The Monster Baru Cormorant

"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. She has been tasked with finding a secret that can destabilize the Oriati Mbo, Falcrest's greatest rival, and make them ripe for conquest — to uncover the existence of the ancient cult that rules the Oriati from the shadows, just as the Throne rules Falcrest. But if they're enemies of Falcrest, that means she can make them her allies.

But while she thinks what happened in Aurdwynn is over, Aurdwynn has its own ideas. As Baru hunts down the Cancrioth, she is hunted in turn by the consequences of her actions. Baru always forgets: there are other players.

The second book in The Masquerade series, it is followed by The Tyrant Baru Cormorant.

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The following tropes have been found in this work:

• Abstract Apotheosis: Farrier is described as seeking this as his ultimate goal — to become the idea of the perfect Falcresti citizen, living on in his students so they will continue his work long after he's gone.
• Action Prologue: The book begins with a glimpse at Unuxekome's disastrous assault on Horn Harbor in the previous book, from the point of view of Abdumasi Abd, an Oriati merchant and leader of the Syndicate Eyota pirate fleet that sailed with Unuxekome's own ships. The attack fleet is destroyed as a Foregone Conclusion and Abdumasi is taken prisoner by Falcrest, but not before it's revealed that there's another layer of conspiracy behind him and the Oriati involvement in the Aurdwynni rebellion.
• Adorably Precocious Child: In a flashback, a six-year-old Baru Cormorant is shown trying to scam a laman out of a few coins so she can buy candy, and also insisting that they sign a contract releasing her from indemnity and malfeasance.

  "Hmm." From their purse the laman extracted fifteen reef-pearl coins, making Baru squeak in greed, and held the coins over Baru's head in a closed fist.
  "Fifteen," the Laman offered, "and no contract."
  "Twenty! And I must have the contract, I am a legitimate businesswoman!"

• 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.
• Animalistic Abomination: The very end of the book reveals that the Cancrioth aren't limited to just human hosts when a Cancrioth orca appears, a human skeleton fused to its flesh by bone cancer.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Province Admiral Juris Ormsment was a minor character in the first book who appeared in a single chapter to be somewhat patronizing to Baru. Here, she's one of the main antagonists.
  • Tain Shir appeared for approximately a single paragraph in the first book as Farrier's bodyguard on Taranoke, but got a few oblique mentions later, particularly by Tain Hu and Xate Olake. Here, she's again one of the central antagonists.
• Becoming the Mask: The central theme of Baru's journey. What's the difference between believing in something and pretending like you believe in something, if your actions are the same either way?
• Behavioral Conditioning: The crux of the 'Farrier Process', which Farrier has been using to groom Baru her whole life. By manipulating events so that all good things in her life are followed by harsh consequences, Farrier has conditioned her to be ruthless, self-isolating, and frightened of her own sexuality — in other words, a minion focused on his goals, and willing to carry them out at any cost. Baru is only a mixed success, but enough of the conditioning took that she constantly attributes selfish motives to people genuinely trying to befriend her and others, and treats any woman she sleeps with as inevitably doomed to die.
• Bury Your Gays: Invoked and discussed. As a result of Farrier's conditioning and Tain Hu's death, Baru has come to associate death and suffering as the logical consequence of homosexual love. After sleeping with Ulyu Xe, this association is so ingrained that Baru outright hallucinates Xe's death a few hours later, her subconscious taking priority over objective reality for a second, when Xe merely tripped and fell near someone carelessly swinging a crossbow around.
• Central Theme: Yomi, described as the Falcresti concept of knowing what your opponent is thinking. Characters throughout the book act based on what they believe other characters are feeling or planning, to try to outmaneuver them. They're usually incorrect.
• The Chase: After the fall of the Elided Keep, the next 2/3rds of the book are driven partly by Ormsment's pursuit of Baru across the Ashen Sea.
• 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.
