The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “He and his party became trapped in Eternal. Powerful deliriants left them confused and unable to find a way out. Only swift action by the Brevet-Captain Aminata and Sterilizer’s marines extracted him. Thankfully, the Cancrioth chose not to retaliate. Perhaps they felt they’d humiliated Falcrest’s best, and wanted to carry the story of their victory home.”

  I’d been furious with Execarne, of course. I’d threatened to have him tried for treasonous disregard of the Throne’s imperatives. And he’d reminded me that I had no idea who he was; that he’d taken the name of a dead man from his station on the Llosydanes; that he was beyond my power to prosecute.

  I’d warned him that I could seal an order for the Morrow Minister’s arrest with my polestar mark. The full force of the Emperor’s authority.

  And he’d replied, calmly, that he had a polestar mark of his own to countermand mine.

  I didn’t know whether to believe him. He didn’t fit in the list of cryptarchs we’d been given at the Elided Keep: only Stargazer and Renascent remained unknown, and I doubted he was either. But Baru was right. They wouldn’t give total knowledge of the Throne’s members to foreign-born federati just initiated months ago. They would only tell us enough to play our role out in the provinces.

  “Mm.” His hand rubbed small circles on my spine, displacing his anxiety into me. “You’ve done well, Durance.”

  “Renascent will be impressed, I trust?”

  “Oh, no question.” He had such absolute control that I knew the sudden, victorious clench of his fist was intentional. “We’ve won. Baru was the living proof. Farrier’s process mutilated her so badly that her mind split in half. Her disintegration proves that his process doesn’t produce perfect citizens, and it never will. The flesh rebels, Yawa. It reasserts its nature. When I tested her at the Elided Keep I saw how terribly she’d been divided. And from your reports and Iscend’s testimony, she only got worse. She had to go mad to survive. The lobotomy was a mercy.”

  “Yes,” I murmured. “Quite a mercy. You were satisfied with its conduct?”

  “Iscend certified every cut you made.” His body seemed to radiate a soft, even warmth, like a banked fire. He was leading me deeper into the Nemesis Court, past shelves of files and galleries of busts, showing me my new dominion. “Once Renascent hands over the files, I’ll force Farrier to surrender Baru, and we’ll send her to the Stakhieczi.”

  “Never to see her home again,” I said, with some pity. “She was cast out by her own people, you know. Ritually exiled for betraying them.”

  “She won’t have to live with that anymore.”

  “I doubt she cared, my lord.”

  But I cared. And I would have to live with my choices. I would always be the woman who’d betrayed her people for her own cruel idea of their salvation.

  He felt me tense. “Your brother will heal, Yawa. When he sees what you’ve done for Aurdwynn, the Stakhieczi addicted to our grain and sugar, the peace secured . . . he’ll understand.”

  “I wish I could believe you,” I murmured.

  He guided me into a dressing room. “Your tailors will fit you for a new judge’s gown. I’ve arranged a place for you on the Nemesis Council, working under Judge-Minister Sabè Frowerer. I have a file on her which will let you influence her decisions—she’s made a series of unwise publications under a pseudonym, and I was able to obtain the original manuscripts and match her handwriting. You’ll be taking Judge Alimoon’s old seat.”

  “What happened to Alimoon?”

  “Retired happily.” He winked at me. “It does happen. A life of civil service, and a well-deserved estate in the Selions waiting for him.”

  A good civil servant. Like Bel Latheman had been. Heia had been so certain, so sure it had been me who killed him. Hadn’t I always been honest with her, even about the horrible things? For her to think I’d lie now—it was like she’d never known me at all.

  I chewed that thought off at the knuckle. “Farrier’s going to make his move soon. Are you prepared?”

  “For his Oriati trade concern? By the time he’s ready to move cargo, we’ll own him and the whole venture. I wouldn’t have let him take Baru if it could hurt us. He’s failed in the only way that matters, Yawa. You defeated his masterwork. My technique defeated his. That’s what Renascent will see.”

  “But he still has vendettas against you. Ways he can hurt you.”

  “Not with Renascent behind me.”

