The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Barhu’s thoughts ticked through loud, painful permutations of the scenario. How he would rage. How he would rebuke her.

  “And you have to do it immediately. Right now he’s scared for Lindon. He wants to go to Falcrest. Which is, of course, the place where he’s most useless to us. We need him in the north.”

  “Yawa,” Barhu said, quietly. “I could go.”

  She laughed. Then she looked at Barhu and her mouth narrowed. “You’re serious? Go to the king as dowry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what he’ll do to you? When he’s done scalping you and bleeding you upside down, you won’t have the dignity of a sky burial or mummification. They’ll take the salt from your body. You’ll be animal feed. And if you’re unlucky, you won’t be dead yet.”

  “If Hu was willing to die for Vultjag . . . how can I do any less?”

  “No. You can’t.” Yawa’s ferocity surprised her. “Absolutely not. I won’t allow it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you do that, then I might as well have lobotomized you back on Kyprananoke. I would be wrong to have spared you. And I don’t fucking like to be wrong.”

  Barhu was so unexpectedly moved by this that she had to cough away the crease in her throat.

  “It’ll be cholera,” Yawa said.

  “What?”

  “We’ve finally come to an island of slopes. The Llosydanes were tall. Kyprananoke was flat. Here, everything runs downhill. Sooner or later all the water that falls on this island reaches the coast, and the towns. If the Cancrioth can’t get Kettling ashore, they’ll use cholera. The sewers are good, but if cholera reaches the upstream lakes, or taints the shellfish beds . . .”

  “Good,” Barhu said, with rising hope. “Good!”

  Yawa stared at her. “Good?”

  “Cholera would be devastating here!” If a few thousand people started shitting out twelve liters of virulent gray fluid a day, some of it would get into drinking water, and spread. “That strengthens the Brain’s negotiating position. She might be willing to talk.”

  Yawa sighed. “Baru, there’s something else you should know.”

  Barhu groaned. It was never anything good.

  “Follow my hand.” Yawa pointed north and west of Cautery Plat, to a place on the shining blue and forest green of the coast, to the left of Helbride’s course.

  Barhu frowned along Yawa’s finger at the shoreline. “Yes. What is it?”

  “Do you see the river Rubiyya?” Yawa traced the silver band of the river, shading gold as it ran down to the sea.

  “I see it.”

  “Can you see the structures on the bay where the Rubiyya meets the sea?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s an experimental colony at the mouth of the river. A test to see how tropical people fare on a temperate island with similar volcanic soil.”

  Oh no. “Yawa. What sort of people?”

  She smiled with grim humor. “Guess.”

  “Kyprananoki?” Perhaps there were survivors, enough to remember and rebuild—

  “No. Your people. Souswardi—that is, Taranoki people. About a thousand of them.”

  The farthest she’d ever come from her home, and still she found it waiting for her. Tau would call it trim.

  “Have you considered,” Yawa murmured, “what you’ll do if the Brain’s a fanatic? What if she’s willing to sacrifice Eternal, and herself, and any hope of retrieving Abdumasi Abd, in order to strike that first blow?”

  “She won’t,” Barhu said. “She’s too smart.”

  But she remembered that grove on Kyprananoke where shattered children stained the coconut wood. If all logical and ethical paths toward freedom have been twisted by your conqueror to lead instead to submission, then abandon logic. Abandon ethics. She’d once considered how the Oriati might resist Falcrest’s infiltration so well: by holding to basic principles of kindness, charity, and honesty, they prevented themselves from succumbing to the pressures of circumstance. Circumstance could be manipulated. Principle could not.

  Neither could absolute, immovable, irreconcilable defiance.

  The Brain might rationally choose to operate on a policy of unilateral violence.

  And if she did . . .

  “There were those among the ilykari,” Yawa said, “who chose to serve Falcrest, the very power that persecuted them, because they believed so strongly that my master Hesychast was the virtue Himu incarnate. What if the Brain believes so strongly in our destruction that she would destroy herself to achieve it?”

