The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

wondered if Cary and Smit and the other players who’d hidden him and Aster were still there. He wondered if they had heard from Cithrin. He started to speak, stopped himself, and then tried again.
    “This man Cinlama. He’s going to go off into the world and find things, isn’t he? He’s going to follow these tiny traces of history, these clues and rumors and half-remembered stories, and try to dig up wonders. I used to be the one who did that. I’m the one who left Antea and went looking for the Sinir Kushku and found the temple. I was the one who brought you and the goddess back out into the world. And now …”
    “Do you fear that this man would take your glory? Your place in the goddess’s favor?”
    Geder shook his head. “I could have Cinlama killed for any reason. For no reason other than that I said so. It’s that I see him and I think of the ways I used to be him. Or the way I used to be my father’s son, and I’m not anymore. Or the way I used to be Dawson Kalliam’s client before he turned on me. I used to be the one who led you into the world and showed you all the things that had changed since your people went into seclusion. And I’m not any of those people anymore.”
    “Would you wish to be?” the priest asked. “Lord Prince, what do you want?”
    The question seemed to float in the air like a feather. Geder tried to imagine himself strapping a leather sack of books to the side of a horse, taking a handful of servants, and pressing out into the forgotten corners of the world. In truth, he hadn’t particularly enjoyed the journey when he had gone, and the prospect of sleeping in a tent and worrying about where the next freshwater would be had more charm in theory than in practice. It wasn’t what Dar Cinlama was doing that Geder envied, it was what he signified. For a moment, Geder was suffering the summer just gone by, hiding in a hole under a collapsed building, spending days and nights in darkness with Aster and Cithrin bel Sarcour. He heard her laugh again and the slight bitterness that seemed to flavor everything she said.
    “I want to matter ,” Geder said.
    “Ah,” Basrahip said, as if he understood.
    T here were, Geder supposed, things in the world that deserved his hatred more than ancient precedents of grazing rights. The worse sorts of stinging flies, for example. Or the way a man’s bowels turned to water if he ate bad meat. Those were worse, if only slightly.
    “You see, my lord,” the scholarly man said, “the question you ask hinges on whether the men in question are grazing animals that come from the same stock. If, for example, they are sheep who descended from the same ram three generations previous, then they are by imperial standards within the same greater flock. In that case—”
    “The old Miniean precedents apply, and this Sebinin fellow doesn’t owe the other one a single coin.”
    “Exactly,” the scholar said, “but if there was another ram—”
    “He owes a tenth of a sheep for every day he grazed on the land without permission.”
    “Precisely. If you don’t mind my saying it, your lordship is very quick to understand the intricacies of these questions.”
    Geder nodded and leaned forward, elbows on the table like a schoolboy before his tutor. It was another of the unresolved issues of the general audience taken care of, or if not taken care of, at least moved to the next stage. He’d send a messenger to the people in question and find out the lineages of their sheep. He had never in all his life imagined that the role of governing an empire would cook down to such a thin broth as this, but he understood now why the general audience came only once a year and usually ended well before the last of the petitioners came before the throne. If he’d chosen to stop an hour or two earlier, he wouldn’t be sitting here now. Nor would Dar Cinlama and his team be preparing to depart. Around him, the small library held the least command of his attention that any collection of books had ever managed. Volume after volume, codex after codex, trailing back through centuries to the founding of Antea, and many older even than that, without a single one being particularly interesting. He wondered whether Basrahip’s disdain for the written word was beginning to seep into him, or if this was genuinely the least interesting subject known to humanity.
    “All right,” Geder said and consulted the page of notes he had sketched for himself, his heart