The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  She was still making notes when Heingyl Ri blindsided her from behind a shelf of Oriati rares. “How comes the bazaar, Your Excellence?”

  “Your Gracious Excellence!” Barhu hastily conjoined the honorifics for a governor and a duchess. “I hope Aratene’s hospitality brings you comfort.”

  “Very much so. Although”—her eyes flashed with irritation—“I did have to explain to my armsmen, more than once, that no one would be offering their daughters.”

  “I’m afraid the notion of sexual hospitality is based on a misunderstanding of our culture. If you can imagine such a thing. Not so much a Taranoki tradition as a tradition of foreigners writing about Taranoke.”

  “A cultural misconception sustained by lurid rumor? In our great republic?” Heia covered her heart. “Perish the thought.”

  “But in other respects, all was satisfactory?”

  “More than delightful.” Heia beckoned, and a handmaiden appeared with a platter of cured venison and jars of brined olives. “Gifts, for your personal comfort. And”—her expression clouded—“the comfort of your parents.”

  “Thank you,” Barhu said, trying not to frown in sympathy: the omen of the stag was clearly still gnawing at Heia. “You won’t stay for the negotiations?”

  “It is, alas, too dangerous. I’ve sent away too many of my armsmen.”

  Barhu took her hand and held it. “Whatever happens here, I promise that I’ll keep Aurdwynn’s welfare first in my mind.”

  “What is going to happen here, Baru?” She went over to Aurdwynni Iolynic; the handmaiden disappeared herself expertly. “I know you and Yawa are plotting something. I see how much strain she’s under. Have you given her enough room to satisfy her own master? What will she say, when he asks her how all this has benefited the Republic?”

  “Oh, I’m going to make a bargain in Falcrest’s interest. That’s the beauty of economics, Your Excellence. It’s possible for everyone to get what they want at a price they consider fair. And I, personally, am willing to pay a considerable price.”

  The Stag Duchess waited with narrow eyes. “So tell me. Tell me what price you’ll pay, and what you’ll get for it.”

  Barhu crossed her arms. They stared at each other across the platter of preserved meats. “Is she really gone?” Barhu asked, meaning the handmaiden.

  “Of course she’s gone. If you won’t share your plans with me, how will you ever share my . . . confidence?”

  Barhu laughed. “All right. All right. You already know the general scheme. I’ll open a trade concern, for traffic from the Wintercrests to the Black Tea Ocean and beyond. At first most of the profit will go to Falcrest, and the Falcresti will hurry to invest in it. I will control more and more of their wealth, and more and more of their power will be spent to protect my interests. In time, this concern will give me all the power I need to . . . well. You’ll let me keep a few secrets, I hope?”

  “Don’t you dare play coy with me,” Heia hissed. The heel of her hand came down on the edge of the tray and all the meats jumped. “This smells like Sieroch. You’ve gathered everyone in one place. You’re promising great things, a bright future, if we only stick with you a little further. And now you’re going to make your move.”

  “Don’t you dare doubt me.” Barhu rose up to meet her. “I delivered you Aurdwynn. I delivered the dowry that you need for your marriage, and that marriage will deliver you peace. Trust me to deliver this, too.”

  “You and Yawa won’t deliver me to any marriage I don’t consent to! And what are you giving her in all this?”

  “A friend,” Barhu said, without quite meaning to. “She and I—”

  “What? You understand each other? You trust each other?” Now Heia looked frightened for her. “If you’re a threat to her plans, she’ll be rid of you faster than one of her experimental patients.”

  “I can’t tell you everything, Governor. The more I reveal, the less powerful I become. You wouldn’t want me powerless, would you?”

  “I won’t leave this room until I learn exactly what you intend here.”

  “Everyone needs money, Heia.”

  “Facile.” She was breathing hard. “Tell me more.”

  “The navy needs money to sail its ships. Parliament needs money to pay for reelection. Everything an empire does is terribly expensive; otherwise they wouldn’t be things only an empire could do. I intend to control that money. I intend to grow it like a crop. Then a time will come to reap. And when that time comes, Falcrest will hear the whole world baying at their borders, and smell the money rotting in the banks, and feel the fabric of their lives fraying under their thumbs. And that’s when they’ll look for the strength they love best.”

