The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “It’s a drug, you Stakhi bumpkin,” Yythel snapped. “Dzir must’ve found some of it in Execarne’s stash. Do you know what he saw, Baru?” Her voice fell to a purr of menace. “He saw himself delivering you to his king. He was sure it would happen. You would be brought to the king, and he would have his vengeance on you.”

  A woman with stars for eyes. Barhu thought she knew who that might be.

  But if Yawa had sent Dzir back to the Wintercrests to carry a message, why hadn’t she told Barhu about it? Was she hiding something?

  Maybe their new rapport was a ruse. Another layer of control, like Falcrest’s trick to break prisoners. Let them escape, let them run down the street, only to reveal it had all been planned, all executed according to the jailor’s design, so the prisoner would know that the will of Incrasticism confined them not just in the cell but in the whole world: all the empire a prison, and your own mind the jailer. . . .

  She felt her heart quickening with fear, and poured her will into it until it deepened and smoothed out.

  “I’m trying to find something Hu left for me,” she said. Back in the Elided Keep, in a moment of absolute suicidal despair, her alien hand had scrawled the words iron circlet. “She told me that I had to remember a man in an iron circlet. Did Tain Hu ever tell you about a man in an iron circlet?”

  “Yes . . .” Ake Sentiamut said, warily.

  “Who was he?”

  “The first man Tain Hu ever killed in a duel.”

  “Where? How?”

  “She was young. She inherited too soon, you remember, after the plague? This man came down out of the Wintercrests with a party of Stakhi fighters. His band had been sighted before, west near Jasta Checniada, and they’d raided villages. Tain Hu couldn’t let them cross Vultjag unchallenged. She called him to duel so that she wouldn’t have to risk her fighters in battle. He saw a little girl, and refused; but when she mocked him he said he was resigned to kill her for her impudence.”

  Ake looked at her hands, as if counting back the years. “She said that she was eager to fight, and that he was afraid to die. He needed very much to live. That was why she beat him. Everything he did had too much weight on it. It made him slow to commit.”

  “Thank you. Thank you. I think I know what this could mean.” Barhu couldn’t help but smile. “It might make all the difference.”

  “More difference than we made for Kyprananoke,” Ake muttered. “No, don’t say anything. Don’t tell me how it would’ve gone differently if you’d been there—”

  She blamed herself, too. “Tain Hu trusted you as her agent, Ake. So do I. I know you did everything possible. More than I could have done.”

  “Don’t you speak of her trust!” Ake snapped. The others nodded or murmured or clenched their fists. “And don’t you dare talk like you trust me! You do not get our loyalty like some kind of inheritance. No, don’t say anything. If I have to listen to one more word I’ll come over there and stop up your mouth. Go see Xe. She needs you, Himu knows why. She’s been through too much on your account.”

  “Of course,” Barhu said. “Is there anything you need?”

  “You might hit your head and die,” Yythel said, sweetly.

  Barhu was now certain that the ledger, the sacred palimpsest where Tain Hu and all the other rebels had recorded their deadliest secrets, held a vital clue. Yawa had the palimpsest now (well, she had the enciphered copy Barhu’s agent Purity Cartone had made: but the content was the same).

  But Barhu did not go to Yawa.

  She went to the aft orlop locker to find Ulyu Xe, who had saved her life.

  The diver knelt by her hemp hammock, meditating. She held a tiny brush in her left fingers, short as the hair from a squirrel’s back. The ship moved slightly, which made her sway, and her sway made the brush paint ink on the deck. She looked as clean and as calm as a tidepool.

  “Ake looks glum,” Barhu said, in Maia Urun. “And you’re not sleeping with the others. Is she angry with you? What have you done to the poor widow?”

  The diver smiled down at her work. “She’s jealous that Dzir and I were lovers, but she also wishes I had loved Dzir better, and made him stay. Her heart is a knot.”

  “I don’t think Dzir left because of any fault in your love, Xe.”

  She shrugged. The brush drew a perfectly straight line. “He was unhappy with me.”

  “Because you weren’t like a Stakhieczi woman?”

