The Traitor Baru Cormorant (54 page)

Dead horses everywhere. Two shapes moving on foot. A red mask—a wolfskin cloak. Cattlson, sword at the ox guard, leaping forward to strike. Tain Hu bare-armed and whirling, slipping on blood and intestines, clawing for room.

The smoke closed again.

“Your Grace,” Baru said, her voice papery. “We win when I am satisfied we've won.”

Suggestions of action, between drifts of wet smoke—a spearcast, a mighty overhead blow, a brilliant flash of light as two blades threw sparks.

A kneeling execution.

She kept her eye bolted to the glass, as if she could make it a part of her.

A white charger burst from the smoke. Rider a cloaked figure, draped in white. Wolfskin, Baru realized. The cloak was wolfskin.

Cattlson. On Tain Hu's mount.

The rider raised eyes toward the spyglass. Lifted mailed fists.

Showed Baru the banner those fists trailed, the great mask and antlers, torn from its mounts, cut free. Not wolfskin at all.

Cattlson's standard, in Tain Hu's hands.

The fighters on the line saw it. Screamed in exultation, a thousand throats, ten thousand.
Vultjag! Vultjag!

At Baru's side, Xate Olake choked: “I wish she had been my daughter instead.” And he began to weep with joy.

*   *   *

T
HE
army of Treatymont broke. Surviving cavalry disengaged from the flower-plains and pounded away southwest. The Masquerade regulars beat a bloody smoke-shrouded retreat. Panicked levies bolted alongside the fire-spooked deer, or surrendered, or burrowed into bear caves and gullies to hide and weep.

Give no pursuit,
the order came.
Re-form. Make camp.

The marines on the Inirein could be on them in a day. There were wounds to treat, shields to mend, dead to mourn. Traitorous Lyxaxu's men had to be disarmed and cast out.

But no discipline, no storm, no menace could keep the Wolf from celebrating its victory. Two decades groveling under the eyes of the Mask, breathing the acid fumes of Incrastic law, breeding to the dictates of the Jurispotence.

At an end.

Mansion Hussacht jagata laughed and drank with Ihuake riders, though laughter and beer were their only common tongues. Rival families out of Oathsfire and Vultjag reconciled decade-old grudges in tearful clinches. Invocations to the ykari and old illegal songs rang off the Henge Hill.

Wandering the ruin of the battlefield, a lonely pair of Pinjagata infantry, worried for their distant starving families, found the Masquerade's abandoned stores of signal fireworks. “I'll sell them,” the first man told his friend, but she, frowning, replied that on any other night they could be mercantile—but tonight the fireworks would be free.

A great mass of Wolf fighters built a bonfire of wet wood, linseed oil, and masked corpses. Some protested that it would stink, but lo, there was corpse-lore to manage that, and it would be the stink of
victory
. Some even knew that the fluid of the spine and brain could be burned as sweet musky incense.

At sunset they lit the pyre, and as it drew in scattered companies it became the center of things, the axis around which their world, in brief defiance of astronomy and the dicta of Charitable Service schools, turned. Soldiers stood to tell their stories, to dance and drum, drafting the first layer of the Sieroch legend.

In a way, that legend was the real prize of the battle: a spark of defiance, a little gem of freedom reddened in winter and cut to shine on the Sieroch plain. Everyone here would carry the understanding home, that secret hard-won knowledge—that if they stood united together beneath a rebel queen they might defeat the Masquerade in all its fury.

By word and song they would tend that legend all across Aurdwynn, and it would grow strong, passed to friends and to their children. They would again remember:
Aurdwynn cannot be ruled
.

*   *   *

T
HE
warleaders gathered on the Henge Hill at sundown. Duke Oathsfire, bereft, looked on with hollow joyless eyes, and the others left an empty space beside him where his friend would have stood. “How?” he had asked, pleading. “
Why?
He was so wise. He had no reason.…”

But in spite of all his grief, in spite of Pinjagata's rasping lung-burnt coughs, they stood in circled council heady with the same joy that drummed the Sieroch around them. Cattlson and Heingyl were dead. Falcrest was very far away. Treatymont would fall. The common people of Aurdwynn rose in love of Baru Fisher and her gifts of coin and grain, her loping lean Coyote, her triumphant red-jawed Wolf.

