The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

“But if you do your own work, and do it very well, they come to you with questions. As it is with Akhena. And if you answer well enough, not just about what they should do but why they should do it … then they learn to think as you think, and to make the choices you would choose. And you lead them without a word, from a thousand miles away, because you are with them in the shape of their thoughts.”

How thrilling that her own thoughts paralleled an immortal’s! What solutions this woman might have discovered, what peerless insight, without the mortal calendar to cut short her work!

“I think about thoughts. The parts of them we can see. The parts we can’t. I try to imagine what’s really happening, beyond our thoughts and memories.

“Everything we are, everything we know of the world, is in this flesh. We cannot see truth, we cannot smell it, we cannot read it from a book. We can only get at the symbols our brains make. Even our sight is a mirage:

I can delude my sight with dreams, I can move it further from the truth. But I know no way to do the opposite. I cannot clear my eyes of the veils they were born with.

Can we have the opposite of a vision, the antithesis of a dream? Something that husks our consciousness open and spills us out into reality? Maybe that is what gods are. Maybe gods have no consciousness because they do not need it. Maybe that is why they don’...

“I hate not understanding. You can’t know everything? Not even you?”

“Ra asks me why Falcrest gives a foreign girl so much power. I tell her they do it to destroy the solidarity of race.

What happens is always different: but the reasons it happens, those are usually the same.

“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.

Tain Hu would never collaborate with the Brain. Never. But maybe Baru would.

Oh no. “A test.” Baru, be wary now.…

“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.”

You mustn’t! You can’t! This isn’t what I wanted! Stop!

Tau had cast a spell on her that made her feel like she couldn’t breathe, like her fingers were skewered on long needles, like her ears were being crushed by fifty feet of water pressure. Shao Lune had the cure. The mason dust—she needed the dust—

“Kill me,” she whispered. “Please kill me.” The thought had been with her since Sieroch, carved into that sullen crown of hurt she wore every day when she woke, forcing her to lie in bed and do nothing at all. The thought said: just be done with it. Just stop. The world will go onward. You’ve failed.

and oh, Wydd save her, she wanted to weep again, she wanted to die, to stop being the woman who had led the dashing Duke Unuxekome to his end.

I’m here. I’m with you.

THERE was something suicidal in the way Tau perched on the side of their bed. All that luxury behind them, all the possibility of a life. And Tau chose, instead, to crouch at the edge.

“I do not like pineapple!” Baru snapped, because she was so bemused at being called a slut. “YOU DO!” Tau screamed, and the blood rushed into their eye like poured wine. “I ASKED YOUR PARENTS WHAT FOOD YOU LIKED! AND THEY SAID PINEAPPLE!”

And Baru thought, oh Wydd, this rage has been in them all the time, even as they were kind to me. But they’ve had the art of goodness, the skill of goodness, and it has never failed them, they have always been better than their rage.

When you sit there jabbering in Iolynic, like you’re in Aurdwynn again?” “I spoke?”

Was this Hu? Is she even fluent enough in Iolynic to talk to herself in it when she's out of her wits? HU?

Baru’s helpless heart, that poor weak useless organ of foolishness, added Iraji to the list of people she had tried to send away to safety.

In these thin wretched hours of star watch, full of poison, absolutely alone, she had discovered that it was possible to feel so terrible and so worthless and so hated by everyone and everything you had ever cared for that you could not even speak a word to save your own life.

She had sacrificed everything good about herself, and everyone who had seen good in her, and when she could sacrifice no more, she had looked for others to take on her debt.

“You volunteered?” As Tain Hu had volunteered.

The truth was that Sieroch had broken her. Giving up Hu had shattered her. She was no one’s savant. She was tired and spent. She wanted to lie down and never wake up.

“Are you desperate to get to your husband’s soul so you can … win an argument?” “It’s an important argument!”

Not the last voice in the world she had expected to hear: not, after all, Tain Hu’s voice. But precious anyway, as unexpected as a shaft of moonlight in a cave.

“I saw you at the embassy—” “I saw you!” “—I had to burn the grounds, I thought I’d killed you—” “—you did the right thing, it was Kettling—” “—I had to talk to you, I had to know—” “—I’m here, I’m here, please, but let’s get away, let’s go.”

