The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

But how, Tau wanted to protest, could you describe a stone entirely with a set of letters? How could an equation about the movement of a stone contain the ways in which a stone might be thrown to hurt someone, or ground to help make flour, or mortared into a wall? How could the equation capture the way in which a certain kind of stone might be venerated by one house, because their forefathers had died to the last in a battle on that stone, and cursed by another house, because that stone had been used in the arrows that killed their herd?

Then, without words, they put their foreheads together and held each other by the stubbled backs of their skulls.

“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.”

Off the ship’s port side, the city of Kutulbha smoldered like a cook fire, and the meal it cooked was a hundred thousand people, and the mouth that ate those people was the mouth missing from the white Falcrest masks that stared across the table as their clerks offered silver pens.

Maybe she and Yawa and the onkos were just avatars of impersonal and inhuman forces. Little sinewy joints in the skeleton of the world, bent by huge muscles of need and excess, mistaking the motions forced upon them for the action of their own wills.

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.