “The best thing we can do is consolidate our hold and wait out the winter. It's the only way out.”

Unuxekome crooked a brow. “Persuade me.”

Baru stabbed Treatymont with her forefinger. “The Masquerade's control is economic. I know—I enforced it. Their garrisons are small, their outposts undermanned compared to fortresses like Ihuake's Pen. Falcrest has never trusted its army, because they know that republics are the natural prey of a professional military. But they are patient, thorough, methodical. They've never relied on the sword to conquer.

“They'll draw their strength in to Treatymont, abandoning the Midlands, securing the coastal plains and the harvest. Bandits will take the roads they abandon. Poverty will fester in the absence of their banks. They'll leave Aurdwynn to rot through the winter, to feel the cold of life without the Masquerade, while they keep the harvest for themselves. Come spring, when the marines land from Falcrest, when the trade winds are ready for easy shipping again, they'll come north in campaign. Marching up through Duchy Nayauru into Duchy Erebog, then into our western flank, through Lyxaxu and Vultjag to Oathsfire. Unuxekome, you will be the target of a second thrust.” She sketched a spear thrown inland from the sea. “A naval assault on Welthony, then a push up the Inirein to meet the other column at Oathsfire's keep. And thus we will be erased.”

Lyxaxu measured her. “It would be an error of rigor if I didn't ask: when did you become a general?”

Blessed Lyxaxu, asking the right questions. “I'm not. I know money, logistics, shipping, and infrastructure. And those are the weapons they'll use to defeat you.”

They were all watching her now, silent, respectful, and it gave her the same thrill she had felt auditing the Fiat Bank, speaking to Purity Cartone, hearing the adulation of the crowd—the shock of power.

“Until spring,” she told them, “most of the Duchies in Aurdwynn will, for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, be left to their own governance. Pulled between the rebellion in the north and the Masquerade to the south. We'll have a few cold, desperate months to court them. And we have one advantage that Falcrest and Treatymont never foresaw: we are
rich
. We can keep our troops fed and armed through the winter. We can step in wherever the Masquerade has left them to crumble. Hold the roads open. Buy out the banks. And if the Masquerade tries to stop us—you are Northmen, are you not? If they cross the Midlands and come up into the vales and the woods, into the land we know like our fathers' hands, struggling through the snows, we kill them.”

Tain Hu set her fists on the table. “Is this how you think we should fight, Baru Fisher? With coin and open roads?”

“No war has ever been won by slaughtering the enemy wholesale.” Baru found skepticism in Unuxekome's eyes, on Oathsfire's face. Only Lyxaxu looked thoughtful. “Come, Your Graces. Surely you have read it in the
Dictates
—war is a contest of wills. The will of the people breaks when war makes them too miserable to do anything but acquiesce. We can turn that will to us.”

“It may work,” Tain Hu said, slowly, thoughtfully. “What we need in spring are healthy cavalry and sturdy phalanxes. Cavalry rules the coastal plain, from Unane Naiu to Sieroch. If we can find enough forage during the winter, if we can keep our own armies from being pinned down or bled dry, if we can convince the Midlands to declare for us … in the spring we can ride in force.”

“They could come at us in winter across the Inirein, from Falcrest's western reaches.” Oathsfire looked to Lyxaxu, as he always seemed to. “One march could take you, I, and Vultjag at once.”

“Not once we destroy the bridges. The river may freeze enough for a northerly crossing, but they'll never march an army north from Falcrest to the Inirein without losing most of it to the snow.” Lyxaxu offered Baru an open palm, upraised. “I'm convinced. This will be our strategy.”

“Why not one strike before the winter?” Unuxekome pressed. “One raid on Treatymont harbor. I could take
Devenynyr
and gather my fleet.”

Tain Hu shook her head. “The other side of the Qualm. If we seem too strong too soon, we'll force the undecided dukes into a choice. And they will choose the surer bet.”

“There's one other matter,” Baru said, speaking, at last, the guilt that had been gnawing her. “A weakness I want addressed. I'll need a ship and a way to pass a secret message to Xate Yawa.”

They waited in silence.

“There's a man in Treatymont who needs to be smuggled out. One I couldn't move without betraying my real allegiance.”

“No,” Tain Hu snapped. “You'll risk Xate Yawa's cover if you pull him out. You'd court disaster, and for what gain?”

“I want him here.” Baru stared the duchess Vultjag down, wishing, incongruously, that she still had her white mask, the impassive glaze of her station. It had gone down with
Mannerslate
. “He's a liability in Masquerade hands. And he's my responsibility.”

“Saving him would be a worse betrayal than abandoning him,” Tain Hu insisted. But her eyes roamed the other dukes, and following her, Baru saw what Vultjag must already know: Oathsfire and Unuxekome leaned in, jockeying for a chance to offer their help.

