The Monster Baru Cormorant
Seth Dickinson
Tom Doherty Associates
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168 notes/highlights
Created by Nic de Vera – Last synced November 24, 2020
Prelude
Kutulbha was a gray disc on the coast of the Oriati Mbo, a dark mortar full of bone. Into that mortar the Falcresti had inscribed two words in their dull blocky script: THE ARC OF HISTORY .
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rapier Kindalana, named, because of its keen point and difficult grip, after his ex-wife.
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so he said the words that would sever him from the human community for all time and make him into a seeping wound of grief and horrible lonely power.
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Act One: The Fall of the Elided Keep
the Empire of Masks,
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This is the story of Agonist.
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T HE pale man with the rowan-red hair oversaw the execution. He had a stylus and a varnished writing-board, and a form clasped in a steel folio, a form for Baru to sign after she screamed for mercy.
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His name was Apparitor
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O ykari Himu, and Wydd, and Devena who stands between you,
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punish Falcrest with storm, and with cancer, and with the excess of moderation which is called weakness.
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how many of her predecessors had vowed, in secret, to defy their masters? None had succeeded. Or, worse, they had all succeeded, all of them defiant, all of their defiance expected and incorporated into the Throne’s victory.
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You must consider the mosaic, not the stone.”
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the notion that any crime could be pardoned for a chance to glimpse these world secrets.
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“The Cryptarch’s Qualm.”
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to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish. Act subtly, lest you diminish.”
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the Tyrant’s Qualm
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you must entice supporters by granting them a piece of your power. But the more people you entice, the more thinly you are spread, and to spread is to perish.”
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I NCARNATION is the art of form mimicking content.
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The Emperor here would be a lobotomite, his will pithed and destroyed with a steel pick.
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“I claim the polestar mark,”
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By my works I make my claim.”
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“I am Agonist,” she told them. “Let it be known.” Agonist. It meant one who struggles .
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You’ve saved us, you’ve saved us,” now thick-throated joy, “Baru, we’ve won . Falcrest is saved.”
??
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Our Metademe deploys demographic weapons against Oriati Mbo. Oriati Mbo retaliates with the bushmeat defense, including especially the zoonotic reservoirs of the Kettling.
??
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Today was the day she had to ease Abdumasi Abd from the resentimente to the attachment.
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give him a lever with a tiny random chance of yielding a pellet on each pull— Then he spends his whole life pulling. Because every moment he’s not pulling that lever, he’s wasting a chance.
Skinner box, opportunity cost
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You carry the weight of your ancestors—” “—but I lift it, and that makes me strong,
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“although I do like that word, bitch, a woman who’s not approved of: it has such wonderful eugenic overtones.
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briefly, possessed an army. It had been disposed of. Field-general was still slang for someone doomed to destruction.
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sprezzatura, the casual and effortless grace of the superior.
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The young tyrants of the Suettaring markets call the modern prosperity the Farrier Age. The Egalitarians who protest beneath the Suettaring hills call him the King of Pillage .
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the squid priest .
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Very few know for certain that Cosgrad Torrinde, Minister of the Metademe, is also the elusive Hesychast. More know that Cairdine Farrier is also Itinerant,
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Falcrest’s Suettaring
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Genius, he says, may be discovered anywhere, and our Imperial duty calls us to discover that genius and to save it from decay.
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keep that ember in your fist, so it always burns.
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All in all he was like a very self-satisfied raccoon.
fat tanuki
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Hesychast rules: all character is determined by heredity. No one may disobey their intrinsic nature.
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When she was not in training (and it was training) with Farrier she drank rare whiskeys and read secret histories and tried to imagine exactly what would come next.
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“Too much of Oriati society is a shared commons. You don’t own the pasture where you graze your sheep—your village takes care of it together. If you don’t own the pasture, you can’t post it as collateral for a loan.
the commons
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Her half blindness didn’t keep her from reading: if she couldn’t always quote the right half of the page,
still? thought temporary
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Imagine a currency made of locks! A currency that measures the value of secrets, and the more the secret’s worth, the more locks you attach.
a crypto currency
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Tain Hu was dead. Hold up that big pain next to losing Aminata. Look at you, tiny pain. You are so little.
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eidesis
knowledge?
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Incrasticism is our Republic’s creed. The word means for tomorrow .
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the mysterious energies of the Oriati sacred stone called uranium.
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Now there’s no more slavery anywhere. We ended it.
a beautiful legacy
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a small nation called Falcrest, which, of late, had begun to think itself a crocodile instead of a crane.
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Prince who lived in it, Kindalana
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She was the rarest of them, the most bound to her studies, the most reticent with her praise and favor, the most cutting in her indictments of failure, and thus the most precious.
