The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  She threw a huge rock into the stream, purely out of euphoria, the desire to hear a splash as solidity displaced uncertainty. Caldera gods boil her, if this was anything but fantasy, it would be a tremendous weapon.

  She had never needed a scientific rationale to believe that she and all the people like her deserved to live with dignity and without fear. But if she could prove in scientific terms that the whole ideology which rationalized their punishment was wrong . . . why, between this and Kimbune’s mighty mathematical proof, there was a chance to destroy a bulwark of Falcrest’s power without spending a single note or killing a single person!

  “A study of pedigrees might substantiate the theory,” Iscend suggested. “Perhaps the Cancrioth has kept track of their breeding for an entire millennium. Perhaps they would be able to demonstrate whether heredity obeys Torrindic predictions, or an . . . alternative model. And the figures do support the resilience of isoamorous behavior.”

  “What figures?”

  “Despite all attempts at eugenic, behavioral, and somatic intervention, undercover hygiene delegates report that one in four people still engage in some isoamorous behavior. Why does the behavior recur so often even when we discourage it so strongly? Why has it not become extinct?”

  Barhu imagined herself before the Faculties, presenting her research. A Proof of the Necessity of My Existence. . . .

  “Baru,” Iscend said, “what’s been done to me can never be undone. Do you understand that?”

  Barhu started out of her reverie. Iscend had crawled up beside her on the bank and propped herself on her elbow. She was sleek and strong and far too close.

  “You’ve already started to undo it,” Barhu protested. “I’ve heard you—” It would probably shame Iscend if Barhu, a cryptarch, directly addressed her use of her own command word. “I approve of what you’ve done this journey. I like the way you’ve altered yourself.”

  Iscend lay on her side, almost exactly Barhu’s height, watching her with an intensity which seemed to twist her perfect face. “You approve, you disapprove. But still it’s not my approval. The terms in the equations have changed, but I’m still bound by their outputs. My whole life I’ve been conditioned to feel wonderful when I serve the Republic. That will never stop.”

  She swallowed. “Right now, you are the Republic, Agonist. You are the closest I can come to seeing my whole purpose in a single woman.”

  Oh no, oh, please stop. “The conditioning will fade. Or you’ll learn how to alter it.”

  “I know how to alter it,” Iscend said.

  “How?”

  “Like this. Gaios. Kiss her.”

  Barhu squeaked into Iscend’s mouth. She made a half-hearted effort to escape, but in that flash of cold and heat there was such suggestion of delights to come—it was like trying to turn down a tremendous investment from a dubious donor: the money might be tainted but it would still spend so well—

  “Wait,” she spluttered, “wait, no! Stop! Stop!”

  “Am I too forward?” Iscend withdrew at once, though not far.

  “You’re not too forward. But we have to stop. I don’t want us to do this.”

  “Because you think I’m not in command of myself? I know exactly what motivates me. I had every part of me laid out in a design. Can you say that?”

  “But you didn’t lay out the design!”

  “I know exactly two ways to feel good, Baru. One is to obey the conditioning instilled in me by the Metademe. The other”—she lay her hands on Barhu’s, all that neuromassage training pent up, waiting to be used—“the other, and, please, draw away if you want me to stop, but the other way I know . . . it is the way all bodies know. The Metademe couldn’t take it from me. I learned it in the function tests. Something I wasn’t supposed to feel, something not part of the protocol. When I slid the flag needles into the small of my back, into my pelvis, into my thighs . . . it made me hot, Baru. It was the first time I ever came. I didn’t make a sound. But I knew it was something they couldn’t take out of me, no matter how they conditioned me . . . I want to feel that. I want you to make me feel good for being near you. I want to feel good in a way they didn’t plan for me. I want that.”

  Barhu was so absurdly turned on by this, the idea of unpinning Clarified conditioning with sheer force of lust, that she almost, almost gave in. Her hands were free, free to pull away, to make the right choice, but the way Iscend moved guided them. . . .

  The moonlight glittered on the passing stream. Patterns each as complex and temporary and fascinating as people themselves. And yet the stream ran on, down to the sea, the direction unchanged.