Tain Hu raised her eyes to the distant Wintercrests and said no more.

“My secretary, Muire Lo,” Baru told the men. “He's the only one who knows my books as well as I do. Without him, Cattlson will have no way to set his accounts in order, no way to conceal his mismanagement from Parliament. He will call on Bel Latheman, who is clever—but it will not be enough. We can make it worse for them if we find and destroy the books.”

I was here during the rebellions,
he'd said.
I don't want to see Aurdwynn go back to that.

Surely he'd realized what she was about to do when she sailed with the tax ships. Surely he hadn't believed she was actually returning to Falcrest for judgment.

Surely he'd found some way to protect himself, his family—

“Xate Olake arranged for the removal of Su Olonori,” Lyxaxu said. “He could do it again.”

Baru cut him off with an upraised hand, an unwise desperation seething within her, the terrible fear that she had just caged herself. She had forgotten something vital, something that Tain Hu might know, something that Xate Yawa certainly did, because three years ago she had sent a burly Stakhieczi woodsman to watch the new Imperial Accountant, and in a smoky tavern beneath a brothel that woodsman had met Muire Lo and—

And tried to kill him, driven to rage by the knowledge that Muire Lo was an agent of Falcrest, a watcher set to guard the new Imperial Accountant. A trained spy.

What would Xate Yawa think when she learned that Baru had tried to bring Muire Lo into the rebellion? Would she go to the ilykari woman in her temple of air and light and say:
tell me the secret that would destroy Baru Fisher?

Tain Hu's eyes had left the Wintercrests. Tain Hu's eyes dwelled on her.

It would be safest, Baru realized, to order Muire Lo's death. It would prove her loyalty to the rebellion in the eyes of the twin Xates.

The tests would never end.

“I cannot betray him,” she said, talking at Lyxaxu, speaking to Tain Hu. “I cannot abandon him, not when I have made him seem so complicit. Permit me this one loyalty.”

“A dangerous loyalty,” Tain Hu murmured. And Baru knew that she knew, that Xate Yawa had told her about the woodsman, about Baru and Aminata in the tavern, about Muire Lo's letters to Falcrest.

Had she ever really assured herself of Muire Lo's loyalty? He'd kept the book with its incriminating notes, rather than sending it to Falcrest—but couldn't Cairdine Farrier have made a copy and left the original with him—couldn't the Masquerade in all its love of subtlety and deception arranged Muire Lo's vulnerability and need for a moment such as this? A way to send him into the heart of the rebellion?

No. She had known him. She had
known
him.

“Send word to Xate Olake,” Baru told the council, her voice hard, insistent. “Tell him I want Muire Lo alive.”

Lyxaxu watched her blankly, impenetrably; but Oathsfire and Unuxekome looked at each other, a brief silent challenge, a contest.

*   *   *

J
URISPOTENCE
Xate Yawa ordered a bulletin posted on every door in Aurdwynn and read to the illiterate in every market and square:

We will execute all those who provide succor to the Imperial Accountant Baru Cormorant.

We will sterilize their families and the families of their husbands and wives. We will seize their property and award it to the loyal.

Inaction is succor. Negligence is succor.

Collaboration is death.

Give us Baru Fisher.

It was the most powerful endorsement she could have offered. Xate Yawa, sister of the forgotten Duke Lachta, the Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, killer of ilykari, arbiter of marriages, had devoted her life to building her own cult of hatred.

Now it was time to leverage that investment.

And she had created one other precious resource for the rebellion. Her years of methodical, ferocious persecution had forced the ilykari priests and their devotees to scatter and adapt, to don subtle camouflage and speak in secret new tongues, to send warnings that could outpace the Masquerade's own sealed directives. From the oil-drenched temples in Treatymont the ilykari sent the word out through the quietly faithful, to every vale and peak, every granary and olive field and trapper's post:
justice comes from a fairer hand.

Aurdwynn had so many divisions. Consider these two souls, examples Baru plucked from tax record and Incrastic report—

An Iolynic-speaking Stakhi woodsman, gone to pray to ykari Devena for his wife's love at a secret henge in high cold duchy Lyxaxu, where the Student-Berserkers grew their strains of mason leaf and studied philosophies of fearless death.

And a Maia olive farmer who worked in Duchy Sahaule and sang the Urun of her warlord ancestors, sang of the duchess Nayauru and her many proud lovers, of her sons and daughters who would one day rule. Sang, lately, of the cruel Duchess Ihuake, whose jealousy was thick as pus.

All they shared was this:

The sullen memory of a time more than twenty years ago when the gate to Treatymont had read A
URDWYNN CANNOT BE RULED
, and the understanding that one could go to the Fiat Bank and get a loan in gold from someone named Baru Cormorant, who, very recently, had won a duel with that dry tit Cattlson. (These things and, of course, a hatred of Xate Yawa.)