The Traitor Baru Cormorant (51 page)

In Treatymont, the crowds gathered harborside caught a wind full of incinerated screams.

Torchship
Kingsbane's
replacement rudder failed in a turn. She drifted out of her formation, siphons far off target. Somehow
Devenynyr
got abreast of her, burning furiously, and the last sign anyone saw of Duke Unuxekome alive was his banner raised to signal boarding. Masquerade marines waited on the rail to greet him, firelight reflected on their speartips, on their white steel masks.

On
Egalitaria
they waited breathless for the fire to spread to
Kingsbane,
for the Burn stores to go and turn the whole torchship into a crematorium. But naval discipline and naval damage control fed by bunkers of piss-soaked sand quenched the blaze.

Devenynyr
was still burning, white and sputtering, when she slipped under. So went the ending of the story of Duke Unuxekome.

Ormsment's story went on a little longer—through the empty transports and the marines who should have filled them.

The real marine transports landed at Welthony that evening, barely two days' march from Sieroch. They knew how to pass the minefield into the harbor—as if an agent among the ilykari divers had marked a safe passage.

Falcrest's white-masked elite came ashore.

 

28

T
HE
last council. Pinjagata and Ihuake. Lyxaxu and Oathsfire. Dziransi. Xate Olake. Vultjag.

The Fairer Hand.

The others spoke of the new disaster, but she sat in a cavernous silence. Tabulating her victims. Duke Unuxekome. Muire Lo. The Duchess Nayauru, the dukes Sahaule and Autr. The citizens of the village Imadyff, of Haraerod, of Duchy Nayauru, all of whom had loved her as the Fairer Hand, all of whom she had fed to the war. The man her guards had accidentally killed—who was he? Ola … something? Ola Haerodren? He had put it down in the well, whatever that meant. Now no one would ever know. 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.

And father Salm. Taken by nameless Imperial soldiers for the crime of sodomy. Perhaps they had killed him in the prescribed way. Perhaps he had been brought to a hidden place for
treatment
.

Ground under the gears of another machine: the empire in Cairdine Farrier's eyes.

An empire she had to change. Whatever machinery it took.

Sousward
.

You are a word, Baru Cormorant, a mark, and the mark says: you, Aurdwynn, you are ours.

They changed the name to Sousward
.

The dread in her stomach felt like falling. She thought of Taranoke, of the caldera, of the fire sleeping down there. The precipice.

Everything would go forward as it must.

“We march at first light,” she said. “West across the Sieroch plain.”

They'd been arguing over how to blunt the marine attack from Welthony, how to save their southern flank. Tain Hu understood first. “We
attack
?”

“We meet Cattlson in the field before the marines can link up with him. We overwhelm him completely.” She looked to weathered wary Duke Pinjagata, famous for the discipline of his fighters. “Only shock can save us.”

“You aren't listening,” Lyxaxu snapped. His anger startled her—Lyxaxu, of all of them, in panic? “They
knew
Unuxekome would attack. They were
prepared
. Someone betrayed him to the Masquerade. Someone let the marines through the Welthony minefield, so they could land on our southern flank. There is a spy, or a network of spies, among us.”

“I know who it was. I've already taken steps.” And that was true. Somewhere out there Purity Cartone smiled in happy obedience, hunting his assigned quarry, maybe already thinking back on the kill. Unuxekome's fleet movements had been compromised by his own ilykari, but Baru had identified the spy back in Haraerod and dispatched her own.

Nothing could be left to chance.

Baru raked the gathered dukes with all her cold. “Our only hope is to defeat Cattlson and Heingyl on the Sieroch plain, then wheel and meet the marines coming up the Inirein. They may be Falcrest's finest. But they have no cavalry. Do you understand? If we defeat Cattlson tomorrow, we will have time to rest the army before the marines arrive.”

