The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

Barhu felt, again, the whole weight of life balanced on her hand, not just her life but all the lives that depended upon her, the cornerstones of an inverted pyramid, trembling in the air, waiting to see how she tipped.

  “Baru? What is it?”

  “I think,” she said, “that I was right to send Svir to handle it.”

  “It’s bad?”

  She nodded. “We have a little more time. But only a little.”

  Yawa put two fingers on the soft underside of Barhu’s right wrist and dug in. “Say that Svir does successfully arrange this marriage. Say that the Necessary King stops his invasion. Say, even, that you get your trade route. What do you have for me? How will you keep Hesychast from lobotomizing my brother when I fail to lobotomize you?”

  “I think,” Barhu said, “that we have to assume one of those lobotomies will go forward.”

  Yawa stared at her as she left.

  A frustrated pang of loneliness, absolutely irrational, why will no one go to the ball with me, sent Barhu down into the hold and the bilge. As if she might find Shao Lune chained up there, awaiting Barhu’s petition upon her makeshift pavilion.

  But Shao was gone. Gone like Aminata, whose death was now almost certain, who Barhu really should begin to mourn—how dare she feel excited about a ball when Aminata had given up everything—but then again, it was beginning to look as if she, too, would have to give up everything—

  Barhu found a hammer and began to tear up the nails in Shao Lune’s sleeping platform. They could be reused. The ship’s carpenter should’ve taken them up already.

  A soft tap on the steep stairs to middeck.

  Barhu looked up.

  A fine ink silhouette against the lamplight. A marvel of illustration, that such presence could be suggested by a few lines. Long legs, gloved hands braced against the walls, shoulders back: and her astronomically cheekboned face tipped down into darkness, to Barhu. She wore a sleeveless suit of black silk under a short and faintly royalist cape. She was wearing men’s heels, called horse-archers because they were invented to fix the rider in the stirrup while taking a bowshot. But they had really quite fascinating effects, Barhu discovered, on the human leg.

  “May I escort you to the ball?” Iscend asked, shyly. A counterfeit emotion but damn it nothing was so thrillingly taboo to an accountant as a really, really good counterfeit. “It’s been so long since I attended a masquerade.”

  “You killed everyone on Kyprananoke.”

  “Yes. And I did it because the Republic demanded it of me.” Iscend reached out her glove. “Everything I am demands that I help you, Agonist. It’s my purpose.”

  “I need to convince a woman to marry me,” Barhu said, recklessly, “in the eyes of a culture that might accept I’m a man. I need her to leave her husband for me, and then, after she marries me, I need her to marry a king. All extraordinarily unhygienic. All vital to the Imperial Republic’s future. Can you help me do it?”

  “Your Excellence,” Iscend said, coming one step down the stairs, “I can help you achieve whatever you desire.”

  Barhu dressed as a barbaric northern lord. A broad-shouldered tabard and riding jodhpurs with a silver wolfskin cape, worn side-shoulder in respect to the summer heat (she would hand it over to a steward, thoughtlessly, as if she owned many more). She chose a silver cover with platinum chips to disguise the full authority of her mask.

  Something was missing. She paced counterclockwise circles, trying to remember what she’d forgotten. Hu would have worn something else. And then, with a pang like an iced molar, she knew that it was Aminata’s boarding saber.

  “Baru!” Yawa called. “The ball’s begun! The boat will leave without you!”

  “A moment!” Barhu secured her purse, her scabbard, and her incryptor. Then, with a great nervous breath, she knocked on the wall beside Svir’s curtain.

  He yanked it back. “I told you, I’m not going.”

  “I know,” she said.

  She’d thought, once, that he was wormlike, atavistic—and now she regretted it. He’d been born to a people starved of sunlight, the skin itself gone pale with hunger. No wonder his throat was always his tell. The Stakhi were the people of the throat. How thirsty his ancestors had been, how starved, to chip at the hard rock in hope of water and precious salt.

  “So,” he said, composing himself. “Your agent’s news?”

  “The king is about to fall. You must go at once. I’ve written and sealed orders for the public revelation of your heritage. For release in the event of my death . . . subject to the discretion of a trusted colleague.”

  “And Lindon?”

