The Traitor Baru Cormorant (46 page)

Tain Hu's voice, tight with alarm: “What happened here?”

The agony of the dead said they'd been killed by gas, the kind of war-poison whispered of in stories about Falcrest's Metademe. But how would a Stakhi woodsman arm himself with a weapon so—

A Stakhi man?
Could
it be?

No. Surely not.

The man loped away from the council house with eerie smooth steps. Baru shivered in some kind of corporeal recognition. It was not who she'd thought, not at all.

But—

He unwrapped the rag from his face (it came away sticky, rank with chemicals) and took a slow breath. Lifted pale features, skin reddened by a terrible acid burn, toward the fading sun.

Tiny precise muscles moved in his neck.

He looked to Baru.

“The Fairer Hand,” he said in Stakhi, and then, in heavily accented Aphalone, a perfect counterfeit: “The work is done. Tell Xate Olake I did not fail him.”

He coughed wetly and touched his chest, where the crossbow bolt had wounded him and sent him into the river.

“Who is this?” Tain Hu asked. It had grown dark enough to see the fires that ringed Haraerod behind her, towers of dirty light to the west and southwest, where Nayauru and her allies had camped.

Baru stared in paralyzed silence at the Clarified remora, at Purity Cartone.

*   *   *

T
HE
ilykari killed Nayauru's allies with their own horses.

Disguised as maidservants and laborers from Haraerod, the ilykari passed unchallenged through the Nayauru bloc's camp and the forests beyond. A phantom army buried in the social context, marking sentries, passing messages in the careful steganography of the persecuted.

At their direction Oathsfire's siege engineers moved into the woods to the southwest and the town to the northeast. Began to set firebreaks with quicklime, naphtha, and oils.

Smoke would start the bloodbath. Poison would seal it.

Nayauru's forces had brought warhorses: a show of strength, and a weapon of deterrence, mighty in battle. They needed to be fed.

While the dukes sat in council, the ilykari poisoned the warhorses' feed.

Just before sundown, the Sea Groom signaled and the word went out. Engineers set torch to oil.

When the fires began, when the wet forest smoke and furious heat of the burning Haraerod outskirts rolled down on Nayauru's camp, the sick frightened warhorses broke discipline and bolted, first in clusters, then a stampede, trampling and whinnying, shitting in diarrhetic clots. Chaos erupted, a roaring stinking mess of collapsing tents.

Autr Brinesalt heard the uproar and knew why his gut had been knotted in dread all day. Sahaule Horsebane heard the alarm and, before any other thought, wished that he had taken a moment more to hold Nayauru and whisper his love.

From the forests, from the Haraerod rooftops, Duke Oathsfire's ten companies of elite longbowmen opened fire.

Nayauru's dukes had not been complacent. Duke Autr's own engineers and scouts, able and alert, had spent two days proofing their camp against fire. Sahaule boasted men of extraordinary discipline. But their sentries had been deployed too widely, hunting for the Coyote in the woods. Their best spies had gone to the rebel camps or into Ihuake's court to listen for treachery, and so missed the ilykari entirely.

Nayauru had counseled her consorts and advisors to expect betrayal.

They had looked for the signs. Drilled the troops. Arranged their pickets. Against the cunning of the ilykari, who had sent Falcrest's riches to the bottom of Welthony harbor, their vigilance failed them.

Sahaule's loyalty cost him his life. He gathered his guard and rode for the Hill House, hoping to save Duchess Nayauru. Oathsfire's bowmen spotted his column and devastated it. Sahaule crawled out from under his dead horse and made it nearly half a mile on foot, staggering forward, cursing the name he bore and the vengeance it had earned him, before a certain vengeful Ihuake levy found him.

What happened between them was the end of a different story.

Mighty Duke Autr went out into the chaos to rally his camp. An ilykari slipped close to strike at him, met the Salt Duke's spymaster, and lost the duel of blade and poison. Autr used drums and trumpets to pass the word—
march northwest, rally on the Belt Road
.

He might have rallied a retreat. He might have calmed the chaos.

But Lyxaxu's howling Student-Berserkers entered his camp and began to rope themselves in the entrails of disemboweled men and horses. Somewhere in the whirlwind, Autr's spymaster bled to death from her knife wounds and a second ilykari, still shadowing the Salt Duke, avenged her mother.

