The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Yawa’s cold blue eyes assessed her. “Is that the bargain she offered you back on Kyprananoke?”

  “Yes.”

  “The one you might’ve gone through with, if I hadn’t sent Iraji to flush you out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Despite the certainty that the Kettling would spread beyond Falcrest?”

  Barhu nodded. “I was . . . single-minded.”

  Yawa slapped her. The seam of Yawa’s glove caught at the old glass cut in Barhu’s cheek and tore. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare keep something like this from me ever again. You’re not going to die young. You’re not going to trade your whole life for some appalling plague. You’re going to live, understand? You’re going to carry on my work when I’m gone. Fuck!” She spat on the floor. “Who the fuck else am I going to trust, you stupid cunt? Heingyl Ri? She’ll never trust me after what happened today.”

  “And Tain Hu wouldn’t want me to do it,” Barhu said, quietly.

  “Oh, listen to the savant, Tain Hu wouldn’t want her to give herself cancer! She’s so penetrating, she’s so bright!”

  Barhu began to laugh helplessly. Yawa sniffed and shook her head. If she smiled, it was so subtle that Barhu could only see it by suspicion.

  “Wait a minute.” Barhu frowned. “What happened today?”

  Yawa fell back heavily into her chair. “A fast felucca came in with the news. Bel Latheman was murdered in his office in Annalila Fortress.”

  “Oh, shit,” Barhu gasped. “Who did it? How?”

  “One of old Heingyl’s guards stabbed him. It wasn’t you?”

  “No! I’m not that stupid!”

  “You had Nayauru and her lovers killed in their camp. I thought you might’ve decided to resort to the same . . . directness.”

  “No, damn it, she’ll never marry me if she thinks I killed her husband!”

  “She’ll never marry the Necessary King, either.” Yawa covered her eyes with her hands. “We’re fucked. We sent Svir off to make a marriage arrangement that’s fucked. Aurdwynn’s fucked. It’s all fucked.”

  She collapsed into her hammock. Barhu groaned and beat her fist against her forehead. “Who did it?”

  Yawa gave her the note.

  Imperial Acct Aurdwynn dead

  Knifed by Governor Aurdwynn’s armsman, also dead by suicide

  Staff report loud argument overheard, two males, possibly also a woman? Empty bottle of drug, m/b a nootrope, found in Acct’s desk. Dosage extreme if taken in one night.

  M/b linked to recent attempted killing of Governor Aurdwynn?

  News is out in Annalila, will reach Cautery Plat tomorrow

  Maroyad

  Bel Latheman had spent so many meals pretending to love her. Barhu was not sure if she ought to mourn him. He was one of those clean-haired, well-behaved cogs who did not do the Masquerade’s evilest work but who made that work possible.

  But he had also been a very good counterfeit, when she had needed one terribly.

  Yawa was now performing angry penknife surgery on a whittled figurine. “She should’ve had all her father’s men sacked. Sentimentality. Always her weakness. She thinks they’ll be loyal to her because they knew her when she was a girl? Men kill their daughters every day.”

  “Oh, dear Wydd. I know exactly who did it.” It must be the man that Heingyl Ri had sent back to Annalila. The one who’d reacted so strongly to the omen of the catamount and the stag. “It really was an accident. What an incredible fuckup. What terrible luck.”

  “Maybe she’ll accept it wasn’t our fault. She’s Aurdwynni. She knows about death. She killed her own father, for Wydd’s sake. I killed your secretary, and look at us now, we’re perfectly civil. . . .”

  She trailed off. “What is it?” Barhu asked, gently.

  “I need it now.”

  “Need what?”

  “You said you were going out to Eternal to find a weapon to use against Farrier. Farrier’s secret, Hesychast’s secret, someone’s fucking secret! I need to know you have it, so I won’t have to lobotomize you. I don’t need to know what it is, just please, tell me you have it.”

  “Not yet,” Barhu admitted. She didn’t have a rutterbook to show Yawa, either; she’d wanted that as proof her trade concern could work. “But it’s closer. I’ll go speak to Tau. We may need to reach Kindalana before I can be certain it’s usable.”