• Cryptic Background Reference:
  • Farrier knows of other cryptarchs who executed their hostages. Apparently they didn't last long. This never gets elaborated on.
  • Several are given in quick succession when Oriati Mbo is introduced, as proof of how old, storied, and complicated the country is.
  • Shao Lune says the Oriati are responsible for creating the old royalty of Falcrest, but given what we know about Mbo society and culture it's hard to imagine the circumstances of that.
• Darkest Africa: Evoking similar racist stereotypes about Africa, the Oriati Mbo is sometimes called the "Filthy Continent" by the Masquerade, a place filled with diseases and savage tribal rituals that kill good Falcresti explorers.
• Dark Secret: Apparitor is keeping a secret from the Throne: while everyone sits around discussing rumors and legends about the Cancrioth, he knows for a fact that they exist and what they're about, because Iraji used to be one of them.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Faham Execarne, Falcrest's spymaster in the Llosydanes, has been running a con where he impersonates Faham Execarne, Falcrest's spymaster in the Llosydanes, who 'Faham' killed (along with the rest of his personnel) for various reasons. When the truth comes out, 'Faham' tells Baru to just keep calling him Faham, since he really is a Falcresti spy despite it all and one alias is as good as any.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Baru, often, whenever she's in the same room as Iscend, a tremendously beautiful and athletic Clarified woman.
• Duel to the Death: After Ormsment finally catches up with Baru on Kyprananoke, she challenges her to one to both get her revenge and spare the rest of her crew from the Throne's punishment (since they'll be able to attest that she had gone rogue was acting on her own). As with Cattlson, Baru is very aware that she doesn't stand a chance, but Tau convinces her The Power of Friendship will see her through. Then, before they can start, the Kettling arrives.
• 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.
• Elective Monarchy: The Oriati are ruled by an array of Federal Princes. The exact details of the process aren't given, but the election isn't about selecting an existing candidate, but for determining whether a prince should be conceived in the first place.
• Emperor Scientist: Oriati legend speaks of the Cancrioth as the world's first scientists, the inventors of the modern scientific method (control group and treatment group) in their search for immortality.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Farrier's ambitions get expanded on. His vision is Falcrest as a world-spanning meritocracy where all are equal and anyone from any corner of the world may rise to power, where genius and talent aren't squandered by the circumstances of one's birth. What goes unstated is that the equality he envisions involves erasing all other cultures but Falcrest's, and the violence inherent in that erasure.
• Even Evil Has Standards: After rebels break the Kettling quarantine at Kyprananoke, it turns out even Falcrest's elite marines balk at massacring innocent families and children to contain the epidemic. Some of them can't bring themselves to do it; others go Laughing Mad as they do.
• 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. Fundamentally, they can't understand why a civilization less healthy, less rich, and more diverse than theirs can be so happy and so long-lived, and have concluded that the Oriati are built on a dark secret, like a drug or a Mind Virus.
• Everyone Has Standards: The only people at the Elided Keep who aren't horrified by Baru's callous execution of her lover Tain Hu are the Heteronormative Crusaders Farrier and Hesychast. For the former, teaching Baru to 'overcome' her attraction to women was the whole point of his grooming, while the latter simply takes it as a jab at his own ideology.
• 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.
• Friendly Enemies:
  • Baru and Svir/Apparitor end up becoming close companions despite the fact that Svir despises her for killing Tain Hu.
  • Faham Execarne, the Falcresti spy, in fact the chief spymaster for all of Falcrest, is best friends with Tau-indi Bosoka, the Oriati spymaster and diplomat, and they work to keep the peace together despite their nations being mortal enemies.
• 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.