  “Is Renascent really an old woman?” I asked. “Someone told me so, at the Elided Keep. But Falcrest despises the old and fears the powerful woman . . . it’s quite incredible to me that you’d follow her.”

  “She’s not,” Hesychast said, tersely.

  “What? An old woman?”

  “I’m not sure she’s a person at all, any more. She made certain requests of me over the years, and—well. I speculate.”

  “What? Is she a parrot, then? A whale? Another tumor?”

  “It’s complicated. And taboo. We won’t speak of it now.”

  “As you prefer.” I settled myself on a stool to wait for the tailor. He knelt to help me remove my shoes, for measurements.

  And then I was looking down into that perfect face, the black-ink eyebrows, the smooth planes of his high cheeks. I caught my breath despite myself. He was staring right into my eyes. I could feel his awareness like fingertips on every seam of my face.

  “Yawa,” he said, “I have a question for you.”

  “Yes?” I managed.

  “Would you have turned, if I hadn’t had Olake hostage? Would you have gone over to Baru?”

  Oh, Wydd help me. Not this. Not now. I closed my eyes. “Baru was . . . compelling.”

  Skin brushed against metal. He was unfolding a compact mirror, holding it up to my face, tilting it. There was someone behind me! He was showing my face to someone waiting behind me—with a garrote, a knife, a pen waiting to record my every word—

  “Farrier is going to seat Baru in a place of honor for his announcement,” he said. “Do you know why, Yawa? Is it more than mere symbolism?”

  “No. I know nothing of what he’s doing.”

  “Have you gone over to Baru’s side, Yawa? Is this all a ruse?”

  “No,” I whispered. Damn him. Damn him.

  “Are you, even now, obeying Baru’s plan?”

  “No!”

  He looked up to the person behind me.

  “Iscend,” Hesychast sighed, “is she telling the truth?”

  Tonight, Baru,” Farrier said. “It’s all been made ready for tonight.”

  He had taken her out to a restaurant called The Misterkills to eat songbirds and brain. The crowd was all amutter with news. The Tahari prediction markets gave good odds for war. Six Admiralty officers had committed suicide, preferring a quick death to the exposure of their secrets as Parliament tidied up the navy for its use. A race mob had attacked the Tahari Spill, where certain more affluent Oriati federati lived; the city constabulary had already taken the families there into protective custody, and they would be resettled in the Brine City slums, where they could help improve the lot of their racemates. A dog had died in the fire and that had caused much public sorrow. The mob, all the rhetorics agreed, should have expressed its anger more civilly.

  “Tonight,” Barhu repeated, absently.

  He touched her hand. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. The food’s delicious.” She took a spoonful of nihari, a stew of slow-cooked lamb meat and marrow with a side of lamb’s brain. The restaurant had a balcony view straight down the manicured blue strip of the ner ab Physic, the Doctor’s Canal, straight west between the Faculties and the Fleet Quarter, through the great docks, and out into the Sound of Fire. When she looked back the servers were bringing out the main course: songbirds drowned in oak-aged brandy and served searing hot in ceramic cups.

  “Barbaric,” Farrier said, with relish. “That’s what I like about it. You’re supposed to put your napkin over your face, like so,” he
showed Barhu, “so we don’t have to see each other crunching and spitting out the little bones. But I never wear mine. It’s against the spirit of things.”

  She watched him eat the first little songbird whole. “Barbaric,” she said, echoing his words. “Because it reminds us of a time when we had to eat birds and mice to survive.”

  He smiled happily. There were little bones in his teeth. “You’re still quite articulate, Baru. I’m not sure Yawa did a very good job.”

  “In recognizing the past,” she said, “we see the improvements we’ve made to our present condition. As I do when I compare my childhood on Taranoke to my life today.”

  He bit down on another bird. The crunch crisp, the spurt of meat juice and brandy. Somehow he could do it with dignity. He spat pointed bone into his cup. The sky behind him was alive with signal fireworks, swooping kites, great murmurations of swallows and northern quelea. Barhu had to breathe deep to detect any trace of sewage or the sulfurous stink of a paper mill. It was hidden, but it was there.