  “Kindalana? The Amity Prince? She’s in Falcrest! I can’t wait that long! I’m not making any progress getting the Eye to yield his fucking cancer, our whole plan for Aurdwynn is falling apart—I can’t go to Hesychast empty-handed!”

  “I know. Please trust me.” Barhu looked her in the eye and willed her to remember their shouted conversation on the wharf. “I trust you to do what they expect of you. You must trust me to do my part. All I need is to return to Farrier with what I’ve gained here.”

  “How can you ask me to trust you?” Her hands were shaking too hard to keep the knife steady. “You tell me you have a plan. You almost make it make sense. But all I see is you delivering Farrier exactly what he wanted. Abdumasi in Falcrest, to reveal the Cancrioth and force Oriati civil war. Yet you tell me trust me, trust me, I have it all in hand. . . .”

  “Yes.” Barhu nodded: exactly so. “I need to be able to deliver Farrier exactly what he wants. I need to be close to him at the right moment. I trust you to help me do that.”

  “For shit’s sake! Tell me what you mean!”

  She couldn’t. If she told Yawa too much Hesychast would know. “The only way to conceal a conspiracy from minds like theirs,” she said, “is to be sure none of us, individually, know the entire plan. I trust you to do what is required of you. Trust me to do what is required of me. I have Farrier’s secret in my grasp. It’s so close. All I ask is that you put me in position to use it.”

  “I can’t! I can’t fail him! If Hesychast kills my brother, I’ll—I won’t be able—”

  “I know,” Barhu said, gently. “You can’t let that happen. You’ll have to lobotomize me.”

  “Oh, damn you!”

  She began to sob. Barhu tried to go to her. She pointed emphatically to the door.

  “Seeing you makes me wish I’d killed him,” she snarled. “Seeing you makes me wish I were as cold as you.”

  She went back to Tau.

  “Your Highness?” she called, past the scar-cheeked Cancrioth woman who guarded the guesthouse.

  “Come in. I’ve been expecting you.”

  Inside, a hooded lantern spilled orange light across a lovely pine floor. Tau was giving Osa a massage. The big Jackal woman lay facedown, grumbling, with a pillow under her breasts and roped fists stretched above her head.

  “As the beginning of an apology for my conduct,” Tau explained. They dug into her back with their thumbs. Osa muttered pleasantly. “Baru, before you say anything, I want to thank you for bringing me safely to Abdu. If you hadn’t saved me from Cheetah, I never would have found him.”

  “I thought you’d never forgive me.”

  Tau-indi looked up with a wonder so tender and so completely undeserved that Barhu almost grimaced and looked away. She would have found it easier (experience in Aurdwynn proved it) to stare at hairy scrota than this pure nakedness of the heart.

  “Forgive you? I’ve said nothing about forgiveness.” Their hands at work in Osa’s muscle, finding the knots of fear and tension, pressing them flat. “I’ve lost almost all the meaning in my life, Baru. My dearest friends will shut me out of their houses, and my name will pass forever from their lips.”

  There was nothing to say that could begin to repair it.

  “But you have allowed me to begin a task whose importance I could never have even acknowledged. A task more vital than anything I could have done as the Federal Prince. The Cancrioth cannot be unrevealed. Some of the Mbo will want them destroyed. Some will want to follow them against Falcrest.

  “I do not know if there will be civil war. I know that religion causes civil wars mo
re than almost anything, and that the reappearance of one’s most ancient foe is far more than a doctrinal dispute. But I know for certain that if there is no one who can say look, I passed among the Cancrioth and I am still human, there will never be peace. It horrifies me to imagine what the Mbo could become if they decide that they are the only true humans in the world.”

  “You still believe Abdu’s human,” she said, wonderingly.

  “We are both beyond trim, he and I. But we’ve found each other anyway. And look, look at this”—they squeezed Osa’s shoulders; she groaned in delight—“I can still do good. With my hands, with my voice. I led the Eye to retake Eternal. And all the bonds of trim I left behind move you now. I knew it when Aminata told me you’d gone to confront Ormsment. I knew it when Aminata told me of all the strange places she’d found your name appearing to her, and my name, and Kindalana’s. And most of all, I knew it when Aminata willingly sacrificed her own life to protect you. You and Aminata are bound, too, Baru. Powerfully so.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Barhu said, and her voice cracked with feeling, because it was such a marvel to have Tau smile at her again, and ten times that marvel to know that Tau obeyed a logic that Barhu would never begin to comprehend.

