The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “The two of you can’t both win! Even if you make it all square between you, bring home everything Farrier and Torrinde want, even if you skip through Commsweal Square holding hands and whistling, your masters need one of you destroyed and one triumphant. You’re cryptarchs now! Did you really think they’d just give you a mission that was everything it seemed?”

  “But the truth is,” Yawa said, looking, once, to be sure the doorscreen was pinned shut, “that we aren’t under our masters’ control. Baru doesn’t give a fig for Farrier, except for his use as a resource. And I—Well, Hesychast is hardly my dear teacher.”

  “And now I know that,” Svir said, with dreadful lightness. “Now I can expose you to Hesychast and Itinerant as seditious traitors—”

  “Oh, please.” Yawa snorted. “Mere gossip? They’d hardly be surprised to learn we’re plotting and scheming to our own advantage. We are cryptarchs, after all. But Hesychast has my twin. He knows I won’t stray.”

  “You try to betray us,” Barhu added, “and I’ll tell everyone your little secret, Svir.” He was the brother of the Stakhieczi king, and that made him royalty. Royalty did not survive in the Masquerade. Death was the most merciful sentence he could expect.

  He did not look at all angry. If anything he was relieved. A bond of blackmail was easier for him to respect than the tenuous gamble of trust. Barhu found that both sad and sympathetic.

  “Fine.” He gave them a gleaming white smile, arc of ice on autumn water. “You want to play revolutionary? Do it. Just remember that every cryptarch who’s ever worn our mask had their own agenda. Their own idea of how Falcrest ought to be. And they were all kept in control. Even me.”

  “He . . . does make a cogent point, I’m afraid,” Yawa admitted. “No matter how much we want to escape this game, we have to keep playing to survive. And by the terms of the game, Baru, sparing your life was an enormous mistake.”

  “It wasn’t.” Barhu snapped her left hand, which still had the fingers for it. “Because I can deliver Eternal to you. One of their leaders, the Brain—she swore to find me. She swore she’d follow. I can bring that ship wherever we require it.”

  “And?” Yawa’s harsh face seemed to crack with strange, unaccustomed hope. “And what will this Brain give you? Something that can help me? Help Svir?”

  “Yes,” Svir echoed, cool curiosity. “What’s on that ship?”

  Death. Death for the whole world. If Barhu had promised to paint Tain Hu across history in the color of Falcrest’s blood, then the Kettling was the perfect paint. And she’d failed to obtain it, because she was too cowardly to accept death as Tain Hu had—

  Stop. Stop.

  I died so you could be free.

  The Kettling was not the answer. Barhu was not sure why she was so sure of it, except that it simply did not fit. She was an accountant and a thinker, not a plague-bearer, not a conqueror.

  So what was on that ship that mattered so much? Her instincts screamed that it was the key. But how?

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  “You don’t know?” Svir repeated. “You risked your life, Aminata’s life, and my fucking life to protect Eternal, and you don’t know what it’s good for?”

  Even four years out of school she wanted to apologize to Svir like a teacher she’d disappointed. “I just know it’s important. Something in me,” she did not name the tulpa, “knows that ship’s important.”

  “Oh, shit.” Svir groaned. “You drilled too deep, Yawa. Of all the people to leverage me, I get an idiot.”

  “I saved that ship because there were people on it,” Barhu insisted, ashamed of this answer, not sure why, wishing that Tau were here to explain her feelings. “I didn’t . . . I just couldn’t let Tau and Osa and Shao and Iraji all die.”

  “No.” Svir shook his head in perfectly performed disappointment. “This is not the way Agonist, betrayer of Aurdwynn, conducts her work. Where’s your calculation? Where’s your foresight?”

  “It’s here! I have foresight!” She looked pleadingly to Yawa. “I know that ship is absolutely vital.”

  “Svir!” Yawa barked. “Has it occurred to your air-starved brain that perhaps Baru is trying to break years of systematic conditioning Itinerant forced on her? That maybe she’s chosen not to act like the ‘betrayer of Aurdwynn’?”

