The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

“Are you going to conquer us?” He looked at her slowly, his eyes narrowed in thought. “We never conquer anyone. Conquest is a bloody business, and causes plagues besides. We’re here as friends.” “It’s curious, then, that you’d sell goods for coins and gems, but only buy with paper,” said Baru. The shape of her words changed here, not entirely by her will: for a few moments she spoke like her mother. “Because if I understand my figures, that means you are taking all the things we use to trade with others, and giving us paper that is only good with you.”

I must learn why this happened to Salm, Baru thought. I must understand it, so I can stop it from ever happening again. I will not cry. I will understand. This was Baru Cormorant’s first lesson in causality. But it was not quite the most important thing she ever learned from her mother. That came earlier, long before the school or the disappearance of brave father Salm. Watching the red-sailed warship in Iriad harbor, Baru asked: “Mother, why do they come here and make treaties? Why do we not go to them? Why are they so powerful?” “I don’t know, child,” mother Pinion said. It was the first time Baru could ever remember hearing those words from her.

“Man and woman, rich and poor, Stakhieczi or Oriati or Maia or Falcrest born—in our Imperial Republic you can be what you desire, if you are disciplined in your actions and rigorous in your thoughts. That’s why it’s an Empire of Masks, dear. When you wear a mask, your wits matter.”

“The mask is for acts of service. The soldier wears a mask on his patrol. The mathematician wears a mask defending her proof. In Parliament they are all masked, because they are vessels for the will of the Republic. And on the Faceless Throne the Emperor sits masked forever.”

But Baru was already planning her movements, drunk on the thrill of it. Later, just as she would hate herself for her calculation, she would remember: This was my first exercise of power. My first treason.

“Aurdwynn has one great habit, Your Excellence, one constant touchstone, no matter who rules.” Her secretary hesitated over the map, his own fingers half-curled, as if of half a mind to draw her hand away from a flame. “Rebellion.”

“Get anything with written Iolynic out of here, too—or Urun, or Stakhi, anything I don’t speak. I need to look self-conscious about it. Post a sign demanding that all business, verbal and written, be conducted in Aphalone. The whole city will think I can’t speak anything but.” “Your Excellence, you can’t speak anything but.” “I’ll learn.”

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.”

“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.”

“Correct. The rebels will seek to convert their debt into stable wealth. The blood of rebellion. But!” But the rebels would be up against the Masquerade, champions of economic war. What a splendid arrangement—what an incredible trap! The Fiat Bank loved to buy gold, silver, and gems at a loss. It sat on them, pleading: oh, we hold them as backing for the fiat note, so you can be sure your paper money has value. Help us help you! Why not pay your taxes in gold and silver? We’ll give you a discount. Ah, now, are you stockpiling hard goods? I’m afraid we must assess a steep tax. Why not just liquidate those goods into fiat notes, and dodge the fee? Baru saw the engine at work, drinking up Aurdwynn’s wealth of gold and silver and gems, sending it to Falcrest, and replacing it with Falcrest-backed paper.

“You can’t go home.” “Why not?” “I don’t know. Because it’s gone.” Aminata frowned, finished her drink, and nodded. “You can’t find it again. Even if you go back, it’s not there anymore. That’s history, that’s how it works! Someone’s always changing someone else.” She was right; she was right, of course, and more fool Baru for not having said it first—the Taranoke of her childhood was gone, had probably never existed; Halae’s Reef had never cut the waves like smooth shark teeth, the water had never lapped that clear on luscious black sand. Pinion had not known the name of every star and Solit had never held her up to count them for an entire night

“You will never rule anything,” Tain Hu said icily, “if you limit yourself.”

“Money is only one kind of power. Faith is power, too. Love is power. Slaughter and madness are both roads to power. Certainly, symbols are power—you wear one wherever you go, that purse you carry. And you wear others when you decide how to dress yourself, how to look at men and women, how to carry your body and direct your gaze. And all these symbols can raise people to labor or war.”

He had a good smile, open and happy; he looked like a man who preferred to smile, whenever his life allowed him.

“If my family misses anyone, it’s the boy they lost to Falcrest. Not the man they got back.” “They don’t recognize you.” “That’s the intent of Masquerade education, isn’t it?” He shrugged, eyes averted. “To remake.”

What a strange position they found themselves in. They’d cast their spears, and now they sat together, wounded and bled dry. More than anyone else in Aurdwynn, she knew Tain Hu’s wants and secrets. She had already destroyed them as thoroughly as she could. Perhaps that meant Tain Hu could trust her.

“You will find no power behind the mask.” Cold, rooted conviction in Tain Hu’s voice. “It will wear you. It will eat your face away. You would do more for your home if you tore it all down.” “How could I? How could anyone? They rule by coin and chemistry and the very words we speak. Falcrest’s power is vast, patient, resilient. No little rebellion will last.” Baru shook her head. “The only way forward is through. From within.” “You will pay a terrible price. You will lose yourself.”

