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November 27 - November 28, 2024
A thousand years of scars all opening at once. And we’ll only have to wait for the right time to move in and save them. That’s how it works, Baru, 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.”
It was a night for doubt and fear, for cutting off old scabs to patch over new wounds. And in the dark hours of that night, hours when hyenas come to beg for their wage of meat, the young Federal Prince Tau-indi Bosoka grieved for the war they had brought on their people.
Who ever heard of an avenger satisfied? Even one?
“You wanted to be alone. You wanted to be hurt. You think you have to be miserable alone, so everyone will know you’re too noble to put your misery on them. But you want us to know you’re miserable. Your favorite thing in the world is to be too hurt for anyone to help.”
“We’ll be heroes.” An electrum glitter of ambition in her smile, like expensive cutlery before a meal. “I’ll have a post in the Admiralty.” “I expect you will,” Baru said. But she knew she was lying. Her women did not survive.
“I wish I were a linguist,” Baru said, out of the nervous need to speak. “You would know more ways to lie.”
Tau stood as if all their bones had worn through sinew and ligament to click together like dice.
“You need me to be your little amphora, your bottle of reserve goodness, to shatter and use up. You’ve been dying a slow death since you killed Hu. You need to take another soul to finish your work. Only it’ll never be done. You’ll always need more. And no matter what you do here, Baru, I expect that by some strange coincidence it will end up being what Mister Cairdine Farrier wants. Don’t you think so, too?”
Each moment she annihilates herself. Each moment she destroys all that she is and yet the need to avenge her cousin re-forms from the nothingness as if it is now axiomatic to the universe like gravity or the first winter frost.
There is only one way to escape the masters of manipulation.” “What’s that?” “Chaos.” Shir stands and grips Hu’s letter in her two fists. “When everything is as violent and disordered as the world in its primal state, nothing remains for the master to manipulate. Man may enslave man. But never will he ever master fire. If you want freedom, be as fire.”
“The weather changes in the same years the sea people come to raid. A rebellion breaks out and a plague spreads in the chaos, or a war empties the treasury just as a weak ruler falls. Too many things go wrong at the same time. The empire fails to make the only two things that can sustain an empire’s existence. Conquest, or commerce. “Without force or finance to hold the empire together, it begins to fragment. The administrators withdraw their power, and the warriors carve up what they leave behind. The elite class vanishes, overthrown or reduced to common poverty: there is no one to tend the
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“Because cancer is the aristocracy of the body. It captures the means of growth for its own use. It convinces the body to serve it, and delivers nothing in return. If it grows too much it brings the whole body down.”
She loved women only when that love was deniable and doomed. Farrier had taught her so. How could she have missed it? What had she told herself even as she chose Tain Hu to be her queen? I will destroy myself if I choose. On this one day I will not deny what I am.
Under the dawn light she struck me as rather lovely, in a brooding, self-absorbed sort of way. You would not know, looking at her, that she was a drunken monster addicted to the suffering of others. But you would know, probably, that she was difficult. She tried to turn her head. The right side of her face had swollen up where she’d struck it in a fall. She seemed to be recovering from ergot; what a remarkable sign of her character that the Cancrioth had tried to poison her after just a few hours of her company.
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.
“No, child. Your obsession was with a woman. Through study and obsession you have built inside yourself the soul of Tain Hu.”
There was a sorrow in Baru now, huge and edged and the opposite of brittle, beaten and alloyed into her and made sharp to cut. It hurt to look at her. Because you saw how much happier she might have been, in another world.
“I’m really very clever,” Barhu whispered. “You should have been a student.” Ormsment sighed. “Everyone would’ve been so much happier.”
She would be famous for it, Tau realized. Famous for charisma and compulsion, for the way you felt when you looked at her, as if you desperately wanted to be worthy of her thoughts. And she knew it, had known it for years. What a terrible wonder to know your own beauty, without shame, and to set it to use, for yourself and for your duty.
