The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “So you would see Falcrest destroyed.”

  “Yes.” And it rushed out of her: “Will you give me the Kettling to bring to Falcrest?”

  “Now,” the Brain said with satisfaction, “we dump these intestines into barrels of brine and chopped onion. They’ll sit overnight. Tomorrow we’ll scrape out the villi and decide what to put inside.”

  “There won’t be a tomorrow,” Baru snapped, losing her patience at last, “if the people searching for me find you here—”

  The Brain reached out and yanked the heavy uranium chime from around Baru’s neck. The thong snapped. As the metal met the Brain’s hands, her skin flashed up bright through blood and offal.

  “Now,” she said, “you understand why I speak of the ways we delude ourselves. I cannot trust you, even if you trust yourself. You think you defy them but maybe they have made you think so. Maybe you are here to steal the Kettling so they can make a cure. Is it not possible? That you do not know how they rule you?”

  It was Baru’s deepest fear and Tau had voiced it perfectly—no matter what you do here, Baru, I expect that by some strange coincidence it will end up being what Mister Cairdine Farrier wants.

  “There is one way to be certain of your motives,” the Brain said. She stood over Baru, and her hands were like suns.

  “Please,” Baru begged. “What power is that? How do you make that light?”

  “Your Taranoki gods are stone and fire, the principles of molten earth. How could fire burn hot enough to melt earth, so far from the air?” In her shining eyes Baru saw true and ancient awe. “That power, Baru. That secret airless fire. That’s what we worship. That is how we are making the immortata, the flesh that never dies, a thousand years ago, in a land you have not named.

  “Now come with me. I must show you something.”

  “What is it?”

  Oh no.

  “A test.”

  Baru, be wary now. . . .

  Her hand was warm, but Baru could not tell if that warmth was in her flesh, or in the light that leaked between their joined fingers.

  The Brain left her soiled smock on a peg. Beneath it she wore bronze armor, tarnished green and ancient. It didn’t fit her. Someone much bigger had died inside it, long ago. The terrible rent in the chest had never been repaired.

  “Follow me.”

  Baru looked for somewhere to wash her hands, but there was only a bucket of ash.

  They met no one as they went belowdecks and aft, through a dining room decorated with preserved peacock plumes, then a library of ancient clay tablets. “The Eye and I curse this part of the ship,” the Brain explained, “to keep our people from fighting here. Neither of us want it damaged.”

  “Can your curse keep boarders away?”

  “For that we have the ship’s magazine.”

  “I don’t know if guns will stop them. . . .”

  “You mistake me.” There was a severity in her now, like a different voice had taken the lead in the choir of souls her tumor carried. “Eternal carries an armament of more than three hundred cannon. The cannon require a supply of powder. If a foe tries to take us, we detonate the magazines. The blast destroys all aboard.”

  The mason dust began to fade, like flavor seeping out of overcooked meat. When she heard the sound ahead, Baru thought it had come from inside her. But there it was again. A scream.

  “The pigs,” she said. “I thought we’d killed the last pig.”

  “The last of the fattening pigs.”

  “There are others?”

  “I told you there is a kinship between human flesh and pig. These pigs . . . serve a different purpose.”

  “The thing you want to show me is a pig?”

  “It is in a pig. It is never born of a pig.”

  “How can something be part of a pig and not be born from a pig?”

  They came to a treasury. Falcresti fiat notes lay in crisp white paper stacks, powdered to keep them dry. Silver lonjaros and segus, golden mzilimakes and faceted devi-nagas, glimmering reef pearl, bars of platinum and unset jewels, not one of them behind lock—as if there were no one on Eternal tempted by worldly wealth.

  “Oh Himu.” Baru reached for a jade statue of an elephant. No wonder the Womb had been so confident in the loyalty of mercenaries! “Who funds you?”

  The Brain hesitated at the far door. The woman who had died and been reborn for a thousand years was afraid.

  “This,” she said, “is the sacrifice I ask of you. It is what I ask of Unuxekome Ra, in exchange for the Kettling: and you know that I am true to my word.”

