"If something hurts, does that make it true?"
Three years following the release of The Traitor Baru Cormorant Seth Dickinson has returned with a sequel. Having succeeded in her goal of joining the highest level of power in the Masquerade following her false rebellion in Aurdynn, Baru continues with her quest to destroy the Masquerade from within.
The book is followed up by The Tyrant Baru Coromant.
The following tropes have been found in this work:
- Aluminum Christmas Trees: The afterword explains that many of the more fantastical elements introduced in the book have a real-world basis, such as naturally-occurring nuclear reactors
, immortal cancer cells, and transmissible cancers. - Ambiguously Brown: Averted with Apparitor.
- Becoming the Mask: The central theme of Baru's journey.
- Civil War: The powers behind the throne want to start a war to take control of the Oriati Mbo. The Admiralty is firmly against this and actively seek to eliminate Baru before a war can start.
- It is revealed that the Masquerade doesn't have a standing army for this very reason. Field-General is slang for someone doomed to destruction.
- Double Consciousness: The head wound Baru took at the end of the last book somehow divided the lobes of her brain on top of everything else, and the right hemineglect-affected half now thinks it's Tain Hu. It occasionally takes over her right arm. Its presence is represented by infrequent right-justified text.
- Due to the Dead: Done stealthily to Tain Hu's body. Baru orders it carved to pieces and fed to the birds in what seems like an act of callous disregard, but in reality this sort of sky burial is the tradition of her native Taranoke. In one stroke, Baru is both giving Tain Hu a proper funeral and preventing Falcrest from using her corpse as fodder for their pseudoscience.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Throughout the early part of the book, the cryptarchs struggle to create an effective plan to fragment the Oriati Mbo society. The Masquerade's usual tools of relying on individual self-interest via trade and education can't find a foothold against the Mbo's dedication to community and cooperation, to the cryptarch's confusion.
- Fantasy World Map: Included at the start of the book, as with the previous, only this one’s scope is (most of) the known world.
- Forensic Accounting: As Baru is a professional accountant, this is how she intends to uncover the secret organization she’s been tasked with finding: just follow the money. In Act II, she discovers one of the Llosydane families is funding pirates just by checking their books and recognizing their expenses look strange.
- Gambit Pileup: Just like in the previous book. All the cryptarchs have their own personal schemes, most of which require manipulating the other cryptarchs, but on top of that they’ve all been tasked with uncovering evidence that could set off an Oriati civil war. Then factor in the politics of the Navy, which is terrified of being drawn into another war with the Oriati while secretly keeping a prisoner who could start it, and split into treacherous members planning a coup of Falcrest, loyalist members pursuing the treacherous ones, and one person playing either side as convenient. Then factor in Prince Tau-Indi Bosoka, an Oriati diplomat who's also trying to stop war from breaking out by finding their vanished estranged friend, who is the aforementioned prisoner who could start the war. Then factor in Tain Shir, who has exactly one goal and zero consideration for anyone else's priorities.
- The Ghost: The cryptarch Renascent is a sinister variant. She holds authority over the other cryptarchs, and it's her command that kicks off the plot, but nobody knows anything about her — deliberately. She disseminates false rumors about herself and "disappears" anyone who tries looking for her. Stargazer is a more standard example: the only other cryptarch whose identity remains unknown to the reader, they never appear because they're busy elsewhere and don't have a reason to show up.
- Grim Up North: Alluded to in the previous book as a mysterious and formidable threat that fought the vast Tu Maia empire to a standstill in the distant past, the Stakhieczi nation that resides in the mountains north of Aurdwynn get some focus in Monster. It turns out life is precarious for them: between the exhausted farms, the inhospitable climate, and no access to the sea, their entire population is constantly on the brink of starvation. Population control via infanticide is commonplace, and all their salt comes from trade with Aurdwynn, which is now firmly in Masquerade hands. The Mansions (basically noble houses) they’re divided into are constantly at odds, and while the threat of the Masquerade has them united under a Necessary King, their unity was never stable and their King’s credibility was badly injured after he put his trust in Baru during the Aurdwynn rebellion.
- King Incognito: Dziransi reveals that the Necessary King's brother went missing in the previous book. Apparitor is almost instantly revealed to be the missing brother and Baru uses this against him
- Locard's Theory: Discussed, with regards to secret organizations. The Cryptarch’s Qualm: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.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Trim, the Oriati "magic" of human connection. Are its effects simply Contrived Coincidence, or does it genuinely affect and move peoples' fates? And what about its dark counterpart, the cancer-magic of the Cancrioth?
- Mole in Charge: Baru Cormorant, one of Falcrest's secret masters, has big plans for its downfall. When trying to gain Tau-Indi's ear, she describes herself as a deep cover agent for Taranoke. It also turns out the Priestess in the Lamplight (secret-keeper for the Aurdwynn rebellion and the lynchpin holding everyone's loyalties together) was an agent of Hesychast, meaning the rebellion was doomed from the beginning no matter how Baru handled it.
- My Greatest Failure: Failing to get Tain Hu to the Stakhieczi safely in the previous book is this for Baru.
- Mundane Fantastic: Inverted. Despite Incrastic scholars saying otherwise, the Oriati are convinced the unremarkable metal called "uranium" has uncanny magical properties. Absurd Oriati superstition claims it causes cancer, and that pregnant women exposed to it give birth to deformed monsters.