  “You’ll give me the letter recommending his resignation now. I’ll extract him from the Empire Admiralty and protect him, bearing in mind the threat you made. I’m sure it’ll motivate me.”

  He began to laugh. “Do you remember when I’d pop in on you in Aurdwynn? Some long-haired asshole, buying expensive whiskeys? You never remembered me. Not once. When I finally sat down and made you the offer, you didn’t know where you’d seen me before.”

  “I didn’t pay enough attention to people, back then.”

  “And look at you now. You’re here dictating terms to me, terms that hinge, and please don’t mistake my admiration for approval, upon your cogent understanding of my desires and objectives. The woman I thought you were couldn’t have done this.”

  “I’m not that woman.”

  “No. You’re not.” He fished a letter out of his stacks, pinching the heavy stock from between two sheets of rag. “This is for Lindon. I’ve already put my incryptor to it. Tell him I’m going home, and then I’m coming back.” He smiled bleakly at the page. “Tell him I remember our first journey together. And that I intend to repeat it.”

  “Your brother will love the story of that journey,” she said. “I’d love to hear the story.”

  “That’s why I don’t tell it,” he said, wistfully. “Got to hold something you want. Will you see Iraji safe? Wherever he ends up? He’s been a good spy for me, and a comfort. I’m sure he doesn’t love me, thank the stars. But I want him all right. See to it?”

  “Yes,” she promised, “yes, yes, I promise you, I will.”

  “Nice cloak. You look like Hu.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and tried to hug him.

  “Easy,” he said, fending her off. “Easy there. You’ve gotten so handsy lately.”

  Barhu stepped into the Arsenal Ballroom, and into her past: the widening-precipice days before Sieroch.

  The banners did it. She hadn’t seen so many in one place since the rebel army gathered. They covered the walls from hardwood floor to high rafters: the masked stag of Heingyl Ri’s new government in Aurdwynn, kneeling figures in gold and jade for the Mbo, plain red sailcloth for the Imperial Navy, the crossroads-and-gate insignia of the Isla Cauteria civil government.

  And for every banner there was a new sort of person. Sharply dressed Falcresti in waistcoats and tailcoats and sherwani. Judges in black robes. Oriati merchants in syncretic outfits, Mbo colors cut in severe Falcrest lines. Aurdwynni chamberlains and armsmen with their Stakhi and Maia and Belthyc blood as varied as the finespun wools they wore. All served by broad-shouldered waiters in dark corsetry that cinched their bodies into the classical triangle of the Exemplary Man.

  Everywhere commerce; everywhere gossip spreading, thoughts exchanged, the tiny arcs of individual lives adjusting their place in the braid, and the braid in turn pulled taut by all the forces of world, spirit, atmosphere. Would Tau find this place as fascinating as Barhu did? More, perhaps. For they would unfold all the people, rather than trying to collapse them into patterns and trends.

  “Your Excellence?” Iscend murmured. “You’re alarmed.”

  “It’s been a long time since I was in the public eye.”

  “You are not in the public eye at all, My Lady Excellence. This is a proper masquerade. While everyone knows Agonist is in attendance, no one knows exactly who she is.” Iscend nodded her white en
ameled half-mask toward the other end of the ballroom. “I see that Governor Heingyl has revealed herself. She is dancing. Perhaps her armsmen made secrecy impossible. Let us proceed as dancers do.”

  “I don’t know many dances,” Barhu admitted. “Just what they taught us in school. And I threw tantrums.”

  “Can you fight?”

  “Naval System, yes, I can—is dancing like fighting?”

  “Utterly unlike it. Dance is the expression of meaning through movement. Combat is the denial of meaning, the assertion of material effect over symbolic power.”

  “Like Tain Shir,” Barhu murmured.

  “Just so. However: there are educational similarities.” Iscend stepped across the invisible limen which marked Barhu’s space. The sense of puncture was acute, needle-thin and cold, and as Iscend lifted one hand, turned it before Barhu’s face, an image possessed Barhu of Iscend’s body in a function test. Marked at every point by the colored needles of acupuncture, in the join of her thigh, her armpit, the fold between her fingers. The shining needles chiming off each other as she flowed from one posture to another.

  “In combat, as in dance, I am trained to interpret the body. You will lead. I will follow.”

  “I don’t think I know how to lead. . . .”

