The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

She shares your body and your memories. She is as much you as you. But she calls herself Tain Hu. And she acts in the ways you imagine Tain Hu would act.”

“that in all my years studying pugilists and people who’ve fallen off horses, I’ve never met anyone who used a condition like this to hide her own plans from herself.

“The students of the ykari, who I admire and seek to emulate even if I cannot be one myself, would say that you have an eryre. A second soul.”

us a soul is not a great ineffable mystery. People are, after all, not very mysterious. 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. Through study and meditation you can read another soul’s law and copy it into yourself until it comes alive, so that you now have two books of law, two selves, two souls.

“No, child. Your obsession was with a woman. Through study and obsession you have built inside yourself the soul of Tain Hu.”

“She’s in my name,” she said, and the giggle became a laugh. “Child?” “She’s in my name! She’s been waiting for me!”

“Don’t you hear it, Yawa, she’s always been there, she’s in my name!”

herself, together, Baru and Hu, Barhu.

How often did you think about your arm? About your neck? About their strength, the way they moved when you ran or wrote? And about the small, constant feeling of their presence? Not often enough. Not until they were broken.

But to call attention to the ordinary would be to make it extraordinary, and to ruin it.

“Why is her fury righteous?” Tau asked, frowning. “What makes her right, to come to one of our cities and dictate terms?”

I think we were both ashamed. We had misjudged each other so badly, both collaborators, both secretly still loyal to our homes. She might be the only person in the world who could understand what I’d done to my brother. I could never forgive myself for it, any more than she could forgive herself for killing Tain Hu. But we might forgive each other. We were each others’ only hope for grace.

But neither of us could cast off our isolation so easily. The closest Baru had come was to say: “I’ve been lonely. For such a long time.” “Nonsense.” I’d sniffed. “You’re not even thirty.”

She was wrapped around me, holding herself up.

“We do need her,” I said, and yes, I even drew the wretched woman a little closer.

I twitched in irritation, remembering a thousand meetings of the Ruling Factors in Aurdwynn, biting my tongue as Hasran Cattlson interrupted me.

What was I going to do? I had thrown away weeks and weeks of planning—decades and decades of effort—on a moment’s compassion. What was I going to do next?

If you had a duty to your friends, then Aminata figured she’d failed it.

“But the more we do to make ourselves bigger, the more crimes we commit. More than people want to think.”

But they weren’t square. 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.

You did your duty to the navy and in return they made you a torturer. They told you find the Cancrioth but they never told you what a Cancrioth was. Just torture Abdumasi Abd, just make him give up the Cancrioth. And you tortured Abdumasi Abd so well that he named your friend Baru as an enemy of the navy. So you went out hunting for Baru, dutiful as ever, and you found one of the navy’s own admirals driven to mutiny, driven to hunt and kill Baru … who was only acting out of her duty to the Throne. And the Hierarchic Qualm says that the hand is blameless when it acts in service to the Throne. Duty absolves all.

It occurred to Aminata, not for the first time, but more urgently than it ever had before, that Baru might be insane.

Baru squeezed her shoulders again, and, to Aminata’s confused disappointment, let go. It was more affection than she had ever shown.

“I kept your sword,” Baru blurted. “If you— I don’t know if you ever wonder if I—you know, kept it. I did. It’s on Eternal, with Shao Lune.” “Oh!” Aminata cried, and pawed at her neckline. Was it still there? Had it broken when she fell? “Look, I kept this, too!” She drew the cormorant feather from her collar and showed it to Baru. Then, without words, they put their foreheads together and held each other by the stubbled backs of their skulls.

I found Faham’s idea of reality as a malleable thing, subject to the influence of our minds, very silly.

Most everyone had something they did, every day, that was a bit like a prayer to the things they believed in. Aminata saluted that way. She meant every one she’d ever made.

It was because Baru couldn’t do anything. She could, at last, stop working.

Barhu knew her own dominant response. It was cold, serpentine calm.

