The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  But the people had warned Ake of trouble. Balt Anagi was an island of the Balts: one of the social rates under the Scyphu families, before the Kyprist government banned the old religious practice. Balts were artisans and craftspeople, and for some reason Baru did not understand but which Ake accepted immediately, they were socially despised. Ake tried to explain: “You know how some people always have their stall at the edge of the market, and no one haggles with them? No? You must have been too young to notice.” Baru could only guess that maybe the artisans, who must have traded with foreigners for wealth, had built up some kind of resentment.

  The Canaat rebels promised fair treatment to all the old rates, but several Balt islets had been raided during the great surge west, as warbands canoed to Kyprist territory to attack. One band had landed here by “accident” and set to pillaging. Anagi’s defenders fought them off. One of the attackers had been killed; his incensed warband had accused the Anagi of counterrevolutionary behavior, and sent east, to a place called Mascanaat, for someone called the Pranist.

  Past noon the Morrow-men led Baru and Ake to meet the Anagi warband. Ake befriended them by offering to sew them new banners: she had a steel needle, nearly priceless, and the warband needed to tell its people apart from its so-called allies. They shared a meal of stone-cooked fish, and another warning. The Pranist, they said, was a purifier, sent to make sure liberated islets were made canaathe, which meant, in the new thinking, fit for people. He would kill anyone who’d had surgeries or inoculations. He would kill anyone educated in a Falcresti school. He would kill foreigners who refused to return to their ships and send back their water.

  And he was shivering. He had the cricket sickness. They called it that because the eastern fringe had the most cricket farmers and that was where the bleeding sickness had appeared.

  Barhu asked whether the Canaat leaders would entertain a water truce. That went over poorly. This rebellion, the Anagis told her, was a motion of the people. It was not something to be started and stopped at anyone’s command. They had learned the price of moderation, of waiting for a better time and a gentler method. The best way back to peace was to finish the Kyprists, break their control of the water, and return these islands to the control of their ancestral families. Their idealism stirred Barhu’s heart.

  The Pranist’s warband came on them at sunset.

  They had pistols, which were terrifying, and obsidian-tipped spears, which were deadly. The Balt Anagi warband routed. Most of the Morrow-men went with them; the one man who stayed tried to bribe the Pranist.

  He was a shivering man in an open white cotton robe, naked beneath it except for a breechcloth and sandals. He took the Morrow-man’s silver, promised to use it to keep clean water from going stagnant, and had the man drowned. “We’ll use his corpse to teach the new kids,” he told his warband, and made a few mock swings with a machete. “Get used to the heft, you know?”

  The sun was falling and their chances were fading. Barhu tried the obvious lies—they were traders from New Kutulbha, come ashore to bring water to children. The Pranist spoke quick, alert Aphalone, but mostly he listened carefully to everything Barhu said.

  “You have water to spare?” he asked. “On your ship? Not wine, not beer, but water?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’ve been marooned in port a while. Any casks you brought with you would be stagnant.”

  “We were lucky enough to refill,” Barhu improvised, “before the, uh, the revolution.”

  “So you got water from a local aquifer?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Kyprists hold all the aquifers. You paid the Kyprists for water?”

  Barhu shut her mouth. This was going nowhere good. But the Pranist went on: “You legitimized their claim to the water. You gave them money good with foreign traders, which they could use to pay for weapons or mercenaries. I know, I know, you did it all to give children a drink. But when Kyprism is defeated, the children will have all the water they ever need, and you have delayed our victory. You see?” He threw up his hands. “You try to help, you fuck things up.”

  She tried to tell him about the apocalypse fuse.

  The Pranist laughed at her. “We have to stop fighting, or we’ll all die? The way we had to go to the barbers for our medicine, or we’d die? The way we had to marry as we were assigned, or our children would die? We’re old hands at the game of obey or die.” He turned to his fighters. “These people, they give me a bad feeling. Let’s bring them to the lagoon.”

  “Wait,” Barhu dared. “Wait, I’m a friend of Unuxekome Ra.”

