The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #3)

by Seth Dickinson

“It can speak?” “It can hold its breath, can’t it? What’s talking except the choice of when to breathe?”

Duty? Law? The men who control you don’t have any duties. The men who control you don’t obey any laws. They act. Then they tell you that it’s your duty to obey.”

Man may enslave man. But never will he ever master fire. If you want freedom, be as fire.”

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.”

Something is out there, Baru. Something real. How can we get at it? 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?

“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.

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.

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.

Maybe the mazes of duty were all built to keep you blind, and you had to start hacking through the walls to get out.

It was a noble thing to constantly ask yourself to be better. But it could also be arrogant, self-involved, oblivious.

A treaty was a spell to force the human world to obey a truth that existed only in paper.

All words were sorcery. 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.

The chime of one of the clocks pulled our footsteps into cadence. Amazing the things that your body does without your knowledge, the ways your flesh takes its cues from the world. There are no boundaries between things.