  “Pretend that you are leading the way across rough terrain, and that I am the terrain. I will present the choices, and you will simply choose the way.”

  That exquisite shiver touched Barhu again, at the suggestion, in the metaphor, of trespass on sacred Imperial ground. “Follow on, then.”

  They drew speculative attention, first for their outfits, Barhu’s barbaric provincial splendor and Iscend’s sleeveless black severity, but most of all for the scandalous tension of their dance. “This isn’t like you,” Barhu murmured, as they passed close, as Iscend’s poise folded for a moment, collapsing toward Barhu, withdrawing again as if in self-reprimand. “You’re being—”

  “Feminine?”

  “I would have said”—a pause for breath, and of course Iscend was exactly in rhythm with her—“demonstrative.”

  It was Falcrest’s notion of femininity, at once exalted and despised by the men who held the power. Coiled and watchful and cunning, taunting in its concealment: the checked sway, the bared throat veiled in hair, the half-parted lips closing to a frown. It was the theater of passion denied, the suggestion that if Barhu only seized control, if she stripped away Iscend’s inhibitions with bold forthright action, she would find surrender to her wants. Barhu didn’t want to like it. But she had come of age in that school, and the teachers, the women who knew so much, had all been raised this way—

  “You told me you have to pass as a man,” Iscend whispered. “I am your woman. Be the man.”

  “How?”

  “Answer the questions I’m asking you. Look. Look how I withdraw. Look at this, the coverage of throat and chest. Look at the way I step, here, to part the legs, and here across, to close them. Look how I turn from your body, to hide it from my sight. I am indifferent to you, I am denying your power. Deny my denial. Take what you want.”

  They were not the questions Tain Hu had ever asked her. They were not the questions Ulyu Xe had invited. They were another world’s way to look at a woman and to pursue her.

  But Barhu had her taste for counterfeits.

  And after some trial and uncertainty, after close pass and wary circle, she held Iscend arched across her hand. The Clarified woman came up with a smile and the faintest flush down her cheeks. “Good,” she said, and if that flush was a reward, if the way she looked at Barhu with new interest was an enticement, well, what was there to do? “Good. You will say most of what you want to say to her without any words.”

  “Who?” Barhu said, having quite lost track of her reason for being here.

  “The Governor. Shall we go to her now?”

  At that moment, the choirmaster opened the envelope Barhu had deposited, and, after a moment’s quiet communion with his singers, they began to sing.

  I am Agonist,” the chorus chanted. “I am the Emperor’s will manifest to you. I stand among you in a secret form.”

  The crowd hushed. Even Barhu shivered in anticipation. Her hand brushed Iscend’s, fabric against fabric: she jerked it away.

  “Tonight I bring a gift worthy of Cauteria, the gate that receives the world’s commerce. A ship will come to you from the shores of the Black Tea Ocean, far in the west of Oriati Mbo. They have journeyed through storm and still to trade with us, and that trade will be to our advantage. Let us undercut the greedy and jealous Princes. Let us cut the Oriati Mbo out of the middle. Soon the Emperor will announce a concern to exploit this opportunity. Tonight, I will offer you first bid on a number of shares in that concern.

  “And if you fear that your investment will be lost in the journey from the Black Tea Ocean, or burnt away by new troubles in Aurdwynn, rest assured that the Emperor has prepared Taranoke and the Llosydane Islands as fine ports of call on the long route, and that Her Excellence the Governor Heingyl Ri has Aurdwynn well in hand.

  “Join with me in welcoming these newcomers as we have always welcomed trade . . . with a smile, a soft voice, and a hard and cheating heart.”

  “Excuse me!” a high voice called, from not so far away. “Excuse me! Is this why it’s not my ball anymore?”

  There was a general appreciative laugh. “To Governor Heingyl Ri!” a man bellowed. “She has lost a ball, but gained a thousand friends!”

  The moment of formality broke; the whispers became a roar of conversation. “It’s so obvious,” someone near Barhu whispered. “Heingyl Ri is Agonist. The woman who brought peace to Aurdwynn deserves the Emperor’s favor.”

  “Too obvious, I should imagine. What about the woman from Sieroch? Baru Fisher? They said she was the Emperor’s agent.”

