The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Barhu sniffed the copy. It smelled like oat bran, like her old tower. She closed her eyes, felt olive oil on her fingertips, a gentle wind on her face. Saw lamplight flickering through thin paper walls. The ilykari made their temples flammable, so they could burn it all when Falcrest came.

  She enumerated the text, and then the spice-word SUSPIRE, turning each letter to a number by its place in the Aphalone alphabet. After that it was a simple matter of subtraction and denumeration.

  Yawa lay back in her hammock. “Will you read it to me?”

  “Shall I began with Olake? Get him over with?”

  She made a small noise. “No.”

  “I’ll begin with my least favorite, then—”

  A delighted cackle. “Oh, who will it be?”

  “Duke Oathsfire has written . . .”

  Duke Oathsfire has written, and he was there at her side, beard fluffed up like an angry possum, confessing that he had, in the end, fallen in love with her: really with the idea of her. A common-born liberator, a high and noble cause to redeem his life of arrogance and privilege. If he devoted himself to a belief, couldn’t he be as respected as his friend Lyxaxu, as noble as his peer Lyxaxu, as beloved, as wise?

  No wonder he’d tried to kill her. She’d betrayed so much of him.

  “He paid his wife to abort a child, knowing they would soon divorce, because he did not want her to have the leverage of a firstborn heir. She told him she would’ve done it for nothing. The child was buried in the Oathsfire plot.”

  “Hm,” Yawa said. “Weak. It could be prosecuted, but I doubt the sentence would be death. Not for the man, at least.”

  “Maybe he was afraid of what would be done to his wife.”

  “You think he cared about his divorced wife?”

  “Maybe his honor mattered to him.”

  “I suppose. Many foolish things did. His wife didn’t want the child, so he did the right thing. Who next?”

  “Duke Lyxaxu has written . . .” She hoped it wasn’t sordid. She couldn’t bear to see Lyxaxu reduced. He had been the only one of the Coyotes to detect Barhu’s treachery, because he had listened to her, listened to her beliefs, and really understood what they would drive her to do.

  But he would reassure her: what is true is true, and you may not turn away from it in fear. For if you do, you are turning your face toward a lie.

  He had mismanaged his duchy into starvation, and, in a fit of self-loathing, committed himself to suffer as the meanest of his peasants. That meant a winter spent among the nihilist-berserkers who studied the nothingness of the self. They ate their own dead: nothing but meat, no sacred value, and the living needed meat to survive.

  Now Barhu understood the feral fox-flash she’d seen in his eyes. He had gone right to the edge of humanity, and past it. “I forgive you,” she whispered. Lyxaxu had hated starvation so deeply, after that winter, that he’d even given aid to his enemy Erebog.

  Yawa was laughing. “He was a cannibal! That’s incredible! Do another, do another.”

  “Unuxekome is next. . . .” Barhu covered the passage with her hand, and felt as if her womb would cramp, remembering his mother’s poison. But that captain of swift ships would not wait at anchor, he would sail forward! With a growl she ripped the hand away and read his last story. It was not a surprise: he had been exchanging weapons, water, and information with the Oriati Syndicate Eyota, in truth a covert arm of the Oriati Fighting Swarm, commissioned to raid Masquerade interests in Aurdwynn by the wealth of the merchant Abdumasi Abd. Grand treason, of course. He had asked the priestess to seal his testimony with his own personal name.

  “Kome Afrasi Riawyys,” Yawa sighed. The name lay on her tongue like sugarmelt. “I had such a passion for him when I was younger.”

  “Yawa! He could’ve been your son!”

  “Hush, hush. We are disclosing compromising secrets here, after all. Who’s next?”

  “There’s only you and Olake left . . . and Hu.”

  “Well,” Yawa sighed, “you might as well read mine, it shan’t surprise you.”

  Yawa’s secret was exactly as Unuxekome Ra had promised it would be. I have resolved to pay any price and betray any loyalty in order to secure the independence of my homeland from all aristocracies and occupiers, be they foreign or native-born. I will never abandon this purpose, though it lead me into my enemy’s power.

  “Why write it down?” Barhu asked her. “Why take the risk of certifying your treason?”

