The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Aminata clung grimly to the ladder and waited for it to stop. Huge god fingers drummed along Sulane’s port side, round shot beating against wood and slapping off water. The thud of direct impacts, the snap of broken rope, the groan of suddenly unsupported timber—

  Then silence, and the screams of wounded.

  “Surgeon!” someone bawled. “Surgeon!”

  But it was Juris Ormsment’s voice that ruled. “Stand to your posts, sailors! The bastards couldn’t hit a cunt with a cock! Their shot’s bouncing right off our timber!”

  She was up on the mainmast shrouds, dangling from the lines on Sulane’s tilted starboard side, hanging out over the ocean. She looked fearless. The crew cheered for her.

  “Where’s my rudder?” Ormsment shouted. “I need helm!”

  Aminata stumbled aft across splintered wood and spilled grease to help the damage control party. She found them struggling to lift the heavy wooden drogue, put her shoulder beneath it, and, pushing in time with the sailing-master’s call, helped tip it over the stern.

  “Drogue’s away!” the sailing-master called. “Pass the word!”

  “Drogue’s away!” Aminata shouted forward.

  The floating drogue uncoiled behind Sulane, dragging against the ship’s motion, pulling at the stern so the whole ship turned west again, straight at Eternal.

  “Strike everything!” the sailing-master cried. “Make her clean!”

  Riggers hauled at capstans and blocks, the whole ship answering like a thing alive, tucking its wings like a peregrine on the dive. Aminata’s favorite thing in the world: the perfect coordinated labor of so many different people gathered in complex ways and yet to simple effect, all to make the ship go where it was needed. Everyone doing exactly what the ship’s design asked of them and in reciprocity the ship doing what they asked of it, together, hand in hand. And the smell of sealant, and the callus-ripping burn of taut rope over your palm, and Aminata knew she would never abandon this ship, never could abandon a ship in battle.

  “Rocketry!” Ormsment shouted. “Cut me two long-fuse torpedoes! Put them right across her course! I want her holed and foundering before we get alongside!”

  She was still fighting for her crew. Still fighting to win.

  The master-at-arms clawed at his eyes and screamed for his mother. Aminata ran to take his place.

  Aminata!”

  Ulyu Xe tried to hold Barhu back so she could tend to the barnacle cut. All Barhu wanted (unfairly, wretchedly) was to shove her down in the bilgewater, seize the oars, and go get Aminata back.

  “Why didn’t she come?” She’d watched Galganath fix the naval mine to Sulane’s rudder, watched the orca pull the arming lanyard. And she’d thought: thank Devena for that whale, because if Sulane loses her helm, she’s done fighting, and Aminata will come to safety.

  But she hadn’t come.

  “I don’t understand. She just had to jump and swim out to you—Apparitor, why didn’t you—”

  “Row,” Apparitor said.

  “What?”

  “Take the oars. I’m exhausted. You row.”

  Barhu looked, selfishly, to Ulyu Xe, but the poor woman had just spent long minutes underwater. She sat her ass down and took the oars. Apparitor sat on the stern thwart, his back to Sulane. Cannon sounded in the distance. The wind twirled the little hairs that had escaped from his braid.

  “She chose,” he said. “She made the decision to stay. Not you.”

  “So we’ll go back for her.” Barhu realized she’d only grabbed the left oar, and snatched for the right, getting it on the first try. “I put her in this position. I’m responsible.”

  “I have a question for you.”

  “What?”

  “Do you understand that other people exist?”

  “Yes,” Barhu said, viciously. “I understand that Aminata might have reasons to do things that—that I don’t understand or appreciate.”

  “Good.” Apparitor began to undo his hair. Behind him, a blurred cannonball blew through the wall of Sulane’s flag stateroom, ricocheted off the iron struts of the hive glass, and bounced around destroying expensive things. Aminata would have stood in that room to speak to Ormsment. Aminata would have left her bootprints in the carpet.

  “You won’t go back to rescue her.” He watched her levelly, his hands up behind his head, tending to his braid. “You know we won’t survive it. And you know that part of this job is leaving people behind. That’s what we do, as cryptarchs, when we change our identities. What if you made some friends as Barbitu Plane? Started a nice little Purge club, maybe? And then the identity was compromised? You couldn’t see them again. Ever.”

