The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  She bent over Baru to force her mouth open. Baru tried to fight. Ra kicked her in the head.

  By the time Baru had her senses back she was swallowing lukewarm tea. It had the bitter, alkaline taste of ergot. She remembered that taste from the night Svir had poisoned her, when she had gone into seizure, when she had seen Tain Hu. Ergot was a hallucinogen, and a dangerous abortifacient—the herbalist Yythel had always warned women against it.

  This, she thought, is what happens when I travel without a bodyguard. Old women pour poison down my throat. Oh, Devena, this is what happens when I try to run from a choice.

  Her womb wanted to get out.

  “Fuck,” Baru grunted. A bizarre cramp, like a wave rolling through her body, nothing like the dull ache of her period, split her stomach and seized her thighs. She gave up crawling and fell forward on her elbows. Gritted her teeth. Blew through her nose until the contraction passed. It left no lingering pain: even stranger.

  There was no child in there to kill, but Baru kept thinking of certain medical texts, read through horrified fingers, about uterine prolapse and fatal torsions.

  She needed to finish the work. She needed to get the Kettling before Yawa came and ruined it all.

  But she hurt—

  Another cramp struck. “Fuck,” Baru panted. “Wydd fuck.” She tried to breathe and smelled the salt marshes around the Elided Keep, the burning mace-grass. Heard the screams of that poor otter they’d shot while trying to kill Tain Shir, crying as it died.

  Hallucinating already. She had to get back to Shao Lune. Shao Lune would have medicine.

  When she raised her eyes from the dark iroko planks and the whittled Cancrioth symbols, she saw Tau. They propped their hands on their round hips and smiled. Their eyes were two halos, perfect rings of light, like artifacts on a telescope lens. Baru had seen that halo before. It meant that she was going to seize.

  “You’re going the right way,” Tau said. “I need you now. I need you to say the things I need to hear. Come to me.”

  “Go away,” Baru grunted. And realized that she could see all of Tau, even their right side. That had happened before, in the instants before the seizure hit—

  “Not now,” she hissed, “not here—not again!”

  “It’ll be all right,” Tau said. “It’ll all be okay, Baru. Trust in trim.”

  The seizure took her.

  I’m here. I’m with you.

  Her consciousness began to tick forward. Gaps of nothingness between oil-painted instants of action. She was on her feet again, walking doubled over. The seizure made the pain distant, added an extra degree of consciousness. Her body screamed as her womb tried to push out something that wasn’t there. She pitied herself, remotely.

  She looked down, and found that she’d been tied.

  There were ropes on her. Not the canvas and silk that had bound her to the Imperial Throne in that ergotic vision on Helbride. These ropes were hemp and jute, linen and coir, very ordinary lines, knotted loosely round her arms and legs. She felt them pull at her, suggesting, gently, where to go. And when she staggered they took her weight. They kept her walking.

  Another tick of absence.

  She was outside Tau-indi’s stateroom. Enact-Colonel Osa slumped against the door. A triplet of infinitely thin bands circled her head.

  Oh, the longing in poor Osa, in her roped-up fists and powerful arms! Baru understood Osa as she had never tried to before. She was a Jackal, one of the first professional soldiers the Mbo had ever raised: she had dedicated her life to repairing the mistakes of the Armada War. If she were not sworn to Tau’s protection, she might happily join the Brain, just for the chance to test herself against Falcrest.

  “Hello,” Baru said.

  “Baru. What have they done to you?”

  “Tau needs me.”

  “Tau doesn’t want to see you.” She clicked her boots together, sublimating some dearly-wished-for violence into the sound. “They don’t want to see anyone.”

  “Is Tau alone in there? Did they send you away?”

  Osa stared at her fists. Baru saw a rope as thick as a ship’s sheetline around Osa’s neck, trailing under the doorjamb and into the room. It was there and then it was gone. It was a hallucination and Baru was sure it was real.

  “They ordered me to leave,” Osa said. “I couldn’t disobey.”

  “Osa, they’ll hurt themself.”

  “I can’t disobey. I took an oath.”

  “Let me go in to them, Osa.”

  She did not get out of Baru’s way. But she did not resist.

