The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

by Daniel Abraham

  In the yard, Enen and Yardem Hane leaned against a low stone wall, talking with a Timzinae girl old enough to have a woman’s figure but still with the light brown scales of youth. Yardem’s ears shifted toward them as they approached and Enen lifted her soft-pelted chin. The girl turned, caught sight of Isadau, and trotted up to meet them.

  “Magistra,” the girl said.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific, dear,” Isadau said. “Maha, this is Magistra Cithrin bel Sarcour from the new Porte Oliva branch. Cithrin, this is my cousin Merid’s daughter Maha.”

  Cithrin nodded her head and the girl matched her before turning back to Isadau.

  “Papa said you should come when you can,” she said, then leaned closer and shifted to a whisper. “He’s got information about the lemon crop.”

  Isadau nodded and let Cithrin’s arm go free.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to meet you back at the house,” she said.

  “That’s fine,” Cithrin said. The girl took Magistra Isadau’s hand, and the pair of them walked briskly off through the gate and out to the uncurbed stone-paved road. Yardem and Enen came forward.

  “Is all well, ma’am?” Yardem asked in his soft low voice.

  “Apparently,” Cithrin said. “But I couldn’t start to tell you why.”

  Enen scratched her collarbone, setting the beads woven into her pelt clicking. “I had that experience of them too. Timzinae are the worst. Haaverkin or Jasuru—even Tralgu, if you don’t mind my saying it, Yardem—you deal with them and you at least know you’re in for something odd. Timzinae seem just like anyone right up until they don’t, and then who the hell knows what they’re thinking?”

  The city was low all around them, the wide streets with stretches of grass and low scrub between them and the houses making it seem less a city than a village grown vast. Horses and mules drew large carts, men small ones. The air smelled of the sea but also of turned earth and damp. Above them, the sky was a blue so intense it was hard to look at and the sun glowed like a great burning coin. Cithrin crossed her arms as she walked, realizing only after she’d done it that she missed Magistra Isadau’s touch and was trying to make up for its loss. She dropped her arms to her sides.

  “Where’s Roach?” she asked. “Wasn’t he on duty today?”

  “Took his shift for him, gave him a day’s liberty,” Yardem said. “He has a nephew getting wed.”

  “Really?” Cithrin said. “I didn’t know he had family in Suddapal.”

  “Some,” Yardem said.

  “He never mentioned them to me.”

  “Don’t know that he felt it was his place to, ma’am,” Yardem said. Enen cleared her throat in a way that sounded more for preparation than for comfort. Cithrin turned to look at her. The Kurtadam woman’s face was masked by the oily seal-like fur of her pelt, but the discomfort showed through in her eyes.

  “I was just thinking, Magistra,” Enen said. “You might not want to call him that while we’re here.”

  “Who? Roach?” Cithrin said. “Isn’t that his name?”

  “His name’s Halvill,” Yardem said. “Halvill rol Kausol. Roach was just what people called him in Porte Oliva. Sort of the way people might call a Southling ‘Eyehole’ or a Kurtadam ‘Clicker.’”

  “Oh,” Cithrin said. “I didn’t know it bothered him.”

  Yardem shrugged. “He’s never said it does. He’s not the sort that makes trouble.”

  “Only if other people hear you saying it, they might take it wrong is all,” Enen said.

  “I understand,” Cithrin said, trying to recall how many times she’d called the little Timzinae guard by name and who had been present when she had. “Thank you.”

  Cithrin had spent most of her life being alone. As a girl, she had been the odd one of her cohort, fitting as poorly with the children of nobility as the urchins who ran in the streets. When she left Vanai, she had adopted false identities, from boy carter to agent of the Medean bank, which had required a certain distance from the world to remain plausible. The work of banking itself was isolated. Simply being known as the woman who could lift a poor man to wealth so long as he was wise, prudent, and lucky—or destroy the highborn if they were prodigal and weak—made her a race of one. She was a banker, and so of course she was alone.

