The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  The Cancrioth was born on the principle that life had value. At first, though, it was merely market value.

  They began as councilors to the Paramountcies’ many rival rulers. Some of them were paid scholars, some were educated slaves, some were foreign mystics and seers. All were employed to bring advantage to their masters by finding ways to better work the slaves. The problem of disease was at the center of the work, and that led to the problem of death. The councilors were already fascinated by this enigma, especially those who worshiped the moon god Mzu (Musu in those days), who was killed every day by the sun and every month by the world’s shadow, and eternally reborn.

  If the moon could die and live again, could people?

  Forbidden to speak to the servants of other rulers, desperate nonetheless to pool their efforts, these councilors resorted to secret letters and clandestine meetings to make progress in the Work Against Death. For decades this cabal made no progress, and time hunted their ranks.

  It was Alu, lamchild of a priest-linguist, who suggested the method of home-group and journey-group that would revolutionize the world. Alu wanted a better way to test the medicinal effect of jungle plants. Alu knew a story about twin princesses, one of whom went out into the world to journey, one of whom stayed at home in the palace to study, each swearing to learn whether worldliness or scholarship made a better queen. The story was about the value of a monarch connected to the people and the seasons: but Alu extracted a different lesson from it.

  The traveling sister had to leave a twin at home so she could learn how her journey changed her. How could you know if a medicine was successful without a group of untreated slaves “at home”? Maybe your new drug was no better than rest and bed care. If you were going to bring a plant to your lord as a panacea, if you were going to ask your lord to spend farmland and labor raising that plant, you had better be damn well sure it worked.

  And it did work. Alu’s method worked. It condensed the whole Work Against Death, the entire menagerie of apotropaic magic, poisonous brews, and ritual surgeries, into a rigorous grid of tests that filtered the gold from the water.

  When their masters saw the progress their councilors had made against dysentery, pneumonia, tuberculosis, fever, and all the other evils, they rewarded their councilors with freedom. Freedom to communicate. To recruit workers. To dispatch expeditions. To order the conquest of certain areas, not only for slave-taking but for access to plants, texts, and traditions.

  And the masters, too, became fascinated by the Work Against Death. If there were medicines against pneumonia or fever . . . were there medicines against age?

  Encouraged by their own success, full of dreams and ambitions, the councilors began to treat everything with Alu’s method. They sifted the Paramountcies’ slaves for the folklore and myths of five hundred languages. Collated the stories to discover commonalities that might point to lost cities and the boneyards of ancient war. Charted the stars, the shape of their own continent, and the outline of distant lands across unthinkable tracts of sea.

  It was Incrisiath, the Brain herself, who discovered the uranium lands, the hot caves, and the secret fire.

  The saw cut through the pig’s neck and into air.

  Half the pig fell wetly on the canvas below. Baru was overcome by vertigo and confusion: plunging back through all that history to a pig lying on canvas. Why was there an entire pig lying here? Hadn’t they been sawing it in half?

  “Baru,” the Brain said, “you are bewildered.”

  “Yes. Damn.” She tapped the right side of her nose. “I have a wound on my brain. I forget about things on my right. Sometimes I forget I have the wound at all.”

  “It must be hard not to trust your own thoughts.”

  “Yes,” Baru admitted.

  “But it can be a good thing, too, to be reminded you’re fallible. We’re all blind in our own ways. I choose that word carefully, knowing many great thinkers without eyesight. Everyone has a blindness, somewhere. Very few remember it.” She offered Baru the loop of intestines from her shoulder. “Hold these while I get the halves into tubs. They go below to chill.”

  Baru balked at the viscera. “Er—”

  “No shit.”

  “Your pardon?”

  “There’s no shit in the intestines. We starve the pigs before the slaughter. Soon we clean these out and pound them with salt. We make sausages.”

  Baru took the noosed-up guts. They smelled of Aurdwynn spring. “You don’t have anyone to do this for you?”

  “I have you!”

  “But no attendants? No servants?”

