The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

“Svir,” she said. “Svir. Just because you hate your own home, just because you’d let the Stakhieczi starve and rot rather than let Lindon or Iraji be hurt, doesn’t mean nothing in the world is worth saving—” “Oh, shut up,” he snapped.

He looked between the two women and his face was empty. You had to be empty, Barhu thought, if you were to condemn an entire people. You had to make yourself distant.

Here’s a coin. Go buy a mango. I’ll cut you a piece. She had given the child a Masquerade coin, so that the child could buy her own island’s fruit, to be cut and apportioned to the child by a Masquerade agent. She had inflicted Cairdine Farrier’s lessons. What you have belongs to me. What you need will be earned with my coin. What you desire will be divided by my knife.

You cannot destroy the masters by mastering them. You destroy them by destroying.

I will cut out your heart and prepare it on red coals. I will strain the flesh of your brain into its separate types, the gray and the pink, the stem and the bell. I will skin the meninges from your mind with an obsidian knife and I will knot up the nerves of your eyes. And then I will divide the relics of your mind among the four quarters of the world. Across Falcrest and the Mbo and the Camou and the Wintercrests I will quarter you.”

Hot

The voice left her panting in the dark for a moment. And then, again: “Where is Abdumasi Abd?” “Baru loves me.”

Iraji sighed and crossed his lean arms. Interesting things happened in his bare shoulders.

“Deserve? Aren’t you and I beyond such illusions?” Iscend’s teeth barely touch when she enunciates: the force in her jaw is so exacting. “The most conditioned, and the least?”

She was not as good a match as Baru Cormorant, who might have been queen of Aurdwynn entire—but Baru Cormorant, may frost crack her spine from her body, was an oathbreaker and a living lie.

Hu, laughing in delight, made it clear she was too strong to be moved by underfed accountants.

“No! This whole thought is backward. It’s not what you swore to me.” “I swore to paint you across history in the color of Falcrest’s blood!” “You want to paint me in plague blood? I hate plague.”

“Falcrest has us hostage. When they conquer us … they disfigure us.” “To be disfigured,” Hu warned her, “is not to be reduced. Or to be made evil. That’s an Incrastic idea.”

“So does this! You and the women in your arms! You think this doesn’t matter as much as thrones and treasuries? You think you paint a portrait of me with your life if you ignore your heart, your hands? I couldn’t.” She touched her smaller nose, her narrow lie-corroded throat, the small groove down her abdomen where muscles lay against each other like books in a shelf. “This is what tormented me, all those days I couldn’t have you. This is what I saw. Do you see what I saw? Someone worth love?”

Hu rolled on her back and stretched. She was one golden-brown coil of power from toe to fingertip; she was a catamount. Baru, intellectually calibrated and mentally awakened to the highest planes of aesthetic and philosophical appreciation, stared at her tits.

“I’m a genius,” she said. “It’s that simple.” “Yes,” Hu sighed. “To my constant bewilderment, you really are.”

“So be it,” Barhu said, resolving to accept what could not be changed, but to never, ever forget it.

“Iraji,” she muttered. “There’s something that’s been on my mind.” “Is it me?” he murmured. It was not even innuendo: he had been willing to talk about his past more openly. In these furtive days her casual lust had softened into fondness, and trust, and a sort of awkwardly racialized camaraderie. In Falcrest’s eyes, she and Iraji shared a single Oriati body, scrutinized for its beauty and sexuality, condemned for its indulgence and its melancholia.

“My mother ran off to seek her fortune, my father had to put me in an orphanage, I volunteered to join the navy—”

aminata... farrier and kindalana's baby?

Whatever duty asked of Aminata, she had a gallantry she couldn’t master.

Iraji smiled coldly at him. “My lord will know what you’ve done.” “The Eye? I’m afraid he’s in no position to complain. Nor will he be until our work is done.” Masako beckoned to his soldiers. “Come. I’m going to speak to the Brain.” “The Eye’s not my lord,” Iraji said, sweetly. “I serve the lightning man.”

“Of course,” Barhu said. “Is there anything you need?” “You might hit your head and die,” Yythel said, sweetly.

“Everyone always asks me that,” the 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?”

Aminata wanted to laugh. It was ridiculous. It was superstitious nonsense, it was nothing to be afraid of! There was no magic, no spell on Baru to bind her! Aminata wanted to scream. Some part of her knew it was all true.

“No?” Tau looked crestfallen. “He moves under many identities. He would be an extremely lithe, supple, athletic man. A bit like the illustrations in an anatomy textbook you weren’t supposed to find exciting as a girl.”

