SHE stood on the peak of Taranoke with mother Pinion at her side. The island of her childhood—plots of sugarcane and black coffee, black beaches. Sea the color of deep sky lapping at the coral. The smell of iron salt and cooked pineapple. Endless stars.
Taranoke had its own politics, its own trade, its diseases and dismays. But to a child it had seemed perfect and solitary and whole.
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. Plague swept the mountain and the plains and they tumbled the mingled dead into the caldera. Children slept in tufa schools, learning to love and marry by a foreign creed, laboring in the shipyards, socialized federati, class one, no distinctions.
The masks killed husbands with fire-stoked iron, and the screams were a reminder: the old ways were not hygienic.
“How grateful we must be,” her mother said, that childhood voice, that vein of utter unquestioned truth. “To have soap and sanitation. To watch our children survive and grow and learn all the names of sin. How fulfilling our lives must be, now that we labor for a greater purpose. Did you know that we died of tooth abscess, child? It was very nearly the foremost cause of death. How grateful we must be for dentists.”
Baru watched it all and with an accountant’s mind made a table of the credits and the debits, a double-entry ledger, hot iron for the sodomites against soap and dentists and a greater purpose.
Pinion took off her smiling mother-mask and revealed herself as Cairdine Farrier, the jovial merchant, the portent with an engine in his eyes. “You had a question for me,” he said, as in the distance the waves began to freeze, became steel and porcelain, a web, a road, a sluiceway that ran with blood and molten gold. From Taranoke east to the heart of things. “About the nature and exercise of power.”
Cause and effect. Credit and debit. The world bound together, one system, one constellation. But she could not see the shape of it. She did not have the master book: second cousin Lao carried it away from her on a road of gloved hands.
“We have all the answers in Falcrest,” Cairdine Farrier assured her. “Everything has been cataloged and assigned its rightful place.”
“Even the rebellions,” Baru said. “Even the rebels.”
He lifted to his face a white porcelain mask blank of all expression and she knew his name was Itinerant. “We will extend our control,” he said. “When the work is complete, when our hegemony is total, no one and nothing will act without our consent. By volition will be a synonym for by decree. The law of the Empire will live within every soul and cell. There will be no more pain or waste. Only harmony.”
“What if Aurdwynn broke free?” She wanted to taunt him but she was full of gears and she could only offer it as a premise, an orphaned shard of logic, a rhetorical device deployed to enable a crushing rejoinder. “What if they could not be ruled?”
The mask looked on her with empty idiot eyes and drool puddled beneath its chin. The Emperor on the Faceless Throne.
“They have only the strength of rebels,” he said, and his voice was a chorus. “Only conviction and ferocity and animal outrage. We have all the might of empire, virtues of coin and persistence and size, sinews of record and law and conscription and industry. Our strengths are of a higher order. We will return. We will buy them out and breed them down and lure them with joy and Aurdwynn, too, will wear the mask.”
Fire smoldered in the Taranoke caldera as its people married flat-nosed foreigners or marched down to the ships to labor and fight abroad.
The mask said: “We always win in the end. We own the future.”
“I knew this,” Baru whispered.
Red rowan-fruit hair curled out from behind the porcelain. “You knew it from the start. In the long run, Aurdwynn would be ruled.”
Ashy smoke made her hoarse, made the words falter in a burning throat. “And what pointless waste, those cycles of revolt and reconquest. What blood and labor would be squandered in decades to come. How much more merciful to find a shorter way. A sooner peace.”
“A higher purpose,” the mask said, in one voice now, a mocking harborside voice, the voice of the man called Apparitor. “So you became a special instrument, for an exalted design.”
I will know the secrets of power, she told herself, clinging to that pillar. Knowledge is control. I will turn that power to my own use and I will save my home.
It has all been for Taranoke.
She found that in the dream, at last, she could weep.
* * *
WARMTH.
She tried not to take it apart.
Warmth around her. The tent. The furs.
Stop, she thought. Go back. Sleep. Don’t think.
Warmth in the circle of her arms. Pressed beneath her chin. Warmth in her heart.