  There was something suicidal in the way Tau perched on the side of their bed. All that luxury behind them, all the possibility of a life. And Tau chose, instead, to crouch at the edge.

  They did not react to Baru’s entrance. Their hands dangled slack. She sat down on the bed next to them. “Please, your Highness. I need your help. I’ve made a mistake and I don’t know . . . I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve been wrong about something. I don’t know how to fix it. . . .”

  “You stink of meat,” Tau said.

  She felt, distantly, another agonizing cramp. Tau leapt in surprise: she must have screamed. “What’s wrong with you?” they said.

  “I’m having seizures,” Baru said, “and a false miscarriage. And I took too much mason dust, before.”

  “I would say you deserve it all. But we are in a place where morality and justice have no power.”

  “Look at me, Tau. Look at this,” brandishing her two missing fingers, “at this,” the split-open glass cut in her cheek, “at this!” Hammering a fist against the right side of her head. “You’re alive, Tau! You’re fine! They don’t have any power over you! Please, I need your help, can’t you help me?”

  “Scientism,” Tau sniffed.

  “Scientism?”

  “Your science has explained some things, so you believe that science must explain all things. You can’t understand what they did to me. So you say nothing was done to me at all.”

  “You’re being a child!”

  “Would you not despair,” Tau snarled, “if this happened to you? If you were taken in by Falcrest and forcibly excommunicated from your—But you don’t believe in anything, do you? Nothing but yourself.”

  She thought about this while her body screamed through another poisoned contraction. It seemed like a fair point.

  “You’re breathing on me. Stop.” Tau put a hand on her shoulder and, without feeling, pushed her off the bed. Her thighs were too cramped up to support her. She slid onto the floor. She had never seen Tau move anyone against their will before.

  “It’s not your fault,” she slurred, “that Abdumasi is one of them. You knew it might happen, didn’t you? You told me there were powers he might have called upon to sustain himself, at the cost of all he was to you. He called upon them. It was his choice.”

  “You’re right. It isn’t my fault. I can be honest with myself now.” Tau did not bother to look down at her. “It’s your fault. Everything. My excision. Abdu taken by the cancer. The war to come. All your fault.”

  She hauled herself up the bed frame, got her chin back onto the blanket. “No, Tau, it’s not . . .”

  “Really? You’ll deny it? You’ll deny the obvious? You’ve subverted me at every turn. You’ve turned all my efforts to your own. Wasn’t I on a mission to find Abdumasi Abd, and to prevent this war with peace and compassion?

  “Then you arrive. You start war on the Llosydanes. You drive me to flight on Cheetah, straight into the Cancrioth’s path. My ship is attacked. Many of my house are killed, people I’ve known since childhood. I’m cast up on your ship, in your control, with a rogue admiral and the Bane of Wives hunting you. We come to Kyprananoke and at once there’s civil war, the Kettling loosed, the embassy violated. And I am cut out of trim. Everything I have ever cared about is taken from me. I will never be a real person again.

  “And here, on this sick ship, I find all my worst fears confirmed, the Cancrioth
is alive and their tentacles are well up inside us, yes, the Mbo, which I thought had prospered a whole fucking millennium on trim and self-betterment, why, we’ve been infected the whole time by ancient aristocrats who worship fucking tumors! None of it mattered! None of it!”

  Their arm came off their eyes. Baru recoiled, crying out, slamming her elbows against the iroko deck. A blood vessel had burst in Tau’s right eye, nightmare red, shimmering with hallucination. Expanding not just through the eye but out of it, like a blossom. The more they shouted, the more the blossom grew.

  “Stop!” she cried. But Tau did not stop.

  “When the Maia invaded, and we thought we’d embraced them into peace, why, it was probably the fucking Cancrioth that set the beetles on their heartland crops! When we appealed to our common decency to stop the displacement of the jungle people, it was probably the fucking Cancrioth who bribed the migrants to turn back! And how about Taranoke, hm? Were you a Cancrioth breeding experiment? Maybe it was a game for them. Maybe one of them bet another, oh ho, watch, I’ll turn the fierce Maia into pineapple-eating sluts!”

  “I do not like pineapple!” Baru snapped, because she was so bemused at being called a slut.

