The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Cosgrad said something short and sharp in Aphalone.

  Farrier spoke in reply. He pointed at Tau-indi and his voice rose in question and then fell in threat. In his right hand was a notebook, half-open.

  Cosgrad, snarling, pushed past Farrier and stalked away.

  Farrier looked at Tau-indi and smiled wearily. “Sorry,” he said. “Remember. That man is insane, and an enemy to every kind of peace, except the stupor of the well-kept herd.”

  “Cosgrad’s my friend,” Tau-indi said.

  “Cosgrad is no one’s friend. He doesn’t see people. He doesn’t believe in civilization, or charity, or progress by education and enlightenment. He only believes in meat. If he gets his way, every marriage in the Mbo would be decided by an equation.” Farrier knelt, so that he was a little shorter than Tau. “Be wary of him. He is the worst of us. The worst thing Falcrest ever made.”

  Tau-indi answered the masked man as a prince should answer a foe. “He helped us make this peace. He is bound to us and us to him.”

  The mask tilted, and Tau-indi recognized the expression in the eyes behind it. Avarice. Curiosity, yes, but also deep, deep avarice. “Cosgrad Torrinde came to live among you,” the mask said, “so he could dig out your ancient sins, and find in them the key to his own immortality. Do you know what he saw when that sorcerer came burning to your door? When she walked toward him afire, without pain? He saw a power he must possess.”

  “And what did you come here to do?” Tau said, bitterly. “To help your people burn cities?”

  Farrier’s eyes were as dark as secrets. “We ended the war here, in one blow, when it could have dragged on for decades. You’ve seen how we can hurt you, Tau. Now I have to show you how we can help. I have to convince you that, together, there’s hope. It’s the only way. Or in a century there will be nothing living around this Ashen Sea worthy of the name human.”

  “What would a man from a young place like Falcrest think to teach us about what will happen in a century?”

  His eyes lit with delight. This was a question he loved. “How could the whole Oriati Mbo spend a thousand years in peace and contentment, surrounded by riches, and achieve so little? You have no eugenics. You have no hygiene. You have not eradicated disease or poverty. You are trapped. You have gone up the wrong road and you cannot turn around. All I offer is a chance to be better.” Farrier slammed a palm on the deck and the crack of noise echoed in the little guest cabin. The silks ruffled. “Everyone dies, little Prince. Everyone. But if we die to make tomorrow better, it’s worth it! That’s what I say to the ruins of Kutulbha. That’s what I say to Abdu’s dead mother. That’s what I tell myself, when my guilt runs up my throat and fills my nose.”

  “Cosgrad says that you’re a liar. You want the whole world to run on lies. Why would I want your schools? Your progress?”

  “Because in a school you can change your own thoughts according to what you learn. Cosgrad would fix you in your place before you are even born. Like a farmer separating the beef cows from the milk.” Farrier stood, and sighed, and smiled again. “This war was just a greeting. A way to open ourselves to each other. The things that happen after a war, the repositionings and reconstructions, are so often ignored by history. But they are more important.

  “Now. Would you like to come up to the high deck with me? I can introduce you to my colleagues.”

  Later that night, under the silk pavilions of the palace-ship’s air deck, Tau-indi saw Cairdine Farrier in his fine jacket and sleek trousers, demonstrating tricks of dance to admirers. Kindalana was his partner, painted and chained, and she whispered things into his ear, or put her arm around him with casual confidence between sets.

  Farrier looked off his keel, uncertain how to react. When Kindalana drew away to make a pass by a group of Prince’s attendants from Segu, shy young men who’d been eyeing her invitingly, Farrier excused himself and went to find a drink.

  “What are you doing?” Tau-indi muttered.

  “Unsettling him,” Kindalana murmured. “The whole time he lived with me, he was scrupulously modest. This is a chance to touch him, to make him look a little foolish, to diminish him and make him want my approval as repair.” She leaned up on the rail, arms outflung, and eyed Farrier with amusement. “Look at him. He’s so confused.”

