The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

And she hears that traitor hitch of compassion in his breath, spoor of his hidden weakness: she finds herself salivating, because she wants so badly to get a claw into that hidden wound and tear it bloody.

that was just proof that victory required sacrifice.

that’s how it’s always worked, cracking open a new province. Stoke their problems with each other, find the cracks and widen them: like tapping an egg on the edge of the dish. And then sell them the solution. They’ll buy it from you and thank you for it.”

at dawn they rose, put on their bravery like a caftan,

the septic need for vengeance,

What’s talking except the choice of when to breathe?”

“I wish I were a linguist,” Baru said, out of the nervous need to speak. “You would know more ways to lie.”

Tain Hu had seen the worst of her and stayed loyal. Tau had seen the worst of her, and now they were telling her exactly what they saw.

“Once,” Baru said, hollowly, “there were hardly any chairs in the world at all. I remember that from History of Materialism. The only chairs were thrones. Ordinary people sat on benches.”

She wanted to claw her own skin right off, peel back her fingernails and prod the soft places beneath until pain made her move—stop pulling at your own fingers and get up! Get up!

They looked, Tau thought, like suicides.

This, Abdumasi was thinking. This is what we become when we are desperate. We grow thorns from our skin, we shout ancient words, and we beg our people to stay away from us. For we cannot be bent from our purpose, which is revenge.

There was not much difference at the time: magic and philosophy were both ways to manipulate symbols to create effect.

If the moon could die and live again, could people?

I’d see Aphalone written only on tombstones.”

“You released the worst disease in recorded history on innocents.” “I am giving them a chance to use their own bodies as weapons. Do you deny them the chance to fight the enemy on its own terms?” “You call that fighting on Falcrest’s terms?” “Yes, absolutely I do.

Imagine an idea like a disease. It spreads because it makes people happy. It makes them happy by convincing them to be content with what they have … can you imagine a greater threat to our destiny? A more terrible fate than pleasant, blissful decay?

To us a soul is not a great ineffable mystery. People are, after all, not very mysterious. A soul is simply the text of a person’s inner law, and a mind is the act of reading that law into the world.

Scald yourself, Juris, and remember by the burn that the world is full of tricks.

I am the consequence.”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Her voice was almost motherly. Maybe devoting your whole being to someone’s end was a little like devoting yourself to their beginning.

“Power can’t be separated from its history. A choice can’t be taken in isolation from its context. Power is the ability to set the terms of the riddle. To arrange the rewards and punishments by which the choice is judged.”

True power was not the ability to conduct a killing or a business deal or an assignation but to alter the context by which those acts were judged and evaluated.

I’ve forgotten how … really, I’ve never been alone. Aminata helped me in school. And then there was Muire Lo, and Tain Hu, and you. And Lyxaxu, and Unuxekome, and Pinjagata … Xate Olake saved my life when Lyxaxu came to kill me. You saved my life when Oathsfire ambushed us. I just let myself think, somehow, that I’d done it all myself, that I was…” “That you were a solitary savant, a bright star in the dark?” “Yeah.”