The Traitor Baru Cormorant (14 page)

“Apologize?” Baru played for time, smiling, trying to figure out what she wanted. “For what?”

“For the man I had watching you. For his conduct toward your secretary.” The Jurispotence straightened her gown's collar with absolutely convincing formality, a manner-perfect mime of what she was saying:
things between us are slightly out of order, and I will set them proper.

So the Stakhi woodsman had been hers. The notebook had been hers. She knew that Baru knew what the man had been up to, and had decided to concede the play before it could go against her.

“I'm young,” Baru offered. Beware, she thought to herself, beware the years she has on you, the games she's played. She used the Masquerade's invasion to gain herself high station and her brother a duchy. Beware that steel. You can't win. “I'm foreign. My two predecessors have come to a bad end. If I had some moral failing that you overlooked, and it damaged the welfare of the Imperial Republic in the province of Aurdwynn, you would be guilty of negligence. If you sent that man to watch me, then you were only doing your duty as the guardian of Aurdwynn's moral hygiene.”

Xate Yawa slumped for just a moment in clear relief, hiding it almost before it showed. The acting was immaculate. “You're so wonderfully pragmatic. We waste too much time on politics here.”

“I'll have the woodsman released and returned to you. If you trusted him with this job, he must be very useful to you.”

“I'm grateful.”

They smiled at each other in mutual respect and admiration for a few moments. Baru thought fixedly about Aminata and nothing else, because it seemed the best way to keep that smile glued convincingly on.

“I've heard you're performing audits,” Xate said. “Have you found anything … untoward? I fear that some of the northern duchies are funding ykari cults. Oathsfire has grown obscenely rich on Inirein trade, and his friend Lyxaxu indulges in
thoroughly
regressive philosophy.”

“The moment I locate an irregularity, I will be in your office, shouting for a warrant. I promise.”

“Beautiful.” Xate Yawa offered a hand. “Oh, this has been so much easier than I'd feared. Please—don't think I did this out of anything but a sense of duty to the Imperial Republic.”

“Of course. A good day to you, Your Excellence.” She kissed Xate Yawa's hand and smiled all the way until Muire Lo opened the office door for her, let her out, and let himself in.

“If you're going to listen at the keyhole,” Baru suggested, “you should pretend you don't know she's leaving until she knocks.”

Muire Lo's flush rose above the ring of bruises around his throat. “You're
letting him go
? Just like that? You didn't even ask why he—”

“He attacked you because you told him that you're a Falcresti spy, which makes you a grave danger to the rebellious plot Xate Yawa is involved in.” She waved away his protest and clapped a hand on her desk for attention (he twitched visibly at the sound). “Listen! Did you hear how directly she played everything? How honest she was? She's afraid of me—she's only putting the strictest truths into play, so I don't have room to turn anything back against her. She knows I have Falcrest's favor, she knows I'm closing in on something that could harm her, and those two things together are a real threat to her. The man who attacked you isn't important.
His notebook is.
Do you understand?”

“If she had the book, she'd have the notes he took while watching you.”

“And written evidence is everything. If she had a reliable eyewitness account of me vanishing into a brothel with a beautiful woman”—his flush said so many different things—“I would be one mistake away from a terrible and permanent fate. She controls the courts. Given reason and motive, she can destroy me. If she's with the rebellion, she has that motive. If she had the notebook, she'd have the reason. Could she have that woodsman fabricate a copy?”

Muire Lo nodded along, sharp and engaged, apparently not on unfamiliar ground. He
had
been trained, Baru thought. “Not without a lot of trouble. She'd have to get forged seals and time stamps. He'd miss telling details. Review would detect it.”

“Good. The woodsman was an urgent option, an expedient. That means her plan is happening too soon for her to take more subtle measures.” Baru let herself go, trusting the analytic trance to spot riptides and shoal water. “So her next step could be murder. She has power over Aurdwynn's criminals. She could turn them loose on me. It worked on Olonori.”

“We should move you back aboard
Lapetiare,
then.” Muire Lo turned to the door. “They're above her reach.”

