The Traitor Baru Cormorant (11 page)

By the letter of the law she'd gone too far. The originals had to remain on the Fiat Bank's premises. But Baru would take the risk. She needed these records, and she needed them untampered with. If the Imperial Accounts could not be kept in order she would be powerless and blind. Without a strong arm and a sharp eye, Aurdwynn would throw her overboard and drown her.

In her tower she found Cairdine Farrier napping behind her desk. He woke at the sound of the door, eyes slitted lazily, and considered her in smug silence for a moment. “You wanted an appointment with me?”

Oh, to snap at him, to say the first and least wise things that occurred:
That's my desk; get out, get out of my tower, get out of my province. Or tell me what you sent me here to do.

She unbuttoned her greatcoat with slow deliberation, folded it, and set it aside. Wine and goblets stood ready on a side table. She poured something red as if she'd picked it herself. “I'm glad you're here,” she said. “Please, find a seat.”
A new one.

He chuckled and stood with a low groan. Dark half-moons hung beneath his eyes. “It's a very nice office. Lovely vaulted ceiling. This was Stakhieczi stonework, built for the new Duke of Lachta—he's vanished, by the way. Even his sister Yawa doesn't know where he's gone, or so she insists. They call him the Phantom Duke, though I suspect he's just very bashful, probably due to excessive childhood exposure to Yawa—where was I? Masonry, yes. The Stakhieczi are unparalleled, they have masonry in their bones. Shame about the previous Accountants, isn't it?”

“Immaterial to me.” She circled the desk to claim her own chair. “My job is to perform my duty to the best of my ability. The unhappy fates of Olonori and Tanifel are only history. Knowing the last Imperial Accountant was murdered would only have been a distraction.”

This was her rebuke:
why didn't you tell me
? But Cairdine Farrier did not rise to it. Instead he shook his head in reproach. “History is never only a distraction.”

She shrugged with affected weariness, studying him, his round face and flat nose, the weight he'd gathered during years on Taranoke. The hair at his temples had silvered. He would probably die before her, and when that day came, what would she think?

“I can't control history,” she said, “so it's not part of my job.”

“Control. Good.” He drummed his fingers at the edge of the desk. “When you speak of control I know you learned the right lessons from Taranoke. But history
must
be part of your job.”

“You made me an accountant. Not a scholar.”

“We
do
have an emperor, you know.” Cairdine Farrier sniffed his wine. “He sits on a throne in Falcrest with nurses to feed him mush and wipe his ass. When he dies, another one's installed, and behind that mask no one can tell the difference. It might be a new man every day. Do you ever wonder why that is?”

“He's a figurehead. Parliament is the real power.” Except Cattlson hadn't thought so.
A theater for the mob
.

“That's a schoolchild's answer.”

His disappointment looked real and hard, not a pedagogue's theater. Baru remembered things she had seen in his eyes, in years long past, and mastered a shiver. “You chose the school.”

“You've always been bored by history. It's your greatest weakness.”

“I am the Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn,” she said softly, “and you are a merchant, Cairdine Farrier. No matter what I owe you or what patronage you've provided, now you must show me due respect.”

She knew as she said it that it was a stupid and childish posture to assume, because he couldn't be
only
a merchant. But she hoped to bait his pride.

“When the revolution came,” he said, “all those years ago, we—I say
we
although I hadn't been born yet—resolved to tear down the aristocracy and build a republic for the people. But no one believed a Parliament could rule with authority. No one believed they could act with unity and decisiveness when the Stakhieczi came down out of the north, or the Maia rose again, or the Oriati federations fell under one lord and found new ambition, or—forbid it—the whispers from east across the Mother of Storms came true. Parliament would dissolve into corruption, patronage, and graft. So the chemists offered a solution.

“Every five years we would choose a wise and scholarly citizen to be emperor, and he or she would drink a secret potion—a draught of
amnesia
.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Behind the Emperor's Mask, he would be unrecognizable; and behind the fog of that potion,
he would not recognize himself
. He would retain his knowledge of the world, its history and geography, its policies and pressures. But he would have no idea who he had been before he was Emperor.”

