The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Cosgrad Torrinde the Hesychast had his Clarified, people like Iscend Comprine, who were born and raised in Metademe conditioning. Hesychast believed that Baru would never overcome her own nature. The flesh mastered the mind, and Baru Cormorant’s flesh could never kill Tain Hu.

  But Hesychast was wrong.

  Baru was Farrier’s monument, his exemplar, his masterpiece. A degenerate child molded into a brilliant Imperial agent. A tribadist who, even when dispatched into rebel woods to consort with warrior duchesses, enforced her own chastity until the night before the end. A traitor who would voluntarily return to Falcrest, to her own repression and to Farrier’s control. Because she believed she was a savant, a hard woman, someone who sacrificed what she must in order to do what was necessary. Someone who had to be alone.

  Behold the chains he placed on you.

  His law lived in Baru. Everything she accomplished was tainted by it.

  If I show you favor, woman, then you will die.

  And through that death I will progress.

  She wore an invisible mask: the laughing face of Cairdine Farrier, carved into the skull of her soul.

  Aminata.”

  “Baru?” Pushed up against Baru’s right shoulder, she must’ve felt Baru go rigid. “What is she doing? Why is she saying these things?”

  Ulyu Xe dangled limp from Tain Shir’s arm. Her soul had withdrawn from all contact with the world. Baru hated to imagine the things Shir had whispered to her in the dark: the truth about Baru.

  “Aminata,” she said. “Did Cairdine Farrier ask you to beat me and scream at me?”

  “I—what—?”

  “In school, Aminata. It’s important. When you called me a tribadist. Did Farrier ask you to do that?”

  “Yes, he said you needed a good fright from a friendly face, so you’d watch yourself and not get into worse trouble later—”

  Baru nodded. “All right, then. Aminata, listen. I can’t explain it all. There’s no time. Just know—please—that I did it all for my parents and my home. That isn’t a lie. That’s the truth. I thought I was helping my home.”

  “Baru, what’s happening?”

  Tain Shir spoke in Maia Urun, the ancestral tongue of Baru’s home; spoke as if she could taste Baru’s thoughts. “Farrier is your secret master, for his mastery is secret from you. He has concealed it within your pride. He has dominated you through your conviction that you secretly resist him. There is no difference between pretending to obey Farrier and committing yourself utterly to his control.”

  Something cried out to Baru—something she’d heard—a sword, and a throne, and a voice, Tain Hu’s loving voice, saying,

  She’ll make you worse, if she can. Don’t let her. I always tried to make you better.

  Listen. Listen. There is a difference between acting out their story, and truly obeying their story. Do you know what it is?

  Baru could not remember the answer. She could not bring it to mind. It was lost in the darkness of her right.

  So she made her choice.

  “I want to be free of him,” she said. “I want that more than I want anything.”

  Shir dropped Ulyu Xe down into the arms of the marines behind her. She smiled, no, she grinned, a big happy grin, like a proud friend.

  “You understand,” she said. “You understand now. Be free.”

  She shrugged loose a spear and fitted it into her atlatl.

  “Shoot her!” Aminata barked.

  But the marine marksman hesitated. He was looking up at Baru with eyes full of hate and fear. This man was Ormsment’s, and he could not bring himself to save Baru’s life.

  Tain Shir cast her spear.

  Aminata shoved Baru out of the way.

  “NO!” Baru screamed, as Aminata went down with the spear in her breastbone, as Kimbune screamed in fear and the marines bellowed in confusion. No, Wydd, no, take it back, not Aminata, not for her, not for her—

  “Ah,” Tain Shir said, with some satisfaction. “She did truly believe she was your friend.”

  She reached to draw another spear from the bundle on her back.

  A needle went through her hand.

  It happened so fast that Baru thought she’d had another seizure. A narrow steel shaft, finned like a crossbow bolt, through and through Shir’s palm: and Shir already yanking the dart out, whirling, her reflexes faster than Baru’s thought as she turned to meet—

  Iscend Comprine.

  Baru had learned her own egocentric weakness, her habit of forgetting about the other players on the board. She’d resolved to think about people more, to remember their inner lives.

  What did it say about her, and her idea of the Clarified, that she’d not spared more than one thought for Iscend tonight?