  “Because it was a vow in sight of the ilykari. I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t lie.” Yawa looked excruciatingly uncomfortable. “Go on, please.”

  “We could stop.”

  “Don’t you dare coddle me. Go on.”

  Now Barhu had to choose between reading Olake’s secret and Hu’s. She glanced left, to put the palimpsest on her right, and stabbed her finger down: and of course she picked Hu’s secret, the one she had come to learn.

  “The Comet Duchess has recorded—”

  “A moment, please.” Yawa fetched herself a handkerchief.

  “She has recorded . . .” Barhu gathered up her courage in the hardness of her stomach. “She says that when she was young, she met a man wearing an iron circlet in the forests of Vultjag.”

  Yes. This was it. This was the message Hu had wanted her to find.

  “Later she learned that this iron-circleted man was the Pretender-King Kubarycz, Lord of the Mansion Uczenith. He had been exiled for his conspiracy to unite his Mansion with the Duchy Erebog. Tain Hu killed him in single combat, and his sons in the ensuing skirmish, thus ending his lineage entirely. . . .”

  Yawa’s eyes snapped up to hers. “It says that? It says she ended his entire line?”

  “Yes. What does it mean?”

  “If the duel was lawful, and there are no surviving heirs, the loser’s inheritance goes to the winner.”

  “Really?” Barhu said, skeptically. “That seems like a good way to keep all your aristocrats dueling to the death.”

  “It is the Stakhieczi custom, so that no Mansion is ever orphaned by the death of its ruling line in war. If Tain Hu were a Stakhi lord, she would now have a claim to Mansion Uczenith.”

  “Vultjag is a Stakhi name,” Barhu breathed. “She was Maia but her ducal name comes from a Stakhi lineage. Vultjag could rule Uczenith. . . .”

  They stared at each other. The hope felt like it would collapse if they dared prod it.

  “Well,” Yawa said. “That’s quite a secret.”

  “She never mentioned—”

  But wait, wait, she had. On their carriage ride together, after the duel with Cattlson, Barhu had asked Hu if she’d ever killed. And she’d said the man with the iron circlet.

  “If Cattlson had learned about this,” Barhu said, wonderingly, “that the brigand bitch of Vultjag had a claim to Stakhieczi aristocracy . . . she would’ve been too dangerous to leave in power. She would’ve been disappeared.”

  “She would never have pressed the claim.” Yawa stared into the wall, seeing distant forest and white mountains above. “She was too much a child of Vultjag. And she must have known the Stakhieczi would refuse her. She could have walked into the Mansion Uczenith and declared herself their lawful lord and it would have made no difference. A Maia woman? They’d sooner be ruled by the rats.”

  “Yawa—” Barhu clenched her fists. “Yawa, I think—”

  “What?”

  “Dziransi witnessed us when I chose Tain Hu as my consort.”

  Yawa’s eyes went wide. “He was there? You did it publicly? Just told them all you would be queen and Hu would be your consort?”

  “Yes. After the battle at Sieroch. They asked me to choose a consort, and I raised Tain Hu up to my side. Dzir was very confused.”

  “Baru, do you realize—”

  “I’m the chosen consort of the rightful lord of the Mansion Uczenith,” Barhu breathed. “Tain Hu was that rightful lord. If the Stakhi recognize our union as a marriage . . . then she passed the c
laim to me when she died.”

  “They’ll never recognize your claim.”

  “Why not?” Barhu said, giddy now. “What if it was to the Necessary King’s benefit to recognize it? Don’t you think he could find a legality to grant the claim?”

  Yawa sat up slowly. “The Necessary King would recognize the claim if it could be transferred to him by marriage. If he married you, he’d have two Mansions. His Hussacht and your Uczenith. And if you produced an heir, the claim to both Mansions would pass down to that child—”

  “No. I won’t carry his child.”

  “Barhu, please, think of the opportunity—”

  “I won’t be mother to a man’s child.”

  “Barhu, come now, it’s not so bad; he jerks off, you stick it up your cunt, repeat until it takes—”

  Something caught Barhu’s eye, a little addendum that Purity Cartone had faithfully transcribed from Hu’s confession. She had written—Barhu burst into laughter—also, and often, I have fucked Oathsfire’s wife—

  Barhu thought about this for a moment, this matter of women fucking women, in the context not of Falcrest’s Incrasticism but of Stakhieczi custom as Svir had taught it to her.