“Mm,” Tain Hu said. “Hello. Your Excellence.” The contented slits of her eyes closed again. The weight of her body had made Baru’s left arm numb. She turned a little, so that they would fit together more perfectly, and pressed her nose and lips into the join of Baru’s neck and jaw. 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.
Remembering her test.
Baru Fisher set her chin on the smooth cap of her lover’s head and howled in silent grief.
There was no way out. The conditions had been set, the mechanisms primed, in distant cities, on docksides, in plotting-rooms, a covenant written in ink, in coin, in blood. This was the endgame.
There was no way out.
* * *
HOW long had she—?
There was power in Tain Hu. In her axe-carrying armor-bearing brawn, in her voice of edict and defiance. Even, by the rules of aristocracy, power in her blood.
What else would Baru ever desire? (And she had desired, base forbidden carnal want, in the ballroom, in the forest, from the very first glimpse.) What more could Baru find in her but that strength, that power?
Much more, it seemed. There was so much more to Tain Hu. So much left to be discovered. An inner sky, constellations barely hinted at, waiting to be mapped.
Tain Hu slept in open-lipped repose, her beauty not the permitted beauty, not the mother-fat of Urun carving or the purebred architectures of Falcresti art. A woman and a fighter and a lord, a nation alone.
So much more to know. The accounting could go on forever.
But time had run out.
* * *
HOW to draw out the disloyal, we wondered?
She dressed in linen and long tabard and trousers, buckled on Aminata’s boarding saber, and went out into the morning cold. The guard around Duchess Vultjag’s tent had been posted wide. All familiar faces, Tain Hu’s favorite armsmen from home. Discreetly inattentive.
Baru went through them, face averted, and up the slope to the place where the porters had brought her baggage. Found the ceremonial purse. Chained it to her side.
We have a favorite method.
She walked through the morning fires and the half-naked fighters hunting themselves for ticks, the smell of curries and coffee, the intersecting songs of Iolynic and Urun and two kinds of Stakhi. The men and women she had brought to Sieroch, in her own name.
She had made the Wolf—knowing all the while how it would end—
“Xate Olake,” she called.
The old spymaster rose from his fireside, propped on the shoulder of an herbalist. “Your Excellence?”
“I have a task for you. A hard thing.”
Was that sorrow in his bright jungle-crow eyes? Did he think he understood?
What she tried to tell herself was: when this is finished, I will remake the world so that no woman will ever have to do this again.
But in her heart she felt the pain like a swallowed razor, like glass dust in her cup.
“Go to the camp of the Vultjag fighters,” she said. “Bring horses and a few men you trust—Dziransi and some of his jagata. Tell the duchess Vultjag that I have stripped her of her station. Tell her that today I cast her out.”
Xate Olake waited, drawn and weary, ready to execute the orders of the queen he had helped to make.
“Take her north under guard. Tell her to ride onward until the Wintercrests swallow her. Tell her that if she ever returns to Aurdwynn, she will face death.”
“There must be a dynasty,” Xate Olake said, with a terrible understanding, a sympathy utterly misplaced. He had spent so long moving the pieces, striking down any threat. He thought he understood. “Even at such great cost.”
We will give you what you most desire. What you have craved since childhoood.
And as Baru walked away, Xate Olake said one more thing, a perfect, unintended blow: “I’m sorry she made this necessary.”
* * *
AND that was that. The time was now, the terms exact, the bargain perfectly clear. She’d faced it, accepted it. She’d said: I understand what you want me to do.
Even now the rest of the clockwork would be striking the hour: now now now.
No reason to hesitate.
Baru put her face against her horse’s flank and bristled her face, her eyes, with the hair and the stink, trying to weep again, to break open and run into the grass like pus. Nothing would come. Her heart had clotted.
I have committed a terrible crime. So terrible that I feel I can do anything, commit any sin, betray any trust, because no matter what ruin I make of myself, it cannot be worse than what I have already done.
And here it was. The crime had been committed long ago. This was only the reckoning.
She had said to the pearl-diver priestess: it has all been for Taranoke.
Baru saddled her rouncey and rode it east under no banner, out through the camp, unrecognized, unlooked-for, the drums of the morning call-to-march drawing groggy protests around her. She wore woodsman’s gear, to hide from attention, and a helm, to hide her face. The bargain had never set an exact place or time—only conditions for the ending, a qualm broken, a victory won. And then a plan for extraction: get clear, and trust us to be ready.…
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.
