The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “It’s simple science,” Cosgrad says, coolly. “In tests, women who fuck other women climax most often. Do you think you can make me physically jealous? Me? I’ve whored myself to Incrastic science for my whole life. They used me as a boy and now I use myself. I don’t care what Kindalana does with her sex. Farrier’s the one who could never get past her body.”

  “Yet you fought over her. You and he.”

  “I cared about the choices she made, the future she wanted. That was what I wanted to keep away from Farrier. I didn’t care who she fucked! Just the way she chose to use her power.”

  “And she chose me.” She lets her eyes say: are you jealous?

  He snorts. “She saw you as an ally of convenience. A way to seize Farrier’s domain for her own use. Do you think she’ll let you use her child for your advancement? A human sacrifice? Because the child would be sacrificed, Agonist. If you tried to use her against me, her identity would come out. The child would lose her citizenship in Falcrest, and any life she’s built here. She might be forcibly sterilized as a royal heir. Will Kindalana let you do it? Will your own conscience let you?”

  She meets his eyes. Now it’s his turn to flinch. She growls at him: “You worry about my conscience? You made me murder the woman I loved because she was a traitor.”

  “We made you bring her to trial. You murdered her.”

  Hu sacrificed herself, but Baru is not going to explain that to Hesychast. “Farrier wanted me to learn that all the women I love will come to grief. Wouldn’t it be wonderful justice, Hesychast, if I took your child away in turn? Wouldn’t it be fair if I punished you like you want to punish all the tribadists?”

  He exhales smoke. “I suppose,” he says, “that it might seem that way to you. From your selfish perspective. Because that’s what you are, isn’t it, Baru? If everyone were like you, humanity would die. You want to be something that very few people can be allowed to be. Selfish.”

  He turns and walks to the stairs.

  “Hey,” Baru calls.

  He looks back. The drums strike up In Praise of Human Dignity and a huge roar of elation sweeps through the crowd.

  She opens her arms, as if to indicate the space between them, the differences, Baru’s darker skin, her height, her differently folded eyes, her sharper nose.

  “What do you think?” she asks him. “Am I still fit only for farming, fishing, and pleasure?”

  Very briefly he looks furious: less briefly, ashamed.

  “You’re an extraordinary Taranoki,” he says. “Take pride in that.”

  The city expects a long and deliciously sordid trial for Mister Cairdine Farrier. He has been a great favorite for so long, every brilliance and triumph of his life raising him up: but now the crank that raised him is free to turn, the ropes are free to snap, and Mister Cairdine Farrier is ready for the plunge. His closed dealings will be brought to light. His mistresses and suitors will testify to his behavior and his talents in bed. His books will be opened and scoured for errors, in finance and ideology alike. Enough great material will be introduced to the public discourse to feed a century’s novels and plays about his rise and fall.

  The presses slam and clatter as the pamphlets breed and the rhetorics try to pith the whole issue with one clever needle of prose.

  Farrier’s personal hypocrisy reveals the hypocrisy of the whole Incrastic project.

  Farrier’s human weakness shows that he is and always has been simply one of us.

  Farrier’s indictment proves that there is a grand royalist conspiracy within Falcrest set on keeping brilliant commoners like Cairdine Farrier out of power.

  Farrier’s sad mistake makes it absolutely clear that the women of Oriati Mbo, and perhaps women in general, cannot be trusted.

  The important thing in prosecuting Mister Farrier is to preserve the dignity and impartiality of the state.

  The key lesson of this whole affair is that the Oriati will stoop to any level to corrupt and destroy our Republic.

  Who can blame him? Look at her!

  How mad and desperate he must be. Look at her!

  When will the child appear, people ask? When will the issue of Cairdine Farrier and the Federal Prince Kindalana be called to court?

  There is very little doubt in anyone’s mind that he has fucked the princess. How couldn’t he? Fetishes and neuroses arise from repression. Farrier’s worldly travels among naked savages and libidinous sailors and worst of all the royalty of the Mbo must have required the most fearsome self-control. In turn that self-control would produce the most transgressive ecstasy when at last it was violated. (The cartoons are numerous, and explicit: they vary in the noises the little cartoon-Farrier makes, and the size of his head.)

