The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Iroko.” The Womb grabbed Baru by the scruff of the neck and put something over her head. “Do not take this off. In case we’re separated and I need to find you.”

  “Hey!” Baru protested, and then forgot her anger in fascination. The loop of twine carried a chime of black stone, oily to the light, not to touch. It was the very same mineral that filled the Womb’s magic frog lamp.

  “Is this uranium?”

  “I won’t name things for you all day, child.” The Womb snapped off a fraying thread from the collar of her cassock. “We are going to the Eye now. Don’t stray. Don’t speak.”

  “You were much friendlier on the boat,” Baru muttered.

  “That was before Tau explained to me exactly who you are.”

  Tau, Tau, why oh why had the Womb cut Tau out of trim? It had been so much easier when Tau was full of life and trust. When they wanted to help Baru out of a powerful ethical belief in her goodness. Maybe Tau would come around. . . .

  “Enough questions.” The Womb’s hands glowed the color of a nighttime lagoon. She saw Baru looking, and folded them in the arms of her cassock. “Let’s go.”

  “Could you explain that first?” There must be some sort of substance, a paint, a pigment extracted from those little frogs, which glowed in the presence of uranium.

  “No,” the Womb said. “But don’t feel slighted. No one can explain it. That’s why it’s sorcery.”

  The padlock on Tau’s door was different from any design Baru had ever seen: not the old Tamermash pattern but some purely Oriati invention. The Womb unlocked it with a small iron key wrought in the image of a parrot’s head. Had the Cancrioth made that lock and key, Baru wondered? Or did they trade for it back in their homeland? Or was there no single Cancrioth homeland, only enclaves scattered throughout the Mbo? Everything a clue . . .

  “Tau?” the ambassador called. “It’s time now.”

  The door opened so quickly that Baru jumped. Tau-indi stood in the wedge of shadow beyond, shoulders limp. Saltwater had ruined their beautiful hair and scratched red rings in their eyes. Enact-Colonel Osa stood uncomfortable guard behind them, trying to check for danger without piercing the cyst of bruised space around their Prince.

  “Have they hurt you?” Baru cried.

  Tau blinked listlessly at her. “They have excommunicated me from the Mbo which I served and treasured all my life.” A sort of membrane seemed to have closed over their eyes, like the white paper beneath an eggshell. “I told them everything I knew about you. What you’ve done. Why you came here.”

  “What about Abdu?” Baru snapped. She shouldn’t snap. Tau just had this way of testing her, and making her feel like she was failing. “You’re giving up on him? These people haven’t given up. I thought you were better than them.”

  Tau froze. A terrible shape passed across their rounded body, their expressive face: brittle, bitter, like frost on glass. Baru realized too late how cruel she’d been.

  If Abdu was Cancrioth, if he had chosen to become Cancrioth, then he had consciously thrown away his friendship with Tau.

  Osa shifted on the balls of her feet. Saltwater dripped from the ropes in her fists and pattered on the deck.

  “Tau,” the Womb said, quietly, “you must come with me now. Both our peoples need your help. If we are found here and taken by Falcrest, they will use us against the Mbo. It would mean war. Help me sway the crew to go.”

  She was like a mother afraid for her children. Well, she carried lives in her womb, didn’t she? Not quite a mother in the conventional sense, but a woman used to thinking of all the souls in her care.

  “Whatever you want of me,” Tau said, bowing fractionally. “My master.”

  Baru gasped in horror. In Seti-Caho master was a slave’s word for an owner. You could run through New Kutulbha screaming tunk and burner and cuge and gava and every other racialized epithet imaginable, but the beating you’d get would be a kindness compared to the way the Segu would answer that word master. The Mbo had annihilated slavery a thousand years ago, and a millennium of taboo had hardened on the word like concrete. Slavers were enenen, without trim, one of the only kinds of people still branded with that word.

  The Womb’s hands flashed in the sleeves of her cassock. “Tau. Please. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”

  “Don’t pretend to be anything other than what you are,” Tau said, sweetly.

  “Tau. If Falcrest finds us here, if they take us and learn what we’ve done, it’ll be war. Millions of your people will die. Will you help me stop that?”