  Iscend was Clarified, born from the choicest eugenic material and raised in Hesychast’s Metademe, conditioned from birth to put the well-being of the Imperial Republic before all else.

  Baru had never expected to see her again.

  The Clarified woman stood loose-kneed on the prow of her own launch. Her body soaked up the tremor of the waves, compressing and relaxing. She held a pistol crossbow, the sort that was always loaded with poison bolts. And, in her off hand, the segmented red shape of a Burn grenade.

  “I’ve poisoned you,” she said. “It’s curare. You’ll stop breathing in five minutes unless you do exactly as I say.”

  “Gaios!” Shir barked at her. “Stop!”

  Iscend froze, except her face, where there should have been a smile. Gaios was her Clarified command word. It should pull her mind around like a leash.

  Instead she frowned. A tremendous warping grimace that broke her perfect high-boned mountain-fox face in two.

  “No,” she said.

  In the boat with Baru, Aminata arched and yelled. “It’s in the jack! Get it out!” The fishing spear had penetrated her combat harness, but stopped against the layers of steel and fabric beneath. One of her marines pounced on her, put a boot on her rib cage, and pulled.

  The bent heads of the prisoners flashed through Baru’s awareness—there was Ake, pale hair strung across an exhausted pale face; there was Ulyu Xe, limp in Ake’s embrace; the boy Run crying in silent fear and anger as Ude, his bearded guardian, tried to cover him. The herbalist Yythel huddled in the stern with sour displeased exhaustion on her face.

  Above them all Tain Shir loomed, reaching up, drawing one of the spears bound across her back.

  “Gaios,” she repeated to Iscend. “Be still. Be still.”

  Iscend’s boat glided closer.

  Iscend grinned, as if she’d just had a brilliant idea.

  And she said, “Gaios. I will not.”

  She had used her own command word. Impossible.

  “Kneel.” Shir reached for her as her boat came closer. “Kneel, gaios, kneel and comply.”

  “Gaios. I refuse.”

  “You will not harm me. I know your word.”

  “You do know my word. But I have a purpose here and I do not serve by departing from it.”

  “What is your purpose? Gaios. Tell me.”

  Iscend’s smile went impish, perversely sly: what could perversion mean in the mind of a Clarified woman? She was bending her own programming, and it delighted her.

  “I am here to protect Baru,” she said. “She is necessary.”

  “To who?”

  “To Durance. To my master Hesychast. To me.”

  Shir said, low and slow, “Gaios. Kneel.”

  “Gaios. I refuse.”

  “You will obey your word!” Shir bellowed. “Gaios! Kneel!”

  Iscend trembled with the force of the command. Her wavering legs nearly pitched her backward. Her body corrected her balance with automatic perfection, and as she came back low and centered she said, silently, gaios, and the motion of that automatic balance became a twitch in her finger, and the crossbow fired.

  The needle bolt went through Shir’s other hand as it passed before her face, and pinned that hand to the
spear beneath. Shir grunted without inflection: neither pain nor surprise. Curare again, no doubt. Something melancholy about the sight of a monster so awful and primordial brought low by merely rational means.

  Iscend’s boat bumped up against Shir’s. Shir lunged without expression, thrusting down from overhead, like a fisherman, into Iscend’s chest, roaring “Gaios!” to freeze her there: and Iscend grimaced at the word, the grimace became a shiver, the shiver became a movement, a sidestep, catching the haft of that spear and pulling, Shir growling as the spear tore itself from her grip and yanked the crossbow bolt out of her hand. Iscend threw the spear away and leapt from her boat to Shir’s, who grabbed at her collar, her belt, her hair, any point of leverage that would let her grapple the smaller woman. But Iscend slipped through her hands like she was greased. Close inside Shir’s guard, she kneed the bigger woman in the groin and went for her throat. A blur of violence as they grappled: Iscend’s fluid efficiency and her smile of delight, as if she astounded herself with every maneuver, and Shir as inelegant, as brutal as a shark breaching with a seal in her jaws, battering it to death against the rocks.

  One of the marines rowing Shir’s boat grabbed for Iscend’s legs.