  But the question is whether this misdeed is merely carnal, an error of flesh, as men are known to make. Or whether it has extended into conspiracy with foreign royalty to create and empower an aristocratic heir within the Imperial Republic. That would be unspeakable treason, betrayal of Falcrest’s fundamental principle: the annihilation of the royal. Castration and drowning would be the least of the punishments it would deserve.

  When Judge-Minister Frowerer, on advice from the new Nemesis Judge Xate Yawa (who handled many scandalous trials in the distant and excitingly barbaric lands of Aurdwynn) announces a closed trial, the city fairly revolts. Two-story graffiti on the facade of a dormitory in the Faculties conveys the sentiment best: WHEN’S THE SHOW?

  But it is quietly agreed among the Ministries and Parliament that this is best. Farrier knows too much about too many. An open courtroom could quickly become too open. Farrier must be tried by a panel of masked judges, and a useful verdict must be obtained.

  Kindalana cannot be touched, of course, she is under diplomatic seal, and in a sense this whole affair has only added to her cachet: after so many years as an untouchable, unimpeachable humanitarian, doing her bafflingly modest work in a slum, suddenly the ice is cracked, she has scandal, she has spark, she has a little sensual allure. So, a thousand powerful men (and not a few women) whisper in their cloakrooms, the Amity Prince does put out. . . .

  And of course the hunt is on for the child.

  Farrier himself writes letters from his cell in the Regicide Oubliette. Items of comfort and admiration appear around him like mold. He receives no visitors but a great many letters.

  “We should kill him,” Yawa says.

  She paces the houseboat’s stern porch in a black cotton suit while Baru treads water in the river below her. “He’s too dangerous. He can sway too much of this city, Baru, he knows people. We don’t. We’ll never have what he has—the old boys in their clubs, the smoking circles, the lounges.”

  “That’s why we can’t be rid of him yet,” Baru says. She’s been up nights wrestling with this thought, too, kill him, kill him now. . . . “He has the influence to make this concern work. Yawa, if he were our pawn he would give us nations.”

  “That’s why he has to die.” Yawa flicks bird shit off the railing, into the river. “The longer he lives, the more people are going to remember that they can’t do without him.”

  “Do you really think killing him will make up for anything?”

  They look at each other, Baru in her linens, Yawa in her sherwani and button-up and trousers, and they both grin horribly.

  “All right,” Baru admits, “it’ll make me feel great. But if he dies it means his vendettas will be released. All his files on Hesychast will go public. If Hesychast falls, your brother . . .”

  “I know how the game is played.” Yawa tugs off her bird shit–tainted glove and extracts a mint machine from her pocket. One click of the razor slices a pellet from the glass magazine and feeds it fresh into her palm. “I’m frightened of our current position. I was directly involved in Farrier’s downfall. That makes me visible. There are other cryptarchs out there, unknown to us, who may be maneuvering even now. . . .”

  “Exactly why we need him alive,” Baru says, regretfully. “I possess him. He possesse
s enough leverage to deter those others. If we kill him, we kill ourselves.”

  Yawa bites down on the mint pellet too hard, and her teeth clack. “Do you really think you can control him, Baru?”

  She treads water and thinks about this. “Yes,” she says. “He’s just been betrayed by the love of his life. Or, at least, the woman he thought he loved.”

  “So?”

  “I know only one person who was strong enough to withstand that betrayal unbowed. Not two. Only one.”

  Yawa growls like a trapped coyote. She sees Baru’s logic. “He’s not stronger than my brother. He’s not. And my brother broke.”

  “And,” Baru says, finishing the chain, “he’s not a tenth as strong as Hu.”

  But why?”

  Cairdine Farrier weeps into his overgrown beard. “Why, Baru, why waste it all? Oh, I know the temptation, I know what it’s like to nurse a grudge, but even if you wanted to betray me, even if you wanted my ruin, why were you so stupid about it?”

  She sits in silence outside the bars and does not answer.