  “She cast a spell on me,” Barhu said. It was the only confidence she could offer. “She won’t attack until I’ve returned to her and completed our covenant.”

  “You have a tremendous faith in Cancrioth magic.”

  “She cast the spell in public, Yawa. If the spell is not completed, everyone will doubt her power.”

  “What, exactly, were the terms of this covenant?” Yawa asked. “What bargain did you fail to complete?”

  Barhu, who had glanced away to the left, pretended she hadn’t heard.

  Get it over with,” Svir snapped.

  Barhu looked up in shock from the Great Game arrangement on the map table. She had been replaying Farrier’s strategy against the Oriati, observing, with some disquiet, how perfectly her own plan might serve to achieve it. “What?”

  “I saw you and Yawa pecking at each other. I know what happens when you talk.” He struck at the doorjamb with the flat of his hand but arrested his palm so swiftly that it made no sound: Barhu leapt in fright at the clap of silence. “Blackmail me. Send me to make your marriage.”

  “Svir, you don’t want this—”

  “What I want is some damn consistency! Either you’ll sacrifice people for your purposes, or you won’t! Just don’t,” he snarled and came two steps toward her, “don’t treat me more compassionately than Tain Hu. It makes me feel like I need to be better than her. And I don’t like it when people expect the impossible of me.”

  She closed her own playing piece, the splintered pawn that represented Agonist, in her fist.

  People were hashes. You could only see their output, the passwords they showed to the world. You could not know the truth of them. But with sufficient time and study you might become familiar with the functions that transformed the shape of a man’s soul into the choices he made: the hash that communicated Svir-in-truth to the Svir who Barhu perceived.

  She believed, as much as she could believe anything about anyone, that Svir genuinely loved Lindon Satamine. She believed that he would throw away all his other work to rush home and protect him.

  “Svir,” she said, “do you believe in trim?”

  He laughed. “No.”

  “Fine. Well, listen anyway. I . . . I choose to believe that I know you. A little about you, at least. And that makes you real to me in a way it wouldn’t have before . . .” She waved her hand toward the devastation they had left behind on Kyprananoke. “So it’s hard for me to coerce you now.”

  He spoke in Stakhi. “Do you remember what I said to you, after Aminata passed? About how there was no easy way out of the hole? How you would be climbing out for the rest of your life?”

  “I remember, Svir.” She faltered: that brief rapport with him was so precious to her that she had not wanted to wear it out by remembering it too often. Leave it in a glass case in the back of the vaults, and marvel, once in a while, that it existed at all. “Why?”

  “Do you remember that I told you I thought you’d die? Because you had no one to hold inside you, here”—he made the same gesture, thumping his chest above his heart—“to keep you from destroying yourself?”

  She held him through the short beat of usual eye contact, knowing he would look away in discomfort, and then look back: that piercing, brutally radiant return, the true Svir, the lightning-flash intensity of his thought.

  “Yes,” she said. “Why?”

  “I should not be one of the things you choose to keep
in your heart. Not because I don’t deserve it. But because you and I are cryptarchs, and you must, you must be able to wield me as a tool. You think that you don’t want to do that.” He shook his head. “But what you really don’t want is to fall into grief again. You don’t want to think of yourself the way you did when you were at your lowest.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”

  “I’m telling you to get it over with! You have no choice. Tell me that if I defy you, you’ll tell Farrier who I am, and he’ll have me in court faster than you can say hereditary sin. Or you’ll tell Hesychast that I’m an undiluted source of High Stakhieczi royal lineage, and he’ll lock me up for his use.”

  Svir’s hands landed on the far side of the map table, and all the pawns and symbols quivered. “You have the upper hand, because you don’t have a fucking hostage. And you know it.”

  “If I promise to protect Lindon and his family, will you go to your brother and negotiate this marriage?”

  “No. That is not acceptable. I will not make a deal with you.”

  “Don’t make me do this,” she said, softly. “Please. I will protect Lindon Satamine with all my power. Him and his family and your child. Just, first, go to the Wintercrest Mountains and make your brother end his war on Aurdwynn. Is that enough?”

