The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  These ships had burnt Kutulbha. Some of the griots said they’d fired arrows into the city with messages to surrender, and then messages to evacuate, printed with a dire warning: FIRE HAS NO MERCY.

  Some said they’d given no one any time to do anything but burn.

  Many of the Princes had come here simply to grieve. Many more had come to bring supplies to the refugees. The survivors met them with gratitude, or dull acknowledgment, or pure inconsolate rage that the Princes still cared about trim or principle when this had happened.

  Tau met Princes who had come with their own Falcresti hostages. Men and women who carried the same terms of surrender Farrier had presented. And they met Princes broken in contrition because they had allowed their Falcresti hostages to die, or killed them in revenge, and in doing so invited doom on their houses, their tribes, their squadrons, their rivers.

  Of all the Princes who had come, Kindalana and Tau-indi were the youngest. That gave them power. They had the most future to speak for. They bore the trim of the unborn, and if there was any purpose to the world at all, it must be to make it kinder for those who waited across the Door for their time to be born.

  “The war must end now,” they told the others. “We must surrender.”

  But they also found Princes mad with rage, Princes who wanted to declare the Falcresti as enenen, an alien enemy without trim, and refuse their blood money. Princes who wanted to raise armies like Tahari or White Akhena and march on Falcrest. And there was worse. Some of them wore no paint except white corpse ash and they said that there were powers older than trim, powers down in the south of Mzilimake, in the hot lands and the jungle, that would fill the wombs of Falcrest with empty cysts of blood.

  “Before principles,” these Princes said, “we had a god whose brain is a tumor, whose eyes protrude on horns of cancer, whose pregnancy swells forever. Let us break the lead seals and the clay tablets. Let us set that god on Falcrest.”

  Tau-indi saw in their eyes a burning woman with green hands and too many green eyes, and wanted to scream.

  It was decided, swiftly and generally, without any one clear formal decision, that they would vote on the articles of surrender: whether to yield to Falcrest now, or go on, somehow, with the losing war.

  On the day of that vote, Tau-indi brought Cosgrad Torrinde to walk among the Princes. “Tell them about your study of the mangroves,” Tau-indi prompted. “Tell them about how you licked the frog out of curiosity.”

  Cosgrad tried to be charming. But Tau-indi tripped him up and teased him and made him stammer and stumble over complicated ideas that barely fit into his knowledge of Uburu and Seti-Caho, so that he looked human and unthreatening. Tahr the Prince-Mother walked with Cosgrad to show her favor toward him, chained and jeweled, haloing Cosgrad in a reflected authority that would impress Segu’s princes. To the Segu women, Cosgrad was something to be cut down to size, a jumped-up laborer and spouse. They could handle him better when Tahr seemed to own him.

  Kindalana spoke, everywhere she went, of Cosgrad’s unlikely friendship with young Tau-indi. “See?” she said. “We can learn to love each other. This man saved my father’s life, and in that healing, a greater wound might be sutured.”

  It was strange to hear this from Kindalana, because Tau knew she felt a deep cynicism about Falcrest’s response to kindness and generosity. But many of the Princes were comforted by her assurance, because it eased their own guilt about allowing a war to break out.

  It was, Tau thought, very Oriati to feel more guilt for the wound in their own conduct than anger at Falcrest’s aggression. It was a noble thing to constantly ask yourself to be better. But it could also be arrogant, self-involved, oblivious. As if everything that mattered was ultimately about Oriati people and their conduct. As if they were so powerful, so central to the world, that only they could be blamed for their own defeat.

  That was when Tau knew Kindalana was right. It was not enough to tend to the Mbo’s trim. Something had to be done within Falcrest.

  On that evening the Princes at the grave of Kutulbha voted on the terms of surrender.

  These were the votes.

  Lonjaro Mbo, the High Heart of the World, the Thirteen-in-Three-in-One that carried on Mana Mane’s faith as recorded in the Kiet Khoiad, voted by a sweeping majority to surrender to Falcrest. Time and population were on their side. They could stop the killing and start the healing. Only the eastern kingdoms of Umbili the Savan Antelope and Kinde the Torch Cheetah, pressed up against Falcrest, voted for war: their shua had been raiding and skirmishing along the border for years, and they stood to lose huge tracts of land in the surrender. The Princes of Abdeli Bduli, the landless thirteenth kingdom which traditionally represented the renegades and common folk, voted for peace but warned of a great and growing anger among their people.

