The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  There was Cosangua Trestle from the Suettaring Joy Battalion, with her young protégé Haille Kensfarrie, courted now by Hob Rondlant the heartbreaker from Advance. No one was entirely certain who was wearing the Archon Tutor’s mask, but this did not stop the offer of discreet bribes for a student’s placement in the Faculties. And a keen eye might detect many other notables and worthies, some moving anonymous under new masks and new costumes, due to scandal or simply social exhaustion.

  The only ministry without even a token presence was the Metademe. Cosgrad Torrinde was commonly believed to be the Emperor’s eugenics advisor Hesychast. No one dared speculate too loudly about his prolonged absence during the spring and summer, however. Any one of the Clarified present might be his avatar.

  The Emperor loomed above them all, a human cocoon at the center of a spiderweb. The Imperial Body was shrouded in a canvas sheet, pulled taut around It by silk ropes that gathered into sixteen great channels and coursed out through bolts and pulleys to draw lines across the huge star-speckled black monoliths behind Its Throne. Then the braids vanished into the walls, symbolically passing out into the Empire, to the very farthest reaches of the most distant province, to execute Its will.

  The Emperor did not often address Its people directly; even today, better than half the people present would have agreed that Its Body was simply a proxy. The Emperor was chosen from the populace and chemically denied any knowledge of Its own identity and history. This was the only way Lapetiare had imagined that a ruler could be truly fair. It was generally understood that the Emperor’s chemically mediated anonymity demanded that It remain aloof. The Emperor’s purpose was not to take the place of Parliament, nor to direct the Judiciary’s verdicts, nor to dispatch the Morrow Ministry’s spies. Rather, It was meant to provide a continuous, enlightened unity of policy through suggestion and influence. When the Emperor did not have the expert knowledge to make a choice Itself, then Its Advisors would provide assistance.

  All agreed that today’s announcement would involve the looming war. The Oriati had attacked Aurdwynn. There would be reparations. But in what form?

  A chime called the crowd to attention. The chorus behind the marble walls whispered through their amplifying pipes.

  “I AM THE EMPEROR AND I KNOW NO OTHER NAME. I HAVE SUMMONED YOU TO HEAR THE WILL OF THE IMPERIAL REPUBLIC. I HAVE ENTRUSTED THAT WILL TO MY SERVANT. COME FORTH.”

  So an orator would appear to read the Emperor’s decision. The crowd waited in a hush to see who it would be.

  Cairdine Farrier peeked out from behind the Throne. “Am I late?”

  Affectionate applause, cheers, boos, whistles of love and lust; he came dancing down the steps, wearing the polestar of Imperial authority on his half-mask. His handsome beard smiled with his mouth.

  “Yes, it’s me! Back home at last. If there are any of you who doubted I was one of the Emperor’s advisors, well, I hope you pay your bets. I am here today, more publicly than usual, because I need your absolute trust. Welcome. No, please, I mean that sincerely. Welcome. I’m glad you’re here. I never, ever dreamed I’d have the chance to share this moment with you.”

  The hundred steps leading up to the Throne were just slightly too large for a human to mount. Farrier came hopping down them like an eager bird.

  “We always win, don’t we? It’s been our habit since before the Armada War. We won against the royalists. We won against smallpox. We won against the Oriati. We know that victory is our future. In the long run the Imperial Republic will save this world.

  “But that’s not much comfort, is it, on days like today. When the markets are in a panic. When our children ask us questions we can’t answer. When it seems as if old and powerful forces have turned their eyes on our little land. We don’t have a great army. We don’t have natural wealth. We’re small people, right? Except Hesychast, that man’s not small at all.” He grinned through the laughter. “You’re waiting for me to answer one question! Will you have to send your children to war?”

  He paused. The Emperor twitched in its cocoon of canvas and silk.

  “No,” he said.

  The crowd let out a tremendous gasp of relief and disappointment.

  “You have been told that war is inevitable, because history is going one way and the Oriati want it to turn back in the other. The Oriati do not want to accept our schools, or our trade, or the fact that there is a right way to live. I can’t blame them, honestly! There are so many of them, and they don’t agree on anything, do they, Tau?”

  The Prince-Ambassador smiled and bowed.