  Nothing within the water could escape its context. Not this choice. Not any other.

  “Please.” Iscend pushed against Barhu’s hand. She was damp from the stream, and cool, except for this warmth. “Please let me have this.”

  Barhu knew she had to stop. She knew, absolutely, that if she let this happen she would hate herself for the rest of her life.

  It was just so tempting to wait a moment longer. . . .

  “Baru!” someone shouted. “Baru-u-u!”

  No voice in the world could have pulled her off Iscend so quickly.

  “Mother?” Barhu gasped. “Ma?”

  INTERLUDE

  RNS Scylpetaire

  Tain Shir walks the deck of RNS Scylpetaire between the forlorn and the furious and the damned. A killer among killers but she alone is free.

  She is unmastered. They are masterless. The difference is everything.

  She has not seen Scylpetaire since the day the frigate left Sulane’s company to find Baru Cormorant’s parents. She hunted it across half the Ashen Sea. Left Kyprananoke aboard the last ship to escape, the merchant Ngaio Ngaonic’s trader. He recited old Scyphu prayers as the wave chased them, subsiding into the deeps around Kyprananoke, until it was no more than a ripple beneath the keel.

  When they made port at Yama and settled into quarantine, Shir leapt overboard, swam between the anchor lines of the crab traps, came ashore like a seal in the dark. She bartered news of Kyprananoke for passage to Taranoke on a Masquerade postal clipper. But Scylpetaire was not at Taranoke. Baru’s parents had already fled.

  Scylpetaire has failed Juris Ormsment.

  And now their traitor-admiral is dead.

  Shir tracked Scylpetaire here to Imaranoke, a speck of an islet north of Taranoke. The name is favorable, though the place is not; Shir suspects it was named so by ancient Maia voyagers in order to draw rival families away from fertile Taranoke itself. The mutineers came here to hide from Sixth Fleet Sousward and the inevitable order for their arrest.

  They still had hope. Reunion with Ormsment. Vengeance against Baru.

  Shir took all that from them.

  “She deserved better,” Captain Iscanine mutters. “Shot dead by her own comrades . . . you say Asmee Nullsin turned on her? That prince bastard.”

  Shir does not care about this question. Ormsment is dead and the circumstances of that death are as immaterial to her future as the position her parents chose to conceive her.

  “You’re afraid they’ll mutiny.” She watches the gray-haired crew scrub the deck. The sun sits directly above the mainmast and does not move. Qualmstones scrape. The waves rush and suck at the hull.

  “Of course I’m afraid,” Iscanine mutters. She’s maintained her uniform in perfect order, though the red wool is soggy in the tropical heat and the pins on her collar are dull from overpolish. “They’ve already done it once. If we can’t go home, if we’ll never have pardons, if Baru’s beyond our reach . . . if I have to tell them we’ve failed . . .”

  She shakes her shunt-scarred head. She was a water-swollen child, and the Metademe barred her from childbearing before she was even out of the crib. She has never known any meaning but the navy. Now those invisible shrouds of support are cut away. She staggers free.

  A delicate time, Shir thinks. A time of second birth, with all its blood and all its screaming.

  �
��I will take command,” Shir says.

  “What?”

  “The Province Admiral is dead. I will take command. You will be ship’s captain, and I will be your admiral, like she was. And we will continue her mission.”

  “How? How can we do right by her?” Iscanine is begging now, though she would not admit it.

  They’ve come to the bow, the railing that overlooks the sprit and the dolphinstriker. Iscanine begins to turn but Shir crowds her against the rail. “Baru has a second father.”

  “She was adopted?”

  “No,” Shir says. “Pinion had two husbands.”

  “At once?”

  “Yes.”

  Iscanine, who has no husbands, makes a salacious eyebrow waggle. “Lucky bitch.”

  Shir is not interested in the predilections of Falcrest’s women, unless they involve her. “The second father’s name is Salm.”

  She imprisoned him and so it is right, in the way of talion, the law of an eye for an eye, that she should set him free. Only then will she in turn be free to conduct the duty she promised Baru. To watch over her. To await the day when Baru at last betrays Tain Hu’s faith.