  The tribes of Segu, the People of the Ships, voted by the narrowest margin to surrender to Falcrest. Kutulbha was a bone ash ruin. Their archipelagos were troubled by starvation and shortage after the loss of so many ships. They needed years to lay down new fleets. But the Princes of the western coast and the southern territories, the mighty uroSegu and far-ranging yeniSegu among them, declared themselves unbound by the vote.

  The Mzilimaki Paramountcy voted to continue the war, claiming solidarity with their northerly neighbor Segu. This drew outrage, even and especially from Segu’s princes. Mzilimake wanted to see Segu’s shipping entirely devastated, so that trade would abandon the coast and come south again, through the Moonlight Kingdoms and their thousand rivers. So much for the people who spoke Maulmake, those bitter Segu-women said; the name of the language meant moon truth, but the Mzilimaki had filled it with lies.

  (Tau was not personally convinced of any malice, though. Mzilimake contained some two thousand tribes, banded into confederations according to the lakes and rivers that connected them. Even White Akhena had only been able to unite them for twenty years. Tau did not think they could possibly all support a single conspiracy against Segu.)

  Some of the Mzilimaki Princes suggested, to Tau’s absolute revulsion, that they knew of deep places in the jungle where one could catch certain bushmeat. A bushmeat that, when eaten, produced a plague they would not dare name. This virulence could defend the Mbo against any invaders.

  “Millions would die!” Kindalana cried. “Millions! Can you count that high, you fools? There would be a corpse for every hair on all of your heads, and enough left over to pluck your genitals naked!”

  Devi-naga the Stormblown Flock, the Land of Jet and Flood, which ran down the continent’s eastern edge along the Mother of Storms and toward far Zawam Asu, voted for peace. Falcrest’s Second Fleet loomed off their shores, sitting on their trade, enforcing brutal and high-handed “mandatory quarantines” on the rice paddies and floodplains. The Squadron Princes were more afraid of starvation than of surrender. Without the grain trade through the Tide Column, it had crept too close to bear.

  By vote of the Princes, born by vote of the Mbo, the oldest and longest of civilizations would accept a conditional surrender to the youngest and least known.

  All this time Cairdine Farrier was nowhere to be found.

  Later they learned he’d gone ashore to help Kutulbha’s orphans, finding them sponsors so they could be adopted and raised in Falcrest.

  They signed the surrender aboard Tau-indi and Kindalana’s dromon, because the future belonged to the young.

  Off the ship’s port side, the city of Kutulbha smoldered like a cook fire, and the meal it cooked was a hundred thousand people, and the mouth that ate those people was the mouth missing from the white Falcrest masks that stared across the table as their clerks offered silver pens.

  Tau-indi took the pen. A treaty was a spell to force the human world to obey a truth that existed only in paper. There was no reason to accept the world the treaty described as true, except that Falcrest had made continued war a part of any other world.

  They wrote their name.

  So it was signed.


  Afterward Kindalana and Tau-indi went ashore and gathered ash for ash cakes. Cosgrad watched them cook with uneasy fascination. When offered a cake he looked away, throat cabled with unease.

  “No,” he said thickly. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  He felt too much a part of it, Tau-indi thought. He couldn’t eat his own guilt. Because then he would begin digesting it, whether into poison or acceptance.

  The war would go on a while after this. Falcrest kept track of the dates and times of each battle and assembled a schedule of penalties. The last great battle was Nyoba Dbellu’s, who led her ships against thirst and scurvy all the way around the Ashen Sea, up past the old Maia lands in the northwest, east across the coast of Aurdwynn, down from the north at Falcrest itself. She traveled far from the coast to avoid Falcresti pickets, at the mercy of dehydration and storm. Of all those that set sail, not two in three survived the entire journey.

  At the end of her voyage, among Falcrest’s islands, the Porpoise Carousel, the tern-stained Nautilus, and the scrubby Little Squid, Nyoba Dbellu’s ships burnt under the siphons of Falcrest’s First Fleet, and their ash filled up the waterway that would forever after be called the Sound of Fire.

