The Traitor Baru Cormorant (47 page)

Baru thought: I wish I could hear you call it
Taranoke
one more time. I wish you wouldn't take this the way you're going to.

“Your ships have the finest admiral they could ask,” she said, smiling. “And your ilykari served me well. Look for my riders weekly, and be wary: when Cattlson marches, you will be his target.”

What she did not say was the thing Unuxekome wanted to hear:
yes, I will need your ships
—
best I go to Welthony, with you.…

Unuxekome's eyes tightened: one moment's disappointment, or hurt. He closed his palm. “May the battle go our way, then.” A touch of aspersion, then, a break in his grace when he spoke the name: “Perhaps Oathsfire's longbowmen will carry the day.”

“Your Grace,” she said, the cold already taking her, the numb calculations that had carried her this far. “Wait.”

He raised his brow in question. A handsome man, certainly, Baru thought; a fine figure, and not unintelligent. She could see no jealous fury in his eyes. No sudden curdle toward resentment.

But now, from Purity Cartone's intelligence, she knew that the ilykari could not be trusted. Unuxekome, above all others, was entangled with the ilykari. He had used his diver-priestesses again and again.

The need to be ruthless would only grow, a rising peak, a steepening precipice tipping toward final cataclysm. She had to
harden
herself. Remove all weakness.

Yes. It had to be done.

Unuxekome had always wanted to be a hero.

“I would be
most
impressed,” she said, coyness in her voice, a suggestion of intimacy that drew Tain Hu's frown, drew from Unuxekome a brief exhalation, “to see the Masquerade's navy rebuked from our shores.”

 

26

O
N
a warm wet morning soon after the slaughter, Baru invited the duchesses Ihuake and Erebog to march up the flanks of Mount Kijune and survey the division of their prize.

In one way this was a kind of escape—she'd breathed enough of Haraerod's corpse smoke. But she, too, wanted to see the prize divided, the yield of her work, the proof of her most appalling and necessary methods. It would give her confidence for the endgame.

She sent Tain Hu to whip the Coyote into its next march, and brought the Stakhi brave man Dziransi as her bodyguard instead. This, too, was a kind of escape. It turned out he couldn't ride. No matter: it gave her an excuse to walk too, sweating, head down, counting and factoring the slow rhythm of her heart.

When the sun burnt away the mist, they looked out to the west from the broken turrets of an ancient Stakhi redoubt and saw the blue-cream reservoirs and new-tilled fields of the Duchy Nayauru sprawled vast and fertile and already aflame. From such a great distance the movement of soldiers was invisible. But the smoke was its own banner.

Erebog tsk'd and beckoned an armsman for a parasol to keep off the sun. “Are those your cavalry? Already so far?”

“My horse. And the Coyote-men.” Ihuake glanced back at Baru. “I told them to burn anything that resisted.”

“Aren't you worried for the safety of your new fields?”

When Ihuake turned her left wrist just so, it rang a bracelet of jade against a band of platinum like a distant bell. “The dead will be good fertilizer.”

Erebog, shadowed, glanced back to Baru too, and her face was wry—maybe offering shared mirth at Ihuake's theater, or shared joy at this great feat of treachery. Duchy Sahaule and Duchy Autr were hers now. Her children would inherit more than a bitter clay-pit.

Baru smiled back, as if to say: see? I can be so very cold.

Erebog touched the flank of Ihuake's horse. “Didn't you bring any shade? Would you like a spare parasol?”

“You sound like a grandmother.”

“I am.”

“Like a grandmother with a lot of stupid, poor children.”

Baru had to bite her fist to keep from laughing. The Cattle Duchess would not stoop to mere parasols—her men were already assembling a command tent. Erebog, untroubled, plowed on: “Perhaps it is so; perhaps some of them would benefit from wealthy, well-read spouses?”

Dziransi murmured to Baru, his Iolynic jagged, “Fairer Hand. Speak now?”

The Stakhieczi fighter wore the breastplate of his armor, a steel ingenuity that no one in Aurdwynn could have made. Baru wanted to peel it off him like a crab shell and take it for study. But the man had worth, too: steady discipline, a sober jaw, a reserve Baru admired, even if it was enforced by language barriers.

And above all else, he represented a hidden power.