  “Ra!” He spat the name. “You’re Ra’s creature? That pirate scum! She told us to wait, wait, wait, wait for Abdumasi Abd to return in triumph with Aurdwynn’s fleet. And we waited, and waited, and the ships never came, and all the while we died. Come on, take them”—he beckoned to his fighters, all young and fierce-eyed, all shivering like he was shivering—“take them, let’s go. They’ll have banana beer and fresh fish at the lagoon. Then it’s back to work.”

  Beside the bloody lagoon stood a village, sugarcane-roofed domes on stilts, a pipe well to gather rainwater. The Pranist’s fighters pulled the Balts out of the village and lined them up beside the lagoon. The youngest men and women were taken out of line and taught to use machetes on the corpses of seals. The Pranist stepped in with encouragement and pointers. A few of the older youth had graduated to dismembering the Morrow-man’s corpse. “You’ll get used to it,” the Pranist called, “if you just don’t look in their eyes. Figure out your own speed. It’s normal to get sick the first time. If someone’s making a mess of things, just give a shout and one of us will help.”

  “We’re going to be killed,” Ake whispered.

  “We’d be dead already if we were,” Barhu whispered back. “I think he’s going to take us to Mascanaat. To meet their leaders.”

  “You’re insane. We’re dead.”

  The Pranist’s fighters were well-equipped and distinctive, with all the markers, according to the Manual of Field Literacy, of an elite guard. Each man (there were only men in his group: he had said the young recruits would be segregated later) wore a thick fishnet cloak and a hibiscus flower behind his left ear. They marched the weak, dehydrated Balt villagers to the edge of the lagoon, where they were stripped naked. There they were inspected meticulously, from hair to toes, and then either sent across the lagoon, to stand on the far shore, or west, into the thick grove of coconut palms.

  No one came back from the coconut grove.

  “Have you had any surgeries?” Barhu murmured to Ake. She was thinking about the long, sutured cut on her back.

  “Does it matter, Baru? We’re foreigners.”

  The youths who had done best with the machetes were taken to meet an old woman who knelt in the lagoon, braced on her trembling arms, her face upturned. As the youths came near, she cupped the blood dripping from her nose and eyes in her hand, reached out, and placed her bloody hand upon the children’s tongues.

  “You can’t do that,” Barhu said, with rising horror. “You’re giving them Kettling, you’ll kill them all—”

  “The blood cannot harm a true person,” the Pranist said, behind her. “Come now. Do you really believe in the lie of blood disease? After all the ‘inoculations’ and ‘infections’ Falcrest lied about, don’t you realize we need an infusion of strength? I was shot by a Kyprist crossbow, right here. Not even a scar! It healed in a day. The new blood is the restoration of humanity. If you feel sick you must kill Kyprists, and then you will feel well again.”

  They were insane. They were insane and it made perfect sense to Barhu because this madness was, like her, made by Falcrest: a pattern of authority by bodily violence which remained, like a scar, after Falcrest departed.

  This terror was ultimately created by the Kyprists, by their ruthless barbers and their use of mass thirst as a weapon. Kyprism was in turn an artifice created by Falcrest’s decapitation of all Kyprananoke’s traditions and the i
nstallation of a biddable new ruling class. No matter how vivid and imminent the horrors here, Falcrest was in a distant but powerful way responsible.

  But Barhu could not bring herself to forgive the Pranist and his warband.

  No matter the cause, these were people doing evil. To absolve them of guilt would be to deny their humanity, to deny that they had some intrinsic dignity and moral independence which only they could choose to surrender. To say that these people were doing monstrous things entirely of their own monstrous nature was to deny Falcrest’s immense historical crimes. But to say that these people were doing monstrous things solely because Falcrest had made them into monsters was to grant Falcrest the power to destroy the soul: to permanently remove the capacity for choice.

  “Help is coming,” she whispered to Ake. “The Morrow-men will have help here soon. Marines from Ascentatic.”