  “I didn’t leave her behind,” Barhu snapped, jerking her head at Ulyu Xe. “Tain Shir was going to kill her, and I volunteered to die in her place. And she just saved my life.”

  “But you did leave me behind, first.” Xe smeared piney unguent on Baru’s wound: the pain made her jump. “I was with Tain Hu when you exiled her. You left us all behind.”

  Another volley of cannon fire slapped at Sulane, raising geysers port and starboard. The frigate was nose-on again, a small target, and the Cancrioth gunners were not having any effect.

  Apparitor raised his voice a little over the thunder. “I haven’t seen Lindon in nearly two years. I haven’t seen his kids, or his wife, or our child. You learn to say good-bye. And each time you do it you know it might be forever.”

  “We’re going back for her!” But her traitor hands weren’t working right, she was fighting herself on the oars, pulling the wrong way—

  “What did you really do to Yawa?”

  “What?”

  “How did you convince her to protect you? Do you have some hold over her brother? Slow poison? A letter that could influence his trial?”

  “No,” Barhu said, exasperatedly. She had managed to get the launch circling to starboard—when the prow came round to Sulane she would pull with both hands and they would go back—

  “How did you turn her? Tell me how you did it.”

  “We don’t have time for this!”

  “What else should we spend our time on? The rest of this is out of our hands. You know, I thought you were going to die whether or not we lobotomized you. I thought you were going to poison yourself, or leap into the water, or slit your wrists. Because you didn’t have anything inside you here”—he thumped his chest above his heart—“to hold.”

  The creak of launch ballistae, suddenly released. Two sleek torpedoes hurtled off Sulane’s prow, splashed down, tugged free of their fuse cords, and ignited. The copper shark-shapes skipped off across the wavetops. Feedback gears twisted their tails to keep them on course.

  “Oh, no,” Barhu whispered.

  “It’s out of your hands now,” Svir said, mercilessly. “You can’t control what happens. Just like you couldn’t control Aminata’s choice—”

  “I created the context in which she made her choice!” Barhu shouted at him. “I put her in the position where she chose to stay on a doomed ship! I am responsible!”

  “Is that how you see other people? Like mice? You build the mazes for them to run, and it’s your fault if they don’t end up where you want?”

  “Aminata’s my friend! I asked her to do this!”

  His nostrils flared; he took a deep breath; Barhu had the strange idea that he was inhaling some intangible alcohol or elixir, a vapor boiling off her soul, and passing it through some special alpine organ created by all his race’s years of delving into the earth to ferret out poisons.

  “You know,” he said, “last time you looked back when you were supposed to be running, you got hit in the head.”

  “You got me out of there.”

  “Yes. I did. If I hadn’t been there, you’d have died. Do you ever think about that?”

  She’d never really thought about that. It offended her.

  She thought about it, now, as the torpedoes ran in toward Eternal. The marvelous killing machines on their way
to discover Tau and Osa and Shao Lune and the Brain and the Eye and the Womb and giant Innibarish and the woman with the scarified face and the cancer pigs and all the other marvels aboard. All the things that Barhu needed, somehow, for some mysterious reason, some master plan locked away in her blind right side.

  It was easy, then, to give up on the arrogance of total control.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she admitted. “Thinking about things Tau said to me. I’ve forgotten how . . . really, I’ve never been alone. Aminata helped me in school. And then there was Muire Lo, and Tain Hu, and you. And Lyxaxu, and Unuxekome, and Pinjagata . . . Xate Olake saved my life when Lyxaxu came to kill me. You saved my life when Oathsfire ambushed us. I just let myself think, somehow, that I’d done it all myself, that I was . . .”

  “That you were a solitary savant, a bright star in the dark?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wonder who wanted you to think like that,” Svir said, with bitter amusement.

  “Hey. How long were you dosing my vodka?”

  “The whole time, Baru. From that first bottle we shared. I had to know how you’d react.”

  “You needed to know how I’d react to rye ergot and vidhara? Vidhara’s an aphrodisiac, Svir.”

  “Anything to get you to do something for yourself. Something he didn’t want.”

