The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Left to their own devices, Tau-indi would have probed Cosgrad’s personal anger, rather than the facts of politics. But they tried to ask what Kindalana would ask: “What would you have done with this war? What opportunities did it offer you?”

  A soft purple star rose out of the deep harbor below, unfurled white hunting tentacles, and began to ripple with light. It was as long as a man. Cosgrad stared down into the water as if he could lean forward and fall through it, into the sky.

  “Farrier talks about historical dynamics. Breaking the, ah, what was it, the degenerate stalemate between the rural power of the farmers and shua and the concentration of administrative power in the Princes and the cities. Unlocking the true potential of Lonjaro and the whole continent. All that shit.” Cosgrad made a stone-throwing motion. “You know why I came to Oriati Mbo. To study how you live. To learn if there’s truth behind the superstitions in Falcrest: that the Oriati are bound to ancient powers.”

  Tau-indi remembered the sorcerer aflame, walking calmly toward Cosgrad. They shuddered hard against him. “Cosgrad, listen to me. You must turn away from that path. Only the deepest and most dissolute grief awaits you there.”

  But Cosgrad had his grave scholarly face on. “I have a grand theory, Tau-indi, it is my life’s work. It is the story of how life came to be.”

  “Out of the Door in the East?”

  “Maybe life came from the east. Maybe. It came from the sea, I am sure. My theory comes not just from the study of beetles and birds and mangrove trees, but from my surveys of ancient myth.”

  The jellyfish constellations moved on the harbor current. A hunting fish passed in front of a distant shining bell and made it blink. A cold salt breeze came up to chop the water and get in their marrow.

  “In Aurdwynn they tell stories of the ilykari, ancient people who practiced and came to embody virtues. Among them is Wydd, who is patience and the flow of water. In the Stakhieczi Mansions they worship brine and aquifers, the water deep below the stone. Here in Oriati Mbo, you remember the Cancrioth, and the power in the water that wells up out of secret caves. And in Taranoke, they say the gods sleep under the mountain’s caldera, down under the water and above the fire. Do you see?” His voice was entranced, but his eyes were sharp. “All of it comes from the water below. Tau, of all the animals, we alone can think and speak and act. How did this come to be?”

  “The world was made for us. The principles organized it out of chaos.”

  Cosgrad’s eyes gleamed like jellyfish. “The world,” he said, “was bred.”

  Tau-indi looked at him and there was no way inside Cosgrad’s thoughts. They had no idea how to find the want behind these words. They waited, shivering in the wind.

  “I think all life radiated from something primal. All living things are descendants of a simple ancestor, differentiated by the needs of their environment and the war for survival. But I don’t know how that differentiation occurs. I have one piece: I know that everything competes for life. But—” He thrust out his hands, seized the ship’s rail as if to crush it into its constituent atoms and sort them into piles. “How do things change, so that they can find new ways to compete? How did birds get wings? They must have a flesh-memory, a part of their bodies that stores their struggles, so they and their children can change in response. They must have remembered, in their flesh, the need to leap higher and higher, to escape predators, to reach food. That was how they grew wings. And people must have that memory, too. We must have something that says, oh, you have labored hard at the oars, so your children will be strong. And you, you were sickly, so your children will be sickly, too.”

  “You think we were once . . .” Tau-indi looked at the jellies pulsing in the chop. “Like that? Our great-great-great-great-grandparents were jellyfish in the sea?”

  Cosgrad’s hands made the rail creak. He looked down, and then up, his eyes wild, full of a tiny piece of something huge, whirling around inside his skull and unable to get out. He groaned, a terrible noise.

  “I can’t find the words for it yet. I can’t find the proof. But I think, I think, I think . . . 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,” Cosgrad whispered. “That was their power. That’s what the squid and the octopi do; I’ve seen it, they change their forms and the markings upon their limbs . . . and down in the deep, beneath them, there might be kraken with the power to alter their own flesh so wholly that it buds off in tiny nymphs that grow into something else.

  “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. They made us, the race of man, with a special gift. We can pass our thoughts by speech, and so put what we learn into each other’s flesh. And those thoughts we speak into our flesh are born into our children.

