The Traitor Baru Cormorant (36 page)

On this common tinder the rebellion hoped to build its fire.

And the fire spread. In the freetown Haraerod, at the heart of the Midlands, the outraged crowd seized the masked messenger who read Xate Yawa's notice and cut out his tongue.

In Duchy Erebog, the farthest northwestern reach of Aurdwynn, a column of ghost-pale spearmen and archers overwhelmed and massacred the Masquerade garrison at Jasta Checniada, leaving the duchy's landlords and merchants full of panicked conviction that Duchess Erebog had cast in with Baru Fisher and that the Masquerade would come for all their wealth and blood. They rose up against their duchess. Erebog spent two months putting down the uprising, and lost so much money she found herself unable to purchase food stocks for the winter. The Crone in Clay had seen seventy winters. She knew what came next—madness, cannibalism, the death of children.

The rebellion pounced. Lyxaxu sent word through the forest to his neighbor:

Erebog, old foe:

You taught me cunning. You disciplined my errors. Above all else I value a rigorous teacher, and above all others I know your strength.

Now the time for lessons is over. I want you as an ally.

Cattlson cannot save you. But we can. A loan can be arranged.

A loan stolen from the tax ships. Treasonous by nature—irrevocably bound to the uprising. But how could she refuse? She had already purged her land of the disloyal. Starvation bayed at her door.

Old Erebog declared for the rebellion.

When the report came to Tain Hu, she burst in on Baru past midnight, wild-haired and flush with wine, crying: “We have the North!”

Baru blinked up at her. “Erebog?”

“Lyxaxu bought her.” She gripped Baru's shoulder, then the curve of her skull, that grip ferocious and exhilarated. “Well done. It was your gold. Well done.”

And so it was: all four northern duchies gathered in the rebel camp, a solid strip of forest and stone that commanded every approach to the Wintercrests and the long-silent Stakhieczi mansions beyond.

In the south the Masquerade built its reply. Xate Olake, at the center of his web in Treatymont, passed sly reports:

Duke Heingyl took counsel with Cattlson. Together they devised a solution to the riots in their capital. Heingyl's armsmen took command of the occupation, filling the streets with Aurdwynni faces, familiar Stakhi freckles and proud Maia noses. The Masquerade garrison formations traded places with them, marching northeast to seize the late Duke Radaszic's precious fields and granaries. The riots didn't stop—cries of
traitor
! greeted Heingyl's men—but without steel masks to hate they were starved for fuel.

Outside the city, the Masquerade's forces staked out a great defensive semicircle.

The western flank met the sea at Unane Naiu, ancient fortress of the Maia conquerors. The circle swept east around Duchy Radaszic and Duchy Heingyl, keeping Treatymont safe at its center, until it met the western edge of Duchy Unuxekome. There Heingyl positioned his elite cavalry, a threatening arrowhead aimed toward Welthony and Unuxekome's land on the Sieroch floodplain.

The cordon kept the rich coastal fields of Duchies Radaszic and Heingyl under Masquerade control. They were Cattlson's best weapon—a lance of starvation thrown north.

The Governor recalled every garrison that fell outside the cordon. Abandoned the Midlands and the North. Even Xate Yawa's social hygienists closed their offices. Methodical, defensive, patient, the Masquerade strategy left most of Aurdwynn to its own devices. “What are they doing?” Oathsfire asked, writing to Baru about matters of finance, scribbling questions in the margins. “Why not use their strength to hold the Midlands? Ihuake and Nayauru could deal them so much harm, and Cattlson needs to go through one of them to reach us. Why abandon all that land?”

And Baru replied as Xate Olake would have: “They are playing the Traitor's Qualm. Leaving the undecided dukes room to consider their loyalties.”

Leaving them to weigh their choice while swift
Scylpetaire
raised anchor and set out for Falcrest, bearing the official declaration, two months after the loss of the tax ships:
rebellion in the Federated Province of Aurdwynn
.