Baru, you fool. You arrogant, callous monster. You should have stopped this. Somehow.
On the eastern edge of camp a Stakhi man with long red hair waited on horseback, a grief-knotted neckerchief bright above his coat. The man who had come to her harborside and said:
Do you know the Hierarchic Qualm?
“It is time,” he said. “Now, at the moment of victory, when we can be sure that even the most cautious traitors are unmasked.” He grinned, a thrill of danger or victory or bloodlust. “You did well, bringing them to Sieroch, arranging a tidy victory. You did well.”
“Stop!” Baru screamed at him. “Undo it! I changed my mind!” And in her fury she rode on him, beheaded him, trampled his corpse; turned back into camp and raised—
She did none of that. It would save nothing. The alarm might, in the short run. But the short run hardly mattered.
Her silent regard must have troubled him, for after a moment, the man named Apparitor looked away. The ghost that crossed his face might have been sympathy. “Come,” he said. “I arranged the rest of it. The jaws are closing. We should be well clear.”
Baru began to twist in her saddle, to look behind her, but Apparitor’s hiss seized her and made her still. “No! Don’t look back.” His eyes were not as hard as his voice. “There is nothing behind you. You understand? Everything lies ahead now.”
Together they rode east, through the sentries. Out across the Sieroch and toward the great roaring Inirein, the Bleed of Light, where the Wolf would march to meet the marines they expected, the marines who would never come.
For a while they passed in silence except for morning birdsong and the sound of water against rich earth. Baru closed her eyes, wiped away the world, and filled it with the memory of beautiful crimes.
The accountant in her said: you made a good bargain. And that had been true, for the woman at the dockside, the frustrated technocrat enraged at Sousward, desperate to find another way to Falcrest.
But that woman had not understood.
Someone shouted. A great thunder of hooves closed on them from the north—a file of armored horse, waiting in ambush behind a copse of incense cedar. Apparitor looked at her in incredulous amusement. “Sloppy,” he said. “Very sloppy.”
It’s Oathsfire, she thought. He sat through the whole night, drowned in grief, gnawing on his friend’s treachery, and when the sun rose he understood why Lyxaxu, most thoughtful and farseeing of all of us, would turn on me.
Maybe he read Lyxaxu’s letters. Maybe he found some draft of that question: Do you not fear their gradual return? Do you see any hope for us in five decades, in a century? Maybe he’d understood why Lyxaxu had asked. Maybe he’d realized what her answer had to be, cold cunning Baru Fisher the accountant.
Maybe he wasn’t sure he believed it. But he came out here to wait. And now, at last, he sees the monster he wanted to make his queen.
He’ll kill me, she thought. And she felt joy.
Apparitor drew a device from his saddlebags and raised it above his head. A green-smoke rocket arched up into the dawn. “Ride,” he said, bending over his horse’s neck. “Ride hard.”
She followed him, an empty mechanism. How had she done it? Until this morning came, she had somehow made herself believe that this morning would never come. She had known but she hadn’t known. How could anyone do that? How could you know something for a fact and ignore it? Antithetical to all rational thought.
Oathsfire’s men gave chase. She heard the Duke of Mills himself, screaming to her, and then the first bowshots hissing past.
Maybe, she thought, this has nothing to do with Lyxaxu or grief or understanding. Maybe they all agreed to kill me and Tain Hu and find their own queen. Ihuake, perhaps, married to Oathsfire. Better than two tribadists.
The whole world a dim play around her. Less real than the memory of Tain Hu.
New shapes in play ahead, though. Horsemen in red tabards and steel masks, bearing heavy crossbows. Masquerade marines—Apparitor’s marines. Rushing their way.
“Ride,” Apparitor shouted, his hair astream. “Think of what’s waiting for you! Think of your reward!” He spurred his horse ahead.
But she hesitated. She did not race for safety.
Think of what’s waiting for you.