  “Why else are the Aurdwynni fractious and rebellious, except that their wars have been bred into them? Why else were the Maia rapacious and conquest-hungry, except that they violated each other and bred promiscuously? Why else are your people wise and passive and superstitious, except that you spent centuries in comfort, telling stories about worlds beyond our own? We have let the world breed itself into us, get into our testes and wombs, fill us with memories of storms and plagues and leeches. We have let ourselves degenerate. Our whole species is spiraling down into a festering nightmare future, Tau. You have never seen the world as I have. You have never seen what Farrier will make of it. He will welcome the degenerate; he will put them in the fields and the mines; he will make himself king of an empire of slaves.

  “But if I can just find the right way to live, Tau-indi, the perfect way, if I can just convince Parliament and the Faculties and Renascent to listen to me, then that correct way can be bred into all life. We will all be masters of ourselves. There will be no slaves and no lessers, for we will all be perfect. Our flesh remembers! I only need the equations, the descriptions of the right way, and then we can put the future into the germ, into our children, and all their children, raised up together, forever.”

  Tau-indi gaped. It felt right and good to learn this about Cosgrad, to understand what drove him. He had a majestic conviction.

  But what he proposed was an act of cosmic hubris. It was like rewriting the end of a story to change its beginning. Like reaching up with your finger and blotting out the moon.

  Cosgrad put his head in his hands. “But everyone thinks I’m mad,” he said. “Squid Priest, Farrier calls me. His dream is much more palatable, I think. He says he will achieve the dream of our forefathers: a society ordered by proper thought, not by fever dreams of octopi. The squid priest! Everyone thinks I’m mad.”

  Kindalana flung her hands at the table full of reports. “Farrier says we invited this on ourselves. Did you know that?”

  Tau-indi had a toothache and that made them want to snap but, really, if Kindalana had learned something awful and inconvenient, she would certainly tell you about it. “That’s ridiculous. That’s evil speech. What could we possibly have done to Falcrest to earn this?”

  “We meddled in their affairs, he claims. We supported their monarchy, when it favored us. Tried to conquer them, once.”

  “Tahari,” Tau-indi said, remembering the name from the songs Tahr sang to them in the cradle. “Wasn’t there a warlord, a rabies prince, named Tahari? And she went north across the Butterveldt and broke the wall in Falcrest, long ago?”

  “She sacked the city. She stole their narwhal horn, the one brought down out of the north by the Verse-hammer.”

  “They had a narwhal horn?” Tau-indi felt a great indignation against this ancient pillager. Then they felt like an idiot child who cared more about a legendary beast’s horn than the ruin of
Kutulbha at Falcresti hands. “Do you believe these things Farrier tells you?”

  She shrugged with an odd shyness, as if she’d been stung stealing honey. “Not entirely. But it helps me get inside his head. We have to bind them to us. I think that’s what we do, Tau. We surrender, and we find a way to ease their hurt.”

  “Are you still going to seduce him?” Tau blurted.

  Kindalana looked at them equitably, without either shame or reprobation. “He says he’s not much older than me, so he’s in my reach; though I think he’s a few years past what he claims. But he’s wary. He knows I possess myself, and that frightens him. And, anyway . . .”

  Tau could not imagine anyone declining the advances of Kinda, with her wide-set eyes and elegant clavicles and shoulder blades like a bird’s folded wings. But Farrier was very odd. And maybe Kindalana had not made any advances until she was sure she would succeed.

  “And anyway,” Tau said, finishing her thought, “you have to marry Abdu.”

  It was the only thing to do. Abdumasi’s fortune was gone, his mother dead, his house on the edge of dissolution. To save that house he needed a quick union to someone with wealth. As a guest Prince, Kindalana did not receive tribute or investment from anyone in Lonjaro, but the eshSegu held her share of the tribal fortune.

  “I have to marry Abdu,” Kinda said, and tried to hide from Tau, tried her best and Tau loved her for it, to conceal the quick shudder of anger and frustration in her hands.

  “You don’t want to marry him.”