  He grinned ferally at her. “No. I’ll never go back to the Wintercrests of my own free will. You wanted this power, Baru. Will you use it or not?”

  She thought about Svir, Svir’s childhood, how he had fled into unknown eastern realms to escape his home. She thought about the man he loved, the child he’d fathered with that man’s wife. She thought about how he’d protected Iraji’s secret even when he could’ve gained so much through betrayal.

  She put all those coins into an account. Then she weighed that account against the Stakhieczi invasion and the fate of Tain Hu’s home.

  There was, by that logic, no choice.

  But she felt that she had a choice anyway.

  “Apparitor,” she said, giving him the honor of a firm gaze and a cold eye, “you will not go to Falcrest to defend Lindon Satamine. You will write him a letter encouraging his resignation, and give it to me. Beyond that his fate will be mine to decide.

  “You will go north to the Wintercrests, to arrange your brother’s marriage to Heingyl Ri, the Governor of Aurdwynn, and the end of his invasion. As dowry, you will tell him that Heingyl Ri offers to him the claim to the Mansion Uczenith, passed to her, by marriage, from the consort of the Vultjag lord who killed Uczenith’s lord and heirs. You will use your knowledge of Stakhieczi law and custom to justify this claim.

  “And if you do not, then I will have your royal blood entered in the Metademe’s records, so that all Falcrest knows you are the living avatar of the great anathema called King. Do you understand me?”

  “Is that all?” he said, calmly. “No dagger aimed at Lindon and his family? They hate the man who plays both sides more than the ordinary sodomite, you know. Because he passes on his sin.”

  Barhu shook her head.

  “No threat of execution for sodomy? No hot iron plunged down my throat?”

  Barhu winced.

  “Ah, her qualms show.” He looked as if he would laugh at her discomfort, but the sound died. “A Falcresti king was executed that way, once. Not out of any particular need to punish his indulgence in men—that was, at the time, no more than a bad habit, like opiates or cheating at cards. But that king’s vice and his execution became connected by gossip, gossip became history, history became law.” He put his spread fingers to his forehead, pointing up: he was miming a crown. “The punishment is still on the books. But now it is for sodomites, not kings.”

  “I would never, ever threaten you with that,” Barhu said, shakily. “I promise you on Tain Hu’s grave I wouldn’t.”

  His alien eyes were stranger for the wonder in them. “I believe you, now. I even believe that in your own pathological and frightening way you loved her. Listen, Baru. I will go to the Wintercrests. I will go to my brother. I will even accept the very strong possibility that I will never return. But.”

  He leaned forward across the map table until, very purposefully, he had blotted out the entire world with his shadow.

  “You,” he enunciated, “have just fucked up. You have put your foot in my trap. Because now that I know what you genuinely want, now that I know that only I can execute it, I am capable of ruining your entire scheme. So I will do this thing for you; but only because it secures me leverage over you.

  “I want seven hundred and fifty thousand fiat notes deposited in the accounts of the concerns I control. I want them within the year. I want Lindon Satamine and his entire family safely extracted from Falcrest, provided with legends, and delivered into my care, or at least into their own.

  “And if any harm comes to them, Baru, I will tell my Brother the King of Mansions that the Duchy Vultjag is full of Masquerade agents. I will name for him the villages and even the houses where they lurk. I will tell him of the slow plagues incubating in the children, and the blights they nurture in their gardens. With fire and with sword I will murder everything you love in Aurdwynn. And then I will carpet the Waterfall Keep in the festering corpses of Tain Hu’s people, and the rats will dance pavane across them. Do you understand me?”

  She nodded. It was only fair.

  He beamed in satisfaction. “There. Mutual leverage. Just the way cryptarchs should behave.”

  22

  War Magic

  Once more Bebble Auranic had sunburnt his balls.

  It was uncouth for anyone’s name to align with their profession; that carried the suggestion of inherited class. But Bebble Auranic often felt that he had perhaps overcompensated away from the family goldsmithing business by becoming a fisherman.

