The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Don’t be sentimental, Mister Farrier,” she says, absently. “I have an idea how to strengthen our position. Would you like to hear it?”

  He nods eagerly.

  “Abdumasi Abd,” she says. “We can use him, Mister Farrier.”

  He smiles with convincing interest. She is close to his secret and it makes him leery. “How?”

  “He’s a very influential merchant. We announce our new trade concern, to ease fears of war. We have the Emperor Itself endorse our monopoly on the new trade. We have Abdumasi Abd present to show that the Oriati are fully in support of our venture—and the rest of the Throne will know that control over Abd means influence over his sponsors. By threat of their revelation to the world. This will demonstrate the strength of our position both politically, and, ah, covertly.”

  “Baru, that’s brilliant.”

  “Yes. A public announcement of the new trade, with Abd present, with Tau-indi Bosoka and as many other Oriati dignitaries as you can gather. It will signal to Parliament that we’ve forced concessions from the Mbo. It’ll show Renascent that your methods have full control of the Oriati situation.”

  “But how do we keep control of Abd?” Farrier muses. He has not a single qualm about using this man who he drove to ruin, of course. “How can we ensure he follows our playbill?”

  “His divorced wife. Make it clear that Kindalana’s in your power, Mister Farrier. Make her attend the announcement. She’ll add to your credibility. And Abd won’t dare disobey you so long as you have Kindalana in your influence. You do have leverage over her, I’m sure?”

  Now Farrier hesitates—now he feels the danger, brushing at his whiskers, laughing from the dark—but if he hesitates here he will reveal he is threatened.

  And Barhu is certain there’s a part of him that thrills at the idea of parading Kindalana in plain view of the world: mine, my Prince, my Oriati princess, mine, not yours, mine.

  “I could ask Kindalana to be present,” he says. “We maintain a cordial relationship.”

  “Good,” Barhu says. “And do you foresee success for this new trading concern?”

  “Success? Success? Baru, this trading concern is going to rule half the world. We’ll have our own navy, and our own banks, and our own historians, because”—he laughs, giddy—“two hundred years from now, this concern will still be solvent. It will live beyond us and carry on our work. They’ll name ships for us, now and always. Do you like that? The fine ship Baru Cormorant, pride and flag of our fleet.”

  “I like it,” she says, sadly. “I like it very much.”

  He is so disappointed by her sudden scowl, so disappointed that he cannot make her smile, that he punishes himself with a sharp tug at his beard. “What is it? What can I do?”

  “All I ever wanted,” she whispers, “was for you to beat Hesychast. To save my home from him.”

  “But I will. What does he have, Baru? Some pedigrees, some specimens. We are about to crack an entire continent like an egg and drink the yolk! You made that, Baru. You won for me.” He shakes her affably, trying to be paternal: but with a fearful tenderness. “I won’t rest until I can show you how grateful I am.”

  “I just wish that I could do more to help. Anything.”

  “Listen, Baru, how would you like a place of honor in the ceremony? Just tell me.”

  She raises her eyes to him. Very slowly, she smiles that old and wicked smile.

  “There is one thing,” she admits, “that I’ve always dreamt of. . . .”

  VICTORY

  Life in Falcrest is pure

  Knives grow sharp

  Glass becomes clear. Water runs cold

  The hearts of the dead

  Are white like fish

  The city of Falcrest waited without patience for its future to arrive.

  Testimony had been delivered. Parliament had convened, performed, and retired. In two days the Emperor would announce the results of the inquiry into the Oriati attack on Aurdwynn.

  Speculation turned like spinning coins, face and number and face again. There had been a conspiracy against the Republic: no, there had been an opportunistic pirate raid. There had been a mastermind, a financier from the Mbo with ties to royalty; no, there had only been a syndicate admiral with dreams of plunder. There would be war; there would not. And in either case there would be money to be made. People came to the Oriati Embassy with condolences, concerns, and sleekly disguised schemes for profit.

  But the Prince-Ambassador was not there.