  “I don’t want to marry anyone,” Kinda said. “Not yet. I wanted a political marriage, a very good one, when the time was just right. I wanted to use what I have,” an unselfconscious shrug, she remarking on herself, “to do good work. I wanted . . . but I do love him, Tau. And he loves his house.”

  13

  Zero Sum

  She’s alive! I’m sure of it. She’s a strong swimmer, and she had plenty of time to jump. Svir, you’ve got to look for her!”

  They were up in Helbride’s foretop, where the foremast jointed from its lower trunk to its middle segment. The ship’s dancing seagull slept here when it was not begging the crew for food or shitting on things. It had fled the moment Barhu raised her voice.

  “Please, Svir,” Barhu begged. “I didn’t even get to return her sword.”

  She saw, in the little quirk of Svir’s smile, the cruel thing he might have said: she watched him set it aside. “This is odd. Normally you’d be certain that Aminata was dead and gone beyond help. Now you’d be drinking about it and pretending not to care.”

  “Svir, stop evading!”

  “I’ll send a boat to search the wreck. But I don’t think we’ll find her. Which is a shame. I didn’t even know you had friends. We’ve lost a magical archon.”

  Barhu sniffed miserably. She hurt. Her back ached where Sulane’s barnacles had cut her open. Her eye throbbed in its pierced socket. Her missing fingers cramped like they were bent against her palm. Even Eternal was missing: the golden ship had turned south and vanished around the black heights of el-Tsunuqba, hiding from Helbride and Ascentatic as it tried to repair its damage and make ready to sail.

  Barhu wanted Aminata back.

  The grief-fatigue, the Oriati disease, had struck again. What should she do with her hands? Her tongue? Would she begin to repeat herself, stagger in circles, rasp like a broken clock? She’d felt so good after the passage through Tain Shir’s test, after Yawa’s unexpected mercy, after hurling herself at Ormsment and surviving. Everything seemed like it had turned around.

  And then she’d lost Aminata, and slept, and that cold sore ring of fog had settled back down around her head. . . .

  She’d had not even one day with Aminata before sending her to die.

  Suddenly, to Svir’s obvious astonishment, which made her giggle wetly, Barhu began to sob.

  “Are you going to fall?” He put up a hand, unsure (Barhu thought) if he meant to reassure her, or pull her to safety, or possibly push her to her death. “Do you need a line?”

  She shook her head.

  “We ought to get you down, anyway.” He mounted the pilot’s ladder down to the ratlines: and when, instead of following, she sat there, stiffly posed to keep the wound at her back away from the mast, weeping angrily, he dangled one-footed on the ladder and boggled at her as the pitch of Helbride swept them both across a little arc of sky.

  “You never did this for Tain Hu,” he said.

  “I was afraid. For obvious reasons.” Because then the Throne would know she cared.

  “You should still be afraid. I’m not your friend. None of us can be friends.” That faraway, dangerous lightning flickered in his eyes. It was something about his skin, the pale contrast with the dark pupil, which made her think of stormclouds and menace. “I know what’s happening to you. You were in deepest despair yesterday. You thought that all was lost, that you were going to die. You struck the bottom of your fall. And suddenly you were so high, so free, and everything was all right. But really what’s happened is that you struck bottom so hard you bounced. Now you’re sinking again. This is how it goes, Baru. There’s no magical way out. You will be fighting your Oriati disease for months. For years. Maybe forever.”

  Barhu did not know what to say to this. Stubbornly she repeated: “I know she’s still alive.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Oh, what do you want from me, Svir? Should I just throw up my hands and abandon her?”

  “No,” he snapped, “what you should abandon is the need to know for certain. Maybe we’ll find her corpse. Maybe we’ll fish her alive from the sea. Probably we’ll never learn her fate. So accept that you can’t know! Stop trying to be the perfect savant who controls every variable! Stop trying to make her alive or dead in your head so you can get your mourning over with! Do you think I’m convinced Lindon’s fine? I don’t know! I don’t know and I have to let it be!”

  She wiped her eyes on the back of her arm and growled. “I hate letting things be.”