  She threw her weight into the door to get it swinging. The wooden pegs of the hinges groaned as it opened. A smell came to Baru, rancid and powerful, sweet in the foulest way.

  Then the screams began.

  Shrill and manlike but not the screams of men. Unanimous in their terror. As if they had all at once been awakened to some unthinkable condition. The Brain made a face of mustered courage and stepped inside. Her bare feet crushed straw.

  Baru imagined herself as Tain Hu, and followed.

  Piglets.

  The Brain had a piglet in her arms, and there were more in the pens. There was something wrong with all of them. Bloody efflux stained the Brain’s brass. The piglet took a rasping breath.

  The Brain stroked the piglet’s belly. It convulsed. The mass of tumors that erupted from its skull shed ichor between broken scabs.

  Baru gagged.

  “This is the baneflesh.” The Brain tickled the piglet’s chin. “It comes to us in the failure of Alu, the Line of the Skin. Of all the Lines it is the most aggressive and the most resilient. All the lines can break the Embargo, the rule that no body’s flesh can grow in another. But the baneflesh can cross not just between bodies but between species.

  “When we first make the immortata, it takes root in new hosts only with the greatest difficulty. But we have a thousand years to select those lines we favor. By amplifying only the tumors with traits we prefer into new hosts, we teach them to grow in certain parts of the body, to cause certain effects. We learn to breed cancer. But we have failures along the way. And the baneflesh is our greatest.”

  Baru felt like the ship were capsizing. She knew precisely what the Brain would ask.

  The Brain tickled the piglet again. This time it did not respond. “Baneflesh can be unpredictable in its course. This family—all these pigs’ implants descend from a single parent—prefers to colonize the layer between scalp and brain. In the forebrain, here, where you can see the tumors are thick and extrusive. In the final stages the tumor eats away the scalp. Nothing remains of the host by then. These poor pigs are not suffering. At times they respond as if in pain. At times they shake with joy. But there is nothing left to feel those things.”

  “Is there medicine?” Baru croaked. “Is there a cure?”

  “There is no cure for malign cancer. Everyone knows this. Cancer grief is harder than ordinary grief, they say. In the way that a slow cut hurts more.” The Brain stared into the pig’s cratered scalp. Small black fans, like coral, grew in mounds from gapingly distended pores. “Do you know why we turn to the study of cancer, back in the beginning? When we realize the water from the hot lands can cause it?”

  “Why?” Baru heard her voice as if through a steel keyhole.

  “Because cancer is the aristocracy of the body. It captures the means of growth for its own use. It convinces the body to serve it, and delivers nothing in return. If it grows too much it brings the whole body down.” She had that old, old accent again. “We see how our lords destroy the people they rule. We think that if we can make a cancer that can live in peace with the body . . . then we can be like it. Cancer without grief. Aristocracy without end. We overthrow our lords, but in the end we fail to rule the people well. I do not hate the Mbo for driving us into the jungle. But they need us now, and the time has come for our return. . . .”

  “Why did you bring me here?” Baru whispered. “What is the test?”


  The Brain lifted the pig like a baby, belly up. Effluent beaded in thick strings on her armor. “If I entrust our most powerful weapon to you—”

  No, no, this is wrong—

  “Then you must consecrate your body to this purpose. You cannot lie to yourself if your flesh has been committed. You cannot hide some secret purpose in the other half of your mind, or find yourself turned back to Falcrest’s service by bribery and temptation, when death grows in your blood and bile. I am immortal long enough to know that death clarifies everything.”

  She ran her burning finger over the fans and ridges of the thing growing in the pig’s head. Not a thing born of pig, though. The same cancer that had grown in Alu’s body a thousand years ago, cut out and reseeded but never touched by death. One endless human growth hopping from host to host.

  And it had come all this way to hop once more.

  “Take the baneflesh into your brain,” the Brain whispered. “Deny yourself any possible future except this mighty blow against Falcrest. Live long enough to complete your task, and no longer. Then I trust you wholly. Then I give you whatever you require to bring Falcrest down.”

  7

  Spasms

  Baru ran.

