The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Baru, everything I saw tells me that ship is raising anchor and making ready to sail. And the moment she does she’s going to run right into Ormsment.”

  Baru nodded. “I know. Will you help me remove her?”

  “You mean—kill her?”

  “Yes.”

  Baru was asking her to put the protection of a Cancrioth ship, an Oriati ship, over her own navy. It was blood treason. It was the absolute opposite of everything Aminata had ever strived to be.

  “I . . . oh, qualms, Baru, I’m Ormsment’s staff captain! She’s supposed to trust me!”

  “I know. I’m not going to try to persuade you. It wouldn’t be fair. Just . . .” Baru squeezed her shoulders again, and, to Aminata’s confused disappointment, let go. It was more affection than she had ever shown. “I could use your help. It’s up to you to decide where your duty lies.”

  That, Aminata thought, was exactly what someone clever would say to manipulate her. But Baru clearly had the power to give her orders. If she wanted Aminata to do something, why not order her?

  She asked a question that mattered to her. “I heard Ormsment sent a ship to take your parents. Is it true?”

  “Yes.” Baru rubbed at her bad eye and yawned. She needed a mint. “There were two mutineer ships, in the beginning. But we haven’t seen Scylpetaire for weeks.”

  “And Tau-indi Bosoka is alive on that Cancrioth ship?”

  “Yes.”

  Then her duty was clear. The navy was sworn to uphold diplomatic protection. The navy was sworn to obey Parliament and, above all else, the Emperor who did not know Its own name.

  She had to help Baru destroy Ormsment.

  But Ormsment had been kind to her, promoted her, believed in her. . . .

  “I kept your sword,” Baru blurted. “If you—I don’t know if you ever wonder if I—you know, kept it. I did. It’s on Eternal, with Shao Lune.”

  “Oh!” Aminata cried, and pawed at her neckline. Was it still there? Had it broken when she fell? “Look, I kept this, too!”

  She drew the cormorant feather from her collar and showed it to Baru.

  Then, without words, they put their foreheads together and held each other by the stubbled backs of their skulls.

  Afterward, when they had agreed on what to do, when Baru had explained the mathematician Kimbune and the two cylinders she’d brought from Eternal, Aminata watched Baru go back up the spit to the other prisoners.

  She embraced the diver, Ulyu Xe, and whispered in Maia Urun. There was a change in Xe, like a wave finally breaking, and at last she moved of her own accord. She reached back for Baru.

  Aminata watched Baru kiss her, promptly, like a signature on a promissory note. It felt weird to watch her friend kiss a woman. Not good weird. But weird like eating cantaloupe, which Aminata hated. You could see, theoretically, why someone else liked it.

  “Now,” Baru said, turning back to Aminata, “the Brevet-Captain Aminata will need to take me under arrest.”

  11

  Keelhaul

  Sails away southeast! Ship coming around the headlands!”

  Province Admiral Juris Ormsment leapt up to her frigate’s shrouds, climbing like no woman her age really should. Finally! Finally it was happening. All night she’d waited for the alarm as Sulane stalked the husk of el-Tsunuqba, mining all the likely exits from the caldera, waiting, waiting, for the mystery ship to show itself.

  Juris knew these ghosts: leviathans that appeared in secret out of the southwest, sighted occasionally, always lost in clouds of unnatural fog. If Baru had come to find that ship, there was something aboard which she valued more than all the lives she’d spent.

  It all made a kind of awful sense, didn’t it? Falcrest’s antiegalitarian elite conspired with Oriati Mbo’s most despicable revanchists to start the second Armada War. Kyprananoke would be the spark to light the rocket.

  And only by mutinying against the very order of the navy had Juris uncovered the conspiracy. What did that say about loyalty?

  Maybe Tain Shir was right. Maybe the mazes of duty were all built to keep you blind, and you had to start hacking through the walls to get out.

  If Baru was conspiring not just against the navy but against the world’s peace, and Juris brought proof to Falcrest . . . maybe she and all her sailors could go home again.

  “Where?” she cried up to the lookout. “Point me!”

  She followed the lookout’s hand.