  “I know.” He beckoned. “Come work. We have a situation to contain here.”

  She didn’t want to think about it yet. Pine pitch glued her back together. Her right eye ached under layers of gauze. Too much saltwater and harsh soap had developed into an infuriating nipple itch, which bothered her in a way separate from the pain of all her wounds. They can put a hole in your skull, and cut off your fingers, and rip your cheek, and slice your back open, and your damn itch will still drive you mad. Like the way loss works: you cannot hide Tain Hu behind Aminata, or diminish Aminata with Tain Hu. How much could you lose in a year?

  More than this, if she failed to do her work.

  She wiped her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “We should begin. Help me down.”

  I think,” Yawa said, with quiet honesty, “that every time we’ve gathered here, we’ve failed. And I hope today we will not.”

  Svir’s cabin was full of three cryptarchs, but empty, anyway, without Iraji. Yawa stood by the doorway, consciously high-chinned and bright-eyed, offering her strength. Barhu slouched in the corner where she’d had her seizure. Svir on his hammock, jaw hard, eyes downcast, toes on the floor, as if he might at any moment rise up and shout.

  “How do we avoid failure,” he said, although it did not sound like a question. “What are your criteria. Don’t say no more secrets between us, or I will scream.”

  “Of course not,” Yawa said, gently. “We are what we are. But my recent, ah, conversation with Baru made it clear that we’ve been . . . unnecessarily antagonistic. All of us. We could’ve found a way to use Iraji as bait without risking his capture. We could’ve let Baru go aboard the Cancrioth ship, then pressured them for her safe release. Tau would still be safe in our care. Shao Lune would be—well, she would be our prisoner instead of theirs.”

  That was a nice story. But it would have ended with a nugget of baneflesh growing in Barhu’s skull: because, given enough time on Eternal to overcome her fears, she would have ta
ken the Brain’s deal. She would have beaten herself into believing she had to die to be worthy of Hu’s legacy. She would have the Kettling, and cancer.

  Yawa had saved her from her own inevitable choice.

  “That’s stupid,” Svir said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Yawa blinked at him.

  “It’s stupid and you’re stupid for thinking it. You two aren’t at odds because you lack charm and clarity and good feelings. I’m not keeping secrets from you because I’m worried that you’re cruel and unfriendly. The reason you two are at odds is that your patrons are mortal enemies. The reason you are at odds with me is that I am your competition.” His larynx stood out starkly on his throat, like something he couldn’t get out. “You were meant to destroy each other. It’s a central part of the reckoning between Farrier and Hesychast that their protégés must go to war. Your performance in the struggle against each other is part of the test of their rival methods of control! Why do you think you’re out here? Don’t you see how much better the Throne could use you if you were sitting in a desk at Falcrest? How much more influence you could wield? But this is a race! You two are snakes in a maze! You’re locked up on my ship, out on the edge of the Imperial Republic, with limited protection and scanty resources, to be sure that you can’t escape the contest, to be sure only one of you can come home victorious.”

  He must’ve had all this bottled up since the Elided Keep. Now he boxed them on the ears with it. “Baru, you have every reason to hate and flee Falcrest. But if Farrier’s control keeps you loyal, even out here, then you’ll be the jewel in his crown—forgive my royalist obscenity, please, I’m just not very good at being polite about him.

  “And Yawa—don’t think I’ve forgiven you for using Iraji, by the way, my vengeance is glacial in its patience—imagine your value to Hesychast, to his ideology of inherited behavior. You’re a wild-type Maia woman, born in strife and poverty, armed with generations of blood knowledge of Aurdwynn. The struggle between the Maia and the Stakhieczi, the wars between the dukes, the pain of the people trampled underfoot. All that is in your blood. If you were locked in a ship with Baru, the acme of Farrier’s education and conditioning, only to outfox her, lobotomize her, and use her as a dowry gift to the Stakhieczi king to buy peace—then you would have solved the same conflict that’s written in your blood. United Aurdwynn and the Stakhieczi with your inherited skills. And those skills would have triumphed over Farrier’s indoctrinated protégé.