The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  He paused for breath. He had explained to Aia once that in the mountains you never interrupted a man who had stopped to breathe.

  “When I heard about the disaster at Sieroch, about Baru declaring herself for Falcrest . . . I thought I would have the crown cut from my head. How could we invade now, with the enemy forewarned?

  “But if I told the army to disband, I might as well throw myself from Karakys. I’d be dead by day’s end. To gather all those fighters here, to take them from their homes and crops, and then to send them back with nothing? I had to let them march. I had to.”

  “You could have married me,” Aia said, without petulance. “Then at least you would have claim to one ally in Aurdwynn. Someone to provision your troops and open the way to the coast. The Masquerade spent the last winter killing bureaucrats, emptying granaries, and thinning out forage. That means no one to pay you tribute, no game to hunt, and no choice for the tenant farmers except to fight to hold their fields. Your army will bog down shattering village phalanxes and chasing horsemen before it even reaches the Midlands. And then I think they will do what Stakhieczi do when they are threatened.”

  “Build forts on the high ground, settle in, and start fighting each other for spoils,” Ataka muttered. “And then the Masquerade will set the plague loose. And our forts will be our catacombs.”

  It was the first time he had spoken these doubts aloud. To admit them to his bannermen would be to arm his Mansion Uczenith foes with rumors of a cynical, defeated king.

  “Marrying you wouldn’t have changed that, Aia. You’re a duchess without land or influence. If I’d taken your hand, they’d all know I’d settled for the least I could get.”

  “Better than nothing,” Aia murmured. She never allowed herself to react to the cold up here, but now Atakaszir could tell she felt the chill. “Which is what you have now.”

  “I promised them the Queen of Aurdwynn as a bride! If I come before the clans with the exiled sister of a dead duchess instead—I might as well drag in a mummified goat!”

  “Marry an Uczenith, then,” Aia suggested, dryly. Atakaszir laughed. The Uczenith were the worst of his enemies, as diffuse and leaderless as a cloud of gnats—they had no proper Mansion lord, Kubarycz the Iron-Browed having vanished into exile with all his heirs.

  The thought of Mansion Uczenith stuck in his mind like a stone in a boot. He kicked at it a few times. It would not go.

  Something was wrong. He had been waiting for something to happen and it had not happened.

  “Oh, zish,” he swore, invoking unholy tetanus. He raised his spyglass to sweep the marching column for something he knew he wouldn’t find.

  The Mansion Uczenith fighters marched to war with iron ingots as their banners, raised on poles of Aurdwynni redwood. It was a defiant symbol of their exiled lord’s crime—Kubarycz’s conspiracy to secretly marry an Aurdwynni duchess, unite their realms, and undermine the other Mansions.

  That banner was nowhere in sight.

  The Uczenith hadn’t marched with the army. Their jagata were still encamped on the lake bed outside his Mansion.

  His first instinct was to halt the column and recall his own Hussacht forces to defend his home. But if he pulled his jagata it would be the death of his Mansion. Had King Atakaszir, first of his name, lost faith in the invasion? They’d all turn back, and by sundown Mansion Hussacht would be a pillaged husk.

  But if he did nothing, the army of Mansion Uczenith would have free rein to squat in his court. And courts did not prosper when they were full of armies.

  “Your Majesty?” Aia asked, softly. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s the Uczenith,” he said. No more needed.

  He went down the spiral stairs from his high fastness, and met a man coming up. The last man in the world he had ever expected to see again.

  The other man fell at once to one knee. “Your Majesty,” he murmured, and genuflected. “I am sorry for my late return.”

  “Dziransi?” He caught the man by shoulders so gaunt they felt like a boy’s. “Dzir, is that you?”

  In that first moment of reunion, when the man who’d been swallowed up by Baru Cormorant’s treachery raised his eyes to his king, even he did not seem sure of the answer.

  “Your Majesty.” Dziransi laid his brow to the stone, his king’s stone. “I have had a vision from the hammer. I come home to you, across the sea where glaciers die, to tell you what you must do to hold your crown. You must marry Heingyl Ri, Governor of Aurdwynn. She will bring you a dowry. She will bring you Baru Cormorant, powerless and bound. Then no one will deny you are the King of Mansions, whose long arm reaches across the world to punish all betrayal. I saw it in the stars. I saw it and I came home to tell you.”