  Tau-indi was down in Brine City, the sprawling immigrant slums across the River of Qualms, pushing two wheelchairs up Hwacha Hill, to the house of the Amity Prince. The chairs were marvels of leather, steel, and wicker from the Navy School of Heroic Medicine.

  One wheelchair carried Abdumasi Abd, whose recent surgery had paralyzed him forever.

  The other chair carried Aminata, stitched together around the crossbow wound on her heart. She was marooned ashore on half pay while the navy waited for her health to recover. Then she would face court-martial.

  Tau was not built to push them both at once, especially Aminata, who was a hundred and seventy pounds of muscle and trapped energy. Fortunately, their faithful bodyguard had come along to help, untroubled by rumors that the Prince had suffered terrible disgrace. A cadre of local youth paced them warily, afraid they were part of some complex Judiciary sting. But when they saw Enact-Colonel Osa’s rope-wrapped fists they came out to show their own corded hands, done in imitation of a Jackal soldier. Osa gave them all firm warrior forearm-clasps. Together they got the chairs up the hill, to the triangular house wedged between the Zero School for Federati and the open-fronted Ember’s Restaurant.

  “I’m going to crawl back to her,” Abdumasi muttered.

  “No, you’re not, Abdu.”

  “I am. She told me if I came back, I’d better come back crawling, and I’m going to do exactly that.”

  “She’d never want you to do that if she knew you were using a wheelchair!”

  “Why, because she’s so enlightened? Because she’d never take advantage of a cripple? She married me knowing it was already doomed, Tau! She knew the whole time! She’s ruthless!”

  “Abdu, please don’t go home angry. . . .”

  “I told you, I’m going back crawling. Kinda!” Abdumasi slid out of his chair, and, fingers jammed between the flagstones, began to pull himself down the walk. “Kinda, I’m home, just like you said I’d be!”

  Tau watched in terrified anticipation: trim was nothing but other people, and if Kindalana did not see Abdumasi as a person anymore, truly they were all lost. . . .

  The door cracked open.

  “Abdu?” the woman in the doorway said. “Tau? Tau?”

  This was the moment, the meeting, where the needle went into the lip of the wound and drew the first suture across. If anything Tau believed had any power at all, the world might be healed in microcosm. The small was reflected in the large, the meek did have power to move the great, a kind word to a stranger could alter the fate of nations: for the great was made out of the small, and the world was made out of people.

  Kindalana wore a pale yellow silk sherwani and loose trousers. She’d done up her hair into four long rows and tucked the braids into a bun. She was beautiful enough to belong in the sort of novel where a mysterious man wept over her painting, in love with a woman he did not know: but she was far too lively. You could never capture her in plaster. And her eyes were as wide apart as Tau remembered.

  “Abdu,” she said, “what are you doing?”

  “I’m home!” Abdumasi shouted. “Back from my adventures in revenge! Got tortured, got cancer, got paralyzed, now here I am!”

  “What have you done to yourself, you fool!”

  She tried to help her ex-husband up from the flagstones, as he tried, sobbing, to embrace her around the waist, so that they fell together back into the house, swearing at each other.

  Tau smiled at Aminata. “You brought us here, you know.
”

  She grimaced and rubbed her breastbone. “Sure.”

  “You did. I’d be dead at least twice without you: burnt once by Sulane, then burnt again at Annalila Fortress. And if you hadn’t shown me how trim brought you and Baru together, I’d still be turned in on myself, wallowing.”

  “Didn’t do Baru much good,” Aminata whispered.

  “Trust in trim, Aminata. Baru will be all right.”

  “I don’t see how. She was lobotomized.”

  On the night when Tau had told Baru the entire story of Prince Hill, a story about ash and trim, Baru had shared in turn her hope of overcoming Cairdine Farrier. She had already deduced most of the secret: what she needed now was not Tau’s information but Tau’s friendship. She was not willing to force the matter on Kindalana; rather, Baru wanted to leave the choice to her. She had asked Tau and Abdumasi to go to Kindalana, and to petition her to use the weapon she had prepared.