  It was not the golden ship guarded by the sea monster. She knew that at once. Those were the uppermost sails of a fast clipper, the top republics, peeking over the black arm of el-Tsunuqba.

  Apparitor had finally decided to end the chase.

  “It’s Helbride.” Her one-legged flag captain stared in astonishment. They’d chased Helbride south across so many miles and now—“He’s coming right at us.”

  “Where else would he go? He knows he can’t outrun us any further. The Prince-Ambassador left the ship, so they can’t hide behind diplomatic right anymore. He has to bargain.”

  Helbride launched a volley of signal rockets. Debris from the blasts stippled the ocean surface and a black skua veered off protesting.

  BREVET CAPTAIN AMN TO PROVINCE ADMIRAL ORM

  HAVE BRU PRISONER

  RED HAIR MAN REQUESTS PARLEY

  Virtues preserve Aminata, she was still alive. “Ask his terms,” Juris ordered.

  The rockets went out and came back.

  RED HAIR MAN OFFERS BRU AND FULL PARDONS

  IN EXCHANGE REQUESTS OUR SILENCE AND RETURN TO POSTS

  “Do you think it’s bait?” Juris asked her flag captain.

  “Yes, mam, I think so.”

  But if it was bait, where the trap? “Let’s play this carefully.” A flash of steam inside her, the place where cold duty met white-hot betrayal. Scald yourself, Juris, and remember by the burn that the world is full of tricks. “Order Helbride to heave to half a mile away. Send our marines over to accept the Lieutenant Commander Aminata, Apparitor, and Baru herself. No one else.”

  “You think Apparitor will come over to Sulane, mam?”

  “He’d better,” she said. “I want some damn pardons written!”

  The crew heard her. There were no cheers. She felt it anyway, that grim and glad hope: not hope of safety, but of seeing their revenge finally done.

  “What about the Oriati ship, mam?” her flag captain asked. “We could be drawn out of position for the intercept.”

  “We won’t be.” Even if the titanic ship could, somehow, outrun them on the open ocean, it had to pass through a minefield to reach deep water. One strike would leave her crippled. They could raid the hulk for prisoners at their leisure.

  But leave that thought for later. One stroke of the oar at a time. One and then the next.

  The fast clipper Helbride, as slim and hugely winged as a krakenfly, reefed her sails and drifted to a halt half a mile south of Sulane’s starboard bow. The morning wind was unsteady, though settling into a blow out of the west, and Juris had to admire the other crew’s deftness. She sent over a launch full of marines to retrieve Baru and Brevet-Captain Aminata.

  The water hammer beat so loud and hard inside Juris that it set her rocking on her feet. This was when they set a trap for you, of course: when you thought you had won. But if you thought that way your whole life you would talk yourself out of ever winning.

  She went over to the starboard side, to check on Captain Nullsin’s distant Ascentatic. He was doing his blameless and definitely unmutinous duty, barking like a sheepdog at the swarm of ships waiting for a steady sailing wind. (Falcrest’s ships, with their superior rigging, could get more speed out of less air: the Oriati and Aurdwynni traders and pirates here depended on strong, sustained wind.)

  When the wind came back steady, the quarantine would fail. There were too many ships, too many channels through the kypra where a canny captain could sneak away.

  She turned her spyglass on the kypra islands. The first thing she saw was a
raft of corpses swarming with crabs. Most of the capital islet Loveport had gone up in fire overnight, torched by Canaat rebels. Now that the initial rush was over, both sides were busy consolidating their territory and purging their ranks. Anyone with insufficient commitment would be killed as a collaborator; anyone who refused to denounce and punish collaborators would be killed as an enemy of the revolution (or of the state). It would go this way because that was how it had happened in Falcrest, after Lapetiare’s revolution. In a few weeks the Canaat leaders would turn on each other, and the winners would build a new government as cruel and selfish as Kyprism, because if they were not cruel and selfish they would be torn down by those who were. And the cycle would begin again.

  All her years in the navy Juris had wondered when that cycle would turn over in Falcrest. When the corrupt greedy Parliament and those vultures in the Judiciary would be cast down to the drowning stone.

