The Traitor by Seth Dickinson

Author:Seth Dickinson [Dickinson, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447281177
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Beetle Prophet stopped to take on reports on the progress of tax season. Baru read them nervously. She was certain that Bel Latheman had told Cattlson about her tax rider, the innocuous question she’d asked every noble and commoner in Aurdwynn: whom do you love best?

Muire Lo’s reports were full of numbers, small tiles prised out of a vast buckling mosaic. Unrest sputtered across Aurdwynn—serfs rebelling against dukes, mobs snapping at tax collectors, garrison troops dealing harsh retaliation. In particular there was great tension in the Midlands, where Nayauru Dam-builder and Ihuake the Cattle Lord each suffered terrible raids by mysterious bandits that withdrew back into the other’s territory.

The weave of rule beginning to fray.

Baru unrolled a map of Aurdwynn and began to paint it in her secret knowledge.

Her tax rider asked the payer to divide ten notes between the local duke, Governor Cattlson, Jurispotence Xate, and herself. She pulled the results from Muire Lo’s reports, quite pleased with her instrument, and painted her map in colors of loyalty—

The red of Imperial Navy sails for towns or duchies that slanted toward the Governor. (Mostly this was Duchy Heingyl).

Forest green, Aurdwynn green, for areas that kept loyalties to their own dukes. Vultjag’s people loved her, and Unuxekome’s, too; but not those of gentle Radaszic or (hm!) clever Lyxaxu and, most of all, Erebog, the Crone in Clay, all of whom suffered in deep debt. . . .

And then blue, great runs of sky blue and sea blue, whatever excited inconstant blue she grabbed from her paint pots, for the areas that loved her.

No one favored Jurispotence Xate, of course. But her power did not require popularity.

So Baru had what she wanted: a map of Aurdwynn’s loyalty, as seen through the lens of one kind of power, the power she best controlled. Now all she needed was an empirical test, proof that she could turn the blue on the map into shouting commoners on the streets. . . .

When Beetle Prophet came to the mouth of the river Inirein, the mighty Bleed of Light that ran down from the Wintercrests and marked the eastern border of Aurdwynn, she went ashore with Duke Unuxekome and walked the streets of Welthony, his capital. On the map she’d painted it blue and green.

Word went out through the streets ahead of her, first by whisper, then by shout, then by riders up the river to the duke’s house. She strode up the riverwalk with her chained purse at her side, and the people of Welthony, no friend of Cattlson or the Masquerade, turned out from their labor to cry in Iolynic and Aphalone: A fairer hand! A fairer hand!

Unuxekome walked with her, smiling, bare-headed, his Maia bones proudly unmasked. “My ship has brought good news,” he told his gate guard. “She’s not here on audit!”

“I grew up in the sea,” she told the armsmen, invoking Taranoke and her own Maia blood. “But I never thought to meet her groom.”

And the watching crowd roared approval, as blue as the map predicted, pleased that this foreigner knew the meaning of their duke’s name.

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