The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  They hauled her again. Deeper.

  The copper saved her life from dismemberment by barnacle so that she could drown instead. The rope pulled so deep into her skin that blood rose black around it. She was stretched out wrist to ankle like a living eight-knot, she was being dragged apart—she had to stay conscious! If she fainted she was lost!

  The warship’s shadow darkened everything. After weeks and miles of pursuit, Sulane was at last overrunning Barhu.

  Mother Pinion’s voice called down the decades. Baru. Pay attention.

  I’m trying, Mother. It’s just so dark down here—

  Baru. Stay awake!

  A hand touched Barhu’s stomach. A hard knee brushed her thigh.

  She looked down: saw her, just where she’d promised she would be. The diver Ulyu Xe, who could swim four hundred feet without coming up for breath. Who’d come over to Sulane by breathing through a reed, hidden from the sentries.

  Barhu could have shouted all her air in joy.

  Xe crawled up the length of her, hands tugging at Barhu’s cassock. The black blade clenched in her teeth glittered like an eclipse. The knife had come from one of Faham Execarne’s Morrow-men, six inches of el-Tsunuqba’s black glass, knapped to an edge so sharp it parted rope like gauze.

  Xe slashed the bridle-rope from Barhu’s waist, reached up above Barhu’s wrists, and cut the drag rope. Barhu’s wrists snapped free, numb from fingertip to elbow. The next heave from above whipped the rope round her waist like a brand and it slithered in a searing coil around her ankles and away. They would know at once it was broken, but they would not know if it was the rope that had failed or Barhu’s body. They would rush to the sides and look for her to surface.

  Barhu shrugged out of the heavy cassock and clung to Xe.

  The diver kicked toward Sulane’s stern and the blind spot around the frigate’s rudder. Barhu’s thin cut bled a red cape behind them. On a bad day she could hold her breath for three minutes if she didn’t have to move. The keelhauling had cost her, but she could last two minutes yet. Xe’s skin brushed wonderfully against Barhu’s, a cool balm for rope burn.

  She was alive! She’d come through that terrible night on Eternal and there was no cancer in her skull and no vial of Kettling in her pocket and no Tau-indi or Iraji or Shao Lune but she was in the water, she was free, she was alive.

  When Barhu opened her eyes she saw the moon.

  But of course it wasn’t the moon. It was the steel sickle mounted on the Cancrioth whale’s fin. And he was coming toward them through the wavering light. Coming with his jaws wide open, propped open, because he was carrying something in his teeth—

  Barhu gurgled in alarm.

  The cancer whale came at her with a naval mine in his jaws.

  Here are your pardons!” Apparitor shouted. “Bottoms up!”

  Aminata came up the ladder to the maindeck at the exact moment the red-haired man shot a flask of vodka, whooped, and hurled it overboard. In his other hand he brandished a fistful of paper. “Here! See them here?”

  He shook the sheaf of documents like a dead seagull. “Take them! Every last one of you absolved of your crimes, from grand mutiny down to your overdue books in Shaheen! But they lack one thing!”

  He scattered the pardons across the deck. Sailors pounced. Officers brayed for order.

  “This is the missing piece!” He brandished a grapefruit-sized device, like a spherical clock. “This is an incryptor. It produces the codes which mark the Emperor’s authentic orders. Those codes will be carefully checked when you present these pardons to save your wretched lives! I have omitted the last digit of each one—and only I can supply the correct numbers! If I survive my return to Helbride, I will flash you the numbers, one by one, as my ship makes for the horizon. Do you understand?”

  Juris Ormsment stepped up to the high rail on the quarterdeck. “Apparitor. This isn’t necessary. We had a deal.”

  Apparitor’s pretty face hardened. “Deal’s done. I want safe conduct to Helbride.”

  “Why?” Ormsment called. “What’s gotten you so skittish? Need to water your mason leaf?” A few sailors laughed.

  “You thug,” Apparitor said, sweetly, “we both know you’ve got no reason to let me go once I sign those pardons. You’ll try to keep me aboard. You’ll try to control me. I won’t have it.”

  “I’d shoot you dead like a dog if not for your vendettas, yes.” Juris came slowly around to the quarterdeck stairs, began to descend to the weather deck. Her hands were wide and empty. “But that day won’t be today. Stamp the pardons. Let’s turn our attention to troubles ashore.”