  Would that there were tens of millions of Tau-indi Bosokas. Would that the whole world had their strength.

  “Yes, well, you don’t understand me because I’m older and better than you,” Tau said, without any malice. “Did you come here to ask your question again?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s about Kindalana, isn’t it.”

  “Yes,” she said, laughing a little. “It’s about Kindalana. I remember that you said, ‘Cairdine fucking Farrier of all people, no wonder Abdu went bad, why didn’t she know?’ And I thought you might know a secret about Farrier, something which could help me fight him. . . .”

  “Of course I do,” Tau said, smiling.

  “Will you tell me?”

  “No. Never.”

  Barhu wanted to scream in frustration. “Why?”

  “Because I swore an oath to protect that secret. Because I would betray everything I care for if I let you treat that secret as an instrument, rather than as . . .”

  Their voice trailed off. They looked sheepish.

  “A person. I knew it. The secret’s a person!”

  “I would like to tell you a story,” Tau said, without reacting at all to her declaration. They lifted their hands for a moment, so Osa could adjust her weight, and then went back to massaging her, pressing brown spots into her black skin. “Would you sit here with me and listen as I tell it? It might take all the rest of the night.”

  “I would love that,” Barhu admitted. “But I have work. . . . I should run the Great Game out, see if all my ideas for this trade concern will work. . . .”

  “The Great Game is nonsense. Cosgrad showed it to me once. It’s a toy boat pretending to be a clipper; it has no conception of the complexity of the real Mbo, or of the influence of the smallest choice upon the whole. Will you stay or won’t you?”

  “Yes,” Barhu said. “I will.”

  “Good. I am going to tell this story in the third person, calling myself Tau-indi, so that you understand the Tau I speak of is a person I can no longer be. That Tau was bound by trim. I am not. Do you understand?”

  Barhu nodded, and wanted, again, to say she was sorry. Did not.

  “This Tau will seem naïve to you. I ask that you remember how I was raised: on a hilltop, in a rich house, with books and trim to study. I barely knew the world. If I seem to confirm the worst Falcresti notions of Oriati royalty, I ask that you forgive my past.”

  “I promise not to judge.”

  “Do not promise that. Only judge mercifully.” Tau cleared their throat and began to work down Osa’s spine. “It begins like this: Tau-indi Bosoka came into this world alone. Now, you might protest, who is not born alone? Stop a moment and think, O listener! Do you have the answer?”

  “Twins?” Barhu suggested.

  Tau made a shushing motion. “Correct! Twins! Now, the House Bosoka had no tradition of twin births. There was no twin to accompany Tau-indi’s mother, Tahr, when she popped out of her lamother Taundi through the mine foreman’s slippery hands and fell into a wash bucket, nor a twin for grandlam Taundi, who came out of Toro Toro downside-up and burbling, so small they were wrapped up in a leaf.

  “But Tau-indi Bosoka was different. . . .”

  Baru, wake up!”

  Now a clock was shouting at her. Barhu must be in that dream about Iscend again, where they agreed to have sex but first Iscend’s clockwork had to be wound up and Barhu couldn’t figure out how.

  “Mmf,” she grunted, putting her face into the sack of beans she used as a pillow. “Unethical.”

  “Wake up, you little weasel!” Someone tried to turn her over. Barhu smelled Aurdwynn, some pore-deep spice memory of olive oil and cedar incense, and knew it was Yawa.

  “What?” Barhu groaned. “Did my parents really let you . . . what is it, what’s wrong?”

  “There’s cholera in Cautery Plat.”

  “What?”

  “Three men from a fishing crew started shitting rice water during the night. One’s dead. They wrung out seven gallons from his bedding. Dehydration shock killed him.”

  “No,” Barhu groaned. “It can’t be. The Brain was listening to me. Aminata told her I was telling the truth, she was going to listen. . . .”

