The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Stay away from us!” they cried, making their own sort of irita, their alarm call. “We are charged with the old power. Stay away, and save your trim!”

  Their sweat ran bloody. Their flesh had swollen and puckered around the thorn wounds. They looked, Tau thought, like suicides.

  Among those eight hunters walked a robed woman. She raised up a hand at Padrigan, and in the shadow of her heavy sleeve, her fingers glistened.

  “No,” Tau gasped.

  Cairdine Farrier cocked his head like a bird.

  At Padrigan’s side, the tribal guards’ speartips wavered. The woman’s head lifted, and too many shining eyes glowed beneath that hood.

  “Test me,” the woman said, in a low carrying voice, fine southcountry Uburu, as horrifying in its ordinary timbre as anything Tau had ever heard: they are here, they live among us! “You will do no harm. I am outside the jurisdiction of steel.”

  Cairdine Farrier drew his little pistol bow, which he kept, despite Tau’s discomfort, for protection against “animals.”

  “Pardon me,” he called. “Are you a sorcerer?”

  “Farrier,” Padrigan shouted, “get back, they’re here for you, go!”

  “Then I am right to defend myself,” Farrier said, and he shot the sorcerer. The little bolt puckered the cloth just below her right clavicle.

  The sorcerer did not react.

  Farrier, his mouth open in a little half-oh of shock and fascination, worked the mechanism to draw another bolt from the magazine. The sorcerer looked at him with green abstract eyes whose number Tau could not make themself count. Farrier shot her again. The bolt went into the woman’s cheek and stuck there, driven into bone, quivering. Her head moved a little, as if pushed.

  “You are not welcome among us,” the sorcerer said. “You will never be welcome in this land or among these people. You are a botfly and your words are nagana. And I have come to cut you out.”

  She turned her glowing fingers on Cairdine Farrier. “You will know your ruin,” she said, between strings of some forgotten Cancrioth tongue, between Tau’s horrible shuddering breaths, a full-body soreness and sickness, pounding as if their lymph would spray from their eyes and ears, “you will know your ruin well. You will put yourself into it as you have put yourself into us, thinking that it is your will. But it is your doom that moves you thus. And your flesh will be filled with ruin, as you have come to bring ruin into us.”

  She closed her fist. A gush of wet white light jetted from her hand and fell like semen to puddle on the ground. The spearmen shuddered back. Cairdine Farrier fumbled for his notebook with trembling hands.

  “Kill them,” Padrigan cried, hoarsely. “Kill them all before she speaks again!”

  Yes, Tau’s heart shouted. Kill them! There is no trim here—these are not people—just erase them, destroy them, silence them and sweep away their footprints! For the principles’ bright sake, kill them now!

  But even Padrigan’s tribal guard, Segu’s famous impi, did not know how to kill the undying. For this you needed magic, and they had none.

  “Let us past,” the sorcerer said, “or I will cut you all with my uranium knife. We want Cosgrad.”

  Her thorn-laced men stepped forward, and Padrigan and his spearmen stepped back.

  “Run,” Tau whispered, and then, shouting, “Farrier, run, run!”

  Padrigan broke with his spearmen: they fled up the hill, and Farrier, at first bewildered, then moved, even he, by the animal terror of the rout, came running with them. Tau broke only when Farrier was safely past. The sorcerer’s cry chased them, words like hornets, aching in Tau’s spine, stinging their thighs.

  The House Bosoka rose ahead—Tau staggered past the termite colony—they looked back and there was a silent man with strips flayed off his face in the shape of grief marks, not two arms lengths’ away, reaching out—Tau screamed, grabbed the mallet from the greeting-plate at the south entrance, and hurled it into the man’s legs. He leapt over it, came down hard, stumbled, fell behind.

  Tau shoved into the compound, screaming for help—someone came bursting from the south breezeway—oh principles, no, it was Cosgrad Torrinde! Cosgrad, still half-mad with meningitis, shouting, “Tau, I understand! I see! I know!”

  Kindalana scrambled out behind him, the chains of her regalia swaying, and tried to tug him back inside. “Farrier!” he shouted, raising his fist at the other Falcrest man. “Farrier, you bastard, I know how the mangroves grow!”