  Astride his catamaran yesterday, he’d forgotten the sun’s reflection off the water, and so burnt the underdangle of his tangle. It had been so sweaty in his linens. Could he be blamed for letting his fruit drop now and then? Everyone in the guild had laughed at him, and he deserved it, he was a damn fool; ten more points on his service exam, he could’ve scored ten more points and escaped the lifelong brand of an oars-mark on his jacket, limited capabilities, restricted responsibility. He could’ve been a maker of unguents. A pharmacist! A—

  Something bumped the stern of his catamaran.

  Bebble turned. The distant shore and the buildings of Cautery Plat wavered in heat haze.

  A whale cruised a circle round his little boat. Water poured off a dark scarred back that curved up to a fin like a great tooth. Sweet virtues, it was an orca! An orca in the Ashen Sea! It must have come up along the Segu coast in the west, through the islands, out of the Black Tea Ocean where no one of Bebble’s race had ever been and returned—

  The orca flicked a spray of water across the stern, drenching his lunch of hard bread and smoked fish. Bebble didn’t care. Bebble had just lost his appetite.

  The orca’s fin had a blade edge. A cutting surface. Collared there by some strange armsman who ministered to whales.

  The whale blew a gout of water through its blowhole and whistled like an elephant miscarriage’s last breath. Bebble screamed. He screamed at the sound and he screamed at the human skull calcified into the huge bony tumor that stared eternally backward into the tumble of the orca’s passage.

  The orca curved back toward him. Its eye fixed on him. Its jaw yawned. It had white laughing teeth.

  Annalila Fortress was invincible.

  Annalila Fortress had fallen.

  Stripes of black and red dye slashed the white cliffs to confuse the aim of distant siege engines. Hwacha batteries bristled from fortified promontories. Rust-flecked pendulum chains and tanks of vilest acid awaited the call to repel assaulters. Cave harbors guarded squadrons of boats. Annalila Point was not just a weapon but a home of weapons, a place like a beehive, generating and sustaining instruments of hurt.

  And yet, without any attack, without even a whimp
er of resistance, she had fallen. Parliament had cursed this fortress with powerful magic. Barhu could see it even from Ascentatic’s launch, where she rode beside Captain Nullsin. The signal flags abandoned mid-code, the sentry posts where noon light flashed off unwatched telescopes. Sea gates lowered and barred. A lonely officer patrolled the western bluffs, armed with nothing but a spyglass and a rocket pistol as a panic signal.

  “She’s sequestered her books,” Barhu murmured to the man beside her. News of Parliament’s fiscal strike against the navy had come in with the mail packets to Ascentatic. “Put all her crew on unpaid leave. They must be in barracks?”

  Captain Nullsin nodded quietly. “For now. Probably drunk as rats on watered rum. Payday was yesterday, and Maroyad would’ve had to give them something to keep them calm when they didn’t get their wages.”

  “I thought the navy held a season’s pay in arrears, to discourage desertion?” The navy’s officer corps was professional and disciplined, but navy sailors were as greedy, miserable, and prone to desertion as any fighting crew. A hold had to be maintained.

  “We do. But that doesn’t mean there’s three months’ pay actually sitting in the vaults. It just means they collect spring’s pay in summer, summer’s pay in autumn, and so forth.” Nullsin tapped his hammer anxiously against his right wrist. “Maroyad knows half her sailors will hop down to the harbor and sign up on a merchant, given a chance. Merchant pay’s always better, since Parliament won’t let us raise our wages. So she keeps them drunk.”

  “Baru,” Yawa murmured, in Iolynic, “if Eternal realizes the island is undefended . . .”

  “We can make a show of force when Eternal arrives. That’s all we need. A convincing show of force, to deter attack.”

  And if it was not convincing, the Brain would realize she could walk ashore with buckets of Kettling blood and start bathing the children.

  Two marine officers (Barhu was amused to spy the insignia of a company captain and a lieutenant commander, doing work that would normally be left to able sailors) hauled open the sea gate to admit them. “Rear Admiral Maroyad’s compliments, Your Excellences, Captain Nullsin,” the captain said. “Please come with us.”