The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

Watching the red-sailed warship in Iriad harbor, Baru asked: “Mother, why do they come here and make treaties? Why do we not go to them? Why are they so powerful?” “I don’t know, child,” mother Pinion said. It was the first time Baru could ever remember hearing those words from her.

And he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, 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.

The island of her childhood was gone. It had died in pus and desperation while she took lessons behind white walls.

She spoke with love, unafraid of winters, of dead sons.

“As long as you believe that is all you are, you will never be anything but a piece of the machine.” “A piece can change the whole. It may take patience, or sacrifice, but—” “This machine? Better to break it, and build something new.”

“There will come a time,” Ake said softly, “when this city will not remember a time before the Masquerade. They will be in our language, and our homes, and our blood.”

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 look like a painted gargoyle. What did you see?” “Hope,” Baru said. “Oh?” “The people can still see their shackles. The Masquerade rules them, but it has not yet made them want to be ruled. The chains are not yet invisible.”

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

“No war has ever been won by slaughtering the enemy wholesale.”

She had always loved the stars. But in the desert of winter it was impossible to forget that they were cold, and distant, and did not care.

The words tribadist and sodomite, the things they mean and define, came later. Before those words there were only people.”

With them came another column, naked of shield, painted in red, trembling at their leash. Lyxaxu’s Student-Berserkers. Tain Hu gave them their word. They screamed axioms of nihilist self-negation as the drugs in their blood peeled their eyeballs open. When they got in among the unarmored Nayauru bowmen the sound and spray that rose was abominable.

“But what of the men of Falcrest, the men in masks?” “Slash their tendons,” the Fairer Hand ordered. “Let Cattlson drown in his own cripples.”

But Lyxaxu’s howling Student-Berserkers entered his camp and began to rope themselves in the entrails of disemboweled men and horses.

They were killing each other in brawls, coughing up their lungs, choking up the Inirein with their bloody shit and the sky with the ash of their corpses. An army in camp was a terrible thing.

“Hold or you’re dead. You and everyone you love.”

Once battle was joined, once they locked in full shield-press, there would be no easy disengagement or maneuver. The line would be drawn, its center and its flanks set. They would have to stab each other to death until someone broke and ran, or until cavalry swept down on the flank or rear and ended them.

But I will not be bound as you are. I will walk among your council and you will tremble at what you have unleashed.