The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “A very difficult child,” an uncle said.

  “Wouldn’t stop crying,” an aunt said, “until that bird started calling, that big ugly cormorant. And she stopped crying so she could listen. Ugliest thing she could hear, and she loved it.”

  Barhu was going to sob again. “If you want me to go,” she said, “please tell me now. If you think I’m endangering all of you by coming here, by entangling you in my work—”

  “Everyone here chose to fight Falcrest.” Pinion leaned forward to catch the table’s focus. “I propose that my daughter is no longer allowed to mope about putting us in harm’s way. We are all volunteers.”

  “Not the children,” the elephant-masked man said.

  “Our children are in this war!” Pinion barked. “The war is about the children!”

  Heads nodded around the table. She turned back to Barhu. “Tell us what you’re doing. Tell us everything. Let us choose whether or not to help you.”

  “I am trying,” Barhu said, “to construct a trade route.”

  It made such sense. Falcrest had come to Taranoke to capture its trade as well as its crops; Falcrest wanted to export the labor of crop-growing to Taranoke and to concentrate the profit of trade in itself. Falcrest had always been driven by trade. Now more than ever, with the entire Ashen Sea turning profit: the Masquerade’s Suettaring merchants and the Tahari Spill’s ambitious middle classes were impatient for another opportunity to try for godhood. They had seen ordinary men become gilt with wealth a king would envy. A day laborer might earn only thirty notes a year, and a whole family could live quite comfortably for eight hundred, with a house and luxuries. But the Armada War had seen men make a hundred thousand notes, two hundred thousand, more.

  Oriati Mbo was richer than all Falcrest’s other holdings combined. If their western coast could be opened to exploitation, if the Mbo’s stranglehold on all that land and labor could be undone, the rewards would be richer still.

  The risks would be immense, of course. Ships would need to travel farther from Falcrest than ever before. They would have to negotiate (or force) passage through the Segu archipelago. They would find new tropical diseases. They would have no charts or weather almanacs to tell them when to sail and when to harbor. No hope of return for ships lost in the Black Tea Ocean.

  But with those risks would come access to so much possibility. The Ashen Sea trade ring was like a waterfall. This would be a maelstrom.

  And Barhu, with the Cancrioth in one hand, with the mountain Stakhieczi in the other, with the Emperor’s favor behind her, was the likeliest person in the world to unleash it.

  Taranoke will be at the center of the chain,” Barhu explained. “It’ll be like the old days, when—”

  “Baru,” Solit said, quietly, “we don’t trade anymore.”

  The table was not reacting with the interest Barhu had expected. “What? What do you mean?”

  “Commerce is handled by factors from Falcrest. We serve as wage or day labor, secretaries, clerks, stevedores. But not management. Never owners. Even the fishing concerns are run by colonial offices.”

  “Once I’m in position, that will change.”

  “How?” Solit asked: gently, but not too gently. “Because you made some money? It still goes to Falcrest. It may not even go to you. You’ll have savvy, well-connected people trying to take your business away from you. . . .”

  “I’ll have no competition. The Emperor Itself is going to endorse my concern as a common venture of the people. I’m going to have a complete monopoly on trade with everything west of Segu.”

  “The Emperor Itself?” the aunt at the table’s head asked, sharply. “I thought the Emperor was an amnesiac. Beyond anyone’s influence.”

  “I have ways to influence the Emperor’s decisions. I promise you.”

  Her mother was frowning like a thundercloud again, and looking out to sea.

  “What is it?” Barhu prodded.

  “When the mask came to Taranoke, they said all the same things. New markets. Better trade. All you’re offering is more of the same, Baru. More gears and levers to add to the same engine that ground us up. Maybe we get a lever to pull for our own benefit. Fine. But what about the people in this new market you’re opening, in western Oria? What will they get? Pox and flu and civil war? A chance to be worked to death in yards and plantations?” She shook her head. “Water flows downhill, child. Pouring more water won’t change that.”

  “With enough time, water changes the shape of the river, ma.”

  “Well,” Pinion grumbled, “it still flows downhill.”