  And on that day, Tain Shir will kill her and cut out her heart and prepare it on open coals.

  Baru may yet avoid the fall. It may be that the Brain has already persuaded Baru, as she once persuaded Shir, to turn away from the path of lies and control. It may be that Baru already carries Falcrest’s death in her arteries.

  And that would be good.

  Empire planted that killing tree on Kyprananoke, where the rebels dashed children dead against the trunk.

  The only answer to empire is to move the tree.

  It is not justice. But there is no such thing as justice. Only the measureless and asymbolic truth. Who prospers. Who suffers. Who lives in glory. Who dies in chains.

  “Make your ship ready to sail,” she commands Captain Iscanine. “We have works to begin.”

  Act Four

  yawa’s choice

  The Iritain Matai

  They came to each other in the moonlit forest.

  Barhu cut her hand on a stone as she ran to her mother’s voice. Blood ran down her fingers; blood pulled her forward. She saw Pinion’s dark thundercloud face in the clearing ahead. Her cry of joy nailed Pinion to the spot: still expressionless as Barhu came into her arms, halfway knocked her over, clung to her, saying, in Urunoki, “Mother! Mother!”

  “Baru,” her mother said, “your hands smell like pussy.”

  “Oh, gods!” Barhu fumbled in the pine cones, trying to scour her hands. Sticky pine pitch everywhere, of course—

  “The pitch doesn’t come off,” her mother said, watching her. “Be careful, now, you’ve cut yourself—you’ll get dirt in there—What did you do to your fingers? Where have you put your two fingers, Baru?”

  “I can’t believe you said that!” Barhu cried. “Why would you say that first?”

  Her mother’s pox-scarred face, her trim body, all shockingly older. She’d gone gray. She wore a dirty mulberry work shirt and rough canvas trousers. Her head had been shaved, recently, for passage on a ship, in a cheap hold full of lice.

  “It’s very rude to get cunt on your mother,” Pinion said. Then she began to laugh. “Solit! Solit, come down! We caught our daughter fingering some falca girl in the woods! She’s so embarrassed!”

  Solit appeared on the upslope, a hammerfall on Barhu’s heart. Father blacksmith grown bigger and fatter and pleasantly darker. “Why are you so cruel to your offspring, Pinion?”

  Barhu fled to the streambank, washed herself, and came back sobbing. Her parents held her close. They cried together. The smell of tears on her father’s face reminded Barhu of home.

  “You remember what she said?” Pinion screwed up her face and squeaked. “You will never change anything with your hut and your little spear!”

  “And you said”—Solit shaking his finger at Barhu—“my lousy daughter, you will return with a steel mask instead of a face!”

  “Let’s see.” Pinion pinched Barhu’s nose. “Still fleshy.” She tugged Barhu’s right ear. “Maybe you use these once in a while, now?” She took hold of Barhu’s chin. “Your cheek was cut. What were you eating, to cut through your cheek?”

  “I was so afraid!” Barhu cried. “There was a ship going to Taranoke, to take you hostage! How are you here?”

  “We’re working for the Cauteria Coffee Concern,” Pinion said.

  “What? You left Taranoke to sell coffee?”

  “We wanted a change of scenery. People do that.”

  “But now? It’s just such good luck, such perfect timing, I can’t believe it. . . .”

  “Still a suspicious child, I see.” Pinion looked darkly to her husband. “Very suspicious.”

  “I’m going to tell her,” Solit said.

  “Don’t,” Pinion snapped, “not yet,” as Barhu said, eagerly, “Tell me what?”

  Solit leaned in conspiratorially. “The coffee concern’s a cover to move people around the Ashen Sea. People who can’t safely stay on Taranoke. Rebels. Smugglers. Good people.”

  “Oh,” Barhu said, impressed. Her parents had developed some tradecraft. “That’s very sensible.”

  “When we heard that a certain coconspirator had come to a bad end, we decided to make ourselves slippery for a while. Some of the people who’d . . . who might’ve been captured could be compelled to give up our names. Cauteria’s the farthest you can get from Sousward on the trade ring”—Solit drew a half-circle in the air, Taranoke to here—“so we came to Cauteria.”

