"The Traitor Baru Cormorant"

[fiefoe]

Seth Dickinson made the political and the military calculations very grim indeed. But of course that's empire for you. Very little joy for anyone involved. And the reader is left with very little to look forward to in its sequel.

• 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.”
• Baru looked at her mother, at Pinion’s eyes red with fatigue, her shoulders bunched in anger, and wondered what had happened to the woman who was a thunderbolt, a storm cloud, a panther. Of all things Pinion looked most like a wound.
• “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.”
• when Baru thought of fat men she thought of happy old storytellers at Iriad, pleased to be old, and large with joy. Cairdine Farrier did not seem that way. He carried his weight like a thoughtful provision, stored in preparation.
• bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.
• Falcrest, she did not let herself think. I will go to Falcrest and learn to rule, as we have been ruled. I will make it so no Taranoki daughter will lose a father again.
• Baru losing but still high on her own future, on the knowledge that she had won. Taranoke would not be her cage. (When had Taranoke become a cage?)
• Incrastic eugenics would dictate the shape and color of the island’s children.
• The soldiers of the invasion, the paper money and the sailcloth, the pigpen diseases, had won. The old divisions of harborside and plainsmen exploited before she was even old enough to understand them.
• Probably an orphan, raised in a Charitable Service school. A whole generation amputated from its past.
• Pinion lifted her eyes to the dead snow-speckled peak. “You spent more time in that school than you did with us. Are you still ours?”
• Baru took him in her own arms, shocked by how frail he felt, by how close they were in height, and whispered in his ear: “I remember my father. I remember my fathers.”
• “Salt and citrus,” Cairdine Farrier said, joining her at the stern with half a lemon in each hand. “The chemicals of empire.”
• She was eighteen, foreign, a woman—and here in Aurdwynn they did not even pretend that this was not a disadvantage to the ambitious. She was alone.
• These books were Baru’s spyglass, her map, her sword and edict.
• But if the peasants are happy and safe, the duchies will not fear rebellion. If the duchies do not fear rebellion, we cannot rule them. And if we cannot rule the duchies by fear of rebellion, Parliament asks, what shield will we have if the Stakhieczi come south over the mountains again?” What similar calculus did they make on Taranoke?
• He sounded impossibly weary. “Aurdwynn threatens revolt the way a jealous mistress flirts.
• dressed in such exquisite fashion that she took it as a sign of honesty—no one would advertise corruption so blatantly, would they?
• “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 man seemed to operate on a drunkard’s theory of loans: why not one more?
• Aminata helped her back upright. “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.”
• “We will be bred like cattle.” Tain Hu bent to rub her horse’s flank, as if in apology. “It’s already begun. They have set quotas—no fewer than so many marriages between Stakhi and Maia bloodlines, no pure Belthyc marriages—” “The first steps of the Incrastic program seek to quantify the natural strengths of the racial types and their various hybrids.”
• How can you be anything but a challenge? A commonborn girl, given authority over a land of old noble men? You are a word, Baru Cormorant, a mark, and the mark says: you, Aurdwynn, you are ours.”
• “You’re so sure there’s a rebellion coming. You’ve snatched this whisper out of the air and made it your own temple and creed.
• “Once she’s bought up their debt, she’ll hold the controlling stake in their wealth, not me—and instead of racing each other for paper loans to keep their commoners and landlords happy, she’ll have them buying gold, grain, and spears. She’ll subvert our own economic system to prepare Aurdwynn for revolt.”
• The purchasing power of the fiat note, the amount of anything real you could buy with it, would plummet as commodity prices skyrocketed. It was monetary suicide. Confidence in the fiat note would collapse, and in short order, Falcrest’s favorite weapon would be useful only as toilet tissue. Which meant that all those loans and debts Tain Hu intended to leverage to build alliances—loans issued and debts held by the Fiat Bank, in fiat notes—would be worthless. So would her own counterfeits. Everything measured in fiat money would be wiped clean. There was nothing Xate Yawa or Governor Cattlson could do to stop it. Tain Hu’s rebellion would die along with the debts.
• “Do you know the story of Xate Olake’s marriage to Tain Ko? Could you tell me why Heingyl Ri has only one living cousin, and who it is? Can you name the dukes who lost all their children in the Fools’ Rebellion?” Baru brushed the challenge away. “Touching stories, I’m sure. I’m not a playwright. If it mattered, I would learn.” “You rule a nation of the bereft. That matters. It changes how we think.”
• 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.” “Any price,” Baru rasped, each word a debit, a loss in her account books: secrets given for no advantage, for no reason except that her heart moved her to speak them. Her traitor heart. “Any sacrifice.
