The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Tain Hu grimaced at a passing carriage. “There’s no horses,” she complained.

  “They’ve made the uranium light boil water, see?” Baru crouched to watch jets of steam spin the axles beneath the carriage. “Marvelous.”

  On a hilltop above the imaginary city (it seemed to have Treatymont’s general street plan, but the henge hills of Duchy Radaszic had migrated in toward the old walls) a lightning farm collected thunderbolts to animate the meat golems that conducted various labor. “Those must run on the same galvanic principle that makes corpses twitch,” Baru assured Hu.

  “I’m sure they do. Why is that man living inside a glass bubble?”

  “To contain the soporific mists, of course.” A street surgeon tended to minor wounds and ailments inside a dome, where the drugs steaming out of a water bong prevented all pain. A little girl with a persistent cough had just gone into the bubble, and the surgeon was slicing open her chest to draw out the infected tissue and replace it with the seeds of new lung. The girl’s mothers argued about something outside as messengers ran past, their letters written in a lovely and mathematically rigorous script which could not encode lies.

  “You have some truly bizarre ideas of how things will go,” Hu said.

  “Oh, you do better,” Baru snapped, annoyed at any critique of her utopia. “I bet yours would just be a big forest full of—of athletic nymphlets!”

  “You’re not a nymphlet. And you’re not that athletic.”

  “But at least I can imagine a better world than a cold woodland!”

  Hu shoved her. Baru tripped over the elevated curb and fell, yelping, into the sky.

  Green opened up beneath her, green and silver-blue and gold: the canopy of Aurdwynn’s northern redwood forest, the towering, cold-hardened trees that filled Duchy Vultjag. She spotted the glass-clear river Vultsniada running south. Mills turned beside fish ladders. On the northern horizon a quarry broke the mountainside into white columns. Baru plunged straight out of the sky, toward some sort of festival where big men were taking turns hurling axes into a tree trunk, where all the children jostled for their turn at the inoculation booth and a ticket to ride the river rapids. There was a granary down there, and a bakery, and a tanner’s and a fletcher’s and a cooper’s and forges and even a paper mill. A perfectly pleasant little feudal village, the sort you might dream of all your life, if you were the kind of duchess who cared for her fief.

  “Follow me,” a warhawk called, and Baru realized she had wings, big black wings with feathers like fingers at the tip. She was a cormorant and Tain Hu was a hawk with steel-tipped talons, the sort the Maia had trained, long ago, to scatter vultures that might betray a kill. When she opened her wings, Baru felt the texture of the air, thermals and dirty washes, lulls and eddies, a vapor map of the terrain below. It was like swimming, it was joyous.

  Tain Hu glided over the training grounds and the tourney fields, across the moat, to the high overlook tower beside the waterfall, where two women stood hand in hand looking across their land: a dark broken-nosed beauty in jodhpurs and a mail-shouldered tabard, and a brooding woman of no particular note.

  Tain Hu the warhawk landed on Tain Hu the woman’s shoulders, as gentle as only a dream bird could be. Baru the cormorant crashed awkwardly into Baru the woman’s stomach, and, becoming the woman, had to get back to her feet with a stupid seabird hopping around underfoot.

  “Gracefully done,” Tain Hu said, innocently.

  “Shut up.” She pulled herself back to the parapet. “Not bad, I see. You’ve got a range of mills, to diversify your output. Are those fish ponds? Well done. A hawkery. And that must be a fur post. Is that horse pasture? You cleared woods for pasture? That’s not a smart use of your land at all—”

  “Nonsense,” Hu said, airily, “the warhorses are for breeding. And they attract admirers.”

  She pointed to a file of pale people, coming down a trail—no, a proper road—from the north. Baru smiled smugly. “So I do have some influence on this design.”

