The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

“Of course I die. I’m not the kind of immortal who never dies, Baru. Just the kind who lives forever.”

King’s balls. Barhu was arguing history with an immortal.

Her voice climbed to that old plaintive cry: why doesn’t the universe know I’m right?

Now a clock was shouting at her. Barhu must be in that dream about Iscend again, where they agreed to have sex but first Iscend’s clockwork had to be wound up and Barhu couldn’t figure out how. “Mmf,” she grunted, putting her face into the sack of beans she used as a pillow. “Unethical.”

After their first and only time together, all curiosity satisfied, he’d vanished from Aminata’s awareness as a sexual thing. Become a kind of warm directional illumination, like a slat of sun.

“She’s about to ruin it,” Pinion grunted. “I can tell. She’s going to tell us something awful.” “You don’t know that,” Solit protested. “Just because she’s trying to be sweet doesn’t mean she’s going to do something which will torture us in the small hours of the night for years to come, as we wonder whether we did something wrong, something that drove her away from us.”

“Barhu!” Solit called, from the river pump where he was drawing water. As if moved by trim: “There’s a woman here! She says she’s your lover!” Barhu was immediately and excruciatingly embarrassed. “It’s not Shao Lune, is it?” “Who’s Shao Lune?” Solit repeated, innocently. “There’s another one?”

Barhu wondered if her parents would be proud or concerned that she was sitting here beside her half-naked lover arguing arctic survival tactics.

SHE passed a compartment strewn with pots, each full of carefully sorted shards of human bone. The dark beyond smelled powerfully of glue. She raised her lantern. Light fell across something the size of a boulder, jigsawed together from curved pieces of bone. It was a tremendous human skull, half-made, unfinished from the jaw down except for two mounds of glue where a lower jaw might hinge. Hundreds of teeth grinned in a white arc, incisors and canines and molars grouped together, tribes of allied bite. “I hate this fucking place,” she said. But she was lying.

The thought of Eternal detonating in a clean blast of fire, swallowing Aminata and Iraji and Tau and everyone else aboard, simplifying them into ash, made Aminata profoundly horny. So there was the next symptom Tau had predicted.

Space shattered and knotted around her. Compartments and passageways tangled like intestines. The datura smoke was a thick ground fog now, and things like centipedes rose from it to taste her ankles. Silhouetted fighters screamed at each other in fury. She was not afraid. This was battle: seven parts trying to find out where to go and what to do, two parts shouting, and one part horrific, irrevocable violence.

Aminata saw and felt only red, but she didn’t need to see, didn’t need to think, she was fighting from her spine. She wrapped her legs around Masako’s waist, put her forearms in front of her face to block his next blow, and threw all her weight to the left. Use your legs, her master-at-arms whispered, use all your body, or die.

All words were sorcery. If enough people believed in words, in a language or a treaty or an Antler Stone, then the words could change the whole world. Faster and further than fire.

“Abdu,” she said, “what are you doing?” “I’m home!” Abdumasi shouted. “Back from my adventures in revenge! Got tortured, got cancer, got paralyzed, now here I am!”

He’d grown a short dark beard, close-shaved and aggressive. He wore a silk sherwani that showed nothing and suggested everything. His trousers must’ve been tailored to the exact contours of his perfect ass; you could not quite see his cock but you could tell he wore it left. He was magnificent. He horrified me.

Naturally Shao Lune has arranged to be her guide: Baru is certain that Shao simply forgets when things don’t go her way, and proceeds as if the universe has been amended, retroactively and completely, in her favor.

“When you’re dead,” Baru says, with rising delight, a wicked joy, “I’m going to take a pass at your secret daughter. I’ll have her to a very charming dinner. I’ll flirt with her over iced vodka and blackberries. I’ll compliment her on her poise. When we get up to leave, I’ll slip an arm around her waist and ask her if she’d like to see my houseboat. And who knows what’ll happen? Who knows? Not you. You’ll be in a little garret, writing letters for me, selling yourself piece by piece so I’ll let you live another day.”