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You couldn’t mention that you were hungry, or sad, or lonely, because Kindalana would try to fix it.
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“You do listen to the griots,”
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Wasn’t it ruled by a mad king who bred people like dogs? Or possibly an octopus?
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all this was like the art of being a spy and a lord and a queen, all this was the game of learning without being learnt—and like that game all of it was a prelude to pain.
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The thousand-year Mbo was cracking apart before her, and Farrier’s ivy was growing in the seams.
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the Physician’s Qualm?” “I do.” The flesh of the people is the body of the Republic. The care of the flesh is the care of the Republic. Neither by injury nor by neglect may I allow the Republic to come to harm.
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Do you ever experience a hemorrhage of will, especially when trying to get out of bed?
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things have to get better as one moves from the provinces toward Falcrest, don’t they? There must be a gradient of hope.”
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a cloak made of a dead silver wolf.
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the poisoner’s dilemma,” Hesychast said. “How do you make a decision when your decision depends on someone else’s choice? And when he’s modifying his choices based on his own predictions of yours?
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Hesychast’s verdict still blew hot in my ears. He had run his tests, and judged her compromised, most terribly compromised, by Farrier’s process.
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Toro Haba’s Law of Force, to explain the way two boats collided. When unequal forces meet, they always bargain fairly. One boat cannot strike another without being struck in return.
newton’s second, f = ma
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Himu the virtue of energy, Wydd the virtue of patience, and Devena who stood between them.
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They developed a method to test the effects of their compounds: home-group and journey-group, the basis of the experimental method.
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I believe Himu, the ykari virtue, was inspired by a Cancrioth operative named Hayamu raQ ù . Hayamu became Himu.”
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if their works were all undone with their departure … if the secrets of inoculation were lost, and the great roads overrun by banditry, and plague left to sweep the world, and babies abandoned in the wind, and the winter given to scurvy, and a portion of the good and great taken each year by a simple tooth abscess … then so be it.
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Put a rocket engine on an arrow, put hundreds of those arrows on a rack, and now you had a hwacha. You didn’t have to pay or train or feed it, and it could beat a company of longbowmen barrage for barrage.
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Hate clung on them like butter. Baru could have drawn a streak in it.
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Shir looks down at him and considers the membranes that men grow to insulate themselves from the brilliant truth.
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The world is indifferent to the reputations of men. Beneath the veil of civilization the truth prowls on an older earth
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he will never rest until he can master that temptation, master the threat of her, achieve dominion over her and all she cares for so that all her happiness is at his disposal. Not one of his students. One of his foes.
??
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Iscend Comprine, Hesychast’s Clarified terror.
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“I am Staff Captain Shao Lune, and I’ve escaped the Traitor-Admiral Juris Ormsment.
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“I worked with this young woman over the winter. She is most career-minded.
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“You think a cult will have account books ?” “Of course they will!”
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Cryptarch’s Qualm? To use your power, you must touch the world. To be touched is to be seen. Didn’t they send a fleet to help my rebels? Didn’t they act? They’ll have left traces.”
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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.
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not one truth of her resides within a relationship to any other thing.
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A shark-sleek woman of brooding intention, a danger and a lure. Like a dark stone beneath rough water.
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Tain Shir will take those things from her. Do you see, O ambitious one? The world does not answer to you. The code you follow will not grant you what you seek.
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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.
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She knows that the best of men have strength and speed beyond her own, as the bear has strength on the wrestler and the catamount has speed on the runner, but still they fear the human for the human is more violent. She is more violent.
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the fire brigades were out in full array, waiting in their boats beneath the veranda of the canal on the Nehr ab-Gamine for a lightning strike to start the bells and the bidding.
hah
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Khamtiger, khamtiger, what do you eat? Your dogs and your cattle and your two running feet.
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the look of a woman who had a fire inside her which Lindon would never know.
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daring him to show a little fire, a little black-eyed shark-toothed aggression,
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Act Two: The Fall of the Llosydanes
What was important? Whatever hurt the most.
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She’d put it off so long, what a damn fool, what a stupid sentiment had paralyzed her:
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Baru slipped down into the ship’s bilge. Staff Captain Shao Lune had been chained here to soak. She crouched in the ankle-deep filth.
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“I just want a little honest company. At least I know you want to kill me.”
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“Honor,” Apparitor murmured, “is just a credit rating for violence.” Baru found that metaphor rather clever.
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Just as a good creditor always paid back debts, an honorable man always answered insults.
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“They give boy children a test of patience,” Yawa said. “The child must pass up an easy pleasure,
marshmallow test
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By sundown she owned a restaurant and a flophouse, the Fiat Bank branch by the docks was on fire, and two pirate captains were dueling for her hand as she sold prostitutes in lots of half a hundred.