  “Taranoke!” Barhu said, as fierce as one should be when speaking true names. “Don’t say Sousward, father, it’s Taranoke!”

  “That’s right.” Solit scrubbed her head. “Taranoke always. Then this great gold ship turns up in our bay, with a navy ship right behind it that ignores all our signals; and at last we hear there’s a carriage column on its way from Cautery Plat. So we go out to meet it, to get our questions answered. We see a fire on the mountainside, the fire leads us to a camp, the duchess in the camp tells us your name . . .”

  Pinion was frowning at Solit with tight-lipped discontent. Barhu put her chin up stubbornly.

  “I’m on your side, ma. I won’t betray you.”

  Are you, Pinion’s eyes asked? Are you? “First we hear of the Fairer Hand. We think our daughter is leading a rebellion in some far-off wolf province. We think she’s found a woman who will tolerate her, this brigand with a large estate. We think she’s found some proper elders to look over her. And then we hear that the rebellion is over. That it was betrayed before it even began. That all the elders are dead. And that Baru Cormorant is an agent of the Throne. You know, if you had never sparked that rebellion, we never would have had to flee home.”

  “Mother, I promise, all that business in Aurdwynn was . . .”

  They both looked at her expectantly. How could she say a move in the game? How could she say that? When she had not yet won the game, and so proved it worth playing?

  “A lie?” Pinion suggested.

  “A ruse?” Solit offered.

  Barhu didn’t know how to explain it, or how to survive their reaction. All she could think to do was to offer up, as justification, a prize she’d earned.

  “Salm’s still alive,” she blurted.

  Something smashed her head. At first she thought Pinion had punched her in the jaw. Then the ringing passed and her father held her up as her mother stumbled backward, hands in the air, having accidentally struck her daughter as she cried her raw triumph, “I was right! I was right!”

  Her parents had never ridden in a carriage before.

  “I’ve never heard of a Cancrioth.” Mother Pinion handed her blackberry scone to father Solit. “Eat that, it’s delicious.”

  “Why don’t you eat it, then?”

  “I want you to have it, dear husband.”

  “You always give me the things you don’t like.”

  “If we li
ked all the same things, dear husband, we would not like each other.”

  “I’m not sure that follows from reason.”

  “You’re being very difficult for a man who’s just been given a scone.”

  “It’s very mealy,” Solit complained, picking the blackberries out of the delight. Heia had insisted on sharing her morning food with the guests. “I don’t understand why everyone wants to put perfectly good food into bread.”

  “Flour,” Barhu said. “De-germed flour keeps for a very long time.”

  “Oh, how’s that?” Solit said, teasing her, although she did not realize it until she had already begun to explain: “The Butterveldt grows the grain, the mills make the grain into flour, barrels of flour provide compact long-lasting calories, so ships can travel farther without resupply, so the warships have a longer reach and the traders arrive more quickly than their rivals, and that quickens the blood of the whole empire, and . . . oh Himu”—a burst of joy inside her—“oh, look at that. . . .”

  They had crossed the last ridge on the steep approach to Aratene. The village tumbled out below, homes and gardens clustered in small circles, linked rings of life in the cup of land around the river Rubiyya. The settlers built with ash concrete and proper volcanic tufa, not the worthless limestone that sometimes tried to pass in foreign markets. The roads were laid out to Taranoki plan, winding paths that climbed ridges and chased streams, wherever the terrain led them. The gardens spilled into the space between. Barhu thought of the long trip up to Lea Pearldiver’s to buy pumice. She’d always loved to climb straight up the slope, cut the distance by leaving the road. . . .

  Fear sprang up to cage her, and she tucked her elbows to her sides as if wrapped in wire. What if no one recognized her as Taranoki? What if merely fearing she didn’t belong proved she didn’t? Wouldn’t a real Taranoki know without a doubt that she belonged? How could she claim to be Taranoki again if she was afraid the whole time? They would give her some test and she would fail—