  She turned to the Pranist. “Stop this. You want a world for people? People don’t kill each other for taking foreign medicine.”

  “Strike her,” the Pranist ordered. “Strike her again if she tries to tell us we’re not people.”

  The butt of a spear slammed into her wounded back and her whole body split in agony, like a cocoon cut open, the half-made butterfly draining out. She fell down gaping on the scrub.

  “You’re speaking Aphalone,” she gasped, unwisely furious. “You’re speaking a foreign—”

  “The people speak through me!” the Pranist shouted, now in panic, as if the self-evident thing Barhu had said was his most dangerous secret. Maybe his young fighters terrified him, too. “I make myself understood to foreigners! I know Aphalone because it is useful to the people!”

  “Don’t touch her!” Ake cried. “She fought against the Masquerade in Aurdwynn. See her face? See her skin? She’s Maia! She fought there!”

  “Races belong to Falcrest. There is no more race. There are only people. These islands must be made ready for people again. There are thirty thousand Kyprists and their collaborators here. If each loyal person kills one, we could have them all gone in a day.”

  “You’re killing the Balt. You’re killing them because you hate them and you want their wealth.”

  “No, we’re not,” the Pranist said, patiently. “We’re killing those who aren’t people any more.”

  In the lagoon, a hawk-nosed fisherman with surgical scars across his belly tried to run. Immediately, without one warning or cry of anger, two of the Pranist’s fighters set at him with their machetes: wordless, grunting, careful to strike him in soft flesh where the blades wouldn’t lodge. They cut his upraised arms from wrist to shoulder, they cut his back when he curled up on himself, and when he was down they slashed the back of his head until he stopped moving.

  Savages, the voice of Cairdine Farrier whispered, degenerate savages, this is what they become without our guidance. . . .

  You bastard. You bastards. You did this to them, you took away everything they had, you locked them in this cage and left them.

  They chose to become this way. They made themselves worse than beasts. You want to justify their sins because you hate Falcrest, but this is not Falcrest’s doing. . . .

  No. No. This never would have happened without you.

  One day, Baru, you will not be able to blame all the evil humans undertake upon Our Republic. And what will you do then?

  I will continue to blame you for the evil that is yours!

  The bleeding woman extended her hand, black with Kettling effluent, and a weeping girl took that hand into her mouth. The fisherman’s body was coming apart.

  15

  Spinal Response

  When the scream sounded from the village Barhu thought it was just another poor Anagint trying to run.

  A man wearing the net and flower of the Pranist’s warband came scrambling out from under the stilt houses with a spear in his back. The end of the spear banged off the wood above him, like a rigid tail. He screamed again, and was intercepted, midstride, by a spear in the small of his back. Baru felt cruel satisfaction: why would he be among those houses if he were not a pillager, or a rapist?

  “Go help him!” the Pranist bellowed. A shudder doubled him over, and he screamed at the mud and at the lagoon. “Find out who hurt him! My body is sick at the crime, sick at the sight!”

  He vomited green-black blood. It came from his mouth and his nostrils. A trickle passed from his left eye.

  People came down out of the village, toward the lagoon. Ordinary people who gathered close to share strength. Some of them were from the Balt Anagi warband. Some of them were not, but they carried fishing spears and machetes anyway. Some of them were the Morrow-men who had been sent to keep Barhu safe. Most of them bled from noses and cracked lips: thick red blood, dehydration blood, not Kettling.

  They were singing together: wavering, out of tune, but all together.

  “You!” the Pranist screamed, shaking his finger at them. “You’ve killed a brave man, a soldier for humanity! Who do you think you are to do this? Who gave you the—”

  He saw the woman leading the attack, and his voice went from him.

  “Tsuni el-tsun,” he whispered: god of gods.

  And you could see why men would call on gods to stop her. She skipped down the slope like a thistle, all points and no center, obsidian-tipped spears bundled on her back. Bounding from stone to black smooth stone as the atlatl in her hand bobbed to a secret rhythm.

  Tain Shir.