  You cannot do this!” The weatherwoman caught at the king’s elbow as he bent to his telescope. “You will be the king of all fools if you try to take another bride from Aurdwynn! The Masquerade governor? How could you even entertain the offer?”

  Atakaszir glared at the hand on his sleeve, usurper in the place Aia had touched. The weather witch, face blasted sleek and dry by years of mountain wind, seemed to realize, all at once, what he saw in her: something old, withered, vitiated of power, like the mummy she would become when she died.

  She snatched her hand back and sniffed.

  “Dziransi saw it,” he told the witch. “He had a dream from the hammer. A woman with stars for eyes told him that Governor Heingyl Ri would be the bride of the mountains and save us forever from the Old Foe. The hammer struck it into him, Ochtanze! It’s all he can speak of! Somehow he escaped the Masquerade and returned to us just in time to save us from defeat. How can you explain that, if he is not hammer-marked? If the stars themselves didn’t guide him back to us?”

  He bent to look into the telescope again, to search for the glitter of distant mirrors. Ochtanze slipped her hand between him and the eyepiece. “The Masquerade let him go. They know you were fool enough to believe in Baru, they know you’ll be desperate to repair your mistake, and now they think they can play you again—”

  “I’m the fool? I’m the fool?” The same words he’d spoken freely to Aia infuriated him coming from the witch. “You’ve been coddling Baru’s eunuch like a stray dog, letting his lies pervert your council. You nag at me to consider his offer—but his words come straight from that scurve-hearted bitch herself! You speak from your nose, woman.” Aia had laughed at that expression, but for all Ataka’s life it had meant someone with two voices, a dissembler.

  “We care for the eunuch,” Ochtanze snapped, “because he knows secrets no one else can tell us.”

  “That’s procht! I told you to leave him on the summit to die!”

  “Do you want that power now, Your Majesty? The power to decide who dies by exposure? Shall I bring our children before you, and make you choose who will go out on the shelf?”

  That he did not want. Wanted it less than anything. The thought of it pinned him to the stone with dismay.

  Ochtanze would not let go of his telescope. “Your Majesty,” she said, calmer now, retreating into that pool of age and enigma all the old weather witches seemed to possess, “I serve the Mansion Hussacht, and so I serve you. As Necessary King, as Lord of Hussacht, and as a constellation man, you must reward those who have supported you.”

  “I know that,” he growled. He hated it when she made sense.

  “If the Mansion lords do not receive some repayment for trusting you with the kingship, they will look to this invasion as a chance to recoup their commitments by plunder. There will be no ordered conquest of Aurdwynn. No farms. No brine. No fresh crops to ward off scurvy. It will all fail. You must show them some fruit from your kingship.”

  “Even if it’s Baru’s fruit.”

  “Even so.” And now the witch, as constant as the moon, would tell him once again: “You should accept Baru’s offer to return your brother. The worst she can do is fail, and you will be no worse off. Also—” She raised her eyes skyward, warning against b
ad weather. “If it is known that your brother is coming home, the Uczenith will hesitate to move against you. They of all Mansions know the importance of succession, having lost their noble line entirely. If they knew Svirakir might return, entitled to the crown, demanding the heads of those who murdered his brother . . . they would never dare harm you.”

  He picked at his chapped lips, thinking. He wanted Aia. Some of his bannermen had joked that when they went to Aurdwynn they would get their own Aias, Maia women who needed things from Stakhi men, Maia women who would do anything to get it. “I’m tired of mouths raised on yak butter and mint,” Hecztechate had joked. “I want to know what pepper and cinnamon feel like!”

  Ataka had snapped that Aia might one day be his wife, and did they want to speak of his wife that way? The bannermen had looked at him strangely, and said nothing, and afterward, somehow, he had felt the fool.

  “Your Majesty,” Ochtanze said. She was offering him a thimble of yak butter for his lips. “Do you really believe Dzir’s dream came from the hammer?”