Maybe devoting your whole being to someone’s end was a little like devoting yourself to their beginning.

People are engines, Juris. Each of a unique make. And if you discover the schematics of that engine you may find the power that drives it. You’d found a power over me that I couldn’t challenge, because everything I do comes from that day when I was seven years old and I wanted to make my parents happy again.”

“Power can’t be separated from its history. A choice can’t be taken in isolation from its context. Power is the ability to set the terms of the riddle. To arrange the rewards and punishments by which the choice is judged.”

The traitor can choose to execute her lover for political gain but she cannot choose the laws that condemn her lover as a traitor, or alter those men who stand to benefit and to suffer from her choice.

True power was not the ability to conduct a killing or a business deal or an assignation but to alter the context by which th...

Mother Pinion’s voice called down the decades. Baru. Pay attention. I’m trying, Mother. It’s just so dark down here— Baru. Stay awake!

A hand touched Barhu’s stomach. A hard knee brushed her thigh. She looked down: saw her, just where she’d promised she would be. The diver Ulyu Xe, who could swim four hundred feet without coming up for breath. Who’d come over to Sulane by breathing through a reed, hidden from the sentries.

Baru wanted her to live. Baru demanded that she live. Baru had said, you send your signal to Nullsin, and you get off that ship.

“I have a question for you.” “What?” “Do you understand that other people exist?”

I’ve forgotten how … really, I’ve never been alone. Aminata helped me in school. And then there was Muire Lo, and Tain Hu, and you. And Lyxaxu, and Unuxekome, and Pinjagata … Xate Olake saved my life when Lyxaxu came to kill me. You saved my life when Oathsfire ambushed us. I just let myself think, somehow, that I’d done it all myself, that I was…”

Devena only knows how I, a Treatymont scullery girl, came to see such sights. It was astounding.

I had seen Sulane in the battle off Treatymont. I knew how Ormsment made her kills. She would skitter in close, where she would not need torpedoes. There her heavy ship-burner Flying Fish rockets could strike a mortal blow.

But perhaps, coming from a land of Unuxekomes and Radaszics and epithets like ziscjaditzcionursz, I was prejudiced toward words that took their time.

Barhu had walked away from so many things. Taranoke. Treatymont. Sieroch. The Llosydanes. Eternal. Always escaping just in time, before the real cataclysm. She had no idea what kind of strength it must take to stay behind.

Hey, thirteen-year-old Baru said, in the throatiest, most confident voice she could manage, not, in the end, really managing at all. Hey, she said, to the girl she envied so much, the lanky Oriati midshipman who got to carry a sword. Hey yourself, Aminata said.

“Please, Baru.” He unclenches his hands, smooths out the tangle he’s made. “It’s true that the women are … not always given a chance to behave correctly. But some of that is exaggeration and prejudice. Some of it is fetishization of the foreign. When we talk about Oriati women as intrinsically erotic, somehow, we place demands on them. We contribute to their degradation.” “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be uncouth.” She lowers her chin contritely. “I was just trying to see things from your perspective. To imagine how it was, when you were there.”

hm..

She was gone but she had always been gone. The difference was that there was no possibility, not anymore, for Tau-indi to turn to her and say, oh, you are a person, alive, and I want to know you.

“Don’t trust anyone who says a thing like that to you, understand? Not while you’re a child.”

She was beautiful, wasn’t she? Not as an ornament, but as an intent, a mind that was a face and a body and all the things that body wore, an active and inseparable wholeness.

What a terrible wonder to know your own beauty, without shame, and to set it to use, for yourself and for your duty. Cosgrad would have equations to describe those arches of chain Kindalana wore, those filigreed catena from ear to nose. But he would have no equations to describe Kindalana, or the way she made people feel. Not yet.

He shows people things and tells them not to want them and then sells them anyway.

“I think all life radiated from something primal. All living things are descendants of a simple ancestor, differentiated by the needs of their environment and the war for survival. But I don’t know how that differentiation occurs.