Stop it

“Child, I am almost forty years old. I’ve spent my entire life thinking about how to be a better person. My capacity to be a terrible person is undiminished by that work, as a pit is undiminished by the construction of a tower. But I can set myself aright when I falter. I don’t need to be spurred.” They self-consciously smoothed their cassock over their hips. “I recommend psilocin mushrooms to all those who suffer an overcast of character. I’ve used them before.”

“I can’t run away,” Barhu said. “I still have to beat Iraji at Purge.” “That’ll never happen.” They both pricked their hearts on the double meaning, and looked away from each other, fearing that instant of shared grief. When he looked back, his jaw moved: a swallow, a twinge of fear, then determination.

She believed, as much as she could believe anything about anyone, that Svir genuinely loved Lindon Satamine. She believed that he would throw away all his other work to rush home and protect him.

She thought about Svir, Svir’s childhood, how he had fled into unknown eastern realms to escape his home. She thought about the man he loved, the child he’d fathered with that man’s wife. She thought about how he’d protected Iraji’s secret even when he could’ve gained so much through betrayal.

And they had gone on like that, whispering praise to each other, things they might have been too abashed to say, if they were not so carnally bashed: you’re magnificent, you’re good, you will do it all so well.

A frustrated pang of loneliness, absolutely irrational, why will no one go to the ball with me, sent Barhu down into the hold and the bilge.

She was wearing men’s heels, called horse-archers because they were invented to fix the rider in the stirrup while taking a bowshot. But they had really quite fascinating effects, Barhu discovered, on the human leg.

“Nice cloak. You look like Hu.” “Thanks,” she said, and tried to hug him. “Easy,” he said, fending her off. “Easy there. You’ve gotten so handsy lately.”

“Pretend that you are leading the way across rough terrain, and that I am the terrain. I will present the choices, and you will simply choose the way.” That exquisite shiver touched Barhu again, at the suggestion, in the metaphor, of trespass on sacred Imperial ground. “Follow on, then.”

“This isn’t like you,” Barhu murmured, as they passed close, as Iscend’s poise folded for a moment, collapsing toward Barhu, withdrawing again as if in self-reprimand. “You’re being—” “Feminine?” “I would have said”—a pause for breath, and of course Iscend was exactly in rhythm with her—“demonstrative.”

The appalling perfection of Cosgrad by candlelight. After all his experiments, all his voluntary and pampered brides, had any man in all the world ever fathered more children? Dividends of his beauty would pay down generations to come.

And once more I detected that hitch of shock, and old sorrow. Tau-indi meant something to him, too.

“Are you the bane of me?” “I would be some things to you,” Barhu said, smiling up from the bow, “but not your bane.”

Not helpless. Never helpless. “Excuse me!” Aminata bellowed. “I have a suggestion!”

“That sounds right.” The Aphalone name Aratene would come from the Urunoki name Iritain, which came in turn from the name of the old harbor town Iriad, Barhu’s home, joined with tain, the Urun word for foreign. The very same root yielded the name Tain Hu: which could be read as great foreigner or foreign bane.

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.

Barhu felt a sudden idiot longing for her, for the security of her self-serving self-possession. You could trust Shao Lune to see to herself. What a terrible marvel of a person. Ulyu Xe was right. It would be very easy for Barhu to think she deserved a lover like Shao.

“A woman’s merit must be evaluated against the background of her race,” Shao said, airily. “You are an extraordinary Souswardi. Isn’t that enough?” “No, it’s not fucking enough! And don’t you dare threaten my friend ever again!”

HOMEOPATHY IS A FRAUD: DO NOT ATTEMPT.

“I’ve always been shorter than my suitors. It made me nervous, knowing they could hurt me. But it’s not the same with a woman. You’re taller, but it doesn’t trouble me.” “Why?” “I don’t know. Women always felt safer to me.”

Barhu was startled by the idea of an actual Falcresti schoolboy, and a man at that, suffering under Incrastic hygiene. Heia saw her expression: “I know. It caused some uproar. The way it doesn’t, when it’s done to people like us.”

And of course Barhu fell in love with her. Just for an instant. She saw a tiny duchess with sharp eyes and an ocean of blood on her hands, staring into the fire, considering the possible futures she might engineer. Of course, in that moment, she loved her.

“Fuck,” Barhu muttered. “No, but thank you.” “You’re not funny.” “You do think I’m funny,” Heia said, smiling. The firelight was painfully flattering. “I can tell.”

“I bet you I can,” Barhu said, with that offhand confidence that Hu had always used to drive her mad. “Oh?” Iscend raised her head from the water. “What will you stake in the bet?” But Barhu, already racing ahead into thought, entirely missed the flirtation.

Only—the world was full of women who loved women— So where did they come from? Why was the behavior not extinguished? “Where do I come from?” Barhu asked, aloud.

i cry

I want to feel good in a way they didn’t plan for me.