- The Man Behind the Man: The Cryptarchy is this for Falcrest. They, in theory, run the Masquerade as the power behind the throne, on which is propped a lobotomized puppet. In turn, the cryptarchy is convinced the Oriati have secret masters of their own, an organization called the Cancrioth. Determining the truths of their existence forms the plot of the book.
- No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: After the events of the previous book, Baru’s inner circle was captured alive and brought to the Llosydane islands for interrogation by Falcrest’s local spymaster, Faham Execarne. His preferred technique is to… board them in his farmhouse and let them do whatever they want, as long as they understand if anything happens to him they’ll all be executed. He cooks, farms, and asks them to help with the chores, and if they decide to say anything about the rebellion that’s on their own time. Ulyu Xe admits some of them wouldn’t mind staying. The food he serves is also laced with drugs to make them more agreeable and inclined to trust him.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Double (triple?)-subverted with Tau-Indi: their devotion to the Oriati philosophy/religion of trim is so earnest that Falcresti politicians assume it’s being used to conceal cynical political machinations. In reality, Tau is every bit as devoted and earnest as they appear — but they don’t mind being suspected of ulterior motives, because it makes their political machinations easier.
- Outhumbling Each Other: Baru and Iraji, bowing respectfully to the Oriati prince Tau-Indi, each attempts to bow lower than the other until they’re both face-down on the floor.
- The Plague: The Kettling. A sort of super-Ebola, it's an extremely contagious, typically lethal hemorrhagic fever that causes victims to essentially liquefy into green-black ooze from the inside out. It has a bloody history among the Oriati, and an outbreak is currently barely contained on Kyprananoke. The Oriati have some means of deliberately triggering outbreaks, and are prepared to unleash it on Falcrest if another war breaks out. Kyprananoke is a test run. Falcrest is ready to destroy the entire island if it breaks containment, because they predict an uncontrolled pandemic could lead to The End of the World as We Know It.
- Remember the New Guy?: Baru's quest brings her face-to-face with survivors of the rebellion she betrayed, specifically her "inner circle" of advisers and aides who were captured alive for interrogation. Apart from Dziransi, Ake Sentiamut, and Ulyu Xe, all of them are new characters who weren't so much as alluded to in the previous book, even though Baru knows all of them personally.
- Superstitious Sailors: A small point of worldbuilding: despite Falcrest’s state atheism and trying to destroy religion elsewhere, at least part of its Navy follows the Cult of Ships, which worships the ships they sail on as living, thinking beings. In fact, of the practice shown, it's the ship's surgeon/political officer who recites its holy text. Aminata is wary of being associated with it, as being ethnically Oriati she’s already on thin ice regarding religion in the eyes of Falcrest.
- The Topic of Cancer: The Cancrioth is introduced as a rumored cult of cancer-worshiping sorcerers who have achieved immortality by the careful cultivation of tumors, which are surgically transferred from person to person across generations. The concept repulses and fascinates the Throne in equal measure, and they're so despised by the Oriati that they led to a thousand-year-old taboo about being contaminated by things that grow inside their bodies. However, the author's afterword cautions the reader about assigning moral judgements to the Cancrioth's culture, and that "stranger ways of life" exist in Baru's world.
- Transparent Closet: In the previous book, Baru's homosexuality was a weapon used against her and intended to chain her to the Cryptarchy. By letting Tain Hu die, Baru is no longer trapped.
- Apparitor: In the early scenes, he draws various pictures of men and rages against Baru for letting Tain Hu die.
- The Unfettered: Baru makes a new nemesis this book in the form of Tain Shir, Tain Hu's estranged aunt. She is "unmastered" — that is, she doesn't give a shit about anything except her goals, and therefore can't be commanded or coerced, whether by laws, morals, or emotional leverage. Everything she does is of her own free will, which means there's nothing anyone can do to stop her. In this way she's a Shadow Archetype for Baru herself, who sacrificed her lover last book so that she couldn't be controlled by a hostage. Shir was also a cryptarch candidate once... and a killing machine with decades of experience fighting guerilla wars. The prose describes her as more akin to a force of nature than anything human or even animal, and Baru is terrified that continuing down her own path will make her into someone as monstrous as Shir.
- In the book's epilogue, Shir hitches a ride from a hermit fisherman who is similarly unmastered: if human civilization was suddenly destroyed, nothing about his life would change. Shir enjoys his company.
- Walking Disaster Area: Each act of the book is named for a different location Baru finds herself at while searching for the Cancrioth. Specifically, each act is named "The Fall of [Location]", and ends with that place suffering a great disaster. Tau-Indi believes Baru has become a living manifestation of the conflict between Falcrest and the Oriati, doomed to bring death and horror wherever she goes.
- The Elided Keep: raided by a naval mutiny, and almost all of its staff executed.
- The Llosydanes: becomes the site of a skirmish between the Oriati and the Falcresti, burning a significant fraction of the dates its economy can't survive without.
- Kyprananoke: suffers an outbreak of the Kettling simultaneous with the Canaat uprising, which will kill thousands even if contained (a big if).
- War Is Hell: The very reason the admiralty is against the idea of a war with the Oriati Federation.
- We ARE Struggling Together: We finally get to witness (most of) the Imperial Throne, the secret movers of the Masquerade who arranged the plot of the previous book... and it turns out every member hates the guts of every other member. Itinerant and Hesychast hate each other utterly, Baru and Apparitor hate both of them as well as each other, Xate Yawa sneers at everyone except Hesychast, and everybody's scared of Renascent.