  “Mangroves?” Tau gasped. Cosgrad had been obsessed with the mangroves that grew in the frettes down south. He couldn’t understand how they survived without saltwater, and this terrified him: maybe Oriati Mbo truly was magical, and he would never learn its logic.

  “I know how the mangroves grow,” Cosgrad said. His lean, vain body swelled and settled with hard breath. Kindalana had her arms around his waist, pulling like she was trying to keep a dog off a cat. “It’s not magic after all. There are minerals in the basins atop the mesa. The rainwater fills up the basins and carries the minerals downriver, to the mangroves. Thus they flourish without saltwater. That is the rule.”

  “Cosgrad,” Tau screamed, “hide!”

  The compound gate swung open. The thorn-lashed men lunged in. The sorcerer walked between them, wet light dripping from her mouth, light burning in her too-many eyes, dark blood pooled beneath the crossbow bolt in her cheek.

  Cosgrad Torrinde, feverish and disheveled, gaped at her. “What?” he said. “I solved the mangroves. What now?”

  “Ah,” the sorcerer said, in that desperately ordinary voice. When she smiled her mouth was just a place of different darkness. “The other tumor. Like knows like, Cosgrad.”

  “You know my name,” Cosgrad said, unsteadily. “Gossip. Shepherds and water women.”

  Kindalana ran down to Tau. They seized each others’ hands, eyes meeting like summer sun through a loose slat. “We stand?” she whispered.

  “Yes. If you’ll stand with me.” They would die here if they had to, before they let their guests be killed.

  “Excuse me,” Farrier shouted, from the far side of the compound: he was waiting by another door, damn him. “Excuse me, mam. Are you a member of the Cancrioth? No one will tell me about you. I’ve asked. Will you tell me, please, where I could learn more.”

  The sorcerer ignored him. Cosgrad raised his trembling hand and pointed to her. “You will be understood. Do you hear me? I will know your law. If I know the law, I can master it. First the mangroves and then the rest. Even you!”

  “Death first,” the sorcerer said, with the fire of her words spattered down her chin. “Death before we let you into us.”

  “Even you,” Cosgrad Torrinde panted. “I will know your law. I will find a way.”

  “Never me,” the sorcerer said. “You will try. But you will find only ruin. A ut li-en: let it be so now and ever.”

  And speaking a word of power, gesturing sharply, she immolated herself.

  Tau gaped in horror. Cosgrad Torrinde stared in fascination and abominable curiosity. Cairdine Farrier bellowed, “Why!?” and stumbled back, falling on the heels of his hands, scrabbling away: as the burning woman, her garments and her skin alight, began to walk, calmly, gracefully, in no apparent pain at all, forward to embrace him.

  The fire was no illusion. The grass around her smoldered and caught.

  It was just then, at the height of the sorcerer’s cataclysmic power, as Cairdine Farrier cowered in that flaming shadow and Cosgrad Torrinde trembled with meningeal visions of secret force, as the thorn-men who guarded the sorcerer screamed in grief and victory, that Abdumasi Abd barged in with his mother’s mercenary guard. Padrigan followed with a few of his rallied tribal guard, crying out, “Kindalana! Run! Tau, child, run!”

  “Fuck me,” Abdu exclaimed. “What is this?”

  And then he saw Tau and Kindalana, holding hands, trying desperately to ward away the burning woman as she advanced. Trying, and failing, with all the dermoregalia and all the
garments of their Princedom, to resist this alien enenen power.

  That was when Abdu realized the Cancrioth could give him something Tau and Kinda could not.

  But on that day he saw his friends in danger, and he shouted to his mercenary shua, “Charge!”

  Cairdine Farrier watched the awful mêlée with the exhilarated horror of a man overseeing a poisoned banquet. All at once the Oriati were chopping each other to meat before his eyes.

  When it was over the thorn-men lay dead in pieces. The sorcerer smoldered in the grass, eyes shut, chest shuddering, heart still beating. The eyes in her face had gone out, as if her soul had left the house of her body to fly away. She had reached out to Cosgrad Torrinde with her burning hands, and Tau, who had never even thought about hurting a person before, who still had not ever thought about hurting a person, struck the sorcerer in the back of the head with a paving stone.

  Kindalana cried out in horror.