  Farrier brooded for a moment, hand on chin. “Since the Armada War, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to avert that inevitability. How can we get the Oriati to work with us? How can we cooperate to avoid a war, without betraying the imperatives of Incrastic progress? I’m here today to tell you that my protégé Agonist has found a way.

  “We now have confident diplomatic and navigational access to the Black Tea Ocean and the western coast of the Oria continent. Directly through Segu Mbo. Without the long journey south around Zawam Asu.” He held up his hands against the crowd’s roar of astonishment. “As soon as next summer, we will be bringing goods to market!”

  It was happening again, it was happening the way the crowd had seen it happen to their parents. It had begun this way in Aurdwynn. It had begun this way in Taranoke. And those who had acted early and aggressively in those provinces were now rich beyond whole dynasties.

  “Of course,” Farrier said, grinning, “the Black Tea Ocean is a long and difficult journey from Falcrest, and the necessary routes will pass through territory held by Segu Mbo—a people who have never welcomed our shipping. Because of the diplomatic and strategic sensitivity of this new venture, and the secrecy required in our negotiations with the Segu, the Emperor has decided to grant an absolute monopoly on trade with the Black Tea Ocean to a single concern.

  “This concern will be legally empowered to raise funds, ships, banks, militia, and even local legislatures in the pursuit of Falcrest’s profitable and benevolent presence on the western Oriati coast. This concern will be authorized to make treaty and war in the Emperor’s name. And, of course . . . this concern is going to sell you shares in its stock.”

  The noise the crowd made was the moan of someone watching a lover undress.

  A hundred pens poised over a hundred pads. Runners braced to sprint. When the concern was named, every investor in Falcrest, from the Suettaring markets to the kitchen tables of middle-class homes, would begin a furious bidding war for shares in that concern. The timid and the cautious would get a few shares and hold on to them simply for the dividend: the portion of the concern’s profit which was passed on to shareholders. But most would hold in anticipation of the price rising: as shares became more scarce and more desirable, the price would bubble up like water from a detonating mine. Those who rode the bubble expertly would be tomorrow’s Parliamins, ministers, tycoons, and colonial tyrants. Those who were consumed would be cleaning fish shit from the undercity canals.

  “The name of the concern which will hold this monopoly,” Farrier said, raising both hands as if unfurling a banner, “is—”

  “Shut up, you hypocrite,” the Emperor said.

  Someone laughed.

  The echoes fell off into absolute shocked silence.

  Farrier frowned. Slowly he turned. Someone else laughed: he was doing a bit, he was playing this up for the crowd.

  Hesitantly, the Imperial Chorus took up the Emperor’s words. “SHUT UP, YOU HYPOCRITE.”

  Farrier scratched his head, a comic’s exaggerated gesture. The crowd laughed uncomfortably.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I thought I knew who was under there. Apparently I was mistaken. Who—”

  “Cairdine Farrier,” the Emperor enunciated, in a voice that buzzed and ratcheted through the clockwork of a voice-changer but never, ever faltered, “by the power invested in me as Emperor of the Imperial Republic of Falcrest, I accuse you of col
laboration with foreign royalty, of producing a royal heir, and of conspiring to enrich that heir by perversion of the Empire’s Incrastic work. I order your immediate arrest. As there are no civil authorities beyond the reach of your corruption, I commend you to the navy’s custody. Empire Admiral Croftare, take him away.”

  The chorus repeated every word. The hall was, otherwise, silent: except for the rapid tap of Cairdine Farrier’s left boot, and the scratch of his finger under his chin.

  Empire Admiral Ahanna Croftare stepped forward. Her two marines followed her. “Well,” she said, into the silence, “you better come with me, Mister Farrier.”

  “Don’t you dare.” Farrier tapped the polestar mark on his mask without turning to her. “You have no jurisdiction here. Someone’s obviously meddled with the Emperor. Steward? Steward, come out here, take that mask off so we can all see who—”

  The crowd booed vehemently. Farrier might as well have asked the steward to pants a child. “Masks stay on!” someone jeered.

  “I find for the Empire Admiral,” a new voice said. “Mister Farrier’s arrest is justified.”

  Everyone turned to the Nemesis Judge Xate Yawa, black rook among finery. Her mask erased any hint of her race, but they all knew who she was. The maid who’d betrayed Falcrest’s dukes to the Masquerade. The very model of egalitarian, pro-republican action in the provinces.