  Farrier spent a while mixing his drink and reading the labels off a Falcrest bottle. His motions were swift and confident, and he made jokes to passers-by. He was acting nonchalant, and acting hard. When he was alone he scratched at his beard.

  “Spent his whole youth traveling the world, plundering everywhere he went,” Kindalana murmured, “and yet he’s still a Falcrest man. Someone taught him that the male of the species is always brightly plumed and forthright, and the female’s dowdy, studious, and cold. He has no idea what to do with me.”

  “I . . .” Tau-indi grappled with their feelings. “I’m not sure this is right. I mean, you’re both very powerful people, but . . . on the day we signed a treaty of surrender, it seems unfavorable. And he’s older than you . . . three years or more, depending on whether he gave us his true age. . . .”

  Kindalana squeezed their arm. “Have you read their laws on women? The etiquettes of sanitary courtship?”

  “No,” Tau admitted. “Are they very strange?”

  “Among other errors, they insist that women are predisposed to use sexual unavailability as a technique of manipulation. He doesn’t understand why I make my own pursuit. He can’t read me.”

  “But you are manipulating him, aren’t you? You’re trying to lure him into some kind of mistake.” Tau-indi felt prudishly hung up on Lonjaro mores, the kind of mores that had kept their mother and Padrigan off each other for years and years. “It just seems to me that if he’s expecting barbaric, lustful women, you’ll only be confirming his thoughts. . . .”

  She shrugged, untroubled. “So I confirm his thoughts. It doesn’t make them true.”

  “Does this actually work?” The idea of taking this friendly, warm, intimate thing and making it a tool . . .

  “I don’t really know. But I’m willing to try.” Now Farrier was headed back toward his admirers, carrying drinks. Kindalana gave Tau a dashing white grin. “Wish me luck, then!”

  “Luck,” Tau said, meaning that, although not sure what form they wanted the luck to take.

  Tau would not learn what had happened that night until much later. Not between Kindalana and Farrier (though it was nothing). And not what happened far away on Prince Hill, in the cool undercroft of the House of Abd, where someone lived who should have died.

  The sorcerer woman had been burnt everywhere, her fingers ruined, her lungs scorched. Her eyes like cooked yolk in a mask of scar. She was dying of infection even as she wept brown fluids from the blistered carnage of her skin. Abdumasi brought her water, but nothing for the pain. She gave no sign of feeling it. That was why Abdumasi wanted to keep her alive. The thought of being impervious to pain . . .

  She could not speak, or grip a coal to write. But she could focus on Abdu when he visited, and respond to his questions with blinks. She could even smile, though she had no lips.

  At first Abdu told himself that he came to see her to get away from the empty tooth-socket feeling of Prince Hill without Tau and Kindalana or his mother.

  But on that day, the day of the surrender, when his grief and his rage seemed to have infested him and made a home out of his soul, he came down to the sorcerer with water and honey wash and a question on his lips.

  “How do you bear it?” he said, in a frightened whisper. “How can you bear hurting so much?”

  She smiled at him and shrugged. Something crisp brushed against something wet.

  “Can we stop Falcrest? Next time they come?”

  She nodded, once.

  “How?”

  The sorcerer curled a finger up toward her own face, and, with her other hand, made the suggestion of a fist. Abdumasi understood:

  Us. My people. We will be ready.
>
  “You’re the only thing I ever saw them fear,” he whispered.

  She opened her hand to him. There was something on her skin, a dark unfading glow, that shone over the light of his own candle like soap on water.

  She beckoned him closer.

  When Kindalana returned to Prince Hill from her time in Segu Mbo and her state visit to Falcrest, she and Abdumasi were promptly married. It had been more than a year and a half since she departed. He did not tell her about the woman who had lived for a while in his undercroft. She did not tell him about the girl who had lived for a while in her.

  31

  A Story About Ash

  And what did Aminata do then?” Tau asked, leaning forward eagerly. “When the Brain asked her if you were telling the truth?”

  “What do you expect?” Barhu hauled the rowboat over evening chop. “I had no idea she was listening. I tried to tell her that I’d never hurt her. She told me that she knew I was lying, because I’d killed Tain Hu, and I must’ve cared about Tain Hu more than I cared about her.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Tau assured her. “You’ll be friends again.”