  Yawa began to throw clothes at her. “I can’t figure how she did it. Eternal hasn’t launched any rockets, pickets haven’t seen any boats slip out. Perhaps untreated sewage on a current. Perhaps it’s all an accident.”

  Barhu twisted her earlobe to wake herself up. “The whale.”

  “What?”

  “If their whale can be trained to plant a mine, it could’ve brought a vivarium of cholera to the harbor. To the shellfish beds. The fishermen probably eat shellfish they catch, right? That was the vector.”

  “Shit!” Yawa picked at her chin. “Is it over? Are the negotiations done? She can’t think she’ll get repairs and safe passage after she’s set cholera on a town of forty thousand. . . .”

  “She might’ve hoped it wouldn’t catch until she was gone. We’d better play it quietly for now.” Barhu frowned blearily at her. Yawa had picked up the clothes she’d thrown at Barhu, and now she was smoothing wrinkles, checking buttons, plucking lint. A maid’s old habits. “I was listening to Tau last night. I think I got what I needed.”

  “Oh?” Yawa looked up sharply from the expensive red cravat she was smoothing. “Do you have . . . it?”

  “Not yet. Not quite. They’ll need to speak to Kindalana. Persuade her that the time is right to move, no matter how personally difficult it might be for her. Abdumasi will sell her the business side. Tau will have to persuade her of the ethics.”

  “I told you I can’t wait that long. If we’re due in Falcrest by 90 Summer then the Reckoning of Ways can’t be long after. I can’t wait.”

  “I know, Yawa. I know.” She yawned. “I need coffee.”

  She went to the toilet, washed, poured herself a cup from Solit’s cow, and came back hoping Yawa had uncoiled a little. She had not. She was pulling individual specks of lint off Barhu’s waistcoat.

  “Yawa,” she said, sitting on the edge of her hammock, watching the old judge clean her things, “have you thought about the things I said?”

  “All that nonsense about yomi? About doing what they expect, but not for the reasons they think?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have,” Yawa growled. “But you said I shouldn’t tell you, didn’t you? You said it wasn’t safe.”

  You too, huh,” Aminata said, trying, and failing, to keep the bitterness from her voice. “Everyone’s switching sides on me.”

  Iraji sat beside her on the stateroom bed. “I think the negotiations are going well. We had fresh water for the pump crew today. If we get lumber, Eternal might be able to sail by the
end of the month.”

  He was avoiding the question. The Eye had come back aboard with a grotesque proposal from Baru. They were going to cut a slice of cancer out of Abdumasi Abd and put it into Iraji’s spine. He would stay with the Cancrioth, carrying the cancer he’d been born to host. The purpose of his flesh accomplished.

  If it wasn’t so disgusting, it’d be almost Incrastic.

  “Apparitor’s gone,” Iraji said. He wouldn’t look at her, because he knew she didn’t like to be seen upset. “He’s left on business for the Throne. He’ll always be my lightning man. But I can’t go back, Aminata. I’ve been hiding from this all my life. It’s who I was born to be.”

  “You’re not born to be anyone, Iraji! You can choose. You can decide what you want to do with your life.”

  “Really? Incrasticism has a little to say about what we Oriati people are born to be, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Then be fair to me. I was trained as a spy, you know. To pass in strange new places. To learn secrets. Where am I ever going to get a better chance to do that?”

  “You could do that anywhere, Iraji.”

  “But I’m here. Why should I run?”

  “Because your race isn’t your destiny!” She seized two fistfuls of the bed to keep herself from leaping up in anger. “Just because you were born one of them doesn’t mean—doesn’t mean you should let them stuff cancer into you. It’s ridiculous. You can overcome your birth!”

  “It’s not my destiny. It’s my choice. A choice I’ve been afraid to make. Do you ever think—maybe they teach us that we can overcome our race just to make us think our race is something we have to overcome?”

  It had always been something she’d had to overcome, she wanted to say. But that was because Falcresti people made it so, wasn’t it?

  He laid a hand on her thigh, which made her flinch in irritation. He drew it back. “Aminata, what’s waiting for you out there? You’ll be court-martialed for insubordination. Shao Lune’s out there pouring poison in your admiral’s ear. . . .”