  “YOU DO!” Tau screamed, and the blood rushed into their eye like poured wine. “I ASKED YOUR PARENTS WHAT FOOD YOU LIKED! AND THEY SAID PINEAPPLE!”

  A spasm knocked Baru back onto the floor. She felt her throat fill with bile; felt herself swallow it, aspirate, and begin to choke. All distant, less urgent than her thoughts. Of course Tau had met her parents. They had been tracking Abd, and Abd had been on Taranoke, working with the resistance; Tau would have met with figures in the resistance. Tau would probably ask about everything, even about their child’s favorite food, to build those precious bonds of trim.

  The spasm passed. She rolled onto her side and coughed up vomit. When she had enough air in her throat to get past the burn she said, “I’m sorry. You’re right. I just lied because I wanted to disagree with you. Oh, Wydd, my parents. What will I tell my parents? I can’t make my parents outlive me. . . .”

  If she took the baneflesh, she would never be able to tell her parents that she had done it all for them.

  “You can’t even tell the truth about pineapple.” Tau threw up their hands. “Principles help you, you lied about pineapple. You are a hole in the heart.”

  “Tau, it’s not my fault Abdu joined the Cancrioth.”

  “Of course it’s your fault,” Tau said, with a gleam of madness in their unbloodied eye, not the madness of insanity but that guilty self-awareness of someone burning a friendship, breaking it forever in a moment’s rage. “Because you’re really just Farrier. Just a little puppet with his hand up your ass. You do everything he wants. You think you’re here to liberate Taranoke? No. You’re here for him. You’re always working for Farrier. So it’s your fault Abdu joined the Cancrioth, because Farrier drove him to do it. Farrier’s the one who broke us, why didn’t she know what it would do to him, Cairdine fucking Farrier of all people, no wonder Abdu went bad, no wonder, no wonder, why didn’t she know!”

  And just when Baru thought Tau would collapse into sobs of rage, they subsided, and sat on the bed with their fists on their knees, their khanga stretched beneath them, thinking.

  “Oh,” they said, and sighed.

  “What?” Baru’s stomach was taut as rigging line. “What?”

  “I’ve been lying to myself. I blame Kindalana for what became of Abdu. What a hypocrite I am.” Tau shook their head. “I blamed her for her choice and I never admitted it. I am such a fool.”

  “I don’t understand. . . .”

  “Truly trim is real,” Tau breathed. “Truly the universe is ruled by the connections between people. We lived together on Prince Hill, beside Lake Jaro. Abdumasi Abd, and Kindalana of Segu, and Cairdine Farrier, and Cosgrad Torrinde, and me. And what happened between us—between our little lives—has altered the whole world. Hasn’t it? Listen, it is so:

  “The Cancrioth are here to find Abdumasi, because Abdumasi went to Aurdwynn to fight the Masquerade.

  “And he wouldn’t have joined the Cancrioth or fought the Masquerade if he didn’t hate Farrier so much.

  “And why does he hate Farrier? Kindalana most of all. So the small summer things of our childhood became the beginning of this war. Isn’t it magnificent? You can’t explain that with money, or statecraft, or math. The Cancrioth couldn’t have arranged any of that, nor the Throne, nor even you, Baru. It is all in the lines between hearts.”

  From nowhere, sun breaking out of eclipse, Tau smiled.

  “Trim,” they said. “It’s real. Even if I am lost to it.”

  “Tau,” Baru said, nervous as a feral kitten, trying to roll over and get her hands under herself, “I know where to find Abdumasi Abd. My old friend Aminata. The one you call the Burner of Souls. She’s here. If she’s a torturer, a specialist in Oriati, then, you said it yourself, they’d use her to torture Abd. She can lead us to him, can’t she? Is it possible that trim drew us together? You to me, me to Aminata, Aminata to bring us to Abdu? Is it possible, Tau, that this is all happening the way it has to happen?”

  She waited a moment for Tau’s interest. It did not come. “Tau?”

  “And what then?”

  “What?”

  “What happens to Abdu once you find him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know. You’re going to give him back to the Cancrioth, aren’t you? As a bargaining chip for your war against Falcrest. He’ll never see Kindalana again. He’ll never heal that wound. He’s lost. As I am lost. The wound cannot be healed now. We cannot be reconnected.”