  It was a powerful weapon, and this plan was the right moment to use it. But Tau would not themself have dared. Not only was this trade concern a heinous gamble with the future of the entire Oriati Mbo, a gamble which could mean the exploitation and devastation of millions and the subjugation of Oriati history beneath the mask, but it would put an innocent at terrible risk.

  But Tau had empowered Baru to represent the Mbo, and if they believed Baru had inherited all their trim (which they did), they had to trust Baru’s decisions as they would trust their own.

  Which was to say: they would trust her decision, but they would run it by Kindalana first.

  “Come inside with us,” Tau said, beckoning to Aminata.

  She grimaced horribly. The pain in her breast was getting worse. Sometimes she screamed so loud in the night that Tau wanted to kiss her lips closed and never let go.

  She would never trust her marines again. She would never trust her navy. She would never trust the people who had asked everything of her and then shot her for it.

  Like Tau, she had lost everything that gave her life meaning. Tau was determined to see her live on with the hurt.

  She shook her head now. “I can’t go into a Federal Prince’s house. Not right to fraternize with royalty.”

  “Aminata, it’s my friend Kindalana’s house.” Tau pouted. “Are you going to refuse my friend’s hospitality?”

  Aminata grumbled and rubbed her sternum.

  “Aminata!” Tau barked. She leapt in the wheelchair. “Didn’t I bring your sword back when you were shot? Didn’t I watch over you as you healed? Didn’t I tell them you were a hero of the peace?”

  She stared up at them with unwilling gratitude and guilty resentment. “I’m not a traitor. I’m not. I can’t just go into her house.”

  “Come in,” Tau begged her. “All we’re going to do here is tell each other the truth. Abdu’s going to tell Kindalana why he went to the Cancrioth. And then Kinda’s going to tell us why she made the choice that drove him away: the thing she did, before they were even married, and didn’t tell him. And then I am going to apologize to both of them for my own mistakes, and for my selfishness in putting my Princedom before our friendships.

  “Then Abdu and I will explain what Baru’s concern could do, and why we need Kindalana to make that concern work. Will you come and listen? You don’t have to speak. Just hear us out. I promise you that it will give you a chance to see Baru again.”

  “You can’t know that. You can’t.”

  “No,” Tau said, feeling the empty places where trim had once pulled at them, phantom connections, gone forever: and choosing, anyway, to act as if they still existed. Trim was nothing but other people.

  Tau wished they could somehow bottle up everything they felt and give it to Aminata. The warmth, the hope and despair and unquenchable hope again that all would turn out well, or, if not well, at least as it had to be between humans. Between people.

  “I can’t know we’ll make a difference to Baru,” they said. “Or that Baru will make a difference to the world. But if I don’t choose to believe it’s possible, then it is certainly impossible. So what do we have to lose by hope?”

  He was waiting for me at the Nemesis Court.

  Nemesis was an old word, and it meant much more than revenge. The mob that stormed King IV Asric Falkarsitte’s palace during the revolution had cried nemesis, nemesis: justice no mortal can escape. Now the Nemesis Court was made as incarnation of that spirit. The granite exterior was surfaced in panes of black onyx, cut so thin that it marbled like flesh. The billows of silk in the grand entrance gallery were fringed in raven feathers, treated to last, sharp enough to cut skin.

  Hesychast awaited me beneath the wall of clocks.

  There were a hundred and sixty-six of them. A murder clock, an arson clock, a patricide clock, and an infanticide clock. A clock for infidelity, a clock for extortion and for forgery and for sedition and for libel, a clock for incitement, a clock for riot; also clocks for the next election, the next great storm, the next harvest. The intervals were predicted by actuaries in Census and Methods. There remained uncertainty, of course. And most uncertain of all was the great clock at the far end of the gallery—

  The Civilization Clock.

  The Cheetah Palaces rose, and then they fell. The Jellyfish Eaters. The Mundo-Camou. The Enerive. The Far Ancient Columnaries, who’d built the pyramids and greatwells along the Mothercoast. The Belthyc. The Imperial Maia.

  All risen, and all vanished.

  The Civilization Clock counted the years till the next great collapse. Every year a judge would ceremonially wind it back a year, to celebrate the Republic’s success. But it had not gained any ground since the Armada War: a permanent reminder of Falcrest’s unfinished dominion.