Baru watched him, wondering if this was the pride she'd probed for, or the history she should've mastered. He sat back in theatrical satisfaction. “Clever, no? A man who does not know who he is cannot have self-interest. Without family or wealth to lure him from the common good, he would rule fairly. When his term ended and the potion wore off he would return to his station, whether pauper or merchant prince, suffering from or benefiting by his own policies. Behind the Mask, the Emperor could be just.”

“But the potion is a lie,” Baru guessed. “The chemists never learned how to make it.”

“Of course.” Cairdine Farrier snorted. “The coronation of the Emperor is simpler than that—it involves a pick through the eye socket and a great deal of drool. But the mob
believes
in the potion. They believe in the Mask. They think the vegetable on the Faceless Throne is one of them.”

“You've written your own history.” The point was blunt but she fed it back to him anyway, although it was a concession. “And it gives you power.”

He might have sighed in exaggerated relief, in another, more playful mood. But he did not. His voice was sharp, empty of ornament. “If you want to excel, if you want to have the station you think you deserve—” He gestured with his wineglass, and his eyes narrowed in the lamplight. “If you want to understand
real
power, the kind of power that made us lord of your little land, you will learn to manage all its forms.”

The candles on the desk danced briefly in the draft.

“Who are you?” she whispered, too curious to resist the direct approach. “Really?”

He set down his glass and held up his empty hands. “Parliament,” he said, lifting his right palm; and then his left. “And the Emperor on the Faceless Throne.”

He left the rest of the exercise to her: filling in the negative space between them, the head behind the empty hands.

“Aurdwynn will rebel,” she said. “Rebellions are expensive. That's why you made me Accountant. So I could follow the money to the proof.”

Cairdine Farrier took a long drink of wine. “You know,” he said, swallowing thoughtfully, “I have a bet with my associate Hesychast. He believes that your race is fundamentally unable to rule. That your easy island life and culture of unhygienic appetites has left you soft and biddable, and that you are all fit primarily for farming, fishing, and pleasure. He maintains that we rule you because it is your hereditary destiny to serve.”

She set her glass down with soft precision. “And you?”

“I have wagered that you will stop the rebellion,” he said and, smiling, lifted his glass in toast. “And now I take my leave. You have work to do. I'll see you in Falcrest, if you make it.”

“Who killed Su Olonori?”

“I don't know. I've made no effort to find out.” He paused by the door. “The same people who'll try to kill you when you get close to stopping them, I presume.”

*   *   *

W
HEN
Cairdine Farrier had gone, she found herself sick with the awful need to know. She had learned what she could about the Throne and Farrier's colleagues, about their tests. But there were other secrets, closer and more terrible, and she could not delay the confrontation forever. She was part of this now, the apparatus of rule.

She had to confront the beast that had eaten father Salm.

She went to the Cold Cellar unannounced, white-masked, gloved, flashing the technocrat's sign to the gate guard, printing her mark in the logbooks. Passed through layers of vigilance and examination into white acid-washed walls, concrete, clean, buttered in lamplight.

The heart of Jurispotence Xate Yawa's power.

From the conditioning cells came soft bell chimes. Near the surgical theaters a quartet of musicians played oboe and lute. A sign by them:
PLEASE DO NOT DISRUPT THE SOOTHING MUSIC
.

Baru walked the transient wing. “For minor corrections,” the functionary at her side explained, a plump Falcresti woman, plainly brilliant, precise and brisk. “This woman, for instance.”

A gaunt Stakhi commoner, strapped to a metal chair, watching nude men approach and depart through the far door. Some of the men—paler, middling height, their features shaped by hasty makeup—stopped a handbreadth away, and a soft, warm note played. The woman's embarrassment softened, and she lifted her lips to draw some drug or draught from the pipe mounted near her head.

But when other men—darker, taller, more muscular or more beautiful—came close, the cell filled with terrible harsh buzzing and a stink that filtered out beneath the door.

