The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

“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 cheetahs, after the Palaces fall, and the cats cry in their crumbling halls. The shattered fragments of the empire can no longer specialize. The cities cannot get food from the farms, the farms cannot get goods and security from the cities, everyone must produce everything they need locally. Starving people leave the cities, carrying disease. Without a food surplus, there can be no priests, which means no temples, no more organized belief, maybe no more records or writing. People who cannot get what they need by commerce turn to raiding and war. The survivors diminish into the wilderness, and forget. It is a slow, complicated thing.