  “Nonsense,” a third voice drawled, male and arrogant. “Never a provincial. I suspect the former Province Admiral Ahanna Croftare. I have it on good authority that she dispatched the marines which shattered the rebel army.”

  “She was in Falcrest by then! It must be Juris Ormsment, that’s why she’s gone missing, the Throne has some new purpose for her—”

  “You think the Throne would endorse an agent from the navy? The Emperor might be naïve, up there with no idea of Its own name, but Its Advisors would never allow—”

  Iscend whispered into Barhu’s ear. “Of all the delights of the masked ball—anonymous liaisons, a poisoned cup, a needle in a dress—none surpass a hidden identity. Did you know that it is law, in Falcrest, that in the course of a masquerade no one’s mask may be removed without their consent? Only an Imperial writ can force a citizen to unmask.”

  “I think I would know you anywhere,” Barhu whispered back, “masked or unmasked.”

  Iscend laughed like sparrow wings. “That is a falsifiable proposition, my lady, and a challenge, too. Look, now, look.” She guided Barhu’s hand. “Your friends are with the Governor.”

  And there was Xe, very summery, wearing a skirtwrap down to her knees and a swimmer’s strophium, crossed so that it framed a diamond of chest and back. Xe ushered Ake forward, an awkward gangly figure in a gown that didn’t fit. The Stakhi woman smiled uncertainly and put out her hand to introduce herself to Heingyl Ri. The Stag Governor of Aurdwynn was a tiny woman, masked in pure white from upper lip to brow, beneath a headdress of gilded antlers that curled toward the chandeliers. It might, in any less republican context, have been read as a crown.

  “Oh, damn.” Ake was going to let slip that Barhu had given her a letter of governorship, and Ri would think she was being usurped. “Where’s Yawa!”

  “Here I am.” Yawa appeared in a feathered black gown. “What has you screeching?” She had mostly finished a glass bulb of what the Maia called sakkari and Falcrest called sangria. A bit of grape skin stuck to her teeth.

  “I need to be introduced at once.”

  “Ah. Yes, I see the problem. Come along.”

  Bar
hu tried to think of a clever greeting. What could you say to a woman whose father had died fighting your army? Was there etiquette for this? Hello, Ri Foesdaughter, and well met? I’m glad your father wasn’t a better killer?

  Heia,” Yawa called, choosing the Duchess Heingyl Ri’s personal name, as Duchess Vultjag had also been named Tain Hu. “May I introduce you to a colleague?”

  Ri’s eyes narrowed. She raised her right hand. The three armsmen behind her, a chalk-eyed Stakhi man, a harelipped toothless fellow, and a Maia brute in maille, all tensed and closed in. Iscend Comprine relaxed fluidly like poison in a syringe.

  “Your Excellence.” Barhu swept a low and sober bow, as the dukes would offer each other. In Iolynic: “The last of your kind, and the most deserving.”

  “Hello,” Ri said, pleasantly. She might be tiny of stature but she was huge in presence; Barhu’s height gave her no power whatsoever against the cut of Ri’s fox eyes. Of all the things Barhu had met on her first day in Aurdwynn, she remembered Ri’s eyes second best.

  “Heia, my dear,” Yawa purred, “is your husband here?”

  “He’s speaking to the guano factors.” Her eyes roamed over Barhu with a wary, vulpine mischief. “Dressed just like a duchess I once knew. Miss Sentiamut, why don’t you and your friends go meet my husband? He’ll make the arrangements for you to join us on our ship.”

  “At once, Your Excellence.” Ake led the others away, firing a wary glance back at Barhu. Run and Ude were arguing with Yythel over which of several mushrooms to eat off a glistening truffle-oiled tray. Barhu smiled at their bickering.

  “You’re fond of them?”

  “Yes. Very much so.”

  “I could arrange their safety, if I just knew a little more about a man named Ketly Norgraf, who vanished from Treatymont this spring. . . .”

  She was a player of the game, young Haradel Heia. Barhu liked her a little more than she ought. “Who is that?” she asked, innocently.

  Heia tipped her head and smiled. “What remarkable work you’ve done for my home. And your work continues—why, not long ago my husband received your letter, ordering all sorts of arrests and economic movements. Even the creation of republican senates, if I am not mistaken?”