  He blinked at her. “Of course it had occurred to me. Many stupid things occur to me. Let’s say Baru has secretly made a strong move, though. Let’s say that Eternal really is the key to our survival in the Great Game. What do we do next, Baru? Do we sail around el-Tsunuqba and offer Eternal our aid?”

  “No,” Barhu said.

  “No? Then what do we do next?”

  “We need to help the Kyprananoki,” she said. “We have to bring some mercy to the people here.”

  “Why,” Svir said, flatly. “Why should we not destroy these islands and get on with our mission?”

  Destroy the islands? Not likely, not with a single remaining frigate at their disposal. “Because they’re like us! They’re people Falcrest has used. We owe them our . . .” She struggled for a word, and found one in Lapetiare’s own writing about the revolution that made Falcrest. “Our solidarity.”

  Svir sat deep in his hammock now, back straight against the wall, staring out at the two women as if from the bottom of a grave. “Kyprananoke chose the Kettling and civil war. Now Kyprananoke must live and die with the consequences.”

  “The common folk here never got to choose. They never asked to take up Canaat machetes or bleed Cancrioth plague. They certainly never asked for their Kyprist rulers to water-starve them into submission.”

  “Do you want to put the old regime back in power? Half the Kyprists are already dead. The rest are barricaded on the reservoir islets waiting to die.”

  “No. I want the revolution to succeed. I want it to be more than a death spasm.”

  “Do you think we have the time for that? We’re due in Falcrest by 90 Summer! I have to be there to save Lindon. Yawa needs to be there for Xate Olake’s trial. We can’t risk that by lingering here while—”

  “While what?” Yawa interjected. “What exactly do you think will happen?”

  Cruel truth smoothed out his throat. “While the survivors on these islands die of thirst and plague. We have no responsibility to them.”

  Barhu hated that idea. “You think we’re not responsible? Even though we triggered the revolution?”

  He looked between Barhu and Yawa, narrow-eyed, taken aback by their unity. “We didn’t cause it. The Cancrioth did. The Scheme-Colonel Masako at the embassy, he conspired with them to arm the Canaat for an uprising. He killed the local Oriati ambassador to keep it secret. You told me that.”

  “But we forced them to act! Think of how it looked when we arrived, Svir. Two Falcresti warships. A Falcresti clipper with diplomatic flags sending parties ashore to meet the Kyprists? All this not long after an Oriati fleet passed through, heading north to Aurdwynn to make war? It looked like we were coming to crush the rebels.”

  “The rebellion would’ve happened anyway!”

  Yes. As it would happen on Taranoke, as it would happen again in Aurdwynn. Somewhere, somehow, one of these rebellions had to succeed. She had destroyed a rebellion; she had to know how to see one through.

  “Svir,” she said. “Svir. Just because you hate your own home, just because you’d let the Stakhieczi starve and rot rather than let Lindon or Iraji be hurt, doesn’t mean nothing in the world is worth saving—”

  “Oh, shut up,” he snapped.

  “Yes,” Yawa said, softly at first, then fiercely, “yes, she’s right, Svir. We are Falcrest’s cryptarchs, but none of us are Falcresti. Not Baru, not me, not you. We’ve put on their masks to steal some of their power. Let’s use it. Let’s help the people here.”

  “Suddenly you’re a charity?”

  “I am an Imperial Jurispotence.” Yawa lifted her nose with aquiline pride. “An enemy of disease and disarray. I was brought int
o the Throne to represent the provincial edge of our Republic. If I cannot do good work here, at that edge, what am I for?”

  Svir rolled his eyes. “Durance, you know better than anyone the futility of foreign intervention in a civil war.”

  “But we can help!” Barhu protested. “We can distribute water, we can teach them how the Kettling spreads and how to safely bury the bodies. And what if the wind picks up? What if the ships here scatter? We have to keep the islands under blockade!”

  “It incubates for forty weeks,” Svir reminded her. “We’d be here for years before we could be sure it was gone.”

  Damn it, that was true. “I can’t just let these people die,” Barhu insisted. “I can’t leave without trying to help.”

  Yawa rubbed her temples. “Svir, you have to tell her.”

