The Traitor Baru Cormorant (55 page)

It has all been for Taranoke.

She found that in the dream, at last, she could weep.

*   *   *

W
ARMTH.

She tried not to take it apart.

Warmth around her. The tent. The furs.

Stop, she thought. Go back. Sleep. Don't think.

Warmth in the circle of her arms. Pressed beneath her chin. Warmth in her heart.

“Mm,” Tain Hu said. “Hello. Your
Excellence
.” The contented slits of her eyes closed again. The weight of her body had made Baru's left arm numb. She turned a little, so that they would fit together more perfectly, and pressed her nose and lips into the join of Baru's neck and jaw. Her breath went out in a long sigh.

For one more moment: bliss.

And the engines woke, the scalpels and the geared schemes, peeling the
now
apart into what had been and what would come, a vivisectionist drawing out organs of consequence, smooth dripping links of
plan
and
outcome
and
risk
and
catastrophe.

The accountant waking inside the woman.

Remembering her test.

Baru Fisher set her chin on the smooth cap of her lover's head and howled in silent grief.

There was no way out. The conditions had been set, the mechanisms primed, in distant cities, on docksides, in plotting-rooms, a covenant written in ink, in coin, in blood. This was the endgame.

There was no way out.

*   *   *

H
OW
long had she—?

There was power in Tain Hu. In her axe-carrying armor-bearing brawn, in her voice of edict and defiance. Even, by the rules of aristocracy, power in her blood.

What else would Baru ever desire? (And she had desired, base forbidden carnal want, in the ballroom, in the forest, from the very first glimpse.) What more could Baru find in her but that strength, that power?

Much more, it seemed. There was so much more to Tain Hu. So much left to be discovered. An inner sky, constellations barely hinted at, waiting to be mapped.

Tain Hu slept in open-lipped repose, her beauty not the permitted beauty, not the mother-fat of Urun carving or the purebred architectures of Falcresti art. A woman and a fighter and a lord, a nation alone.

So much more to know. The accounting could go on forever.

But time had run out.

*   *   *

H
OW
to draw out the disloyal, we wondered?

She dressed in linen and long tabard and trousers, buckled on Aminata's boarding saber, and went out into the morning cold. The guard around Duchess Vultjag's tent had been posted wide. All familiar faces, Tain Hu's favorite armsmen from home. Discreetly inattentive.

Baru went through them, face averted, and up the slope to the place where the porters had brought her baggage. Found the ceremonial purse. Chained it to her side.

We have a favorite method.

She walked through the morning fires and the half-naked fighters hunting themselves for ticks, the smell of curries and coffee, the intersecting songs of Iolynic and Urun and two kinds of Stakhi. The men and women she had brought to Sieroch, in her own name.

She had
made
the Wolf—knowing all the while how it would end—

“Xate Olake,” she called.

The old spymaster rose from his fireside, propped on the shoulder of an herbalist. “Your Excellence?”

“I have a task for you. A hard thing.”

Was that sorrow in his bright jungle-crow eyes? Did he think he understood?

What she tried to tell herself was:
when this is finished, I will remake the world so that no woman will ever have to do this again
.

But in her heart she felt the pain like a swallowed razor, like glass dust in her cup.

“Go to the camp of the Vultjag fighters,” she said. “Bring horses and a few men you trust—Dziransi and some of his jagata. Tell the duchess Vultjag that I have stripped her of her station. Tell her that today I cast her out.”

Xate Olake waited, drawn and weary, ready to execute the orders of the queen he had helped to make.

“Take her north under guard. Tell her to ride onward until the Wintercrests swallow her. Tell her that if she ever returns to Aurdwynn, she will face death.”

“There must be a dynasty,” Xate Olake said, with a terrible understanding, a sympathy utterly misplaced. He had spent so long moving the pieces, striking down any threat. He thought he understood. “Even at such great cost.”

We will give you what you most desire. What you have craved since childhoood.

And as Baru walked away, Xate Olake said one more thing, a perfect, unintended blow: “I'm sorry she made this necessary.”