  “Have some,” he urged her.

  She took a spoonful from the cup of sheep brain. It felt like curdled yogurt and tasted like sweetbread and cinnamon, or caviar without the fishy taste. She liked it. “A touch heavy on the cinnamon, I think.”

  “Oh, like you’d know,” Farrier teased. He liked it when she put on airs.

  “If I am to save Falcrest,” she said, “I ought to have a little of its culture.”

  “The food’s not unsettling your stomach? I thought it might, after so long on a diet of . . .” He trailed off, and fussed uncomfortably with his napkin.

  “Gruel,” Barhu suggested. “Porridge spooned by nurses?”

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t forgotten how to taste.”

  “I really did mean it, you know.” He leaned closer. “When I told you in the Elided Keep that you’d saved Falcrest. I meant it with all my heart. When the Emperor announces our trade concern tomorrow, Renascent will know who deserves to drive the Empire forward.”

  Before they’d gone out, Farrier had sent a maid to lay out her outfit. He had not, of course, come to measure or dress her by himself. She knew exactly why. The modesty he observed in Barhu’s case was her first clue toward his secret. It came from a very specific taboo.

  “Oh, I’m proud of you.” It burst out of him. He looked at his gore-stained napkin, as if it were less shameful than his feelings. “You wouldn’t like my ugly thoughts, Baru. My doubts. My fears. On some nights it seemed Hesychast and his Clarified would take the future and I . . .” He shuddered. “I thought: what if he was right? What if people could never unlearn their fleshy nature? What if some behaviors had to be cut out as diseases, and some . . . some children had no future at all? Then I’d have wasted my life, all of it, on this foolish quest to find genius in places most of Falcrest would use like a condom and cast away . . . oh, pardon my obscenity.” He sniffed. “Pardon my sentiment.”

  “Well,” Barhu said, softly, “here I am. I asked my mother a question all those years ago, and now I’ve answered it.”

  The word mother made him frown. “What did you ask her?”

  “Why you were powerful. Why Falcrest came to us and changed us. Why we didn’t go to you, instead.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t know.”

  “Do you?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Well, go on! Why did we go to Sousward? Why didn’t Sousward come to us? Impress me!”

  There was so much she could say. The matter of money, Falcrest’s wholesale adoption of paper fiat notes and liquidity banking, which allowed them to move value more efficiently: you could not raise money from your people to fund an expedition if all their value was locked up in farmland and lumber and milk. But when it was stored in paper notes in banks then you could borrow from the people without actually taking their property.

  There were the ships, the superb rigging and coppered hulls and the chemistry of citrus and salt that kept the crews alive to sail, and the fearsome laboratories that produced the Burn. There was the culture of desperate and syncretic inadequacy, fear of the world outracing Falcrest, which had stolen the best of Stakhieczi astronomy and Oriati scientific philosophy. And the culture of revolutionary bloodshed, willing to use living bodies to discover the causes and cures of disease, to test which substances would do harm if used in piping, food, cloth.

  And Lapetiare and his coffeehouses, where the art of debate grew from spectator sport to revolutionary spark, where the stockbrokers did their trading now. There were the pigs that gave Falcrest the annual flu, which made the Masquerade’s collective immunity so vigilant, which laid flat the populations of every new province Falcrest seized. There were the canals and the waterways, the ancient expertise at managing tsunami and flood that became the modern engineering that turned the mills that made the flour and the soybean meal that put the calories into the workers. And the sewers. And the aqueducts. And the republican government, which shifted the flow of a Parliamin’s corruption and favoritism from fellow elites to a Parliamin’s constituents, so that corruption at least helped the common people sometimes.

  But all of those things were just limbs and muscles on the beast. They explained how Falcrest was conquering the world but not why. A strong man might have the ability to strangle or force a weak man. But nowhere was it written that the strong man was fated to kill or enslave that weak man.

  Would Taranoke, given all these advantages, have gone to Falcrest, subverted and enslaved it, made it part of a Taranoki empire?