How are you here, Ulyu Xe? I sent you home to Aurdwynn! I saved you! How did Aminata find you? How did she bring you here? I saved you! But her women always came back to die.

It wasn’t that Baru was jealous or possessive of Xe’s body or what she chose to do with it. No, it was that—that— —that Shir had stolen Baru’s story. Xe was her lover. Shir couldn’t kill her. Xe was supposed to die for Baru. What a diseased, repulsive thing to feel. And yet Baru felt it. She undeniably felt it.

“So I am his model. A wild-type islander girl taught to govern herself perfectly. Taught to obey Falcrest no matter how terribly she wants to resist. Taught to deny herself the companionship and compassion she requires. I am his proof to Renascent that his method triumphs over Hesychast’s eugenics. I am the one who will always obey, because I can always rationalize my obedience as my own will.” In Urunoki, Baru gasped: “I am his weapon.…”

She’d met a woman she loved. And she’d kept that woman at a distance, despite Tain Hu’s cunning and charisma and devastating presence, despite Baru’s own fantasies. She’d kept that woman at arm’s reach until the very night she knew Tain Hu and all the rest of the rebels were doomed. Only then had she allowed herself to fall. When their love could only lead to death.

She loved women only when that love was deniable and doomed. Farrier had taught her so. How could she have missed it?

Behold the chains he placed on you. His law lived in Baru. Everything she accomplished was tainted by it.

Something cried out to Baru—something she’d heard—a sword, and a throne, and a voice, Tain Hu’s loving voice, saying, She’ll make you worse, if she can. Don’t let her. I always tried to make you better. Listen. Listen. There is a difference between acting out their story, and truly obeying their story. Do you know what it is?

Iscend grinned, as if she’d just had a brilliant idea. And she said, “Gaios. I will not.”

Oh, Yawa! Your women keep trying to die for me.”

You spent all you had. And there was no one left to draw a loan from, no more divers on the soft grass, no more officers with sly cruel faces, no more gentle Tau-indi or sweet Iraji or even Apparitor to shout at you. You were spent.

“Yawa,” she said, “will you tell Admiral Ormsment that I’ve gone, please? So that my parents will be safe.” It was done now. She could rest.

Oh Baru

Tain Hu’s ghost hand cupped the right of her face. Go away, Baru thought. I’m bruised. You’re hurting my eye. But the hand would not go.

Taranoke, Taranoke, I am the burnt and unpeopled husk of Taranoke, I am your home as you deserve to find it, I am the true and empty shape of your heart.

“And I won’t think at all, afterward?” “You’ll be happy like a child.” “Are children happy? I don’t remember.”

“I’m glad,” Baru moaned. “Oh, Hu. I am so glad. You’ll do better than I would’ve, I’m sure. And Taranoke … maybe, somehow, someday, for Taranoke…”

Her right eye was on me, flicking back and forth steadily between my eyes, as if—

“Can you write your name?” “I can’t see.” “Don’t look. Just write.” “My name’s Baru.” “I know. But please write it for me.” “I don’t want to sign the paper.” “It’s not a signature. It’s blank.” “You’re lying.” “Baru, what does it matter now? Write your name.” She tried to shrug, and the shrug moved her right hand, a twitch, a spasm, a curl of ink, an emphatic slash, another curl, three sloppy Aphalone characters, tuh aie noo, tuhainoo, taihn oo, taih noo, tain hu. My name is Tain Hu.

If Baru was a victim of Cairdine Farrier’s ingenious process, as Tain Shir had convinced her—if she’d been taught to sacrifice all those close to her, and to protect her own isolation—then why hadn’t she thought of executing Hu until Hu herself suggested it? That’s right, Baru. Why?

“Your right arm. It answered me honestly.” Cold leather gloves whispered across her face. Tender. That was the word for it. Yawa was touching her tenderly. “Your arm said you’d done it all for Taranoke, and for Tain Hu.”

Oh Hu...

“The eryre. That’s what the ilykari call it. A living model of another mind, a second consciousness in the same brain.