The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

How fickle the heart could be: here she stood in a village full of her parents and her people, and yet Helbride’s departure felt like leaving home.

And then she thought, why, I’ve never asked my illusion of Hu to tell me anything that only Hu could’ve known. Because I know it’s not really Hu. Aren’t I, though? You never knew the real Hu; you knew your mind’s own awareness of her. Does it matter if that awareness comes from within or from without if one is true to the other? What I carry is the image I’ve made of Hu, my record of her beliefs and the method of her choices. It’s the law of being Hu: and that is enough for me to carry and to tap for strength. Isn’t that a soul?

This was how to make a world out of different people. Not Incrasticism. Let them meet and see what they have to offer each other. And if someone tries to take it: all together, stop them.

“Don’t worry about me.” Barhu picked up the left oar, and then, with a shake of her head, the right. “I’ll be back for my lobotomy.” “Damn you. You don’t get to joke about that until you’ve given me an alternative!”

Tain Hu volunteered, you know?” Barhu threw the mooring lines up at Yawa. “She went in with her eyes open. Both eyes open to the end. It was her choice. She knew it was the right way.” “She’d have torn my eyes out if I ever hurt you, Baru!” “Take care of my parents if I don’t come back. Tell them I’m sorry—no, tell them I did my best.” Barhu shoved off from the quay. “Make sure Xe gets back to Aurdwynn. She has a child there. Make sure Aminata gets a pardon.” “For Devena’s sake, Baru, what’s out there worth risking your life?”

“Think about the secrets you’ve kept from Hesychast. He knows what you’ve done for him but he’s never understood your motives! It’s possible to do exactly what they require of us, Yawa, but for reasons they don’t understand! That’s how to beat yomi! Conceal our maneuvers inside their maneuvers! They think their yomi is maintained until the moment it is broken!” “Baru,” Yawa screamed, “this is not the time for your philosophical fucking ramblings! Don’t go out to that ship! Come here and explain yourself!” “Trim calls me back to Tau!” she shouted back. “There’s a weapon out there. Something I can use. I have to find it. Trust me, please.”

Yawa began to swear at her in Iolynic, calling her a fool, a hot cow turd with a hoofprint in it, a girl poured out from her mother’s gutter, a paint eater, a hairless bloodless dried-out cunt, a carrion bird, a cracked cornerstone, an assface. Barhu rowed out toward Eternal. When she had some headway she raised a hand to wave.

In the spirit of contrarianism, she looked back.

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

“Life,” she murmured. “That’s all we are, Baru. The dread Cancrioth. Just life that goes on living. The Womb will do anything to keep her children alive. The Eye will do anything to keep us safely out of sight. They are each good and necessary organs. “But life needs to do more than just live, doesn’t it? Sometimes we have to risk ourselves … risk death. For our families. For our people. For an ideal. That’s what a brain is, isn’t it? An organ that guides the body against its own instincts. Why do we need a brain, Baru, if the skin and the stomach are enough? A worm has no brain. A worm can still touch what it loves, eat what it tastes, flee from its fears. We need a brain to deny ourselves what we want. Sometimes we must choose hate over love. Sometimes we must choose death over life.”

make my choice, child. I am born messiah to one people, and only one. They are mine to protect, not any other.

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

“Listen, the best way to break a mill is to jam up the machinery!” “The best way to break a mill is to burn it down, Baru.” “Not if you want to keep building mills and making flour! The reason Falcrest is winning is because its ways are stronger! I can steal that strength!” “But it is still Falcrest’s strength. It is still that monstrous pillaging force which treats people like coin and coin like people. And if you try to wield it you are seduced by it.

“Nothing you own by Falcrest’s means is owned by anything but Falcrest. When you think you possess them, that is when they possess you.”

There are things more powerful than money in this world. I am born to the signs of whirlwind and geyser, black moon and cicada scream. I do not pay to become messiah. The world makes me so.”

“Can you name one difference between your plan and Falcrest’s total victory, except that in your plan you are in charge?”

“She wants to fight the whole world at your side, Baru. And she knows you need her. Once she’s realized Falcrest doesn’t need her, where else will she belong?”

Of all the things she thought she’d never have again, from Tain Hu’s whispered kuye lam to the sound of Muire Lo laying out her morning coffee, Tau-indi’s trust was not the most unlikely. But it was out there. It was far out there.

Tau’s opinion of her had changed so thoroughly, without any action at all on her part, that she found it almost offensive. How dizzying, how disorienting, that Tau would have such total and autonomous power over themself. But that was the lesson that the laman had always tried to teach her, wasn’t it? Other people were real. They did not need one Barhu Cormorant to push them to their ends.

Tau, who had called her a wound, a hole in the heart, did not think she had consumed Kyprananoke. Did not assume she’d given the order. It was trust and faith beyond anything she deserved. It was grace.

Tau looked back at Barhu with feline smugness. They might have even shimmied their hips at her, like they were dancing on her head.

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare keep something like this from me ever again. You’re not going to die young. You’re not going to trade your whole life for some appalling plague. You’re going to live, understand? You’re going to carry on my work when I’m gone. Fuck!” She spat on the floor. “Who the fuck else am I going to trust, you stupid cunt? Heingyl Ri? She’ll never trust me after what happened today.”

“How does this answer my question? You think there’s something the ana culture knows, some secret of catching seals, which can’t be replicated or invented by Falcrest? Something magical?” “Yes.” “What is it?” “Whatever it is that can only be learned by living for hundreds of years on the wuxunanikome.