Baru stood at the highest part of the circle, balanced on the tumbled stone of the ancient henge, sweat-soaked, exhausted, her boots worn, her gloves frayed. All eyes on her, but for Vultjag, looking out across the battle plain, her broadcloth cloak wrapped at shoulder and hip against the cold.

“The Fairer Hand will be acclaimed queen,” Xate Olake said. His beard had suffered terribly in the battle and now he looked a little motley. “Can there be any question?”

“My landlords spend her coin,” Ihuake said. She had given up her riding gear for ducal finery and rich rings, not out of any practical need, perhaps as a silent scream of joy. “I cannot deny the power of
that
claim. And I think she will rule well.”

“Aye,” Pinjagata rasped. “My people sing her name. She could give us peace.” At that thought he smiled, and for a moment his breath seemed easier.

“Who then will be king? There must be a dynasty to unite Aurdwynn.” Xate Olake opened his hands and turned to her. “I think it best to look beyond our borders. Will it be the Stakhi king? Or some Oriati man, whatever royalty they maintain?”

Ihuake lifted her chin, thinking, certainly, of her son. Pinjagata covered a long, dry cough. The question roused not a flicker of interest in Oathsfire's hollow, distant eyes.

Baru stood above them all on the toppled henge stone, like a premonition of a throne.

Who, then, will be king?

She could have lasted a little longer. Seen it through to the end, and saved herself. But today was for defeats, for triumphs, for great efforts to come to victory or ruin, and she did not have the strength.

Baru let the truth fall.

“I called on one sword,” she said. “When offered the quiver, I always chose the same arrow. I put the harshest weight on a single back. And she has carried us here. She has raised us up. She is worth a legion to me.”

She knelt on the fallen henge stone. Lowered her hand in offering.

Tain Hu, eyes afire in the twilight, reached up and took her wrist. Drew herself up onto the stone to stand at Baru's side. The wind caught her cloak and whipped it once, a soft utterance, before she drew it still—a sharp, sure motion, like a pull on the reins.

They stood together, Baru breathless, giddy, the hero of Sieroch a warmth against her side, a dry murmur in her ear:

“I had dared to hope.”

Silence in the circle.

“What does this mean?” Oathsfire asked.

“It means,” Xate Olake said, “that we know why she rebelled.”

Pinjagata squinted. “I don't see the dynasty. Less I've made a mistake.” His voice roughened with a kind of wry affection. “You never
did
tell me if you were a man.…”

“We should go,” Oathsfire uttered, voice thick. “She has chosen. Leave them to their council.”

Unspoken, there:
and leave us to ours.

“She is our queen,” Xate Olake insisted. “There are still ways for her to bear. This is no disaster.”

“Quiet, Lachta,” Ihuake said. There was a thickness in her voice, though it was not anger. It might be gladness, even, for she smiled. “Our questions will wait for tomorrow. For now, let them be.”

The dukes turned away, leaving Dziransi standing, befuddled, until Pinjagata took his wrist and drew him off down the hill. He looked back at Baru in enormous confusion. Behind him she heard Ihuake laugh in unfettered delight.

Now they stood alone on the high hill and the sea wind cried between the ancient henge stones in the dying light.

“
Imuira,
” Tain Hu whispered, an Urun word, a breath under the rising wind. Her voice trembled with things left long unsaid.
“Kuye lam.”

Those words Baru knew. They were the same in Urunoki, on her childhood home.

She touched Hu's shoulders, her high cheekbones, hesitant, conditioned, trembling against more than a decade of fear and repression and rigid self-control. Her skin felt transparent, burned raw. A sudden gust made her shiver.

Tain Hu's eyes were wide and close and utterly aware. She had been chewing anise and smyrnium. Baru could smell it, clean, sharp.

Fuck them, Baru thought. Fuck them. They can all burn. I will destroy myself if I choose.

On this one day I will not deny what I am.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I've never done this before.”

“Such an ascetic.” Tain Hu chuckled warmly, and in that warmth Baru heard the life she had never had, would never reach. “Fear not. I am practiced.”