“No. If I'm locked up on a ship I might as well be dead—I won't be able to hunt for the rebel gambit.” Baru put her steepled hands to her mouth, her brow, the back of her neck, thinking furiously. “I need to be somewhere where it's too risky to strike at me. Somewhere that would unavoidably link my death to her or her allies. Can I move my office to the Cold Cellar? No—no, she'll see everything I do, it has to be far away from her—”

“Tain Hu,” Muire Lo said.

“What?”

“Vultjag. The Duchess of Comets—Tain Hu.” He grinned, excited, caught up in his own idea. “Tain Hu's late aunt was married to Xate Yawa's brother, Xate Olake, the Phantom Duke of Lachta. Everyone knows Tain Hu was the first to challenge you, out on the ballroom floor—everyone knows she's the one who tried to draw out your sin where Xate Yawa could observe it. If you were close to her, and you were killed,
everyone
would see Xate Yawa's hand in it.”

“If I were close to Tain Hu…” Baru traced the logic. Tain Hu, clearly seditious, could not kill Baru without drawing Cattlson's full wrath. Xate Yawa would want to keep attention away from their connection—

It was perfect in every way, except that it would put her right in the grasp of a woman who might not share Xate Yawa's subtlety. Who might reach for a knife instead of a writ.

But she had told Cairdine Farrier she would stop the rebellion. Cairdine Farrier was the way to Falcrest.

She would accept the risk.

Baru began to open drawers. “I'll get all the records I need to keep working. Find Tain Hu and inform her that I'm going to her estates in Vultjag to look over her records. Tell her that I would be more than honored by her company.”

*   *   *

W
HEN
Muire Lo had gone to make arrangements, Baru went back up to her rooms to find country clothes—riding jodhpurs, heavy coats, hard-soled boots. While she worked she thought, trying to be remote and cold about it, calm and deliberate. But it hurt her heart to consider these things, and soon she found herself tearing clothes from her cabinets, piling them unfolded like a child in a snit.

She sat on the corner of her bed and put her head in her hands.

Even on the best roads, by the best carriage, Tain Hu's Vultjag estates were hundreds of miles and many days to the north, up the long causeways through Duchies Heingyl and Ihuake.
Lapetiare
would sail long before Baru could make the trip and return. She would lose the marines aboard, her only trustworthy hand in Aurdwynn. She would lose Aminata, her only friend.

She could order the ship to delay its passage, and bring Aminata and some of her soldiers along as security. But that would be sentimental and, worse—so much worse—stupid. She couldn't ignore the fact that Aminata had brought her to that tavern, had drawn her upstairs on drunken pretense with one of the Jurispotence's men watching. It might have been unhappy coincidence. Or Aminata could have been thinking of her career, and all the ways that the favor of a provincial Jurispotence could help it.

When Muire Lo returned later, he said, “All the arrangements have been made. Will you need me to carry any messages to
Lapetiare
?”

She wrote a terse and official set of orders, commanding vigilance during her absence, ordering the ship to sail on schedule. She couldn't risk reaching out to Aminata, couldn't even offer a formal good-bye. It would only provide more evidence of some unsavory connection.

So be it, then. She could go forward only with what she absolutely needed.

“You won't be coming,” she told him, unsure how he would take it. “I need you here.”

The word
need
made him smile, not unpleasantly.

*   *   *

T
AIN
Hu sent a carriage and a column of horse, twenty riders carrying the comet banner. Baru expected to ride alone in the carriage, the duchess aloof on horseback. But when she stepped up into the cab she found Tain Hu waiting within, sprawled along the length of one passenger bench like a satisfied cat.

“Yours.” She gestured to the other bench.

Baru set her bag of papers and palimpsest down carefully. “Your Grace. Thank you for attending to my request so promptly.” Her lips really
did
look a little like a recurve bow, didn't they? Always drawn in mockery …

“I'm not unaccustomed to Masquerade scrutiny. They send their creatures to keep the North reined in.” Tain Hu wore riding breeches and there was mud on her tall boots. She had the noble height, raised on good meat and citrus; Baru was glad to almost match her. “I'm sure we'll make an occasion out of it. Aren't you bringing anyone? Where's your little chaperone?”