  The two war parties, Balt Anagi’s defenders and the Canaat raiders, gathered across from each other, hesitating in that long nerving-up time before the first blow. It was not easy to strike first, Barhu had read: that was why so many warriors went into battle drunk. There would be a while of shouting and threatening and working up before—

  Tain Shir shrugged and a spear fell out of her bundle into her waiting hand and then home into the atlatl’s notch. The throwing arm made a little zip when it swung. She stepped and half-turned with the throw and the spear pierced the Pranist’s lung and put him on his back in the blood-scummed lagoon, thrashing underwater, the length of the weapon looping in the air.

  Ake covered Barhu and held her down in the heliotrope bushes. “Don’t move! Don’t take their attention!” Barhu, paralyzed by terror and fascination, could hardly resist.

  The Pranist’s fighters broke. It was astounding how quickly it happened; but this was battle as ordinary people fought it, not the disciplined phalanx-lines of Aurdwynn. Shock and terror won the fight before first blood was shed. When the Pranist’s fighters turned their back to flee it became easier to kill them, even for unbloodied men and women.

  Tain Shir moved among them, killing, killing again, impaling the Pranist’s cadre one by one, twisting them by the bowel as if the spears were levers and their bodies were the fulcrums of some ancient door. She did not hurt the youth who had taken the Kettling blood. Barhu was not sure if she was relieved or horrified by that.

  “It’s her,” Ake whispered, “it’s her, I saw her poisoned, I saw her go into the water. How is she alive?”

  “I don’t know.” As if she had been called back to the world by the massacre here. As if the wall between life and death were too thin. “Maybe the dose was too small. . . .”

  Tain Shir loped through bloody lagoon water to kick the sick old woman over on her back. She fell pitifully and did not come up again. The freed villagers cried out to each other, husbands finding wives, children begging for parents.

  “Baru,” Ake whispered, “what if she tries to finish killing you?”

  “I know.”

  “She’ll do it again—make you choose—”

  “I know,” Barhu said. “It’ll be me, if it has to be one of us. I made that choice.”

  “I don’t believe you for a moment,” Ake said.

  “I know,” Barhu said. She rose from the bushes and called out. “Shir!”

  The killing woman turned toward her. Blue unblinking eyes, ragged bloodsoaked body. Like a red-muzzled wolf. She reached
back for a spear.

  Barhu put up her wounded right hand.

  “I have Tain Hu’s soul,” she called. “I’m carrying her eryre. Do you know what that means?”

  Tain Shir raised the atlatl with the spear fixed in it.

  “I’m telling the truth! Ask your aunt—ask Ake here—”

  Tain Shir stepped and twisted and threw.

  Tain Shir kills Baru Cormorant in a thousand ways.

  She drives the point of a spear up through Baru’s stomach and out the top of her back. She crushes Baru’s temples until Baru’s eyes swell with blood. She rips out Baru’s throat so that her final words will be the one true utterance spoken only by gouting blood and mortal air. She punctures Baru’s lungs with a short knife so that Baru drowns in her own breath as Helbride’s surgeons fight and fail to save her. They pierce her lying throat in their desperation. They fail.

  All these killings are possible.

  But in the one true world that denies all other possibility, the spear Shir hurls is blunt, and it knocks Baru windless on her ass among the sweet white heliotrope bushes.

  “Fuck!” Baru rolls onto her stomach to beat in agony at the soft earth. “Fuck, fuck, shit.” She has fallen on her wounded back. “Himu fuck!”

  “I know,” Shir says.

  “What?”

  “I know that Tain Hu lives in you. I heard you confess it to Auntie Yawa. I followed you up from the water, so I could kill you if you’d lied to me.”

  “Lied about what?”

  “About choosing to die. You were ready. I heard you beg her to kill you.”

  “Where’s Iscend?” Baru pants. The Stakhi woman Ake is at her side, helping her up, wary eyes on Shir. She is a trifle of flesh with a fierce, bitter spirit in her. Shir imagines she would have the gamey, fear-flushed taste of frightened prey. “Did you kill her?”