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Tain Hu had given her some advice on the detection of Masquerade agents. “Check the boots. The first thing they do with their wages is buy good boots.”
granny weatherwax approves
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Baru scanned the numbers, letting her savancy sift the money like a new vintage on her mind’s palate.
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“The first digits of your water sales that month were randomly distributed. See? About as many numbers start with five, or nine, as one or two.” Baru prodded the page. “Real accounts always have more ones and twos on the first digit. It’s called the Littler Law.
benford’s law
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You have blunt-trauma dextral hemineglect with an alien limb and possible complicating fugue flight.
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it’s our way.” A phrase that made Baru feel reflexive contempt and skepticism, for what good was an unexamined way? Only much later would she come back to this moment and break the wall before her to find the truth.
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The execution was a public spectacle, of course. The state had to keep up its credit rating, too—see how we punish the transgressor?
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Life, Baru thought, was cheap here. Not cheaper than in Aurdwynn, really, but cheaper than it ought to be.
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Encrypted Bonds Only
??
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you could make a fortune simply by buying fiat notes, waiting an hour, and changing them back to ring shell.
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Falcresti trade—women in severe buttoned-down formalwear and waistcoats, subtly made up to look stern and severe, their hot eyes prepared to deprecate and dismiss those who would buy their attention.
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This was a school that let you choose your own studies as you pleased … for what it taught was the correct way to choose.
if sincere, cool, meta ratinality. or cynical manipulation
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Service was the best balm for grief.
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What would little Falcrest, a small nation of mad kings and nebbish bureaucrats, manage against the mbo?
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Ulyu Xe her in the homeland accent, ulYou shee , not the mangled Aphalone Ullyu zee .
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“My lady the duchess was determined to go back to save you.” “From the Throne?” “From yourself.”
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Baru would never have mistaken him for a real farmer: his eyes marked them one by one, like files.
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Begin with a hashing function.
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Yes, the world has laws, which are consequences for your actions. But remember that there is nothing you cannot choose to do. Only consequences you fear to face. If anyone ever tells you that they have no choice but to compromise, remember this. They are afraid.
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Xe’s morning calisthenics required one to do everything very slowly. A minute for a single crunch, a pushup held for a hundred count.
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remember this well. “When you use a story to deceive in your own service, the world remembers what you have done. The world knows trim, which is the power that binds. And trim will make your own story echo the stories you tell to others. If you deceive those around you, you will in the end deceive yourself, to your own grief.
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“Oh, the women of the veldt are rough to the touch, they’ll grind your hands to flour, and the buckle on your belt will rust right shut, when the veldt wife turns her glower, but hark now lad just lie on your back, you do not know your power, she’s grown to a lass on the flat endless grass, no she’s never seen a tower—”
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“Execarne” produced a silver seal ringed in tiny chiseled codes. “I really am Morrow Ministry. I’m just not the exact Morrow Ministry agent you think I am. Come on. I’ll explain while we go.”
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Baru had a general policy of never pulling unlabeled levers,
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Today Shir teaches a lesson. A lesson for Baru on the nature of the world she has chosen to inhabit.
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Time stamps crunch as the clerks break the mechanisms of the single-use clocks to certify and seal that this record was made at exactly this time and date.
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“Stop,” Baru cried, driven by panic to act, to charge forward and grapple with the horror rather than wait for it to reach her: this was always her choice.
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In place of Nitu’s life, Tain Shir had macheted off two fingers of Baru’s right hand.
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I—I can’t be near Unuxekome Ra!” “Why?” “Because,” Yawa said, “I’m the one who exiled her to Kyprananoke. And she swore her revenge on the life of her son.”
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Captain Nullsin was a short fat man with a hammer in place of his left hand
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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.
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When the situation begins to escalate out of your understanding, you do not chase after it. You impose order. You step back to the last moment you understood, and proceed from there.
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His crown burnt with the cold, but he could not take it off.
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“Ziscjaditzcionursz,” he said, zish-jaditshionursh, softer than the wind; it meant, more or less, may a rusty nail be driven into my bloody flank by a traitor, though really it meant, oh, fuck me.
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His name was Atakaszir, of the Mansion Hussacht.
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desperation was the keen whistle of death.
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a king cannot whisper, it stinks of procht, the sick-thought of schemers, so he cried it aloud instead.
say it loud
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Act Three: The Fall of Kyprananoke
She did it as soon as she woke. Do the most painful thing first: the pain is how you know it matters.
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Surely, if your ship was traveling at wind speed, then the wind could no longer exert force on the sail: it was an elementary lesson for Taranoki children, Toro Haba’s Law of Force.