  “The clock for rebellion in Aurdwynn has been set to forty years,” he said. He recognized me even through the black mask and the misshapen quarantine gown, of course. He would recognize me if my face were acid-burnt to a rind. Sometimes I thought he could smell people. “Long enough for two new generations to grow. One to inherit the fear of Baru’s betrayal. One to rebel against their parents’ caution.”

  “There won’t be an Aurdwynn in forty years,” I said, “if you release plague against the Stakhieczi.”

  “But you’ve prevented that, Yawa.” He’d grown a short dark beard, close-shaved and aggressive. He wore a silk sherwani that showed nothing and suggested everything. His trousers must’ve been tailored to the exact contours of his perfect ass; you could not quite see his cock but you could tell he wore it left. He was magnificent. He horrified me.

  “It remains to be seen if we succeeded,” I said. “If Dziransi made it safely, if he can persuade the king to accept Baru as dowry . . . then there’s a chance. But what if we can’t get Baru away from Farrier again?”

  “Everything Farrier owns will be mine once the Reckoning is finished. I’ve encouraged him to act freely, call in favors while he has the chance. It’ll help flush out his quieter friends.” He offered his naked hand for my gloved shake. In older days, before the Metademe had infiltrated the places where the sodomites conducted their trade, a gloved hand meant a top and a naked hand meant a bottom. “How was your visit to the navy?”

  I’d just been at the Admiralty, escorted through halls of chrysanthemum stone to the glaring lamp-and-mirror coldness of War Plot. I’d hand-delivered the letter from Svir asking Lindon Satamine to resign. He’d whooped in relief and left Ahanna Croftare with a very nautical “Enjoy the fucking dolphins, Ahanna!”

  I supposed it was a sailor’s saying. Croftare had greeted her promotion with intense wariness: she had the seat she’d craved, the Empire Admiralty that her career needed the way a fall needs a finish. But she was certain that I was setting her up for destruction.

  “It went smoothly. Empire Admiral Croftare is aware that I possess enough evidence surrounding the Ormsment mutiny to destroy the entire Admiralty. She’ll be suggestible. I asked her about—” I quibbled for a fatal moment over whether to relay this fact: do not hesi
tate, Yawa, don’t let him see, he sees everything. “I suggested that the navy could make up for its recently curtailed income by providing older ships to escort and conduct new trade in the far west.”

  “A matter we can have Farrier manage, once we possess him.”

  “Yes.” I hesitated, purposefully this time. “Ah . . .”

  “Your brother’s no better, no worse. I have him resting in the Metademe.”

  “Thank you. Abdumasi?”

  “Be at ease. I won’t vivisect him. After a brief physical, I released him to Tau’s custody. I felt I . . .”

  He shook all over, a frisson of deep, fleshy emotion. “I felt I owed them both that much,” he said. “Follow me. I’ve made an appointment for a gown fitting, and I need to ask you a few questions.”

  The chime of one of the clocks pulled our footsteps into cadence. Amazing the things that your body does without your knowledge, the ways your flesh takes its cues from the world. There are no boundaries between things.

  “Tell me about Faham Execarne’s interference,” he prompted.

  I explained. “The Morrow Minister made an ill-advised attempt to board the Cancrioth ship. He sought a sample of the Kettling disease, so that we could begin work on a cure.”

  “Fool,” Hesychast murmured. “The Kettling can’t be cured. Incrastic hygiene is the only defense. Clean hands, gloves, and population surveillance.” He saw my irritated glance, and touched the small of my back in apology. “I’m sorry for interrupting. Proceed.”

  “His attack failed.” Execarne still thought the Cancrioth whale had detected his approach. It hadn’t: Galganath was away in Cautery Plat harbor, planting glass vivariums full of cholera in the shellfish beds. That outbreak had been contained quickly and decisively. The Brain’s test of our vigilance had failed.

  It was my warning that had betrayed Execarne. The moment I learned the Cancrioth whale was out of position, I’d told the Brain that Execarne might make a raid on her ship.