The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Move them! Bring the Prince to the deck or you’ll both die down here!” the Womb screamed. “Don’t you understand? Falcrest has found us! You know what Falcrest does!”

  Falcrest—yes. She had to finish the work. She had to follow the roads of porcelain and molten gold to the wellspring and there she would pour in the poison and kill it all.

  But she couldn’t see the way.

  “Where’s the Brain?” she said, plaintively. “I have to say yes. . . .”

  “Say yes to what?” The Womb loomed in her vision, and there were a thousand faces in her stomach, peering at Baru in horror. “What did the Brain offer you, Baru?”

  “I was going to win,” Baru said, hollowly. “But I was too afraid. . . .”

  The door at the far end of the passageway burst open. Shao Lune gasped in fear: it was the huge man Innibarish. He looked like a bear crawling into a dollhouse.

  “Abbatai.” His voice was not gentle anymore. “One boat has come alongside. There’s a boy in it.”

  “What boy?”

  “He says his name’s Iraji, and that he’s important to us. He says he’s been poisoned, and he won’t get the antidote unless we send Baru down in exchange for him. He says that it’ll go badly for us unless we do. What should we do?”

  Oh, no. Iraji was here. But she’d left him on a houseboat—she’d left him safe—

  “Baru,” the Womb hissed, “can you get us safe passage? Can you—she can’t hear me, damn it. Is she mad?”

  “Xate Yawa sent the boy.” Shao Lune stepped in front of Baru, blocking her from the Womb’s sight. “I’ve been working with her, you know. I led her to you, with the tracer on the boat. Xate Yawa’s a Jurispotence, a lord of judges. She’s the one who can get you out of here.”

  The Womb clicked her tongue against her teeth. “This Shate woman, she can control those ships?”

  “She can offer Ormsment a pardon. A real Imperial pardon.” The thing Shao Lune wanted most for herself. “She’d do anything to get that. Anything except let Baru live.”

  “Then she’s no more use to us. We’ll trade her for this boy.” The Womb sighed. “What a pitiful mess.”

  Baru’s helpless heart, that poor weak useless organ of foolishness, added Iraji to the list of people she had tried to send away to safety. Muire Lo and Tain Hu and Xate Olake. All dead. Or worse.

  No one could escape the game.

  She had to speak. She had to say that she was still useful. She had come so far, so many had died for her, she couldn’t give up, not now, it made no sense. . . .

  Suicide, the Manual of the Somatic Mind said, was often an impulse. As often as eight times in ten it was unplanned.

  She had reached her frontier at last. In these thin wretched hours of star watch, full of poison, absolutely alone, she had discovered that it was possible to feel so terrible and so worthless and so hated by everyone and everything you had ever cared for that you could not even speak a word to save your own life. Tau had not cast a spell on her at all. Tau had simply told her the truth. She had sacrificed everything good about herself, and everyone who had seen good in her, and when she could sacrifice no more, she had looked for others to take on her debt.

  Any accountant could have told her you could not defer the debt forever. And it would always be called at the worst time.

  “Innibarish.” The Womb pointed to Baru with one bright hand. “Take her up to the weather deck and put her off the ship. I’m going to the pharmacy to get every antidote I know. Do not let the boy die. He’s hope for Undionash. He’s hope for all of us.”

  Innibarish hauled Baru out through crowds of Cancrioth sailors who hauled on capstans and winched in anchors to the beat of a lead drum. When she lost her footing to the last spasms of the ergot poison, or to the post-ictal wreckage in her brain, he carried her.

  Iraji waited for her at the rail. His dancer’s body was folded wretchedly. She could not see his gold-flecked eyes in the dark.

  “I came to rescue you,” he said.

  They’d dragged him up from his pathetic little dinghy because he was already too sick to climb. Two of the Eye’s sailors held him upright. A woman with scarified dots down her cheekbones brought him a bowl of water but he ignored it.

  “What were you thinking?” Baru screamed at him.

  He smiled weakly. “I told you. I came to save you.”

  “Yawa made you do this?

  “If she didn’t have me to trade, she would’ve done worse.”

  She had to keep him from the Cancrioth—she had to stop them from realizing who he was. If she couldn’t save herself at least she could protect him. . . .