  “Listen, making money isn’t the end of this project. It’s the beginning.”

  “How?” the elephant-masked uncle asked.

  “I . . .” She had not wanted to say this. “I can’t tell you. I have to keep the full plan secret.”

  “Why?” her mother asked, warily.

  “If anyone suspects you’re working with me—” Fear bubbled up like heartburn. She’d told herself once that she needed a blade for a spine, so that if she bent from her purpose, she would be cut. Her parents were that blade. If someone seized them, she would be disemboweled.

  She lost her thoughts for a moment. Someone said, “No one can suspect you’re working with us? Then there will be no Taranoki involved in your plan to save Taranoke?”

  “There can’t be,” she insisted. “I have to seem completely estranged. Even from you, Mother, Father. I have to seem like I’d treat your deaths as a minor inconvenience. I’ve gone to . . . to great lengths to create that impression.”

  “So take the carpets,” the head aunt said. “Have yourself exiled. That would make your distaste for your heritage more credible, wouldn’t it?”

  Pinion and Solit shouted “No!” almost together. The table burst into shouting. Barhu stood there, fingertips on the wood, staring at her plate.

  The matai were right. If she were ritually cast out, if she raged and swore her eternal hatred against Taranoke and her own family, it would armor them and her against hostage-taking. Not foolproof. Not against the truly ruthless. But it would be a measure of protection.

  “Farrier,” she said.

  Silence. As if she had splayed out her right hand and cut the rest of her fingers off.

  “What about him?” The aunt at the head of the table had a vicious gleam in her eyes. “We know he was the power behind that vile school. We know he planned all of it. We read his books. My Adventure.” She spat. “I’d see him on trial, if I could. In our court.”

  “He’s going to do these things,” Barhu said. “All these things I’ve said I’ll do, he’ll do for Falcrest. But if you’ll help me here, if you’ll welcome these Cancrioth as guests, I truly believe I can find a secret which will destroy Farrier forever.”

  “What secret?” Pinion looked ready to kill. “Has he—did he dare—!”

  “No, Mother. He treats me like a daughter. Scrupulously so.”

  She looked nearly as sickened by that. “How can the Cancrioth give you this secret?”

  “There’s someone on their ship. A Prince who knew Farrier, long ago. And others who might help me. It’s all tied up, the trade route and the secret I need to learn. It’s all on that ship.” She looked at all of them, one by one, pleading. “Will you help me? All I ask is water to ease their thirst, a bazaar to occupy their time, and a private room for negotiations. Very soon the men who want to control me will take me back into their power. This is my last chance to do work against them. And I genuinely believe that the future of the world will be determined by what I can do here.”

  “There’s too much at stake,” the aunt with the taro leaf said. “Taranoke needs us. We can’t risk ourselves on a . . . political ploy.”

  “It’s more than Taranoke!” Barhu insisted. “It’s so much more! I was on Kyprananoke not weeks ago. Do you know what Falcrest did there? Do you know what remains of Kyprananoke? Ocean! Just ocean and rock!”

  “Kyprananoke,” the elephant-maske
d man snorted. “Did they finally run out of compost to grow food? Or did the tide just come in an inch too high?”

  “You don’t understand!” But how could they? How could anyone who hadn’t seen it? “Listen,” Barhu begged them. “Kyprananoke was Falcrest’s holding before we were. When they were done with Kyprananoke they left. But it didn’t stop. The people they’d set in power held their posts. The wounds they’d cut kept bleeding. All the old ways of agriculture were gone. All the old ways of justice were disposed of. All the water was in the hands of tyrants. Things got worse and worse. There was resistance, and revolution, but it was as hard and cruel as the regime it fought. And when the situation became so terrible that it endangered Falcrest, they reached out and wiped Kyprananoke off the map. Everyone there is dead. They tried to get free of the chains Falcrest left behind, and Falcrest killed them all for it.

  “How can we wait for a better time? Do you really believe Falcrest will ever let us go? They are in us deeper than they were ever in Kyprananoke. In two hundred years they will still be on our island and we will live in concrete blockhouses and work in their kitchens and struggle to remember that we were ever free!”