“Come.” She took him by the shoulder and guided him away from the duchesses, to the crumbling wall. “What is it?”

He looked west with strange green eyes, like barite fire. “Very beautiful. Very flat. Rich land. I do not know land like this. Mansion Hussacht—carved from mountains.” He drew a pattern in the air, like steps. “Waterfall engines. Terrace farms.”

She ventured a few words of Stakhi. “Your people—come south? Trade. Marry. Warmer land.”

Dziransi stared at her for a moment, his jaw quaking with desperately repressed mirth. Baru, embarrassed, went back to Iolynic. “That's what you want, isn't it?”

“Soon I will tell you what we want.” He settled his weight on the haft of his long spear. “Soon I will be ready to ask. In the right place, under good stone. Tell me now: what will happen to—” He reached west, toward the rich burning colors of Nayauru. “Flat land?”

Baru tested the strength of the ancient stone and leaned up on it. “Ihuake's siege engineers will go to Dawnlight Naiu and threaten to open the dams. Facing the ruin of all their holdings, Nayauru's landlords will revolt against her loyal lords and sue for peace. One of Nayauru's surviving children will be married to one of Ihuake's, and then Ihuake will rule the Midlands. Erebog will get Nayauru's clients.”

“Erebog.” The Stakhi word came easily to his tongue, like brickwork. “Erebog asks me dangerous questions. In Stakhi, Mansion-tongue Stakhi, not Aurdwynn accent—she asks about man she loved. Clan lord she loved.”

“What did you tell her?”

Dziransi touched the masonry with one gauntleted hand. When he found a loose stone he frowned at it. “I tell nothing. Silence is stronger. But I know he fell. Mansion Uczenith lord—he fell.”

Precious insight. Baru grasped for more. “He overstepped?”

“He wanted to bind his mansion to Erebog. Get flat land to make himself a king. But he was not necessary. We only accept necessary kings.” Dziransi rapped at the loose stone and it tumbled out of the wall. “Now the Mask comes at us. Now we make Necessary King. He looks for advantage, as Uczenith did. But he is greater. You understand? His hand is broader. He—” Dziransi gripped at the air. “Constellation man. Wide eyes. Long arms. He makes himself strong. Flat land is very strong.”

“The Necessary King sent you south,” Baru said, but got the chance to ask no more: Ihuake and Erebog, dismounted now, came sweeping over. Erebog snapped something in Stakhi and Dziransi's face closed up in stern indifference.

Ihuake drew a naked platinum circlet from her left arm. “Your hand.” When Baru offered her right hand, Ihuake slid the circlet over her wrist, up her arm until it cut into Baru's strength.

“For what you did to Nayauru,” Ihuake said, hand still on Baru's arm. “It was a venal act, an ignoble thing. But it got me what I want, and that I value above all else.” She turned the circlet and it slipped on the sweat of Baru's arm. “You think you'll be my queen now?”

Baru remembered kneeling to Ihuake, common-born and desperate. “I think I'm going to win another war for you,” she said, chin high.

“You couldn't win a pissing contest without my cavalry.” Ihuake looked over Dziransi with cold assessing eyes. “But you've gathered a curious strength, coyote woman. Himu breathes through you. If you get your throne, remember this—I was hungry. I used you to kill Nayauru and take everything I wanted. I am fed now. Keep me sated, lest I grow hungry again.”

Erebog rolled her eyes. “Listen to yourself. You sound like a milk cow, lowing for blood and land. At least Nayauru had a vision.”

“I want exactly what Nayauru wanted.” Ihuake's voice rolled over the Crone like the breaking of a dam. “I want to make a new empire for my people. I want to reclaim my blood and history from the interloper out of Falcrest. I differ from Nayauru in one great respect: she is dead, I am ascendant, and my children are going to fuck her name out of every song and book of noble lineage. And yours too, Erebog, yours too—which is the
best
you can hope for, you poor wretch.”

Erebog laughed at her, and might have said something cold and distant and very old. But Baru held up a hand to silence whatever might have come next. “I value one thing more than your cavalry, Ihuake,” she said, “and it is the same thing that permits me to trust you. You're very honest.”

*   *   *

I
HUAKE'S
cavalry and Erebog's phalanxes stampeded over Nayauru's land. Nayauru's landlords, desperate to restore calm and protect their claims, murdered Nayauru's loyal vassals, named one of their deceased ruler's infant sons duke, and sued for peace. Ihuake promised her daughter to the child. So it was done.