Think of the Coyote-men, the Wolf, gray-bearded Xate Olake, the loyal guards, the ilykari divers, Tain Hu, Tain Hu, Tain Hu—
Why did it have to be this way? What had she ever done to bind herself to this outcome? She could have stayed in the camp and ordered a swift march north. She could have fractured her Wolf into its ducal pieces and sent them home, or run away with Tain Hu, fled into the Wintercrests. She could have found some way to betray her own betrayal. She was the key, after all, not the exhausted Wolf or the gathered rebel dukes; ultimately she was the vital weapon.
But then, of course, nobody would ever save Taranoke—
An arrow caught her exhausted rouncey in the rump. It screamed and fell, dragging its hind legs for a moment, toppling. She slammed to the earth, shouting, her head smashing around inside the loose-strapped helm.
A clean spring sky above. A gorgeous dawn.
If she wanted to die, she did not want it enough. Her body sprang to its feet, checking her sword, taking a few dizzy, spinning steps.
She looked up to see Duke Oathsfire roaring down on her, sword bare, wild hate and grief in his eyes.
A crossbow quarrel glanced off his horse’s champron. She had a moment to see him blink in surprise. The second punched through his chest. He slumped across the reins, blood bubbling at his lips, and then fell.
You will not die at Sieroch. Another lie she’d told. Small, in the counting of such things.
Good-bye, Baru thought, good-bye, and turned to look for the shooter, the marines riding down to her rescue. Saw Apparitor, hand outstretched, the man who had offered her exaltation at this terrible cost.
His eyes fixed on something behind her, where her helmet chopped off her peripheral vision. He opened his mouth to call warning.
Oathsfire’s guardsman rode down on her and his maul smashed the side of her helmet and closed her whole world like a door.
* * *
THE Apparitor had arranged his instruments perfectly.
Duchess Ihuake drank her morning soup, drank the tetrodotoxin the Clarified had used as seasoning, the foreign poison against which she had built no tolerance. Her compliments went to the cook—the new spice has left my lips numb—and then in morning council she slurred and fell and passed into paralysis and died. So passed the Cattle Duchess, who dreamt of a new hearthland where her people could be free.
Her spymaster went roaring among the cooks. “Who did this?” he cried. “Whose hand killed our duchess?”
“The hand that moves us all,” a chef’s assistant said, and hurled a pan of boiling oil into the spymaster’s face.
Pinjagata, the Duke of Phalanxes, reviewed his troops before the march, and though he labored to breathe through his battle-burnt lungs, they stood in their ranks and took pride in his nods. A pale smiling man in the first row dropped his spear and stepped out to knife him up under the chin. “Baru Cormorant keeps her own accounts,” he said.
The spearman duke died on his feet. He never saw his country at peace.
Chaos in the Wolf camp as the warhorses fell paralyzed.
Blood and smoke in the streets of Treatymont, as Admiral Ormsment’s soldiers stormed into rebel safe houses, poured acid into secret rooms.
In distant Erebog, where the Crone climbed her tower’s steps, weary and heartsick from her war against Autr and Sahaule, dreading the news from Sieroch, burdened by the memory of love gone cold and silent, a workman spilled stinking caustic oil all across her. She rushed to wash and at the first touch of water the oil caught spectacular fire, unquenchable, a furious sparking blaze, a killing flame. So passed winter-eyed Erebog, the only lord of Aurdwynn ever bold enough to reach north.
The Clarified meant for the duchess Vultjag could not find her target. Exiled, the duchess’s grim armsmen said. Gone north with Xate Olake. By order of the Fairer Hand.
Panic erupted in the Wolf camp. Word spread of a terrible plot—Oathsfire and Vultjag, secretly promised to each other, would overthrow Baru Fisher and rule Aurdwynn together. No! The Stakhieczi under the Necessary King were already marching down the Inirein, intent on completing their centuries-old conquest.
The Wolf looked to its master. Messengers scrambled. Deputies and lieutenants shouted, red-faced.
But Baru Fisher could not be found.
The decapitation was complete. The rest of the design was the harvest—a great many seeds to be scattered to the wind. The real prize, after all, was the legend of Sieroch, the secret knowledge revealed here. The knowledge of how the Masquerade might be defied, and to what result.
