The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Then what in the name of precarious Devena would you have me do here?”

  Courage, Barhu. “Is it possible to fake a lobotomy? To . . . allow Hesychast to believe I’ve been removed, long enough to avoid your, ah, punishment?”

  Yawa began to laugh. It was the cruel, mocking sound Barhu had inflicted on classroom rivals who insisted their errors were correct. “Fake a lobotomy? Iscend. Iscend, I know you’re listening. If I were to fake a lobotomy upon Baru, would you be able to pass it off to Hesychast as real?”

  “There is such a range of results,” Iscend called from the sink where she was scrupulously cleaning herself, “that it is very hard to prove or disprove that a lobotomy has occurred after the fact. Hesychast would not be confident of the lobotomy’s success unless I were to attend myself, and certify that the maniple performed every cut exactly as instructed.”

  “See?” Yawa snapped. “Your survival, and the survival of all the good you could do, would depend entirely on Iscend Comprine lying to her own creator.”

  Iscend’s lips moved in the dark. She swayed like Iraji about to faint.

  “Damn,” Barhu sighed.

  “Even if he believed the lie, it wouldn’t work for long. The moment you took any action but passive compliance, he would know the lobotomy was false. He’d know that I hadn’t won the Reckoning for him.” Yawa stared into the corpse’s back, opened like butterfly wings. “I wish you had more to offer me, Baru. You keep asking me to trust you, but as Svir said . . . we are not in a line of work agreeable to trust.”

  Barhu read the tag on the dead man’s cadaver. He had been pulled overboard by his fishing net, the file said, and nearly drowned. His crew had fished him out in time to save him. He’d coughed up the seawater, finished his shift, and gone out drinking with his crew that night. And died, in the middle of the pub, of the washing death: his lungs stripped of necessary fluids by the brine he’d inhaled. He had asphyxiated on dry land.

  “You know,” Barhu said, staring down at the corpse’s bulging eyes, “I think that lobotomy is my worst fear in all the world. Worse than drowning.”

  “I know,” Yawa said.

  Barhu wondered how Yawa would react if she suggested that Yawa should let Olake be lobotomized. Well: how would she, Barhu, have reacted to Tain Hu’s execution if they’d known each other for sixty years instead of three?

  Put that way it was obviously impossible.

  “Will you show me one?” she asked.

  “Show you what?”

  Barhu pulled the hooks out of the man’s splayed-open back and, with a grunt, flipped him over. His dead eyes stared at nothing. “Show me a lobotomy.”

  Yawa grimaced. “I don’t use my tools on a corpse. Call it a superstition. Or a fear of gas gangrene.” That was a morgue attendant’s disease, characterized by huge purple blisters and a gas release so rapid that the flesh could be heard popping and crackling.

  “Surely a similar set of tools could be found,” Iscend suggested, returning from the sink. “How are yours different from the standard?”

  “I use a one-tenth-inch orbitoclast to puncture the bone, and a telescoped interior needle to perform the cuts. I prefer the precision.”

  “A delicate design,” Iscend noted. “Prone to snapping off when extended.”

  “I know how to avoid stylus breaks,” Yawa snapped, “thank you very much. I’ll use whatever they have here. It’s not as if the patient will complain if I use a thicker needle than I like. Baru, you truly want to see your worst fear performed in front of you?”

  “Absolutely,” Barhu said. “I want to know everything that can go wrong.”

  27

  Choice and Context

  There was no more time to make arrangements. Eternal had put down anchor. The Cancrioth waited, thirsty and sinking, in the bay beside Iritain. And in Iritain Baru’s parents waited, too.

  They set out late in the morning, Governor Heingyl’s procession guarded by her own armsmen and by a party of Maroyad’s marines: the armsmen glared at them across the withers of the carriage team, resenting this sign of official distrust, even after the ballroom attempt on Ri’s life. Barhu would have left them all behind, but these armsmen were Ri’s family. And that left Barhu prodding, again, at thoughts of her parents. Was she ready to see them again? She’d expected more time to prepare . . . more results to show them, as justification for the choices she’d made . . . would she need to lie? Could she lie to her mother? Would Pinion hate Barhu already? Would she hate Solit, for letting Barhu go to the Iriad school?