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the Falcresti could break that law. Arranged at the right angle, Helbride ’s sails acted like a wing—they could get force from the air by some mathematical trickery. Helbride could run downwind faster than the air.
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“Please. I have dignity.” “Where?” Baru peered around. “You’ve hidden it so well.”
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Gods of stone, it had grown so hard to think. She’d been clever once.
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Each member of your cabal requires constant favors and protection, and if a tile is not satisfied with its allocation of beans, it may flip.…” “The Tyrant’s Qualm,” Baru said. “You must divide your power to gain allies, but not too far?”
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This seemed to be the key to victory: choosing when to transition from growth for growth’s sake into the actual execution of your endgame.
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“That’s what you’re talking about. The game-of-winning-the-game is called the metagame.”
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“The game presumes that all parties involved have guarded themselves against basic tactics like assassination and poisoning, which we call the Simplicities.”
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the clavicle was the most delicate bone, you may break it with a few pounds of force : so if you were Oriati, part of a people with a long tradition of the martial arts, you touched the clavicle to show your trust.
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a wound in trim ?” Iraji swayed. Fell down to his knees. “Yes,” he said. “I do … a wound like Kutulbha.”
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the trick of postprior reasoning, to assume a conclusion, and deduce the conditions that might make it true. A dangerous method, but sometimes powerful.
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Maybe the difference between truth-for-itself and tactical truth was the only difference that mattered. Maybe the most crucial and subtle distinction in life was the difference between someone who was truly good and someone playing at goodness to gain power.
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“I think Tau just told me how to find them.”
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“I think Tain Shir met the Cancrioth.”
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That was the trap of trim, wasn’t it? What if you felt awful, awful, and yet you were unable to ask for help, because you could give nothing in return?
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They gathered in Mzilimake, in the southern lands beyond the veldt, where the fish in the water glow with inner light, to study the heat that boils up in the uranium land.”
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A hygienic person is easily aligned, because their purposes—that is, the map which connects their desires to their behaviors, to their rewards—is cleanly laid out.
legible
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There is a difference between acting out their story, and truly obeying their story. Do you know what it is?”
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The Farrier Process works by creating subconscious associations which alter behavior; and indeed those associations are strongly present in you.
renshaw tachitoscope
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I believe your seizure was caused by some sort of exchange between the two minds.”
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“The Kettling’s not real,” Baru insisted. “This is an Oriati trick.” Diseases killed people by fever, by pus, by worm and buboe and diarrhea. But they did not melt people into dumplings full of green-black blood.
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“Get a little dirty,” Baru suggested. “Worth it to get clean, isn’t it?”
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a mother-of-worms was found in the cisterns in the Segu capital Kutulbha.
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in the chaos there came up Prince Hill a sorcerer, her hands and eyes alight with blue-green uranium power, to cast a spell of ruin. She spoke En Elu Aumor, the tongue of the Cancrioth. Abdumasi Abd witnessed her, and Tau-indi, and the two men of Falcrest. And in that spell all their fates were written: three men to seek that power, and one laman to refuse it and all it represented.
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Baru knew she had weaknesses as a thinker. She was arrogant, self-centered, and blind to what she disdained.
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Their burst of carnal appetite was not desperation but the product of Apparitor’s meddling with vidhara, a remarkable aphrodisiac: he and Iraji had been very careful preparing Baru’s dose, which required some experimentation.
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It put the question of power upon the actors trapped in the poisoned dinner: it set them against each other,
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it concealed the agency which had arranged for these ministers to be poisoned in a room with one bottle of antidote. It distracted responsibility from the one who had arranged the scenario
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Power was not the province of those who made choices. Power was the ability to set the context in which choices were made.
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No great wars begin. We settle this like women.”
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a Canaat fighter; Pran Canaat meant the world for people,
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The bushmeat defense, the navy files called it, but it would forever be the Black Emmenia to her,
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Someone had eaten one of the forbidden meats from the forbidden place. Someone had done it here, on Kyprananoke, and then they had shared the behemoth sacrament of their blood.
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A tall black dorsal fin, slightly backswept, and on the leading edge it was fitted with a steel cutting surface.
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Behind the fin, a bony tumor ruptured the creature’s back. The growth ran down along its spine halfway to the tail.
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Tain Shir fashions herself an atlatl, the bloodiest weapon in all of human existence, if you reckon the lives it has taken.
spear thrower
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There is no nameplate. But great symbols down the flank speak in En Elu Aumor, the sacred tongue of the Pitchblende Dictionary. They say: Eternal .
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On the high rail, a tiny man stands silhouetted against lantern light. Shir sees the long horn of crabbed flesh jutting from the eye socket. The man is onkos. He bears the immortata.
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The persistence of folly, removing all doubt 