  Baru could smell the threat of sorcery in the air. Something of burnt garlic, and a faint metallicity, like blood in her molars. Thrilling and awful. Osa bristled helplessly.

  “I won’t resist,” Tau said. “Everything I do will be your will.”

  They plunged down narrow stairs that creaked beneath their heels. At each landing the light from the Womb’s lantern was cut by the turn and they had to go on for a moment into darkness. As a mansion, Eternal would have been enormous. As a ship, everything inside her built to smaller scale, she was a labyrinth. Baru tried to keep a map in her head, but every time they turned right she lost her place.

  “Who is the Eye?” Osa asked.

  “An onkos,” Tau-indi said.

  “What’s an onkos?”

  “A sorcerer with a highly developed tumor. They are not all fully initiated into a Line. Some are . . . latent. Awaiting growth.”

  A scream like a dying man came from astern. “Pigs,” Baru blurted. She remembered pig screams from Treatymont. “If you’re low on water, why haven’t you slaughtered your pigs?”

  “Because certain lives depend on them,” the Womb said, curtly. “Move.”

  They spilled into a broad companionway deep below the weather deck. People moved in the dark, sentries whispering salutes to the Womb. Curtains swept aside. Baru smelled compost and rich humus. The Womb called out in the same tongue as that prayer: ayamma, ayamma, a ut li-en . . .

  She made herself break the blister of Tau’s silence. “What is that language?”

  “En Elu Aumor. Their high speech. Recorded in the tablets of the Pitchblende Dictionary, deep within the Renderer of Souls.”

  “I wish I were a linguist,” Baru said, out of the nervous need to speak.

  “You would know more ways to lie.”

  They crossed a coaming, a wooden lip where a flood door could seal against the deck. The smell of compost was so thick in Baru’s sinuses that she sneezed.

  The Womb’s candlelight fell on a man’s back.

  “Virios,” she said. “I’ve brought our guests.”

  He was a pleasant-looking man, roundish, black skin, thinning hair. Baru decided he was from Mzilimaki Mbo: he had a calf tattoo of a colobus monkey. He wore a simple work shirt and a knee-length skirt. He had been digging, barehanded, among the mushrooms that grew in a tub of humus.

  His shoulders slumped. “I told you,” he said, in deep Aphalone, “that you had to send them away. How are we going to keep the Pale now, Abbatai? You’ve let them see too much.”

  He turned. His cancer came into the light.

  Osa swore in Seti-Caho. Baru cried out and stumbled back.

  “Yes.” The Eye sighed. “You will think I’m distracted, because of the way one of my eyes looks off into nothing. I assure you it is purely a mechanical issue. Speak to my other eye.”

  His left eye had a stalk like a snail. Thick, the color of crab shell, longer than his nose and slightly uphooked. The eye bulged from the tip in a tangle of living veins.

  “Onkos.” Tau calm as a corpse. “The cancer grows well.”

  “Thank you,” the man said, as if complimented on his beard. “You are . . . ? No. No, it can’t be. Abbatai, what have you done?”

  “They are excised,” the Womb murmured. “Safer than the alternative. This is Tau-indi Bosoka, Prince of Lonjaro Mbo.”

  “Are you really immortal?” Baru blurted. “Do you remember things fro
m a thousand years ago?”

  “I am. And I do. Though I was also born in Mzilimake, on Colobus Lake, not more than sixty years ago. Those two lives are in me, together. None of which I want to tell you.” He had a wonderful syllabic accent, the rhythm of his words set by the length of the sounds rather than the points of stress. It was like song. “But it seems the Womb has decided our Pale of secrecy is worth breaking if it gets her what she wants.”

  “You speak very well, sir,” Baru said, idiotically.

  “Of course I speak well!” he snapped. “I was raised in a society of knowledge; I speak twelve languages! I’ve seen nations far beyond the edge of Falcrest’s grasping little maps!”

  His eye slackened. “No place for pride now, though. Not here.” He wrung out his soiled hands. “I would offer a handshake, as you do in Falcrest. But my hands are dirty. Why were you brought to me?”

  “Tell him, Baru,” the Womb urged. “Tell them what you told me.”

