The Tyrant Baru Cormorant
Seth Dickinson
Tom Doherty Associates
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102 notes/highlights
Created by Nic de Vera – Last synced November 16, 2020
Players, Pawns, and Vessels
Tau-indi Bosoka—Federal Prince, ambassador to Falcrest
August 11, 2020
9
Now
Farrier has a deadline.
August 11, 2020
13
the thousand-year glue which holds the Oriati Mbo together is unshakable belief in the intrinsic and inalienable humanity of your neighbor, an ethics they call trim.
August 11, 2020
15
A democlysm: death like no dying the world has ever seen.
August 11, 2020
16
if you believe what some believe, he is more than one man, he is all the other souls that grow in the flesh of his spinal cord.
August 11, 2020
17
Act One. Baru’s Choice
An orca with a human skull embedded in its breaching back.
August 11, 2020
19
“Where the dead go to grow.”
August 11, 2020
19
The whale blew mist and the blowhole whistled like thunder piped down a thigh-bone flute,
August 11, 2020
22
The shadow ambassador whistled to the whale. “Good boy, Galganath!”
August 11, 2020
22
“I never should have trusted you,” Tau-indi said. “You’re a hole.”
August 11, 2020
26
in the water crouched a very tiny, very unhappy frog. It saw Baru and said wart! wart!
August 11, 2020
28
That blood was a symptom of the Kettling, the Black Emmenia, the abominable pandemic of legend. The Kettling came from the deep southern jungles of Oriati Mbo. So did the Cancrioth.
August 11, 2020
29
So that first woman was named Kimbune. Why did you come here, Kimbune, to ask after your husband’s soul?
August 11, 2020
34
The sign of the Round Number was tattooed on her forehead: a circle with a long line beneath it, divided into three large parts and a tiny fraction—the ratio of the circle’s circumference to its diameter, three point one four. A number representing the portions of the body, the phi losopher Iri anEnna had said. One part of water, one of air, one of flesh, and a little fraction of mystery.
August 12, 2020
45
“You almost drowned me.” Kimbune looked away defiantly. “I didn’t mean to break it. The design was flawed.”
August 12, 2020
46
Better for you to die than to let the baneflesh have you!
August 12, 2020
49
she noticed, again, that she was missing two fingers on her right hand: she forgot that sometimes, because the hand was on her blind side.
August 12, 2020
52
“Permission to come aboard?” “Denied, mam.” He waited for the ship’s purser to record that in the log. “Shall we disembark you through the ship’s great cabin?” “Immediately.” She returned his officers’ salutes with a pointed glance at the deck. Obediently they all looked at their toes, so that they could say, at their court-martials, that the Province Admiral had ordered them to disregard her presence.
August 12, 2020
58
The Kyprananoke archipelago had fallen into democlysm, the word great Iranenna (she’d read her prerevolutionary philosophers, in school at Shaheen) coined for “a chaos made of man.”
August 12, 2020
61
“I’m a man,” the ass-shot person said. “You’re confused, because I haven’t got my things on, so you see a woman. My name’s Ngaio.”
August 13, 2020
69
The Mbo had annihilated slavery a thousand years ago, and a millennium of taboo had hardened on the word like concrete. Slavers were enenen, without trim, one of the only kinds of people still branded with that word.
August 13, 2020
84
“En Elu Aumor. Their high speech. Recorded in the tablets of the Pitchblende Dictionary, deep within the Renderer of Souls.”
August 13, 2020
85
“The Kettling isn’t even ours! It was never meant to be on this ship! But the Brain conspired—she never wanted to help Abdumasi, she always meant this voyage as the beginning of her war!”
August 13, 2020
88
This man was one of the immortal Cancrioth, secret rulers of the thousand-year Mbo? He seemed just as bewildered and petty as any duke of Aurdwynn.
August 13, 2020
89
We do not act on scales shorter than a human life!”
August 13, 2020
90
“As in any good experiment, each ship received a different treatment. Purpose was assigned an elite crew, tested by schooling and sea service. Their provisions were calibrated by starvation studies in prisons. The Storm Corps designers calculated the ship’s layout to preserve a core of warmth and comfort. “Auroreal, on the other hand, was crewed with survivors. Sailors who’d straggled home from failed expeditions. Officers who’d led their boats across leagues of open ocean and pack ice. The Storm Corps sourced their provisions from traditional bastè ana techniques. Of course, Auroreal fell behind Purpose when the expedition set out.
