The Monster Baru Cormorant

I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.

She accepts the world as it is and the world accepts her thus. She is not mastered. What is done to her cannot confine what she will do.

The world is made of stories, which bind us all together, and impossible stories are the best of all, for they bind us in impossible ways.

Honor,” Apparitor murmured, “is just a credit rating for violence.

I’ll never know anyone’s true self, will I? Their thoughts and memories, the selfness of someone, the me-ness of me: that’s like a true name, a person in all their formless awesome grandeur. But we do not see that grandeur. We see each other only in the shapes we are forced to assume. Words constrain us, and also our laws, and our fears and hopes, and the wind, and the rain, and the dog that barks while we’re trying to speak, all these things constrain us. We all force our true selves into little hashes and show them like passwords. A smile is a hashing function, and a word, and a cry. The cry is not the grief, the word is not the meaning, the smile is not the joy: we cannot run the hash in reverse, we cannot get from the sign to the absolute truth. Maybe the smile is false. Maybe the grief is a lie.

No living thing ever defeated Tain Hu in battle. Only the tide could fight her. Only the moon and the sea together could bring her down.

Power was not the province of those who made choices. Power was the ability to set the context in which choices were made.

She chose when and where she would die. She chose the meaning of her death, and she chose the method. Rare is that gift, isn’t it? Rare is the choice to write the end of your own story.

War is a way to kill those who least deserve death, and enrich those who least deserve life.

In our grand successes over the past century we have invented a monster called a middle class. Our predecessors pillaged the Ashen Sea, and now the people are accustomed to receiving that pillage. And they are accustomed to their innocence. If they learn what we do on distant shores to secure their safety and prosperity, I am certain they would hang us all. Not for the crime of what we did, mind! But for the crime of allowing them to know.

In time the things you’ve done become too large to carry with you. So you set them down. And you think that you are free. But then you look back and see that someone else carries your burden now: you see that you have dropped your weight upon those who stood behind you.

Tain Shir walks the deck of RNS Sulane between the bombs and incendiaries and steel-tipped barbs. A weapon among weapons but she alone is free. The tragedy of the knife is the hilt. The tragedy of the crossbow is the trigger. Shir has neither. She cannot be gripped nor fired. She is unmastered. The sailors are rude with her. So be it. Etiquitte is the domain of those whose power is conditional upon the respect of others, and Shir is unconditional. If she drifted alone in the void beyond the moon or if she walked among the monarchs of the ancient Cheetah Palaces she would not be altered in her capabilities or her intentions, for not one truth of her resides within a relationship to any other thing.

There are families here, Baru.” There are families everywhere, Baru thought. That has never stopped anyone: except the people who lose.

Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. But to use your power you must touch the world. To touch you must be touched, to be touched is to be seen, to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish. Act subtly, lest you diminish.

Do not do her work for her. Do not build her up in your mind. She's only one woman.

When you are disemboweled in battle, you tie your guts up tight, and you keep fighting. Later the wound can kill you. Once you’ve won.

There is no unalloyed good in the world of power. Even a healer has to choose whom to save.

Look at Tain Shir and you cannot fathom the name behind the cartouche. You cannot extract her reasons. You only see why men turn to religion: for hope that there are gods to oppose her.

Banking was the most powerful weapon in the world, because people stored their wealth in banks, and the banks could loan that wealth out to fund great labors. You could tax your people dead to fund your armies, and they would hate you for it. But give them a bank and a fair interest rate and they would give you everything they had and let you do what you pleased with it and ask only to have it back when you were done.

When things break underfoot, you know that you are going forward.

Oh, it wasn’t fair! Of course the world could be cruel, but couldn’t it at least be equitable in its cruelty? If you gave up your soul, if you abandoned those you loved to secure a greater freedom, weren’t you owed a reward?

Who says you have a duty to a nation? Who says you cannot reject an unjust duty? Who says you can decide which evil is small enough to tolerate, and which is too great to allow? Who says you should allow anyone to hold such power over you, the power to use your work for purposes you do not understand?

He attacked Oriati Mbo with all his powers. Schools to seduce the young. Banks to issue loans, loans to put Oriati into debt, debt to give him an excuse to seize their land and property. He built toll roads and canals for exclusive trade. He gave his allies inoculations against disease. He brutalized the Oriati currencies with counterfeiting and debasement, flooding their continent with fake money so they would turn to the stable, reliable Falcresti fiat note as their trade coin. It was precisely how he captured Taranoke. It failed utterly.

Give a woman power—not a hearth to keep or an office to run, but real power, power she didn’t have to constantly guard or justify—and she would gain all power’s evils with it. Evils which were not intrinsically masculine at all, but which, in societies that gave men power, belonged most often to men.

But that was what people did when the world went mad. They tried to help.

Baru remembered her fathers flirting on the beach, fearless and beautiful. The whole world had not been against them, no matter what the Empire said.

You must understand, no matter what anyone tells you, that you are free. In this moment you may do whatever you choose. No one can stop you. They can choose how to react to your choice, but they cannot stop the choice itself. This is freedom, understand? A knife in your hand. And you may do with it as you please.

If anyone ever tells you that they have no choice but to compromise, remember this. They are afraid.

For what, in the end, was the difference between pretending perfectly to feel something, and actually feeling it? If you acted the same way, truth or lie?

Was goodness still good if you hewed to it out of tactical necessity? Was there, Baru wondered, any difference between being good and pretending to be good for your own gain, if you took the same actions in the end? Was there any difference between telling the truth unconditionally, and deploying the truth in service of your agenda, if you told the same truth?