The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Ake! Ake, is the truce ready? Is Governor Love ready to negotiate . . . ?”

  “He’s infected. His aide’s in charge. She’s busy killing everyone who’s not loyal to her. I couldn’t get through.”

  “Try again!” Barhu gasped. “You have to try again—”

  A hand brushed her cheek. “Aminata?” Barhu gasped, “Aminata, is that you?”

  But the hand closed over her mouth and her eyes, and stilled her for a while.

  She woke in darkness and screamed in pain.

  “Hush,” Svir hissed, “hush. People are sleeping.”

  “How much have I missed?”

  “Your water truce. It lasted half a day. There are too many Canaat factions, all afraid they’ll look weak if they stop fighting. And the Kyprists are desperate for a chance to break out. Someone always starts fighting again. The truce can’t hold.”

  “Because I’m not there. I have to go persuade them.”

  “It has nothing to do with you, Baru. You didn’t release the Kettling here. You didn’t push through water reforms that left the Kyprists in control of the aquifers. Or destroy the old compost agriculture. Or force the people into sugarcane planting. Or do any of the things which poisoned Kyprananoke. You did not create these circumstances.”

  “The rebels will be blamed,” she gasped. “Because all their evils are done in the open. The Kyprists are worse—they just make their crimes into laws—you must be sure it’s remembered! There was a tree where Canaat dashed children to death. But the Kyprists had jails, jails where they did as much and more. . . .”

  “Stop. Stop. Meningitis is serious, Baru. You don’t want to spend your last words cursing some provincial junta. Or defending those Canaat monsters.”

  So much left to do. So little of her mind to do it with. “You can’t use the fuse,” she rasped. “You have to give them a chance.”

  “When the wind picks up I’ll have no choice. The ships here may not have water, but they’ll take dehydration over a plague port.”

  “You can’t! Take the chance, Svir!”

  “You’re an accountant,” Svir snapped. “You understand the logic. Don’t put the blame on me. It’s just the numbers.”

  In the grip of fever the numbers crawled on her like ants and she moaned in horror. If even one infected carrier reached the mainland, if the blister number was exactly right and that carrier infected three others . . . in just eleven generations of infection there would be two hundred and fifty thousand infected. Seven out of ten would die. More than lived on Kyprananoke by far.

  “I’ll come by,” Svir murmured, “when you’re awake, and I have news.”

  He did. The Canaat seized one of the Kyprist reservoirs in the chaos, but the retreating Kyprists filled it with corpses. The atoll’s summer crops had failed. The locust and cricket farms were dying out. Kyprist cutters were arresting fishermen or throwing them overboard in their own nets for “supporting insurrection.” Ascentatic burned a dromon that tried to depart on sweeps. An overland scouting party sighted Eternal on the southern coast of el-Tsunuqba, putting out fishing boats, scouting desperately for water. A peace offering of lumber had been taken, and then thrown back, and then taken again: all, apparently, by different factions of Eternal’s crew.

  Ulyu Xe swabbed Barhu’s head with a cool cloth.

  Yawa talked to her, too. She said Ake was in the east, at Mascanaat, where the rebels let her pass because they’d heard stories of Tain Hu.

  “Yawa,” Barhu croaked. “If I don’t . . . if you end up without my services, please look to my parents. Search for them on a prison hulk off Taranoke. And my father Salm. Tain Shir knows where to find him.”

  The pain in her skull eclipsed whatever Yawa said next.

  It happened while she was asleep.

  All she heard at the time was a mast-top girl shouting “DECK, DECK, GALLEY ON THE RAM! PORT SIDE!” And the creak of her hammock swaying as Helbride heeled over.

  The other captain must have decided there was no escape from Kyprananoke without a ship fast enough to outrun Ascentatic. His dromon closed on Helbride during the night, moving under sweeps in the shallow water. The dark jagged shape of el-Tsunuqba concealed his ship’s outline until it was too late. Before Captain Branne could finish crying out “Beat the crew to quarters!” the dromon was charging Helbride’s port side.

  Helbride answered wonderfully to the sailing master; her sheets fell from their clewage with living eagerness. As soon as Branne had steerage, she threw the helm over to port and turned into the dromon, as if to match ram with ram.

  It almost worked. She might have slipped past, just feet from collision. But the dromon grappled onto Helbride in the close passage, flank to flank. And the boarders waiting to swarm up the ropes onto Svir’s clipper looked up with grim, determined faces.

  Faces stained with fresh, unclotted blood.

  “PLAGUE SHIP!” the mast-top girls cried.