But the word would not come. “We’re going about this wrong,” Muire Lo said, sitting in a circle of abandoned thesauruses and rubbing his temples. “What should the roots be? If you had to invent the word now, from first principles—what would it be?” “Crypsis,” Baru said, “for secrets.” She sat beside him, leaning back on her hands. The lamps made their shadows dance. “And the suffix?” “For rule? -Archy.” “Crypsarchy?” “Cryptarchy. And the rulers would be cryptarchs.” Baru thought of the Masked Emperor, silent and mindless on the throne.

“It’s poisoned,” said a voice from her bathroom. She’d read in Manual of the Somatic Mind that the character of a man could be divined from how he startled—toward a door, toward a weapon, or toward nothing, a prey animal’s petrified freeze. Whether it was the wine or all the dreams she’d had of a moment like this, she only drew a sharp breath and set the wineglass down. She discovered that she could still think through her fear. He would have killed her already if he wanted to. He wouldn’t have revealed the poison if he meant for it to work. She was safe. Unless this was an act of cruelty rather than calculation. Unless he was here to harm before he killed.

“Your tower guards are unreliable. You should have had all the locks changed. What I’ve found to be the case with you technocrats”—he took up her wineglass and sniffed at it—“is that you respect subtlety overmuch. You obsess over whispers and rumors and intangible marks of authority, and fail to consider what will happen when a man with a knife breaks into your rooms and cuts your throat. Aurdwynn is not civilized enough for subtlety.”

What drives you to these theatrics, Xate Olake?” “You have, of course. Young folk respect theater more than death.”

He was a literal creature, eager to obey the letter of orders. Given his own way, he would seek to satisfy as many authorities as he could. He had been conditioned to take pleasure in obedience, like a dog. He had no preference for her or Cattlson, but inasmuch as she could offer him more freedom to obey—to obey her and Cattlson, rather than merely Cattlson—she could work him.

“Your tactics are self-centered. You have forgotten that you are not the only player on the board, that inherent talent speaks for no more than experience, and that others around you seek to expand their authority and constrain yours. Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.”

She stood at the prow and watched the dawn, trying to see the curve of the world, to imagine it turning beneath the sun, the great patterns of trade and sickness and heredity and force moving on its face. The very ink and grammar of history. Driven by and made from and ultimate master of hundreds of millions of people. The question and the answer: Mother, why do they come here? Why do we not go to them? Why are they so powerful?

“Is this how you think we should fight, Baru Fisher? With coin and open roads?” “No war has ever been won by slaughtering the enemy wholesale.”

“Come, Your Graces. Surely you have read it in the Dictates—war is a contest of wills. The will of the people breaks when war makes them too miserable to do anything but acquiesce. We can turn that will to us.”

Except for the uprising in Erebog, there had been no great battles, no dramatic betrayals. Just a slower, more powerful unrest, a movement of the earth, a stirring disease. The Masquerade’s most powerful military discovery had come early in its history: battles didn’t kill soldiers. Plague and starvation killed soldiers, the slow, structural forces of conflict. Maybe rebellion was the same. A change in structures. Like a bridge bending under wind and wave.

“Is this how you’ll lead?” Tain Hu sometimes came to her study to mock her. “Bolted up behind a desk, ink-stained and often drunk?” “This is how your conquerors overcame you. This is their strength.” Baru shook a cramp out of her wrist. “And I’m nowhere near drunk.” “I can correct that.”

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.

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.

“Men used to marry men,” Tain Hu told her, as they crouched together over a fire pit to cook their venison. “And women once took wives. It was done by the poor, the starving, the desperate, by those who needed a business pact or a shared roof. By soldiers on campaign with no one else to turn to. Mostly it was done by those without needs or troubles—done for love. The words tribadist and sodomite, the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people.”

“Be careful,” Tain Hu warned her. “You have earned respect. But there are no men in Aurdwynn who can respect what they desire. I learned that from Oathsfire’s courtship, when I was young.” “There are other women here. They are not all mistreated.” Baru thought of the archers and fletchers, moss-pharmacists and astronomers, and the rangers like Ake. “Would you have me pretend to be a man, as you once did? Is that the only way to keep their respect?” “Go to one of those women,” Tain Hu said, “and ask her how she was spoken of when she left her lover, or took a second, or never had one at all.” “I have made brothers of these men. Not lovers.” The Duchess Vultjag, her hair unbound, her shoulders rolling beneath her leather and mail, shook her head ruefully. “You have been given a permit of brotherhood, Baru Fisher, and you have no say in when they will revoke it, or why.”