Autr Brinesalt died calling out to his orphaned son.

Trapped between two fires, choking on smoke, leaderless and dismounted, the Western Midlands forces tried to flee on foot, and found themselves impaled on one last treason.

Haraerod's own guard phalanxes, citizen-soldiers bought by coin, by sidelong words from the duchess Ihuake, and most of all by the belief that they could fight for the only ruler who had helped them through poverty and winter, filled the gaps between the firebreaks. Nayauru's exhausted, asphyxiating, dismounted soldiers faced a wall of more than a thousand twelve-foot spears crying,
A fairer hand! A fairer hand!

The survivors of the massacre tried to turn back.

But the panicked stampede of men and horses behind them, still acting on the order to march for the Belt Road, pressed them forward.

Oathsfire's bowmen, firing down into the crowd of targets, ran themselves out of arrows.

The phalanx did not run out of spears.

By morning a quarter of Haraerod had burnt to the ground. The Fairer Hand's men gave the townsfolk stern warning—the mountains of human and animal corpses heaped on the killing grounds would have to be burnt, and all drinking water boiled for weeks to come.

Those who had lost a family member in the cataclysm would be paid one gold coin per head, and three coins for a ruined home.

*   *   *

B
ARU
would not go near Purity Cartone until he'd been manacled and bound, his wrists and ankles tied to heavy stones, his clothes torn from him and searched for knives or darts or reagents that would mix into killing gas.

Tain Hu protested fiercely. “Why would you do this? This woodsman saved your life, as he saved Xate Olake before you. He killed for you. What has he done to deserve this?”

Baru stood in silence, afraid to move or think. Petrified by the Clarified, by the physical danger of his presence, by the greater menace of all the things he was a talisman of. Had he dyed his hair so brilliant red to carry a message? To say—
remember
—?

At last, after cold consideration, she spoke. “He is an instrument of Falcrest, a man bred and conditioned to serve as a spy and assassin. He could be here on Cattlson's orders.”

“Why would Cattlson order the death of Nayauru? Why would Cattlson send this man to
save
Xate Olake?”

“Do you remember when you took me to see the riot? What you told me then?”

They have a clever technique
. A favorite strategem of Xate Yawa, of the Masquerade, of the ruling power behind the Faceless Throne.

Tain Hu touched her lips with two splayed fingers. “A honeypot. You fear this man was sent to buy our trust, so he could betray us at a key moment.”

“Just so.” Just so, just so. But why Cartone, a man known to Baru, to Duke Unuxekome? Why not another Clarified entirely? Were they in such short supply?

One of the guardsmen beckoned. The prisoner was ready.

“Permit no visitors,” Baru told Tain Hu. She nodded. Of late that simple gesture of respect made Baru uneasy with warmth.

Baru went down the steps into the yellow lamplit cellar where they had cast Purity Cartone.

The Clarified looked up at her, face red with acid burn, and began to cry.

“Command me,” he begged. His face blinked from emotion to emotion in eerie flashes—childish grief, a lover's joy, thoughtful concern, a string of perfect counterfeits, like the semaphore flags of a burning ship:
help, help, help
. Through it all he wept clear silent tears. “Make use of me, Your Excellence. Give me use.”

She looked at him and saw wreckage. Not a person in distress, but a broken machine.

Perhaps she chose to see this. It was easier than the alternative.

“Suspire,” she said, hoping the command word still worked. “Tell me your mission here.”

“I have no mission.” He sat among his limp bindings, hollow. “The Jurispotence punished me for failing to stop you at Welthony. She castrated me, to end my line, and told me that I had been judged a failure. Clarified no more. Cast out.” He rocked gently, an idle movement and yet still somehow wrong, wounded, all his smooth calibrated motions skewed and out of tune. “I could no longer find orders from the Jurispotence or the Governor.”

Pity seized Baru. This man had been made to serve the Imperial Republic, designed and conditioned even before his birth. And what had they done to him? Acid wash, and worse—

They had cast him out, and in doing so, they had broken off all their hooks in him. They had given him to Baru.

Could Xate Yawa have done it by intent? Sent him to Baru as an instrument?

“You came to me for orders,” she said. “I am the Imperial Accountant, the highest authority left in your reach. You used Xate Olake to find me.”