  “I’m not a woman,” she said. “I’m a man. I can marry women.”

  “What?”

  “That’s how it works in the mountains, Svir said. Only a man can marry a woman. But whether you’re a man or a woman is decided by how you act. I can act as a man, and so I can become a man.”

  “Act like a man?” Yawa tucked her chin in, put up her heels like she was wearing horse-archers, crossed her arms in a pantomime of Falcresti manhood. “Exactly what are the qualifications?”

  Barhu described the qualifications with her hands. Yawa laughed like a gutter girl. “Oh! You always struck me as the one on the other end—”

  “Yawa!”

  “So you are a man. You are the man with the claim to Mansion Uczenith’s ruling line. What does that gain us?”

  “I can marry a woman,” Barhu said, happily, “a marriage the Necessary King can recognize. Then she can take the claim to Uczenith from me when we divorce. Then she can marry the Necessary King, delivering the claim to him! The king will make sure it’s all legal because it benefits him. And I won’t have to fuss around with semen samples, I won’t even have to meet this king, I’ll just send him my divorced spouse to be his wife.”

  “You’ll still require a suitable wife,” Yawa mused. “Someone who symbolizes the union of Aurdwynn and the Stakhieczi Necessity. Where will you find such a woman?”

  Barhu smiled wickedly at her. “I thought you might introduce us to the mutual bride.”

  “What? Who?”

  “You sent Dziransi to the Necessary King, didn’t you? We’ll send him the bride he expects. Only the dowry won’t be my lobotomy anymore. It’ll be my claim to the Mansion Uczenith, passed through her.”

  “Oh no.” Yawa covered her face.

  “I recall Ri’s rather fetching,” Barhu said. “And more pronouncedly feminine. I could be a plausible husband, don’t you think?”

  No,” Svir whispered. His neck was tight as a hangman’s noose. Sinew and larynx stood out like height lines on a map. “No, I won’t go back.”

  They’d come to him together, a mistake: he’d looked up and said, “Ah, wonderful, no matter which way I turn there’s someone to stab me in the back.”

  Barhu tried to bring it up elliptically and Svir just stared at her like a distant thunderhead, debating whether to come over and incinerate her. She’d pointed out (not wanting to blurt Svir’s secret right out in front of Yawa) that he must have been a man of some influence in the Wintercrests, or he couldn’t have afforded the fleet of ships that he’d commanded when Falcrest captured him. Had he known the man who would become the Necessary King? (The man, she did not say, who was his brother?)

  Svir put his pen point-first into his palm. It made a very deep dimple. “Perhaps.”

  “We have an action in mind,” Yawa said, “in the Wintercrests. The political and strategic consequences could be enormous. It might mean the end of hundreds of years of war. But the action would require an agent in the Necessary King’s court who was exquisitely sensitive to the nuances of Stakhieczi custom and law. A negotiator to smooth out objections and difficulties. We wondered if—”

  “No,” he said, with his throat like a noose. “No, I won’t go back.”

  Barhu tried to signal Yawa that she should leave. But the Jurispotence Durance was not accustomed to abandoning her work to the young. “Apparitor—Svirakir—we both know that you were someone important in the mountains. I don’t know who, exactly, but you have too many teeth to be a Mansion commoner. This is your chance to use that heritage to the whole world’s advantage—”

  “But I don’t care about the whole world.” He beamed poisonously at Barhu and Yawa. “I’ve told you plainly what I want. I want Lindon, I want my family, and I want enough money to complete construction on my new fleet. And then I’m going east. Before the whole Ashen Sea turns into Kyprananoke.”

  “Do you want to see Farrier triumphant?” Yawa snapped. “Do you want to see Baru’s master in power? Hesychast could at least protect your family—”

  “Oh, fuck them both,” Svir said, cheerily.

  “Damn you,” Yawa snapped, “this is your function in the Throne. Your special expertise is in Stakhieczi and northern frontier affairs.”