  “I wouldn’t stay in the space he made for me. As the wise ones say: the man who tries to hold water ends up with soggy pants.”

  Barhu narrowed her eyes. “Did you just make that up?”

  “I would never invent scripture.” She washed the brush in a plate of alcohol, set it gently aside, folded her hands on her knees. “Enough of Dziransi.”

  Enough of him, Xe, and more of you. She looked full-faced and dark and alive. With a surge of gladness Barhu went and sat by her. “Thank you for what you did at Kyprananoke. You saved me.”

  “Thank you for what you did at Kyprananoke,” Xe echoed, in that infuriating Wyddish way she had. You threw darts at her and she caught them and threw them back. “You saved me.”

  “Did Shir hurt you?”

  “Of course she did. Did she hurt you?”

  “No—well, yes, but—only in necessary ways, I suppose.”

  “So we were both hurt to change you.”

  Barhu could only accept that. “We’ll be at Isla Cauteria soon. I’ll charter you a ship to Aurdwynn—a proper clipper-rigged ship that can go against the trade winds, so you don’t have to circle the whole Ashen Sea to get home. You’ll be back in Treatymont by autumn.”

  “Come what may,” the diver said, without any excitement.

  “Oh, come, Xe! Don’t you want to be back in Aurdwynn? See your family? Help Ake start her work?”

  “I want all those things, Baru. But wanting things is the beginning of suffering.”

  “Are you . . .” Barhu cocked her head. “Are you suffering?”

  Xe thought about this for a moment. “I am far from my family and my child. My only companions are Stakhi-blooded people who think that I, as an ilykari and a diver, am a sacred whore. I am lonely, Baru.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You won’t try to talk me out of how I feel?” Xe smiled. “That’s progress.” She got up and sat on her hammock. “Will you help me be sure this is rigged for two?”

  Candle watch, drowsy and warm. They curled in the hammock together.

  “You want to tell me something,” Barhu prompted, not because Xe had given any hint, but because she was a devotee of Wydd, and if you didn’t prompt her occasionally she would just hold her silence for days.

  Xe rolled to face her. Her hip lathed out a space between them. “I was told that you had taken another lover.”

  “Yes. A navy woman. Does that bother you?”

  Xe’s deep dark eyes made Barhu feel like she was being watched and considered by an entire summer night. “She betrayed you, didn’t she? She led Xate Yawa to you on Eternal.”

  “Yes, but I failed her. . . .” Barhu was shocked (damn her interior insurrections) to feel her eyes welling up. Did she really care so much for Shao Lune? “I betrayed her, too. I left her behind. . . .”

  “You mustn’t believe that she’s the sort of lover you deserve.”

  “What sort of lover?”

  “One who hurts you. One who treats you like a tool. One who makes you feel as if you’ve failed her.”

  “Are you jealous?” Barhu said, out of pure fright at the idea of patient, silent Ulyu Xe holding a grudge.

  “No.” Xe put a hand to Barhu’s face, and, without moving, let one line of tears part across her fingertip, to bead in the seam between flesh and nail. “I grew up in a Maia greatfamily, Baru. I expect my lovers to take lovers. But you’re young. Everyone you let into your heart will leave a seed in the soil there. I don’t like what would grow from her. That’s all.”

  Barhu thought about wha
t Tain Hu would say regarding Shao Lune, and discovered it much harsher than Xe’s verdict. Hu would not even have Lune for one night’s passion.

  “I’m afraid of ending things with women,” she admitted. “I’m afraid that Farrier’s making me do it.”

  Silence. Ulyu Xe accepted that fear and let it breathe.

  “Xe,” Barhu said, slowly. “I think I might be Tain Hu’s widow.”

  “Her widow?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it, I could never bear to think about it . . . but I chose her as my queen-consort. I think it could be argued that I chose her to marry me. I was queen for a night, wasn’t I? If I declared the marriage in sight of witnesses, wasn’t it executed?”

  “Ah,” Xe said, softly. “And she is with you, isn’t she? Her eryre is in you?”

  “That’s what Yawa says.”

  Hot, full lips pressed against the side of Barhu’s neck in the dark. “She can hear me? She can feel me?”