  Apparitor made eye contact with Aminata, just for an instant, and his eyes said get out now.

  But Aminata wasn’t going to run away with the job half-finished.

  She slipped over to the starboard rail. A sunflash lantern on a hook waited for the officer of the watch to post news to Ascentatic. Aminata set the lantern on its bearings, trained the lens at Captain Nullsin’s distant frigate, pointed the collector at the sun, and began to work the shutter as quietly as she could.

  N U L N U L N U L

  A M N A M N A M N

  ONE RED IF YOU SEE ME

  ONE RED IF YOU SEE ME

  Nullsin had of course posted a double watch on the mast tops, in case of ships fleeing. She’d asked him to keep an eye out for messages from Sulane. She trusted him.

  Almost at once a red flare ignited up in Ascentatic’s republic sails. They’d seen her.

  “Oh, Juris!” Apparitor cried. “You think we’re going to fix Kyprananoke? Solve it like a little puzzle? Once the wound’s in the gut there’s nothing you can do but end it quick!”

  He was up on the port rail now, his feet tap-tap-tapping between lines and brackets as he danced out onto the channels that moored the huge mainmast shroud lines. “Time’s up! I’m going to leave, I’m going to go, and you’d damn well better do the same! Because that thing out there will have your little ship for a toothpick!”

  Sulane’s rigging moaned in the rising wind.

  Everyone else was utterly silent.

  Behind Apparitor, the mountain gave birth.

  Oh, virtues . . .” someone breathed.

  A great rustle ran through the crew. At last the mast-top girls looked up from the drama below and cried out, “Sails! Sails away west! Ship coming out of the caldera!”

  Fog rolled out of el-Tsunuqba, low and heavy, thick as soapsuds. Aminata knew at a glance that it was unnatural. But not half as unnatural as the silhouette that loomed within. The four hundred feet of preposterous immensity.

  Eight masts, junk-rigged, not tall by Falcrest standards but absurd in their number. Sails like the canopy of a cloud forest. Huge curved broadsides, deck upon deck, studded with cannon-ports.

  Eternal came forth. For the first time, Aminata saw it in sunlight.

  Fuck me, she thought. It’s like a city.

  Ormsment stared at the behemoth and Aminata saw the shroud of duty settle over her, smoothing her brow, flattening the cables of her throat. The admiral had seen her enemy.

  “Give Apparitor a boat,” Ormsment commanded. “See him safely away. Sound battle stations and rig for fighting trim.”

  Her crew looked up to her.

  “That ship,” she roared to her crew, “belongs to the Oriati who released plague on these islands! I saw it done at the embassy! If they released plague here, they can bring it to Falcrest!

  “At any moment that ship is going to strike a mine. And when it does, we will be in position to take it. We will bring the survivors back to Falcrest and we will reveal to our people what was done here. We will be heroes! Are you with me?”

  A roar of approval and Aminata wanted to join it—she was trained to lead marine assaults, seizing the titan compartment by compartment, gassing out the degenerate Oriati conspirators from their warrens and pits.

  She imagined them whispering in Falcrest about what Aminata had done, about the prize the Burner of Sou
ls had taken. Cheering her as she stood up before Parliament, drawing record attendance for a member of her race. And her name registered upon the Antler Stone, the first Oriati chiseled into that long list of the people’s champions.

  Imagine how proud Maroyad would be when Aminata reported back to her . . . imagine a crew, her crew, calling her captain . . .

  “Mam?” a small voice called.

  Aminata looked up from the lantern and there before her was a girl, the youngest person Aminata had seen on Sulane, which was crewed mostly by old-leather sea revenants and battered rope-ends. This girl was gangly, not more than seventeen, with the roughed-up voice of adolescence.

  And she was Aurdwynni: pale as snow, with Stakhi blood and a round face and sunburn on her ears. She must have some mark on her service jacket, some weakness of behavior or heredity, which said that she would never be more than an able sailor. So Juris had accepted her on this final voyage.

  “Mam,” the girl said, saluting, “if you’ve not got a fighting station, master-at-arms says we could use you down with the marines.”