  She bolted barefoot from the pigpens, plunged down stairways no wider than her shoulders, leaving footprints of hay and unthinkable fluid. She stumbled into a compartment where something huge and domed and white, netted with join lines, curved out of shadows that smelled like glue. Hundreds of human teeth grinned in an arc at Baru, and she ran from them, too.

  She ran with mason dust burning out in her sinuses and ebbing from her heart. She ran not because she couldn’t face the choice but because there was no choice at all.

  If she could sacrifice Tain Hu to her mission, and genuinely believe that sacrifice was in service of a worthwhile goal, then she must also be willing to sacrifice herself. She must be willing to set a fixed end to her life in order to gain a weapon that would complete her life’s work.

  Or she was just a hypocrite, just Cairdine Farrier’s pawn, a greedy self-interested monster using the cause of her people’s freedom as an excuse to seize power for herself.

  If she couldn’t do this, she was worse than a traitor. She was a collaborator.

  She had to do it. She had to accept the baneflesh.

  You mustn’t! You can’t!

  This isn’t what I wanted!

  Stop!

  She struck something in the dark, the right side of a doorframe she hadn’t noticed, and fell. The watertight coaming came up into her stomach like a blunt guillotine. Her cut cheek landed first and blood burst over her tongue.

  “Tau,” she grunted. “Tau, stop.” Tau had cast a spell on her that made her feel like she couldn’t breathe, like her fingers were skewered on long needles, like her ears were being crushed by fifty feet of water pressure. Shao Lune had the cure. The mason dust—she needed the dust—

  “Ba-ruuuu,” a woman cooed. “Something frighten you, girl?”

  A boot stepped on her wounded hand. A leather glove ground her cheek down into the wood. The tip of a hooked knife tickled her throat.

  “Ra,” Baru gasped.

  “You didn’t think I’d sailed away on my little boat, did you? Didn’t think I’d forgotten about what you told me?”

  “Ra, don’t—the Brain needs me—”

  “I won’t kill you. Just something we need to clear up, before you go.” The knife scratched a line across her throat, up to her cheek. “Look at me.”

  Baru couldn’t look at her. She couldn’t think what to say. She opened her mouth and at last, without any thought, it came out.

  “Kill me,” she whispered. “Please kill me.”

  The thought had been with her since Sieroch, carved into that sullen crown of hurt she wore every day when she woke, forcing her to lie in bed and do nothing at all. The thought said: just be done with it. Just stop. The world will go onward. You’ve failed.

  “Oh no. Not you, Baru girl. Not when the Brain has such hopes for you.” Ra grasped Baru by the chin and made her roll over. The blade of the knife curved flat over her throat. Ra held a tin mug in her off hand: incongruous hospitality. “Did she offer you the baneflesh?”

  Like a cough: “Yes.”

  “Me too. Price of the pistols, price of the plague. And I took it.” Ra’s grin, an arc of glistening lead in the darkness. The smell of wine on her breath. The Pirate Duchess was drunk as a brewery rat. “She put it right up my nose. Can you believe that? Squirted it up there like I snorted a fly. Said it likes the blood in the nose. Said there’s a special place where the nose is connected to the brain. Said it takes root nine times in ten, if it’s done right. I didn’t give a shit. Don’t have anyone left, don’t plan to leave anything behind. Especially not a grandchild.”

  She stepped down on Baru’s stomach, hard. Brandished the mug. “Drink this.”

  Ra looked so old. Leathered by the world: soaked in hope and then scraped raw, hope and the blade edge, again and again, until even the toughest layers of her lay naked to the acid world. And fired, and scraped again, and stretched into someone else’s shapes.

  “Oh Devena,” Baru groaned. She knew why Ra was here. Baru had lied, in a moment of panic, to protect herself. Said she was carrying Ra’s grandchild. And Ra believed it. The mug must be tea of silphium, or something like it. An abortion.

  “You killed Kyprananoke,” she gasped, to buy time. “You monster. You gave them the Kettling?”

  “Of course I did. We pinned all our hopes on Abdumasi Abd, you know. On his fleet. He was going to liberate Aurdwynn, cut off the Masquerade trade circle, throw back their ships. Then he was going to return with Aurdwynni soldiers and overthrow the Kyprists here. We could’ve bought the things we needed from a free Aurdwynn. Grain. Soil. Metal. Lumber, so we could finally build something.”