“She volunteered for fidelity conditioning to repair her marriage,” the functionary explained. “Wise. Two of her social proximates reported on her behavior. She could have been found responsible for hedonic sociopathy or hereditary misconjugation.”

“The method?”

“Simple conditioning. We pair pleasant stimuli with facsimiles of her husband. If that fails, we'll proceed to paired-icon behavioral coaxing, manual stimulation, or sterile proxy conjugation. The final option is a diagnosis of hereditary nonmonogamy defect and sterilization.”

Baru found herself grateful for the mask. “What about surgical intervention?” she asked, thinking of Aminata's warning, of the nauseating threat. “To render conjugation joyless? Do you conduct those here?”

Tain Hu had looked into her eyes, smiling, her lips drawn like a recurve bow, the motion of her breath slow and assured in her shoulders and chest, and she had not seemed at all nauseated or afraid—

But that had been a trap. Baru stamped on the image and the thought with silent, urgent efficiency.

“I'm sorry, Your Excellence. The somatic intervention wing is closed to visitors without the Jurispotence's direct approval.” She gave Baru a cool sidelong gaze, assessing, and Baru saw Xate Yawa's eyes behind hers. “Our behavioral work here is equally important. Aurdwynni family structure requires strict corrective action. Especially among the Maia bloodlines.”

On the way out they went through the holding cells, full of men and women waiting to be processed and assigned to judges. Strings of stamps marked their charges, their risk assessment, the nature of their arrest:

C
OLLECTED
BY
SOCIAL
HYGIENE
PROFILE
.

R
EPORTED
BY
SOCIAL
PROXIMATE
.

F
AILED
UNDERCOVER
LOYALTY
SPOT
CHECK
.

R
EPORTED
BY
SOCIAL
PROXIMATE
.

R
EPORTED
BY
SOCIAL
PROXIMATE
.

R
EPORTED
BY
DEEP
COVER
INFORMANT
.

C
OMPLIED
WITH
ENTICEMENT
CHECK
.

In another conditioning cell, a man sat in a drugged stupor, manacled to a chair, moaning in chemical bliss, while a functionary in a bone-white mask stared into his eyes and recited: “Falcrest. Mask. Hygiene. Incrastic. Loyalty. Compliance.”

A crash of hidden cymbals. The functionary raised a smoking censer to the man's face, poison-yellow, as the crash came again, again, again. “Rebellion,” the mask said, as the man began to shriek. “Revolt. Devena. Himu. Wydd—”

The new carriage they gave her for the ride home had a drunken old man for a driver. Rattled, she barely acknowledged his greeting—“They call me Gray, for the beard. I know every street and sewer in the city.”—and it took her minutes to realize he'd been driving her in circles.

“You should be more careful, Your Excellence,” he admonished her. Passing lamplight caught his blue jungle-crow eyes. “I could've taken you into Northarbor and given you to a diver with a knife. The last Accountant I drove came to such a fate.”

“Xate Yawa will hear of this,” Baru hissed. Her mind was still fixed on the Cellar, and on the thought of Salm, taken in the night to some waiting camp, or pit, or the hold of a receding ship, to be remade with drug and knife, or (better? was this better?) snuffed out in agony.

Gray laughed like a madman at that, the sound flat, arid. “Yes she will!”

But he took her to the Governor's House.

 

6

D
REAMS
of the Cold Cellar haunted her. In the morning she hissed and grunted through Naval System exercises, trying to breathe and sweat the memory away, until she could at last make herself think of the audit again.

“Muire Lo!” she called, rinsing herself, buckling and belting on the accoutrements of her office, waistcoat and purse and sailor's boots, an armor of imperial devices. “Come! I need to walk and think.”

They clattered down the accountant's tower in a busy racket, Muire Lo baffled by her energy but playing along. “This is what I need to find,” Baru said, counting off points on her fingers. “What I need to pin the rebellion down and snuff it out. It's a pattern—a very specific sign we'll see.”