The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade) by Seth Dickinson

Author:Seth Dickinson [Dickinson, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780765380746
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

16

TAU-INDI

I’D be fucked bareback in a pen of gonorrhetic pigs before I let Baru steal my home.

The gall of her. The bilious clotted gall. Ordering her pale little stooge back to Vultjag to seize control of the North! All she’d had to do was let Heingyl Ri give the pardons, trust Heingyl Ri to care for Vultjag and the others, but no, no, Baru had to have them for herself.

Baru might be a vicious narrow-minded weasel but she had a certain insight, didn’t she? If, in the spirit of my career as a hygienist, Aurdwynn could be imagined as a gigantic cunt (having midwifed most of my life I tended to think the nation and the organ shared a certain perverse resilience) then the coastal south was the happening end where all the business was conducted. But the north was the potential, the fallow womb, and Baru wanted to get her child in there first.

She knew what I was up to. Somehow she knew. And she was moving to stop me. I would need to write Heingyl Ri as soon as I could, and urge her to mind her security: Baru’s assassins would be at her already.

I’d been in a foul mood since Baru left me at the World Telescope, and doubly foul since that limp prick in the plaza tried to hang me with his cock-grip hands. But as soon as Baru began to move openly against me, I felt much better. I’d tidied away the whole mess of Baru at last. No more uncertainty. Hesychast was right about her, she had been irreparably compromised by Farrier’s secret process, and therefore she was an enemy of Aurdwynn’s freedom and had to be treated as such. My thoughts of befriending and tutoring her were easily dismissed. She was entirely wrapped up in her own ambitions, and would never accept me.

So I moved ahead with my other plan for Baru.

The enemies of kings are powerful prizes, my friends. If you know anything about the Stakhieczi, know that they do not like their kings. A Necessary King may be elected in times of need, but at his first sign of weakness he is unmade again.

The man who ruled the Wintercrests knew he had erred terribly by offering his hand and his armies to Baru, only to be betrayed. Now he looked a fool, dishonored and weak—

—and if he wanted his honor back, there was only one way to get it.

I would give him that honor. And in exchange he would give me my fulfillment.

As Baru drowsed in the cellar, drugged by the wine I’d left for her, I ordered Iscend to draw Dziransi outside. She simply challenged him to wrestle. He said he would not fight an unarmed woman, for it was against the gentle honor. She said he was afraid to lose. That note of pride gave the Stakhi man an excuse to beat her, so he went out, amiably, into the dark saltgrass.

In their first grapple Iscend drove a poisoned needle into his bare thigh.

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