• God Guise: It's explained that some of the Aurdwynni ilykari serve Falcrest, Hesychast in particular, because they view him as an avatar or second coming of Himu. Hesychast's early experiments in Aurdwynn discovered how to deliberately trigger the growth of tumors in people, and cancer is one of Himu's aspects, so the ilykari of Himu came to worship him despite being brutally persecuted by the same. Furthermore, Hesychast believes that Himu themself was a Cancrioth operative who was active in Aurdwynn in the distant past, whose legend grew in much the same way as his own.
• Going Native:
  • A recurring problem with Falcrest's attempts to infiltrate the Oriati, trim apparently being a far more seductive ideology than Incrasticism.
  • The Oriati have a history of making their rivals do this. Cosgrad describes them as having seduced all their conquerors. Indeed, it's the basis of their military strategy: shock and awe the enemy, then befriend them once they surrender. Centuries ago, when the Tu Maia invaded, the invasion just kind of petered out, with the end result being that the Oriati received a lot of Maia into the gene pool.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Xate Olake didn't take discovering Yawa's true loyalties well. When he reappears, the former rebel spymaster been reduced to a crazed, howling wretch apparently incapable of speech, muzzled and chained like a rabid animal. Baru worries he'll tear out her throat if he gets too close to him.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: A standard Falcresti interrogation technique, exaggerated. When they interrogate a prisoner, there are two stages. The first is the resentimente, a Torture Technician whose job is simply to brutalize them under the pretense of interrogation (since the Masquerade knows Torture Is Ineffective). After a few weeks of this, they send in the attachment, a "legal advocate" who "rescues" them from the torturer, whose innocuous questions are far more likely to get honest answers.
• The Great Fire: The Armada War ended after Falcrest bombarded the Oriati port city Kutulbha with Burn rockets, creating a firestorm so intense it sucked in air for miles around and burned the entire city into undifferentiated ash, along with everyone who tried to rescue people from it. Afterwards, rain turned the ash into concrete, leaving a permanent scar on the Oriati coast.
• 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.
• Hello, Sailor!: Discussed by Apparitor, himself a gay sailor. In his experience, long voyages tend to make everyone go a little 'isoamorous'. Baru argues that such people were always bisexual and can only express themselves at sea, far from Falcrest's Culture Police, but Apparitor theorizes that Situational Sexuality is at work.
• Hiding Behind Religion: 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.
• Hunk: Cosgrad Torrinde, the Hesychast, is the most beautiful man in Falcrest, the epitome of the masculine ideal, fitting for the man in charge of its eugenics program. The narration repeatedly brings attention to his body, which is so perfectly sculpted it could be used as an anatomical diagram. This is a hint that the similarly muscular 'Calcanish', the informant who Aminata interviews trying to figure out what the hell Baru did to the Llosydanes, is Hesychast under an alias. Later, it's mentioned that he's also hung like a horse. Contrasting his physical perfection, he's also a hypochondriac who gets sick a lot.
• Honor Before Reason: Against the Masquerade's methods of conquest, which involve manipulating material conditions so that accepting their rule is the reasonable thing to do, Baru notes that this is probably the most rational and effective means of resisting them: holding fast to things like principle, honor, or hate, which aren't so easily manipulated.
• Immediate Sequel: After the prologue, the book begins slightly before the end of The Traitor Baru Cormorant, in order to provide additional context to its final scene, and then picks things up from there.
• Immortal Ruler: The Cancrioth are believed to be such, hence why the Oriati Mbo has endured for a thousand years. In the Throne's eyes, the only way they could last so long without changing is if their leaders are similarly changeless and eternal. And if they can figure out how the Cancrioth does it, they can make Falcrest eternal, too.
• I Never Got Any Letters: During her years in Aurdwynn, Baru never received any letters from her parents or friends, like Aminata — because Farrier had intercepted and was withholding them, to "keep [her] focused." Of course, the other half of the problem is that Baru never once wrote to them.
• Karma Houdini: What motivates Admiral Ormsment to go rogue: after Baru Cormorant killed countless good Falcresti sailors in the destruction of the tax ships, not only did she receive no comeuppance, but she was elevated to the highest levels of Falcresti government for good service. Ormsment thus takes it on herself to avenge the dead and become Baru's Laser-Guided Karma, in defiance of the Republic's will.