  “Yes—”

  “Then I will say what she is trying to tell you. Everything ends. Everything will end and you cannot fear that. But you must decide what the endings will mean.”

  At dawn the next morning, Barhu rapped on the one door in Helbride that never opened.

  It led to a converted dry stores compartment, one deck below Svir’s map room. Food and water and soap went into it, and nothing came out. The woman within poured her wastewater over the stern. Sometimes the room emitted thin scratching sounds, which made the sailors hammocked nearby complain of vermin and make the handwashing gesture to expiate evil.

  “It’s Baru,” Barhu called, and waited for the door to open.

  It didn’t. Barhu rapped again. “Please,” she called, “Kimbune, it’s me. We’re coming to Isla Cauteria soon. I’m certain we’ll find Abdumasi Abd there. I want to talk to you before we arrive. I want to make arrangements for your husband’s soul.”

  The sound of toes on wood, wary as a cat. At last Kimbune’s voice came through. “Where are my people?”

  “Eternal is following our wake. We’re both catching a trade wind out of the west. We’ve kept their mast tops in sight so they can chase us; I don’t imagine they have charts of the whole trade circle to follow.”

  “It’s not really a circle, you know,” Kimbune said. “There’s easterlies to the south and westerlies to the north and the other legs are—” She cut herself off, though Barhu was completely sympathetic to her need to assert herself through knowledge. “Are they safe?”

  “No.” Barhu would not want to be lied to in Kimbune’s place. “One storm would sink them. They need a port, and they need a cover story to reach it. If we’re going to bring them safely into Isla Cauteria, we need to signal them. Can you reach them by uranium lamp?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s supposed to go through surfaces, but not very far. . . .”

  “We can send you closer by boat, if we must. Will you try?”

  The door cracked open. Kimbune’s thickly lashed eyes peered out at her. Her portioned-circle Round Number tattoo gleamed on her brow. “You can’t trick me,” she said, warily. “I’ve made certain of it. I won’t help lure my people into a trap.”

  “May I come in?”

  “There’s power in here. I ask that you respect it.”

  Barhu took a nervous step back. “What kind of power?”

  “Truth,” Kimbune said. “Come in.”

  The door opened. The wedge of lamplight from outside met and joined the candlelight within. Barhu gasped in wonder. All the walls and floorboards were brushed with Cancrioth script, ancient En Elu Aumor patterns joined together in gorgeous oriasque. In places, Kimbune had even whittled the characters into the wood. And if Barhu understood not one dot of it, she still felt a cosmic frisson, like seeing the book of the world’s truths, edge-on, with all the pages shut together.

  “What is this?”

  Kimbune closed the door behind Barhu. “The proof.”

  The proof? Yes, she’d mentioned a proof when she left Eternal. She’d said it would protect her. The bastard went and died before I could convince him, she’d said, but it’s true, I’ve finished it and it’s beautiful and he was wrong, five hundred years he was wrong—

  “All this is one mathematical proof?”

  “Most of it is supportive.” Kimbune watched her carefully. “If I explain this truth to you, it may change you. Will you accept that?”

  Ask Barhu to respect knowledge, warn her that knowledge might change her forever, and she would always say yes, yes, these are the laws that I worship. “I do.”

  So Kimbune told her:

  e (i * π) + 1 = 0

  “I have proven here that the Number of Interest, raised to the power of the Round Number multiplied by the Impossible Number, equals negative one.”

  At first Barhu didn’t understand. But there was a light on Kimbune, some astral delight, and she was, in this shining light, with this secret in her, almost dizzyingly beautiful: not attractive, not lust-invoking, but worthy of veneration and protection and awe.

  Barhu thought it out in her head. The Number of Interest e, 2 point 7 1 8 2 8 and so forth into infinity, was a remarkable number used in the computation of compound interest. The Round Number pi was the ratio of a circle’s radius to its circumference, 3 point 1 4 1 5, as tattooed on Kimbune’s brow.

  “I never understood i,” she admitted. She was an accountant, not a wild number-philosopher. “The square root of negative one. It’s an impossible number, it can’t exist. But here you’ve done something with it, you’ve proven . . . it’s related to these other two, somehow?”