  “Why did she make you lie? Why did you tell these people you’re important to them?” If he would only play along—

  “Baru, don’t . . .” He slumped until the sailors at his shoulders caught him, his conditioning against any thought of the Cancrioth battling fear and poison.

  She strained against Innibarish’s huge arms. “What did she give you, Iraji? What’s the antidote?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked embarrassed. He had been a very capable spy, and proud of it. “She put honey in it. I couldn’t recognize the taste. She says she’ll send the antidote once she has you. I had to come, Baru, I had to take your place, before you did something terrible. . . .”

  “You volunteered?” As Tain Hu had volunteered. “Oh, Iraji . . .”

  “I had to get you out of here. I knew you were going to do something stupid.”

  Baru laughed wretchedly. She’d already done something stupid. She’d already fucked it all up. If only she’d said yes to the Brain, she would be the sorcerer’s ally, under her protection.

  But she’d lost her stomach. Run away from the fate Tain Hu had embraced. She had never been worth Hu’s love.

  The truth was that Sieroch had broken her. Giving up Hu had shattered her. She was no one’s savant. She was tired and spent. She wanted to lie down and never wake up.

  “Oh, Baru.” Tau-indi’s voice from her blind side. “Even him? Even him?”

  “It’s not my fault,” she groaned. She was so weak, so empty of any self-respect, that she could not stop this cowardice: “He volunteered.”

  “He’s dying.” Tau’s voice was high with outrage. “What have you done?”

  “I don’t want to die.” Iraji turned watery, pain-wide eyes on Tau. “Your Federal Highness, you mustn’t die, either. It’ll be all right. We’ll be all right, both of us, you’ll see. Baru has a plan—”

  She did not have a plan.

  “A plan for who?” Tau said, bitterly. “No one but herself.”

  “No, your Highness. Tain Hu believed in her, and my master knew Tain Hu. She wouldn’t believe in a false hope.”

  But she had, hadn’t she?

  “Abbatai!” The Eye’s rich voice, calling out to the Womb, who was coming down the long promenade stairs from the sterncastle. “Who is this boy?”

  “I’m the missing Undionash host,” Iraji said. “The boy who vanished.”

  A hush fell across the deck around them. Cancrioth sailors looked up from their work. Baru wished she could seize the clock of the world and run it back a moment, so that she could strike him, vomit on him, anything to keep him from saying it.

  They could never let him go now.

  “I am the missing Undionash host. My mother carried the Spine. I was born to carry it, too. I fled the Cancrioth when I was young, because I was afraid. And now I’m home.”

  Tau began to weep. “You poor boy. You poor, poor boy.”

  “You are him,” the Womb said, in wonder. “You’re the boy from Baru’s picture.”

  “And what’s wrong with him?” the Eye shouted, pushing through lines of sailors. “Why can’t he stand on his own?”

  “He’s been poisoned—they say they’ll send an antidote if we surrender Baru. I brought everything I could, but many of these are fatal at the wrong dose. . . .”

  “Then send Baru down!”
>
  “I thought you’d die before you’d let her break the Pale, Virios.”

  “Fuck the Pale.” The Eye looked at Iraji the way Baru had imagined father Solit might one day look at her. “He’s Undionash, like Abdumasi. He’s a sign of hope. We can’t let him die.”

  He marked Baru with a finger. His cancer horn stared wildly past her. “You are leaving. Now.”

  Innibarish hauled Baru to the rail. “I’m sorry about this,” he murmured. “You seem like you need help.”

  She got her feet under her. She would walk to Yawa, damn it. That much at least she would do. Tain Hu had walked down to her own drowning unbowed—

  A woman’s voice cut through the hubbub with the absolute clarity of a geometric proof.

  “Without me?”

  The mathematician Kimbune came running down the deck from the prow. The circle-and-line tattoo on her forehead glistened with sweat, and she wiped tears from her red eyes.

  “You were just going to send her away? When she knows where to find Abdumasi, and my husband’s soul?”

  “Kimbune, please,” the Womb groaned. “The Brain lied to you. She doesn’t know.”