  “What? Tell me what?”

  Svirakir got up on his toes and then subsided into his hammock again, as if struck by galvanic shock. The muscles of his throat were as blank and slack as open sky. “Baru, have you learned about the apocalypse fuse?”

  Yawa shut her eyes.

  “No?” Barhu said, with a horrible foreboding.

  “We have a set of charges in place on el-Tsunuqba. They are capable of dropping the south face into the caldera and triggering a massive wave. The entire kypra would be inundated. Along with all the ships moored here.”

  “Oh,” Barhu said. Her thoughts swelled up like her punctured eye socket, trying to encompass this new variable, this appalling possibility.

  “It would wipe out all the infected,” Svir said, “and all the ships which might otherwise carry the Kettling. The death toll will be enormous. But it will not, in absolute terms, be higher than a particularly bad winter in Aurdwynn. And I know both of you survived last winter with your consciences, such as they are, quite intact. So.”

  He looked between the two women and his face was empty. You had to be empty, Barhu thought, if you were to condemn an entire people. You had to make yourself distant.

  “You two can try to help Kyprananoke if you insist. You can hide from the fact that one of you must destroy the other as long as you can. I am going to watch with my hand on the fuse. And if the Kettling seems ready to escape into the world . . .”

  His hands made a motion like snapping a stick.

  14

  Epistemic Violence

  This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” Yawa said. “And I include the sequence of events that nearly made me lobotomize you.”

  “I think it could work,” Barhu said, trying to be cautious, but unable to constrain a little hope. They were on maindeck, where Yawa had caught Barhu packing supplies. “We have Ascentatic to keep the quarantine. Water supplies to entice cooperation. The threat of this apocalypse fuse to use as a political bludgeon to convince the Kyprists to yield. I really do think we can secure a truce.”

  “The stupid part,” Yawa snapped, “is that you want to go ashore to do it yourself. It’s an idiotic risk. Remember what happened to me on the Llosydanes? A man recognized me, by sheer bad luck, and if Iscend hadn’t been there to protect me—”

  “No one knows me here, Yawa.” No one who hadn’t been in the doomed Oriati embassy, at least. “I’ll be fine.”

  “You can’t pass as Kyprananoki; they’re not Maia and you don’t speak el-Psubim. They’ll know you’re a foreigner. And before you tell me that Kyprananoke is a port, and therefore cosmopolitan, may I remind you that the Canaat are rebelling against foreign influence?”

  She was right about the danger; but Barhu had to risk it anyway. She had to make a genuine effort to help Kyprananoke. What if Tain Hu had been born here? What if she herself had?

  Barhu knew, knew in the gnawing way that you remember all those looming problems you shove into the back closets of the mind, that she had lost the thread of her grand plan. The next step was upon Eternal, not here.

  But she had to know how to end Falcrest without simply murdering it. How to butcher an empire. How to do it cleanly, and to end up with useful and nutritious parts. To do that you would need a revolution, and there was a revolution here.

  Why not study it? Learn from it?

  “I have to go, Yawa. I can’t do my work from out here. I have to speak to their leaders, get a sense of them. Like I did with the Dukes back home.” She wished she had some Oriati silk or jade to stuff into her bag, something to use as a gift, but she was too afraid to ask Tau’s Cheetah crew for a donation: they knew that Tau had gone somewhere with her, and not come back. “I’m going.”

  Yawa stepped on the hem of her bag, so Barhu couldn’t lift it. “We have Execarne’s Morrow-men, every one of whom can pass as native. We can work through them.”

  “I don’t trust them, Yawa. They’re good for tailing boats and pulling fingernails. Not for this kind of negotiation.”

  “That,” a third voice said, “is why you’re sending me.”

  Coming down from the foredeck crowd was pale Ake Sentiamut, lank-haired middle-aged Stakhieczi widow, once Tain Hu’s agent. She was upsettingly thin, of perfectly average height, unintimidating in every way. Barhu and Yawa stared at her.