• 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
• Lady Land:
  • Segu Mbo, one of the four great federations of the Oriati Mbo, is said to be the closest the world has to a matriarchy. A few details are given about men there being stereotyped as self-effacing and wives abandoning their husbands and families to go haring off on adventures.
  • Downplayed by the Llosydanes, which are a matriarchal society with three women for every man due to their tradition of killing all male children who are insufficiently peaceful and submissive, started after a civil war was fought between mostly men. Baru (and Aminata, who was born in Segu) is skeptical of the idea that men are inherently more violent and unreasonable than women, and she sees men being pushed around and harassed in exactly the same way men treat women in patriarchal societies.
• 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.
• More than Mind Control: Early on, Apparitor suggests that Baru is subconsciously acting out Farrier's will without realizing it, a horrifying thought for a woman bent on destroying everything he stands for. Farrier himself confirms a little while later that her execution of Tain Hu (done so the rest of the Throne would have no way to control her) was exactly what he wanted her to do. Even her defiance was part of his design. This becomes a theme for the rest of the book — how much of what Baru does is her own will, and how much is Farrier's conditioning?
• 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.
• Monument of Humiliation and Defeat: After burning Kutulbha to a smear of ash concrete in the first Armada War, the Masquerade went in and carved the words The Arc of History into it in huge letters to boast that their victory was a historical inevitability.
• Multiple Narrative Modes: In contrast to the previous book, this one includes points of view besides Baru, fitting the greater complexity of the situation she's stepped into. These include:
  • Aminata, who is torn between her loyalty to the Navy and her loyalty to her old friend Baru
  • Xate Yawa, whose narrative is in first person and provides a point of view from one of Hesychast's agents and how Baru comes across to other people (i.e. callous and sinister)
  • A Story About Ash, a sub-story about Tau-indi's childhood, which soon intertwines with Farrier and Cosgrad's childhoods after they become guests in Tau's house
  • And interludes from Lindon Satamine, Svir's lover and Falcrest's chief admiral, who provides a look into Admiralty politics ahead of the looming war, and Atakaszir, the Necessary King of the Stakhieczi, on whom Baru's and Yawa's plans both hinge, and who is engaged in his own politics that could threaten Falcrest.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Baru spends the first few chapters trying very hard not to show how appalled and horrified she is at killing Tain Hu. Knowing it's what Hu genuinely wanted doesn't make it any easier.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Baru's inner circle of the Army of the Coyote was also Tain Hu's inner circle, and knew of her plan to sacrifice herself for Baru. They are sworn to her on two levels, first from Baru being acclaimed queen of Aurdwynn, and second from being Tain Hu's Vultjagata, who swore to obey Baru if she kept Tain Hu's faith. But since Baru became queen on false pretenses and betrayed the entire rebellion to the Masquerade, this loyalty is tenuous and disputed despite their oaths, even the one they took to Tain Hu.
• 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.
• Noodle Incident: The Cheetah Palaces and the Jellyfish Eaters.
• Original Man: It's mentioned that Falcrest believes that all humanity is descended from a Template Race, which changed and diversified as it spread across the world, according to Torrindic theories of heredity.
• 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.
• Pay Evil unto Evil:
  • How Tain Shir intends to punish Baru for her crimes: forcing her to sacrifice people close to her and parts of her body over and over again until it breaks her, as payback for sacrificing Aurdwynn and Tain Hu for her own ascension. This causes conflict with Shir's accomplice Ormsment, who just wants Baru dead.
  • The original Faham Execarne was gassed to death in his own headquarters by his impersonator, in part as poetic justice for his role developing the same war gas by testing it on living Sydani captives.
• 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.
