The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  You thought she was your friend, didn’t you, Aminata. And a part of you still thinks so.

  Maybe Aminata could find Baru. But if Juris involved her, she’d be doomed. Attainted as a mutineer. All her talent and dedication wasted.

  Unless . . .

  . . . unless they could bring home such proof to Falcrest as to justify their mutiny.

  Unless they could capture Baru, and make her confess to conspiracy to create a war. Then the decision to mutiny to go after Baru would be an act of heroic foresight. . . .

  “Lieutenant Commander,” Juris said, “how much would you do to catch Baru?”

  Nullsin set his hammer in his good hand and squeezed it like it could hold Aminata at anchor. Poor Asmee Nullsin: he did not yet know what all captains and all admirals had to learn, that you could not protect your best. They would find their own danger.

  “Anything, mam.” Aminata met her eyes. “I have to know the truth.”

  “I could use a new staff captain,” Juris said. “My last one went over to Baru’s side. Are you interested?”

  “Lieutenant Commander,” Nullsin said, urgently, “if you go over to Sulane you’ll be out of my chain of command, you understand? You’ll be Fifth Fleet Aurdwynn, then. I will have no power to protect you from any Parliamentary inquiry directed at Fifth Fleet.”

  “I understand, sir.” Aminata remained at attention. “I want to go, sir. I need to be the one to bring her in.”

  The Cancrioth!” The boy Iraji filled the little houseboat with his scream.

  I had, in my station as Jurispotence of Aurdwynn, learned to hide my love of the divine. If a Ministry of Antiquities stooge brought me a two-thousand-year-old ceremonial oil scrape and asked me to destroy it as an artifact of unhygienic religiosity, I could hardly scream in anguish, could I? I could hardly stand on my toes and beg for Himu’s sky-swift forgiveness. My mission was to protect the living faith, not its dead relics.

  So I never betrayed my awe in the face of the sacred.

  But when poor Iraji screamed, I heard a boy touched by the numinous. The exaltation in his voice, the power in that word: nothing human. I clutched at Faham Execarne to steady myself, but he had recoiled in shock; we both nearly fell. Two very dignified elders we were!

  “The Cancrioth!” Iraji screamed again. “They took Baru in my place! She went in my place!”

  He had to scream to get the words out before he fell. His eyes rolled back white. He began to faint.

  I lunged at him, pushed his limp body against the wall, trying to keep his blood up by sheer fright. I wore a structured quarantine gown and a black filtered mask, and I knew Iraji would see a spider descending on him. Xate Yawa in her web.

  “The Cancrioth is here?” The clockwork voice changer pressed to my throat buzzed like a cloud of flies. “You’re certain!”

  “Yes! They’re here! They’ve come to find what they lost!”

  “What have they lost?”

  “I’m one of them!” he screamed, huge-eyed and horribly beautiful, Apparitor’s Oriati concubine wandered so far from his bed. “I’M ONE OF THEM!”

  “Oh,” I rasped.

  Did Apparitor know? What mad love for Iraji could make Apparitor conceal the boy from us—when proof of the Cancrioth was the object of this whole quest?

  Perhaps he was the one who’d conditioned Iraji to hide the truth from himself.

  I wanted to send Iraji back to Helbride and Apparitor. But if Baru found the Cancrioth unchallenged, she would bring home victory for her master. Farrier’s victory would destroy Hesychast. And if Hesychast fell, I would fall with him. I would be destroyed, or imprisoned, or enslaved by Baru.

  Then Baru would feed like a hagfish on Aurdwynn, my home.

  “Iraji.” As cold as I had pronounced any verdict in the courtroom. “Would you exchange yourself for Baru?”

  He nodded tremulously. “Yes. It should have been me. . . .”

  “Why?” Faham Execarne burst out. He was Falcrest’s chief spy and my ally of convenience, a robust old mind who’d seen as many years of human deviance and self-delusion as I. And still he was astounded by Iraji’s choice.

  Why would this beautiful young man go into the enemy’s lair for the sake of a woman who’d kidnapped and abandoned him?

  Iraji had been a spy in Baru’s entourage, in the days before Tain Hu was brought to her for execution. Had Baru tricked him into believing that she truly loved Hu?

  “Because it would be . . .” He wavered like a drunk. “It would be good for my trim.”