  No. And the Oriati were the proof. The Oriati had their own heinous history, their own spasms of conquest: but for much of their millennium of unsurpassed worldly power, they had kept to their own borders and their own internal struggles. Their voyages had been for exploration and trade. They had been good neighbors.

  Aurdwynn had of course washed itself in blood. The Maia had come to conquer, the Stakhieczi had counterinvaded to preserve the great green breadbasket that fed them. So you might be tempted to say that wherever cultures meet conflict was inevitable. But they had been two rival homelands at war over the middle ground; neither had ever made a possession of the other.

  Yes, people had always been evil nearly as much as they had been good. Yes, happiness was rarer than suffering—that was simply a fact of mathematics; happiness required a narrow range of conditions, and suffering flourished in all the rest.

  But Falcrest was not an innocent victim of a historical inevitability. Empire required a will, a brain to move the beast, to reach out with appetite, to see other people as the answer to that appetite, to justify the devouring of other peoples as right and necessary and good, to frame slavery and conquest as acts of grace and charity.

  Incrasticism had provided that last and most fateful technology. The capability to justify any violence in the name of an ultimate destiny, an engine to inflict misery and to claim that misery as necessary in the quest for utopia. A false science by which the races and sexes could be separated and specialized like workers in a mill. And the endless self-deceptive blind guilty quest to justify that false science, so that the suffering and the misery remained necessary.

  Falcrest had chosen empire.

  Falcrest could therefore be held responsible for its choice.

  Not all those who lived in Falcrest participated in its devourings. But all those who lived in Falcrest had benefited from them, and by encouragement or by passive acceptance they had allowed those devourings to continue.

  “What were we talking about?” she said. “Mister Farrier, did I tell you about my one wish? There’s something I’d like. . . .”

  She watched his smile collapse.

  “Yes, Baru,” he said. “You told me about your wish. It’ll happen tonight. I’ve made all the arrangements. No one will interfere. I’ve made it clear this is a personal matter. My gift to you.”

  It was time.

  The Emperor awaited Its People.


  To Its left ran a sluiceway of ice water, cold and clear as a winter dawn.

  To Its right a stream of glass eyeballs rolled down a marble chute.

  One hundred marble steps descended from Its Throne to the vast pillared floor of the Levelest Gallery, where all Its gathered petitioners stood on even ground. You could lay a ball of rubber on the floor and it would not roll even one inch in any direction. Footsteps wore the Gallery down: in storm season it was painstakingly resurfaced.

  Upon the Emperor’s face a mask of white enameled steel smiled gently down upon the assembled invitees. There was Pristina Cuprajacque, the light of the stage, tormenting the fashion observers, who were trying to decide if her reductively simple gown was anything more than a cinched tube of cotton. There was Mandridge Subahant, leader of the Candid Party in Parliament, jeering at a woman from Advance who had suggested he was having an affair. Mandridge was the only man in Falcrest who could boast of his blatant social coercions and yet summon a thousand outraged supporters at the slightest accusation he was morally impeachable. At the far opposite end of the crowd, his inexhaustible leftist rival Truesmith Elmin shook hands with a file of donors, defying the ongoing rumors that she was suffering a slow poison.

  Here came the new Empire Admiral Ahanna Croftare, with the escort of two marines she was always entitled to muster, and a perimeter of pure threat which only a few very curious gossips dared cross. And the new Nemesis Judge Xate Yawa, present on behalf of her court, widely credited with the delicious power play which had thrown Aurdwynn into rebellion and then dragged it back to heel just in time to parry the Stakhieczi invasion.

  There was the Oriati Ambassador Tau-indi Bosoka, quite plainly dressed, with two guests in wheelchairs and a masked woman in a cotton gown who appeared to be, depending on the decorum of those you asked, a great beauty in traditional costume or a whore. One of the wheelchair guests was the merchant magnate Abdumasi Abd, recently returned from adventures abroad, and it was rumored that he had been vital in making tonight’s great announcement possible. He had been a vocal enemy of commerce with Falcrest for so many years. His conversion was surely a sign of a tremendous diplomatic breakthrough, or of effective leverage.