  She leapt his grip and kicked him, backward, in the face. But Shir got Iscend’s arm, outthrown for balance, and with a roar of effort she extended it so far Baru was sure it would pop from its socket—

  Iscend whirled with Shir’s pull. She saved her arm but could not get out of Shir’s reach. One bloody hand closed over her face, clawing at her eyes.

  Shir grunted like a bear and dug in.

  Iscend’s free arm tucked the red shape of the Burn grenade into Shir’s waistband.

  “Gaios!” Baru screamed, terrified for Ulyu Xe and Ake and all the others, all those who would burn with Shir, “NO!”

  Iscend’s finger hooked through the grenade’s rip-ring.

  The Cancrioth whale bumped its head against the boat.

  Not even Clarified were trained to include cancer whales in their kinesthetic choreography. Iscend tipped backward and Shir, still clutching her face and throat, went down with her, both together, into the dark water.

  Motherfucker!” Aminata shouted. She grabbed Baru by the shoulder and hauled herself upright. “Stand down, stand down, police your weapons! I’m in command here! Marines, as Ormsment’s staff captain, I’m in command until we figure out what the fuck is happening! Stand down!” For a moment it was going to be all right.

  Then a beam of light pinned them all in place. A point of chemical fire cupped in a focusing mirror, bright enough to blind.

  “Put ’em up,” Faham Execarne called. “I want hands right up. We have a hwacha trained on you, and a barge full of angry men behind it. Bows down, hands up. You too, Agonist. You especially.

  “In the name of the Morrow Ministry of the Imperial Republic, by the authority of the Jurispotence-at-Large Xate Yawa, you are all under my arrest.”

  Where is my niece?” Yawa’s mechanical mask ground each word like a coffee mill. “Where is Tain Shir?”

  The Morrow Ministry agents cinched Baru’s straitjacket tighter. “She went in,” Baru gasped. “She was shot in the hand, poisoned with curare. Then she fell into the water.”

  “Where is Iscend Comprine?”

  “In the water. You didn’t know she’d do that, did you? You sent her to keep me alive, but you didn’t know how far she’d go. Oh, Yawa! Your women keep trying to die for me.”

  The Morrow-men were going now, leaving Baru alone, straitjacket bound to metal, Xate Yawa looming over her.

  “Never again,” Yawa said. “You’ll never hurt anyone I treasure ever again.”

  The dawn rose through the skylight behind her. They had hauled Baru away from the others, onto a makeshift landing and up an ancient lava tube. Maybe no one had been here since the Day of Thunder Capes, when Mount Tsunuq blew itself apart. On the day of that eruption, some ancient Jellyfish Eater, a liturge from the Tiatro Tsun come to watch the dawn, might have stared down through the skylight above Baru to see the fire surging below.

  The gods of fire had passed through and gone. Only burnt stone remained.

  Baru felt the sore crown around her head, that ring of hurt which marked her worst days of ennui. She was ready to close her eyes for a while.

  You spent all you had. And there was no one left to draw a loan from, no more divers on the soft grass, no more officers with sly cruel faces, no more gentle Tau-indi or sweet Iraji or even Apparitor to shout at you.

  You were spent.

  She wondered what would happen to Kimbune. Faham Execarne had fixated on her, although Kimbune was pretending not to speak Aphalone. “The Cancrioth!” he kept shouting, as if volume could get his point across. “Are you really the Cancrioth? Amazing. Amazing! King’s balls, we can’t let Parliament know about this. Where’s Tau? They must be a dreadful mess right now, I’ve got to reassure them—”

  Baru did not have to care about any of that anymore.

  She closed her eyes and sighed. A cool wind blew up the lava tube. Here inside the volcano the air smelled exactly and wonderfully like Taranoke.

  “Yawa,” she said, “will you tell Admiral Ormsment that I’ve gone, please? So that my parents will be safe.”

  It was done now. She could rest.

  The Cancrioth would never find Abdumasi Abd. Falcrest would drive Oriati Mbo to civil war and lay its eggs in the wounds and pillage the whole continent. Vultjag would remain a poverty-stricken hamlet, unless the avalanche of Stakhiecz invasion wiped Tain Hu’s home entirely away. Iraji would live out his life incubating cancer. Svir’s lover, the Empire Admiral Lindon Satamine, would be murdered by a Parliamentary purge during the war. And Tau-indi Bosoka would die bitter and alone, all their faith in trim destroyed.

