The Traitor Baru Cormorant (37 page)

The marten-skin mantle tricked her. For one instant she saw not a man but a rabid fox, his eyes sharp with wit, hot with rage. And she sensed the things he might have said, an arsenal of plain pointed words to remind her that she faced an equal, a mind that would not be turned by flattery or indirection.

But part of that cunning was restraint. Lyxaxu did not lash out.

“No,” he said. “It was my turn to learn a lesson from Oathsfire. No philosophy will feed my daughters. No common good will buy grain for my serfs.”

The cold made her shiver, but Baru held his eyes and offered terms. “I can arrange for some of the money to vanish. How much will you need?”

“I don't want money. I want a promise—better: a contract.” He lifted himself from the rail to turn back toward her, and again something in the motion of leaf and wind fed Baru an illusion, as if Lyxaxu were unwrapping the man from the marten-skin, or concealing the fox. “Play the others as you must. Lead Oathsfire and Unuxekome around by their dreams of dynasty. Feed the Xates with blood and poison to keep their teeth from your neck. All this I understand: revolution is a filthy business, and prices must be paid. But Duchy Lyxaxu is not your coin. Do you understand? My home is
mine
. When it comes time to sacrifice—spend another.”

A deeper cold moved along her spine, like the ghost of an obsidian blade. Lyxaxu saw too much. “They will all ask me this. Who would not?”

“And you will lie to satisfy them. But not to me.” He held out his hand. “This will be the truth.”

They shook. Lyxaxu looked over her shoulder. “We should go back in and see to Oathsfire,” he said. “Before Vultjag kills him.”

*   *   *

B
ARU
got her money. Lyxaxu gave his share, and as she'd expected, all the others followed. She went back to her study at Vultjag and made arrangements.

The rebellion had touched off a crisis of confidence and a spectacular crash in the Masquerade fiat note. This was ideal—everyone now preferred silver and gold, which meant a little rebel coin could buy a lot of wheat or flour or salt.

“Oh,” Vultjag said, following Baru's explanation. “So we've gotten wealthier just by sitting here? No wonder you became an accountant.”

Baru had to be wary; Cattlson would try to trick the rebels into buying poisoned or weevil-ridden grain. So she arranged for Xate Olake's agents to steal a set of official seals from Treatymont. With these she could forge purchase orders from the Masquerade government.

Her instruments were ready. Time to provision the rebellion for winter.

For this she reached out to Oathsfire. He'd made his fortune trading along the Inirein, running goods up from Duchy Unuxekome and into the North, dodging taxes and playing arbitrage. He gave her the cutout agents and smugglers she needed, her own makeshift Imperial Trade Factor. She wrote contracts backed with rebel gold, payable on delivery, and even delighted the smugglers and merchants with the first insurance policies they'd ever seen.

“
I have concerns,
” Oathsfire wrote, “
that they may insist on such generous terms in the future, making business difficult.
” She ignored him.

Food, wood, and metals began to flow north, filling out the granaries and stockpiles. The need for salt, their only reliable preservative, was desperate—Duke Autr would not sell to the rebellion without the consent of the duchess Nayauru, leaving the rebels dependent on sea salt from Unuxekome.

Desperate, too, was Baru's need for a staff. Coordinating purchases and transit from Vultjag's isolated valley posed an impossible challenge. She needed a trustworthy agent, someone she could send south to Welthony to manage Unuxekome's ports, someone who would understand what she wanted without needing a letter to confirm it.

A secretary.

At the southern pass, Vultjag's armsmen at the fellgate raised a banner: unknown riders coming.

*   *   *

“N
O,”
Baru said, and then, more softly, her mind taking better measure of it, “oh no.”

“You can't see him,” Tain Hu said, and took Baru's shoulders, to stop her from bolting toward the carriage.

Baru let herself be drawn to heel. Stared, hollow, at the mud-splattered carriage that had come to a halt just beneath the gates of Vultjag's waterfall keep, at its veiled windows, its pus-yellow warning flag. At the yellow-jacketed drivers.