  “Flee!” the other ship’s griot cried. She leapt up onto the rail, cupping her face, showing them hands of blood. “Flee your ship, or die with us!”

  “Abandon your ship,” the dromon’s captain shouted. “Swim away, save yourselves! We want only the ship!”

  The Cheetah crew, survivors of Tau’s ship rescued by Helbride, shouted shame in reply: if the attackers had the littlest trim and decency, they would do the right thing and throw their oars overboard, drift away to die in quarantine rather than spread the disease. But there was no chance a self-sufficient crew of yeniSegu sailors would be browbeaten into giving up their lives by a well-to-do Prince-house from the heart of the Flamingo Kingdom.

  Very coldly, not a whit of fear in his jaw, Svir stripped off his shirt. He walked to the rail and showed the Oriati his scars: the livid, branching lightning-marks that trailed down his body like the kiss of a jellyfish. In the moonlight they seemed silver and alive.

  “I am Svirakir of the Mansion Hussacht.” He put his hand up, fingers splayed like bolts. “I bear the lightning in me. I fear no illness, for lightning has no flesh. Get back before I call down fire from the cloudless sky.”

  The captain motioned to his sailors to wait a moment. There was real wonder in his eyes.

  “Who are you?” he shouted. “How were you so touched?”

  At that moment Helbride’s cook shoved her lord Apparitor down to the deck and leapt onto the Oriati ship with her apron full of Burn grenades.

  The next time Barhu woke, Faham Execarne was at her bedside. “Hello,” he said. “I’ve been putting a little anesthetic in your water, keeping down the screams.”

  “Do you know?” she wheezed. “Do you know what they’re about to do?”

  “Yes,” Execarne said, sadly. “We’re enacting a quarantine. Exactly like we quarantine any other outbreak. Do you understand the problem of this disease? The long incubation period? They get better for a while. They can travel before they start to bleed. Once it’s out it can’t be stopped.”

  “I know,” she moaned. “But . . .”

  But if all the Kyprananoki died, the things they believed in would all be gone. Their gods and holidays. Their food. Their grudges, their gifts. All the things they had made of what they had.

  “I can’t remember,” Barhu said.

  “What? What can’t you remember?”

  “Taranoke. I swear to the caldera gods, sometimes. But I don’t remember their names. I remember plantain leaf and cooked pineapple. Coffee. Iron salt. But I don’t know how to make our food. I don’t remember the right word for the elders. I remember hating plainsiders but not why. . . .”

  “Hush,” he said, blowing smoke. “Hush, you’re rambling. You’re putting confusion in the air. Vital to hold on to our subjective control of reality, with such chaos around us.”

  “We can’t do this. You can’t allow this.”

  “There are less than a hundred thousand Kyprananoki. Even if we had a ninety percent chance of containing the disease—which is grossly optimistic—a ten percent
chance of the Kettling escaping to kill a million people, just a million, outweighs the entire population of Kyprananoke.”

  No. That was accountant logic, the logic that had failed her in Aurdwynn. Because numbers alone couldn’t count what Tain Hu had meant to her. She was one life on paper and yet a universe to Barhu. Kyprananoke was more than a tally on a page. They had a heritage, the Jellyfish Eaters and the Scyphu and the Tiatro Tsun. And they had a language. And so many irreplaceable people, people like Ngaio Ngaonic, who she had met at the embassy.

  She knew that Tain Hu wouldn’t drop the mountain. Tain Hu had survived plague. She’d lost her parents to it. And doggedly, determinedly, she had gathered the survivors to rebuild. Because she believed that the right of an individual or a people to have a chance, even the smallest chance, was inviolable. That right was what kept powers from rationalizing the destruction of entire peoples as an acceptable cost.

  “This is the wrong way,” she said.

  “Maybe.” Execarne sighed weed smoke. “It’s certainly not good. But good intentions aren’t enough, Agonist, no matter how forcefully we concentrate on them. The world is big, full of many minds, all hard to change. It is possible to do your utmost and still fail. By the way, they say the odds of you surviving this meningitis are bad.”

  “I can’t die,” Barhu croaked. “I have a plan.”

  Execarne’s smile crept through the wall of fever. “Don’t we all?”

  The meningitis came up around her like the bell of a jellyfish, and Barhu’s mind failed.

  INTERLUDE

  The Water Hammer

  it was the wind that woke her. It came out of the southeast, over gentle wavetops and charred corpses, to rouse the Lieutenant Commander from her fugue.