  Still, the isolation she felt in the compound at Suddapal was unlike the cultivated distances she’d experienced before. Here, she could retreat to her room, close the door behind her, and feel like a prisoner waiting for the magistrate’s justice, or else she could go out into the compound and be greeted and welcomed to half a dozen conversations and endeavors from quilting to shoeing horses to sitting with the children of the family and improvising poetry, and never once feel she was truly at home. Being alone in her room, trapped by the walls, was unpleasant. Being alone in the midst of a group that seemed to go out of its way to make her welcome was worse. The only solace she could take was the branch’s books and kitchen’s wine cellar, and so over weeks, she had become a citizen of both.

  The evening meals came late, the wide hall with Magistra Isadau and her siblings and their families and friends often making room for twenty people. Afterward, the diners would withdraw to the yard or to private rooms. The sound of lutes and drums and living voices lifted in harmony were as much a part of the after-meal as sweet wines and cups of chocolate. Cithrin, though, excused herself from the merriment, took a bottle or two of the rich red wine the house imported from Pût, and took some ledger or company book from Magistra Isadau’s office to her room to read like a girl lulling herself to sleep with a volume of poetry. The wine calmed the tightness in her body, the play of numbers and agreements occupied her mind until the music of the house didn’t bother her and the cold of the night drove her under her blankets and, at last, to sleep.

  Except that some nights, sleep would not come. On those, she would rise, dress in her dark wools, and walk the halls of the compound. There were always a few men and women still awake or else woken early for the next day. The capacity of the Timzinae to go without sleep was remarkable to her. On one such night, she found Yardem sitting at the watch fire alone, staring at the stars scattered above them and listening to the first crickets of spring.

  She looked up, tracing the new constellations she knew. Stars were not her passion.

  “Evening, ma’am,” he said. “You’re up late.”

  “I suppose,” she said, her words careful and deliberately unslurred. “You are too.”

  “Am,” Yardem said and flicked one jingling ear. It might have been only her imagination, but the Tralgu’s wide, canine face seemed wistful. “Seems we’re settling in well.”

  “Yes,” Cithrin said. “Magistra Isadau is a very intelligent woman. From everything I saw at the market house, I’d have thought the bank would be barely turning a profit, but she manages to do quite well.”

  “I was thinking more of the household,” Yardem said.

  “They’re very kind,” Cithrin said. “I’ve never been around a real family before. To see the way they treat each other … the way they treat us, for that. They’re all so open and loving and accepting. It’s like we’ve always belonged here and just never knew it.”

  In the trees at the compound’s edge, an owl launched itself up against the stars, a shadow moving on darkness. Yardem traced its arc with eyes and ears, and Cithrin followed it by following him. The silence between them was calm, companionable. Cithrin put her small hand over the back of his.

  “I hate it here,” she said. “I have never hated anyplace as much as here.”

  “I know.”

  “It is obvious? I try not to let it show.”

  “I’ve known you a while,” Yardem said.

  “They’re all so kind, and all I can feel is how little I belong with them. Magistra Isadau? She’s like a good witch from a children’s story. She’s sweet and she’s wise and she wants the best from me, and it makes my skin crawl. I keep thinking that I wouldn’t know i
t if she hated me. God knows she’d treat me just as well.”

  A falling star streaked overhead, there and then gone.

  “I knew a man once,” Yardem said. “Good fighter, pleasant to keep watch with. The sort of man who’d have done well in a company. Might have gotten as far as running one if he’d kept at it. Only he’d spent his whole youth as a slave. He’d do well enough when we were on campaign, but when we were done and he had time and money of his own and no one telling him what to do? He didn’t know how to act.”

  “How did he deal with it?”

  “At first, the captain tried keeping him back, giving him duties even while the other men went out and drank themselves poor. Treated the boy like he was still enslaved. That worked for a time, but in the end it wasn’t enough. It took the boy a season to manage it, but the magistrates stripped his freedom and sold him to a farmer.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “Is it?”