  “Why?” He tears at his beard. The strands come out bloodless, curled, faded at the tips. “Why did you do it? For money? For a trade monopoly that you won’t even control? You don’t know business! You don’t know how swiftly you’ll lose it all! There are shareholders to please, and markets to mind, and parliamins to bribe, and you’ve never done any of it before. In ten years you’ll have nothing—with me you could’ve ruled the whole Ashen Sea—”

  “Lapetiare’s revolution began with a single act,” Baru says. “Sometimes one voice is enough.”

  “No, it didn’t begin that way! It didn’t! That’s a schoolchild’s lie! The revolution was decades in the making, it was about money, it was about the army’s frustration and the king’s poor choice of ministers and his refusal to yield certain privileges, it wasn’t just a mob standing up one day and deciding to—”

  He checks himself, and sinks back into the frame chair the prison has allowed him. His eyes are like shattered fortresses, emptied of provisions, left to crumble.

  “Why. Just tell me why.”

  “Because I hate you.”

  He laughs once. “You hate me? You hate me? Everything I did for you, the school, the accountant’s post, the chance to prove yourself . . . how could you hate me for it? No, no”—he shakes his head, he kneads his temples, fingers trembling—“I can’t believe you’d be so foolish as to cast aside your future out of hate. Someone’s tricked you, Baru. Was it Hesychast? Did Hesychast offer you something, some Clarified abomination. . . .”

  “It was the women,” Baru says.

  Farrier growls low in his throat. “No . . .”

  “Tain Hu showed me such such delights. . . .” Baru tips back her head, eyes hooded, lips pursed, a mockery of passion. Farrier looks nauseous. “There are things a woman can experience, Farrier, which a man will never know. You can’t imagine the ecstasy. One night with the duchess and I would’ve given up anything, everything to feel that again. Oh, you poor man, you poor stupid man, floundering between Kindalana’s thighs for something you’ll never find. And all you did was make your own downfall.”

  Cairdine Farrier closes his eyes. “Well,” he says, hollowly. “You’ve set aside a few more principles, I see.”

  “When did you do it?” Baru jeers. “When did you sire the child? Did you think, when you had your cock inside her, that she was yielding to you? Surrendering like her people surrendered after Kutulbha? When you came, did you think you were filling her up with your future, like you wanted to fill up the whole Oriati—”

  “Stop!” Farrier roars. “Baru, what’s wrong with you!” A sudden hope beneath the black brows: “Did Hesychast drug you? Is that it? He’s poisoned you, hasn’t he! You have to serve him or you won’t get the antidote!”

  “Oh, he’s not the one who poisoned me,” Baru whispers. “You wanted me to hurt, didn’t you? You made my family hurt, and you made them hurt me. You made Aminata hurt, and you made her hurt me. You wanted me to know that whenever I strayed from your path I’d suffer. That was the Farrier Process, wasn’t it? You wanted me to live in your story. Well, you’ve failed. I’ve always wanted to fuck women, Farrier, and no matter what you do, I always will.”

  He clings to his chair and stares at her wild-eyed. “It’s not possible. You understood the consequences. You chose abstinence. You chose what you valued over what your body wanted. You learned so well. . . .”

  “I hate you,” she says, calmly. “I hated you when you took my home. I hated you when you put me into that sick school. I’ve hated you so long, Farrier, you and all you stand for, you pathetic dribble of a man.”

  He is trembling now. He keeps trying to smile confidently and his lips will not do it.

  “I’m going to end this city,” Baru tells him. “I’m going to end your entire Republic. In a thousand years they’ll remember you as a footnote to my rise. A little prologue, oft elided. Farrier, who thought he ruled Baru Cormorant.”

  “You’re mad. You can’t ‘end’ the Republic. Not even a real Emperor could do it.” He groans. “Oh, Baru, what have I done? I thought you wouldn’t end like Shir. I hoped you wouldn’t end like Shir. I loved you, child, like a daughter. . . .”

  “Daughter!” she barks. “That’s what gave you away, you shit! The way you treated me. The delicacy, the care, the pride, the insufferable modesty. Do you know what kind of ‘father’ lets people threaten to circumcise his daughter? No father at all! A rapist. An ally to rapists. A man who makes the world safer for rapists everywhere he goes. You’re going to be brought to justice, Farrier. Not Falcrest’s justice. I’ve a fairer hand to deliver your verdict. Tain Hu’s justice for you, Cairdine Farrier! The woman I loved! The woman who begged me to murder her, just so I could get to you!”