  Some of Juris’ crew, seeing the Kyprananoki killing each other, called them savages. Juris couldn’t agree. Hadn’t they done exactly the same thing in the course of their own mutiny? Killed everyone at the Elided Keep with knives and machetes?

  The real problem would be the corpses. The Kyprananoki didn’t have enough land to bury their dead, or enough fuel to burn them. So the dead were weighted and cast into the deep sea. That meant fishermen hauling loads of bodies, smearing their holds in Kettling blood. Some of them would catch fish while they were out there. Haul those fish home in the same holds.

  Baru was beaten. But what the fuck were they going to do about the Kettling?

  She would have to convince Nullsin that she’d made the right choices. They would have to cooperate.

  “Boat’s returning from Helbride, mam,” her aide called. “They have Baru, Apparitor, and Brevet-Captain Aminata aboard.”

  The pieces were in play. There was nothing to do now but watch. If we had miscalculated, then Eternal was lost, and with it my chance to satisfy Hesychast’s need for a eugenic miracle.

  Execarne’s people found a rock escarpment on el-Tsunuqba’s northeastern flank, a place where goatherds liked to perch and watch their vertical flocks. I admit that the morning sun even had me considering a nap.

  Then Faham Execarne came stumping up the goat path, red-eyed and wild-haired, to discuss the end of the world.

  “Faham!” I moved over on the cushion to make room for him. “You look like you’ve had too much to smoke.”

  “Not nearly enough.” He sat down in a puff of cannabis stink. “You know, I tried to convince Baru they were just a Morrow Ministry deception. Cover for our own work in the Mbo.”

  “The Cancrioth?” I laughed. “Did she believe you?”

  “I don’t think so. It was worth a try. I thought, if we made her believe they didn’t exist, she might not find them. I suppose I underestimated her willingness to chase delusions.” He sighed blearily. “Don’t give me that look.”

  I found Faham’s idea of reality as a malleable thing, subject to the influence of our minds, very silly. If it were true, surely the fantasies of all the poor and sickly would have worked some improvement by now.

  “You weren’t really trying to persuade her, Faham. The lie was for Tau, wasn’t it?” Faham Execarne had collaborated with the Oriati prince to help protect the peace. I thought they were even friends.

  He grumbled and scooped rocks from under his ass. “I wouldn’t lie to Tau.”

  “No. But Tau would have preferred it if you had no idea the Cancrioth existed.” I patted his thigh. “And deep down, Faham, I think you like to make people happy.”

  “Pfah.” He went rummaging in my bag. “No food?”

  “I’m too nervous.”

  “Did you know I wrote the War Paper?”

  “The dire one? The one that predicts the end of all civilization?”

  He nodded silently.

  “Alarmism to frighten Parliament, isn’t it?”

  He shook his head. “There’s something I have to tell you.” And he pointed upslope, behind us, toward the towering south wall of the flooded caldera.

  “There’s an apocalypse fuse here,” he said.

  “An apocalypse what?”

  “Explosive charges buried in the rock of el-Tsunuqba’s south face.”

  “What?” A pine-needle brush ran up my spine. I had been to Mount Kijune to walk the cliff bridges, and I had imagined what might happen to the villages below if the mountain face slipped. “But that can’t possibly work. . . .”

  “It can work. It’s been done before, on a smaller scale. ‘Aligning the dead world with the needs of the living Republic.’ It will be done again here.” He squinted into the rising sun. “Once a year one of my agents climbs the mountain, pulls a random charge, and tests it. If anything, time has made them more volatile. They’re still ready to be used.”

  “It’s nonsense. This much rock? Nothing human could move it.”

  He blinked sun dazzle out of his eyes. His shoulders were tight, hands pressed heel-down to the stone. “You see how el-Tsunuqba is shaped? Like a cup tipped over, facing north? When old Mount Tsunuq erupted, it blasted out its north face. The south face is still strong on its outside edge . . . but the inner face, above the caldera, is just loose debris and fill.”

  He drew a shape in the air, a cone like a torchship’s Burn siphon, defined by the south wall, the east and west slopes, and the caldera, all aimed north into the kypra atoll. “Do you see?”

