The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

She stood at the prow and watched the dawn, trying to see the curve of the world, to imagine it turning beneath the sun, the great patterns of trade and sickness and heredity and force moving on its face. The very ink and grammar of history. Driven by and made from and ultimate master of hundreds of millions of people. The question and the answer:

WHEN her control faltered it let slip rage: jaw-splitting, teeth-breaking, thought-killing anger, minute and obsessive in its detail, omnivorous in its appetite. Anger at every choice and circumstance that had brought the world to this unacceptable state. Fury against causality. And as she traced the chain, the knot, the map of all the roads that had brought Muire Lo to ash in the forest—at the center of the map, between the thickets of empire and revolt, she came, again and again, to herself. Her fury had nothing else to eat and so it began to eat her. She sat at her table with her trembling pen and wrote nothing.

Baru raised her hand to smash the wineglass. Checked herself, checked even her trembling, and stood there in absurd pantomime, too firmly in control of her anger to move, too deeply angry for anything but stillness.

The terror that took Baru came from the deepest part of her soul. It was a terror particular to her, a fundamental concern—the apocalyptic possibility that the world simply did not permit plans, that it worked in chaotic and unmasterable ways, that one single stroke of fortune, one well-aimed bowshot by a man she had never met, could bring total disaster. The fear that the basic logic she used to negotiate the world was a lie. Or, worse, that she herself could not plan: that she was as blind as a child, too limited and self-deceptive to integrate the necessary information, and that when the reckoning between her model and the pure asymbolic fact of the world came, the world would devour her like a cuttlefish snapping up bait.