“I escaped the Jurispotence once she renounced her authority over me. I sought you out.” He made a perfect face of desperation, a blank skull trying to sign emotion with mastercraft masks. “You still serve the Imperial Republic, and I am still permitted to serve you. By transitivity I may still fulfill my purpose.”

That old sick joy, her first and favorite drug. Control. “I do serve Falcrest. Fear not: you will serve me. Tell me why you killed the duchess Nayauru.”

A simpleton's smile—relief, and pure pleasure. At last he could obey again. “Your spymaster ordered it.”

Xate Olake overstepping his place. But it had been a wise and ruthless stroke, the class of gambit that had earned him and his sister a duchy and a Jurispotence. “Tell me everything you know about the Masquerade's strategy for the summer.”

“Cattlson seeks one decisive battle at the Inirein. He hopes to secure his authority in Falcrest's eyes by restoring order to Aurdwynn before the next tax season. He has an abundance of food, but also of disease, and no money left to sustain his administration. Principal Factor Bel Latheman, to whom he trusted his finances, has been distracted from his duties by his new marriage to Heingyl Ri, who manipulates him against Cattlson.”

Xate Olake's intelligence confirmed. Good. It would have to be verified again, in case Xate Yawa had arranged all this, but there were scouts for that. “What did Nayauru want? Was she there to kill me?”

“I don't know.”

“Who ordered the death of Muire Lo?”

“I don't know.” Tears filled Purity Cartone's open honest eyes. “I'm sorry.”

Hush, she could say, hush, it's all right. But Cartone the mechanism wouldn't care. His only comfort was subservience. They had made him that way.

Instruments of the Masquerade deserved no compassion.

She stepped closer, to speak softly. “Tell me everything you know about Xate Yawa's true loyalties.”

“The Jurispotence?” Purity Cartone recoiled in his bonds, stones shifting against the floorboards. He sat for a moment, gaping, as if astonished by something he'd discovered.

“She has no authority over you,” Baru assured him, soft, coaxing. “I am Falcrest's truest servant in Aurdwynn.”

“Xate Yawa serves the future of Aurdwynn. She cares only for her ability to control that future, to guarantee a distant peace.” The Clarified sighed with inner release. “Through the Priestess in the Lamplight, she thinks she controls the very ilykari she persecutes. Spends them like coin to buy Cattlson's trust. But she is deceived. The priestess does not serve her. The paramount masters observe Xate Yawa through their agents, and consider her promising. She may be chosen for exaltation.”

“What?” Forgetting caution, Baru stepped closer, kneeling. “Again!
Tell me that again!
”

“The paramount masters. The mind behind the Masquerade. A closed circle, each member balanced against another. Chosen by invitation and test to dictate the Imperial Republic's grand strategies of policy and heredity.” Bliss in his voice. How
forbidden
this act of service must once have been—

“What agents among the ilykari?” Baru set her palms on the floorboards and leaned in to hiss. “Who? Who is the Priestess in the Lamplight?
Who among the ilykari serves Falcrest?
”

Purity Cartone smiled brilliantly, conditioned triggers clattering deep within him, drumming out rewards. “The priestess of Himu in Treatymont. The one whose temple hides above a lamp shop.”

The secret-keeper. The ilykari who had written in old Iolynic all the things that could destroy the rebels.

The woman to whom Baru had confessed her second-gravest sin.

The woman who had recorded it for all eternity on palimpsest.

“Purity Cartone.” Her voice a serpent's hiss: later she would remember it with a thrill of unease and triumph. “I have a task for you.”

*   *   *

T
AIN
Hu and Xate Olake stood with Baru and watched the Stakhi woodsman ride south, his roan palfrey sure-footed, his pace swift.

“Shame,” Xate Olake said. “I rather liked him. An honest fellow, I thought.” He wrinkled his brow at Tain Hu. “A
Clarified,
you say? I suppose it could be so. He said Xate Yawa had sent him.…”

“I found a use for him,” Baru said. “A useful task, at a safe distance.”

Hoofbeats pounded behind them—Duke Unuxekome and his honor guard. The Sea Groom dismounted in an easy leap, athletic and sure. “I ride for Welthony, to rally the fleet and guard the Inirein's mouth.” He opened his palm to Baru. “Will the Fairer Hand need my ships?”