  “There’s no possible way you can know that.”

  “She wants to fight the whole world at your side, Baru. And she knows you need her. Once she’s realized Falcrest doesn’t need her, where else will she belong?”

  The Prince was, as ever, landing spears in tender places. Barhu had found Tau and Osa waiting for her on the weather deck when she came back to her boat. The fallen Prince had looked her in the eye.

  And they’d smiled.

  Of all the things she thought she’d never have again, from Tain Hu’s whispered kuye lam to the sound of Muire Lo laying out her morning coffee, Tau-indi’s trust was not the most unlikely. But it was out there. It was far out there.

  “Did they drug you?” Barhu had demanded.

  “I did that myself. A treatment for my despair. The Womb has released me to go ashore.” Tau curtsied so their cassock petaled on the deck. “It has come to my attention that the first summit between the rulers of Falcrest and the sorcerers of the ancient Cancrioth has no representative from Oriati Mbo. As I am no longer a participant in trim, and thus no longer suited to speak for my people in negotiations, a substitute must be found.”

  “A substitute what?”

  “A substitute me, of course. An ambassador of the interests of Oriati Mbo.”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “I certainly do mean you! When the Womb severed me from trim, the loose connections affixed themselves to your soul. You have taken my place in the web of human destiny, Baru. You must heal the old wound between Abdumasi Abd, Kindalana, and myself: and so save the Oriati Mbo and the world from war.”

  Tau’s opinion of her had changed so thoroughly, without any action at all on her part, that she found it almost offensive. How dizzying, how disorienting, that Tau would have such total and autonomous power over themself. But that was the lesson that the laman had always tried to teach her, wasn’t it? Other people were real. They did not need one Barhu Cormorant to push them to their ends.

  She had asked: “Why would you possibly trust me? After the way things ended on Kyprananoke?”

  “I am certain you didn’t have anything to do with the way things ended on Kyprananoke. I am certain you are fighting even now to stop it from happening ever again. Am I wrong?”

  “You’re right,” she had admitted, and her throat had swelled up, and left her unable to speak. Tau, who had called her a wound, a hole in the heart, did not think she had consumed Kyprananoke. Did not assume she’d given the order.

  It was trust and faith beyond anything she deserved. It was grace.

  Now, on the choppy bay, Osa shifted in the bow of the boat. “Someone’s coming out to meet us.”

  “Probably my parents,” Barhu grumbled. “Come to scream at me for going out to Eternal alone.”

  “Your parents are here?” Tau looked insufferably smug. “I suppose you think that’s a perfectly reasonable coincidence, and not evidence of a powerful human force drawing you back together, to reconcile your hurts.”

  Barhu almost made the evidential counterargument—Cauteria was a perfect place to hide if you were fleeing Taranoke, and her parents had more cause than most to flee, so it was logical they’d be waiting for her here, and not at all the result of trim.

  But she liked Tau’s smug smile.

  Her parents clearly wanted to call her a fool for going out to Eternal alone, and dress her in guilt for the worry she’d caused them; but thankfully they assumed it would be improper to do so in front of the Federal Prince. They led Barhu’s boat in, through the mess of drifting flotsam from the shattered barges, to a boathouse hastily cleared of its stores. The Eye waited there, guarded by the woman with scarified cheeks, both holding bright Falcrest-made lanterns with fascination and discomfort.

  “Your Highness! Thank Alu you’re all right.” The Eye kissed them on the cheek. Tau did not show the slightest discomfort at his eyestalk brushing the side of their head. “I’m so glad you’re ashore. I’ve not wanted to go see Abdumasi without you.”

  “Abdumasi’s here?” Tau seized the Eye’s hands, and shot one look of heartbreaking gratitude at Barhu. “We’ll go at once!”

  “He’s waiting at the town meetinghouse, with Kimbune. I’ve been negotiating with this judge woman, Yawa. She’s conceded to a meeting.”

  “Yawa, hm?” Tau looked back at Barhu with feline smugness. They might have even shimmied their hips at her, like they were dancing on her head. “Side by side with Baru. The two rivals now in alliance. What a twist of fate.”