  An insect landed on Cithrin, its legs struggling against the fine, pale hair of her forearm. She flicked it away.

  “We say our souls want joy, but they don’t,” she said. “They want what they already know, joyful or not.”

  Yardem grunted as if he’d taken a blow to the gut and pulled his hand away from her to scratch an itch she doubted was really there.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”

  “Should.”

  “But you can’t.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “The war, partly. The word in the trade has it that Antea is stretched tight as a drumskin. Wore themselves thin last year, and on the edge of falling apart. Except there’s other stories too.”

  “You can’t say that and not tell,” Cithrin said. “I’d fire you.”

  “They’re saying that the spirits of the dead march with the Antean army. And that the birds and dogs all start running away before their army comes the way they do from a fire. Makes it sound as if there’s something uncanny about the Lord Regent, like he’s some sort of cunning man.”

  “Geder’s not a cunning man,” Cithrin said. “He’s … he’s just a man of too little wisdom and too much power.”

  “You sound sad for him.”

  “No,” she said. “He burned my city. Killed the people who raised and looked after me. I lived with him for weeks. Took comfort in him. I don’t think there’s a word for what he and I are to each other.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “You took comfort in him,” Yardem said. “For some people—”

  “He got anxious, I didn’t say no. What’s love got to do with that?”

  “Nothing,” Yardem agreed. “Only there are people who don’t see it that way.”

  “They’re fools,” Cithrin said, without rancor. And then, “You said partly. What’s the other part?”

  “I don’t know where the captain is. What he’s doing. There’s no word of him anywhere. It … bothers me.”

  “I wish he was still here too.”

  “Not sure I said that, ma’am,” Yardem said ruefully. “I’d hoped to know where he went and what he did. The captain and I didn’t part on the best terms. People who betray him don’t tend to end well, and there’s a good chance he feels I betrayed him.”

  “Then he’s a fool too,” Cithrin said.

  Yardem didn’t answer.

  Geder

  Well, you know how it is,” Geder’s father said, scratching at his belly. “Rivenhalm in winter. Spent a fair part of the season listening to the ice crack. Not a great deal more going on. Though this might amuse you, hey? You remember old Jeyup the weirkeeper? The one with the crooked nose?”

  “Yes, of course,” Geder said, though the truth of it was that he had only a vague impression of a tall man with dark hair and an unfortunate voice. The room in which they sat now was less than halfway up the Kingspire, and still higher than any other tower in Camnipol. He’d thought that the view might impress his father, and perhaps it had. It was hard to tell.

  “Well, just before thaw, he was out cutting ice away from the weir. Making repairs. Only he’d misjudged the ice. Fell right through, half died from the cold of it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Geder said, and glanced at the great spiral stair of rosewood dressed in gold that led to the floor above. The floor where Basrahip and his pet adventurer Dar Cinlama were meeting even now. He hoped to catch sight of the great priest as he descended, but the only form on the stairway was a servant in ceremonial robes trotting off on some errand or another. Geder leaned back in his seat.

  “Don’t be,” his father said, “because that’s just the thing. Good came of it after all. The cunning man was away in the east seeing to a man who’d had a tree fall on him, so until he got back old Jeyup had Arrien, the butcher’s widow, coming to nurse him along. And they married at first thaw, if you can picture that!”

  Geder’s father slapped his knee in merriment that invited Geder to join in. Geder did smile, pretending pleasure he didn’t actually feel. Rivenhalm had been his home for the whole length of his childhood and the early part of his time as a man, but the fine points of it seemed as vague as someone else’s memories. He remembered the weir and its keeper, the long path behind the manor house that led to the cave where he’d hide in the summer, the smell of the library, the small niche his father kept always lit by a single candle in memory of Geder’s mother, and those tiny fragments would be rich and full of meaning. But they had no context.

  “So,” Geder’s father said, “tell me. What translations are you working on these days?”

