The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

“You’re on duty, Brevet-Captain.”

  She shrugged. Her chains rattled. “So are you, Your Excellence. Besides, I’m a prisoner until we’re done sorting out these . . . irregularities.”

  “Irregularities. Ha. I’d say we have some fucking irregularities here.” He scratched his beard and frowned. Aminata wondered if he was going to kill them all.

  He put the blunt up to her lips. Aminata took a drag and exhaled smoke in his face, just as cool as could be.

  Execarne squinted at the diver Ulyu Xe. “She’s meditating,” he told Aminata. “Everyone thinks she’s scared out of her mind, but she’s meditating. Something tossed her up, see? Something she thinks isn’t natural. She’s trying to fall back into the current of the world. She’s a smart one, our Xe.”

  “Sir,” Aminata murmured, shifting on her sore knees, “what’s happening?”

  Execarne looked at her with reddened horse eyes. “War,” he said. “We’re starting the war. Right here. That fuck-off huge ship is about to sail right into Juris Ormsment’s minefield. She’ll burn the ship and haul the survivors to Falcrest, where she’ll make them confess, to Parliament, that they’re part of an Oriati conspiracy against our great Imperial Republic. And after that I don’t see any way, any way at all, to avoid the big one.”

  “The big one, sir?”

  “Did you ever read the War Paper?”

  “No, sir.” Deliberately using the navy honorific sir, rather than the distancing Your Excellence.

  “Well, I wrote that damn thing. A forecast of the consequences of a full-scale Oriati civil war and simultaneous war with the Imperial Republic. One out of six people die, I estimated. One out of six people in the world we know.”

  He shielded his blunt from a gust of dawn wind down the lava tube. There was still no light except the soft glow of the jellyfish-tea lantern. “The damn thing is we’d probably win it. Falcrest’s done a lot of shitty things, Brevet-Captain. We got rid of kings because they weren’t accountable to the people. Now we have the power, we the mob, and we’re accountable only to ourselves. We’re getting bigger and stronger because who wants to grow smaller and weaker, huh?

  “But the more we do to make ourselves bigger, the more crimes we commit. More than people want to think.” He took another draw. “When I look forward, I see a Falcrest that’s become fully parasitic. Sucking in everything it needs from the provinces. Rousing itself from its revels just long enough to roll over and crush whatever’s gnawing. A swollen, beautiful golden age . . . like a leech bigger and more complicated than its host. Imagine what we’d do if we owned the whole Ashen Sea. I mean, fuck, look at what we’re about to do here.”

  “Sir?” she ventured.

  “The Kettling’s loose on these islands. I don’t see how we stop the plague here unless we go all the way.”

  “All the way, sir?”

  “Yep.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “It’s simple.” Execarne ground his blunt out under the toe of his boot. “Given a proper fleet, we could burn all the ships at anchor and blockade the islands until the Kettling burns out. It would take years, given the properties of the Kettling, and a huge expenditure of money and resources. But we don’t have that option. We only have two warships here, and one of them’s a mutineer. So we use our alternative.”

  “What’s the alternative, sir?”

  “When Falcrest held Kyprananoke, my predecessors became concerned that it made a natural port for pirates and filthy degenerates.”

  She nodded thoughtfully, eyes fixed on him. In her experience men liked to tell young navy sailors about how the world worked, especially sailors who were attractive foreign ingénues. She knew men found her attractive, but only as a body, not as a whole person, an Oriati woman. That was why she used whores: that way she saw the man the same way he saw her.

  “It is a natural port for pirates,” she said, to prompt him to continue.

  “That’s right. And they figured that wherever degenerates harbor, plague follows. Say, for example, that Oriati Mbo has a disease it wants to use as a weapon. How might that disease pass from Oriati Mbo to Falcrest without being detected? Well, it couldn’t go around the trade ring. We inspect those ships too well. So it might come in through Kyprananoke, where smugglers dodging our patrols like to make harbor.

  “And so,” he said, “my predecessors set up an apocalypse fuse.”

  “Sir? What’s that?”

  He grinned ghoulishly at her. “Fuck,” he said, “you look a bit like old Kindalana, don’t you? The way she looked when she first came to Falcrest. When she said she was going to bring the Oriati Mbo into our Republic.”