  Heia was watching her with a kind of astonishment, as if Barhu had just grown a rack of antlers. “What strength is that?”

  “Revolution.”

  “And you’ll be that revolution? A foreigner?”

  “Of course not. Just a woman in a mask.”

  “The same as any other.”

  “Not,” Barhu said, “if the mask is the Emperor’s.”

  “You want to be Empress?”

  “I wouldn’t know it if I were, would I? The Emperor has no idea who It is. That’s why we trust It to be fair.”

  “Then how—”

  “Please, my Lady.” Barhu gave her Tain Hu’s lopsided grin. “Let me have my secrets.”

  Heia blinked several times. Then she came around the desk, took Barhu by the chin, and kissed her, succinctly, on the lips.

  “Is that a betrothal?” Barhu murmured.

  “No. But it is a way to keep me in your mind.” She looked up at Barhu with quick fox eyes, but they were not mischievous: cornered eyes, skittish eyes, looking for a way out. “All this matter of the state marriage, the Necessary King . . . I can’t see how Bel will ever approve of it. I won’t go behind his back. But I . . . need time to think. Please.”

  She kissed Barhu again, on the cheek, and went. Left Barhu’s stomach fizzing like champagne. She sat down and went back to work.

  In the prow of Annalila Fortress, Bel Latheman works.

  He’s learned to deal with the fear of losing Heia by drowning himself in work that will make her happy. When she is gone on business, as she is tonight, Bel Latheman opens his account books and continues to sort out the cryptic mess left behind by the last Imperial Accountant of Aurdwynn, Baru Cormorant. She made strange leaps in her logic, never showed her work, obeyed bookkeeping protocol at its surface but often filled her ledgers with equations and trendlines whose purpose he can’t even begin to guess at: except that they are probably experimental metrics of Aurdwynn’s economy, research she conducted in order to effortlessly ruin his life.

  What can happen in a year, what good and what horror. This past winter: when he couldn’t see Heia more than a night a month, for fear of Coyote garrotes finding them in bed. When he had to wait in the bitter cold for his guard to search every room and closet of his tower before he could go in and open the latest list of dead.

  And Heia’s hot lips, fierce in the snow, the first kiss hers because he was so damn timid: the letter she’d left him, on the night before she vanished for two weeks, I will lose my father before I lose you, Bel.

  The hasty, happy marriage in the hot-rock sauna in Northarbor. They’d embraced carefully, he and Heia, in towels: her armsmen were there, and one of them even conducted the marriage, big-chested and boomingly cheerful in the steam. He’d been jealous of that man, before, and the jealousy had made him do isometrics so he could be as huge and fierce. She’d touched his chest and said, Bel, you’ve grown! After the marriage he was never again jealous of that one man; and he saw how Heia had, gently, made him close that wound. Though she warned him against her armsmen: “They’ve known me since I was a girl, Bel, but men who love girls often murder the women they become.”

  The hardest night of his life was when her father died. Harder than the nights after Baru’s performances, when he wanted to scream
of helpless rage. Women like Baru, he’d written in his last letter home before everything got very confusing, were the reason why Falcrest needed mannism so badly. Men might make money and show their faces in Parliament, but women had a coldly natural disposition toward schemes and plots, and given a station and an opportunity, they would wrap men in their webs.

  Anyway—he breaks his quill and tries another—when Heia’s father had died at Sieroch, when the whole city had convulsed with cheers at his death, Heia sat in their little hideaway garret and stared emptily. “I killed him,” she’d said, when he asked for the twentieth time what he could do. “I killed him so I could be free.”

  He’d told her that was nonsense. She’d snapped at him with a terrifying and aristocratic authority which he’d never heard before: “Don’t presume to know my methods, Bel!”