  “Trust me,” she said, to the staring crowd. “I know what to do with royalists.”

  Empire Admiral Croftare came up the steps with her two following marines. “Stop!” Farrier barked. “You’ve crossed the shoreline! This is not the navy’s mandate!”

  “Judge says it’s all right,” the Empire Admiral said, and shrugged.

  “Come now.” Farrier appealed to the crowd. “This is a trick. A reactionary strike by a jealous rival. Let’s all keep our heads and discover who’s swapped themselves in for the real Emperor.”

  “I am the real Emperor,” the voice boomed. The chorus was now only a moment behind it. “I was chosen as Emperors are chosen. Now I must speak. Do you hear me, Cairdine Farrier? I must speak against you.”

  Farrier stared in true puzzlement at the Emperor.

  Then he sighed and stripped off his gloves, offering his naked hands to the marines for the cuff. “This is a very petty prank, and a desperate attempt to sour my good news. Once we’ve verified the charges are false, I hope I’ll see you all again in the markets, earning a piece of the fortune that’s—”

  “But the charges are true, Farrier,” Tau-indi Bosoka called. “You know it as well as I do. You’ve consorted with foreign aristocracy. You’ve created an heir.”

  The crowd gasped in delighted shock and shocked delight as the absolute indignity of those words, delivered by an Oriati royal, slapped the blood from beneath Cairdine Farrier’s mask.

  “Tau?” he said, in bemusement. “But . . .”

  “But what?” Tau had not worn their full dermoregalia. They were in the plain waistcoat of a Falcresti citizen, and a long skirt of Lonjaro block prints, dressed to capture two worlds in one. “But I’m too kind to tell the truth? But I’m too gentle to lay it out in public? But I’m too soft to do this to you?”

  “I thought,” Farrier said, into the absolute silence, “that you wouldn’t want her hurt. . . .”

  Eyes began to turn to Tau’s companions.

  Tau shook their head in absolute disappointment. A few people made the hand-washing sign against evil: not out of fear of Tau, but out of their own sorrow to see Tau so distressed. “She won’t be hurt, Farrier. Don’t you understand? You could never hurt her. She was smarter than you.”

  Farrier did not understand. He shook his head, and waved at the approaching marines as if they were friends coming his way at a party he was not ready to leave.

  “Quite a melodrama.” He smiled broadly at the crowd. “Whoever arranged this little embarrassment deserves an award of some sort. Possibly even in stock certificates—”

  “Will you deny her?” a woman cried. “You’ll deny her even now, Caird? You’ll pretend she’s not real?”

  Farrier froze. His eyes were not the darting eyes of a liar anymore. He looked deeply, profoundly afraid: as if his chest had been cut open, his ribs pulled aside like crab legs, and his heart laid out beating for the knife.

  The woman came out from behind Tau. “You told me that it didn’t matter who’d fathered her flesh. You said it was the man who raised her who was her real father. Tell them, Farrier! Tell them that you’re her real father. Tell them!”

  Kindalana of Segu leapt up from the floor of the Levelest Gallery onto the Emperor’s first step. She shrugged off the cotton gown that had concealed her majesty. No one there, except Tau and Abdumasi Abd and perhaps Farrier himself, could say if what she wore was the traditional garb of a Prince of Segu Mbo. But everyone who saw her thought it must be: her bare clavicles painted in gold, the slender length of her neck ringed in silver, her sinfully delicate shoulder blades bare to the chandeliered oil lights so far above. The parts of her that were modest were very modest; the parts of her that were naked were not the parts anyone in Falcrest would call taboo.

  But all who looked upon her saw, first and most easily, the thing that they associated with an Oriati woman of high station: the foreign princesses in the rag novels, who wore jewels and chains and nothing else, who were always wide-hipped and cunning and at ease in their sensuality. Women who seduced the weak-minded with their sinful physicality. A conniving manipulatrix. Ideas as camouflage and armor, and Kindalana had gathered those ideas, and gone to war.

  People gasped as they made the connection.

  Cairdine Farrier had gotten a daughter with Kindalana of Segu. She had seduced him and he had fallen to royalism.

  He had a royal child. He had sired an unlicensed child to a royal line.

  Farrier’s ghastly gray heartbreak was the proof of it.