  But it didn’t matter. She was going to die. Nothing would be her problem any longer.

  How badly she’d wanted to stay in that moment when she woke in Tain Hu’s arms. How terribly she’d wished that she would never think another thought. The first time in her life, maybe, that she’d wished for ignorance.

  “I’ll fetch my instruments,” Yawa said, and disappeared into Baru’s blindness, to make the lobotomy ready.

  Tain Hu’s ghost hand cupped the right of her face.

  Go away, Baru thought. I’m bruised. You’re hurting my eye.

  But the hand would not go.

  Baru lifted her face to the dawn that came down glorious through the skylight. The morning birds were rising, rising, thousands of them singing to each other, tens of thousands, lifting from the black slopes of el-Tsunuqba, voice of the mountain, Taranoke, Taranoke, I am the burnt and unpeopled husk of Taranoke, I am your home as you deserve to find it, I am the true and empty shape of your heart.

  And the birds called out in their tens of thousands, and their wings shadowed the dawn, and Baru wanted to know how many, how many exactly, and how much of the sky their wings could blot out, and how much of el-Tsunuqba their shadows could darken, and all the rest.

  She began to count.

  INTERLUDE

  Falcrest

  it was a hot, wet spring day in Falcrest, the City of Bleach and Sugar, when Parliament summoned the Empire Admiral to entertain his own doom.

  The day’s casualties were already severe; the Empire Admiral noted the harborside birds, huddled beneath the piers as if the sun had beat the strength from them. A few diving anhingas gathered smugly on pilings to dry their outfanned wings, but the humidity left them bedraggled, and they retreated, protesting hoarsely, to the shadows of the boardwalk. A pair of soaring ibises came in off the Sound of Fire, looking for thermals. But the thick, wet air soaked them out of the sky and they came down on a freshwater pond to ruin the hopping-lily paths made by the jacanas.

  The Empire Admiral Lindon Satamine watched all this from gridlocked water traffic, his dark formal eyeliner saving him from only the worst of the glare, as his barge languished in the circulating pool at Meshnet. The Na
rrow Way to Parliament was right there, just a minute’s swim away.

  But the Judiciary, may their cocks be knotted off at the tip and left to blacken, had a traffic checkpoint blocking everything.

  “I have a summons, damn you.” Lindon waved the silk-paper letter at the Judiciary ravens blocking his way. “I’m the fucking Empire Admiral, you plucked-ball chickenshits! Parliament demands my attendance! Now!”

  Out on the Sound of Fire and anywhere beyond he was power incarnate. He could burn an island to the bedrock or blockade a whole nation into eating their dogs. But here, in the watery intestines of Falcrest proper, he was just another man in traffic.

  And without Svir’s political support, he was just another toy for Parliament to disembowel and bat around.

  Not for the first time, Lindon thought that the principle of cordoned power had been enshrined in the Republic’s law entirely and exclusively to fuck him over.

  At least he wasn’t under arrest. If they wanted to arrest him they’d do it quietly, like that time Mandridge Subahant had forced through a writ of assisted self-critique and sent two field judges to detain Lindon while he ate dinner at the Charred Hull. They hadn’t dared arrest him mid-meal, making enemies of the owners and patrons alike, so Lindon had saved himself from their tender attentions by ordering course after course of meats and sweetbreads and whiskeys, maintaining his appetite long enough for Svir to overturn the writ and recall the judges. Afterward Lindon had nearly died of meat shits.

  Why was Parliament wasting time by awaiting his presence, when Parliament’s audience was so notoriously impatient with delay? (Parliament was of course open to the public, and the public loved to vote for those who put on the best show.)

  He tried to recite a mnemonic to fortify his patience. “Breast Heel, Moonmount Shadow, Goblet-of-Ants, Poison Dart Ford, 121 Streams, Lily Lake, Uranium Gorge, Colobus Lake, Tantamount, Lake Akhena,” chanting out the names of all the confederacies in distant Mzilimake Mbo, “Hops River, Grey Eclipse—”