  “Oh, any little lord can make her people do scut work. That’s dominance, and it’s brittle.” The Brain knelt, grunting, to get the pig by its two trotters. “But if you do your own work, and do it very well, they come to you with questions. As it is with Akhena. And if you answer well enough, not just about what they should do but why they should do it . . . then they learn to think as you think, and to make the choices you would choose. And you lead them without a word, from a thousand miles away, because you are with them in the shape of their thoughts.”

  “It’s like the riddle of the three ministers!” How thrilling that her own thoughts paralleled an immortal’s! What solutions this woman might have discovered, what peerless insight, without the mortal calendar to cut short her work! “Do you know that riddle? It’s about power. . . .”

  “Not by that name.” The Brain grunted as she dropped the pig—no, damn it, half the pig—into a tub of salt. “Do you think about power?”

  “Often . . .” Baru felt like she were being walked around the edge of a pit, waiting to be pushed in.

  “I think about thoughts. The parts of them we can see. The parts we can’t. I try to imagine what’s really happening, beyond our thoughts and memories. What is the far side of the moon like, I ask myself? Is it waiting to be formed? Is it already in existence? Do we discover it as it truly is, when we go there, or do we force it into the shape of our own moon? Here—look.” She produced the pig’s severed head and struck it with a cleaver. The white brain revealed itself like the center of a halved pomegranate. The hog had been exsanguinated: everything that should have been red was pale now. “Everything we are, everything we know of the world, is in this flesh. We cannot see truth, we cannot smell it, we cannot read it from a book. We can only get at the symbols our brains make. Even our sight is a mirage: I have visions enough to know that. But visions never make my sight more true. I can delude my sight with dreams, I can move it further from the truth. But I know no way to do the opposite. I cannot clear my eyes of the veils they were born with. Something is out there, Baru. Something real. How can we get at it? Can we have the opposite of a vision, the antithesis of a dream? Something that husks our consciousness open and spills us out into reality? Maybe that is what gods are. Maybe gods have no consciousness because they do not need it. Maybe that is why they don’t answer prayers. They cannot conceive of the world except as it is.”

  “I don’t understand,” Baru admitted. “If we are all deceived by our thoughts, but in a way which lets us act sensibly and consistently, are we deceived at all? You might as well call language nonsense, just because a word is not the same as the thought it names.”

  The Brain shrugged. “It troubles me for centuries. I keep a diary.”

  “I hate that.” The mason dust helped Baru laugh. Intestines jiggled on her shoulder. “I hate not understanding. You can’t know everything? Not even you?”

  “Especially not me. Only a god knows everything, I think.” The Brain looked up keenly. “What would you do if you were a god, Baru? Would you destroy Falcrest?”

  The turn caught Baru off guard and she choked on the answer.

  “Don’t be shy. Tau tells me your story, remember?” The Brain pitched one half of the pig’s brain to a bucket, missed, and, with a sigh, went to pick it up. “Even if I go to Falcrest and report you, who believes me? Your purpose is to go among Falcrest’s enemies and entice
them.” She lifted the bucket and carried it to the ship’s rail. Her arms were wiry. “Ra asks me why Falcrest gives a foreign girl so much power. I tell her they do it to destroy the solidarity of race. They want the Maia and the Stakhieczi and the Oriati and all the rest of us to know that anyone can wear the mask. Even one of our own. So speak sedition, Baru. There’s nothing to fear.”

  Baru imagined herself sitting upon the throne in the Waterfall Keep in Vultjag. She had refused the Necessary King from that throne. She could draw on that same power for the courage to tell the Brain the truth. It was hard to separate the memory of that throne from the Emperor’s proxy seat in the Elided Keep: but one of them warmed her, and the other chilled.

  It was so hard. She had so many layers of caution set in place. So many living lies fixed in place to die and calcify.

  But, by mason dust or by sheer need, she managed it:

  “If I had my way, I would see Falcrest destroyed.”

  “Falcrest the city?”

  “The Imperial Republic of Falcrest. The Masquerade. The entire civilization. I’d see Aphalone written only on tombstones.”