  “I thought the idea was to give me a seizure. So you could blackmail me.”

  “That too.” He shot her a tired, twisted smile. “I am a cryptarch. Plots within plots.”

  Sulane was now within half a mile of Eternal, and the pattern of cannon fire had disintegrated from volleys into spasms of individual fire. All the Cancrioth sailors at their guns, all those hobbyists the Womb had bemoaned, maybe even some Termites who had practice with cannon: all desperate to fend off one of Falcrest’s firebearers, Sulane as avatar of the whole Armada War and all the humiliations the Mbo had suffered.

  Their shot skipped off Sulane’s flanks to flail the water. Tore fluttering pennants from Sulane’s sails. Scythed sailors from the open deck.

  Did everything and anything but penetrate the frigate’s hull.

  “No wonder nobody uses cannon,” Barhu said in frustration. “They’re awful.”

  “Stop rowing,” Svir told her.

  “No! We’re going back for Aminata—”

  “Baru,” Ulyu Xe murmured. “You’re just turning us in circles.”

  “We can’t get them back,” Svir told her. “Either of us.”

  He had Iraji on Eternal, as Barhu had Aminata on Sulane.

  At that very moment a torpedo struck Eternal.

  Sulane’s taken aback,” Faham explained. “The wind from ahead slowed her to a stop. Without water moving under her hull, she can’t steer. The drogue they threw off the stern will keep her pointing the right way, but she’s stuck.”

  “What a curious thing to say of a ship,” I remarked. “Taken aback. Like she’s been affronted.”

  “That’s where the phrase comes from in the first place, you innocent provincial lass. Taken aback means a ship without steerage, driven backward by wind—”

  Kimbune cried out in horror.

  One of Sulane’s torpedoes drowned and sank.

  The other rammed nose-on into Eternal’s starboard side.

  I had witnessed the Battle of Treatymont, where Ormsment’s torpedo barges had worked such ruin on Unuxekome’s ships, but it was still always a surprise to me when the strange devices worked. The piston crushed the detonator, the detonator fired the charge. Water spouted up the side of Eternal’s golden hull. The gold film cracked, baring black wood beneath; but the worst damage would be below, where water hammer and void tore at the hull.

  “She’s hit, then,” Execarne said, tonelessly. “Holed at the waterline.”

  Kimbune seized two fistfuls of her hair. “Will she sink?”

  “I don’t know. Has she any pumps?”

  “Of course! We invented pumps!”

  I considered this boast, and allowed it. Perhaps irrigation had come north from the ancient Oriati.

  “And do your people know how to fother a sail?” Execarne asked.

  “Fother? I don’t know that word.”

  “Then we’ll see.” He sighed. “If you’ll look north now, here comes Ascentatic.”

  I gasped aloud in wonder. South flew Captain Nullsin’s Ascentatic, beam on to the morning wind, as small beneath her sails as a krakenfly’s slim tail between its lacy wings. All her signal batteries were firing, rockets booming around her:

  STAND DOWN, CEASE FIRE, IN THE ADMIRALTY’S NAME STAND DOWN

  Captain Nullsin, answering Aminata’s call, had come to stop the fighting.

  But Sulane’s reply was another pair of torpedoes toward Eternal. Kimbune shouted in dismay, and began to draw angles in the air, as if she could calculate the weapons off course.

  Eternal sprouted millipede legs.

  Devena only knows how I, a Treatymont scullery girl, came to see such sights. It was astounding. The great ship produced banks of oars from all along its lower hull, like a galley. The long sweeps dug into the water, churning up vortices that flashed and glimmered with distressed jellyfish.

  With a verve that would have earned a cheer from any ringside crowd, the Cancrioth rowers prodded the incoming torpedoes away, blasting one long sweep into a splintered stub, flipping and drowning the other torpedo. “Ai-o!” I called, the old cry from Treatymont’s duels, and then felt very sheepish.

  But the Traitor-Admiral’s frigate was in motion again.

  The riggers had put up fresh canvas. The wind in Sulane’s sails pushed her backward, and now, with water moving under the hull and an emergency rudder over the stern, the ship had steerage again. They cut their drogue away, close-hauled the sails, and made ready to beat upwind.