  “Oh,” I said, quietly. The idea was almost impossible to hold on to. It couldn’t happen so quickly. Not to so many people. Ridiculous. “But the kypra’s quite widely scattered . . . the avalanche would hardly reach it. . . .”

  “No. It wouldn’t. The rock face would slide into the caldera. But the east and west ridges would . . .”

  “Would what?”

  He burst into a fit of coughing. I tried to pat him on his back but he fought me off. “The east and west ridges would focus the displacement wave!”

  “Like a tsunami?” The big waves that struck the Mothercoast of Falcrest and Devi-naga Mbo.

  “No. No. Tsunamis are swells in the ocean, like the sea’s decided to move inland. Peak wave height is maybe thirty feet, but the wave just never stops. The damage comes from the whole mound of water migrating inland. This would be the opposite. Water displaced by material dropping into the sea. Narrow, very narrow. But . . .”

  He held a hand up above his head.

  Tall, he was saying. Tall.

  It was the hardest salute of Aminata’s life.

  Some people wouldn’t take their gods’ names in vain. Some people wouldn’t use words like bitch or tunk. Some had secret names for their lovers that they never spoke in anger. Most everyone had something they did, every day, that was a bit like a prayer to the things they believed in.

  Aminata saluted that way. She meant every one she’d ever made.

  “Mam,” she said, crisply, to Juris Ormsment’s black-bruised eyes and ragged uniform, to those admiral’s pins she’d vowed to serve, “may I present the prisoner.”

  Baru grunted and went down to her knees on Sulane’s weather deck. Her bad hand hit first and she cried out, fell with the wounded hand clasped to her chest, her right shoulder striking the deck.

  One of the officers behind Ormsment laughed in a kind of shock. That’s her? That’s all?

  “Here she is!” Apparitor flourished like a waiter serving a trussed-up stag. “Freshly lobotomized, courtesy of the Jurispotence Xate Yawa, who provided the medical finding that justified Baru’s arrest. All done legally, thank you. All of it notarized and ready to stand in court. No one on this ship would want to do anything illegal, would they?”

  He glared at Juris Ormsment. She didn’t even look at him. Aminata shivered: the admiral’s eyes were coolly and completely sieving Baru into particles of hate. Some of her officers jostled and muttered, staring at Apparitor. Aminata didn’t know exactly why. She’d asked him, on the boat trip, who he was: he had given her a big s
mile and a smug “I am the Emperor’s humble servant.”

  Now he pointed to the master’s mate who had just, in Aminata’s estimation, started to think about pulling a knife.

  “Don’t you dare. You wouldn’t like what happens to your admirals when I die.”

  “What would happen to me if you died?” Juris Ormsment asked, absently. She was still studying Baru.

  “Letters would be sent,” Apparitor said, with sweet answering menace. “Courts would be convened. Do you remember the Paybale Affair, Juris? It’d be a shame if everyone on that bank’s deposit list were to be published in Advance . . . and a crying shame if the world knew where that money really came from. No one is clean.” His eyes raked the crowd. “None of you. Juris here wouldn’t have invited you on this voyage if you hadn’t sinned. And the Emperor knows all sins.”

  The Traitor-Admiral stared at Baru with a powerful wonder. How could Baru be? One young woman. Just one. You might see her in a secretarial pool and note her only for her black frowning eyes. But so many lives had ended on her account. Pan Obarse, a man Aminata had admired for his perseverance despite a cruel harelip and the obstacle of his race: he’d died on Mannerslate when Baru blew it up. And that boy on the Llosydanes whose head had burned to coal. And those poor garrison regulars in Aurdwynn whose tendons had been slashed. And all those Aurdwynni who’d followed the Coyote banner. All gone on Baru’s account.

  “Can she understand me?” Ormsment breathed.

  “Try her,” Apparitor said. “Lobotomites are passive, not stupid.”

  Baru flinched when the admiral came toward her, and Aminata clamped a hand on her shoulder to steady her. It was possible Ormsment might just kill her now, knife across the throat: but Aminata knew, better than anyone, how vital it was to be sure Baru understood what she’d done.

  Ormsment crouched on the balls of her feet. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.” Baru’s shoulder tightened in Aminata’s grip. “I can hear you.”