The yellowjackets were survivors, immune. The flag predated the Masquerade occupation, but it still meant the same thing:
plague
. Some Aurdwynni sickness, some ferocious hybrid, brewed in this cauldron of bloodlines and cattle, the rats and fleas of five civilizations.

An infected passenger.

“I'll call to him from outside,” she said, toneless, her detachment involuntary and inadequate. “He'll hear me.”

“No one gets close.” Tain Hu's boots made wet phlegm noises in the mud. She circled Baru, to stay between her and the carriage. “He's traveled in quarantine all the way from Treatymont. If he passes one flea, one breath … you understand? The winter keeps us huddled close. I had this pox when I was a child. My parents had it, too. I became duchess very young.”

“A note, then,” Baru begged. “A palimpsest. We'll wear gloves. Let me write to him.”

Tain Hu's eyes softened. “I'll carry it between you. I have immunity.”

“You could give whatever he writes to me—”

“No. You can't touch anything that's been near that carriage.”

“You could hold it up for me to read.”

Anger folded the corners of Tain Hu's mouth, softened, after a moment, by a stroke of something warmer that passed almost instantly back into irritation. “He'll have to dictate the message to me.
Nothing
leaves that carriage. I'll read your messages to each other. You'll write what you want me to say—”

“But I can't write anything you can read to him,” Baru said, amazed at the incredible, stupid injustice of it: Tain Hu couldn't read her Aphalone script, and Baru couldn't write in Iolynic.

The irony of it almost ripped a wild laugh from Baru. The plague signs were Aurdwynni, but the paranoia, the doctrines of quarantine, were Masquerade, were the basics of Incrastic hygiene.

The liquor of empire. Everywhere.

“Dictate your messages to me,” Tain Hu said, taking command, plucking the simple solution out of Baru's grief. “I'll take them down in Iolynic. Or, if you prefer, I can bring a translator.”

An armsman brought a palimpsest. Baru stood beneath the overhanging battlements, huddled against the cold and rain, and wrote in runny black ink:

To His Excellence Muire Lo, the acting Imperial Accountant, once secretary to Baru Cormorant: Baru Fisher sends her regards. She knows no finer candidate for the position. No more capable or deserving mind.

She began another sentence, at first an apology, then a thanks, and then, in the end, just a sharp strikethrough. She could say something else after Muire Lo's reply. The translator came out of the keep, bowing to her duchess and the Fairer Hand, and did her work swiftly.

Tain Hu went to the carriage, walking into the invisible potentiality, the immanence of plague. Could she be sure it was the same pox she'd had, and that she was immune? Perhaps so. She spoke to the drivers, poised on the balls of her feet. Accepted something from them—a letter in a horn case—read it under the rain-shield of her cloak, and then returned it. Went to the windows of the carriage, lifted a veil, spoke softly to the glass.

Baru's stomach felt glassy, a decanter, an acid flask.

Tain Hu returned, her head bowed, stopping a long shout away. The mud caked her boots. “I'm sorry,” she said. “The nurse says he's asleep. I think I heard him coughing, but he didn't reply.”

“Ah.” Baru swallowed. “The letter the drivers gave you? Is it from Xate Yawa?”

“Her brother, I think—it used one of his ciphers. Xate Yawa seized Muire Lo for interrogation so that Cattlson couldn't get to him first. He was too close to you to escape suspicion, and he would have been given to the Clarified if she didn't put him in the Cold Cellar. When the Xates had a chance, they arranged for him to escape prison and leave Treatymont. But the prisons are unsanitary, the old sewers backed up by rain, the drinking water not always properly boiled … there was sickness among them.…”

“Ah,” Baru said.

“He was lucid when they passed through Haraerod. But he relapsed.” Tain Hu took a step back, as if afraid her words would be infectious, too. “Nothing can be done for him in the North except what the yellowjackets have already done. We can only wait.”

Wait. As Baru had waited to warn him. And look what that had done.

Baru turned away and went back into the keep, her steps filthy, accretive, heavy with mire. At the portcullis she stopped and began to kick the stone, trying to get herself clean.

Tain Hu did not call after her.