  “Indeed. The Stakhieczi like to see my horses. And they like to meet, drink with, befriend, bed, and sometimes marry my people. Their glass and steel sells south at a tremendous margin. Vultjag uses that money to buy grain, salt, sugar, and spices from downriver to sell back to the Stakhieczi. Recently various crop brokers have established year-round offices here. And of course there is a post maintained by the Vultjag Trading Concern, which oversees the general trade from the Llosydanes, Taranoke, and Oriati Mbo beyond. I tax a reasonable rate. It goes into insurance, fire watch, and medicine for my fief.”

  Baru kissed her on the mouth. “Hu, it’s wonderful!”

  “It’s not real.”

  “But it will be! Vultjag can be like this! Ake can do it, and Heingyl Ri—”

  Hu gathered Baru up and made her rest her head in the crook of her strong neck. She smelled of pine. “Kuye lam,” she said, “nothing will be done if war consumes the Ashen Sea and destroys my home. So you have to go back. You have to finish the work.”

  Baru nodded, eyes squeezed shut. “I will. I know what to do now.”

  “You’re walking a very dangerous road. You’ve built an engine to give you immense power. But you’ve also given Falcrest the chance to capture that engine. They will remake the whole Mbo in their mutilated image if they can.”

  “I won’t let it happen. I won’t. I have to make the masks believe that I’m giving them what they want and need. It’s the only way to trick them. And then, when the moment’s right . . .”

  “Be sure you don’t miss the moment.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And will you be happy?” She stroked the line of Baru’s shoulder. “Will you do that part of the work, too? I wanted that. That is the reason your stupid self-sacrificing plans to infest your body with cancer and plague cannot be allowed. You must be happy. I died to give you that chance. You must be happy.”

  “I’ll try. I promise.”

  “Good. Then you’ll be all right on your own.” Hu looked down at her with that awful lopsided smile that cut right through Baru’s young heart. “How did you fake that lobotomy, Baru?”

  “Snap-off picks.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t know how she was going to do it ahead of time, mind. But I do know now. Yawa prepared orbitoclasts that were weakened at the neck, where the needle joins the base. When the maniple started to move the styluses, the steel needle snapped off inside my head. They never completed the necessary cuts. Iscend was able to certify that the maniple had performed all the correct motions without actually lying.”

  “That’s an absurd risk! What if they hadn’t snapped? We’d both be dead! Worse!”

  “I trusted Yawa to make it work.”

  Hu’s eyes narrowed. “Wait. Are you telling me there are still two steel needles shoved up behind our eyes?”

  “Yes.” Baru felt rather bold and ravishing about it, actually. She had masts in her brain.

  “Won’t they kill you?”

  “Oh, no. Plenty of prisoners had steel implants to strengthen their self-control, in older days. No one died of them. I’ll be fine.”

  “That woman,” Hu said, and spat over the towerside. “So you’re telling me that your entire plan to achieve the Throne depended on your thick skull’s ability to snap steel? I suggested you use the Emperor’s seat to complete your work. I didn’t know this was how you’d gain it.”

  And she had suggested it. She had repeated Baru’s promise back to her: I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.

  There was only one aristocratic seat in Falcrest. And the color of Falcrest’s blood was in part the molten gold of commerce.

  “I was certain that Farrier’s secret was a daughter,” Baru said. “He was modest with me exactly as a Falcrest father would be with a girl child. He had a pattern of female students, as if he were trying to replace something missing. He was uncomfortable with the topic of Kinda
lana and the whole concept of Oriati sexuality—probably because she managed to seduce him so thoroughly that she got pregnant off him. All those clues led me to the truth.”

  “Truly you have discovered the ability to consider the minds and actions of others,” Hu said, dryly.

  “Shush.”

  But her swat found empty air. Hu had dropped to one knee and bowed her head. “My lady, I am yours in life and in death. But I must ask your leave.”

  “My leave? Hu, where are you going?”

  “To carry out my last duty, Your Highness, my queen.” Hu kissed her hand. “You cannot be obsessed with me forever. I’ve brought you to a place of some safety. Now you must go on without me.”

  “You promised you’d always be with me,” Baru whispered.