  “I see.” The Brain stuck her finger into the remaining half of the pig’s brain like she was going after earwax. “How do you handle the butchery?”

  “What?”

  “How do you butcher an empire? Have you seen one die, before?”

  “I’ve read about the Cheetah Palaces, and the—”

  “Oh, never mind the books. Historians are always writing down what they see happening. The same mistake my friend the Eye makes. What happens is always different: but the reasons it happens, those are usually the same.

  “I see it happen. I see it again and again.” Her voice took on the accent of some ancient tongue. “The weather changes in the same years the sea people come to raid. A rebellion breaks out and a plague spreads in the chaos, or a war empties the treasury just as a weak ruler falls. Too many things go wrong at the same time. The empire fails to make the only two things that can sustain an empire’s existence. Conquest, or commerce.

  “Without force or finance to hold the empire together, it begins to fragment. The administrators withdraw their power, and the warriors carve up what they leave behind. The elite class vanishes, overthrown or reduced to common poverty: there is no one to tend the cheetahs, after the Palaces fall, and the cats cry in their crumbling halls. The shattered fragments of the empire can no longer specialize. The cities cannot get food from the farms, the farms cannot get goods and security from the cities, everyone must produce everything they need locally. Starving people leave the cities, carrying disease. Without a food surplus, there can be no priests, which means no temples, no more organized belief, maybe no more records or writing. People who cannot get what they need by commerce turn to raiding and war. The survivors diminish into the wilderness, and forget. It is a slow, complicated thing.

  “How could you alone make all that happen?”

  “I could do what you’ve done here,” Baru said, harshly. “What you’ve done on Kyprananoke.”

  The Brain’s hand was in the pig’s brain, scooping. “What have I done here?”

  “You released the worst disease in recorded history on innocents.”

  “I am giving them a chance to use their own bodies as weapons. Do you deny them the chance to fight the enemy on its own terms?”

  “You call that fighting on Falcrest’s terms?”

  “Yes, absolutely I do. Falcrest uses smallpox on your home in Taranoke. Isn’t it justice for Taranoke to use pox against Falcrest? Even if it means sacrificing your own bodies? Haven’t you given up your fingers, there?” The Brain tilted her head, bird-curious. “The law of talion, Baru. An eye for an eye. Should we not do to them as they do to us?”

  Baru wanted to ask why Kyprananoke had been chosen for this demonstration, rather than Taranoke. But she already knew. Kyprananoke was smaller and more isolated, visited mostly by pirates, smugglers, and unfortunates. Kettling on Taranoke would go everywhere. Kettling on Kyprananoke might be contained.

  Always the price rolled down on the smaller.

  Tain Hu would never collaborate with the Brain.

  Never.

  But maybe Baru would.

  The Brain finally got what she was digging for. The front lobe of the pig’s brain came free in her fist.

  “This is the best tool we have,” she said, turning the gray fat to show Baru, “to understand our own brains. Apes’ brains are more like ours. But they’re dangerous to work with, and sacred to many of our neighbors. We prefer pigs. There’s something in pig flesh that’s . . . kin to us.

  “We poison the pigs. We starve and strangle them. We drive nails into them, we trepan them, we cut pieces out of them. And by studying what they lose when we take a piece of them away, we discover what that piece does. Do you know what we’ve found, Baru?”

  “What?”

  “The brain survives. I see men shot through and through the head live long enough to die of fever. I see children with nothing but water in their skulls grow up to be mathematicians. I see brains pierced by arrows, fishing hooks, mine shrapnel: all of them healed in time. I meet you, Baru, struck in the head but perfectly clever. Poison the brain, and sometimes you just . . . change it. Does destroying Falcrest really destroy its empire?”

  Analogy games were easy to bend: “Brains,” Baru ventured, “don’t survive Kettling.”

  The Brain laughed. “Well said. Come, help me with the intestines.”