  Twenty years younger I might have laughed in disbelief. Twenty years aching for my own redemption in the sight of the ykari I pretended to hate and persecute silenced that laugh.

  “She’s playing you, child,” Execarne warned him.

  “Is she?” the boy said, quietly. “I’ve saved her life twice, on Helbride and at the Elided Keep. She saved mine, too, on Cheetah. And I am sure that I am the closest thing she has to a friend. We are bound together.”

  “That’s how she lies to people.”

  “No,” Iraji whispered. “It’s not a lie. No matter how much you both want it to be true, you and her . . . you’re wrong.”

  Faham Execarne’s clothier, the operational leader of his Morrow Ministry cell on Kyprananoke, came in from the deck outside. “We have the trail. South into el-Tsunuqba. That isn’t Canaat territory. Someone else has her.”

  We had flushed Baru from Helbride, away from witnesses, so that we could destroy her without taking the blame. We had to act now.

  Iraji was so young. What a waste to spend him here. . . .

  But Aurdwynn needed me to triumph. My brother needed me to triumph. Hesychast needed the Cancrioth’s secret and immortal flesh, balm for all his eugenic troubles—needed it to win the Reckoning of Ways. And if he failed, then I failed, and I had done everything for nothing! Decades of paranoia and self-denial, persecuting my own people, betraying my own brother, wasted because upstart Baru Cormorant beat me to a cult of cancer worshipers!

  Yes. It had to be this way. I would have her tonight. By dawn I would have her dead on my lobotomy pick, and a gentled new woman cut to life in her body. Then she would go north as living dowry.

  “Take Iraji to the boats,” I ordered. “He’ll be our leverage. Have the tactical surgeon prepare my lobotomy instruments. I’ll operate as soon as we have Baru.”

  Aminata’s boat crunched across a corpse.

  “Sorry, mam,” the boatswain called. “That big ol’ burner snuck right up on me.”

  A hush fell over the boat. Burner was not just slang for burnt corpses but, after the Armada War, a particularly vile epithet for Oriati people.

  That wasn’t what got to Aminata. She was used to racialism. It was the triple meaning, the ironic reversal, that made her grunt in pain. She was the burner. She was the one who’d torched the embassy at Hara-Vijay with everyone inside. Even the children.

  She had made that corpse beneath the keel.

  Her tongue found a stinging sore where she’d bit down on a spark. On that thrill of pain she shouted her orders. “Up, up and search, I want her alive! Fat Kyprananoki woman with an arrow in her ass! She can’t have gone far!”

  Of all the people at the embassy reception, she could remember only one who’d definitely spoken to Baru and definitely escaped. The woman had been shot in the ass going over the wall, but she’d made it.

  Maybe Baru had told her something.

  Aminata jackknifed over the boatwale, down into bath-warm water and scattering fish. The cormorant feather tucked into her collar brushed against her chin.

  Hey, bird. I’m gonna find out what the fuck is going on with you, and I’m not going to let anyone hurt you until I do. Not even the Province Admiral, so help me. She gave me some pins. Breveted me up to captain, temporarily.

  I really want that promotion to stick one day. . . .

  But first, Baru, I have to know what you’re doing here.

  The Kyprists triaged
survivors of the fire here on the pavereef, a concrete-filled ring of coral around the embassy. An exhausted old woman in Kyprist-orange gloves ran the triage station. The nurses carried a wretched thing up to her, the wreckage of a person screaming through a red hole. The old woman shook her head: too many burns across too much skin. The right decision. The nurses used their hands to close off the arteries in the victim’s throat: a blood choke, fatal if applied long enough. Aminata wished she could blood choke whoever had released the plague.

  The patient died.

  Then the nurses lifted the next burnt body from the gondola, and it was like the screams had just found a new throat.

  She would never wake up in a world where she hadn’t done this. From now until the day she died, she’d be the woman who’d burnt these people. The Kettling couldn’t be allowed to spread—she knew that—she’d seen the bleeding faces—but look at what she’d done. Crispy red-black skin everywhere. Crispy like the meat you dropped into the fire and fished out laughing. The smell of burnt hair, and the sea clogged with jellyfish around them—And the screams—

  She threw up into the reef. The taste of bread and vinegar. “Oh, kings,” she groaned, and splashed water from her canteen to rinse.