• Plague Doctor: When reintroduced, Xate Yawa now has a habit of wearing a bulky, sinister "quarantine gown" clearly inspired by medieval plague doctors. It's described as resembling both architecture and "the shadow of a raven cast up into strange dimensions", and it's a little unclear why she wears it aside from intimidation value.
• The Power of Friendship: The Oriati magic of 'trim', which applies supernatural significance to the bonds between people. A worker of trim, such as the Oriati prince Tau-Indi Bosoka, manipulates threads in the fabric of human connection to bring people who need something near people who have something, and on a grander scale can alter the fate of entire nations, as small changes in the fabric ripple out through the whole. That is, if you believe in such things.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • The Llosydane Islands were annexed by Falcrest decades ago. But they didn't have any resources worth taking, so instead of wasting money assimilating them for no return, the Masquerade declared them a 'cultural preserve', and didn't bother interfering with the native culture. Of course, that doesn't mean they aren't taken advantage of in other ways.
  • In a rare case of pragmatism making things worse, Falcrest ended its occupation of Kyprananoke because it was no longer profitable to maintain a presence there, after they conquered Taranoke. By that time, they'd already absorbed the local government and ensured the Kyprananoki couldn't live without them, so when they pulled out, things went straight to hell.
• Prescience by Analysis: The ultimate goal of the Throne, as expressed by the Great Game.

  You, too, will be held to account for your contribution to the great and final work, which is our quest for a theory of perfect rule: a means by which the Imperial Republic of Falcrest may be rendered causally closed, so that the sprout of every seed and the turn of every cyclone occurs in accordance with our predictions, and therefore in accordance with our decrees. Thus we may at least achieve the state of ruling without acting, a self-governing world.

• Prevent the War: A considerable part of the Gambit Pileup.
  • Baru, Svir, and Yawa have been tasked with finding evidence that can start an Oriati civil war and make it ripe for conquest by Falcrest.
  • The Admiralty is under the impression that Baru is planning on goading the Oriati into a second Armada War with Falcrest and sets off to stop her.
  • Abdumasi Abd is an Oriati merchant who led a pirate fleet into an attack on Falcresti territory, but his patrons are the Cancrioth, which the Oriati hate, and is therefore a bargaining chip that could be used to start either war. He is currently in custody of the Admiralty, who are unaware about the civil war plot, so that he can't be used to start the second Armada War.
  • Tau-indi believes that war is a consequence of their own faulty trim and seeks to make amends with Abdumasi to mend it and stop the war from happening.
• The Purge: One of Falcrest's favorite hobbies, to the point where it became the subject of a popular card game. The Admiralty fears a second Armada War because Parliament would start it by purging the fleet of uppity admirals. Even the Throne is designed to destroy itself in blackmail and scandal if it ever stops acting in Falcrest's interests. Yawa relates a story about how the Morrow Ministry, Falcrest's intelligence agency, once controlled all of Parliament, only for the Throne to execute them by the hundreds in kangaroo courts.
• Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: After the Canaat attack the Hara-Vijay embassy with Kettling plaguebearers as an indiscriminate bioweapon, Aminata gives the order to burn the whole building down, infected and healthy alike, because the Kettling cannot be allowed to spread. And it doesn't matter, because the Canaat and the Kettling are already rising up everywhere else, too.
• Raised as a Host: Iraji's secret is that he used to be part of the Cancrioth, raised and consecrated to bear a piece of the immortal tumor borne by his mother. He ran from them, and somehow ended up with Apparitor, but the Cancrioth still wants him back.
• Red Baron:
  • Aminata is now known as the Burner of Souls among the Oriati, owing to a prisoner she tortured to insanity with drugs and fire, convinced that he lived in a world consumed by flames.
  • Tain Shir is called the Bane of Wives due to her time inciting the Invijay tribes against the Oriati, leading raids against villages where she killed and enslaved many husbands.