  “And I won’t go back. Not with the navy about to eat Lindon.” Svir held up one hand, palm out, thumb at right angle to his forefinger: the kind of sign you might make in falling snow, in mittens, to signal the people following you to halt.

  “I’m not doing a damn thing for either of you,” he said, “until I have some leverage.”

  “All right,” Barhu said, over Yawa’s silence. “How do we do provide you leverage?”

  “You sign a statement that could do you real harm. I inspect it to be sure I’m satisfied. Then you apply your incryptor to seal it as a genuine product of your authority, and you give it to me to hold.” Svir offered his pen, still capped by an invisibly thin layer of his skin. “Deal?”

  Barhu looked to Yawa. “I can’t. Will you?”

  “You can’t,” Svir interrupted, “because so far you’re completely unconstrained in your power, except by that nasty diagnosis of epilepsy Yawa’s got. Is your loyalty to a dead woman’s sacrifice really more important than earning my service?”

  Yes. Yes, it had to be. Yawa would need to be the one to yield a hold. Only Yawa was closed up, eyes shining, mouth bitter. “You’ve already got my twin. What more do you want?”

  “Hesychast has your twin,” Svir countered. “I have nothing on you.”

  “And you’ll get nothing more.”

  Svir turned his alien eyes on Barhu. “It looks like it’s up to you, Agonist. You want my service? Either give me a hook in you. Or use that leverage you’ve got to make me obey. That’s what Hu died for, isn’t it? To give you the power to compel without being compelled? Compel me!”

  There had to be another way. “Svir, I know what you’d risk if you went home.” The Stakhieczi did not look kindly on traitors, and Svir was arguably the greatest traitor they’d ever produced. “But this could mean the end of the Stakhieczi as a threat to Aurdwynn.” And the beginning of the Stakhieczi as a trading partner, one end of her beautiful, beautiful plan. “Will you do this, knowing what’s at stake?”

  “NO!” he roared. His hand came down on his folding desk and the hinges rattled and the pot of ink leapt and settled back into a black star of spill. “NO!”

  And then, more terrible than that roar, sliver-thin and quiet: “Go. Get out. Go.”

  21

  All in Motion, Too Swift, Too Soon

  Svirakir, Prince of Mansions, Apparitor of the Imperial Throne, dangled a hundred and seventy feet above Helbride’s weather deck and thought about jumping.

  His body stuck out into the wind like a flag: he was hooked through
the mainmast lines by his right arm, and braced against the mast by his right foot. His left dangled in open air.

  He watched the sun lever. That was what they said in the Mansions, not rising but levering, the light of the sun tipping down across the world on the fulcrum of the Wintercrests. It illuminated the birds above Isla Cauteria: hawks and sea eagles, ospreys and skua, the gannets and the white gulls, and at last the black dome of the volcanic peak. Now the light touched the bright chips of lakes.

  He’d tried his best to play his role, and so buy time for himself. But Yawa and Baru had failed to destroy each other. Instead they’d fallen into each other’s arms (not literally, as far as he knew: Baru was still running experiments on the diver Ulyu Xe’s endurance) and developed an admittedly charming seditious streak.

  Not that they’d let him into their sedition. But it was obvious, and predictable, that they were conspiring against the Throne. Leave two infant cryptarchs at sea for months and of course they’d get delusions of independence. He’d had them once, too.

  The reassertion of authority was going to be brutal.

  With his left hand he measured the horizon’s slight bob. Though of course the horizon was really stationary, and Svir was the one moving. You act, you think that you are changing the world, shaking the whole mess on its foundation: but really all you have done is move yourself.

  Of course, if Svir really wanted to see the horizon move, then he could leap from the mast. The horizon would collapse in on him until it achieved a radius of zero when he struck the water. Which was an ugly thought, but he knew exactly why it had come to him.

  The possibility of Lindon’s destruction always made him want to die. And that possibility was coming true.

  He’d climbed up here to check the weather beacon on Annalila Fortress. After staring at it for half a chime he could no longer hide from the truth.

  The beacon was transmitting the wrong test code.

  Every morning, the weather beacon transmitted a test code to ships and outlying observers, who flashed it back in turn. Of course the test code changed every week, to keep everyone alert.