The Traitor Baru Cormorant_The Masquerade by Seth Dickinson

Author:Seth Dickinson [Dickinson, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466875128
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2015-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

18

THE slaughter in Welthony harbor ran through the dawn.

Aurdwynni spearmen patrolled the shore and, laughing, cast from boats at the sailors in the water. Most of the Falcresti drowned before they made it to shore. Others swarmed up the nets of the four surviving transports—spared by mines that missed or failed to detonate. Duke Unuxekome’s archers took their own sport with them. Pitch arrows started fires on the decks and rigging, but disciplined Masquerade crews with sand, knives, and jars of old urine kept them from spreading.

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.

And she would have to do it again, and again.…

She’d mapped out her schemes from here to Falcrest. Everything had been put into its place, every detail considered. So why had Mannerslate exploded first? Why not second? Why not third? It had to mean something—

Of course it didn’t.

Baru tried to exhale the whole tangle. Chance, coincidence: they would have their say. She had to remember that.

“They’ll try for a breakout,” Duke Unuxekome murmured.

But there was no way out. Unuxekome’s dromons and tartanes, waiting in coves and inlets nearby, had blockaded the harbor mouth.

Cordsbreath, one of the four survivors, took on water and eventually sank. Unuxekome’s elite dive sappers—middle-aged women in loincloths, chewing young mason leaves to dilate their pupils—swam out into the starlit harbor, crying prayers to ykari Himu. The handheld mines they planted brought down two more transports.

The last tax ship tried to run the blockade, hit another Oriati mine, and sank prow-first.

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.

Eight transports had—as planned—split in half, spilling cargo across the harbor floor. The chests were bright red, heavy but designed to be moved long distances on land, by foot if necessary. Divers (still all women—coastal Aurdwynn held to the Tu Maia tradition of diving as a woman’s work) went down into the harbor with ropes and stones. Some vanished into the wrecks for heart-stopping minutes.

Chest by chest they fixed ropes and buoys, and chest by chest they began to raise them. Some came up by pulley and muscle, hauled by boat teams. Swarms of divers went after the rest of the easy targets, descending with bundles of air bladders weighed down by rocks, fixing the bladders to the chests, and cutting the ballast free.

Baru itched to go down to the harbor, to help make a tally of the recovered wealth or count the dead, to pin her sick anxiety to some real number. But they’d agreed that she would pretend, for the moment, to be Unuxekome’s prisoner.

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