  • The Kettling is also known as the Black Emmenia. Why exactly isn't clear, but it's related to the first time it appeared, when it killed every unborn child in Mzilimake Mbo and almost all their mothers with them.
• 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.
• Replacement Goldfish: Iraji is explicitly provided to Baru as a replacement for Muire Lo, her late secretary and confidant from the first book, in the hopes that some remnant emotional connection will cause her to let her guard down around him and let slip something incriminating the Throne can use to control her.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Apparitor has no love for Falcrest, but he does love a Falcresti man. As such, his ultimate goal is to gather the wealth and resources to get himself and his loved ones the hell out of Falcrest before a second Armada War starts and kills everyone.
• Slave Liberation:
  • Oriati Mbo originated from a slave uprising against the ruling Cancrioth. They abhor slavery so much that in ancient times they went around the Ashen Sea completely eradicating the practice, which is why no cultures perform chattel slavery today.
  • Iscend, a Clarified, has begun deprogramming herself on her own initiative by using her own Command Word on herself to gain a measure of independence. Baru is fascinated to hear of this, comparing it to a slave using her own chains to free herself.
• Smash Cut: Baru arrives in the Llosydanes, prepared to start following the money and start sniffing out the origins of the pirate attack on Aurdwynn.

  She went about her work.
  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.

• Sorcerous Overlord: The Oriati hate and fear the Cancrioth as the order of sorcerer-scientists who ruled and enslaved them in ancient times. Their power was linked to radiation, specifically uranium, from the naturally-occurring fission reactors in (what would become) Mzilimake Mbo. As the radioactive fire never died, so too were the Cancrioth immortal.
• Split Personality: 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.
• Spotting the Thread: The Oriati embassy on Kyprananoke regrets that its resident ambassador is absent on a fishing trip when Baru and Tau-indi arrive on matters of state. Tau-indi instantly realizes that the embassy has been compromised, because they're a personal friend of the ambassador and knows they hate fishing.
• Start of Darkness: For Tain Shir, it was when she was forced to kill her own mother to put down the Fool's Rebellion in Aurdwynn, in the name of the Masquerade. Shir begged Ko to surrender and join her new master Farrier to find a new way for Aurdwynn. Tain Ko's last words were I am unmastered.
• Storyboarding the Apocalypse: Inserted between chapters two and three is a report to the Parliament of Falcrest detailing the possible outcomes of a second war with Oriati Mbo. In the worst-case scenario, the war escalates to the use of biological warfare between both sides, leading to disease, starvation, societal collapse, the deaths of one out of every six people in the entire known world, and potentially the complete disintegration of civilization and humanity regressing back to a scattering of subsistence farms.
• 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.
• Supervillain Lair: The Elided Keep, the secret fortress of the Throne. It features staff who are sworn to secrecy by blackmail, archives designed to self-destruct in case of attack so their enemies can't learn their secrets, a room full of disguises and falsified credentials for the cryptarchs to go anywhere, another room full of maps where the cryptarchs can simulate plans for world domination, and a throne room. It is, however, completely undefended — anyone who knows it exists should be too afraid of the political power wielded by the Throne to attack it. Too bad Tain Shir doesn't fear political retribution, and neither does the willfully traitorous Ormsment.
• Take Up My Sword: Tain Hu, shortly before giving herself up to execution, wrote a letter to Baru's old friend Aminata asking her to protect Baru, physically and emotionally, because after her sacrifice she obviously won't be around to do it any more. Hu caps the letter off by knighting Aminata according to her authority as Duchess of Vultjag. This only deepens Aminata's anxieties surrounding Baru.
• Tastes Like Friendship: Invoked by Tau-Indi, who shares a meal with Baru and Iraji with the express purpose of establishing a bond of friendship among them, as part of a ritual of trim to bring them closer to their goals. And to ensure they take part in the ritual, they lock the doors behind them, while the ship they're on is slowly sinking.
• 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.