  “She’s right,” Solit said, into the quiet.

  “She’s right,” the aunt who ate with taro leaf agreed, “and it doesn’t matter. We don’t get to do what’s right. We have to do what’s in our power, and what’s in our power is getting people off Taranoke when they’re in danger. If we draw so much attention to this village—”

  “Oh, to rot with that,” another aunt jeered. “We’re not so important. Look at us! Living here in houses we built, while back home they’re stacked two to a bunk, day and night shift. I say we get back in the fight. So we might get killed. So what? We risked that every day back home.”

  “We could put on quite a bazaar,” Solit said. “Candied fruits, canvas shades, dancers of such beauty and grace that the sun will dally at the zenith to watch. And a ritual battle, to get their spirits up for buying. Like the good old days, before that first red ship. . . .”

  “Let’s vote,” the elephant-masked uncle said.

  The taro leaf aunt nodded. “Yes, let’s vote.”

  Pinion stood up. “I’ll take Baru outside. She shouldn’t see the tally. Solit has my vote.”

  “Mother,” Barhu protested. But there was no refusing Pinion in her own house. In a moment they were out the back, in the cool shade, looking up at the green shoulder of the mountain and the pasture where the carriage horses grazed.

  “Baru,” Pinion said. “I don’t understand what you’re up to, and I don’t want to.” She took her daughter by the arm, not gently, but with care for how it felt. “But I want you to know, whatever happens, that you’ve been true to yourself. You’ve followed your curiosity to places I can’t go. Become someone I could never be. That makes me so proud. A daughter who’s more than her mother . . . that’s what I always wanted.”

  “Oh, ma.”

  “Tell me the truth. Are you going to ask for the carpets?”

  She couldn’t lie to her mother. But gods of fire it hurt to say.

  “I might, ma. If it keeps you safe. Safer.”

  “Gods,” Pinion said, softly. “This world. Not enough that we can’t see you. Now we have to tell everyone that we hate you? That we never had a daughter?”

  “It’s worse than that.”

  “Worse?”

  “I have a colleague . . . a woman named Yawa. And there may be a price I need to pay to her. She’s put herself at risk for me. I have to make good on the debt.”

  “What, Baru? What price?”

  “You’ll know it when it happens.”

  “You and your secrets.” Small, sharp tears in Pinion’s eyes. Rare currency, in Barhu’s life. “I wanted to say—I’m glad you came to visit.”

  She took her mother by the hands. “Thank you for letting me be here. Tasting the food. Sitting at the table. I don’t remember all of it from when I was young, but I will remember today. No matter what else happens to me.”

  Solit came out the back door, grinning. “We’re going to do it. We’ll be ready tomorrow.” His grin faltered. “Is it so terrible already?”

  29

  Ant Juice

  Barhu watched Iscend arise from the Rubiyya, clean water charting paths of least effort down her body. The hydraulic veil, Barhu thought: she wears it briefly, and very well.

  “Perhaps you see the lagoon goddess,” the Clarified woman suggested, “who was born where the first lava met the ancient sea. That’s your legend, isn’t it?”

  “So you’re a goddess now? That’s not very egalitarian.” She knew how she looked, damn her, and her confidence was maddening. And the worst part was Barhu’s body missed Xe’s touch and Iscend knew it. She could tell.

  “The blame is yours, Agonist,” Iscend said, teasingly. “I was only guessing what you might be thinking. Was I right?”

  “She wasn’t a very gentle goddess. She could breathe steam into your mouth and scald your skin from your body. In our stories she was the wife of fire-bleeding Mother Mountain and salt-seeded Father Sea, and . . .” Barhu trailed off. She had always been shy of the pages where the lagoon godess was illustrated. Heroic nudity would not have intrigued her much, but something about the steam-shrouded intimation of the goddess’ idealized form made Barhu stare.

  “Have a fine swim?” she asked, with such self-defensive sarcasm that it might have dried Iscend as well as her suncloth.