  “I will.” Hu looked up, fierce and dark and golden, perfect. “Always and forever in your heart. You don’t need this . . . mental trick to keep me alive. There are other women: oh, don’t look that way, as if I’m the only one suited for your oh-so-particular tastes. Go make some mistakes. Go find someone different, someone utterly unlike me, except that she should drive you mad, too, because she doesn’t agree with you, and she won’t bow down when you want; but she’s loyal beyond all reason when you need her. There must be another woman like that, somewhere.” Hu grinned. “One or two, at least.”

  It was hard to look at Hu. She was so fierce. Like staring into fire, when you are the fog.

  “What if Shir’s right? What if ruling in Falcrest makes me happy, and I cannot give it up . . . ?”

  “My love, my queen, kuye lam”—Hu was unbearably radiant now, a cold clean light like a star—“I am a part of you forever, but I was born to rule high wilderness, to guard my people and to defy my foe. If I could answer these questions of empire and complicity for you, would I love and need you so much?”

  “You told me that you would tell me the difference! Between pretending to obey them and really giving in . . .”

  “And I told you that I want you to keep asking that question forever. You will know the answer when you die, Baru. You will know it by the change you’ve made in the world. That’s what Agonist means, isn’t it? The one who causes change.”

  “I don’t want you to go,” Baru whispered.

  “Too bad,” Hu hissed, though she was grinning. “I chose where and how to die. I died a fucking hero, didn’t I? Name some unexplored lands after me. And a statue. I always wanted a great big statue. The Duchess Triumphant, with my sword upraised, and Cattlson’s banner in my other hand: and you can give me great broad shoulders, and classy stone tits, but don’t you dare fix my nose. I want it broken and I want it crooked. Just so.”

  Left eye open,” Iscend commands. “Point your left hand to my left eye.”

  Baru aims her forefinger.

  “No,” Iscend clucks, “that’s my nose, Your Excellence.”

  “Shit.” Baru points a little farther right, where memory, if not instinct, says Iscend should have another eyeball. “That hasn’t gotten worse, has it?”

  “There has been regression. You were learning to correct for your hemilateral illusions, but after the meningitis and the recent trauma to your frontal lobes, you’ve lost some progress.”

  Trauma is one way to put it. Baru can’t feel the steel lobotomy picks still embedded in her brain, no matter how she pokes her forehead or spins her head back and forth. Yawa has assured her that most cases of cranial artifact (a fine way to say shit lodged in the brain) are truly harmless, and that the lurid stories of men whose entire personalities are destroyed by a harpoon through the brain are exaggerated—most of those historical cases, Yawa says, made a full recovery with time and practice.

  But Baru wonders what will happen if she goes outside in the cold, or in a thunderstorm, or in deep water where the pressure fills her sinuses. Will the steel freeze within her? Will it draw lightning? Will it be ejected from her eyes? And what if she begins to itch, inside her head?

  Iscend draws her touch kit. The needle, the feather, the silk, the sandpaper. “Strip and lie down.”

  The Antler River is smooth as glass today, and if Baru hadn’t been on Helbride so long, she might not know they were on the water at all. She has not invented a name for her houseboat yet, but she loves it already. Iscend tests her reactions with quick systematic touches. Baru contemplates the absence of tension between them. For a scene out of fantasy, one of those pornographically useful cases of plausible nudity between strangers, it’s wholly unerotic.

  “Iscend,” she says, “when you kissed me, did you really—I mean, did you feel anything?”

  “This is a medical exam, Your Excellence. I’m bound by medical ethics.”

  “I’m not propositioning you! I’m just curious!” She tries to turn her head sideways. Iscend adjusts her, firmly, chin-down, so that Baru has to talk to the floor.

  “I believe you knew all along the lobotomy hadn’t taken. I think you collaborated with Yawa to hide that from Hesychast. I even think that’s why you tried to seduce me. So you’d have that bodily association between me and . . . and feeling right, I suppose.”