A red rocket went up from the peak of the Henge Hill. The Clarified concealed there raised spyglasses to watch the result.
From the mists of the swamplands to the south, their flat-bottomed pole barges abandoned miles behind, their pupils still wide with the mason leaf that had let them navigate the night, the first marines rose from ambush cover and began to march.
They chanted as they closed, as the sentries scrambled to raise the alarm or stood in paralyzed horror, a booming chorus, practiced on the ships, on the barges, rehearsed without understanding—for who among Falcrest’s marines spoke Iolynic?
SHE WAS OURS.
FROM THE BEGINNING. FROM THE FIRST DAY YOU SPOKE HER NAME.
FLEE TO YOUR FAMILIES. RUN TO YOUR HOMES. CARRY THE WORD: WE LOOKED OUT FROM BEHIND THE MASK OF HER. WE WILLED THE REBELLION’S BEGINNING. AND NOW WE WILL ITS END.
BARU CORMORANT IS AN AGENT OF THE THRONE.
* * *
SHE came back to consciousness in the stifling cabin of a navy warship, somehow convinced that she was asleep on a cushion of nothingness. Apparitor looked up from his chair, setting down a pen, closing a book in his lap. She caught a brief flash of a drawing: a man, slender, frowning, beautiful, his neck burnt. Unfinished.
Memory struck like a maul. The past is the real tyranny.
She had kindled the rebellion knowing she would snuff it. She’d promised herself her heart would not be drawn in.
But she had not made herself a fine enough machine.
“You can weep, if you need to,” Apparitor said. “I wept when I earned my own exaltation. I wept for what I had betrayed.”
She lifted herself on her hands, head swimming, staring down at the sheets tented over her breast and toes—and as Apparitor passed off to her right, he vanished. Not hidden from sight but gone.
Apparitor and his book and his chair and the whole right side of the cabin. Utterly absent.
By astonished reflex she looked to where he had been. The moment he crossed over to the left side of her face he came back, a discontinuous arrival, an apparition.
“No weeping? I see. Practiced at detachment, I suppose. The army gathered at Sieroch scattered, as we intended. Your work is done. Now others begin their tasks.” He held up his pen, frowning, making a mark in the air. “We suffered a troubling loss in those final days, you know. An agent among the ilykari priesthood, vital to our project in Aurdwynn. She was a master-of-secrets for the entire rebellion. I suspect Xate of sniffing her out and killing her. Did you find any hint that—what are you doing?”
Baru moved her nose left and right while he watched with furrowed brow. Left, right, left—and each time he crossed to the right side of her nose, he blinked out of existence.
“Bring me your doctors,” she croaked.
* * *
THEY have a clever technique. A favorite strategem of Xate Yawa, of the Masquerade, of the ruling power behind the Faceless Throne. The honeypot. Suspect sedition and unhygienic thought? Give it a warm place to gather. Let the word go out. See who scurries out to take the bait. See who offers them support, who launders their money, who hides their secrets.
But a favorite becomes predictable. New techniques must be developed. The science of rule must be extended.
Why wait for an inevitable rebellion? Why accept the risk of betrayal at a key strategic moment? Aurdwynn cannot be ruled. All its dukes and faiths and bloodlines present a terrible puzzle. A sick system, unprofitable, unwilling to change to meet the demands of Incrastic development.
If you want to avoid a great fire, burn the deadwood. You only need a suitable spark.
A spark who understands that a quick and failed revolution now would be more humane than a bloodbath in ten years. Someone who looks to a more distant horizon. Craves a higher power, even at terrible, unanticipated price.
And next time Aurdwynn sees that spark, next time it raises its hands toward the heat, it will remember: last time, we were burned.
In Falcrest, in the Metademe, they condition prisoners just so: permit escape. Offer a rescuer, a collaborator. Slip a key in with the food. Let them come close to freedom, let them feel real triumph—they would not let me this far! This is the crux: give them the taste of victory, the certainty that this cannot be part of the game.
And then snatch it away. The collaborator betrays them. The key will not open the outermost door.
With enough repetition, most prisoners learn to ignore a key, an open door, a whisper to run. Led out onto the street, they will wait to be returned to their cells.
After a time, they begin to teach new prisoners the same.