• Trust, like money, needed a guarantee to back it. She would need allies with secrets. Secrets that she could hold over them. If she wanted to build a web, well, she would make it out of people already full of hooks. Yes—that would do it. Everyone poised to destroy everyone else, and thereby held in check. A trust governed not by love or simple fear, but by the assurance of mutual ruin,
• “No rebellion can succeed without winning over the cautious and the self-interested. The zealous rebels and firm loyalists must attract the middle... No, we need dukes, and the dukes are trapped in the Traitor’s Qualm. It is too soon.”
• like a sail tearing under a brief and powerful wind, he smiled. “You may loosen or constrain my freedom to speak.”
• “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.”
• am gravely disappointed that you and Governor Cattlson alike have elected to go forward with this juvenile challenge. I’ve worked for years to end Aurdwynn’s affection for trial by combat. Now here you are, stirring up the country with rumors of the commoner’s favorite gold-lender taking up sword against the Governor.
• Duke Unuxekome can take you upriver to my keep in Vultjag.” Where she could be pocketed and held like a coin.
• Ake finished and began to put her instruments away. “It puzzles me,” she said, “that you would crush Tain Hu’s rebellion, and then make yourself into a rebellion of your own. But I am a commoner. Perhaps I have no mind for games of power.” Her eyes were evasive, deferential. But perhaps, Baru thought, this was her own art, to hide herself behind propriety. They all had their own arts of passage.
• Ake Sentiamut took her out into the streets in common garb. “Hide your teeth,” she warned. “They will break your disguise.
• It’s not what the Masquerade does to you that you should fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It’s what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.
• None of it could be reduced to something as simple as invader and invaded. Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom.
• The secret of secrets rose in her like a rotten thing trying to retch itself up, and just to stop it, to head it off, to do anything but say it or feel it like a pole of obsidian strapped to the curve of her spine, she seized the priestess by the back of the neck and held her close to hiss a different secret, her lips against the ilykari’s small dark ear: “I want to fuck women.”
• Baru smiled bravely at Muire Lo, lying, shutting him out, closing him like a book of things already known.
• Now Unuxekome’s divers, women hand-picked from loyal pearl and spear families, oiled and nose-clipped and racing the sunset, only—only!—had to cut the right mines free, the mines beneath the anchored transports. Baru had studied the designs, particularly the firing mechanisms, the spring-and-spike systems that would spark detonation when the mine pressed up against a ship hull. She believed they would work. Masquerade torpedoes were more complex and temperamental, and—allegedly—they worked.
• She tore at Unuxekome’s collar, his stubbled neck slick with blood and cooking oils. He deserved better than this—not how he would have wanted to die, far from a ship, flat on his back, with pheasant in his face—not any kind of story worth a duke—
• In the harbor the transport Inundore snapped like kindling. One of her masts broke halfway and speared the deck as it fell. “It’s begun?” She helped the bloodied duke to his feet. “It’s begun.” Unbidden, she thought of the harelipped navigator and his beautiful charts.
• The harbor’s collective shriek—the victors, the dying, the bells and drums of Masquerade officers trying to rally, a desperate atonal music—carried to the ducal house. Mannerslate had exploded first. Baru obsessed over it, probing the fact like a sore. She’d sailed with Mannerslate’s crew knowing they were all going to die. She’d lied to them, a terrible kind of lie, a nothing unusual will happen lie: the treason of banality. She’d acted as if all were as it should be.
• When the sun rose on a harbor bloated with wood and corpses, the recovery began. The whole plan came down to one differential: marines could drown. Precious metals couldn’t.
• “I know,” Baru said. Better a woman of divided loyalties than one of no loyalty at all. Better a reluctant traitor than the terror of a true sociopath.
• 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.
• “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.
• WHEN 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.
• “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.
• “To what end?” Ake Sentiamut asked, as the others muttered about starvation and cold, about an islander woman ordering them to march in winter. To what end, indeed? To the end she had found in her grief, in her obsessive study of the tear-spotted maps. A way to reach the scattered vales and hamlets, the commoners and craftsmen and, before the spring, make them part of the revolt. A way to become formless, ineffable, beyond the reach of the Masquerade and its spies, its clockwork plans and careful schedules of recrimination. She’d provisioned the rebellion, arranged investments and lines of communication, because that was the way to victory—and now she had a way to extend that strength, a way to build the logistics of rebellion on cold dangerous ground. A way to win the Traitor’s Qualm by showing the Midland dukes a power more real than the enemy’s, older yet more immediate, an Aurdwynni power, a power born not of coin and calculation but from the land.
• her tutorship harsh, often impatient. “You must appear a master,” she insisted. “They would forgive an Aurdwynni a missed shot, forgive a man who struggled to string. But never you. Your errors will be written on your blood and sex. You must be flawless.”