  Her father Padrigan screamed in the grass. He’d pulled Abdumasi back from the mêlée and one of the thorn-men had cut Padrigan with a machete.

  “Daughter,” he gasped. “You look like a Prince. I’m so proud.”

  Abdumasi stood, fists clenched, frowning over the corpses of the thorn-faced soldiers. He was thick with anger and confusion, but also with a fascination Tau did not at the time detect.

  This, Abdumasi was thinking. This is what we become when we are desperate. We grow thorns from our skin, we shout ancient words, and we beg our people to stay away from us. For we cannot be bent from our purpose, which is revenge.

  5

  Shir and the Letter

  Tain Shir will force Baru Cormorant to kill Aminata or to kill herself.

  She will compel Baru Cormorant to govern herself by the laws with which she governs others. As Baru destroyed Tain Hu for her own benefit so Tain Shir will compel Baru to destroy all that she pretends to love for the sake of all that she professes to want. Until Baru has gained everything and possesses nothing at all. Or until Baru finds one thing in all existence that she values more than her own power.

  Tain Shir will teach her thus.

  When Shir began this hunt she hoped to find a particle of redemption in Tain Hu’s rescue, but Tain Hu is dead and that particle is now beyond Shir’s reach. Each moment she annihilates herself. Each moment she destroys all that she is and yet the need to avenge her cousin re-forms from the nothingness as if it is now axiomatic to the universe like gravity or the first winter frost.

  Tain Shir feels neither hope nor regret. She knows only purpose and the wilderness of possibilities that she might traverse to achieve that purpose.

  Before her stands one of those possibilities.

  “Why did you take my prisoners?” Aminata intercepts her on Sulane’s middeck. “Captain Nullsin just flashed it over—you had Tain Hu’s household loaded onto an assault boat. Why?”

  She brushes past. Aminata chases after her. “Those are my prisoners! They’re under my protection!”

  There is no protection.

  “You don’t believe me?” Aminata follows Shir down into Sulane’s belly, still shouting. “I’ve got a letter that’ll prove it. Those people are my charge. Not yours, Tain Shir. That’s your name, isn’t it? Look, I have a letter from one of your relatives! Look!”

  Shir sits on the chest at the foot of her sleeping pallet and goes back to work. She is carving a stone weight for the arm of her atlatl, to improve the quality and silence of its throw.

  “Letters aren’t for me,” she says.

  Aminata, strong and high-browed, would catch Shir’s eye if she were not so pricklingly nervous. Shir watches her hand as she offers the letter. One nervous flinch. But only one. “This letter is. It’s addressed to me, but you need to read it. I mean it. It’s for you.”

  Shir works her chisel’s point against the limestone and cracks a flake away.

  “Listen,” Aminata snaps, “I have a duty here. Do you understand that? We all have a duty to uphold the lawful orders of our superiors. But we also have a responsibility”—she hesitates—“to . . . examine those orders critically . . . when they go against the good of the Republic.”

  Shir does not acknowledge the existence of any republic or any good that might accrue to it. But she does acknowledge the existence of dutiful young women who almost understand the meaninglessness of the laws that bind them. “What orders do you doubt?”

  Aminata leans in to mutter, “Killing Baru before we understand what she’s doing here is wrong—”

  Shir scoops a dart with the atlatl’s forked tip and whirls to put the dart between Aminata’s legs at better than a hundred miles an hour. The steel-tipped fishing spear pierces even deeper into the wood than it would Aminata’s bone.

  “That’s real,” she tells the Oriati girl. “Only that. Duty? Law? The men who control you don’t have any duties. The men who control you don’t obey any laws. They act. Then they tell you that it’s your duty to obey.”

  Aminata flinches. Most people flinch when they look at Tain Shir, because they see nothing and fill it with their own fears.

  “Tain Hu believed in duty,” Aminata says, softly.

  “Tain Hu died.”

  “Not without leaving a testament.” She brandishes the letter again. “Read it, damn you. Or I’ll tell Ormsment to deny you the marines you want. How are you going to get Baru then?”

  Shir requires Aminata herself more than she requires the marines. So she takes the letter and reads it.

