The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

“I slaughtered three dukes for you.” Baru showed the Cattle Duchess her canines. “I gave you all your hungry dreams in one night.”

“Tain Hu has what matters,” she said, her heart rejoicing, her throat full of glass. “My trust.”

WHEN she was alone again Baru snuffed out all the candles and thus hidden from herself she tried to let herself weep in fear. Still it would not come. She had built the dams too strong, polished the gears too perfectly. Bargained too well. She sat in the dark and fell through the hollow of herself for a time. But helplessness came uneasily to her. After a while she rose and went out to walk the edge of camp, through huddled fires and the smell of roast and sickness.

Baru wanted in that moment to speak the truth. But she had no tongue for it. She had burnt all her truth away. Alloyed it into the machine.

Patterns of drumbeat and silence, all across the field. Baru fell into trance, into the analytic cold. Saw the formations, the phalanx line and the cavalry wing, with an engineer’s eye. Imagined the brace of loyalty and ferocity and discipline that held the soldiers in their places even in the face of barbed spears. Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive.

Empire came on tempest wind. The harbor choked with red sails. The forests fell and rose again, incarnated in tarred hull, incarcerated in main and mizzenmast.

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.

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.

The surgeons at the Elided Keep have a diagnosis. You are not half-blind. The wound runs deeper than that. They touch the side of her head, where the maul struck her helm. Your brain can no longer understand that half of the world. The left hemisphere of your vision is your entire universe.

She begins to laugh, a wild, sobbing, lunatic sound. What else can she do? It’s just blind chance. Just a maul to the brain, a bruise on the mind. It doesn’t mean anything at all. But it’s so elegant.

“Of course I know the Qualm,” he says. “‘The sword kills, but it is the arm that moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder, then? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath, and only does its duty, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.’”

SHE was supposed to be safe. Off the board. But of course she came back, to face death, to try to save her home. What else did she have? Baru always forgets: there are other players.

“You owe me nothing. I swore to die for you.” She shrugs precisely. The wine in her glass barely moves. “So it will be.” I see your strategy, Tain Hu, Baru thinks. I see the order of battle. You go to your death with exquisite loyalty. I measure my treason against your faith and it eats me up, now and for the rest of my life. It is the most hurt you can manage. It will work.

But I will not be bound as you are. I will walk among your council and you will tremble at what you have unleashed.

But that will not be enough now. Good-bye, she thinks. Good-bye, kuye lam. I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.