• “Be careful,” Tain Hu warned her. “You have earned respect. But there are no men in Aurdwynn who can respect what they desire.
• “There is a balance,” Tain Hu said, “seen everywhere in nature. It takes many prey to support a predator. We have brought too many predators to Duchy Nayauru.” And Baru saw the Masquerade’s hand at work. They had sent their woodsmen everywhere, driven out the deer, burnt the underbrush, gathered the forage and taken it into their fortifications. Left the Coyote no prey but Nayauru’s serfs.
• Baru missed the ilykari priestess, her ledger of secrets, her hushed temple drowned in olive oil and perilous lamplight. This damn conspiracy was missing its keystone. All that remained were the unsteady arching ambitions of the dukes. Ah, but—hadn’t she volunteered to be that keystone, at that river house, on that bloody shore? Hadn’t she declared herself the Fairer Hand?
• Baru spoke into the briefest gap before Nayauru’s retort. “The Masquerade thrives on information.” Control the space. Use height and voice and strength of limb to pull at their regard. If she seemed foreign all the better—she would hook them and draw them up out of the sea of their own politics.
• “What you risk,” Baru said into the clamor, speaking as if she were the only voice, “is an Aurdwynn without dukes.”
• She extended her hand, offering them the invisible weight balanced on it, the fulcrum of history. Baru Fisher, beloved of Devena. “Falcrest came to power by overthrowing its own aristocracy. They wrote the Handbook of Manumission in the blood of dukes and kings. You sit here thinking that perhaps Treatymont and Falcrest can offer you safe power, but they will discard you like leavings when your time is finished. They want to tear down the duchies and polish Aurdwynn flat like the mirror of a Stakhi telescope. Turn to me instead. Turn to the people you have ruled.
• phantom army buried in the social context, marking sentries, passing messages in the careful steganography of the persecuted.
• 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.”
• “You cannot refuse,” Tain Hu murmured. “You cannot refuse a man who offers victory with one hand and sets ten phalanxes at the head of the Inirein with the other.” Xate Olake’s eyes begged her to be sane. What could she say? A gift this large was no different from coercion. How could it be refused?
• Tain Hu had said, with cold venom: 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.
• 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.”
• Wandering the ruin of the battlefield, a lonely pair of Pinjagata infantry, worried for their distant starving families, found the Masquerade’s abandoned stores of signal fireworks. “I’ll sell them,” the first man told his friend, but she, frowning, replied that on any other night they could be mercantile—but tonight the fireworks would be free. A great mass of Wolf fighters built a bonfire of wet wood, linseed oil, and masked corpses. Some protested that it would stink, but lo, there was corpse-lore to manage that, and it would be the stink of victory. Some even knew that the fluid of the spine and brain could be burned as sweet musky incense. At sunset they lit the pyre, and as it drew in scattered companies it became the center of things, the axis around which their world, in brief defiance of astronomy and the dicta of Charitable Service schools, turned. Soldiers stood to tell their stories, to dance and drum, drafting the first layer of the Sieroch legend.
• In a way, that legend was the real prize of the battle: a spark of defiance, a little gem of freedom reddened in winter and cut to shine on the Sieroch plain. Everyone here would carry the understanding home, that secret hard-won knowledge—that if they stood united together beneath a rebel queen they might defeat the Masquerade in all its fury.
• On this one day I will not deny what I am. “Forgive me,” she said. “I’ve never done this before.” “Such an ascetic.” Tain Hu chuckled warmly, and in that warmth Baru heard the life she had never had, would never reach. “Fear not. I am practiced.”
• Clever, she thinks, to offer yourself as a test. I should kiss you, shouldn’t I? You and your masters think you’ve found a hold on me. But I could break that hold if I just leaned a little closer. If I looked into Tain Hu’s eyes and made use of you. She leaves him sprawled against the parapet and turns to the estuary so that he falls on her right and vanishes from awareness. She knows he must still be there, but her wound swallows him.
• “You will not do it in private,” he warns. “There will be no tender words, no secret mercies. You will not give her the privilege of death by your own hand. You will order her execution, your men will drown her in the surf, and her body will go to Falcrest—so that we may know she died in pain, and not by some arrangement.” His eyes crack. Something in him feels for her. Perhaps he did this himself, once.
• In the silence, Tain Hu lifts her eyes. “Your Excellence,” she says, and bows her head, as if she were still field-general, and Baru still the Fairer Hand. Baru sets her blade down between them like a little wall, just below the wine her servants left, and sits in the other chair. She wants more than all else to smile, and to answer the last thing Tain Hu ever said to her, that smiling sleepy greeting: hello.