  20

  The Palimpsest

  Shattay ya-Wah,” Faham Execarne said, which made me laugh and elbow him so hard the hammock tipped. We clung to each other and kicked until we had balance. If we fell we’d wake up Svir, and sleep was the only thing that made him tolerable lately.

  “No one would ever pronounce it that way!” I protested. “Shate yah-wah. That’s how you say it.”

  “Zaytee yayway.”

  Wydd sustain me, I think I giggled. “What are we smoking?”

  “Trimwell Black Edition. The finest in Falcrest. Eugenically conditioned for”—he paused to sneeze—“excellence and clarity of effect. Raised in a soundscape of bees and birdsong. Evenly illuminated so the plant never fears winter. I own a four-percent stake in the concern.”

  “A wise investment?”

  “It gets me the Black Edition, and nothing calms me so. And if the world is but a figment of our collected thoughts”—he smiled fetchingly at me—“then nothing calms the world so well as a calm mind.”

  Helbride pitched on a gentle following sea. I let the rhythm settle me onto Faham’s arm. He began to rock the hammock, very gently, with the touch of his bare feet. I smiled into his hard, wide farmer’s chest.

  “Are you conspiring against the welfare of the Imperial Republic?” he asked.

  I looked up sharply: from below his face was a bearded outcropping, a mossy totem in the forest of his hair, like something left by the Belthyc. “What?”

  “Captain Branne was consulting charts of Isla Cauteria today. Looking for a place to moor a ship much, much larger than Helbride.”

  Sloppy, Svir, very sloppy: he was too accustomed to trusting his crew. “Baru has a plan to bring Eternal in to harbor there,” I murmured. “I’m willing to go along with it. The entire reason I’ve preserved that ship is to get the flesh samples Hesychast needs. Living specimens of the immortal Cancrioth body.”

  “Then we should seize that ship by force.”

  I drew away from him in astonishment. “What?” This from Faham the spymaster, who feared war above all else.

  But he’d killed his own spies, too. On the Llosydanes he’d gassed his entire station to eliminate one mole. He was not a man averse to death.

  His handsome rustic face, paler Falcrest skin, untouched by fear or anger: “We should take the entire ship as a prize. We should disappear the crew to a Morrow Ministry site, along with Abdumasi Abd and everyone from Cheetah. Cover it all up. No Cancrioth exists. Kyprananoke was a natural disaster. Tau-indi disappeared at sea with their entire clipper—don’t look at me like that, of course I’d keep them comfortable. But they would disappear, with all their knowledge of what we’ve seen. That’s what we tell the Oriati. That’s what we tell Parliament. Make it all disappear.”

  He took a long draw from the joint and blew into the darkness. “The navy . . . the navy is a problem. If our suspicions are correct, and Abd is on Cauteria, they’re aware of the Cancrioth by now. They know the Cancrioth has enough influence to organize a fleet-strength naval attack on our provinces. They may demand a first strike. But after Ormsment’s mutiny, I think Maroyad will understand it’s best to stay quiet.”

  “Faham!” I prodded the bottom of his chin. “Where’s your patience? Shouldn’t we see how the situation develops?”

  “No.” I felt him swallow. “We’re in the dominion of worst-case scenarios now. The worst case is that a war faction is in control of Eternal, prepared to release the Kettling as close to Falcrest as they can. If the navy is attacked, they will retaliate immediately, not just here but all along the northern Oriati coast. It’ll be chaos. So we must put a tourniquet on it. We must twist it as tight as we can.”

  He lowered his chin against the top of my head, rubbed his beard against my hair. “And if you seize Eternal, you’ll get what Hesychast needs from you. It will work out in your favor. I want the best for you.”

  “Faham—”

  “Hush. Let me say it while I can say it. You and Baru, this . . . arrangement of yours. I assume that you got her to compromise herself, under threat of lobotomy. You think she’s under your control now, and you’re using her to bring the Cancrioth in.”

  I was silent.