  “And you do? You know better than her?” Kimbune shouted. “You’re going to give up, sail home!”

  The Womb and the Eye looked at each other in dismay. “Kimbune,” the Womb sighed, “this boy is one of us, and he’s dying. The only way we can save him is to send Baru away—”

  “All that remains of my husband lives in Abdumasi Abd.” Kimbune’s voice trembled with outrage. “I will not lose his chance at eternity. Not for anything. The Brain says Baru can find him. So I am going with Baru.”

  The poor mathematician was going to give herself to Yawa. She’d be vivisected. They’d pull the cancer from her living flesh and give it to Hesychast.

  “Osa,” Baru rasped. “Osa, come here.”

  As the others argued, the Jackal soldier woman leaned her head close.

  “You must not let Tau kill themself,” Baru whispered. “Please. They will want to live again, soon. Their flame burns strong. Just don’t let it blow out now.”

  Then Baru made herself walk to the rail. If she went fast enough maybe she could leave Kimbune behind.

  Black water below. She could jump, and no one would ever find her body. . . .

  “You’ll only give them a hostage!” the Eye shouted at Kimbune. “You’ll be cut open before their Parliament. You can’t go!”

  “I don’t care,” Kimbune said, determinedly. “I have to save him. Someone fetch Baru’s things! Didn’t she come with things? Bring them here!”

  “Baru, you bitch!” Shao Lune shouted. Two sailors held her back as she tried to bolt after Baru. “You promised you’d get me out of here! You promised! When Yawa lobotomizes you, you’d better beg her to save me! I hope it’s all you can think about!”

  Baru could not bear to look back.

  Someone threw a rope ladder over the side for her. She looked down and saw, directly below, Iraji’s empty dinghy. Out in the dark green shadows of the caldera water, ripples of phosphorescence betrayed more boats closing in through the dark. A rocket flare ignited overhead. The sputtering light shadowed Eternal’s huge barnacled hull, the cannon-ports, the streaks of effluent along the golden skin. Far below the bladed fin of the cancer whale circled like a scream.

  She put her leg over the side and found the ladder. She lifted her other trembling leg over. She began to descend.

  “Baru.”

  She looked back.

  The Brain was there, a halo of uranium light cast from her hands onto the torc around her neck, a horrible strain in her eyes. She looked as if all the strength had been drawn from her: as if the baneflesh pig had put a straw straight into her soul and suckled.

  But she was coming through the crowd, beating them aside with the power of her presence. There was still blood on her hands, on her sandaled feet. She drew Kimbune with her, pulling her like an ox.

  The Brain threw out her hand to Baru, and in that hand there was light like water. She cried out in En Elu Aumor. The light arced between them, fountainjet in air, and splashed over Baru’s scalp.

  “Return to me,” the Brain shouted. “I bind you thus. I find you. You find me. We complete our pact. It is happening now, in our future; this is our memory, recalled in that moment. They are the same. Ayamma, ayamma, am amar!”

  An ergot cramp kicked at Baru’s thighs. One of her feet slipped. She was weaker than Tain Hu. Tain Hu hadn’t lost her grip. Tain Hu had managed to hold on to her chains until she drowned.

  She grabbed for the ladder. But the rope her hands found was not real: it was the tenuous, hallucinatory strand, thin as spidersilk, that led up to the deck and to Kimbune.

  How odd, she thought, with some uncorroded inner curiosity. I thought the Cancrioth didn’t have trim.

  Then she fell.

  8

  Surrender

  She fell down the freeboard of a ship taller than any she had ever known.

  But Eternal was not taller than the cliffs on Taranoke, where the divers plunged like herons and came up grinning. She managed to get her feet pointed. The filthy cassock billowed around her, fluttering like moth wings.

  Impact.

  Seawater flooded her mouth, poured through the split-glass cut in her right cheek. The slap of contact did what all her self-flagellation couldn’t. It made her want to act. The only thing in the world she needed to do was get to the surface and breathe: and that, at least, she could manage.

  She scrabbled for the boatwale of Iraji’s dinghy and tried to pull herself aboard. She couldn’t. She fell back into the bath-warm water, just her nose above the surface. It was all right. She would rest here for a moment. It was all right—

  Kimbune grabbed her by her wounded right hand and hauled. Baru screamed in pain, unable, for a moment, to understand what force had seized her: her damn blind right!