“She's never led us wrong.” Oathsfire considered the lamp at the center of the circle. He spoke with a new strength, grown in spring—a force of conviction or belief that told Baru, somehow, that he no longer had his own status first in mind. “Not in my estimation. Not yet.”

Ihuake eyed Baru in quiet consideration, her nobility drawn about her like an iron cloak. “Never led you wrong? Has she ever led you in battle? Even once?”

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

“Bluster,” Xate Olake murmured. “Careful.”

“I am done with care.” Baru rose. “I will go across the Sieroch alone if I must, and face them with only the dawn at my back. But I will go.”

“I will go with you.” Tain Hu stood, her smile wry, hungry, and almost—almost—met Baru's eyes. “Cattlson will remember the last time we two challenged him.”

“Tomorrow on the Sieroch.” Oathsfire looked to Lyxaxu. “Rare is the man who chooses where to die, my friend.”

“Terrible choices,” Lyxaxu breathed. Where was the fox in him? Where was his own conviction? “Every way we turn.”

Pinjagata spoke at last, leather-tongued, flinty. “We march at dawn. Set a quick pace all day. Strike with fading light, worn horses, exhausted men. So be it. But who will command our newborn Wolf? The camp wants to know. Who is our general?”

The circle looked to Baru.

“I will give the phalanx line to Pinjagata. The bowmen to Oathsfire. Dziransi, you will lead your phalanxes as reserves for Pinjagata—Xate Olake, tonight you must be sure his jagata fighters understand our drumbeats. The Coyote-men can choose one of their own to command the scouts and skirmishers.”

“But the van.” Ihuake's voice like plains thunder, like the hoofbeat of her herds. “The other places are secondary. Everything depends on the action of our horse. Who will lead the cavalry? Who will call the charge that breaks their line?”

“I have only one field-general,” Baru said.

From her place in the circle Tain Hu raised her eyes and her face shone gold in the lamplight.

“No. She has no ducal cavalry of her own.” Ihuake crossed her arms. “No feel for the momentum of it. I could offer better. My son Ihuake Ro.”

All this was true. But Baru had weighed the factors, and decided.

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

*   *   *

W
HEN
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.

Stone-curlews wailed to each other across the dark. Another sort of bird whispered past above. Nightjar, Baru tallied, or nighthawk. She couldn't tell. Her census had slipped.

She found herself walking uphill, seeking the highest stone promontories to the north. It might have been some Taranoki islander factor, something in the blood. Or she might have known where she would find Tain Hu, sitting cross-legged, looking out over the galaxy of campfires on the Sieroch below.

“Your Excellence.” Tain Hu bowed her head.

“Vultjag.” Baru wet her lips.

“I am honored by your trust. I will not fail you tomorrow.”

More than anything else in the universe, more than the power to dictate law at Taranoke, more than the knowledge of the count of stars in the sky, 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.

Her voice came husky, choked. “I don't deserve this. I haven't earned it.”

“The honorifics? The deference? The army and all its followers camped before you?” Tain Hu rose to a crouch, to her feet, in a single powerful uncoiling. A mantle of starlight glinted on her broad mailed shoulders. A disquiet gleamed in her eyes. “What would you have me call you, then? My friend? My sister? You are my queen, or you are not. I swore an oath. When you doubt yourself, you doubt me. Do you doubt me?”

“There's something I should tell you,” Baru said. It came out a rattle, a hiss, not like a lie would have, no; not smooth, not calm, not confident. Lies on her tongue, grown into the flesh of it, oiled in her blood. Allergic to the truth. “There's something I have to say.”

She came so close, and so far. Like the paradox of the man walking halfway down the Arwybon Way, and halfway again, always so close, always a compound infinity from his destination.

But Tain Hu took her by the jaw, the heel of her gloved hand cupping Baru's chin, leather-bound fingers across her lips, gentle around the flare of her nose. Measuring her, just as Baru had measured Tain Hu in Cattlson's ballroom, judging the cut of her cheekbones, her nose, her chin, the markers of heredity, of blood.

