The Tyrant
Page 6
Shao was nothing like her. Baru could pick one grid sector of the net, any sector, and find something to admire. But the net kept her from seeing the whole woman.
The staff captain hung her uniform. She turned, and saw Baru watching her, and said, grinning, as lively and friendly now as she had never been on Helbride, “Come on, I’m not doing your laundry for you.”
Baru hugged herself and shivered. They were alone. The two of them on this huge ship in this huge dead caldera, cut off from everything, hundreds of miles from anyone who would be their friend.
“Sorry,” she said, foolishly: Shao Lune would never respect weakness. “I was thinking.”
“You’re lucky we’re both prisoners now,” Shao said. For a moment her eyes were indecent: so obviously flirting to take Baru’s mind off her betrayal. “Puts us on an even footing.”
You don’t understand, Baru thought, you don’t know what it is with me. If we—if I allow myself to—then you’ll be lost here, Shao. I’ll have to abandon you to get what I want. That’s the life I chose.
Oh, fuck that.
Shao Lune padded maddeningly to the door, to check the lock. How did she do it? How did she decide how Baru would see her?
“I’ve been noticing things,” Baru said, desperate to seize any kind of control. “The ship is undercrewed. And the shadow ambassador mentioned things which made me think . . . the Cancrioth, they’re not unified, not in command of their situation. Not the way my sponsors expected. Not some kind of octopus with their arms in everything—”
“Like the Emperor’s Throne?”
Baru laughed harshly. “After watching three of the Emperor’s agents run from a single navy frigate for weeks on end, do you still think we’re all that?”
“But you’re not part of the true Throne.”
“The true Throne?” Baru snapped, dangerously. “Am I false, somehow?”
“You are a foreigner. Xate Yawa is a foreigner. Apparitor is a foreigner. Do you really believe the real Throne would have so many foreign-born members? Do you really think it would have so many women?” Her eyes lingered on Baru as if marking the differences between them, at once dismissive and intensely domineering. “You didn’t think it was coincidence they sent three foreign-born agents on this expedition, did you? And no one born Falcresti at all?”
“No,” Baru admitted.
She’d begun to wonder, in her hangover reveries, whether half the purpose of this expedition was to shake them down, test their loyalty and their hereditary virtues—and whether the other half of the purpose was to keep them out of the way while more important things happened.
Shao turned back to Baru with a cotton cloth covering an object in her hands. “I have your things from the boat. The sack with your papers, and your little device, which I didn’t open. I wanted to take the cover off your mask, in case there was water trapped underneath, but I thought I should get permission. Would you like me to . . . ?”
She slipped the cotton cloth away to show the beautiful terrible thing underneath. It still had its green cover on, the cover Baru had worn to the embassy. Shao ran one finger down its edge and found the seam where it lay over the true mask.
“Yes,” Baru said, with a tremble she could not control.
Shao undid the little clamps and pulled. But suction kept the cover attached, and Shao’s short-nailed fingers weren’t able to pry it away.
“Allow me,” Baru said, reaching out.
Shao lifted the mask to her full mouth and bit down. Her tooth parted the little gap, and the cover came away like a rind. The blank blue-white ceramic of Baru’s mask waited beneath. The eight-point polestar insignia of Imperial authority blazed around the right eye in chased silver.
“Beautiful,” Shao breathed, as Baru shuddered in ugly need. “Put it on.”
“I don’t see why,” Baru said, stiffly.
“Put it on. I need to ask you a question. As what you’re supposed to be, Baru.” A spike of ugly impatience, like a nail through her lip. “Someone who knows what to do.”
Baru slid the mask down over her face. It had been made just for her. The fit was lighter than fog.
Shao drew herself up straight. “Why did you bring us here? What do you want from the Cancrioth?”
To get something from them to kill your whole civilization. To make Tain Hu’s sacrifice worth it. To prove I was worth her faith.
“My master wants proof of the Cancrioth’s existence,” she said. “If I possess it, he’ll give me anything. Anything at all.”
“Including a pardon?”