  She was so wrapped up in her worries that she lost her seat in the Governor’s carriage. Ake and Ude Sentiamut invited themselves along and stole Barhu’s place. She did not get a chance to speak to her would-be wife at all until they stopped for water.

  “Heia, did you know that the Stakhieczi value salt a thousand times more than gold? Pan any river in the mountains and you’ll find gold. Salt, though, salt preserves food for the winter. That’s why their word for salary comes from their word for salt.”

  “I know,” Heia said, with wary curiosity.

  “Did you know that they make the finest steel in the world? As hard, as flexible, and as beautiful as Tain Hu.” This made Heia laugh. “Legend says they can tease a pound of steel from two pounds of raw soil. I heard in Aurdwynn that the secret ingredient is the mountain wind itself.”

  She cocked her hip to support the barrel she was filling. “Is this your idea of courtship?”

  It was. “Did you know that in Oriati Mbo they have a lot of salt and spices, and not nearly enough steel?”

  I made Faham treat me roughly. His cover on the Llosydanes kept him doing real farm work, pulling stone and working plow. He was magnificently strong. He had sure hands and thick arms and a heart that made him what the maids in the Governor’s House used to call zisuczi: like steel. Afterward I lay against his broad chest and listened to him breathe in the dark. He ran a finger down my cheekbone. “Old Maia women are supposed to have hairy lips and bad tempers.”

  “I pluck the hairs. And I do have an awful temper.”

  “You should smoke more.”

  “I can’t smoke away my problems, Fa.”

  “The world is a dream.” He kissed me behind the ear. “It might as well be a pleasant one.”

  I shivered at the warmth of his lips. He and I both knew that the dream would not be pleasant for long. A choice would have to be made.

  I did not know if I could give Barhu everything she wanted. I was not certain at all. She had come from a trading village on a trading island. She had been raised by a man who used commerce and influence as his weapons. She had never been merely common.

  There was so much she didn’t understand.

  In the morning we waited in the small front room of our house in the Annalila fortress yard, borrowed from a retired rocketry mate. Stewards served coffee in glass pots, with prisms of Souswardi sugar and shaved fruit on ice. I wondered where they got the ice from, and how long they could keep it from melting.

  Shao Lune arrived with a thick roll of sheepskin palimpsest under her arm. “Your Excellences. So pleased to see you here.”

  “Show us,” I snapped.

  Shao Lune hung her diagram with a pair of clothespins. A deck plan of Eternal, annotated with details of dimensions, materials, assessment of fire hazard. The ship’s cannon-powder magazines a splotch of dangerous red, forward of amidships and directly below the cargo hoists.

  Faham Execarne gave a grudging nod. “I believe these plans are genuine.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked him. I was in agreement: forgers always gave it away in the linework. But I was curious what tells he looked for.

  “All the stupid shit in the design. If she’d forged this, she would’ve made the plans make sense. Real ships have history.”

  I waved to Shao Lune. “Please proceed.”

  “Your Excellences.” Shao Lune beckoned her companion forward. “Upon my request, Commander Falway has
prepared a plan for a compartment-by-compartment seizure of Eternal. The plan calls for a primarily lethal approach, using gas, smoke, and flooding as the main force components. We’ll take prisoners from the wounded and subdued. The action will begin with divers from Sterilizer, to secure lines on Eternal’s hull and prepare an approach for the boats—”

  “This is all, of course,” I said, “strictly a contingency plan, in the event that the negotiations do not meet my requirements. Not to be enacted without express authorization.”

  “Yes, Jurispotence.” Shao Lune nodded with quiet, professional competence.

  The crater of Isla Cauteria’s peak still smoldered; Barhu wondered if Taranoke’s old gods of stone and fire lived here now. Certainly there was other life in plenty. On the carriage ride she tallied wild goats, feral pigs, stiltbirds, nene-ducks, geckos swarming over hot stones, night herons, frigatebirds above, finches and sparrows and pheasants, rock doves (pigeons, in nice scenery), hawks and gyrfalcons like the sorts that allegedly perched on the heads of gyraffes. Young ohia and koa trees boulevarded the road, shadowing tall blue ginger, cup vines, and everblooming lantana. Iscend climbed up onto the carriage roof with refreshments, then lay beside Barhu and inquired after various birds.

