The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “The Cancrioth!” Aminata gasps in excitement. “I knew it! Baru’s looking for the Cancrioth!”

  Poor Aminata. She clings to this letter because it allows her to believe that Baru never betrayed Tain Hu. And if she didn’t betray Hu, then perhaps she never betrayed Aminata.

  Shir saw them together, once and only once, when they snuck out of the school at Iriad. Aminata tall and lanky and sailor-smooth, drawling stories to Baru from the side of her mouth. And Baru perched beside her on a stone on the harbor cliffs, dark-eyed, looking up intently at Aminata’s face, taking every word and biting it like a coin. When Baru laughed it was like flash through thundercloud.

  Baru will betray Aminata tonight. When Shir forces Baru to choose between Aminata’s life and her own. Baru will choose herself. And choose again, an endless sacrifice, each one justified by the accumulation of its priors. It will not stop until Shir forces Baru to sacrifice her own father. And perhaps not even then.

  You’ll regret not making a bargain with the Eye,” the Womb said. “The Eye just wants to find Abdu and go home. The Brain will extract a price.”

  “You’re afraid of her,” Baru suggested, cheerily. That made her even more excited to meet this Brain.

  “You certainly should be.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Baru assured her. She felt much better now, after the medicine Shao had given her. “I’m an agent of the Emperor Itself, Miss Womb. To defy me is to defy the entire Imperial Republic. Isn’t there anyone else on this ship?”

  The Womb led Baru forward along a dark causeway toward the ship’s bow. “It’s night. The crew’s asleep.”

  Baru thought they must be sailing badly undercrewed, and she was confident in her assessment. Shao Lune’s marvelous mason dust had her feeling like the old days again, like bright autumn mornings in Treatymont, waking up to a draft under the door and a saber-blade of sunlight through the window, Muire Lo setting out coffee on her desk downstairs. Snorting mason dust was better than drinking coffee for the first time! Yawa must have known all along that it was a treatment for Baru’s dark moods—but Yawa wanted her weak.

  Well, no more! By the time Yawa blundered her way to Eternal, Baru would have a pact with the Cancrioth, the promise of Oriati civil war for Cairdine Farrier . . . and a vial of festering blood in her pocket.

  “So this Brain woman shot up Tau’s clipper?”

  The Womb walked more slowly than Baru, and had to rush occasionally to catch up. “She was the one who insisted we arm the ship. She divided the crew during the voyage.”

  “How?”

  “Sermons. Her faction controls the ship’s prow, the orlop lockers, the chartroom, and the navigation instruments.”

  So she has the rutterbook, Baru thought.

  “She appeals to the vengeful and the angry.” The Womb sighed. “And there are more and more of those the farther we stray from home. Why are you humming?”

  “Sorry,” Baru said, turning slow circles as she walked. “D’you reckon I could buy some of this iroko wood?”

  “No. It comes from the western Oriati coast, along the Black Tea Ocean. Your ships can’t sail there. Segu controls the strait from the Ashen Sea.”

  “Perhaps we could arrange some kind of conditional passage? A few ships on a limited basis?”

  “Trade with Falcrest?” The Womb snorted. “Please.”

  “Shame,” Baru said, still grinning. What a wonderful remedy this dust was! “It’s very nice wood.”

  They climbed a stairwell that wrapped around the huge cavity of a cargo hoist. Baru stopped at each landing to stare, and to imagine Eternal unloading goods at the Crane Gallery in Falcrest. The Womb tugged her irritably onward. “What’s gotten into you? You’re sweating.”

  “My mind is like a furnace,” Baru said, and tapped her temple winningly. The cold uranium chime swayed at her neck.

  The curled cuttlefish of the Womb’s hands flared in her sleeves. “Did you get into something from the pharmacopeia?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Baru. Stop.” The Womb barked it with such force that Baru braced herself on the railing, very rationally afraid she might be blown down into the cargo hoist. “You must persuade the Brain to act, do you understand? You must convince her to abandon her madness here and sail. If we die, I’ll be sure you die with us.”

  “What madness keeps her here, specifically?” Baru inquired.