  “Mam,” her subordinate Gerewho Gotha called, “are you all right?”

  “It’s the smell,” Aminata grunted.

  “Mam?” Faroni oyaSegu called. “Mam, I’ve found her.”

  The ass-shot woman lay on a plank with wet seaweed pillowed under her forehead. Her daishiki was hiked up, revealing the fresh crossbow wound in her left ass cheek. No one had had time to dress it. She groaned as Aminata and Faroni approached. “Here to finish me off?”

  “I’m very sorry, mam. We were trying to prevent any infected persons from escaping.” Aminata checked the wound: deep but narrow, not lethal unless infected or poisoned. “You should be all right. Just report to a quarantine if you develop any illness in the next few weeks.”

  “I’m a man,” the ass-shot person said. “You’re confused, because I haven’t got my things on, so you see a woman. My name’s Ngaio.”

  “Well, Mister Ngaio”—Aminata obeyed the navy’s unofficial protocol for handling presanitary confusions of gender—“we came to ask you some questions. You were down in the embassy courtyard before the, uh, the confusion, correct?”

  “To my regret,” he groaned.

  “Did you speak to the woman in the expensive green mask?”

  “The one your admiral wanted to kill? Yes. I’ll tell you, too, if you just”—he gasped, resettled his weight—“get me water, bandages, and a crutch. I have to get to my ship. The Canaat will kill me for collaboration. I’m a Balt, you see. It’s not safe for us now.”

  Aminata had no idea what a Balt was, but she assumed Kyprananoke, tiny as it was, had its own tribes with their own grudges. “Faroni, find something for him to lean on.”

  The younger Oriati woman saluted and trotted off. Aminata helped Ngaio upright to drink from her canteen. Gerewho frowned, worried, probably, that Ngaio might be infected. Aminata waved him off to find bandages: the Kettling passed by blood, and she would get rid of the canteen.

  “Anything you can remember. Please.”

  Ngaio gasped and wiped his mouth. “The woman in the green mask called herself Barbitu Plane. We talked about Prince Tau-indi Bosoka. Barbitu liked them. We talked about Prince Kindalana of Segu, and her plan to join Falcrest and Oriati Mbo together to avert a war. Barbitu was with a woman, a Falcresti woman, who asked me about the plague, and, well”—Ngaio laughed like a sob—“the plague turned up. Which led to . . . well, you certainly know, don’t you?”

  “This Falcresti woman, she was navy?” That would be Staff Captain Shao Lune, who had abandoned Ormsment in favor of Baru.

  “I suppose. She was in a uniform. She said she was Barbitu’s slave.” Ngaio grimaced, in distaste as much as pain. “Slave jokes. I don’t like them.”

  Neither did Aminata. “What happened when Admiral Ormsment arrived?”

  “She said Barbitu was really Baru Cormorant, and also Agonist, whatever that means.” Ngaio threw back his head to finish the water. Her tits bobbed with the motion—his tits, damn it. Aminata didn’t understand why he thought he was a man, but as an interrogator (the infamous Burner of Souls, torturer of her own Oriati race-kin) she knew better than to alienate the subject for no reason.

  Ngaio went on. “Then the Prince Tau-indi Bosoka made it clear this woman, Baru or Agonist or whoever, was under their protection.”

  Shit. Baru was under explicit and sacrosanct diplomatic protection. Any harm done to her would be an act of war against the Oriati. “What did Admiral Ormsment do?”

  Ngaio laughed, and shouted a little at the pain. “She called Baru to duel.”

  Shit. She’d broken diplomatic right. That would convince half of Parliament the Admiralty had gone berserk. There were files in the Parliamentary offices right now, signed and sealed, waiting only to be brought to the proper attention to destroy the navy woman named in the neat label on the back.

  “Why? Why did she ask for a duel?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. The other navy woman, Baru’s companion, she called Ormsment a traitor. Then Juris said she’d sent a ship to take Baru’s parents hostage.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what she said. She offered to fight Baru, woman to woman. Baru spoke to Tau-indi for a few moments, and then she came forward as if to duel . . . and then”—Ngaio shuddered—“someone said ‘I’m thirsty,’ and it all went mad.”