  “Iscend,” Barhu asked her. “Whatever I do as an agent of the Emperor is in service of the Republic, correct?”

  “Within reasonable limits, I should think,” Iscend said, so cheerfully that Barhu almost thought she was being teased.

  “What would those limits be?”

  “The general improvement of the Republic’s condition. The suppression of disease and disorder. The pursuit of an Incrastic future of ordered breeding, sterile homes, equal yet specialized races and sexes. And a complete understanding of the natural world, so that all its forces and peculiarities may be accounted for in the Republic’s policies.”

  Barhu considered the economy of the clouds in the sky. What currency did clouds use? How did they pay for their own existence, so as to grow fat and thunderous? What difficulties and expenses made them dwindle away?

  “What if Incrasticism were itself disproven?” she asked. “What if Incrastic thought were outstripped by some foreign alternative? Say, for example, that a foreign mathematics were to make some discovery beyond Incrastic knowledge.”

  “Incrasticism is a self-improving tool. It is flexible and amenable to change.”

  “Could it ever change so that it was amenable to me?”

  “You mean, could it become accepting of the tribadist?” Iscend was looking right at her now, not even blinking: a signal of openness, but also of wariness. “That would depend on the origin of the taboo. Some argue it existed before Incrasticism, in the days of the Verse-hammer and their wars against the shaheen kings. Others say it was a reaction to the decadence of the Fourth Dynasty. A taboo supported, of course, by the most rigorous scientific investigation.”

  “Science like Torrindic heredity.” Behaviors enter the hereditary particles, to be passed down to offspring. “What if that heredity were wrong?”

  “You’re suggesting that my very existence is based on a lie!” But Iscend was smiling like a barracuda.

  “You’re teasing me,” Barhu said, in wonder.

  Iscend adopted an Urun accent. “I could not possibly do so.”

  “Now you’re imitating Ulyu Xe!”

  Somehow she made herself looser, an interior uncoiling, relaxing into the motions of the carriage, like she was full of water. “I can be her. I can be anyone you need me to be.”

  Barhu scoffed. “Don’t be silly.”

  The Clarified woman’s face narrowed. Her shoulders tightened, her breath came through her nose, and she glared at Barhu with serpentine intensity. “I can, though.”

  “Oh, don’t be her,” Barhu groaned.

  Iscend’s eyes flattened into indifference. Her muscles tensed, relaxed again, so she lay on the carriage roof like a sprawled panther. Her hands were loose fists. The red of her lips suggested a mouthful of blood.

  Barhu recognized the imitation, and shuddered.

  “Interesting reaction,” Iscend said, coyly.

  Sunset caught them just five miles from Aratene, on the mountainside above the the Rubiyya valley. Governor Heingyl called for a halt, to spare the horses from a risky descent in the dark. As soon as the tents were pitched she launched a blackberry-picking expedition “in the name of Aurdwynn’s ranger tradition.” Ake Sentiamut walked with her, the two women speaking intently in Iolynic, exchanging small energetic gestures.

  “Like they’re cooking together,” Barhu said, bewildered. “Look at their hands! Chopping, gathering, mixing . . .”

  “Concerned, my lady?” Iscend asked. “Should I eavesdrop?”

  “No, no.” It was just hard to give up control.

  Barhu climbed a tree, trying to spy Eternal’s masts in the cove to the northwest. There was nothing to see in the falling dark, so she turned to voyeuristic observation of the camp. Was Haradel Heia flirting with her handmaidens? Or was that just how Aurdwynni ladies associated in high company? The compliments, the laughter, the delighted exchanges of food and favor?

  Somewhere on her blind side a branch snapped like a pistol shot: she leapt in surprise, and looked.

  A stag stood below her, dying.

  It had the velvet antlers of spring growth, flush with blood and water. They had been crushed and now they bled down its face. Another wound on its breast yielded dark arterial red. One of Heia’s handmaidens saw the stag and shrieked. The Stag Duchess herself stood aghast, hands black with raspberry juice. Not with all the repertory in Falcrest could you have invented a better image of her father’s ghost.

  The stag screamed like a maimed man, exactly like the man Ude Sentiamut had mercy-killed by the Fuller’s Road. One of the armsmen wailed and tore at his jerkin. “It’s calling to her! It’s saying her name!”