“A pardon would be nothing. He’d give me a province.”
“And he can save us from Ormsment?” Shao’s eyes narrowed with need. “She’s very close, Baru. She has us trapped here. She has Sulane and she might turn Ascentatic to her cause. You know what she’ll do if she catches us, Baru.
“She’s come so far to kill you. I don’t think she’ll stop now.”
3
Forces Converge
Water hammer.
It smashed at Juris Ormsment. It leapt inside her, the guilt and the rage, the storm-loud scream of all the sailors she’d left to drown under Baru Cormorant’s “protection” at Welthony Harbor. She had not been a walking wound, before Baru. She had not been a thin dressing over a gushing cut. She had never considered mutiny at all.
Now here she was, many miles and many lives from her post, hunting Baru. And the water hammer was in her.
She hauled herself up the ropes onto the deck of a warship. Not her flag Sulane or her consort Scylpetaire (detached, now, for the long voyage to Taranoke, to gather Baru’s parents as hostages) but the Emperor’s own frigate RNS Ascentatic.
Ascentatic’s master-at-arms cried out “Admiral on deck!” The ship’s officers snapped to attention. The marine lieutenant struck the chime and the drummers rapped out a salute. Juris almost cried aloud with pride: to see the navy turn out its honors for her, one last time. She was sworn to murder an agent of the Emperor’s Throne, and thus in open mutiny against the lawful authority of the Emperor. She would never receive these honors again.
But Ascentatic’s company did not yet know.
The captain did. She’d made sure of that before trespassing on his ship. Ascentatic’s Asmee Nullsin offered her his good right hand. His left was a prosthetic hammer, amputated after two severed fingers went to rot. A rigging injury. Always mind the sacrifices your sailors have made, Ahanna Croftare had told her.
Juris gave him a firm shake. “Permission to come aboard?”
“Denied, mam.” He waited for the ship’s purser to record that in the log. “Shall we disembark you through the ship’s great cabin?”
“Immediately.” She returned his officers’ salutes with a pointed glance at the deck. Obediently they all looked at their toes, so that they could say, at their court-martials, that the Province Admiral had ordered them to disregard her presence.
Nullsin’s ship was in fine order. The company stood at their action stations, thick-armed men and broad-shouldered women at the lines, nimble girls aloft in the rigging, rocketry mates ready with lenses screwed into their masks at the hwachas and the big ship-killer Flying Fish rockets. Above everyone and everything towered the three masts, foremast and mainmast and aft. The mainmast alone was as tall as Ascentatic was long, built of interlocked lengths of pine, because no single tree could grow that tall and strong. A fleet of Falcresti ships in close company made the highest forest in the world.
The sails were stronger than the masts, though. If the battle frigate Ascentatic put up a full spread of canvas on a strong wind, she would sail her own masts off. The canvas would simply tear the wood apart and fly away. Pulled away from their stations to answer a higher call.
Nothing could ever be built strong enough, Juris thought. Nothing ever went untested.
They went inside the sterncastle, to Nullsin’s great cabin. He ordered his steward away and Juris dogged the door shut. “Is anyone listening?”
“No,” she said, which was mostly the truth. “They pronounce it Hara-Vijay, if you can hear the difference.”
“I’m a good officer, mam. Trained to listen to blunt orders. Not nuance of accent.”
“I expect you’d like some blunt orders from me?”
“I’m not sure I do, mam, after what you’ve told me.”
She nodded: an honest reply. “What about the embassy staff?” It was the navy’s duty to safeguard embassies, even the enemy’s. “And the Prince-Ambassador?”
“Most of the staff died in the fire. No sign of the Prince-Ambassador.” Nullsin grimaced. “Very bad if Tau-indi Bosoka was in there. We could be blamed, and then . . .”
Parliament was always looking for an excuse to decapitate the Admiralty and install its own picks. This threat was eight parts fear of what a popular admiral might do (seize the trade, declare herself empress) and two parts dislike of navy women. A bunch of tribadists and anti-mannist bitches, the men in Parliament thought. And the Merit Admirals, the navy’s professional society of old women, were the worst of the litter.