  Ra spat into the dark. “But you fucked him. There was no hope for Kyprananoke after that. So when the Cancrioth arrived, when the Scheme-Colonel in the nice white clothes came to me with an offer, I asked them to make our bodies into weapons.”

  “Why? Why?” She wasn’t even from Kyprananoke! She hadn’t the right!

  Ra’s false teeth clicked in her grin.

  “The whole world has stepped on Kyprananoke. Old Mount Tsunuq blew itself apart rather than live here. Falcrest seized what was left, bleached out all the old ways, couldn’t find a way to make the leftovers profitable, and abandoned the islands to rot. Even the sea hates this place. Every winter the Old Gray rises up to drown us.” A laugh like a pistol shot. “Why do you think Yawa exiled me here? This is the land of people who don’t matter.”

  “These people matter,” Baru whispered, because if they didn’t, if Falcrest had revoked their right to matter when it discarded them, what would happen to Taranoke when it was free?

  “Oh?” Ra mocking her, but sad, so sad. “How often did you think about Kyprananoke before you came here? How often did you ever consider this place? At least if we hurt you, you’ll remember we exist. ‘Kyprananoke, where the plague began.’ You’ll remember that for centuries. I don’t forget about you, do I, Baru? Not since you killed my son. You hurt me, and so I remember.”

  “I liked your son,” Baru said, and oh, Wydd save her, she wanted to weep again, she wanted to die, to stop being the woman who had led the dashing Duke Unuxekome to his end. “I wish he hadn’t—I wish he were still here—”

  “No. No more Unuxekomes.” Ra’s foot pressed down harder. “We were all right, as aristocrats go. But our time is past. So drink this fucking tea.”

  “I made it up. There’s no baby.”

  “No baby.” Ra sneered at her. “Then you won’t mind drinking this anyway?”

  “There’s no need, Ra, I swear.”

  “Next you’ll tell me there’s no file full of blackmail on my son—”

  “That’s real, Ra.” Baru grasped desperately; maybe she could bargain with this. “He wrote it himself, dictated it to an ilyk
ari priestess, when he joined the rebellion. It was a way to bind him to the other rebels, adding his secret to their ledger. But I had my man steal it, your son’s secret, I kept it safe—”

  “Show the scroll to me.”

  “I can’t! Yawa stole it!”

  Ra shivered with hate. Her boot crushed Baru’s sternum toward the back of her ribs. “Yawa. I remember when she was just a ratty maid tacking up slogans on shit paper. Aurdwynn Can Rule Itself. How many centuries of my family in Welthony? How many? And she sends me away like a barren wife.”

  “If you let me go,” Baru croaked, “I can help you find her. You could still have revenge. . . .”

  Ra ennobled herself. Her chin came down, her shoulders firmed, her bones themselves seemed to stiffen. There was, for a moment, a duchess in the hall with Baru, a captain and a lady, a fighter and a soul.

  “I don’t need to kill her. The masks will do it for me. She thinks she can trick them. She thinks she’ll save Aurdwynn from their grasp, but she’ll die as their puppet. They’ll strangle her with her own strings.”

  What in Devena’s name was Ra talking about? “I have to stop her, Ra. She doesn’t care about Aurdwynn. She wants what her master wants—”

  “Her master? Ha. You don’t know, do you?” Ra tapped her foot against Baru’s throat. “You don’t know she’s a traitor.”

  “Of course I know,” Baru rasped, “she’s been working for Falcrest since the beginning—”

  “No, she hasn’t. She swore to overthrow the masks and liberate Aurdwynn.” Ra’s eyes were far away, lost in better days. “Swore it to the virtues, and wrote her vow on a palimpsest in the sacred olive-oil lamplight. My son was there. Xate Yawa never lied to an ilykari, not her, not once. And my son never lied to me.”

  She hiccupped a burst of wine smell and looked thoughtfully into the cup of tea. “Let her have Aurdwynn. Let her die trying to save it from the masks. Fuck that place. Fuck this world, the eater of children. Fuck what we’ve all become.”