The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.

She was powerless without her patrons. Could power be real if someone else gave it to you?

“I have a theory,” Tain Hu said, “regarding your attention to birds.” “Oh?” “It’s the only tongue of your homeland that you can still hear spoken aloud.”

“Money is only one kind of power. Faith is power, too. Love is power. Slaughter and madness are both roads to power. Certainly, symbols are power—you wear one wherever you go, that purse you carry. And you wear others when you decide how to dress yourself, how to look at men and women, how to carry your body and direct your gaze. And all these symbols can raise people to labor or war.”

“I am Baru Cormorant,” she protested, “accountant, and I earned my place by merit. I am a mark of nothing except myself.” “As long as you believe that is all you are, you will never be anything but a piece of the machine.”

“Do you duel?” “Not with you, Your Excellence!”

My mother was a loyalist during the Fools’ Rebellion; so was my father, although his loyalist was the other kind. They both called themselves loyalist, you see.

” She laughed, meaning to sound hollow, regretful, but it came out a husky boast.

“Why do you hide everything? I want to see laughter, or tears, not a second sort of mask.” And Baru thought: if I am going to Falcrest to win the secrets of empire, I must be entirely devoted to it, outside and in. I must be able to hide any emotion, pretend to be anyone. If there is rebellion in my heart, a rebellion of huntress mothers with man-killing spears come to find their vanished husbands, well, I must be ready with acid and steel mask. But she answered: “I spend too much time with numbers.”

“You will find no power behind the mask.” Cold, rooted conviction in Tain Hu’s voice. “It will wear you. It will eat your face away. You would do more for your home if you tore it all down.”

“Civilization must endure,” the Apparitor said, as if reading her thoughts in her eyes. “At all costs, the Empire must survive. The lives our sanitation and discipline will save, the victories we will win against disease and disorder in the centuries to come—they justify any brutality. We must have control. Control by any means.”

What I’ve found to be the case with you technocrats”—he took up her wineglass and sniffed at it—“is that you respect subtlety overmuch. You obsess over whispers and rumors and intangible marks of authority, and fail to consider what will happen when a man with a knife breaks into your rooms and cuts your throat.

“No rebellion can succeed without winning over the cautious and the self-interested. The zealous rebels and firm loyalists must attract the middle.

So this was what it took to rob her of her cool, of the careful deliberation that had carried her through ballrooms and plots and sorties with her enemy. Just a powerful man shouting in her face.

“I remember mornings like this used to smell like shit. We had awful sewers, and everything would back up into the streets when it rained.” “And now?” “The Masquerade rebuilt them while I was gone.” He shrugged. “No more sewage fog on summer mornings. But you have a hot bath at the top of a tower, so I suppose you’re not impressed.”

It’s not what the Masquerade does to you that you should fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It’s what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.

Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom.

Better a woman of divided loyalties than one of no loyalty at all. Better a reluctant traitor than the terror of a true sociopath.

Her fury had nothing else to eat and so it began to eat her.

The Coyote was an army at service, a reverse brigand, bursting out of the woods to raid the innocent with money and safety and hope.

“Would you have me pretend to be a man, as you once did? Is that the only way to keep their respect?” “Go to one of those women,” Tain Hu said, “and ask her how she was spoken of when she left her lover, or took a second, or never had one at all.” “I have made brothers of these men. Not lovers.” The Duchess Vultjag, her hair unbound, her shoulders rolling beneath her leather and mail, shook her head ruefully. “You have been given a permit of brotherhood, Baru Fisher, and you have no say in when they will revoke it, or why.”

That old sick joy, her first and favorite drug. Control.

“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?”

Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive. A matter of deception, of conviction, of lies made true through performance. Like everything else.

I used to wonder if you were a monster. Now I know the answer. If you want power in this world, power enough to change it, it seems you have to be.