  It did not seem possible.

  Why would these three insane numbers, two of them infinite and impossible to write on a page, one of them imaginary and impossible to write at all, yield a simple elegant result like negative one? How could you do math with numbers that never ended? How could you prove anything about them?

  Yet Kimbune had. If Barhu believed in her proof, she had established that these numbers were connected, far deep down in the universe: like three masts of a sunken ship, jutting from the waves, hinting at the bulk beneath. Proof in the highest sense, pure mathematics, issued from that place the Oriati believed in, the realm of perfect premade shapes, beyond the Door in the East.

  “If you brought this to Falcrest,” Barhu whispered, “and the scholars in the Faculties verified it . . . they would have to accept that the greatest mathematicians in the world come from Oriati Mbo. Kimbune, this proof would upend the Faculties, the polymaths, everyone who believes Incrasticism is the only way to learn truth. They would have to give you a place in the Exemplaries, and sit you among the greatest wonders ever known. . . .”

  “Then why are you frowning?” Kimbune asked, softly.

  “I frown a lot.”

  “No,” Kimbune said, stubbornly, “you’re upset.”

  Barhu told the truth. “I don’t understand how a people who made something so beautiful could also release the Kettling on innocents.”

  Kimbune closed her eyes. “Neither do I,” she whispered. “Neither do I.”

  “If I bring your ship to Isla Cauteria . . . will they use the Kettling again?”

  “I don’t know.” Kimbune’s eyelashes flickered between them. “If the Brain wants that, she would make it happen. You’re under her power. She frightens me.”

  “I belong to myself, Kimbune.”

  “She cast a spell on you, to bind you to her. I saw her do it.”

  Barhu could hardly deny that had happened, and to deny the Brain’s power would in a sense be to deny Kimbune’s protection, too. “All she did was call me to return to her. That shouldn’t frighten you.”

  “Can you bring Eternal safely into harbor?”

  “I think I can. I think I can moor Eternal somewhere private, someplace with access to timber and water, and make a bargain to get you all home. But to do that I need to keep the navy from destroying Eternal. I need your people to put up ca
rgo cranes, cover up the cannon, raise merchant flags, and pretend to be a free trader. Then I can get Eternal safely in.”

  And then one of two things would happen. She would execute her own plan to bind the world to her will. Or the Brain would release the Kettling in Falcrest’s home waters.

  Kimbune drew a hesitant breath. “I will be the only one to use the lamps?”

  “Yes. I promise.” And if Iscend observed, and deduced the code, well, Barhu could not help that. “Will you send the messages I need?”

  “Yes,” Kimbune said, nodding quietly. “I’ll do it.”

  19

  Two Faiths

  Where are you taking me?” Aminata shouted. The four Termites hauling her were too strong, and no matter how she struggled she couldn’t get at their knives. All she had left was her voice. “Masako, where the fuck are you taking me?”

  “Everyone always asks me that,” the Scheme-Colonel sighed. “Where are you taking me? If I didn’t want you to know, I’d lie. If I wanted you to know, I’d tell you. If anyone put a moment’s thought into the realities of their situation, they’d stop asking that question. But they never do. It’s always where are you taking me. Why doesn’t someone ask why I’m taking them? Or how I took them, so at least they could improve their security?”

  “You kidnap a lot of people?”

  Bored as a baker making injera: “All in the service of the Mbo.”

  “Service? Please. The Cancrioth’s anathema to the Mbo. It’s acid on your skin. You’re a traitor.”

  “This is why the Mbo has people like me, Aminata. To be the glove between the acid and the skin.”

  “Baby killer,” she spat. “You gave the Kettling to those rebels. You killed every child on Kyprananoke.”

  “Falcrest killed children when they burnt Kutulbha.” He had sweat stains under the arms of his blouse. Aminata wished they were blood instead. “Cholera killed children in Devi-naga last year. Do you know what the parents do, when there’s cholera? They give their own children clean water first. They understand that not all the children can live, so they prefer their own children to others’. My job is to protect the future of our children. Yours and mine, Oriati children, one Mbo, our Mbo, united against all enemies.”