  “Careful!” Baru cried, and then, without warning, found herself on her ass in the shallow bilgewater, aching.

  “Are you all right?” Kimbune cried. “I was trying to help you. You went all limp.”

  “The ergot’s still giving me seizures.” She struggled up to sit on a thwart. “It’ll pass.”

  “Ergot? Who gave you ergot?”

  “A madwoman.”

  “Which one?” Kimbune asked, nervously, and then began to laugh. Baru, bloody-tongued, helpless, began to cackle along with her.

  “Oh Alu.” Kimbune looked out into the dark pool of the caldera. “What have I done?”

  “What have you done?” Baru could not believe the others had let her go.

  “I’m coming with you to find my husband.”

  “Abd?”

  “My husband who is in Abd.” Kimbune showed Baru a canvas sack. “I packed a few of your things. Your mask. Your odd little calculator. That boy up there, is he really the Undionash child?”

  Iraji! Baru scrabbled around beneath her, searching for some kind of signal, a flare pistol or a lantern, that would make Yawa give up the antidote. There had to be a clue what to do, where to go. . . .

  “Listen,” she snapped. “When I’m gone, you must tell Xate Yawa that the Cancrioth is prepared to release plague in Aurdwynn if you’re not returned safely. Tell her that. Remember to specify Aurdwynn, not Falcrest. Do you understand? You have to protect yourself. That will keep her from hurting you.”

  “Gone? Where are you going?” The mathematician clutched the canvas bag to her chest. Lumps of shape betrayed the contents: the arc of Baru’s mask, books, balls of clothing, two heavy cylinders that made dull noises as they struck each other. Kimbune’s long-lashed eyes peered warily over the bag at Baru.

  “I’m not going to survive this,” Baru said. It was a liberating thought.

  “Nobody will hurt me,” Kimbune said, hopefully. “I’m carrying the most important thing in the world. It’ll protect me.”

  There was no flare pistol anywhere, no sign of a signal Baru coul
d send. Yawa wouldn’t just let Iraji die, would she? She grabbed at the oar in her lock, took one haul, and set the boat spinning. There were two oars, damn it! Where was the one on the right?

  “What’s that?” she asked. “What’s the most important thing in the world?”

  “A proof.”

  “A proof?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Kimbune said, clutching her bag. “It’s too powerful. The bastard went and died before I could convince him, but it’s true, I’ve finished it and it’s beautiful and he was wrong, five hundred years he was wrong—”

  “Wait a moment. Do you mean your husband?”

  “Yes!”

  “Are you desperate to get to your husband’s soul so you can . . . win an argument?”

  “It’s an important argument!” Kimbune cried. “Don’t look at me that way. Who’s that over there?”

  “Who? Where?” Baru stared into the dark. Saw boats silhouetted against wormlight.

  “Yawa?” she called. “Yawa, I’m here. Give him the antidote.”

  Dark shapes shuffled around, a vague exchange of negative spaces. Then someone stood up in the prow of one of the boats. Raised a lantern.

  “Baru? Is that you?”

  Not the last voice in the world she had expected to hear: not, after all, Tain Hu’s voice. But precious anyway, as unexpected as a shaft of moonlight in a cave. And Baru saw her on the prow of her boat, coming closer, uniformed, upright, every inch in command, and reaching out to save her.

  Aminata.

  Aminata pulled Baru off her boat and didn’t let her go.

  Baru squawked and tried to put her feet down but Aminata crushed her close, held her, muttered in her ear, “Hey, you asshole.” She smelled of honest sweat and aftershave. Her scalp beneath the mask was fresh razor-smooth black.

  “Hi,” Baru groaned, and for a moment Aminata held all her weight.

  “You’ve got some kind of glue on your head,” Aminata said.

  “Oh.” The Brain’s glowing ichor hadn’t come off in the sea. “It’s, uh, it’s like jellyfish tea.”

  Aminata fussed at the stain. “Can’t you go anywhere without starting a civil war?”

  Baru croaked a little laugh. “This one’s really not my fault.”