Svir sat deep in his hammock now, back straight against the wall, staring out at the two women as if from the bottom of a grave.
excellent imagery
“THIS is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” Yawa said. “And I include the sequence of events that nearly made me lobotomize you.”
Barhu knew, knew in the gnawing way that you remember all those looming problems you shove into the back closets of the mind, that she had lost the thread of her grand plan. The next step was upon Eternal, not here. But she had to know how to end Falcrest without simply murdering it. How to butcher an empire. How to do it cleanly, and to end up with useful and nutritious parts.
No matter the cause, these were people doing evil. To absolve them of guilt would be to deny their humanity, to deny that they had some intrinsic dignity and moral independence which only they could choose to surrender. To say that these people were doing monstrous things entirely of their own monstrous nature was to deny Falcrest’s immense historical crimes. But to say that these people were doing monstrous things solely because Falcrest had made them into monsters was to grant Falcrest the power to destroy the soul: to permanently remove the capacity for choice.
One day, Baru, you will not be able to blame all the evil humans undertake upon Our Republic. And what will you do then? I will continue to blame you for the evil that is yours!
He saw the woman leading the attack, and his voice went from him. “Tsuni el-tsun,” he whispered: god of gods. And you could see why men would call on gods to stop her. She skipped down the slope like a thistle, all points and no center, obsidian-tipped spears bundled on her back. Bounding from stone to black smooth stone as the atlatl in her hand bobbed to a secret rhythm.
tain shir the Thing that you are
“It’s her,” Ake whispered, “it’s her, I saw her poisoned, I saw her go into the water. How is she alive?” “I don’t know.” As if she had been called back to the world by the massacre here. As if the wall between life and death were too thin.
The killing woman turned toward her. Blue unblinking eyes, ragged bloodsoaked body. Like a red-muzzled wolf. She reached back for a spear. Barhu put up her wounded right hand. “I have Tain Hu’s soul,” she called. “I’m carrying her eryre. Do you know what that means?” Tain Shir raised the atlatl with the spear fixed in it. “I’m telling the truth! Ask your aunt—ask Ake here—” Tain Shir stepped and twisted and threw.
This is why Baru needs her. Baru can play games of strategy with the very masters of those games. But in the end she cannot do what Shir is capable of doing. She cannot reach across the board and cut the other player’s throat. You cannot destroy the masters by mastering them. You destroy them by destroying.
The woman Barhu spoke to, the maker of fires and cooker of crabs, was just gauze across a wound. The thing unmastered rose in silence and the crab’s huge shell in her hands made a groan like a cracking skull. Barhu did not flinch away: only looked up in wonder and horrified awe at this unnameable unorderable Object that loomed above her like the black wreck of an eclipse moon.
And there was no other living woman in the world who had done anything as intimate to Barhu as chopping off two of her fingers.
your taste has been nosediving baru
“You know Baru?” the voice asked, quietly. Its whole character had become wary, thoughtful, interested. “Know her? I’m her sworn protector. I’m her knight! The Duchess Vultjag made me her knight! Fuck with me, and you’re fucking with Tain Hu!”
He’d tried to lead his people to that future. But to get to the future you had to get through the present, just as you had to risk the jagged slopes to get to those warm fields below. And the present had its strangling hand round his throat.
A woman lost to procht, the sickly thought of schemers.
But no matter how much he wanted her, he was a Stakhieczi king, and self-denial came as easily to him as thirst. Love maddened him, made him stupid—but so did starvation. And like starvation it would pass in a few months.
Baru, intellectually calibrated and mentally awakened to the highest planes of aesthetic and philosophical appreciation, stared at her tits.
“Then I will say what she is trying to tell you. Everything ends. Everything will end and you cannot fear that. But you must decide what the endings will mean.”