  And she bounded off across the slanting deck, across coiled shroudlines and boat ties, nimble as a squirrel.

  When Tain Shir’s spear had punched her in the chest, Baru had screamed, no! Not her! No!

  Baru wanted her to live. Baru demanded that she live. Baru had said, you send your signal to Nullsin, and you get off that ship.

  But the girl. She was so young. . . .

  Look.” I guided Faham’s hand to the little dot of color that tossed in Sulane’s rising wake. The frigate was turning west, as we’d hoped it wouldn’t, but at least there was good news: “Do you see that boat there? Apparitor’s slipping away.”

  “Where’s my spyglass?” he groused. “You! Go get me one of the Stakhi optics!”

  “We haven’t any, Your Excellence, we sold them last month to launder the kickbacks from the—”

  “My ministry for a telescope,” Faham groaned. “Someone!”

  One of his Morrow-men scurried off to find him a lens just as another party of spies arrived with the prisoner Kimbune. I watched the Cancrioth woman carefully. She’d been nervous and withdrawn, but there was a deep-set fearlessness in her, too; not arrogance, I thought, but the assurance of divine protection.

  She did not seem assured now.

  At the sight of Eternal she cried out. “You said you’d get them away safely.” She looked between me and the red angles of tall Sulane, swinging west to intercept. “You said they’d escape!”

  “They’ve cleared the minefield,” I assured her, which I had deduced from Eternal’s failure to explode. The ship, Baru said, was full of rocket-powder. “The trick with your uranium lamp worked. Aminata gave them the correct coordinates for the safe passage.”

  “But your navy ship is still there! It still has all its weapons! The Brain made us do drills, how to die before the fire could get to you—you’ll let them all die like that? You promised me!”

  I gave her a grandmotherly smile, wholly counterfeit. I had absolutely no idea what might happen when the two ships met. “Baru and the young Aminata have a plan to see to Sulane. Faham, what is that ship doing now?”

  He was still in his foul mood, and that would only make him fouler: he would think his anger was causing misfortune. “What a disaster if we lose Tau,” he muttered. “That laman gave us at least ten extra years of peace, I’m sure of it. Quickly, quickly, which way’s the wind?”

  “Out of the west.” With the sunrise the westerly blow had steadied and strengthened. I had no real understanding of wind or current, so I could not say if this was a manifestation of some nautical law. Weather was notoriously unpredictable at the edge of the Kraken Still.

  “Hm.” Execarne grimaced. “Then Eternal has the weather gage over Sulane.”

  “That’s good for them, isn’t it?” This I remembered from my conversations about pirate-hunting with Ahanna Croftare, before she’d been promoted and replaced by Ormsment. Whoever had the weather gage was upwind of their foe, and could ride the wind down on them.

  “Not this time. The weather gage benefits an attacker but hurts a defender.” Faham knuckled his temples, plucked fitfully at the hairs of his beard. “The wind will push them toward Sulane. They have to fight. If they fight, they’ll lose. And if Ormsment goes home with a Cancrioth prize, we’ll be razing Oriati cities and retching up Kettling blood by autumn.”

  “Trust Aminata,” I suggested.

  “Can’t trust anyone,” he grunted.

  “I trust you, Faham,” I said, which was true, as far as my trust went.

  A Morrow-man returned with a spyglass for Execarne. He trained it on Eternal and moaned. “Oh, virtues. There’s Tau. . . .”

  A small figure in a bright khanga stood at Eternal’s rail. I reached for Execarne’s hand and he gripped me so hard I had to put a nail in the back of his hand.

  The laman stood limp, as empty as a winter field. I felt such pity. I’d looked that way on the night they’d brought me Olake’s execution order, the order I couldn’t sign.

  Ormsment’s Sulane launched a spread of fireworks. “They’re ordering Eternal to surrender and push their weapons overboard,” Faham translated. “The Oriati are running out their cannon in reply.”

  The golden ship’s starboard side opened dozens of tiny doors. Black tubes protruded to menace Sulane. Ormsment’s flagship tacked upwind toward the giant, a little red dog trotting toward a lion.

  My vision had faded with age. My sense for motion at the edge of sight had not. “Look! Look there! Is that Baru?”