  Haradel Heia covered her mouth. Blackberry juice stained her cheeks.

  Something in the tall grass behind the stag made a sound like a bird chirp. It grew, not birdlike, to a growl. A red catamount rose up from its crouch in the treeline and leapt onto the stag’s haunches. The stag warbled, tried to buck it off. The cat climbed, grabbing bloody paw-holds with its claws, trying for the throat and the killing bite.

  But the catamount couldn’t open its jaws. It could only nuzzle the stag’s throat. A rusty trap dangled from its back leg. If it were human it would have sobbed in desperation.

  The thing had lockjaw.

  A cold premonition of danger on her blind side. Barhu glanced over, saw the Stakhi armsman who’d shouted in horror. He was crying. Torn between love of the old duke’s daughter, and anguish at the old duke’s ghost screaming and bleeding under the claws of a catamount, the symbol of Tain Hu, the woman who had killed him.

  You could not ask for a clearer omen. Old Heingyl’s ghost was begging for revenge as the spirit of Tain Hu tore at him.

  Barhu leapt down from the tree and did the only thing she could do. She found a longbow and a quiver and went to kill the maimed things. Iscend met her with a glass bottle from the medical bag. “This will help.” The label read:

  POISON LETHAL POISON: RAPID CONCENTRATED KRATOM OPIATE ALCOHOL SOLUTION WITH ACONITE SUPPLEMENT:

  FOR LARGE ANIMAL DEFENSE IN BAITS OR BOLTS.

  LOT ONE OF SEVEN WINTER AR 130.

  HOMEOPATHY IS A FRAUD: DO NOT ATTEMPT.

  It even had a little brush, for application. Their poisons, Hu, are as useful as their roads. Barhu plunged the brush into the bottle, turned it to get a good coat, nodded when Iscend said “Be very careful,” and painted a ring of poison—not on the arrowhead itself, where the target’s skin could wipe it away, but on the shaft behind the head.

  She nocked the arrow and drew.

  In winter memory, Tain Hu touched Baru’s elbow, drew her spine a little straighter, pressed at the curve of her back. She whispered,

  “Shoot.”

  Barhu sighed and shot the
stag. It groaned and fell. Then the catamount: draw, aim, sigh, shoot.

  Heingyl Ri ordered the mournful armsman back to Annalila Fortress at once, clearly worried about what he might do in his agony. Then she ordered her house to help burn the corpses.

  It was the fire that betrayed Barhu’s camp to the people hunting her. But she did not know that yet.

  What a terrible omen.” Haradel Heia, Governor of Aurdwynn, shuddered and shifted closer to the fire. “My father’s sign. Tain Hu’s sign. They aren’t at peace. . . .”

  “It wasn’t Tain Hu,” Barhu assured her. “Tain Hu rests well.”

  “Dangerous to speak for the dead,” Heia murmured.

  “She trusted me to speak for her.” Barhu poked the fire with the catamount’s thighbone. She and Iscend had slaughtered the cat, curious about its anatomy. It had made a bloody mess of Barhu’s traveling clothes, and she had stripped down to linens, a loose tunic, and a cloak. Crouched at the fireside now, she was curious to see Heia noticing her legs.

  Iscend hadn’t washed. In place of her calisthenics she was silently, viciously fighting Heia’s armsmen, winning sometimes, losing sometimes, a bloodsmeared specter on Barhu’s blind side. The men were ginger with her until she threw them, or hit them in the throat.

  “You really married her,” Heia said, guardedly.

  “I did. I think. Are you married, if you choose a consort? Maybe we were only betrothed. But I could argue that I was acclaimed Queen, and had the power to execute the marriage. Certainly,” she even managed to wink like Tain Hu, “the marriage was consummated.”

  Her firelight flush. “And now you want to marry me?”

  “I want to pass to you the claim to the Mansion Uczenith, so you can bring it as dowry to the Necessary King.”

  “I feel quite self-conscious.” Heia plucked at her square neckline. “I’ve never, ah, thought of another woman as—it’s quite—you’re so much taller than me!”

  Barhu laughed. “So?”

  “I’ve always been shorter than my suitors. It made me nervous, knowing they could hurt me. But it’s not the same with a woman. You’re taller, but it doesn’t trouble me.”