August 13, 2020
96
“Auroreal vanished into the north. It was Purpose’s elite that returned.” “They reached the lodepoint?” “No. They gave up. When things began to go wrong on that exquisite ship, there was no tolerance for error in the design, no patience for mistakes among the crew. Everything was made to work perfectly; nothing was made to survive imperfection. So they concluded, very rationally, that they had to turn back. It was Auroreal that pressed on, irrationally, courageously, into the north.”
August 13, 2020
97
The frame of fiction allows the reader to … adjust their comfort. If they want to trim away a few of the more extreme points, write them off as artistic exaggeration, well, we give them permission. And if they want to imagine things went further, that we are hiding the juicy bits … well, we equip them to imagine.”
August 13, 2020
98
“Let us past,” the sorcerer said, “or I will cut you all with my uranium knife. We want Cosgrad.”
August 13, 2020
102
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.”
August 14, 2020
107
When Shir forces Baru to choose between Aminata’s life and her own. Baru will choose herself. And choose again, an endless sacrifice, each one justified by the accumulation of its priors.
sunk cost
August 14, 2020
110
“She thinks, Baru. She thinks and thinks and thinks. Among the people of Abattai, of my line … to us, Incrisiath is the Unborn One.” “Why?” “Because her mind is like a child in the womb. Full of possibility. But curled up on itself, unseeing. All the Brains see visions and portents, and they struggle against the pull of the Door in the East, the temptation to involute their consciousness and abandon reality for what lies within. This Brain … has fought harder than most to remain in our world. She wants to make her visions real.”
August 14, 2020
112
one man wore only work gloves and a bright orange penis gourd.
August 14, 2020
114
“I’ll tell you about us, if you’d like. I don’t care if you tell the world. I think that truth always helps the righteous.”
August 14, 2020
117
Nothing had happened exactly the way it was remembered, especially not in the Mbo, where memory was like a house you arranged for the benefit of those who lived in it, not a museum to leave untouched.
August 14, 2020
118
It was an insatiable engine of democlysm. Philosophers like Iri anEnna and Mana Mane had not yet been born. The Whale Words and the Kiet Khoiad had not yet been written. No one had worked to convince the world that each individual life had a value.
whale words
August 14, 2020
119
The Cancrioth was born on the principle that life had value. At first, though, it was merely market value.
August 14, 2020
119
Forbidden to speak to the servants of other rulers, desperate nonetheless to pool their efforts, these councilors resorted to secret letters and clandestine meetings to make progress in the Work Against Death. For decades this cabal made no progress, and time hunted their ranks.
August 14, 2020
119
the method of home-group and journey-group that would revolutionize the world. Alu wanted a better way to test the medicinal effect of jungle plants. Alu knew a story about twin princesses, one of whom went out into the world to journey, one of whom stayed at home in the palace to study,
August 14, 2020
119
Alu’s method worked. It condensed the whole Work Against Death, the entire menagerie of apotropaic magic, poisonous brews, and ritual surgeries, into a rigorous grid of tests that filtered the gold from the water.
August 14, 2020
120
the councilors began to treat everything with Alu’s method.
August 14, 2020
120
Everyone has a blindness, somewhere. Very few remember it.”
August 14, 2020
121
any little lord can make her people do scut work. That’s dominance, and it’s brittle.”
August 14, 2020
121
if you do your own work, and do it very well, they come to you with questions. As it is with Akhena. 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.”
August 14, 2020
121
We cannot see truth, we cannot smell it, we cannot read it from a book. We can only get at the symbols our brains make.
kant, descartes
August 14, 2020
122
“The weather changes in the same years the sea people come to raid.
August 14, 2020
124
“Trim. An ethics for children in a world of child-killers.
August 14, 2020
126
“Why would I, thousand-year Incrisiath, alive in all the dawns I have ever seen, rise from my studies to make war on mortal empire?”
August 14, 2020
127
“They understand the secret of power, Baru.” “Which one?” “The ability to improve one’s own power, no matter how slowly, triumphs in the long run over any other power. Time magnifies small gains into great advantages. If you are hungry, then it is better, in the long run, to plant one seed than to steal a pound of fruit. Falcrest applies this logic in all their work. They do not conquer. They make themselves irresistible as trading partners. They do not keep their wealth in a royal hoard. They send it out among their people, stored in banks and concerns, where it helps the whole empire grow. They do not wait to treat the sick. They inoculate against the disease before it spreads. All their power sacrifices brute strength in the present for the ability to capture a piece of the future.”