  “Up the river before dawn, then down with the rising light. The parrots have absorbed some of their sounds from the villagers here. One of them shouted the word ‘bear’ at me. I think in the hope that I would drop something as I ran away.” Iscend scrubbed her face in the suncloth and began to untie her wet strophium. Paused with fingers on the linen. “May I?”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. . . .”

  “Iscend,” Barhu said, exasperated, “just go on as if it hadn’t happened, understand?”

  “I’m sorry for what I did last night.” Iscend grimaced and touched her brow. “I, personally, am sorry for putting you in such a position. I went too far.”

  Barhu had been poking at the tactical aspect of that riverbank encounter. Iscend was too self-possessed to ever lose herself to passion, wasn’t she? So there must have been a reason she wanted a carnal alliance. She needed to feel Barhu as a source of pleasure, approval, satisfaction. Some inner conflict to resolve, some scheme to advance. . . .

  Or was Barhu just forcing her idea of Iscend back into the conveniently impersonal mechanism of the Clarified? What if that really had been a plea for personal trust and affection? What if Iscend had simply been attracted to Barhu? She didn’t spend much time accounting her own charms, but she supposed her luck with Xe and Shao (if you could call that luck) spoke to a certain aspect that caught women’s eyes. And Hu had murmured such praises. . . .

  “It’s fine,” she managed. “If you really wanted to . . . take a pass at me, then I’m sorry, but I can’t. And if you felt you had to, out of some other purpose”—even, most terrible suspicion, out of Hesychast’s orders to prove that Barhu couldn’t control herself—“then I’m glad it didn’t happen.”

  Iscend nodded. Her eyes were surprisingly cold. “I examined the village in the night. Everything is to my satisfaction. I should return to Cautery Plat.”

  What? That hurt more than it should. “You’re my bodyguard. I need you here. The Cancrioth could attack. . . .”

  “You’ll have the marine detachment. You’ll be safe.”

  “What about Hesychast? Wouldn’t he want you to observe?”

  Iscend shivered violently. A flicker of caricatured emotions passed over her face, fear-disgust-anger-hate, like an actor’s drill. Barhu had seen this before, in Purity Cartone, after he’d been cast out by Xate Yawa. It was the chameleon-shift spasm of a confused Clarified looking for a simple order to fulfill: a simple person
to be.

  Iscend snapped her wet cloth at the river. Droplets stippled her reflection. “I believe I can serve the Republic best by returning to Annalila Fortress at once. If you can spare me.”

  There was no way for Barhu to refuse that, for it was as close as Iscend would come to demanding her own way.

  She was so glad to feel merely confused and hurt over a woman’s conduct, rather than knotted up in numb self-denial, that she walked in circles on the town green with her hands in her pockets and savored the distraction of her lightly bruised heart. What a foolish little problem to have, this matter of Iscend! But it kept her from wallowing in anger at Shao Lune.

  She began to daydream of seeing Aminata again.

  The matai got up in the village commons to announce a trade bazaar, welcoming these far western Oriati and their treasure ship to the town of Iritain. Barhu was delighted to see the shieldbearers practicing their mock combat, like Salm had before the old Iriad markets. The spirit of her childhood was in the air here, sustained by these people who had lived in freer days.

  She fortified herself in the library to review her negotiating strategy. So she wanted trade: well, if the Cancrioth were a secret society, if they were able to bankroll Abdumasi Abd’s war fleet, then surely they could support their end of trade! The difficulty would be in persuading the Brain to see the value of her new plan. How do you butcher an empire? With gold, Incrisiath, with gold and commerce, and with your hands in their beating heart. The Womb would not like the risk, but she was a pragmatist; she would understand Barhu’s arguments. The Eye would hate the idea of exposing the Cancrioth to the world, but if Barhu could show him that this was the best way to avoid war, to convince Falcrest there was profit to be made without conquest . . .

  (Of course, her doubts whispered, Falcrest sent its terrible influence wherever it saw profit, and she was about to mark the Oriati as most profitable indeed . . . did she truly think she could control that influence? Yes! Yes! That was what a monopoly was for—she would be in control, and she would play the game fiercely, so that control could not be taken from her. . . .)