And the first storm of autumn howled in off the Ashen Sea.

 

20

T
HE
storm crashed ashore.

The rebels called it a blessing from ykari Himu, whose virtues included spring, birth, genius, leadership, war, hemorrhagic diseases, and cancer, all the forms of energy and excess, including the hot open water of the Ashen Sea and the storms it spawned.

As long as there had been sailors on the Ashen Sea, ships obeyed the law of seasons: in summer, ride the trade winds clockwise around the sea, from Falcrest to the Oriati Federations to Taranoke and onward past western lands until you come at last to Aurdwynn. Or voyage against the wind if your oars and sails and seamanship permit it, accepting the costs in time and labor, trusting in your navigators if you venture away from the coast.

But once the autumn storms begin, get your ships to harbor. No voyage, no matter how swift, no matter how close to shore, can be considered safe. The trade winds will betray you and vicious new currents will cast you up on the rocks.

Whether
Scylpetaire
made the journey to Falcrest no agent of the rebellion could say. But with the early storm they had won a powerful victory. The easy ways between Falcrest and Treatymont were cut.

Any reinforcements would have to come by land, through snow and rock and frozen marsh, across the Inirein. And Oathsfire had dropped the bridges there, blocked the risky fords with his phalanxes. The marines, Falcrest's lash, would not arrive until spring.

*   *   *

T
HE
storm reached Vultjag, scattering the kettles of birds that circled the forest, swelling the river Vultsniada that ran through the valley, spilling its last rain against the slopes of the Wintercrests and Tain Hu's keep. Baru stood on the battlements and let herself soak, shivering in wet broadcloth, trying to feel cold and small and insignificant.

Like an idiot. If she fell ill there would be no saving her, not here in the north of Aurdwynn, far from Masquerade medicine. She had left the coast and Unuxekome's house behind and gone into the farthest north. Safer, yes, but easier, here, to feel far from things, to pretend she could hide and be small, to deny the burden she had lifted.

Rebellion.

From
The Antler Stone
she'd come to imagine rebellion as a creature of banners and fields, riots and mobs, secret signs and families divided. Swift and harsh as wildfire.

It had been two months since Welthony harbor, since Radaszic's disastrous march on Treatymont. 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.

Tain Hu moved flags and symbols around the maps in her plotting room with agonizing imprecision. Here, the shape of a mask, going south: Masquerade formations withdrawing, raiding granaries and fields as they went. Farmers and ducal levies turning out to oppose them in a thousand tiny skirmishes that stoked resentment and hate. “We win these,” Tain Hu said, “even when we lose.”

Letters reported a string of peculiar assassinations. Ducal secretaries, freetown ombudsmen, ilykari priests, trade factors. Someone chiseling at the bridge between serfdom and nobility. This troubled Baru because it was so clever. It spoke to real talent in the Masquerade command. Cattlson had his strengths, and one of them was his instruments, the Clarified, the web of technocrats around him.…

The rebel dukes readied for war.

Like the others, Tain Hu had levied her able-bodied men and women—they appeared on the map as little pins, each one a phalanx ready to march. But the levies were temperamental creatures, their loyalty kept by salaries and the promise of reward. Fighters would set down their arms and go home if payment came late, or their families needed them, or morale fell, or an omen struck, or this, or that. So there were two other kinds of soldiers: professional cavalry, terribly rare in the North, and the all-important rangers who would rule the winter.

Baru left the soldiering to Tain Hu.

Soldiers were an Aurdwynni duke's answer to the problem of war. But Aurdwynn had not conquered the Masquerade, which meant that Aurdwynn's answers weren't enough. Baru turned her own attention to the greater problems, the problems a Falcresti would address.

Reports came too slow, and often proved inaccurate. This drove Baru mad. (Only now, deprived of its vast sprawl, did she fully appreciate the Imperial Accountant's subordinate bureaucracy). So she ordered every duke to detach a section of their cavalry—yes, she'd insisted, I don't care how precious they are to you, how badly you need them to prance around to herald your arrival, news is more precious still—to form a messenger corps.