August 14, 2020
127
“This is the baneflesh.” The Brain tickled the piglet’s chin. “It comes to us in the failure of Alu, the Line of the Skin. Of all the Lines it is the most aggressive and the most resilient. All the lines can break the Embargo, the rule that no body’s flesh can grow in another. But the baneflesh can cross not just between bodies but between species.
August 14, 2020
130
She was a woman in sailor’s slops and a diver’s strophium,
strophium, a kind of greek bra
August 16, 2020
157
This is the great desire of Renascent, the Throne Reborn. And I must prove to her that I am the way to fulfill this desire.”
August 17, 2020
161
I am his proof to Renascent that his method triumphs over Hesychast’s eugenics.
August 17, 2020
161
Baru had learned her own egocentric weakness, her habit of forgetting about the other players on the board. She’d resolved to think about people more, to remember their inner lives.
August 17, 2020
166
But the Judiciary, may their cocks be knotted off at the tip and left to blacken, had a traffic checkpoint blocking everything.
August 11, 2020
172
Act Two. The Plague
“I’ll make cuts to render you docile, suggestible, and childlike.
aggressive, independent, old
August 17, 2020
180
“She has hemineglect,”
August 25, 2020
184
The ilykari. The students of the Virtues, who knelt around the sacred olive-oil lamp, and whispered to me, their persecutor and secret hope, all the secrets of the divided mind. The Way of Eggs. The art and mystery of cultivating the sacred eryre. It was the purpose of the ilykari to study and practice and embody the sacred ykari virtues so totally that they became those virtues. The greatest ilykari were no longer themselves. They were Himu, and Devena, and Wydd. They had nurtured and grown new persons within themselves. These new persons were called eryre.
August 25, 2020
184
your mind needs a way to explain what the eryre is doing.” “The what?” “The eryre. That’s what the ilykari call it. A living model of another mind, a second consciousness in the same brain.
August 25, 2020
188
“in Aphalone it’s called a tulpa.
August 25, 2020
188
she calls herself Tain Hu. And she acts in the ways you imagine Tain Hu would act.”
August 25, 2020
189
I’ve never met anyone who used a condition like this to hide her own plans from herself.
August 25, 2020
189
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. Himu, Devena, and Wydd all studied and practiced their virtues so completely that they became those virtues. That’s why we emulate them.”
August 25, 2020
190
Through study and obsession you have built inside yourself the soul of Tain Hu.”
August 20, 2020
190
Baru and Hu, Barhu.
August 25, 2020
190
You boy fool, we do not get to consent to the stakes, to the risks, to the prices we pay. We pay them or we fail.
August 18, 2020
206
The Kettling can take forty weeks to incubate after infection. That’s long enough for a carrier to reach the shores of the Ashen Sea and find the nearest city.”
August 18, 2020
206
you never knew how much I did to smooth your way, ah, ziscjaditzcionursz, let’s be rid of her, Durance,
ziz what?
August 18, 2020
207
Maybe the mazes of duty were all built to keep you blind, and you had to start hacking through the walls to get out.
August 20, 2020
221
Most everyone had something they did, every day, that was a bit like a prayer to the things they believed in.
August 18, 2020
226
Who contrived to put three ministers at a dinner party with poisoned wine and only one dose of antidote? Who arranged the dinner? Who provided the poison? That person has the true power.” “It’s a rhetorical device, you self-important cunt,”
August 20, 2020
232
“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.”
August 20, 2020
232
The cancer whale came at her with a naval mine in his jaws.
August 21, 2020
238
Famous for charisma and compulsion, for the way you felt when you looked at her, as if you desperately wanted to be worthy of her thoughts. And she knew it, had known it for years. What a terrible wonder to know your own beauty, without shame, and to set it to use, for yourself and for your duty.
August 22, 2020
262
the superstitions in Falcrest: that the Oriati are bound to ancient powers.”
August 22, 2020
264
I think life came up, out of the sea. In the old sea a mind was born, I don’t know how or why, but that mind was soft and pliable, a wet mind without fire or sharp tools, and it had only one power, only one!” At the harbor mouth the shearwaters complained for lack of bread. “The soft sea minds could remake flesh,”
August 22, 2020
266
“And they made us. They made us to conquer the land. The things we remember as ilykari and brine and power-in-water and gods beneath the caldera, those were the soft minds.