She went up to her high tower and ordered the servants to draw a hot bath and then leave her to her work. Tain Hu, delayed by the need to bathe and smoke her own clothes, was not there to tell the yellowjackets to wait when they next checked on their passenger, was not anywhere her servants knew to look for her when they tried to send word. And so it was the next morning when Baru learned that the body of the man in the carriage had been taken out into the forest and burnt.

*   *   *

W
HEN
her control faltered it let slip rage: jaw-splitting, teeth-breaking, thought-killing anger, minute and obsessive in its detail, omnivorous in its appetite. Anger at every choice and circumstance that had brought the world to this unacceptable state.

Fury against causality.

And as she traced the chain, the knot, the map of all the roads that had brought Muire Lo to ash in the forest—at the center of the map, between the thickets of empire and revolt, she came, again and again, to herself. Her fury had nothing else to eat and so it began to eat her. She sat at her table with her trembling pen and wrote nothing.

Into the fire came a knock.

Tain Hu stood at the door of the study, her boots immaculate. She held two scabbards in the crooks of her arms.

“I don't want to duel,” Baru said, absurdly self-conscious of her loose gown and bare feet. She'd plundered Vultjag's wardrobe. Everything was too long.

“So be it.” Tain Hu stepped past and set the two scabbards on Baru's worktable, covering the notes. “I'll leave them there. You can use them when you want to make me leave.”

Her gaze was direct, but she picked at a loose thread on her tabard, at first with a slow, considered rhythm, and then in impatient yanks.

Baru poured a glass of unwatered wine, and then, after a purse-lipped pause, a second. Tain Hu accepted with a nod and a murmur. They waited in silence for some externality, a falling book or a crash of thunder, to give them permission to speak or act.

“He could have been very useful,” Tain Hu said.

“He always was.” The dry benediction felt like satire, a cheap joke, a pretense of mourning come too early. She wondered if Tain Hu could hear the bitterness in her phrasing: “He'll be missed.”

The angle of Tain Hu's gaze deflected a few degrees, a rudder bracing against an expected gust. “You were close to him.”

A range of lies and misdirections, careful admixtures of the truth, diluted by implication:
I cared about him. He helped me come this far. We were friends. I never thanked him.

But they felt stale, pointless, rotten. Instead she said the harder, truer thing: “I trusted him. Unwisely. But I did.”

And Tain Hu frowned and nodded, as if she understood. “Trust is precious,” she said. “And hard to share.” She twisted the loose thread around her fingers. “I'm sorry they didn't trust him. I'm sorry they didn't trust you with him.”

“What?” Baru frowned for a moment, puzzled, and then stepped back, her weight on her right heel, stumbling in place. “Xate Yawa? Her brother? No. They didn't.”

They had known Muire Lo's letters went to Falcrest. Xate Yawa's woodsman had made sure of that.

“I don't know.” As Tain Hu spoke, Baru wished that she would stop being honest, so that she would find nothing new that hurt. But she continued, merciless: “I might have done it, in their place. I might not have trusted the Imperial Accountant's secretary in the heart of the rebellion, out of my reach. He had been to Falcrest, and he was sent back. They would have suspected his purpose as a check on you, and marked him as a threat. Perhaps they thought they were helping you.”

Baru saw her own reaction reflected in the taut muscles of Tain Hu's neck and shoulders, the readiness of her stance. But even in the face of Baru's fury Tain Hu did not speak in anger.

“It is very dangerous,” she whispered, in sympathy, in warning, “for those in our position to admit emotion. It will always be taken as weakness.”

Baru nodded, a cold acknowledgment, a recognition from strength, passing over in that instant of conversation all the admissions and disclosures that might have unfolded, the shapes of the invisible cages around them.

Then she said, just as she realized it: “But if I had never asked them to send Muire Lo…”

If she had never called for him—

“I don't know,” Tain Hu said. That awful honesty. “Maybe the sickness in the jails was real, and you were the best chance he had to get out. Maybe it
was
them, and if you hadn't asked, they would have let him live. I don't know.” She jerked the loose thread out of her tabard and considered it as if seeing it for the first time. “Will you look for revenge?”

“No. It would be an error. None of us can afford an error.” Baru set down her rattling wineglass. “Not one mistake. The stakes are too high.”