  He knuckles his hollowed eyes. With gentle bitterness, he says, “I see I’ve lost the Reckoning of Ways.”

  “I should say you have,” Baru purrs.

  “Well. You’ll go on a few years, Baru, but without me you’ll fail. And I will survive this. I’ll be there when you’ve wasted yourself, to try to repair the damage you’ve done. There’ll be other bright young girls. There’ll be other chances. No more tribadists, though. Those I’ll have to leave to Hesychast. And your father Salm, well . . .”

  He trails off, so that he can watch her horror. But he’s disappointed. She’s not scared of what he can do to Salm. She’s ahead of him there, too.

  “When you’re dead,” Baru says, with rising delight, a wicked joy, “I’m going to take a pass at your secret daughter. I’ll have her to a very charming dinner. I’ll flirt with her over iced vodka and blackberries. I’ll compliment her on her poise. When we get up to leave, I’ll slip an arm around her waist and ask her if she’d like to see my houseboat. And who knows what’ll happen? Who knows? Not you. You’ll be in a little garret, writing letters for me, selling yourself piece by piece so I’ll let you live another day.”

  There are footsteps outside. Her time is up; the constables are coming to end “Wuxa Rin’s” clerical visit. She rises to go. One last shot: “I’m going to have your books reprinted, too. With corrections. I’ll attribute them to you.”

  “I have your father—” he says, desperately. “I have your father Salm. If my codes don’t reach his captors once a year, he’ll die!”

  “Shir is on her way to rescue him,” Baru says. “Oh, yes, I turned her. I did what you couldn’t, Cairdine Farrier.”

  Baru looks down at this man who squeezed her life into shape. She checks herself for stray emotions. Her books are clean. She has paid all her debts, said all she needed to say.

  He just sits there frowning, pulling at his beard.

  “If you don’t send your passwords,” she tells him, “to defer all your vendettas and keep your organization running, then the verdict is going to go against you. And if you kill yourself, Farrier, just to let all those vendettas go . . . remember that I won’t be touched.”
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  “Because you killed Tain Hu,” he says, viciously.

  “Because she volunteered for execution,” Baru corrects him. “I hadn’t even thought of it until she presented her plan. Isn’t that incredible, Farrier? She’s the one who gave me the idea. You thought I’d saved Falcrest when I killed her. But the only reason I killed her is that she volunteered. You’ve been outmaneuvered by a dead tribadist. You pathetic fuck.”

  It is an unseasonably cold night when she emerges from the Regicide Oubliette by a back way and descends to the service canal.

  She thinks of the Stakhieczi, and of Svir up in the high heights of the Wintercrests, trying to arrange a marriage. She thinks of Heingyl Ri, officially in mourning, who she will have to marry, in at least a passing sense. She thinks of Vultjag under occupation, of the bubonic plague waiting for release against the Stakhieczi invaders, of Kettling simmering in the green jungle holes that give the disease its name, and maybe in the forests of Isla Cauteria, carried by bats released from Eternal.

  There is so much left to do, so much that can go wrong. All that has happened so far is still within the confines of Falcrest’s power. Blackmail, trade, markets, and maneuvers—the Brain was right. They are all in a sense affirmations of the Masquerade’s supremacy.

  But Baru has set her course. Tau-indi thinks she might succeed. Kindalana thinks she might. Even the Brain thinks she might: if only as provocation to her people. That’s a nice quorum of support.

  “How was it?” Yawa asks her.

  “Cathartic. I told him too much. But can you blame me?” She shivers. “I’m fucking frigid.”

  “Me too,” Yawa says, dryly, “if you can imagine it.” She has been waiting a while.

  “Do you want to come over to my boat? I have a shocking number of liquors and wines.”

  “No, no,” Yawa says, with obviously false absentmindedness. “I have work to do.”

  “You’re turning down drinks on my boat?”

  “It’s rather exposed,” Yawa says, critically. “Out there on the river. You should avoid it, at least till I can have it secured. You have no idea what kind of favors a Nemesis Judge can ask of the constabulary. In fact, why don’t you come to the Court? I can show you some interesting things I’ve found in the files.”