  “Tau,” he began to say, “might we have a conversation about your embassy’s—”

  “No,” Tau said. “No amnesty. You treat people like things, and I cannot stand it.”

  Farrier might have defended himself then. He might have called out to the people that he, an explorer and champion of the republic, was being sabotaged by a foreign seductress.

  But he had truly loved her, and he was undone.

  In the stories they would tell about this day, he tumbled all the way down into the crowd, between the sluiceway of ice and the spill of eyeballs. And they all flinched back from him, the nepotist Cairdine Farrier, who had mingled his seed and his future with royal issue.

  In reality he slipped only one step, and got his feet back. But it was enough.

  “In light of these revelations,” the Emperor said, and if there was a hint of dry humor in that voice, all the more testament to Its wisdom and humanity, “and the obvious corruption inherent in granting authority over Oriati Mbo commerce to a royalist and an Oriati blood collaborator, management of the new Black Tea Ocean Concern and its monopoly will be reassigned to one of our loyal agents. Be assured, however, that trading is open. Good business to you.”

  When Aminata got up from her wheelchair the pain scraped at her chest like a pair of giant knuckles rubbing her breastbone. Her vision seemed as long and narrow as the trajectory of a bolt, straight from her face to the white mask of the Emperor.

  Two brown-black eyes stared back at her. She was too far away to possibly see their color but she knew they were brown-black and that they were watching her. Aminata would have known those eyes if they came washing ashore in a bottle.

  “Baru?” Aminata breathed. “How the fuck . . . ?”

  Pandemonium had reached the very edges of the hall, spilled out through channels and corridors, to leap across Falcrest at the speed of fireworks. Mandridge Subahant, the Candid whip, came forward in a chevron of supporters. “Get that thing off of there!” he bellowed. “It’s a cheap fake. Someone’s trying to silence Mister Farrier!”

  “Nonsense!” T
ruesmith Elmin leapt up on the shoulders of a fellow Parliamin. “The Emperor’s doing exactly what It’s required to do! Intervening when It must to guard the Republic!”

  “Parliament won’t stand for this!” Mandridge roared. “We’ll find you out, you hear me?” He shook a finger at the Emperor. “We’ll find out who’s under there soon enough, and then you’ll drown for treason! You’ve assaulted a great man!”

  “If anyone comes near the Emperor,” the Nemesis Judge Xate Yawa purred, “they will have my court to answer to.”

  It wasn’t possible, Aminata thought. The lobotomy had been observed, hadn’t it? It had been certified by observers, or no one would have believed in it. It couldn’t be Baru.

  Yet here was Yawa, playing along, as if she’d been on Baru’s crew the whole time. So the lobotomy had to be fake! And Baru must have trusted Tau-indi and Abdumasi to convince Kindalana to appear here, to substantiate the charges against Farrier openly and publicly where they could never be silenced or massaged away. How could she have left her life and power in the hands of three Oriati she barely knew?

  Tau-indi touched Aminata’s hand. “See?” the Prince said, warmly, though there were tears in their eyes, the tears of a person so gentle that they mourned even the ruin of the awful. “She trusted you. She trusted us.”

  In that moment, against all reason, Aminata felt like she was in a fleet of two, a navy of her and Baru: she had just been promoted to Grand Admiral, captain of everything she had ever wanted.

  And she would have sworn, despite the pain in her chest, that the Emperor winked at her.

  Baru walked Tain Hu through the streets of the world to come.

  “Well,” Hu drawled, “this is certainly cosmopolitan.”

  People of every nation bustled past them, dressed in a beautiful array of textiles and fashions. Small-nosed, high-cheeked Falcresti, some of them with the vitiligo-spotted Grendish look; Bastè Ana in white cotton versions of their traditional furs, bearing the dignity of their own capitalized race-name; dizzyingly many sorts of Oriati, though they were no longer “Oriati” at all, no longer subject to that simplifying Falcresti label, but Devi-nagi and Mzilimaki and Segu and Lonjaro. Maia families moved in squabbling, bickering, laughing clusters of interrelationship. And Taranoki like Baru. And even Kyprananoki, reborn in this dream-world from some precious few survivors, not diluted by intermarriage but simply sustained by it: their culture, their memories, insoluble and precious. Even the Sydani were here, and their men were as fearless as the women.