  He is distracted: he’s read a page of Baru’s notes without understanding a damn thing. He goes back and begins, again, methodically, to scan through the page, to imagine the cape slithering off Ri’s naked body on that night she came alone to his tower, her throaty Am I still forbidden, even here? The obscene and deliciously private things she’d known how to do, which he for months feared as much as he enjoyed: oh, how he wishes this thrill will be forever, that he will never ever quite grasp or understand her, but always find himself walking uphill toward her. He thought once that he would never quite fully respect her, if only for her race. And he was so wrong.

  There comes a knock.

  “Imperial Accountant!” Bel shouts, because so many people have come looking for Heia, trying to cut deals great and small for a piece of the new Aurdwynn. She is here to buy fertilizer; it feels like everyone else is here to buy her. Most recently that strange bony Stakhi woman at the ball, who wanted a ship home, and also, obviously, wanted to tell Bel something: but did not.

  “Sir,” the man at the door says, one of Heia’s Stakhieczi bodyguards, “I’m taking this shift over from Alemyainuthe, and he’s going down to the town.”

  Bel frowns at him. He still can’t keep all the Aurdwynni names straight: three languages colliding makes confusion he can’t follow. “Weren’t you traveling with Heia?”

  “Yes, sir, but she sent me back here, away from her.”

  “Did you upset her?”

  “No, sir,” the man says, more irritably than Bel thinks he should tolerate, “there was just an incident with a stag and a catamount, and she felt I reacted poorly. Our provincial superstitions, sir.”

  “I see,” Bel says, bemused.

  “There’s a lady visitor for you, sir,” he says, with the very faintest disapproval. He is fiercely Heia’s; he may have even watched her birth. “She has papers from the mayor’s office in Cautery Plat. She says she’s here to check their import-export tables against yours.”

  Bel feels a thrill of pride. It’s for him! Official business! “Send her in!”

  “She’s not married, sir,” the doorman says. He is as fiercely Stakhieczi as he is fiercely Ri’s. “Just so you know. And I don’t like the look of her, somehow. Maybe I’ve seen her before.” The implication being that anywhere he saw her would not be a place a proper woman should be seen.

  “I expect she will be perfectly professional,” Bel snaps. “Would you like to chaperone?”

  “No, sir. I’ll be outside, sir, in the atrium.”

  The woman slips in. Bel makes an immediate note to have a talk with his doorman—not a reprimand, but rather an apology of his own, because he understands why the doorman warned him. Whoever she is, she’s perfect. Not perfectly a match for Bel’s taste, but perfectly in accord with the classical Falcresti ideal, from her brushstroke cheekbones to her narrow coat and gracefully simple stride. Writers of rag novels overheat into metaphor to create women like this: the “sparrow-like gait” of Tinadette Bane, the “essential and irreducible” form of Goodbake’s Diligena Sum, the “very provocation of unapproachable virtue and cold disregard, which invites in the male heart the need to approach and be regarded,” from something Bel doesn’t remember.

  “Asshole,” the woman mutters, in very masculine fashion. Clearly the doorman bothered her. Then she shakes herself and, with a guilty flash of her teeth, remembers her manners. “Your Excellence? My name’s Sutra Cane, from the Mayor’s office.”

  Bel’s been trying to be more masculine himself, so he very ably avoids stammering or mumbling. Instead he kicks a chair toward her. It’s too much—the chair will topple—but she catches it.

  “Join me,” Bel says, “in the great work of progress, or, at least, preventing regress.”

  There’s a part of him, a small part he despises, which still whispers, she should be your wife. A woman like her, with cold modesty and a good Faculties education, who’ll come to the marriage with an unlimited childbearing license and a substantial dowry, just for tradition’s sake. And she’ll have beautiful smooth brown skin, not a sort of woodstain with pox-marks. And she’ll exercise isometrically instead of growing lazy curves and obscene tits, and you’ll—

  Bel doesn’t want to think about anyone’s tits. He’s been told intrusive sex thoughts drop off with age. He can’t wait.

  “What have we here?” he asks.

  Sutra Cane briskly lays out her own tables, and asks to compare her records of Aurdwynn’s intake and outlays with Bel’s: this leads Bel down a digression about Baru’s note-taking style, which makes Sutra lean forward in interest. Bel immediately deluges her with figures.