  “Does it matter? Dreams of prophecy and change. Dreams of war.” The Womb’s eyes filled with exhaustion. “Her line . . . they lose themselves in wild ideas. When the growth develops too far, they become erratic. Maybe she’s gone malumin.”

  “Malumin?”

  “I don’t know the Aphalone word.”

  Baru leaned against the corridor wall to get her breath. Her heart was hungry, and she kept coming up short on air. Doubtless her mind was sucking it all down. “Would Abdumasi Abd be as valuable to her as he was to the Eye?”

  The Womb looked at her sharply. “You’re ready to offer him, now?”

  “Of course.” If it made Tau sad, well, they could take some mason dust and feel better.

  “I don’t know. It’s very hard to know her.” The Womb paused on a landing to catch her breath. “She thinks, Baru. She thinks and thinks and thinks. Among the people of Abattai, of my line . . . to us, Incrisiath is the Unborn One.”

  “Why?”

  “Because her mind is like a child in the womb. Full of possibility. But curled up on itself, unseeing. All the Brains see visions and portents, and they struggle against the pull of the Door in the East, the temptation to involute their consciousness and abandon reality for what lies within. This Brain . . . has fought harder than most to remain in our world. She wants to make her visions real.” The Womb straightened, breathed, and tugged her cassock down. “But she wouldn’t have come on this expedition if she didn’t care about Abd. And Abd’s line, Undionash, is a natural ally of Incrisiath. Surely the Brain wants him safe. . . .”

  “So she’ll negotiate?”

  “She’d better.” The Womb swore in Maulmake, a sound like a bobcat. “This damn book-taught crew! No discipline. No proper captain. I told them we should’ve hired mercenaries.”

  “You use mercenaries?”

  “Here and there. When there are no better ways.”

  “And you don’t have . . . problems keeping their loyalty?”

  The Womb laughed, and took the bait. “No. No, we do not.”

  So the Cancrioth were rich. Intriguing.

  They came abovedecks, where the green wormlight from the caldera walls washed out the stars. Baru stared up into the rigging overhead, thick as jungle canopy, awestruck by its complexity.

  “Maybe you are immortal. It must take a hundred years to learn how to sail this. . . .”

  “Baru,” the Womb said.

  “Is it an automaton, somehow? Are there gears, pulleys, levers you can pull to make the sails work—or is it all done by hand? Do you have some special line of cancer suited to crawling around on the tops—or monkeys? Apes? Jungle apes, trained to sail—”

  “Baru!”

  “What!” Baru snapped.

  And saw the crew.

  Ranks and ranks of them. They were all Oriati. But they were not the brisk smiling traders Baru remembered from Taranoke, nor the waistcoated civil servants of Falcrest’s federated Oriati, nor the Jackal grenadiers with their dashing shoulder flags. They were certainly not like Tau-indi’s golden Cheetah crew in their fine clean uniforms. If all those kinds of Oriati had gathered here, they would not have filled a single file of this crowd, this parliament of human variety.

  They were so ecstatically different as to defy any category larger than the individual. Sweaty albinos with big straw hats, women with vitiligo spots like you might see in eastern Falcrest around Grendlake. Loinclothed divers in belts of cork, able sailors with spare lines knotted up their arms, navigators whose long queues fell halfway to their trousers. Shaven-headed riggers. Car
penters in turbans and gunners with gauged ears and missing fingers. Their eyes contained all the shapes Baru knew—the upturned and lightly folded Maia, the level and crisply folded Falcresti, the round Stakhi, the wide-spaced classical Oriati—and many more besides. Some of them wore cassocks like the Womb, but others were dressed in sailor slops and loose vests, or kept their own taboos: one man wore only work gloves and a bright orange penis gourd.

  Some had split brows and swollen lips. They’d been brawling down below, before the Womb brokered her peace.

  “Not a word,” the Womb whispered. “They know you’re not part of the crew. If they hear Aphalone in your accent . . .”

  “Hello!” Baru called, in the Urunoki of her childhood, daring herself to keep any hint of Falcrest’s trade language from the sound. “Do any of you know my tongue?”

  “What did you say?” the Womb hissed.

  “I just said hello. They won’t kill me for hello, will they?”