She had her prize: Nayauru's land and treasury. She declared for the rebellion.

Erebog committed her scurvied, hungry soldiers to the occupation of Nayauru's land. Too depleted by winter to join the battle to come, they would serve as a garrison against the leaderless and furious duchies Autr and Sahaule. A summer of raids and pillage against Nayauru's former clients would, Erebog felt, restore her troops and her own treasury to fighting shape.

The rebels gathered their strength for the final battle.

Southeast toward the Inirein—the great artery that connected Welthony to the rebel North. Southeast went the ranked and serried phalanxes of Duke Pinjagata, and the torrent of horse and livestock from Ihuake's pens, and all the wages and supplies stockpiled by Oathsfire.

On the Sieroch floodplain, where the road from Treatymont came east to the river, they would meet Treatymont's awakened wrath.

The Fairer Hand and her field-general returned to the forests of the North to rally the fighters they'd fed and armed over the winter. They were met with rapture, a clamor of joyful disorder—ilykari and mothers, sodomite-husbands and merchants, all crying out to the avatar of their new liberty. Reaching for a future free of the Incrastic disciplines that would bind their bodies and labors to Falcrest's design.

Tain Hu and Baru Fisher rode side by side through days of hawk call and redwood.

A forest of spears walked with them to the Inirein. Phalanx after phalanx. Boarding Oathsfire's barges for the rush downstream to the great camps at the Sieroch floodplains.

At the end of their passage, the duchess and the fallen Imperial Accountant returned to Vultjag and saw the valley speckled by the shadows of circling raptors, small hunting signs on the redwood canopy. In the north, the waterfall crashed through the sluiceways of the limestone keep. They sat in their saddles at the fellgate crest, the duchess Vultjag taller and more relaxed than Baru, who still had trouble making friends with horses.

Tain Hu drew breath. “If we win against Cattlson. If they give you a throne—”

“Not now,” Baru said, afraid to let her terrible weariness show, her wrenching sickness at the thought of tests to come. “Speak of something other than battle and thrones.”

In the valley before them a hawk stooped on some invisible prey. “You sound heartsick,” Tain Hu said.

Baru shifted in the solid-treed saddle and, unable to find relief, stood in her stirrups. She gazed out over the valley, the river, the little constellations of house and quarry and mill. “The people in Duchy Nayauru.” The people she'd bartered to Ihuake like cattle. “Are they much like yours?”

“I don't know. I've never gone west. The Maia blood is strong there, though, as it is in me.”

Baru smiled sidelong at her. “I thought you knew everything about Aurdwynn.”

The duchess looked hurt. “The land is vast. There are as many villages in each vale as stars in the sky.”

“You're off by…” Baru squinted. “Several orders of magnitude.”

Tain Hu shook her head ruefully. “Xate Yawa should ban the marriage of accountants and poetry.”

A murmur of activity behind them. Two men came forward from the retinue—first Dziransi, and then Xate Olake. Dziransi, somber and grave, cast down his eyes and spoke in Stakhi.

“He wants to sit in council,” Xate Olake translated. His voice thickened with urgency. “He says he has seen enough, and now hopes to act. I know what he wants, and I know what it could mean for Aurdwynn.
Listen
to him.”

“No relief for the Fairer Hand,” Tain Hu muttered. “Remember my warnings about him and his nation.” She turned to the spymaster. “We will go to my keep, then, and speak in safety.”

Baru spurred her mount downslope, seeing, for a moment, only a chasm before her, an avalanche of consequences drawing her down to the end.

She'd known all along that this moment would come. She hadn't expected it to rise up and swallow her. Hadn't expected the mistake she'd made.

*   *   *

“T
AKE
the throne,” Tain Hu said.

They stood on the dais in the waterfall keep's audience chamber, the long rafters red in torchlight, the air thick with pine. The muddy boot-tracks of a thousand petitioners, left unwashed, traced the way from the door to the duchess Vultjag's seat.

“It's yours,” Baru insisted. “You're the duchess.”

“I'm your field-general, sworn to serve. I can't sit above you.”

“I don't have any formal standing. I'm a commoner.”