*   *   *

A
ND
that was that. The time was now, the terms exact, the bargain perfectly clear. She'd faced it, accepted it. She'd said:
I understand what you want me to do
.

Even now the rest of the clockwork would be striking the hour:
now now now
.

No reason to hesitate.

Baru put her face against her horse's flank and bristled her face, her eyes, with the hair and the stink, trying to weep again, to break open and run into the grass like pus. Nothing would come. Her heart had clotted.

I have committed a terrible crime. So terrible that I feel I can do anything, commit any sin, betray any trust, because no matter what ruin I make of myself, it cannot be worse than what I have already done.

And here it was. The crime had been committed long ago. This was only the reckoning.

She had said to the pearl-diver priestess:
it has all been for Taranoke.

Baru saddled her rouncey and rode it east under no banner, out through the camp, unrecognized, unlooked-for, the drums of the morning call-to-march drawing groggy protests around her. She wore woodsman's gear, to hide from attention, and a helm, to hide her face. The bargain had never set an exact place or time—only conditions for the ending, a qualm broken, a victory won. And then a plan for extraction:
get clear, and trust us to be ready.…

Without any outward sign or motion, in the wreckage of herself, she donned her armor, made it firm around her heart. Raised her mask: a cold discipline, a steel beneath her skin.

Grow comfortable, she told herself. It will never come off.

Baru, you fool. You arrogant, callous monster. You should have stopped this. Somehow.

On the eastern edge of camp a Stakhi man with long red hair waited on horseback, a grief-knotted neckerchief bright above his coat. The man who had come to her harborside and said:

Do you know the Hierarchic Qualm?

“It is time,” he said. “Now, at the moment of victory, when we can be sure that even the most cautious traitors are unmasked.” He grinned, a thrill of danger or victory or bloodlust. “You did well, bringing them to Sieroch, arranging a tidy victory. You did well.”

“Stop!” Baru screamed at him. “Undo it! I
changed my mind
!” And in her fury she rode on him, beheaded him, trampled his corpse; turned back into camp and raised—

She did none of that. It would save nothing. The alarm might, in the short run. But the short run hardly mattered.

Her silent regard must have troubled him, for after a moment, the man named Apparitor looked away. The ghost that crossed his face might have been sympathy. “Come,” he said. “I arranged the rest of it. The jaws are closing. We should be well clear.”

Baru began to twist in her saddle, to look behind her, but Apparitor's hiss seized her and made her still. “No! Don't look back.” His eyes were not as hard as his voice. “There is nothing behind you. You understand? Everything lies ahead now.”

Together they rode east, through the sentries. Out across the Sieroch and toward the great roaring Inirein, the Bleed of Light, where the Wolf would march to meet the marines they expected, the marines who would never come.

For a while they passed in silence except for morning birdsong and the sound of water against rich earth. Baru closed her eyes, wiped away the world, and filled it with the memory of beautiful crimes.

The accountant in her said:
you made a good bargain
. And that had been true, for the woman at the dockside, the frustrated technocrat enraged at
Sousward,
desperate to find another way to Falcrest.

But that woman had not understood.

Someone shouted. A great thunder of hooves closed on them from the north—a file of armored horse, waiting in ambush behind a copse of incense cedar. Apparitor looked at her in incredulous amusement. “Sloppy,” he said. “Very sloppy.”

It's Oathsfire, she thought. He sat through the whole night, drowned in grief, gnawing on his friend's treachery, and when the sun rose he understood why Lyxaxu, most thoughtful and farseeing of all of us, would turn on me.

Maybe he read Lyxaxu's letters. Maybe he found some draft of that question:
Do you not fear their gradual return? Do you see any hope for us in five decades, in a century?
Maybe he'd understood why Lyxaxu had asked. Maybe he'd realized what her answer had to be, cold cunning Baru Fisher the accountant.

Maybe he wasn't sure he believed it. But he came out here to wait. And now, at last, he sees the monster he wanted to make his queen.