A problem there. Most of the cavalry were illiterate.

Fucking hell, but of course, of course—no one raised in a white-walled Masquerade school would ever become ducal cavalry. After a few cups of wine Baru hit on a solution—incorporate the scattered ilykari priests as scribes. They knew old Iolynic and they had their own ecclesiastical codes. Once the protocols reached Erebog and Unuxekome, Baru hoped they could deliver a stream of secure information from the full reach of rebel territory.

“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.”

“Go
away,
” Baru said, laughing.

*   *   *

A
S
ever, there was the money.

The dukes wanted to split up the tax plunder. The very idea panicked Baru—separate treasuries, separate policies, mismanagement and graft. So she cornered Duke Lyxaxu at a council in his home, High Stone, leaving Oathsfire and Tain Hu to trade barbs while she herded him out into a marble-floored rotunda with a breathtaking view of autumn forest below. The towering Student-Berserkers he used as bodyguards waited at a polite remove.

“How are the accounts?” he asked.

“Too fat. We need to buy food and war material. We have the craftsmen we need to make weapons, and the granaries to survive the winter. Now we need to feed that engine.” More than anything else, the rebels needed to turn their gold and silver into spears and bread.

“I understand the need.” Memory of desperate winters in his eyes. “How can I help?”

“I need control of the money,” she told him. “Every coin.”

He arranged his mantle against the chill, taking care with each crease and fold. He was graying and slim, and up here the wind sang dry and cold as starlight. “You think I can give you that?”

“I'm certain you can.”

“But I only have my own share.” There was a kind of curiosity in his eyes when he spoke to her, as if he expected strange words and foreign connections, ligatures of philosophy that he could savor and tug at and try to take apart. “How will I take Oathsfire's? Unuxekome's?” A spark of wicked delight in his eyes. “Do you have another trick of finance? I came out quite poorly from your last maneuver.”

“They look up to you.” Maybe he wanted her to say this. “You're the philosopher-duke with the books of ancient wisdom. When you act, they watch your example. When you give me your share they will know their best mind has faith in me. And if they aren't persuaded—” She smiled dryly. “I know how persistent your letters can be.”

“Mm. It might be so. Oathsfire takes my counsel, when it suits him. Certainly others have done well for themselves by mimicking my successes … and avoiding my failures.” He turned away, stepped to the edge of the rotunda to consider the forest far below. “You want me to help you be more than a figurehead. And in exchange?”

“In exchange?” Lyxaxu, of all of them, should understand why she needed this. “I do my job. I guarantee the fiscal security of the rebellion.”

“Yes. You preserve the common good.” Here the trees were not all conifers. Lyxaxu watched the wind peel the forest canopy of its autumn dead and throw the leaves up toward the mountains. Baru caught a little sigh of appreciation. “But we're bargaining, aren't we? Wouldn't I be a fool to do this for you without some personal gain?”

Baru would have caught his shoulder and pulled him around if it weren't for his height: she would only be emphasizing the difference and giving him a kind of power. “If you insist on playing the rebellion for your own benefit then we will all go into the Cold Cellar together. Is that how you want this to end?”

He looked at her over his shoulder, eyes narrow above the silver marten-skin. The great storm of leaves blew across the sky behind him, troubling birds. “I miss the man who would rise to that argument. I miss Lyxaxu the philosopher-duke, moved by grand selfless ideas; he was a good man to be. But that man—I hesitate to call him a duke at all, knowing what I do now—led his people into starvation. That man watched his neighbor and student, his boorish venal ill-read goat of a friend, grow wealthy and fat by being very selfish indeed. Can you imagine how that felt? To counsel a man out of boyhood, only to see him surpass you? To see his people prosper while yours wept and ate their rags?”

The wind fell off. Baru spoke softly, to show respect for the confidence Lyxaxu offered. “Perhaps it means you counseled him well.”