  “Why?” Barhu said, truly baffled. “Isn’t the sun too much for you? And there’ll be fighting—”

  “Too much for me? I’m from Little Welthon, remember? I showed you what it was like there. We had riots, plague, cutthroats, corrupt constabulary. What did you have? A private tower, a secretary, and bodyguards.” She cut off Barhu’s next protest with a slash of her hand. “You made me your agent, remember? You gave me a sealed letter authorizing me to govern in your stead. I want my agency!”

  “But that letter was meant for Vultjag! For Aurdwynn! There’s nothing for you here!” Now she was accidentally making the same argument Yawa had just made to her.

  “You think a rebellion against Falcresti puppets is nothing to me? Don’t you know what I gave up for Tain Hu? Don’t you remember?” She thrust a palm into Barhu’s stomach, shoving her back. “I was the one who brought you into her house. It’s my fault you killed her. It’s my fault you ruined—”

  She stopped, breathing hard through her nose. She had made her point.

  “They’ll know you’re a foreigner, Ake,” Barhu warned her. “They’ll see your skin and your hair.”

  “Yes, and they’ll see a Stakhi woman from Aurdwynn. Aurdwynn which revolted.” Ake crossed her thin arms and glared. “Won’t they trust a real rebel better than a counterfeit?”

  They paddled in from Helbride, choosing a simple canoe over a skiff or launch for the chance to blend in with kypra traffic. They would meet an escort of Morrow-men on an islet called Balt Anagi, and those men would bring them to local Canaat leaders. Water would be their opening gift.

  Morning sun glared from the naked blue overhead. Rising heat off the kypra islets dissolved the moored ships into smears of canvas and spar, as if they might vanish from their moorings entirely, appear in the harbors of distant cities to wait, silent, for some harbormaster to discover the gobbets of blood and flesh where the Kettling-tainted sailors had burst like overcooked dumplings.

  With the wind picking up again, only the need for water kept those ships in harbor now. The Kyprist government still held the reservoirs, and they would not let the foreign shipping, their only possible allies, raise anchor.

  “When you get thirsty enough,” Ake said, digging her paddle in to swerve the canoe around a crab-riddled mass of floating meat, “your brain tears away from the inside of your skull. Just shrinks right off. Terrible way to die.”

  “Thank you for that fact.”

  “I wanted you to know what you were getting yourself into. You’ll see children who’ve died that way here.”

  “I saw dead children in Aurdwynn.”

  “Oh, you did, did you? How much you learned from us.” Ake stared at the heliotrope bushes and coconut trees on a passing islet. “I’ve never seen a coconut. I thought they would look more like faces. Aren’t they named for looking like fa
ces?”

  A crab the size of a ten-year-old wandered around the grove, snapping its claws. Barhu watched it, thinking about coconuts and coconut crabs and thirst, and about the basic resilience of these islands: born in the apocalyptic eruption of old Mount Tsunuq, cursed by the unsteady winds and errant currents of the Kraken Still, deprived of even the most basic wood and stone, and still, stubbornly, alive.

  “Ake,” she said, “I think everything’s going to turn out all right.”

  The two spearmen threw Ake down beside Barhu, on the saltgrass at the edge of the red lagoon. “Oh stars,” Ake gasped, in Stakhieczi, “oh black and hidden stars, Baru, look, look what they’ve done—”

  “I see it.” The lagoon’s color was blood. Some of it still seeped from the corpse of the poor Morrow-man who’d tried to stop the warband from taking Barhu and Ake. He’d been a fool to think a bribe and soft words would work, and his fellows knew it: they’d been wise enough to melt back into cover, to wait for a chance when they could make a difference.

  This was not the kind of place where subtlety and maneuver held power. Not anymore.

  There had been portents from the beginning. The first group of Anagis they met (all the Kyprananoki on this islet called themselves Anagi, or Anagint, “friends of the Anagi”) had welcomed their offer of clean water, rationing it among the children and the nursing women. Barhu admired their architecture while Ake befriended the children. Everything was built up on stilts, and the wells were in the Devi-naga pipestem style, to keep seawater from tainting them during floods. Barhu deduced, from the hardwood used in their doors and structural beams, that Anagi islet made its living by breaking and selling shipwrecks.