  She measured out a portion of air, like a draw from a well, and spoke. “I was sent by my colleagues in Falcrest to make secret contact with the immortal rulers of Oriati Mbo.”

  “Rulers.” His human eye narrowed. His stalk stared up and off at nothing. “Is that what you think we are?”

  “My colleagues believe it. I am here to learn the truth.”

  The Eye rubbed his ordinary eye. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. “And you, Prince Bosoka?”

  “Baru lied to me.” Tau stood as if all their bones had worn through sinew and ligament to click together like dice. “I was looking for my friend, hoping to bring him home and avert war.”

  “Your friend?”

  Tau hesitated. Baru felt a gritty little speck of hope. It was the plainest sign Tau had given, since their excision, of caring about anything at all.

  “Abdumasi Abd,” the Womb supplied: a mother speaking up for a quiet child. “Tau’s been searching for Abdumasi, Virios.”

  “I would rather let the Prince speak for themself,” the Eye snapped. “Tau-indi Bosoka, were you aboard the ship we attacked? The clipper Cheetah?”

  “I was.”

  The Eye ducked his head in contrition, which had the unnerving effect of aiming his upturned eyestalk directly at Baru. “Then I am truly sorry for what we did to you and your house. I confess I meant to intercept your ship, speak to you, and learn where Abdumasi had been taken. I was the one who sent the signals asking for a parley. I know you chose not to respond, because of the taboo you place upon us, but I never . . . By the time I realized the Brain’s people were at the cannons, and that they meant to sink you to keep you from escaping, it was too late.”

  “You’re searching for Abdumasi?” Tau’s voice was a desert. “Why . . . why do you want him?”

  “He’s dear to me, Prince Bosoka. To all of us. He carries Undionash, one of our rarest lines. It was a gift to show our trust in him.”

  The Prince blinked. Their cheek spasmed. They said nothing. A very long way away, on a continent vast enough to hold Tau’s heart, mountains fell.

  “Please, Tau,” the Eye begged, “do you know where he is? I never wanted him to go out into the world to make this foolish war. It was the Brain, she’s too full of ideas, she can’t see. . . .”

  Tau made a sound Baru had heard only once before, from the people who died after battles. Whatever hopes for Abdu they had secreted away must be scoured out, now. Ruined.

  “You have cannon,” Osa blurted, throwing herself on the silence. “Who was this ship built to fight? Who’s your enemy?”

  “We have no enemy,” the Eye snapped. “We are not warriors. The cannon are for protection!”

  “But you armed the Canaat rebels,” Osa insisted. “You subverted our embassy here. You conspired with Scheme-Colonel Masako to destroy the Kyprist leadership. And when Ambassador Dai-so Kolos found out what you were doing, you killed them.”

  “I did not do that!” the Eye shouted. His voice echoed off the close rafters, faded down intestinal lengths of corridor in Eternal’s huge belly. “The Kettling isn’t even ours! It was never meant to be on this ship! But the Brain conspired—she never wanted to help Abdumasi, she always meant this voyage as the beginning of her war!”

  “Virios!” the Womb snapped.

  He put up his dirty hands. “I’m sorry. But I never . . . I never wanted to be entangled in the world’s business. I never meddled in your embassy’s affairs, or in Kyprananoke’s rebellion.”

  Disappointment crawled like a roach around the edge of Baru’s thoughts. This man was one of the immortal Cancrioth, secret rulers of the thousand-year Mbo? He seemed just as bewildered and petty as any duke of Aurdwynn. All he ruled was a tub of mushrooms in the dark belly of a ship.

  She didn’t want this man. She wanted to speak to the Brain.

  “Baru,” the Womb prodded. “Tell him about your people. Tell him we need to leave.”

  “Yes. Ah.” Tau’s silent shudders were very hard to ignore. “I have insurance, if I come to any harm. There are two navy warships under my command, and if I do not reach an agreement with you, they are prepared to—”

  “She’s lying!” Tau shouted.

  The sound shattered in the dark. Baru wanted to scream in frustration.

  “What?” the Womb snapped. “What’s that, Tau?”