“So many conquests,” Baru said, trying to tease. But Tain Hu did not let her finish the sentence.

 

30

S
HE
stood on the peak of Taranoke with mother Pinion at her side. The island of her childhood—plots of sugarcane and black coffee, black beaches. Sea the color of deep sky lapping at the coral. The smell of iron salt and cooked pineapple. Endless stars.

Taranoke had its own politics, its own trade, its diseases and dismays. But to a child it had seemed perfect and solitary and whole.

Empire came on tempest wind.

The harbor choked with red sails. The forests fell and rose again, incarnated in tarred hull, incarcerated in main and mizzenmast. Plague swept the mountain and the plains and they tumbled the mingled dead into the caldera. Children slept in tufa schools, learning to love and marry by a foreign creed, laboring in the shipyards,
socialized federati, class one, no distinctions
.

The masks killed husbands with fire-stoked iron, and the screams were a reminder:
the old ways were not hygienic
.

“How grateful we must be,” her mother said, that childhood voice, that vein of utter unquestioned truth. “To have soap and sanitation. To watch our children survive and grow and learn all the names of sin. How fulfilling our lives must be, now that we labor for a greater purpose. Did you know that we died of tooth abscess, child? It was very nearly the foremost cause of death. How grateful we must be for dentists.”

Baru watched it all and with an accountant's mind made a table of the credits and the debits, a double-entry ledger,
hot iron for the sodomites
against
soap
and
dentists
and
a greater purpose
.

Pinion took off her smiling mother-mask and revealed herself as Cairdine Farrier, the jovial merchant, the portent with an engine in his eyes. “You had a question for me,” he said, as in the distance the waves began to freeze, became steel and porcelain, a web, a road, a sluiceway that ran with blood and molten gold. From Taranoke east to the heart of things. “About the nature and exercise of power.”

Cause and effect. Credit and debit. The world bound together, one system, one constellation. But she could not see the shape of it. She did not have the master book: second cousin Lao carried it away from her on a road of gloved hands.

“We have all the answers in Falcrest,” Cairdine Farrier assured her. “Everything has been cataloged and assigned its rightful place.”

“Even the rebellions,” Baru said. “Even the rebels.”

He lifted to his face a white porcelain mask blank of all expression and she knew his name was Itinerant. “We will extend our control,” he said. “When the work is complete, when our hegemony is total, no one and nothing will act without our consent.
By volition
will be a synonym for
by decree
. The law of the Empire will live within every soul and cell. There will be no more pain or waste. Only harmony.”

“What if Aurdwynn broke free?” She wanted to taunt him but she was full of gears and she could only offer it as a premise, an orphaned shard of logic, a rhetorical device deployed to enable a crushing rejoinder. “What if they could not be ruled?”

The mask looked on her with empty idiot eyes and drool puddled beneath its chin. The Emperor on the Faceless Throne.

“They have only the strength of rebels,” he said, and his voice was a chorus. “Only conviction and ferocity and animal outrage. We have all the might of empire, virtues of coin and persistence and size, sinews of record and law and conscription and industry. Our strengths are of a higher order. We will return. We will buy them out and breed them down and lure them with joy and Aurdwynn, too, will wear the mask.”

Fire smoldered in the Taranoke caldera as its people married flat-nosed foreigners or marched down to the ships to labor and fight abroad.

The mask said: “We always win in the end. We own the future.”

“I knew this,” Baru whispered.

Red rowan-fruit hair curled out from behind the porcelain. “You knew it from the start. In the long run, Aurdwynn
would
be ruled.”

Ashy smoke made her hoarse, made the words falter in a burning throat. “And what pointless waste, those cycles of revolt and reconquest. What blood and labor would be squandered in decades to come. How much more merciful to find a shorter way. A sooner peace.”

“A higher purpose,” the mask said, in one voice now, a mocking harborside voice, the voice of the man called Apparitor. “So you became a special instrument, for an exalted design.”

I will know the secrets of power, she told herself, clinging to that pillar. Knowledge is control. I will turn that power to my own use and I will save my home.