It was hard to read Tain Hu's age: older, clearly, but not much older, which made her contempt all the more grating. (How young had she inherited Vultjag?) She could remind the Duchess Vultjag of the appropriate honorific, but it would only seem petty. “I don't need any staff,” she said, smiling back. “I expect the audit will go smoothly, and I am assured that your men-at-arms can provide the finest security on the road. The safety of your estate, of course, hardly needs praise.”

Tain Hu drew herself upright with slow control. “Aren't you afraid,” she said, the corners of her mouth and eyes drawn ever so faintly, “that if you find something wrong with my finances, I'll cut you apart and bury the pieces in the woods?”

Yes I am, Baru thought, but she let none of that thought into her face. “Am I afraid that you're a fool? No.”

“Su Olonori was killed in his bed. The murderer was never brought to justice.”

“You will have to protect me even in my bed, then.”

Tain Hu sat back against the bench and considered her with what seemed like genuine bemusement. Her reset nose was a little crooked from the front, which seemed a good flaw to fixate on. “Why are you here?”

“Simple. If I'm to do my job, I need to know where the money goes.”

“Money isn't everything.”

“I'm an accountant.” Baru offered a wry shrug. “As far as I'm taught, it is.”

Tain Hu set her hands on her knees and leaned forward, her lips parted over her incisors, disgust or challenge or something else in her eyes. “As far as you've been taught. And now you want me to teach you the rest?”

She heard the memory of their last meeting, her own words thrown back at her.
All the paradoxes of Aurdwynn bound up in one woman. I think I could learn a great deal from your lessons, Tain Hu.

“Would I be here if I didn't?”

“Then watch. Understand what you're part of.” Tain Hu reached behind her and opened the driver's shutter. “Take us to Northarbor before we leave the city. I want her to see the purge.”

*   *   *

I
N
Northarbor, where dockside architecture gave way to the arches and arcades of old Stakhieczi stonework, they found a riot underway.

The sound reached them first, a roar, a surf that wouldn't ebb. Then they met lines of Masquerade regulars in blue and gray working in cadence to move barrels of diluted acid. And, last—from the vantage of a rooftop, because neither Tain Hu nor her armsmen were eager to press deeper into Masquerade lines—they saw the riot itself.

The mob wore iron-mordant green. Baru had expected to see them on the attack, pressing on prison gates or carrying torches for a tax collector's home.

But it was the garrison that had cornered the riot, cordoning that roaring mass against the north edge of the square, where they stood in defense of a lime-washed warehouse without window or label except the Aphalone script
NORTHARBOR SPICE
. Baru strained to hear their chant, but it reached her only as a desperate thunder.

“It's a secret temple,” Tain Hu murmured in her ear. “To Wydd. Defended by its followers.”

“A god?” Little in her studies had mentioned faith in Aurdwynn except as a political problem.

“A human being. Someone who practiced a virtue completely enough to become the name and the trait. To speak of acceptance or obedience, winter or pneumonia or erosion or time, is to speak of Wydd. Wydd stands across from Himu and Devena stands between them.” Tain Hu touched her brow, in reverence, or just after an itch. “Not that anyone of worth believes these old forbidden superstitions, of course.”

“They don't look very accepting to me.” Baru searched the garrison lines and found the barrels of acid, passed hand over hand toward the front. Sappers waited with spades and gloves and rag-stuffed masks to pry them open.

“They are very poor followers of Wydd, it seems,” Tain Hu said dryly. “Perhaps Himu moves them today.”

The sappers opened their barrels and drenched the crowd in acid with slow underhand throws. Screams reached them on the harbor wind. “Don't be too concerned,” Tain Hu said. “Pacificant-process acid only burns the eyes and membranes. On skin it leaves an itch and a red rash. Blindness is rare, but the burns will mark the guilty for days to come, so they can be rounded up. A just and gentle method, I'm assured.”

A lock of Tain Hu's hair had come free from her braid and set itself wiggling in the breeze. Baru fixated on it, preferring it to the chaos below. “Why build a temple to Wydd in a warehouse? Why defend it?”