  He looked at her sharply. “Yes. Do you?”

  “If it’s true, Your Majesty, and not a Masquerade lie, then . . . you face a choice. Your brother is the reason you are king. The kidnapping of a Mansion prince made the clans recognize the Necessity of unity against the mask. If you return your brother . . . you will, in a way, have justified your entire kingship.”

  Atakaszir scooped a fingertip of butter and pressed it to his lips. Somehow Baru knew. Somehow she’d found another way to torment him with false hope. . . .

  “If,” he said, “Baru really can send him home. And won’t turn it against me, somehow.”

  “Yes. But once you had him, nothing could take him away again. There would be no uncertainty in your victory. What is this alternative Dziransi offers? Somehow marry the Masquerade governor? Promise the Mansions that she will deliver Aurdwynn and an heir? And hope, hope against all sense, that the Mansions will wait patiently for years . . . instead of laughing this off as another trick played on a gullible king. You would have nothing to show them now. No victory for this summer.”

  He looked up sharply at her. “You don’t know?”

  Old Ochtanze, who chose which babies would go out into the cold to die, narrowed her eyes in warning. It was unwise to challenge a weatherwoman’s knowledge. “Know what?”

  “The marriage to Heingyl Ri comes with a dowry. Dziransi has promised it. There will be no need to wait for an heir to secure my power.”

  “What dowry?”

  “Baru Cormorant,” he said, and had the satisfaction of the weatherwoman’s astonished gape. “Yes. She’ll be brought to me, Dziransi says, by the Governor Heingyl Ri. And then I will hang her upside down in my court, and flay her scalp from her skull, so that all her blood pours out through the soil of her thoughts. The whole world will know that to betray me is to forfeit all hope.”

  NOW

  It’s been a long time since Cairdine Farrier interrupted her story.

  He’s washed her hair. He’s fed her a solution that tastes mildly of mint and milk through a straw that tastes the way bleach smells.

  Mostly he sits beside her, murmuring thoughtfully, as she tells him how she used her knowledge of the Cancrioth to prevent Yawa from lobotomizing her, how she moved against the protests of the other cryptarchs to destroy Kyprananoke and contain the Kettling, how she succumbed to meningitis at the vital moment when she meant to bait Eternal into following her toward Falcrest.

  She’s discovered she can open her eyes into narrow, eyelash-visored slits. The straitjacket prevents her from touching her face, but she feels a cool, dry wash around her swollen eyes. Someone has been swabbing them against infection.

  “Is this from meningitis?” she asks him. “Is that why I feel so strange . . . ?”

  “No, Baru.” He looks for an instant as if he is about to sob, and then, for a longer instant, as if he is about to leap up and drive a fist through the window of the morning room. “I told you. Xate Yawa did this to you.”

  “But she didn’t lobotomize me . . . I convinced her that I was working with her. . . .”

  He lifts the glass bottle with its reed to her lips. While she drinks the sweet, mint-flavored medicine he asks, gently, as if afraid it will upset her, “Did Tain Shir ever come back?”

  “After she tried to kill me? And I hid behind Aminata?” Baru frowns intently. “I don’t remember. . . .”

  “Never mind, Baru. She’s just a woman with a spear. She can’t do you any harm.” He strokes her brow, fingers gentle around the swelling, as if he has found in the bruise some echo of his own deep-set and inaccessible eyes. “Just tell the rest of the story as you remember it. I won’t interrupt after this—except—that story you told Yawa, about the tulpa of the duchess from Aurdwynn. Was there any truth to that?”

  “No,” she says.

  Act Three

  svir’s choice

  I Will Write Your Name in the Ruin of Them. I Will Paint You Across History in the Color of Their Blood.

  Baru lay side by side with Tain Hu on the sheer face of the cliff.

  The world was tipped sideways so that the golden fields and green pastures of Aurdwynn’s midlands ran up and down like wet paint on a wall. Miles away, south and down, farther than any human eye should see, Treatymont’s broken towers protruded like coathooks from the Horn Harbor. Below that the Ashen Sea curved away into plunging infinity.