He'll kill me, she thought. And she felt joy.

Apparitor drew a device from his saddlebags and raised it above his head. A green-smoke rocket arched up into the dawn. “Ride,” he said, bending over his horse's neck. “Ride hard.”

She followed him, an empty mechanism. How had she done it? Until this morning came, she had somehow made herself believe that this morning would never come. She had known but she hadn't known. How could anyone do that? How could you know something
for a fact
and ignore it? Antithetical to all rational thought.

Oathsfire's men gave chase. She heard the Duke of Mills himself, screaming to her, and then the first bowshots hissing past.

Maybe, she thought, this has nothing to do with Lyxaxu or grief or understanding. Maybe they all agreed to kill me and Tain Hu and find their own queen. Ihuake, perhaps, married to Oathsfire. Better than two tribadists.

The whole world a dim play around her. Less real than the memory of Tain Hu.

New shapes in play ahead, though. Horsemen in red tabards and steel masks, bearing heavy crossbows. Masquerade marines—Apparitor's marines. Rushing their way.

“Ride,” Apparitor shouted, his hair astream. “Think of what's waiting for you! Think of your reward!” He spurred his horse ahead.

But she hesitated. She did not race for safety.

Think of what's waiting for you
.

Think of the Coyote-men, the Wolf, gray-bearded Xate Olake, the loyal guards, the ilykari divers, Tain Hu, Tain Hu, Tain Hu—

Why did it have to be this way? What had she ever done to bind herself to this outcome? She could have stayed in the camp and ordered a swift march north. She could have fractured her Wolf into its ducal pieces and sent them home, or run away with Tain Hu, fled into the Wintercrests. She could have found some way to betray her own betrayal. She was the key, after all, not the exhausted Wolf or the gathered rebel dukes; ultimately
she
was the vital weapon.

But then, of course, nobody would ever save Taranoke—

An arrow caught her exhausted rouncey in the rump. It screamed and fell, dragging its hind legs for a moment, toppling. She slammed to the earth, shouting, her head smashing around inside the loose-strapped helm.

A clean spring sky above. A gorgeous dawn.

If she wanted to die, she did not want it enough. Her body sprang to its feet, checking her sword, taking a few dizzy, spinning steps.

She looked up to see Duke Oathsfire roaring down on her, sword bare, wild hate and grief in his eyes.

A crossbow quarrel glanced off his horse's champron. She had a moment to see him blink in surprise. The second punched through his chest. He slumped across the reins, blood bubbling at his lips, and then fell.

You will not die at Sieroch
. Another lie she'd told. Small, in the counting of such things.

Good-bye, Baru thought, good-bye, and turned to look for the shooter, the marines riding down to her rescue. Saw Apparitor, hand outstretched, the man who had offered her exaltation at this terrible cost.

His eyes fixed on something behind her, where her helmet chopped off her peripheral vision. He opened his mouth to call warning.

Oathsfire's guardsman rode down on her and his maul smashed the side of her helmet and closed her whole world like a door.

*   *   *

T
HE
Apparitor had arranged his instruments perfectly.

Duchess Ihuake drank her morning soup, drank the tetrodotoxin the Clarified had used as seasoning, the foreign poison against which she had built no tolerance. Her compliments went to the cook—
the new spice has left my lips numb
—and then in morning council she slurred and fell and passed into paralysis and died. So passed the Cattle Duchess, who dreamt of a new hearthland where her people could be free.

Her spymaster went roaring among the cooks. “Who did this?” he cried. “Whose hand killed our duchess?”

“The hand that moves us all,” a chef's assistant said, and hurled a pan of boiling oil into the spymaster's face.

Pinjagata, the Duke of Phalanxes, reviewed his troops before the march, and though he labored to breathe through his battle-burnt lungs, they stood in their ranks and took pride in his nods. A pale smiling man in the first row dropped his spear and stepped out to knife him up under the chin. “Baru Cormorant keeps her own accounts,” he said.

The spearman duke died on his feet. He never saw his country at peace.