  To the Oriati Lieutenant who I know is close to my lord, I write this by the mercy of my captor, who hast permitted me a final inscribtion on the eve of the voyage which I hope will end in my death. . . .

  Hu’s Aphalone writing is poor. Shir reads on. The line about “emotional hemorrhoid” makes her laugh aloud. Aminata jerks in surprise.

  Please see to the well-being of my lord even when she will not. Please ensure that she is not alone even when she convinces you that she needs no one (she is lying). Please do not abandon her even when she makes herself wholly intolerable.

  Tain Hu loved Baru Cormorant.

  “This says nothing about Baru,” Shir tells the woman who believes she was Baru’s friend. “This letter is only a testament to the quality of Tain Hu.”

  “It names me protector of Tain Hu’s legacy.” Aminata does not flinch from her eyes this time, though the galvanic blue of Shir’s irises is alien to anyone born south of Aurdwynn. “So your sister’s house is my responsibility. The people you’re stuffing into that assault boat to use as leverage against Baru are my duty. You can’t just steal them for—”

  “Cousin’s house,” Shir corrects, being the child of Hu’s aunt Ko.

  “Whatever! Don’t we owe it to your dead cousin to consider the possibility that Baru needs our help? Shouldn’t we at least give her a chance to tell her side before we . . .” She looks over her shoulder again, afraid not just of Ormsment but of every last sailor on this ship, all of whom chose death and exile for a chance to kill Baru. “Hand her over to Ormsment for execution? I asked Ormsment if Baru would get a fair trial. I know she was lying.”

  “You know how flag officers lie, now?” Shir says, teasing her. She decides that she enjoys the Oriati woman. She needs to be stripped of her beliefs, as most do. But then she could be so exquisitely violent.

  “I’ve seen Samne Maroyad smash up her office and stub out a cigarette on my hand,” Aminata snaps, “so I’m very familiar with the ways flag officers behave under stress, thank you.”

  Shir does not particularly know who Maroyad might be. Some admiral. Aminata’s commander before she came here. “Tain Hu is dead. I came to avenge her. How she died doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it does! This letter says your cousin wanted to die! She gave her life for Baru!”

  “People can be made to want things. The way Baru was made to want to serve Farrier.”

  “Then we can save her from Farrier,” Aminata says, which is so foolish Shir laughs in deli
ght, her eyes wide, her smile wider. Aminata, recoiling, nearly trips over the spear shaft between her feet.

  “I was once Farrier’s creature,” Shir tells her. “I escaped him. There is only one way to escape the masters of manipulation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Chaos.” Shir stands and grips Hu’s letter in her two fists. “When everything is as violent and disordered as the world in its primal state, nothing remains for the master to manipulate. Man may enslave man. But never will he ever master fire. If you want freedom, be as fire.”

  She moves to tear the letter apart.

  “Stop!” Aminata cries. “Stop, stop, don’t do that!”

  She lunges for the letter. Shir catches her by the lapels of her uniform reds and swings her by her own momentum to slam down onto the pallet beneath her. The wood pumps her breath out of her as hot wet wind across Shir’s face. How many times she’s felt that last startled breath before opening a throat.

  “Fuck you!” Aminata hisses, struggling, trying still not to draw attention. As if anyone on Sulane would be surprised by Tain Shir’s rage.

  “Would you bet your life that Baru’s your friend?” Shir asks that defiant face. “Would you wager everything that she really cares for you?”

  Aminata’s throat flutters against Shir’s knuckles. “I have a duty to discover the truth.”

  So it will be duty until the end. A shame.

  Shir tightens her grip. Shir smiles.

  “Let’s help Baru show us the truth,” she says. “We will go to Eternal now. It is a good place for teaching.”

  Aminata blinks warily. “What’s Eternal?”

  “The Cancrioth ship.”

  “The what?”

  “I found it. I told Ormsment where to find it. She believes it will vindicate her.” It will not. The Throne will never allow her to survive her betrayal. Control is paramount. “Ormsment will assault Eternal and bring home the Cancrioth to Falcrest to justify her mutiny.”

  The cries of the sailing-master sound on the weather deck above. Sulane heels as she turns south, toward the ruined volcano. Deckhands roll mines to the stern as a tactical clerk carefully marks down the position of each drop, so the field can be recovered.