  “I’m dreaming,” Baru said.

  “Hallucinating, rather.” Tain Hu crawled out to the northern face of Mount Kijune’s summit, tipped over onto a ledge. She stuck her arms out over the abyss like she was diving and said, “Ha!”

  Baru grabbed at Hu’s ankles, terrified, but this extra security just encouraged Hu to worm her torso out over the drop. “Haaa!” she shouted, waving her arms. “I’m the queen of infinity!”

  “Come back,” Baru snapped, and dragged her by her ankles onto solid ground. “I need to talk to you. You’re supposed to tell me something.”

  Hu rolled over grinning. “Am I?”

  “Yes,” Baru said, frowning, “but I don’t remember what. Come here—”

  “No, you come here—”

  She ended up on Hu’s lap, facing her, knees astride her hips. Hu wore the six red slashes of her war paint, three on each cheek; nothing else of consequence. She shaved Baru’s scalp down with a straight razor. Baru watched her tongue move in concentration.

  “We’ve done well, I think,” Hu said. “So far.”

  “Have we?” Baru, afraid to look her in the eye, stared at her crooked nose. “Really?”

  “You’ve won great victories, Baru. I swore to bring you victory. So I’m”—she smiled slyly down at her—“quite pleased, thank you.”

  “Victories? Where? How?”

  “On the Llosydane Islands, certainly.” Smooth, shiveringly delightful razor rasp on Baru’s skin. “I thought that went rather well.”

  “Well? Well?” She tried to seize Tain Hu by the shoulders and shake her. Hu, laughing in delight, made it clear she was too strong to be moved by underfed accountants. “I bought half the Llosydane Islands and then I left them to starve! The fires Sulane started will ruin the date crop—if they don’t have dates to sell they can’t import food—Hu, I killed them!”

  “Did you?” Hu’s lopsided grin crept up to delight. “Are you sure? When you were so busy trading money and dates and prostitutes on the Llosydanes, I might have . . . scrawled a few extra orders you failed to notice.”

  “You devil!” Baru cried. “What did you do?”

  “Our trick there was a currency bubble, yes?” Hu tapped her nose with the dream razor. “In an ordinary year, the Llosydanes sell dates for Masquerade money. They use that Masquerade money to import food. They can’t survive without Falcrest’s markets, yes?”

  “And you,” another tap of the razor, straight edge against her brow, making Baru frown, “you wanted to get the attention of the ruling families there. S
o you caused a currency panic. You crashed their currency, the Sydani ring shell; you made it worthless compared to the Masquerade fiat note. Everyone with a fortune in Sydani money was suddenly a pauper by the outside world’s standards . . . until you offered to convert their useless fortunes into strong fiat notes.”

  “Yes—I needed to talk to the ruling families, I had to learn where the Oriati fleet bought its water—” This was how she’d first met Tau-indi Bosoka, and where she’d discovered the name Abdumasi Abd. “So I made their ring shell worthless and they had to come to me to trade it for fiat notes.”

  “And at the end of the crisis . . . ?” Hu prompted.

  “I left. I ran away. We burned down half their date crop in the battle and now they’re going to go broke and starve. Oh Himu!” Baru ground her knuckles into her brow, cringing in shame. “Hu, what was I doing?”

  “What were we doing, you mean?” Hu rapped her on the knuckles with the flat of the razor. “You sold all your fiat notes for Sydani ring shells! You accumulated a tremendous fortune in their currency, a fortune useful only on those islands!”

  “And I wasted it!”

  “We did not. We left very specific instructions for the handling of that money.” Hu slid her free arm under Baru’s arms, a hug or a wrestling clinch, and went back to work on her scalp with vigor. “You may not have noticed it, but we established a trust. Our entire fortune has been locked away, under the care of a board of trustees, for a single purpose.”

  “What?” Baru did not remember this at all.

  Hu, razor poised at the nape of Baru’s neck, paused to frown at her. “Come on. I didn’t inherit all the brains when we were split in two. What do you think the trust is for? Where do you think your ill-gotten fortune will be spent?”

  “I don’t know. . . .”