The terror that took Baru came from the deepest part of her soul. It was a terror particular to her, a fundamental concern—the apocalyptic possibility that the world simply did not permit plans, that it worked in chaotic and unmasterable ways, that one single stroke of fortune, one well-aimed bowshot by a man she had never met, could bring total disaster. The fear that the basic logic she used to negotiate the world was a lie. Or, worse, that she herself could not plan: that she was as blind as a child, too limited and self-deceptive to integrate the necessary information, and that when the reckoning between her model and the pure asymbolic fact of the world came, the world would devour her like a cuttlefish snapping up bait.

“Do nothing out of love.” Her smile had a little death in it: not a threat, not a warning. Only the sense that she had grown old, that she felt her fire burning low, and chose to speak plainly. It cost her nothing. “I loved a prince once, far away in the mountains. I loved him without any calculation or reserve. That error still dogs me.”

Erebog reclined, weighing the point in one gloved palm. Baru fought a chill at the cold empty disregard in her eyes—a skull’s patience for the passions of the young.

“What your soldiers did at Imadyff cannot be argued away. I heard of men disemboweled and mothers burnt. No words in any tongue can disguise that.” “War has never spared the innocent,” Lyxaxu said softly. “No.” Nayauru’s lips curled in disgust. “But neither has it pretended to love them. I will never give my people to Baru Fisher, who conjures power out of lies.”

“Did you really give me a slow poison last summer?” “Child,” Xate Olake said, with a kind of wary fondness, “I thought you would bring yourself to ruin without my help.”

down from outside its walls. Even if we win, even if we drive them into the sea, they will return with honey and with wrath. We would be stronger within them, learning how to make our protests heard.”

The Clarified looked up at her, face red with acid burn, and began to cry. “Command me,” he begged. His face blinked from emotion to emotion in eerie flashes—childish grief, a lover’s joy, thoughtful concern, a string of perfect counterfeits, like the semaphore flags of a burning ship: help, help, help. Through it all he wept clear silent tears. “Make use of me, Your Excellence. Give me use.” She looked at him and saw wreckage. Not a person in distress, but a broken machine.

“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.”

The ruin inside Baru, the yawning precipice, had filled her up with scars. She swallowed the jibe, let it strike that barren tissue, felt it only as a distant prick.

She stood in utter stillness, unable to advance, unwilling to withdraw, the charge of Tain Hu’s touch galvanic, annihilating. Everything she most wanted in this instant would destroy everything she had most wanted for all the rest of her life.

That we are not free. Not even when we march beside them, nor even when we lead them. Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.

“We are fools,” Baru murmured, “to go into this battle without the certainty that we have already won it. We are all fools.” All the careful manipulation of coin and grain and cattle and marriage, all the delicate alignment of vectors. And it would all be reckoned here, in two masses riding lathered horse and casting their spears, killing potentialities as they killed each other: It will be this way, not that way! This way and no other!

Taken by some particular mood, Oathsfire opened one bare palm to the rain. “Every moment is an edict spoken by its past. The past is the real tyranny.” “I regret, then, that we cannot aim your bowmen at anything but our future.”

am glad to be part of this fight. Glad to do something I know is right. I think I always needed this more than coin or family.” But family was on his mind. “Your Grace, will you be able to fight alongside Tain Hu?” “Am I a petty man, you’re asking?” She looked at him in surprise, struck by his awareness. “You have been speaking to Lyxaxu, haven’t you.” He laughed. “We had all winter to continue our dialogs. And yes, yes, I think I was a petty man. I envied Lyxaxu, you know, even though he was my friend. His looks, his love, his—his certainty. I coveted them. I made myself rich off the river trade just so I would have something he lacked.”

“But I must. A good man never goes to battle dirty.” He stroked his horse’s neck, smiling gently. “I took such vindictive pleasure when you sent Unuxekome away, you know. The Sea Groom and his salt and his smiles—I hated him, hated the way you pinned your plans on him, the way you spoke to him, the respect you gave him. When he left, I was sure all my bowmen and barges would give me a suit.” He flinched as the distant mountains strobed with lightning, and then laughed at himself. “I wanted to be king. Or, maybe—to be the kind of man who you would want as king.”

“You fool.” She spoke rashly, unwisely, but with honesty. She had never wanted to care about these politics of courtship, the intrigue of who would own her and what everyone would think about it. “You cannot care for me. We’ve hardly met.” “I spent the winter listening to my people cry your name.” He stroked his charger’s mane between thumb and forefinger. “A good duke looks to his people’s loves. I have, of late, wanted to be a better duke. So. Perhaps I studied too well.”

The army swallowed bread, beer, and coin at an unsustainable rate. Old resentments bred internal violence and that violence bred new resentments in turn. They were killing each other in brawls, coughing up their lungs, choking up the Inirein with their bloody shit and the sky with the ash of their corpses. An army in camp was a terrible thing.

Baru had snatched up his story and put an end to it. All of them grist in the gears of her machine. The machine she had built, or become.