  I had seen Sulane in the battle off Treatymont. I knew how Ormsment made her kills. She would skitter in close, where she would not need torpedoes. There her heavy ship-burner Flying Fish rockets could strike a mortal blow.

  “How far does she need?” I whispered. “To make the shot certain?”

  “A quarter mile,” Faham muttered. “Less than a thousand feet, if possible.”

  Kimbune began to pray.

  I found her tongue unsettling, the words too small, the syntax too rapid. But perhaps, coming from a land of Unuxekomes and Radaszics and epithets like ziscjaditzcionursz, I was prejudiced toward words that took their time.

  Execarne began to murmur a translation. He knew the Cancrioth language. The man was full of marvels.

  En ash li-en ek am amar

  Su au-ai vo bha to

  En ilu ilu es ahar Love of life is life’s one sacred art

  Su to en ilu a alo For you, love—I don’t know that word

  Ut oro ona ti ti-en The sky has no edges to find

  Aum ana ti se si ihen And we’ve more ahead than behind

  An elu it Forever is real

  Shu ah anit The sign and the seal

  Man aul aum ra na o ael-it. Not the line, love, but the wheel.

  Kimbune closed her eyes and touched her brow, where the sign of the round number had been tattooed across her thoughts.

  Faham held my hand.

  The fate of the Ashen Sea balanced on a moment: Juris Ormsment returned to Falcrest with a Cancrioth prize and all the world roused to war, or Eternal triumphant, Juris dead, and some hope, any hope at all, of my success.

  With a plume of white sparks, with a whistle like a hawk descending, Sulane fired a Burn rocket toward Eternal.

  No!” Barhu shouted, and her back ripped with the shout. She gagged in pain and yet she could not look away.

  Fire was the foe of all ships, but Eternal, huge and undercrewed, full of untrained sailors and explosive powder, would suffer worst of all. The Burn could not be extinguished by water or by wind. It would eat everything it could reach.

  Tiny figures on the Cancrioth ship’s rail fired pistols and bows at the incoming rocket. Among them s
tood one short colorful person, like a splash of paint. A stout woman behind that figure tried to draw them away. They would not go.

  Barhu said: “Tau—”

  And the golden ship burst into a swarm of kites.

  At first she thought the sails had torn free. But there were sailors up in the rigging, playing out the lines of their kites, black diamonds and brilliant firebirds, jellyfish trailing tasseled tentacles and krakenflies with jointed legs. The wind was out of the west behind them, and it lofted the kites exactly where they needed to be.

  Sulane’s rocket struck a huge vulture-kite, tumbled end for end, fell into the ocean, and popped into a scum of fire.

  “Before you get too excited,” Svir said, grimly, “I feel I should remind you they were just taking the range.”

  All the cannon on Eternal’s starboard bow were silent. Cancrioth sailors swarmed down the side of the ship, descending on nets and ropes, towing an enormous patch—a ship’s sail, but shaggy, covered in yarn and cord, smeared in pitch. They were fothering the torpedo wound: dragging a patch across it and using the pressure of the inrushing water to hold the patch itself in place. Then they could make repairs from within.

  Red Sulane had regained her speed. She came swiftly toward Eternal, tacking sharply, all aboard performing to their utmost. The rocketry mates would be aiming lower now, shooting for the hull, where the kites could not interfere.

  From the north Ascentatic raced to interpose herself. Barhu had read all about her in the public edition of the Navy List: an Attainer-class frigate fresh from the Thalamast’s yards in Rathpont. She had been improved over the old Shaheen-class in quiet, economic ways that Barhu appreciated: her lumber had been treated with a newer and cheaper process, she was three weeks quicker to cycle through the drydocks, her storm armor had been impregnated with a dye that killed infant shipworms, her rocket magazines could be swiftly flooded, her provisions came from the Metademe instead of a privately owned supplier—

  And none of it would matter. She was too far to intercept Sulane, put marines aboard, and force her to stand down. She was certainly beyond torpedo and heavy rocket range, even if Nullsin were willing to turn those weapons on a comrade. Her hwachas might cross the gap, but those were weapons meant to kill crew, not damage ships.