  Apparitor’s little boat paused aft of Sulane to throw a line. A sleek brown woman hauled herself aboard. Her bound chest heaved for air. Surely that was patient Wydd’s student, Ulyu Xe. She and Apparitor reached over to haul another woman aboard—scowling face, black eye, why, who else it could be?

  Baru was alive. She grappled with Apparitor, shouting: he shook his head.

  With an inaudible cry she threw herself to the rear of the boat and stared at Sulane. She was looking for her friend Aminata.

  That was the moment when Sulane’s stern exploded.

  Aminata was still on Sulane’s weather deck, working the sunflash to signal Ascentatic, when Eternal fired its ranging shots.

  The huge Oriati ship’s starboard side decorated itself, silently, with ten little jets of smoke. She stared in wonder. It took the rocketry mate’s shouted “Down!” to make her duck.

  The crack of the detonations reached her a moment ahead of the cannon shot—black blurs across the dawn-gold water—like arrows, but fast, so fast. Aminata clasped her hands over the back of her neck. Kings, what would it feel like? Would there be any time to feel the hit? She was tense, she had to loosen up, make herself soft like she was drunk—

  Nothing happened. No crash of timber. No fire in the rocket magazines.

  “They fell short!” the rocketry master called. “They hit the sea!”

  Aminata peeked back up over the boatwale and took the range to Ascentatic. Nullsin’s ship was coming south, struggling in the lees of the islands—he could not possibly arrive in time to force Sulane to break off—not unless Aminata somehow slowed Sulane down—

  A part of her could not believe, no matter how well she’d thought it out, that she was truly working to protect an Oriati ship.

  Suddenly the ship jumped beneath her: her sea legs soaked up the motion. Ten hundred times worse for her stomach was the detonation from astern. The magazines!

  “Magazines!” the master-at-arms screamed. “Report the magazines! Sound off!”

  Aminata tore off sternward, plunging down the ladder, crying, “Report the magazines!” That sounded like a signal firework detonating inside the ship, and if it somehow reached the Burn supply, they were about to die in clinging fire—

  A sailor belowdecks screamed back. “Magazines secure!”

  She turned to shout abovedecks. “Magazines secure!” Then, after a ragged breath, “What t
he fuck was that?”

  “The rudder’s gone!” someone shouted back down.

  “We hit our own mine?” Sulane was clear of anything marked on the charts. . . .

  “I don’t know! But the rudder’s fucked!”

  A collection of surgeon’s tools slid past her, blades and bonesaws ringing cheerily; a mercy-spike bounced off her boot and landed killing end down between two planks. Without a rudder the wind had taken them: the whole frigate was heeling north, prow coming starboard as Sulane tipped over.

  Sulane had been maimed. She could go. She should go. That was the plan, to make sure Sulane couldn’t hurt Eternal. And then go.

  Ormsment’s bellow: “Away the damage control party! Cut off the rudder, run out the drogue, I want the bow turned back into the wind! Lash me an emergency rudder! Come on, show me your salt!”

  Ordinarily Ormsment’s flag captain would have picked up her orders and repeated them. But she was busy at the prow, tending to a wounded sailor: old amputee comforting the newly maimed.

  Aminata felt two great hands seize her by the wrists and try to pull her in half.

  One hand had four long fingers of duty and a thick thumb of guilt. Sulane was a warship in combat. Ormsment needed her staff captain.

  But the other pull said—this ship is doomed. Ormsment’s a mutineer who led her crew to ruin. You made your choice. Jump overboard and swim, swim, it’s not too late. You deserve better than this!

  You worked your ass off! Don’t die for nothing!

  The wind’s slow hand pulled Sulane broadside on to the Cancrioth ship.

  Oh Wydd,” I whispered. “Have they caught fire? Is it over?”

  In a single silent instant Eternal’s whole cannon-studded side vanished in a wall of smoke. I had never seen anything like it outside of a forest fire. “Is it their magazine?” I demanded of Faham. “Has the magazine gone—”

  The thunder came over us then, and I could not speak.

  Chain shot tore through timber, lines, canvas, flesh. A mainsail shroud line snapped free and the lashing end took the master-at-arms across the eyes. Something struck the mainmast and whipped around it keening like a funeral till it smashed itself to a halt and thrummed there, four feet of chain, burnt and smoking.