“What the fuck was Tau-indi doing here?” she wondered aloud. Juris had known her—known him—damn it, known them as a cheerful, somewhat zaftig laman who gave clever gifts. They’d presented Juris with a loose-leaf copy of the Kiet Khoiad, with chapters that could be rearranged to change the story. If every last person in the world were gathered up by the archons and offered their heart’s desire in exchange for their soul, Juris had really believed Tau-indi would be the last and most virtuous of the resisters.
Baru had turned them both. Juris to mutiny, and Tau, somehow, to Baru’s side.
People bent. You hit them hard enough and they just bent.
“I’m in open mutiny,” she told Nullsin. She would not carry out a mutiny meant to protect the navy’s good officers by lying to one of those good officers. “I’ve already killed members of the Imperial advisory staff and defied Imperial edict.”
“Queen’s stitched cunt,” he snapped, “do you have to say it? Begging”—he swallowed—“your pardon, mam.”
“Did you know before I told you?”
“We were on the Llosydanes after you. We saw the aftermath of your . . . pursuit there.” He closed up his crystal decanter with his good hand. “Why haven’t you caught your target?”
“Her ship is fast. She has assets to expend.” And the whims of the unfortunately necessary Aurdwynni brute Tain Shir had interfered. “She used Tau-indi’s diplomatic seals to head us off.”
Nullsin offered her one of the whiskeys. His hand was shaking, narrowly and very fast: living through a moment he knew would be questioned and interrogated with his life as the stakes. “I have orders to bring her in for questioning. Out of concern she’s part of a conspiracy to ignite open war with the Oriati.”
The whiskey tasted like a peat bog full of brine. She loved it. “Orders from who?”
“Rear Admiral Maroyad, on Isla Cauteria.” He drank, lunging at the glass, trying to cover his shaking hand with vigor. “We picked up five prisoners from Baru’s old retinue in Aurdwynn. The so-called ‘Vultjagata.’ They led us here. They also told us that you attacked the Morrow Ministry station on the Llosydanes.”
“You believed them?” she said, trying to be wry. “I’m hurt.”
“I believed the wrecks of two Oriati dromon you left behind. I did what cleanup I could before Parliament finds the mess.” He watched her carefully. “With respect, mam, what the fuck were you thinking? Gassing the Ministry station? Murdering Falcresti citizens?”
She hadn’t gassed the station, but it hardly mattered. “Do you really want to know? Do you want that information in your possession when the Parliamentary inquisition is called?”
Nullsin paced over to stare into the oil painting of Admiral Juristane’s flagship bombarding the Oriati fleet in Kutulbha harbor. The artist had captured the slick, oily Burn fire clinging to the waves, floating like grease on a pan. Nullsin drank again, grimaced, and looked back.
“Are you going to ask me to join you?”
“No.” Oh, Nullsin, of course not. He had his duty to his mission and his crew. She would not force her own unforgivable failure on him.
“I refused to let you board,” he said, watching her. “I’d be in my power to ask you to leave now.”
“You’re right. Of course”—she paused, letting him understand that she was about to leverage him, just a little—“if you send me away, we can’t cooperate to manage the situation ashore. Have you seen what they’re doing to each other?”
Nullsin shuddered.
The Kyprananoke archipelago had fallen into democlysm, the word great Iranenna (she’d read her prerevolutionary philosophers, in school at Shaheen) coined for “a chaos made of man.” Nowhere in nature could you find bloodshed like this. Years of surgical punishment and water interdict by the ruling Kyprist junta had finally flashed the islands to fire. The Canaat rebels were boiling out of the west, slaughtering their way across the archipelago with fishing spears and exotic rocket-powder pistols, shooting dead everyone who’d ever spoken a kind word about distant Falcrest. In Loveport, the acrobats’ scaffolds now dangled the bodies of orange-gloved Kyprists.