  “It was a mistake, Yawa. Her virtue is unpredictability, and you can’t afford that right now. She handled Aurdwynn well, but that wasn’t her plan, was it? That was the Throne’s design. Now she’s trying to sell you on a new plan, isn’t she? Some trick of money and political influence.” He touched the nape of my neck, fingertips teasing out the hairs, searching for the lowest. “You can’t let her attempt it. She’s an unreliable field operator at best, and there’s no evidence at all she can build and execute her own strategy for the Oriati conflict.

  “But you, Yawa, haven’t you always always had a plan? Haven’t you worked your whole life to prove you could be trusted with Aurdwynn’s future? Wouldn’t you have that, and anything else you wanted, if you brought Eternal in as your own prize?”

  “You think I should betray her,” I whispered.

  “I think that you should be true to yourself.”

  I turned up to look at him. “It would empower Hesychast, and you hate him so—”

  “All the better to have a woman I trust close to him.”

  “Olake was the last spy who trusted me, Faham.”

  “I am not your brother.” He gave me a short, firm kiss. “Let me prepare an action against Eternal. Make a plan to lobotomize Baru the moment she’s given you the Cancrioth. You still have medical justification; you’ve received her extensive confession about her mental abnormalities. Can it hurt anyone if you make preparations?”

  “It might hurt you to trust me, Mister Fay-ham Esheecarnay.”

  He guffawed. “No one would pronounce it that way.”

  The bells sounded for morning watch.

  It’s worked!” Barhu burst into Yawa’s cabin on pitch-stained feet, clutching a sheet of charcoal marks. She hadn’t been so exhilarated to deliver an answer since the night the Dukes had asked her to name her consort. “Ascentatic’s sighted Eternal flying Segu merchant banners, all cannon ports shut, cargo spars prominently mounted. She looks like a treasure ship!”

  “Hardly a substantive disguise.” Yawa scratched out whatever she’d been writing. Barhu caught the word defendant: another plea for her twin. “You can call her a treasure ship from here to Haraerod, but the navy will see she’s huge enough to carry an army.”

  “That’s all right! We’ll go ashore to Annalila Fortress and seize control of Rear Admiral Maroyad by political means. The disguise is for the public. As long as they see an opportunity for profit—”

  “Instead of a floating atrocity full of plague?” Yawa snapped. “Have you forgotten what I have at stake on Cauteria?”

/>   “No. Of course not. Governor Heingyl is important.” Put Yawa’s fears first. “If we can get Eternal safely into port, we’re one step closer to the sample you need for Hesychast.”

  “You told me the immortata was sacred, and that they’d never give it up.” She smiled up at Barhu, face like an expensive bridge, all cables and tensions. “Svir made it plain that one of us must destroy the other, Baru. We can’t both survive this.”

  “Not openly,” Barhu countered.

  “Do you have a plan, then?”

  Barhu was desperately unready for that conversation. “I have an alternate dowry. Something to bring the Stakhieczi king into the marriage without my, ah, sacrifice.”

  “Fine.” Yawa threw up her hands. “At least it’s a useful distraction.”

  Barhu took a deep breath. “Tain Hu wanted me to remember something about a man in an iron circlet. Do you still have . . . the document where she recorded her secret?”

  Once this ledger had bound all the rebel leaders of Aurdwynn together. Fatal secrets recorded on a sheepskin palimpsest by the Priestess in the Lamplight. Barhu had learned, almost too late, that the Priestess was an agent of Falcrest—doubtless one of Hesychast’s followers in the ilykari. This palimpsest was meant to go into Hesychast’s files. Instead, it had gone to Barhu, and from her to Yawa.

  “I never deciphered the transcript,” Yawa said. The carpenters had installed a door on Yawa’s slot cabin, a thick oak slab with a big black iron lock. Yawa fussed over it to avoid looking at Barhu. “Partly because I didn’t know the spice-word, of course. But I also found the thought of deciphering it . . . difficult.”

  Her brother’s secrets would be on the palimpsest.

  “If you’d like, I can give you the spice-word, and leave you to decrypt it. . . .”

  “No, no. Help an old woman with her figures.”

  “Old women are supposed to be good at figures. That’s what they taught us in school.”

  “I didn’t go to school.” She cleared her little desk and made space for Barhu. “Please.”