  “I’m not really,” Geder said. “You know. Being Lord Regent. Running the empire. The war makes it hard to have the time, really.”

  Lehrer’s face fell a bit, and Geder felt he’d said the wrong thing.

  “Of course,” his father said. “It’s just that it was so important to you when you were a boy. I hoped you’d be able … Well, that’s the world, isn’t it? We do what we have to do.”

  A long, low, rolling laughter echoed in the distance. Basrahip. The urge to leap up from his seat and go up the stairs, the desire to know what had happened in the meeting was like an itch, but he also didn’t want to seem anxious. It would have been beneath his dignity, and he didn’t want Basrahip to laugh at him. He hated it when people did that.

  “I’ve, ah, I’ve kept you too long,” his father said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” Geder said. “I’m always happy to see you. As long as I’m Lord Regent, you should come by the Kingspire anytime you like. I could get you rooms here.”

  “My own rooms are fine,” Lehrer said. “They suit me.”

  He levered himself to his feet and Geder rose with him. The older man looked frailer than Geder remembered, his hair thinner, his skin more ashen. It was just the winter, Geder told himself. With the summer sun and the court season to keep him busy, his father would get his color back. They stood for a moment, both of them unsure what etiquette demanded. At last, Lerer made a little bow appropriate for the Viscount of Rivenhalm to the Lord Regent, but with an ironic smile that meant for the father and son. Geder followed his example, and then watched as his father turned and walked away. He felt a lingering sense of having failed somehow. Of having disappointed. He shouldn’t have been thinking so much about Basrahip.

  Basrahip. He glanced at the stairway, licked his lips, and started walking toward it, forcing his demeanor to be casual.

  Basrahip and Dar Cinlama stood together under an archway of pale stone. The priest was speaking too quietly for Geder to make out the words, but his huge hands were gesturing, massaging the air. Cinlama nodded his understanding and agreement, the light from his eyes casting shadows across his cheekbones. The vastly large Firstblood man and the thin, muscular Dartinae looked like a woodcut, an allegory for something more than what they actually were.

  “Well, then,” Geder sai
d, walking up to them. “All the plans are made, then, yes?”

  “Lord Regent,” Dar Cinlama said as he bowed. The amusement in the man’s voice was probably only Geder’s imagination.

  “Yes, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said, putting his hand on the Dartinae man’s shoulder. “My friend Dar and I are quite pleased. Your generosity and wisdom will bring you great rewards from the goddess.”

  Geder felt his smile curdle.

  “That’s good,” he said. “I’m pleased to hear it.”

  Cinlama made another little bow, but Basrahip frowned and Geder bit his lip. He shouldn’t have said anything. The falseness of the words would be clear as daylight to Basrahip. But then, Geder considered, that might have been why he’d said them.

  “Forgive me, friend Dar,” Basrahip said. “I must speak with Prince Geder now.”

  “No problem with that,” Dar Cinlama said, grinning happily. “I think the list of things I’ll need to prepare should keep me busy for days.”

  He bowed to Geder a third time and then trotted away, self-congratulation radiating from him like heat from a fire. Basrahip’s wide face was a mask of concern. Geder crossed his arms.

  “What troubles you, Prince Geder?” Basrahip asked, gesturing that they should step into the meeting room that priest and explorer had just abandoned.

  “All sorts of things,” Geder said. “The grain stores we’re capturing in Sarakal aren’t as rich as we’d expected. Ternigan’s saying the siege at Nus may take longer than he’d thought it would. I’ve got half a dozen decisions from the grand audience that I still need to do something about, and they’re just gnawing at me. It’s all just …”

  Geder held his hand out, trying to express his frustration and the sense of loss that words could not quite encompass. It had all come so suddenly. The sense of being the most important man in the world had been wonderful, and it had been transitory. Geder couldn’t explain it precisely. It was as if everything had been fine before Dar Cinlama had made his petition, and then tasted of ashes afterward. He could no more justify it than deny it away.