  That name again! The man Calcanish on the Llosydanes had mentioned the Oriati Prince Kindalana, and Aminata had guessed, correctly, that the name would provoke him sexually. Why did it seem like the name was following her?

  Footsteps sounded from the lava tube above the spit.

  The Jurispotence Xate Yawa and a young red-haired Stakhi man came down the tube, carrying Baru between them. Her right brow swelled up around an eyeball red as ruin. She grinned at Aminata and the smile was so guileless and glad that Aminata knew at once it was too late.

  They’d lobotomized her.

  Barhu was happy.

  The hole behind her right eye had pierced some thin interior membrane, and whatever was inside, a fluid of feeling trapped there by her anguish and manic self-control, was now running out.

  “Aminata,” she said, staggering across the pillowed volcanic rock, “Aminata, oh, you’re all right, you’re okay,” hugging her as she knelt there, befuddled, with her ankles and her wrists chained together, but that was all right, Barhu could fix it.

  “Please, can you unshackle her?” she asked the Morrow Minister, who rose up red-eyed and coughing to stare at her.

  “What’s happened to you?” Execarne demanded. Aminata was rigid in her arms, refusing to meet her eyes.

  “Oh!” Barhu understood. “No, I haven’t been simplified. It’s still me!”

  The Vultjagata prisoners looked disappointed. Except for Ulyu Xe, who did not stir at all.

  “It’s me,” she repeated, hopefully, “it’s Barhu. I’m here to help.”

  “She doesn’t realize what’s been done to her,” Yythel muttered to Ake.

  Yawa signaled to Execarne, who muttered, “All right, all right,” and produced a key. He unlocked Aminata from her shackles. Beautiful Aminata who had taken that spear for Barhu.

  “Thank Wydd for good armor, right?” Barhu said, grinning at her. She’d filled out from her teenage lankiness in a way that Barhu, seeing her so often in school, maybe hadn’t marked day by day. But now, after years apart, she took Barhu’s breath away. She had grown shoulders and arms and strong thighs to match her height. There was a steadiness and a correctness in her, a confidence that she would do her very best to find and accomplish the right thing.

  “Baru?” Aminata said, in wary wonder of her own. “They took you away, and I thought . . .”

  “It’s all right. It’s all right. We”—she waved toward Yawa, a crow statue in her quarantine gown—“we made an arrangement. I’m all right.”

  Aminata flinched. Her eyes fell off Barhu’s. “I didn’t know what Shir was going to do. I really, genuinely did not know.”

  “No,” Barhu cried, “don’t be sorry—Oh, balls,” spinning to Yawa and Svir, “may I speak to her alone, please?”

  “You look ready to tear in half,” Svir said with some delight. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  “You could go out to the end of the spit,” Yawa said. “Just don’t collapse into the water.”

  “Come, come along.” Barhu tugged Aminata off down the volcanic isthmus until it faded into water the exact same color as the stone. She wanted to embrace Aminata again and resisted only by holding on to her shoulders and kneading muscle like a cat. “Aminata, I’m so glad to see you.”

  At last she smiled, incredulous. “You talked your
way out! I thought you were finished! How do you do it?”

  “I told the truth. I told Yawa the truth.”

  “Can you tell me the truth?”

  Tell Aminata that she was working against the Imperial Republic?

  “Wydd,” she said, invoking the ilykari who kept secrets, “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can tell you. That’s the truth. Why are you here, Aminata?”

  “One of my prisoners named you. He said you lured him to attack Aurdwynn, when you were playing rebel up there.”

  Barhu nodded. “I suppose that was Abdumasi Abd?”

  Aminata covered her mouth. “Oh, fuck. Did you already know?”

  “Know that you tortured him?” Barhu guessed.

  Aminata hissed in dismay. “Maroyad’s going to murder me!” She grabbed Barhu’s shoulders in return, not gently. “I could actually be executed for this, Baru! I wasn’t supposed to let anyone know Abd was in our possession; if Parliament finds out, they’ll have the navy for grand treason—”

  “Aminata. Aminata. Shh.” Barhu actually laughed, and felt terrible for it. “It’s okay. You’ll be okay. I promise. If you’re worried about the navy’s future, I think Juris Ormsment might’ve done more damage than you ever will. Who’s Maroyad, anyway?”