  Marines insisted on prodding Tau and Osa with clinical thermometers to check for fever. Osa’s face had been badly burnt, but there was no sign of infection. “All clear,” the marine sergeant said, with some disappointment.

  The Eye led the little procession across the green to the town meeting hall. “Tau,” Barhu muttered, “I’ve got to talk to you about something, when you’ve a moment—”

  “Is it the conversation we had about why Abdumasi hates Farrier? My realization that I blamed Kindalana? Ah, I see it is. Don’t look so affronted, Baru.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Obviously you are interested in Farrier’s past. I hinted that I knew him when he was young. It makes sense you’d want to pursue it—”

  “Tau? Your Federal Highness?”

  But Tau stared at the doorway into the meeting hall. Abdumasi Abd stood in the light, the two great wooden doors held open by his arms. “Tau? Is it really you?”

  “Hi, Abdu.” Tau waved, fingers curled.

  Abdumasi fell to his knees and began to sob. “Tau! Tau, manata, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry—”

  “It’s all right.” Tau went fearlessly to their friend. “Abdu, it’s okay. I’m here now. It’s going to be okay.”

  The two huge doors nearly swung shut on Abd. Kimbune, darting past the two embracing friends, caught them and held them back.

  Barhu almost cried out in joy. She’d done it. She’d made a terrible mess of it first. But she had at last brought two people together across the wound Falcrest had torn between them. She’d done a good thing. She did not expect reward. That would be poor trim. But she certainly would not refuse it.

  “Look at him,” the Eye breathed. “Abdumasi Abd. He’s all right.”

  “Are you asking about him,” Barhu murmured, “or the thing in his back?”

  “There is no difference anymore. All of him is important to us. If we can only bring him home, if Falcrest hasn’t learned too much from him, there may be a chance . . .”

  “There is no chance you can return to secrecy,” Barhu told him. “None at all. The Brain’s right about that; the world will learn you exist. And Abd doesn’t want to go home with you.”

  The Eye still wore his work shirt and skirt, gardener’s clothes. As if he were still at his tub of growing things, trying to tend them through
the drought. He did not seem to see any difference between that work and this one. Barhu admired him for it, in a way. He was not a politican or a manipulator. Just an old soul trying to do some good.

  “I was afraid of that,” he said, softly. “That he’d want to leave us.”

  “He has to go home to Kindalana. He and Tau. The three of them have to be together again. It’s important.”

  “For Tau? Or for your schemes?”

  “Both,” Barhu admitted. “But for your future, too. The Cancrioth will never be a secret again. If you want to survive your discovery, if you want the Mbo to find a place for you, Tau and Abdumasi will help make it.”

  “Or he could be dragged before your Parliament and forced to name us as an enemy of your Empire. How can I let him go, knowing he could do that?”

  “He won’t be used to start a war. Not if he’s good for business.”

  “He carries Undionash in his spine. So few of us remain who bear that Line. We gave it to him as a symbol of our trust, of how deeply we valued him. I never thought he would lead us to war.” Sadness touched that deep musical voice. “If he leaves us, we could lose all those souls. . . .”

  “What if you could keep Undionash, and let Abdumasi go?”

  He looked at her, one eye wary, one bent off toward infinity. Always minding two things, the Eye.

  “How?” he asked.

  Where the fuck have you been?” Yawa snarled. “I saw Tau and the Eye with you, I saw you all go to Abd. Were you planning to tell me what you were up to?”

  “I’m sorry, Yawa. I had to bring Tau and Abd back together. Then I got caught up speaking to the Eye—”

  Yawa chopped her hand down like an axe. “Stop.” She’d changed into a linen peasant’s dress for the night; her guest house smelled of the olive oil taper she’d lit. “What happened on Eternal? What did you give the Brain to get Tau and Osa free?”

  “I didn’t give her anything. She tried to give me the Kettling. All I’d have to do is accept a brain-eating tumor. She thought it would keep me loyal, so I didn’t turn the Kettling over to Falcrest for some fat reward.”