The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

In Baru’s eyes she was a coil of storm surf, a thunderbolt, as slow and powerful as sunlight. Her dark eyes and the teeth in her smile were the shapes that Baru imagined when she read about panthers.

“Because if I understand my figures, that means you are taking all the things we use to trade with others, and giving us paper that is only good with you.”

I must learn why this happened to Salm, Baru thought. I must understand it, so I can stop it from ever happening again. I will not cry. I will understand.

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.

“The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast. But—” Later she would hold to this moment, because it felt that he had offered her something true and grown-up and powerful rather than a lie to shield her. “When the joining is done there will be a sea for you to swim in.”

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

Go, then. Learn all their secrets. Cover yourself in them. You will return with a steel mask instead of a face.

While she had waited behind the walls of the school, her home had been conquered.

The Masquerade had taught her all the names of sin. But her parents taught her first. And she knew in her heart, in the habits of her eyes and thoughts, what she was.

Aurdwynn has such a deep and fractious history … it is difficult to fit those pieces together into something that will not break again.”

No ship could be hired, no land developed, no army raised without some money changing hands. These books were Baru’s spyglass, her map, her sword and edict.

“You’ve always been bored by history. It’s your greatest weakness.”

A man who does not know who he is cannot have self-interest. Without family or wealth to lure him from the common good, he would rule fairly.

“The coronation of the Emperor is simpler than that—it involves a pick through the eye socket and a great deal of drool. But the mob believes in the potion. They believe in the Mask. They think the vegetable on the Faceless Throne is one of them.”

The man seemed to operate on a drunkard’s theory of loans: why not one more?

How far away were those springs? The sky printed in the still water? Dark young stone down in the deep like the shadow of caldera gods? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t manage the geography or trigonometry with her pounding headache. Forever far. Unreachable.

in Falcrest prisoners are permitted to escape their cells, permitted to reach the streets, only to be recaptured. Again and again. So that they will learn that escape is always an illusion.”

For a while Baru didn’t notice how closely she’d been observing the other woman. Perhaps this was self-deception: once noticed, it would have to be controlled.

Hu replied that the ancient Tu Maia had invented heavy cavalry and the horse-drawn plow, and that it had given them half the known world, but only for a time.

Not with a staff of a hundred and a sleepless year could she bring this under control.

Passing in different worlds became second nature. First nature, perhaps: what else was she? What loyalty did she really have behind the mask?

“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.” “How could I? How could anyone? They rule by coin and chemistry and the very words we speak. Falcrest’s power is vast, patient, resilient. No little rebellion will last.” Baru shook her head. “The only way forward is through. From within.”

“Any price,” Baru rasped, each word a debit, a loss in her account books: secrets given for no advantage, for no reason except that her heart moved her to speak them. Her traitor heart. “Any sacrifice. It is the only way to take a piece of their power for our own.”

In the absence of direction, claim and expand the freedom to act as you will.”

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. Aurdwynn is not civilized enough for subtlety.”

Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.”

Because I know you’re selfish, calculating, and farsighted, and when you find no way forward through the Falcresti maze, you’ll resort to tearing it down. I knew it even when you ruined my counterfeits. I knew you’d tire of the chains.”

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.

“You have Xate Yawa on your side, in the same way I have the sea on mine. The sea takes no side. Be careful about pinning all your plans on her.”

(perhaps this was a habit of the nobility, born into power, unconditioned to secrecy and meticulous self-containment—a habit of those who never had to earn their station).

Baru smiled bravely at Muire Lo, lying, shutting him out, closing him like a book of things already known.

“What concerns me the most,” she said (the topic of the new name had come up, that ugly word Sousward), “is just this—that in making your culture ours we have overlooked some strength, some primal vitality that might have bettered us. What use a republic of nations if we make them all the same?”

“Once she is in us we will not get her out. She will be like a tick. She will grow fat on us and we will never dig her free.” “She’s earned her place.”

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

They were all watching her now, silent, respectful, and it gave her the same thrill she had felt auditing the Fiat Bank, speaking to Purity Cartone, hearing the adulation of the crowd—the shock of power.

war is a contest of wills. The will of the people breaks when war makes them too miserable to do anything but acquiesce. We can turn that will to us.”

“This is how your conquerors overcame you. This is their strength.”

Duchy Lyxaxu is not your coin. Do you understand? My home is mine. When it comes time to sacrifice—spend another.”

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

“You must appear a master,” she insisted. “They would forgive an Aurdwynni a missed shot, forgive a man who struggled to string. But never you. Your errors will be written on your blood and sex. You must be flawless.”

Curiosity came over Baru as instantly and powerfully as conditioned fear, and the mixture made her laugh.

“There is a balance,” Tain Hu said, “seen everywhere in nature. It takes many prey to support a predator. We have brought too many predators to Duchy Nayauru.”

I would not waste my finest sword on a task better fit for poison.”

I know what I want. Tain Hu’s eyes, empty as a storm night.

The trouble with philosophy, Lyxaxu had said, was that it so often failed to survive a test.

A deeper drunkenness had taken him, the exhilaration of an old man who had planned to die before he saw his dreams made real, and then, one morning, found those resignations undone.

“Hu,” Baru began, grappling with chains of implication and consequence, trying to set the incendiary impossible words one after another without detonating the whole thing, trying to find a way out, a way to stop, a way to go on. A bridge across the bottomless, red-haired chasm.

Freedom granted by your rulers is just a chain with a little slack.

“I am done with care.” Baru rose. “I will go across the Sieroch alone if I must, and face them with only the dawn at my back. But I will go.”