  “My commanding officer on Isla Cauteria. She sent me to bring you in, on Ascentatic. And I . . . I went over to Ormsment, see, to get to you. I couldn’t let anyone else do it. It had to be me. I didn’t want to . . .” She straightened her combat harness, punctured chest and all. “I didn’t want to never know.”

  “Never know what?” The newest, strangest thing Barhu had ever felt, this joy. She could find out what Aminata feared, and assure her it could be averted.

  “Never know why you sent me that letter.”

  “What letter?” Barhu said, baffled, and then she remembered the letter she’d mailed to Aminata from the Elided Keep. I wonder if we could discuss navy politics, and the mutability of government.

  “Did you send me that letter, Baru, to see if I’d join a mutiny against Parliament?”

  “Oh, no, that’s not what I meant at all! I wanted to give you a pretext to give the letter to Censorate, if you didn’t want anything to do with me. . . .”

  But now that she tried to explain it, she found her own rationalization flimsy and stupid. She clearly had wanted to discuss mutiny with Aminata. She’d just denied it to herself. She’d been too cowardly to confront the fact that she was putting Aminata in deadly danger.

  Aminata’s eyes were huge in the dark. “Why is Ormsment trying to kill you?”

  “Revenge.”

  “Revenge for what?”

  “I killed a lot of her sailors at Welthony Harbor.”

  Aminata hardened up, like she was about to get hit. You weren’t supposed to do that. It made the blow hurt more.

  “You did that? It happened exactly like people say?”

  Barhu could do nothing but close her eyes and nod. “Yes. I tried to lure the sailors off the ships, but when they wouldn’t come . . . we had to get the money out of the transports. We blew holes in the ships with mines. Pulled the gold and silver out with divers. A lot of sailors drowned, or died in the fighting. I couldn’t stop the rebels from killing them without blowing my cover.”

  “Fuck, Baru. I knew people on those ships.”

  “I knew lots of the people I betrayed in Aurdwynn. I had to do it. It was my—”

  “Your duty?”

  “Yes. My duty, as written by the Throne.”

  Aminata blew out a shaky breath. “Those prisoners on the boat, those were your people?”

  “Tain Hu’s people,” Barhu said, roughly. “I couldn’t let them be hurt.”

  “Kings, Baru, why did you ask me about that day we were sparring?” The day they’d fought. “Why was that on your mind when Shir was about to spear you dead? Why that?”

  “I guess it was the thing that I needed to know the most.”

  Aminata’s eyes searched hers. “Why?”

  “Because it made me afraid we weren’t friends. And I needed to know who wanted me to feel that way.”

  “The merchant from Iriad. Farrier. He said it would be good for you to get a little fright from me. Why would he give a shit if we were friends?”

  Barhu’s smile tore at her face, stretched flesh that didn’t want to move, and pricked a tear of pain from her good eye.

  “Ow,” she said. “Oh, Aminata, you have no idea.”

  How little Aminata had forgotten of her face! Those watchful, willful, stormwater-colored eyes. Her arched black brows. But her right eye was swollen almost shut, ghoulish purple, like the bruise Aminata had given her, with a practice sword, on the day they’d fought.

  She looked down at Baru’s hands and there were two fingers missing. “What happened?”

  “Tain Shir. Last time we met.”

  “Oh, queen’s cunt, I didn’t know—”

  “It’s all right,” Baru said, smiling that weird disjointed smile, tight and shy on the left side of her face, big and cocky on the right. “I think I needed that to happen. Anyway, you jumped in front of a spear for me, so we’re square.”

  But they weren’t square. There was a sorrow in Baru now, huge and edged and the opposite of brittle, beaten and alloyed into her and made sharp to cut. It hurt to look at her. Because you saw how much happier she might have been, in another world.