• Trigger Phrase: The Clarified and their command words appear again.
  • Purity Cartone informs Baru that he has two: 'Suspire', which she used frequently in the previous book, compels him to obey her commands, while 'Caenogen' lets her reprogram the terms of his obedience to answer only to her.
  • Iscend Comprine, a new Clarified, has 'Gaios' as her command word, and demonstrates the downsides of having one: Tain Shir uses it to stop Iscend from attacking her, and the fact that she knows it is enough to convince Iscend that Shir is a loyal servant of the Throne even though she really isn't. Later, Iscend starts using it to command herself, which means she can disobey her masters. Using your own command word is a taboo among Clarified, but no one around is qualified to reinforce her conditioning.
• Transferable Memory: In contrast to Farrier's egalitarianism, Hesychast's vision is a world where memories and personality traits can be replicated and transferred from person to person through specially-cultured tumors, so that people can be programmed into model citizens. He believes the Cancrioth possess this technique already and use it as a form of Parasitic Immortality — tumors carrying whole Cancrioth personalities being surgically transferred into the bodies of successive generations.
• 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 the only way to stop her from doing something is through violence, and no one is better at violence than Tain Shir. 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. 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.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Baru knew exactly what she was doing when she betrayed the Aurdwynni rebellion, but she had no idea she was betraying Taranoke, too. When she baited Duke Unuxekome into attacking Treatymont, the Oriati pirates who joined him were led and funded by Abdumasi Abd, a wealthy Oriati merchant who was also funding a Taranoki resistance movement. When Abdumasi was captured, the Taranoki rebels lost their backer — rebels who included her own parents. Baru is horrified to realize she may have inadvertently doomed her home even worse than before.
• Virtual Training Simulation: The Throne has an analog version called the Great Game, which uses enormous maps and "very large rulebooks" to simulate global geopolitics, and the effects of their plans on it besides. It's a contractual requirement for members of the Throne to know how to play it, and their ultimate goal is to refine it until it becomes a 1:1 emulation of reality.
• 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).
• Warding Gestures: Being a society of neat freaks, Falcrest's gesture of warding off evil is to pantomime washing your hands. Apparitor does it at Xate Yawa to annoy her, since he dislikes her almost as much as Baru.
• 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.
  • On a larger scale, the whole of the Masquerade: Navy against Parliament, Admiralty against the Judiciary, and the Ministries against each other.
• We Used to Be Friends:
  • Hesychast and Farrier are described as hating each other the way only enemies who became friends and then returned to being enemies can. They can make a pretense of friendly cooperation, and are so close that they can practically finish each other's sentences, but ultimately both of them would love nothing more than to ruin the other.
  • When reintroduced, Aminata is in her feelings about not having heard anything from her old school friend Baru after they parted ways three years ago, even given that the last news from Aurdwynn was that Baru had turned traitor and killed a lot of Falcresti sailors in the process.
• Womb Horror:
  • When the Kettling infects a pregnant woman, it invariably kills the child in the womb and usually the mother, too, as the dead fetus goes septic and induces a horrifying miscarriage.
  • The Cancrioth's servants include women who appear to be pregnant, but instead of a child, they carry a tumorous mass that never comes to term.
• You Are Too Late: Ormsment is able to recruit Tain Shir to her cause partly because Shir wants to rescue her cousin, Tain Hu, from the clutches of the Throne. She doesn't take it well when she finds out Baru executed Tain Hu weeks ago.
• Young Conqueror: Shiqu Si, the War Princess, carved half the known world into the old Tu Maia empire (the largest in history) before dying at twenty-one. At one point, a character accuses Baru of plotting to become the next Shiqu Si.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The Kettling making its appearance at the end of the book is framed as "the dead invading." Its victims are alive, but bleeding from every orifice, they certainly look like walking corpses, and they're intent on spreading the disease to others — which they do by force-feeding others their infected blood and flesh.

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