  “Ah,” she says, following without struggle. “What a relief. We seem to be lined up! If there was a difference then the Imperial Trade Factor’s office would have ratcatchers out here looking for corruption—”

  “Are you a ratcatcher?” Bel asks.

  She goes pale. “Me? No! Oh, not you, too.”

  Bel can’t help asking after that. “Having trouble in the office?”

  “Yes,” she says, tensely, “people think I’m too good at my job, and therefore that I’m a plant.”

  “Ah. Women do get that, I understand. The impostor complex: a belief that women aren’t showing their true selves among men.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Does it bother you very much?”

  She looks at his wall, in stiff profile. “I’m not an anti-mannist. I just want to do my work and be assessed fairly.”

  “That’s all mannism wants,” Bel assures her, “a fair shot for both sexes, and fair value on the different strengths of each.”

  A spark of interest in her eyes. Why do people call it a spark? Because, Bel thinks, guiltily, they want it to catch. “Do you find it difficult?” she asks. “Being a man in a woman’s job?”

  “People check my math a lot,” he jokes.

  “That must be hard. . . .”

  He looks at her with the face that means: do you realize you’re here to do exactly that?

  She covers her mouth. “Oh, I didn’t mean to imply—I just thought, with the war and all, it’d be wise to come square our numbers! Before communications become difficult!”

  “No, of course—”

  “You don’t think it’s because you’re—”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  “Thank you.” She laughs. “You’re young and handsome, and you look like you should be out making bargains on horseback; I’m sure you’re sick to death of people doubting you can do figures. . . .”

  She must see something in his eyes, because she swallows and shuts up. “All seems to be in order,” Bel says, as gently as he can. “If there’s nothing else?”

  She hesitates. A huge weight settles on the top of Bel’s spinal column and begins to press. He felt this weight at the beginning of that last dinner with Baru: no matter which way it topples, it’s going to break something.

  “Is it true you were an arranged marriage?” she whispers. “You and the Governor?”

  Arranged marriage is a taboo, since it reeks of royalty. “Love match,” Bel says, briskly.

  “But the word as we heard
it was—to unite the Ducal lines with the Provincial government—”

  “If you’re asking if I was whored out by Parliament,” Bel snaps, “then no.”

  Sutra’s chest swells (his thought, Bel knows, is impelled by the damn fetishism surrounding Cold Indignant Passion, but that does not prevent him noticing) with outrage. “Please don’t be obscene!”

  “You brought up arranged marriages.”

  “Purely out of concern for your safety!”

  “I assure you I don’t need any domestic gallantry,” Bel snaps, “and that’s quite enough familiar talk from you—”

  This wounds her pride and she strikes back: “The way your wife cuckolds you, I should think you need a gallant lady or two!”

  The weight of anxiety topples off Bel’s spine and plunges, like a spear, down through his throat, the bottom of his stomach, the tangle of his intestines, directly into whatever gland in his ballsack produces the masculine fear. He feels one of those hot dizzy washes that always accompany the most intense jealousy.

  “Rumormongering,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I shall have to speak to your control secretary about this behavior.”

  She breathes hard, her eyes closed. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just hate it when women take advantage of men for . . . you know. Politics.”

  Bel doesn’t ask her to go on. But he doesn’t stop her.

  “The rumor is the Stakhieczi king is looking for a wife,” Sutra says, softly. “And your wife, Governor Aurdwynn . . . she was seen dancing with a Souswardi woman at the Governor’s Ball. And then departing this fortress with her, and a Stakhieczi man and woman, too. Did she stop to say hello before she left?”

  She had. She’d come up and kissed him and asked after his work. She hadn’t mentioned why she was going to Aratene in such a hurry. Or with whom she traveled. Or when she’d be back.

  She certainly hadn’t mentioned traveling with that bony Stakhieczi woman. Or meeting with a Souswardi . . . and there is only one Souswardi who Bel knows to meddle in the affairs of Aurdwynn, and in his life. . . .