Scheme-Colonel sighed. “Where are you taking me? If I didn’t want you to know, I’d lie. If I wanted you to know, I’d tell you. If anyone put a moment’s thought into the realities of their situation, they’d stop asking that question. But they never do. It’s always where are you taking me. Why doesn’t someone ask why I’m taking them? Or how I took them, so at least they could improve their security?” “You kidnap a lot of people?”
THEIR dromon sailed toward Kutulbha through a green sea scummed with ash. Tau woke in the night to the sound of the prow parting corpses. The rowers coughed so much that Tau couldn’t get back to sleep. Fat sharks circled with grins full of human meat, and the black sky lowered limbs of ash to feed from the funerary water. They sailed between two plates of death and they were like one torch moving across a charred savannah under a starless sky. The principles in Kutulbha were the principles of a tomb. No, Tau-indi thought, that was wrong. A tomb was, after all, a place people made to consecrate
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incredible imagery
Here they found the sleek shapes of Masquerade frigates, red-sailed, like the wings of a bloody carrion bird peering up from its feast. On their decks engines of fire and racks of rocket arrows waited for orders to kill.
“Before principles,” these Princes said, “we had a god whose brain is a tumor, whose eyes protrude on horns of cancer, whose pregnancy swells forever. Let us break the lead seals and the clay tablets. Let us set that god on Falcrest.” Tau-indi saw in their eyes a burning woman with green hands and too many green eyes, and wanted to scream.
It was, Tau thought, very Oriati to feel more guilt for the wound in their own conduct than anger at Falcrest’s aggression. It was a noble thing to constantly ask yourself to be better. But it could also be arrogant, self-involved, oblivious. As if everything that mattered was ultimately about Oriati people and their conduct. As if they were so powerful, so central to the world, that only they could be blamed for their own defeat.
Tau-indi took the pen. A treaty was a spell to force the human world to obey a truth that existed only in paper. There was no reason to accept the world the treaty described as true, except that Falcrest had made continued war a part of any other world.
“I believe you, now. I even believe that in your own pathological and frightening way you loved her.
She was the Brain: she was as ancient as thought. She had known her whole life the awful appetite of the baneflesh, and the power of a child who repudiated his mother. Not with all her will and all her pain could she stop herself from knowing those things.
“I need to convince a woman to marry me,” Barhu said, recklessly, “in the eyes of a culture that might accept I’m a man. I need her to leave her husband for me, and then, after she marries me, I need her to marry a king. All extraordinarily unhygienic. All vital to the Imperial Republic’s future. Can you help me do it?” “Your Excellence,” Iscend said, coming one step down the stairs, “I can help you achieve whatever you desire.”
Instead Iscend said, levelly, “Your Excellence, if you must indulge a vice which could compromise you, then you should indulge it with a woman who can be trusted. A woman whose entire purpose is your betterment and success.”
extremely problematically sexy of you iscend
And Governor Heingyl would be a good chaperone. Barhu had spent too much time longing for women in forests to trust herself around Iscend. She had made a very firm resolution to never touch the Clarified woman. But she had betrayed oaths before.
okay i promised to not fall for her charms. but i am an oathbreaker, so I really can't trust that. real
“Sex is a useful tool in espionage. It makes people talk. It can draw them into error, which can be leveraged. Sex is one of the basic elements of blackmail, and blackmail is one of the One Trade’s nine methods for running an agent.”
Barhu was so absurdly turned on by this, the idea of unpinning Clarified conditioning with sheer force of lust, that she almost, almost gave in.
Barhu was about to scoff. And then she thought, why, I’ve never asked my illusion of Hu to tell me anything that only Hu could’ve known. Because I know it’s not really Hu. Aren’t I, though? You never knew the real Hu; you knew your mind’s own awareness of her. Does it matter if that awareness comes from within or from without if one is true to the other? What I carry is the image I’ve made of Hu, my record of her beliefs and the method of her choices. It’s the law of being Hu: and that is enough for me to carry and to tap for strength. Isn’t that a soul?