“It’s as if all the people who live anywhere in the world, no matter how primitive or savage Falcrest says they are, are accumulating interest. Learning things which can only be learned by being who they are, for as long as they have been.

“That’s a Falcrest conceit,” Xe countered. “We’re saying they’re clever in a way that’s not valued by Incrasticism.” “How? How is it clever to do whatever your ancestors teach you?” “Because your ancestors are smarter than you. Not any one of them, but all together.

This idea of trim became so fixed in the culture, through personal faith and through its glorification in great works like the Whale Words and the Kiet Khoiad, that people obeyed it for no rational reason at all, even in the face of mortal temptation. They were good even when they had no reason to be good.

The Oriati Mbo had never invented inoculations. Or rocket-launched naval incendiaries. Or citrus anti-scurvy regimens. Or soap before surgery. Or techniques of social control. Thus Falcrest believed that its method triumphed over the Oriati way. But Falcrest found the Oriati utterly resistant to their suasions and enticements. Not because the Oriati were primitive or ignorant, not because they were all the same, but because the one thing that united their vast nation of nations was a belief in trim: doing the right thing just because it was right.

Stubbornness and faith in the old ways could be a good thing; it could be the greatest thing, when your enemy wa...

“What have I done?” Barhu asked, nervously. “What do I need to fix?” The diver stared at her. Finally Barhu understood.

And it would protect her, too. She would never be tempted by an offer of the governorship. She would never be tempted to go back to a home she had never really known: only loved from afar, loved it for its hidden aspect, the way you love a god.

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.

And she knows she has him.

He is so disappointed by her sudden scowl, so disappointed that he cannot make her smile, that he punishes himself with a sharp tug at his beard. “What is it? What can I do?”

The small was reflected in the large, the meek did have power to move the great, a kind word to a stranger could alter the fate of nations: for the great was made out of the small, and the world was made out of people.

Like Tau, she had lost everything that gave her life meaning. Tau was determined to see her live on with the hurt.

“No,” Tau said, feeling the empty places where trim had once pulled at them, phantom connections, gone forever: and choosing, anyway, to act as if they still existed. Trim was nothing but other people.

But I cared. And I would have to live with my choices. I would always be the woman who’d betrayed her people for her own cruel idea of their salvation.

Yes, people had always been evil nearly as much as they had been good. Yes, happiness was rarer than suffering—that was simply a fact of mathematics; happiness required a narrow range of conditions, and suffering flourished in all the rest.

Empire required a will, a brain to move the beast, to reach out with appetite, to see other people as the answer to that appetite, to justify the devouring of other peoples as right and necessary and good, to frame slavery and conquest as acts of grace and charity.

Incrasticism had provided that last and most fateful technology. The capability to justify any violence in the name of an ultimate destiny, an engine to inflict misery and to claim that misery as necessary in the quest for utopia. A false science by which the races and sexes could be separated and specialized like workers in a mill. And the endless self-deceptive blind guilty quest to justify that false science, so that the suffering and the misery remained necessary. Falcrest had chosen empire. Falcrest could therefore be held responsible for its choice.

Not all those who lived in Falcrest participated in its devourings. But all those who lived in Falcrest had benefited from them, and by encouragement or by passive acceptanc...

How could she have left her life and power in the hands of three Oriati she barely knew? Tau-indi touched Aminata’s hand. “See?” the Prince said, warmly, though there were tears in their eyes, the tears of a person so gentle that they mourned even the ruin of the awful. “She trusted you. She trusted us.”

In that moment, against all reason, Aminata felt like she was in a fleet of two, a navy of her and Baru: she had just been promoted to Grand Admiral, captain of everything she had ever wanted. And she would have sworn, despite the pain in her chest, that the Emperor winked at her.

“You have some truly bizarre ideas of how things will go,” Hu said. “Oh, you do better,” Baru snapped, annoyed at any critique of her utopia. “I bet yours would just be a big forest full of—of athletic nymphlets!” “You’re not a nymphlet. And you’re not that athletic.”

She was a cormorant and Tain Hu was a hawk with steel-tipped talons, the sort the Maia had trained, long ago, to scatter vultures that might betray a kill.

Tain Hu the warhawk landed on Tain Hu the woman’s shoulders, as gentle as only a dream bird could be. Baru the cormorant crashed awkwardly into Baru the woman’s stomach, and, becoming the woman, had to get back to her feet with a stupid seabird hopping around underfoot.

Baru kissed her on the mouth. “Hu, it’s wonderful!” “It’s not real.” “But it will be! Vultjag can be like this! Ake can do it, and Heingyl Ri—” Hu gathered Baru up and made her rest her head in the crook of her strong neck. She smelled of pine. “Kuye lam,” she said, “nothing will be done if war consumes the Ashen Sea and destroys my home. So you have to go back. You have to finish the work.”

“And will you be happy?” She stroked the line of Baru’s shoulder. “Will you do that part of the work, too? I wanted that. That is the reason your stupid self-sacrificing plans to infest your body with cancer and plague cannot be allowed. You must be happy. I died to give you that chance. You must be happy.”

“Good. Then you’ll be all right on your own.” Hu looked down at her with that awful lopsided smile that cut right through Baru’s young heart.

“So you’re telling me that your entire plan to achieve the Throne depended on your thick skull’s ability to snap steel? I suggested you use the Emperor’s seat to complete your work. I didn’t know this was how you’d gain it.”