  “So,” Aminata said, fumbling the words like rope in seawater-numb hands. “I guess we’re . . . we’re at the point where I have to ask you where my duty lies. I was sent here to bring you in for questioning. I have a duty to Rear Admiral Maroyad to obey her orders. I even have a duty to obey Province Admiral Ormsment, though that duty’s abrogated if she’s in open mutiny. But . . . all those duties are overruled by obedience to the Throne, Baru. You could give me orders.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “What, you want me to take you back to Maroyad?” The burn on the web of Aminata’s hand seemed to throb. Rear Admiral Maroyad’s voice was encoded in that pain, driven into Aminata’s flesh where she’d stubbed out her cigarette.

  The moment anyone finds out we’ve got Abd, everyone comes for him. He’s a coin to buy a war. The Judiciary will want him, and Parliament, and the Imperial fucking Throne . . . and to get to Abd, they will purge anyone who tries to hold him. . . .

  “No,” Baru said, as infuriating as she’d ever been. “That’s not what I want. I just don’t want to force you into anything, Aminata. What do you think you have to do?”

  Aminata thought about duty.

  You had a duty to your captain, to your admiral, to the Republic and its ideals, to the faceless and anonymous Emperor raised by lottery and chemistry to its impartial Throne. In service of that duty you beat your friend with a training sword and you snarled, it’s a crime against law and nature, you should’ve told me, they’ll take a knife to your cunt!

  You did your duty to the navy and in return they made you a torturer. They told you find the Cancrioth but they never told you what a Cancrioth was. Just torture Abdumasi Abd, just make him give up the Cancrioth. And you tortured Abdumasi Abd so well that he named your friend Baru as an enemy of the navy. So you went out hunting for Baru, dutiful as ever, and you found one of the navy’s own admirals driven to mutiny, driven to hunt and kill Baru . . . who was only acting out of her duty to the Throne. And the Hierarchic Qualm says that the hand is blameless when it acts in service to the Throne. Duty absolves all.

  Put that way . . . Aminata’s true duty was to obey Baru.

  “Baru, why did you have to do any of this?” she asked. “Your exam scores were perfect. You could’ve had a post anywhere, anywhere at all, I was always so—”

  Proud. She wanted to say it but she was afraid Baru wouldn’t care. Aminata had been so proud to know an Imperial-rated savant, a foreign-born federati like her, racially outside like her, who could get anything she wanted through hard honest work.

  Why had Baru give
n that up?

  “I did it for Taranoke.” Baru looked right into Aminata with her own wounded, blood-ringed eyes. “I could’ve been a fine accountant. I could’ve been promoted up to Falcrest and been a model federati. But I wanted to do something for Taranoke. I needed more than I could get from the civil service.”

  What’s Taranoke, Aminata wanted to retort? What’s home? It exists nowhere except in your memory. It’s gone, it’s changed, you can never go back.

  She’d never had or needed a home.

  But then she thought of swift Lapetiare, her first sea post, where you woke to your watch chime and went to your post knowing exactly who you were and why you were needed. The ship might change, the faces in the crew, the color and temper of the sea under the hull.

  But that was still home. That place where you knew who you needed to be.

  “How is any of this mess,” she said in exasperation, “going to help Taranoke?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Baru said, smiling that cocky lopsided smile that Aminata did not remember from school at all. “I’ve recently discovered the plan I thought I was pursuing . . . wasn’t the plan. It was a mistake. Some part of me knows the real plan. It involves Aurdwynn, and these Cancrioth somehow . . . I’ve done things, strange things, and I need to learn why.”

  “Baru, that doesn’t make any sense!”

  “It does if I’m working in compartments.” Her grin became that thoughtful, self-satisfied smile that child Baru had always produced when she got away with something.

  It occurred to Aminata, not for the first time, but more urgently than it ever had before, that Baru might be insane. And that ugly thought made her remember another.

  “Where’s Shao Lune?” she blurted. “What happened to her? Was she really your—your slave?”

  What had Baru done with her last navy companion?

  Baru flinched. It was not a flinch backward but inward, retreating behind hardness, like an octopus into a shell. Aminata knew that Baru was about to lie.

  But then she didn’t. It cost her visibly, like sticking a hand in a wound to pull out the splinter within, but she told the truth.

  “Shao Lune’s on Eternal, the Cancrioth ship. I abandoned her there. With Tau-indi Bosoka and their bodyguard. I desperately need to keep that ship safe, Aminata. It’s so important. The people on it are so important. Will you help me?”