August 22, 2020
266
he will make himself king of an empire of slaves.
August 22, 2020
267
We will all be masters of ourselves.
August 22, 2020
267
She stole their narwhal horn, the one brought down out of the north by the Verse-hammer.”
August 22, 2020
268
Something in me,” she did not name the tulpa, “knows that ship’s important.”
August 22, 2020
276
Barhu could not bring herself to forgive the Pranist and his warband. No matter the cause, these were people doing evil. To absolve them of guilt would be to deny their humanity, to deny that they had some intrinsic dignity and moral independence which only they could choose to surrender. To say that these people were doing monstrous things entirely of their own monstrous nature was to deny Falcrest’s immense historical crimes. But to say that these people were doing monstrous things solely because Falcrest had made them into monsters was to grant Falcrest the power to destroy the soul: to permanently remove the capacity for choice.
August 24, 2020
287
“Tsuni el-tsun,” he whispered: god of gods.
August 24, 2020
290
She is a trifle of flesh with a fierce, bitter spirit in her.
August 25, 2020
292
“I escaped all meaning. You cannot. You are a reader of books and an interpreter of signs. When you look at the stars you see constellations. I only see lights. That is why I cannot be mastered.”
August 25, 2020
293
You cannot destroy the masters by mastering them.
the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house
August 25, 2020
294
What a reasonable presumption it must seem: that Shir is grown like a scar around the day she murdered her own mother on the banks of the Vultsniada. But Shir knows the world at its fundament, she is a creature of that scoured truth. Her mother was one of many and distinguished from the rest only by sentiment. All those she’s killed had mothers. All of them. None were worth any more or less than hers.
August 25, 2020
296
upon the trunk of that palm is a stain where the little children with dental work and surgical scars and the babies born of shiqusection were dashed against the wood.
cesarian
August 25, 2020
296
“I went to Mzilimake Mbo to stir up civil wars for Farrier.
I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe
August 26, 2020
301
The Mzumauli, the moon worshipers, they divorce each other by shouting their old names five times.”
August 25, 2020
301
The Cryptarch’s Qualm. Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. 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.…
August 17, 2020
302
“You define yourself by what you sacrifice. So the sacrifices had to begin coming out of you. Not from others. You yourself.”
August 26, 2020
305
She was not happy, exactly. But for the first time in months she had no heart to spare for her own hurt.
August 29, 2020
330
“imagine if one of the paramount masters could be rendered supreme, uncontested, so that her orders would be untainted by any interest but her own. She would of course have Clarified to advise her on her interests. So the Clarified would advise her, and she would make orders, and give them to the Clarified to execute, and the circle would be closed. And it would be as if the Clarified commanded themselves.”
greg egan did it first
August 30, 2020
332
Act Three. Svir’s Choice
why do you think that you’d use war in your great work? When you’ve realized so proudly that power comes not from brute strength but from the control of the context in which strength is deployed?”
September 7, 2020
349
Act Four. Yawa’s Choice
“Constant aggression,” he said, through broken lips. He got back to his feet with only a little weariness. “The instinct of the body facing violence is to withdraw and contract. You must expand and fill up space. You must claim everything around you so that the enemy cannot. Even your voice must assert victory. I read your fighting manual.”
August 12, 2020
653
the wall of clocks. There were a hundred and sixty-six of them. A murder clock, an arson clock, a patricide clock, and an infanticide clock. A clock for infidelity, a clock for extortion and for forgery and for sedition and for libel, a clock for incitement, a clock for riot; also clocks for the next election, the next great storm, the next harvest. The intervals were predicted by actuaries in Census and Methods. There remained uncertainty, of course. And most uncertain of all was the great clock at the far end of the gallery— The Civilization Clock.
August 11, 2020
683
The modesty he observed in Barhu’s case was her first clue toward his secret. It came from a very specific taboo.
August 11, 2020
691
And the republican government, which shifted the flow of a Parliamin’s corruption and favoritism from fellow elites to a Parliamin’s constituents, so that corruption at least helped the common people sometimes.
August 11, 2020
692
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.
August 11, 2020
693
The Emperor was chosen from the populace and chemically denied any knowledge of Its own identity and history.
August 11, 2020
696
if I’d known you weren’t lobotomized, I would’ve stepped in to keep you from sitting on that Throne.
August 12, 2020
718
The persistence of folly, removing all doubt 