  “They might kill you just for seeing their faces, Baru! Some of them have lives to go back to in the Mbo—”

  “This isn’t a warship at all, is it?” Baru stared in wonder. So many different people in one place reminded her of Iriad market days, cooked pineapple juice stinging her lips, the last season before the red sails. “These people aren’t soldiers.”

  A very small man, not much more than four feet tall, perfectly proportionate, what Falcrest would have called a pygmy (Baru did not know a better name), came forward from the ranks. “Baru Cormorant. The Brain will see you, if you will help her with her chores.”

  “What chores?”

  “She is slaughtering the fattening hogs.” He beckoned with his small hand. “She will show you what to do. She prefers to teach.”

  6

  The Brain

  Sorry about this,” the Brain called. “They tell me the messiah shouldn’t do chores, but I think it sets a bad example.”

  She stood in the orange pool of a cone lantern. A gutter of fresh blood ran beneath her sandaled feet. She had a thirty-foot loop of stripped pig’s intestine coiled over her shoulder and a four-foot black saw in her hand. The pig’s carcass dangled from an iron hook beside her.

  “Last of the herd.” She patted the pork flank. “Chickens cost half a gallon a day. In Sukhabwe, eight hundred years ago, we are fighting the cocks because we cannot water them all in the drought. Pigs are even greedier! Does the Eye stop watering his mushrooms? I tell him he ought to use nightsoil, but he’s prissy.”

  Her Aphalone was perfect, if you ignored the strange tenses, and very Segu. She was a sturdy woman of no clear tribe, what Falcrest would’ve called “peasant stock.” A cloud of coiled black hair spilled down to her shoulders. She had shaved it into a tonsure, leaving the top of her head bare.

  The oil light caught at a shape there. Something beneath the skin, negative image of a triangle—

  Baru gasped. The Brain had been trepanned. Someone had cut a hatch into her skull.

  Baru knew from grotesque childhood fascinations that trepanation was exquisitely dangerous. If the membrane beneath the skull was punctured, the brain would die . . . but who could say what the Cancrioth had learned to do? What surgeries they had developed over a thousand years of exploratory self-mutilation?

  The Brain waved Baru forward. “Come, come. Don’t be fastidious. On the day when the Devi and the Naga marry their peoples, they slaughter ten thousand buffalo, and the rice patties flood red. This is hardly a mess.” She wore a bloodstained smock, and something hard beneath it, shaped like armor. “I bung it before you arrive. Help me with the cut.”

  “It’s too warm to slaughter,” Baru protested: regurgitating farm technique she’d absorbed in Aurdwynn. “The meat will spoil.”

  “She comes from Falcrest and she talks hygiene! Do you really think we can’t keep pork before you come along?” She offered the double-handled saw. “It’s hard for me to find good help, you know. People volunteer for the honor, and my choice becomes political.”

  “There’s no time,” Baru protested, “my people are coming—”

  “Pick up your end, woman! This work is ours to do!”

  Together they settled the blade across the pig’s groin. Baru was surprised by how easily the saw went in: a soft zzp, like bubbles bursting in a bath. The Brain had to jerk back on her handle to keep Baru from falling. “Easy now! On my rhythm.”

  Together they sawed through the carcass from groin to gaping neck. The intestines coiled on the Brain’s shoulder nearly slipped; she adjusted them with a shrug. She had the curious, gentle face of a dove. (Baru did not trust that impression; there seemed to be no reason for it to be true.) A thick brass torc reflected a ring of green wormlight back up on her face. It gave the uncomfortable impression of armoring the Brain’s body against her skull.

  “It’s a joke,” she said.

  “I—your pardon?” There was something slippery about the way she formed her tenses.

  “ ‘The messiah doesn’t do chores.’ I am born—this body is born—under a set of signs. An eclipse, a choir of cicadas, a geyser of blood, a burning whirlwind. It is foretold among certain peoples that this moon child will come. We—the other souls in me, you understand?—wish to join with the child, so that we can learn the faith of Mzu. I am raised in two worlds, Baru. By day the messiah of one people; and at night tutored as the immortal child of another.”

  Was that why she seemed to speak of the past as the present? Had she mistaken the visions and seizures of her tumor for prophecy?