  “Tau, if I can stop Falcrest, if I can stop the war, it doesn’t matter what happens to us—”

  “No. People are not coins. They are not for you to sacrifice for your own use. Whatever you expect to gain from the Cancrioth, Baru, it will not make the world you want. It will only tear the wound wider.”

  The contractions were coming further apart now. Like something inside her choosing not to be born. “Tau,” she said, through tears of pain. “I came here for help, help making a choice—”

  “GET OUT!” the Prince screamed.

  And Baru thought, oh Wydd, this rage has been in them all the time, even as they were kind to me. But they’ve had the art of goodness, the skill of goodness, and it has never failed them, they have always been better than their rage.

  Until now. Until I took that goodness from them.

  She crawled for the door.

  And the whole ship began to scream.

  What’s happening?” Shao Lune cried. “What have you done?”

  Down below them: a sound like a bull charging a steel rod the size of a redwood tree. It came up through the frames of the ship to rattle Baru’s jaw so hard it popped in its hinge. Another contraction hit her, and with it that weird ergotic wave through her mind; she staggered headfirst into Shao’s stomach.

  “Alarm,” she grunted, as Shao tried to steady her. “Must be an alarm. Something belowdecks—huge bell, or resonating cavity, or,” she grinned at the image, “big cancer elephant, trumpeting, ah, shit,” the cramp felt like it would push her heart up her throat, “shit.”

  She gagged more bile onto the beautiful etched deck.

  “What did they do to you?” Shao pulled her along, clearly practiced at wrangling puking-drunk shipmates. “You smell like pig filth! Your hands—did you kill someone? Did you murder someone, Baru?”

  The contraction peaked and Baru screamed silently into Shao’s shoulder. The cool cloth of a cotton tunic beneath her lips: trust Shao to find the good fabric.

  “Yawa’s here,” she gasped. “She’s found us. . . .”

  “What if it’s Ormsment instead? What if she captures us? She’ll kill me.” Shao shook Baru, not gently. “Are we protected? Did you make the deal? Are we safe?”

  “No,” Baru groaned.

  “What?”

  “I fucked it up, Shao. I ran.
I was almost there, I had an arrangement . . . but the Brain, she wanted me to do this thing, this thing I couldn’t do, I couldn’t—”

  Shao Lune dropped her to the floor. “You stupid gava whore.”

  The Womb burst into Baru’s awareness from the right. She’d hitched her cassock up to run, baring sandals, bruised shins, skinned knees. The poor woman. She must’ve scrambled up here, carrying a tumor the size of twins.

  “Boats,” the Womb panted.

  Shao kept Baru between her and the Cancrioth woman. “Boats?”

  “Galganath’s sighted boats. I sent Innibarish to ring the irita obelisk and call everyone to posts.” The Womb grimaced at the bile pooled on the floor. “You must call the boats off, Baru, before they try to board us. Or some idiot’s going to drop a lantern while loading the cannon and kill us all. Baru? What’s wrong with her?”

  Baru reached for a lie and the next absence seizure tore it away from her. Time blinked.

  She was on the floor, leaning against the wall. Shao Lune and the Womb had leapt to new places. Shao was shouting, “Who are they? Are they navy? If they’re navy assault boats then Baru can’t call them off, you see? They came all this way to kill her.”

  The Womb wrapped protectively around her tumor. “I don’t know. Galganath reported three separate groups. One must be the navy.”

  “Help.” She reached for Shao. “Give me mason dust. I need to finish the bargain. Before it’s too late.”

  Shao sneered in disgust. “You’re blacking out and you want more dust? When you sit there jabbering in Iolynic, like you’re in Aurdwynn again?”

  “I spoke?”

  “Talking to yourself. Do you do that in private? Try to encourage yourself with royalist fantasies, like a little girl in a mirror?”

  “ENOUGH!” the Womb bellowed. The power of her voice seemed to bend the world around Baru. “Osa. Where’s Osa?”

  Tau’s bodyguard climbed from Baru’s blind side. The Womb beckoned to her, left-handed, a crude and urgent gesture. “Get your Prince up on maindeck. Maybe we can use Tau’s diplomatic seal to keep the boats away.”

  “The Prince won’t be moved,” Osa said.