  “She’s lying. The navy’s trying to kill her. You saw Ormsment call her to duel at the embassy, didn’t you? She has no one following her. She’s alone. She’s been alone since she left Aurdwynn and it is destroying her. She’s done nothing of any worth, even to her masters, since she executed her lover. All she does is lead people to ruin. She is a wound!”

  The Eye looked between his three visitors with growing astonishment. “She lied? Abbatai, you brought her among us because she said she could get her warships out of the way, and they aren’t even hers?”

  “I brought her here because she knew our tongue! She spoke it at the embassy! She showed a picture of a boy—she knows where to find the son of Ira-rya!”

  “Does she? Or was that another lie?”

  “She does have people searching for her,” the Womb insisted. “They’ll find us, and when they do we must be gone. Virios, please, you can sway nearly half the crew. You control the water caskage, the fogmaking rooms, the kitchens, the preservariums, the fishing locker—everything we need to survive. If you say it’s time to go, then the Brain will have to listen. You don’t understand what she’s done here! She’s turned these islands into her laboratory! She has the Kettling, it’s loose, it’s out there! We have to go home before she brings it to another—”

  “I’m not giving up on Abdumasi!” the Eye roared.

  Silence, except for Tau’s wounded gasps.

  “Fine,” the Womb said, soothingly. “Baru, tell him where to find Abdumasi. Tell him where we should go next. We’ll leave Kyprananoke, we’ll find a way past those ships out there, and we’ll go rescue Abdumasi. Just tell him, Baru.”

  “No,” Baru said.

  She did not know where Abdumasi Abd had been taken, or even if he was alive. She was not sure she could have shared that secret even if she had it. It would be like cutting Tau’s kidneys out when she had already stabbed them in the heart.

  “A ai bu en on na,” the Womb swore, viciously. “Tell him, or we’ll have to make a deal with the Brain to get this ship moving. You’ll have to pay her price. You don’t want that, Baru.”

  Any price would be worth it to secure the Kettling and destroy Falcrest. Tain Hu had been willing to die for that goal. Therefore Baru had to be willing to die as well, or she was a coward and a hypocrite.

  The Womb’s hands faded palest green as she opened them to the Eye. “If you won’t help get this ship out of here, Virios, I have to go to the Brain. And when I do, don’t you dare come to me with some high-handed protest about how she’s betrayed us.”

  “Let her sell herself!” The Eye beat the meat of his hand against the side of the wooden planter. His human eye bulged
in anger. “Am I the only one who remembers who we are? We do not meddle in the secular world. We do not act on scales shorter than a human life!”

  He turned his back, bent himself over his dirt and his mushrooms. “We should never have let Abd go make his war. We should have kept him safe, with us. Where he belonged.”

  Tau began to sob.

  The Womb was so coldly furious with Baru, afterward, that she would only speak to Osa. “You’ll go back to the void cabins and wait. I’ll return when I need you. I have to make sure the Brain’s people won’t kill Baru the moment they see her.”

  Baru lagged behind, not feigning her exhaustion, so she could whisper to Tau. “Ormsment has my parents. You heard her tell me she’d sent Scylpetaire to Taranoke. Help me save them.”

  Tau said nothing.

  “Why can’t you help me? Why are you undercutting everything I do?”

  Tau smiled like a melon rind, ghastly and eaten. “I tried. I told you to go into the ring with Ormsment. I told you that if you were true and honest, if your soul was good, your trim would deliver justice to you and all those you loved.”

  “I did go into the ring with Ormsment!”

  “You did. Do you remember what happened then, Baru? Do you remember what your soul delivered to us?”

  That was the moment the infected Canaat had revealed themselves.

  “You can’t possibly blame me for the embassy!” Baru hissed.

  “Of course I can. I arranged that whole reception as cover for you to meet with the shadow ambassador, didn’t I? You manipulated me into it. You were even going to use Iraji.”

  “I didn’t give up Iraji!” Baru snarled, drawing Osa’s grunt of warning. “I could’ve brought him here as a gift for the Cancrioth, but I didn’t!”

  “No.” Tau sighed, pushing ahead, after the Womb. “Because you’re waiting for me to give you permission.”

  “What?” She’d thought nothing of the sort.

  “Tain Hu gave you permission to kill her for your own advantage.”