  “An interesting theory, Your Excellence. Though it puts a great deal of stock in your very untried talents as a lover. And it does deny me a degree of humanity, doesn’t it?”

  “Only if you think that knowing yourself, and using that knowledge to change yourself, is inhuman.”

  “Isn’t it?” Iscend teases: certainly teasing now. “What human being ever really understood themself?”

  “I want to know why you protected me.”

  “I act for the good of the Republic,” Iscend says, neutrally. “You know that. Clearly your trade concern is in the Republic’s best interest.”

  What Baru likes about Clarified is that they’re very logical. But what she likes about Iscend isn’t so easily laid out. Yes, obviously she’s elegant, and insightful, and armed with secret methods of mental and physical discipline, and she is an incarnation of that Imperial power which Baru has so queasily come to wield.

  But she’s also funny, in a dry and straight-faced sort of way. She’s comforting. She always knows what to do. And that gold-brushstroke illumination about her, which once dazzled and enticed Baru, now reads to her as delight. Iscend is glad to exist, in a way very few people will ever attain.

  Are these traits all synthetic, too? Were they selected for her by Hesychast?

  Maybe not. If behavior can’t be passed down, as Baru and Iscend theorized in the forest, then the whole project of human eugenics is doomed. If eugenics doesn’t work, that means the Clarified aren’t as deeply Clarified as Hesychast believes.

  And if that’s true, if Iscend is pretending to have inherited all the traits Hesychast thinks she should possess, then she is a woman wearing a mask.

  Iscend’s slim fingers probe the sides of Baru’s throat. “Swallow, please.”

  Baru swallows. She tries to imagine herself as Clarified. She tries to imagine filtering everything she wants through the greater good of the Republic. Would she have to say, I’m thirsty, I should drink, so that I can better serve the Republic? Or, I’m inexplicably sad, I should do something I enjoy, because I serve the Republic best when I’m happy?

  Perhaps she would.

  What if Iscend, like Baru, wants to be free? Then she would need to say, I want to be free, because I serve the Republic best when I am free.

  What if she supports Baru’s ascent to the heights of power because this allows Iscend to serve a single woman who is more and more like the Republic incarnate? If Iscend can advise that woman, and thus in a way determine what that woman in turn orders her to do . . . isn’t that a kind of freedom?

  Especially if that Supreme Woman has demonstrated a concern, a real regard, for her self-determination and safety.

  Baru hums into the pillow.

  “Thinking, Your Excellence?”

  “Always,” Baru says, as Iscend digs into her shoulder muscles, probing, always probing, for some flaw.
“Always thinking.”

  “Half thinking,” Iscend says.

  Baru can’t turn around to see if she’s teasing.

  There is business to be done at the Admiralty, so Agonist makes an appearance. Naturally Shao Lune has arranged to be her guide: Baru is certain that Shao simply forgets when things don’t go her way, and proceeds as if the universe has been amended, retroactively and completely, in her favor. She may be threatening Baru’s friend with court-martial, she may have given deck plans of Eternal to Faham Execarne for his doomed assault, but she is in perfectly good standing with Agonist the cryptarch.

  She simply must be.

  She greets Agonist as if they are cordial acquaintances, and not as if she has seen Baru drunk and desperate to die, nor as if they have spent any time knuckles-deep in each other and moaning with need. A terse letter of recommendation from Samne Maroyad has landed Shao Lune a post here at the Admiralty. She may be a snake, but the navy’s snake she will remain. Baru, walking beside her, wonders if she has begun to blackmail the Admiralty with her intimate knowledge of Ormsment’s mutiny. Probably. Of course Shao has a new uniform, freshly tailored, strictly obedient to code, but with an eye to compression and minimization of the body, and to the display of merits and pins in places that flatter her neck and slim shoulders. She looks spectacular. Baru’s relieved that she doesn’t find the woman even a little distracting. Whatever softness she’d developed for Shao is gone: not brutally excised, but set aside for good and necessary reasons, as people, in the course of their lives, must do.