Closing her mouth, so that she could speak nothing, not the lies, not the truth.

Baru shut her eyes against the force of her own response.

“Tell me tomorrow,” Tain Hu said. “After the battle. Only then.”

*   *   *

A
T
dawn the drums began to beat.

The Army of the Wolf marched west across fertile Sieroch ground and their passage raised no dust. Late in the day they came to the killing ground.

This was the shape of the battlefield, the crucial shape:

South was an impassable marsh. North, past the Henge Hill where Baru would establish her command camp, were the plains that stretched up to Duchy Pinjagata, greening in the spring. Cavalry land. The phalanx line would fight between the marsh and the hill, but the horse would swing north, out onto the plain of low flowers.

And before them—

Before them the land dropped a little into a shallow bowl divided by the Sieroch Road. Like an arena. Past that little bowl rose the forest, gnarled, ancient, untouched by logging.

Baru had been terrible at geography, once. But she could learn.

At the edge of the forest, where the road came out, the enemy's banners moved in swift disciplined lines. The stag of Duke Heingyl on the wings and, at the center, a mask ringed in clasped hands.

Cattlson had come.

Baru watched from the Henge Hill, where she stood with Xate Olake. The spyglass he had gifted her was battered, but she hadn't seen better optics since her last time aboard
Mannerslate
. “Stakhieczi, of course,” Xate Olake explained. “Even Falcrest copies them.”

She watched Cattlson's army array itself for battle.

“They're hurrying into formation. Good.” She lowered the glass. During the march she'd made a feverish review of her books on war. “I was afraid they might just withdraw.”

“They'll fight.” Olake snatched a fly out of the air. “No reason not to.”

“You're so certain.”

“Cattlson's a stubby little prick of a man, but he's not inept. They know we set a grueling pace to make it here. They know that half our troops are already dying of starvation. And they're afraid we'll set the woods alight around them if they retreat.” The Duke of Lachta wore a fall of borrowed mail, carried only a crossbow and a short knife—to cut his beard off, he'd said, in case it looked like he'd be captured.

“Wise of them,” she said. “The Coyote's always looking to burn.”

A patch of color caught her eye. She checked the spyglass again, and found a great banner stretched between two poles: a white mask, antlered, ringed in multicolored hands. Beneath the banner cantered cavalrymen in masked helms, their horses armored head and flank.

“Cattlson's here.” She gave Xate Olake a wry smile. “He spent the winter and half his treasury on a new standard.”

“Vain prick. Can you sight him?”

“No. His guard, though.”

On the low ground to her left, in the space between the Henge Hill and the marsh, the Wolf's first-rank phalanxes settled into a line of battle. Bowmen and reserve phalanxes made a checkerboard behind them. The Mansion Hussacht jagata waited among them, ready to be thrown into the fiercest fighting. Elite reserves committed at the right moment could save a battle—or win it.

And to the right—

To the right, out on the flowered grassland, squadrons of Wolf cavalry milled and grazed. Tain Hu had raced them into position, taxing horses already on the verge. Now her signalmen flagged for rest. Too late for some: Baru's spyglass found dead horses and dismounted men, some walking back toward the line, some grieving by their dead steeds or hesitating to offer mercies to the loyal dying.

The horses, too, had reserves. Duchess Ihuake, still stewing, rode with them. During the march she had complained about Tain Hu stealing troops she had no need for, giving orders that made no sense. Baru had no time to attend to her pride. Ihuake and the reserve cavalry would stew in the east.

The cavalry battle would happen on the north flank, the right flank. At the center, the phalanxes would meet. The left flank didn't exist: it was a swamp for cranes and krakenflies.

If both centers held, then, Tain Hu's horse would determine everything.

“You know anything about battles?” Xate Olake murmured in her ear. Wisely: not a question for the drummers and the bannermen behind them to overhear. “Not war. Battles?”