  The guts had to be pared clean of fat, then washed through, end to end, with saltwater from a lever pump. Then they were cuffed and turned inside out by a trick so clever it made Baru laugh: you dangled the intestine straight up and down, like a sock from a laundry line, and pulled the bottom inside-out so it made a kind of bowl. Then you filled that bowl with water, and let the weight of that water draw the intestine down so it everted.

  “You don’t wear gloves,” Baru said, with some discomfort. “This is raw meat. . . .”

  “Ah, it’s only flesh.”

  “You could get sick.”

  “That’s what Falcrest teaches you to fear, isn’t it?” The Brain poured out handfuls of coarse salt to pound into the intestines. “They think the Oriati are spiritually diseased. That Mana Mane’s whole pleasant notion of trim . . . traps them, somehow.”

  It was exactly what Cairdine Farrier had told Baru. Imagine an idea like a disease. It spreads because it makes people happy. It makes them happy by convincing them to be content with what they have . . . can you imagine a greater threat to our destiny? A more terrible fate than pleasant, blissful decay?

  The Brain sighed. “I think they’re right.”

  “What?”

  “Trim. An ethics for children in a world of child-killers. Look at Tau-indi Bosoka. A pathetic caricature of Oriati nobility, full of spiritual advice and incapable of cunning. What’s left of them, now?” The Brain’s fists rose and fell, slapping salt into meat. “I really do find the Mbo beautiful. But its time is finished. Something new takes its place. Something that can fight.”

  Baru heard Cairdine Farrier’s voice again. We can save the people. But their history, their traditions, their literature . . . it’s all tainted.

  She hadn’t expected the Cancrioth to agree with him.

  “But you do want to fight Falcrest,” she pressed.

  “Oh, absolutely. Do you know why I fear Falcrest, Baru? I see many nations, many kinds of power. I fear their kind the most.”

  “Why?” Baru asked, with a student’s hunger.

  “Guess. Unuxekome Ra tells me they call you a ‘savant.’ ” The Brain lifted her chin and looked down at her, owlishly, like a severe schoolmistress. “Why would I, thousand-year Incrisiath, alive in all the dawns I have ever seen, rise from my studies to make war on mortal empire?”

  “Well . . .” Baru thought it out. Salt crackled beneath her fingertips. “If you feel the Cancrioth itself must act, then it’s because the scope of the t
hreat is obvious only to the immortal. Someone who has watched the great sweep of history.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And yet the threat must be urgent, or you wouldn’t come out of hiding. You have to act now, as soon as possible, because the danger will only grow.”

  “So it is.”

  “You think Falcrest is going to win, don’t you? They’re going to rule the world.”

  In her dreams at Sieroch, and in her hallucinations after her seizure on Helbride, she had seen Falcrest as rivers of molten gold and porcelain flowing across the world. The shape of the machine of empire building itself. Remorseless because it recognized no value except the ability to make more of itself.

  “I do.” The older woman rattled as she moved: a metallic sound beneath her butcher’s smock. “They understand the secret of power, Baru.”

  “Which one?”

  “The ability to improve one’s own power, no matter how slowly, triumphs in the long run over any other power. Time magnifies small gains into great advantages. If you are hungry, then it is better, in the long run, to plant one seed than to steal a pound of fruit. Falcrest applies this logic in all their work. They do not conquer. They make themselves irresistible as trading partners. They do not keep their wealth in a royal hoard. They send it out among their people, stored in banks and concerns, where it helps the whole empire grow. They do not wait to treat the sick. They inoculate against the disease before it spreads. All their power sacrifices brute strength in the present for the ability to capture a piece of the future.”

  “Like the futures contracts,” Baru murmured. She’d taught Hu to use those contracts. “Another Falcresti invention.”

  “Are you sure? Falcrest likes to infantilize the Oriati, and to take credit for our inventions.”

  “They take everything,” Baru said with bitter admiration. “They won’t stop until they have the world. Everyone will be Incrastic. Everything will be priced by the market. Every word will be Aphalone. Unless someone destroys them now, strikes with all the force they can muster, to choke the baby in its cradle before it grows.”