  “You know my name?” Baru probed: always safe to repeat something they’d already divulged, in hope of gaining more.

  “I know everything. Tau tells the Womb about your gambit in Aurdwynn, your secret war against Falcrest. Unuxekome Ra hears it all, and tells me. I trust Ra and so I trust you.”

  “You trust me?” Baru nearly lost her rhythm. “I could be an assassin!”

  The Brain laughed. Her torc rattled against metal beneath her smock. “I’m a thousand years old, Baru. Emperors and whales lie to me. I am proselytized by storms at the helm of a burning fleet. I am threated by the War Princess and bribed by White Akhena: she puts a spear up against my belly, a set of ivory at my flanks, and a silver bowl on my head, and she kisses honey onto my tongue. The lies you tell are easy to see. I only fear the lies you’ve been made to believe are true.”

  On the push: “Lies about the Cancrioth?”

  “I’ll tell you about us, if you’d like. I don’t care if you tell the world. I think that truth always helps the righteous.”

  “Tell me, then,” Baru said, too hungrily. “Tell me who you are.”

  Despite all fear she found herself rising to an unexpected joy. This was the first time since her childhood that she’d met anyone who knew, without duplicity or complication, that she opposed Falcrest. Someone who knew what she had done in Aurdwynn, and who still, knowing the truth about her—

  Baru, don’t be a fool,

  don’t leap without looking

  —wanted to help.

  “Who we are. A question that causes fierce argument, lately.”

  “Excuse me.” Baru couldn’t help but ask. “Do you . . . your verb tenses, they’re not quite what I’m used to in Aphalone. Is it regional . . . ?”

  “No. I cannot tell past from present in the ordinary way. Now I am fleeing south into Sukha Pan, now I am slipping into Uro’s tent, now I am whispering to Akhena as she drives her husbands like cattle, all at once. It is an effect of who I am. But I sort things by observing which causes precede which effects. My memories are not clouded, Baru. They are as clear as life. Sometimes I get lost in them if I don’t keep my hands and my mouth busy.” The Brain pushed the saw. They were deep into the abdomen now, where the intestines had been. Baru had pig’s blood on her cassock. “So. Where do I begin?”

  You’ve always been bored by history, Cairdine Farrier had told her. It’s your greatest weakness.

  “At the beginning, please,” Baru said.


  They had not been slavers, the Brain said. Not exactly. That was the myth of the Cancrioth but not the truth. Nothing had happened exactly the way it was remembered, especially not in the Mbo, where memory was like a house you arranged for the benefit of those who lived in it, not a museum to leave untouched.

  But the myths were right in one way. The Cancrioth had truly been sorcerers and philosophers. There was not much difference at the time: magic and philosophy were both ways to manipulate symbols to create effect.

  Only later, when there was a name for what they did, would they be called scientists.

  It was a time of plague and dire scarcity on the continent of Oria. The Cheetah Palaces had crumbled into nothing but names on plundered tombs, and the salaried engineer caste who’d built their ziggurats and standing steles was now extinct. With them died the irrigation and cisterns that kept the cities alive. Suddenly there were millions of people who could not be fed.

  In the time between the Palatine Collapse and the Mbo, in the time of the great Paramountcies, those unfed people became slaves.

  The priest-legal caste encouraged slavery on the grounds that austerity and selfless labor were holy: slavery was a worldly ordeal that would guarantee the spirit’s virtue. The kings and queens of the Paramountcies insisted upon slavery because their neighbors used slaves, and because slave raids kept their warriors busy on the border instead of restless in the capital.

  Slavery was a terrible institution in a thousand ways. One of those ways was hygiene. The forced movement of entire nations of bodies spread disease: tribe after tribe torn from the quilt of the world, liquified and poured into the gullet of the Paramountcies’ appetite for work. The slaves died in ways and in quantities that exceeded the horror of any epidemic and any war, for in truth slavery was both things and more. And the death of slaves only stoked the demand for more.

  It was an insatiable engine of democlysm. Philosophers like Iri anEnna and Mana Mane had not yet been born. The Whale Words and the Kiet Khoiad had not yet been written. No one had worked to convince the world that each individual life had a value.