Some of the rebels were bleeding green-black blood, the telltale symptom of the hemorrhagic plague that the ancient Oriati had named, for the way it boiled up out of certain hidden reservoirs, the Kettling.
“Helbride flashed me an order an hour ago.” Nullsin showed her the scrap of paper where a tactical clerk had translated the sunflash into text. “A command from the Emperor’s agent Apparitor. Prevent any ship from departing these waters, on penalty of destruction by fire.”
Juris sneered: Apparitor was quietly understood to hold sway over the Empire Admiral Lindon Satamine, a young man from the Storm Corps who had been promoted, unfairly, over all the Admiralty’s seasoned fighting women. “Will you comply?”
“There’s Kettling here. How couldn’t I?”
“You’re right,” she decided. “That has to be your priority.”
“Good.” Nullsin drank too long, and coughed. He put the glass down on his writing blotter. “We’re right on the fulcrum here, aren’t we, Province Admiral?”
It was absurd. The state of the whole Ashen Sea balanced on them, here, right now. This plague could kill millions if it reached the mainlands. This civil war could be the first blow of an Oriati attack on Falcrest, the beginning of a war that might (if the worst predictions were true) set back civilization half a millennium.
So much depended on the next few days. They might button it all up neatly and restore the Ashen Sea to sanity. Or the plague might escape. The war might flash over. And in two months every city from Devimandi to New Kutulbha would burn as millions of plague-carrying refugees swarmed like locusts into the Occupation and the Butterveldt.
Once, long ago, the Cheetah Palaces had ruled the Ashen Sea. Their time had ended. Once, not quite so long ago, the Jellyfish Eaters had ruled the Ashen Sea. Their time had ended. Kyprananoke was all that remained of them.
Falcrest ruled the Ashen Sea today. It was genuinely possible that in a few hundred years no one would remember Falcrest at all.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, softly. “I wouldn’t want to manage this alone.”
“I’m not glad you’re here,” he said, smiling ironically. “But since you are, I’m glad you brought a damn fine warship.”
They chimed their glasses off each other, that high thin ping of glass on glass that Juris had first heard as a child, in services at the Cult of Human Reason.
The steward’s door burst open. A tall Oriati woman in a half-buttoned uniform shoved past the steward. She was big, her eyes alert, tall and well-muscled and wide-hipped, near as far opposite the Falcresti ideal of compact beauty a
s you could get.
“Lieutenant Commander,” Nullsin snapped, “what in the name of virtue are you doing?”
“Sir!” The Oriati woman saluted first Nullsin, then, without pause, Juris. “Lieutenant Commander Aminata, reporting.”
No one eavesdropping, eh, Nullsin? Probably he hadn’t known. But wait a moment now—“I recognize you. You were at the embassy.” Juris had seen this woman firing her flare pistol, calling in the Ascentatic marines. “You gave the order to burn the grounds, didn’t you? To contain the plague?”
“Yes, mam,” Aminata said, firmly. “I gave that order.”
“You did the right thing.” Her heart cried at that firmness, that discipline. What the navy asked of its young women. How gloriously they answered. “You did your duty.”
“Yes, mam.” A little steel glinted in her eyes: she did not need to be told her duty.
“Lieutenant Commander,” Nullsin said, warningly, “you shouldn’t be here right now.”
Aminata took a deep breath. Her eyes went to Nullsin for a moment, apologetic, and then returned, decisively, to Juris. “Mam, I want to volunteer to lead the attempt to capture Baru Cormorant.”
Nullsin groaned like he’d been stabbed. Was there something between them? No, definitely not. Aminata would use whores, and a man who fucked with officers under his command would not last long in the navy.
“Lieutenant Commander,” he said, “Baru died in that fire.”
“No, sir, she wouldn’t go into that embassy without a way out. I think I have a lead on where she’ll go next.” She recentered to perfect attention, staring at Juris. “But if we go in with a large force, we’ll spook her, mam. Just give me my two suasioners, an assault boat, and a few marines. I’ll track her down. I’ll find out the truth about her purpose. And if need be, I’ll bring her in.”