  Aminata had seen Baru wielding Aminata’s old saber, the one she’d gifted to Baru in Aurdwynn. If Baru had kept that sword close at hand she must still care about Aminata—she must be worth more respect than a woman who would take Baru’s innocent parents hostage—

  Or she’d just held on to a good saber.

  “Did she mention anything,” Aminata asked, in desperation, “about a duchess? A Duchess Tain Hu?” The mysterious Tain woman had sent Aminata a letter, entrusting her with Baru’s safety on the eve of her own death. . . .

  “No,” Ngaio said. “Nothing about that.”

  Oh, none of this made any sense. Right before the plague and the massacre, Shao Lune had given a navy signal: I’m drowning, throw me a line. Who was she afraid of? Baru? Or mutinous Juris Ormsment? Or both of them? Kings and queens, there were so many questions—

  And that was why she had to be the one to find Baru first. She had to know, once and for all, if Baru . . .

  If Baru what, exactly? Served the Republic in all she did?

  Or cared about Aminata, even a little? Deserved the trust that the Duchess Tain Hu had expressed in her?

  Where did her duty lie?

  “There was the poem,” Ngaio said.

  “What? What poem?”

  “Barbitu—Baru, I mean—was trying to find a boy’s parents. She had a sketch of the boy. Oriati, younger than you, very beautiful. She said he knew this rhyme: ayamma, ayamma, a ut li-en . . .”

  A frisson took Aminata: two entirely separate things coming together. “Gerewho, listen. Do you recognize those sounds?”

  The syllables made her young suasioner rock back on his heels. “Yes, mam, I think so. From the . . . that last interrogation, before we sailed.” They had interrogated Abdumasi Abd, the special prisoner taken from Aurdwynn. They’d been told to ask him: What is the Cancrioth? He’d given up Baru’s name, setting Aminata on the hunt. But he’d given up something else, too. A string of syllables that had frightened Gerewho viscerally. Those syllables.

  Was Baru actually searching for the exact same Cancrioth that Aminata had been tasked to find? Were they on the same side?

  “But I don’t understand,” Ngaio said, with as much exhaustion as pain in his voice. “Why does any of this matter? Isn’t this Baru woman dead? I didn’t see her come over the walls. . . . She’s gone, isn’t she?”

  “No,” a new voice said.

  That no pulled Aminata
around like a hook in her earlobe. It was the way it was said, somehow. It scared the shit out of her. That no might have negated anything. A question or a life.

  A big woman ambled up the reef toward them. In one hand she held a crude spear-thrower, an atlatl. In the other a jellyfish, its arms trailing from her fist. She had been eating its bell.

  “Who the hell are you?” Aminata snapped.

  The woman’s eyes flashed blue in the setting sun. “You’re from Ascentatic.”

  “Not anymore. Lieutenant Commander Aminata, RNS Sulane, now seconded to Province Admiral Ormsment—”

  An expression of indecipherable appetite. “Aminata. I know that name. Did Baru Cormorant ever pretend to love you?”

  Aminata blinked at her. “What?”

  “I can bring you to her,” the woman said, and the hunger in her voice made Aminata flinch. “I am Ormsment’s hunter. I find Baru wherever she goes. But before I bring you to her, you must tell me this. Did Baru pretend to love you?”

  All Aminata’s instincts said this woman was a killer. A pirate or a cutthroat. She didn’t want to give this “hunter” anything. But if it meant finding Baru . . .

  “We were friends, once,” she allowed.

  “Would she hesitate if it came to a choice between her life and yours?”

  The same question Aminata wanted to answer herself.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Come, then.” The big woman beckoned and smiled. “Come. I need to gather something from your old ship. And then, together, we’ll go to Baru.”

  Ngaio Ngaonic hobbled away across the coral and concrete, as fast as his wounded ass would let him. Aminata had meant to ask him why he and Baru had discussed the Federal Princes, Tau-indi Bosoka and Kindalana of Segu. Too late now.

  A STORY ABOUT ASH 6

  Federation Year 912:

  23 Years Earlier

  Upon Prince Hill, by Lake Jaro

  in Lonjaro Mbo

  Kindalana!” Tau-indi hammered the door plate with the greeting mallet. “Kinda!”

  A groundskeep opened the way. “Your Federal Highness, remember there’s a taboo against burrowing things today—”