  Awareness returned as a damage report. Throat: burnt. Boots: missing. She’d kicked them off before she leapt. Her whole ass side from her heels to the nape of her neck burnt tender. She was still wearing the rest of her combat rig, and only the wooden spar she laid upon kept her above water. Every breath felt like a chest-cold swallow. The smoke off Sulane must have made her cough until she passed out.

  But she was alive. She was alive!

  She stuck her head up and tried to get her compass. She’d drifted south toward el-Tsunuqba, and the quickening current had her. Ahead the water frothed up into cream-and-coffee color where it plunged into a narrow black strait that roared like a waterfall. But it couldn’t be a waterfall, there was no elevation change, so—

  “Oh fuck,” Aminata said.

  Back on Taranoke, she’d gone on an expedition to the autumn whirlpool at Juditu. The other midshipmen had thrown one of the water rescue mannequins into the vortex—Aminata hadn’t participated, not wanting to be blamed for mishandling equipment. The mannequin had been sucked down nine hundred feet on the sounding line, then slammed into the bottom and drawn down-current so fast the line snapped.

  She really, really did not want to die that way.

  With a cold washing pain as the saltwater licked her burns, she rolled off her spar and began to kick against the current. She had to lose ballast, maybe lose her uniform, certainly get rid of this thing tied to her rig, what was this, a hard metal cylinder—

  It was the Cancrioth uranium lamp.

  The shroud had dragged open and the oily rock inside was naked as a showboy on officer’s night. Aminata rolled onto her back and tried to get the damn thing off, but the knots were dire. She’d really wanted to keep it. Why would she tie it on so well? Did she think it was worth money? Had she confused it, somehow, for an actual lamp, a beacon for her rescue?

  Something massive brushed against her back.

  Aminata looked down and shouted in horror.

  A human skull with fuzzy spikes of cancer-bone growing through its eye sockets slipped past beneath her. She was still shouting and flailing when a tremendous set of black tail flukes slapped water in her face.

  “Ai!” she shouted. It was the Cancrioth orca! It was here to eat her!

  She’d read about settlers way down in Zawam Asu who’d learned to fish in cooperation with orca pods. She’d read about orcas rescuing fisherfolk. Or playing with them. Sometimes the play involved dragging them into the water. Dragging them down.

  The maelstrom shrieked ahead. She was caught betwixt a whale and a whirlpool.

  The orca breached. Those huge white eye-spots. Tiny eyes below them, the true eyes, only she’d never heard of an orca with glowing eyes before, green like tide-fire. There were rings of paint around the eyes, as if the whale had been smeared with a substance like jellyfish tea.

  The orca swam toward her, yawning. Its teeth were curious and huge. The glowing rings round its eyes brightened as it came.

  Aminata looked at the uranium lamp and thought, oh, fuck me.

  When human hands pulled her from the whale’s back, when rough ropes hauled her up a cliff of golden film and black wood onto the deck of a ship, she was still aware enough to begin the Mantra Against Captivity.

  “Aminata isiSegu. Brevet-Captain. RNS Ascentatic. I will not break my silence except to repeat these truths, my name, my rank, my ship, Aminata isiSegu . . .”

  Someone squeezed a trickle of freshwater onto her lips. Someone else shouted in protest. Rough hands tore the uranium lamp away from her body.

  They’re squabbling, she thought, they’re squabbling over me. Am I about to be killed? I suppose that depends on who wins the squabble. Should I tell them I gave them the way through the minefield? Should I tell them I saved their ship?

  No. Don’t admit you helped them. No one loves a traitor. No one trusts a sneak. And it’ll just convince them they can turn you, if they try.

  When she woke up again she’d been moved.

  Cold sediment-gritty water slapped across her face. Her heart throbbed in panic: a drowning response, she thought, to make her alert before the real pain—

  Something lashed against her cheeks, slimy and sinuous. Her eyes popped open. A squid grabbed at her, a squid with its beak open in panic, with arms that looked like raw meat. She cried out and tried to pull away, but she was shackled to the wall, naked to the linens, her burns screaming. Something made a sound like a nail drawn down glass. She screamed back.

  This went on for a long time.

  Aminata knew what was happening because she had done it herself. This was the resentimente, the brutal false beginning of torture. Soon they would send someone to rescue her, to pretend to take care of her, and she would fasten on them with desperate gratitude. That would be the real beginning.

  Every time she began to sleep they hit her with cold saltwater, squirming tentacles, and a nail scratched into glass.

  When something changed, she thought she might be hallucinating. “Pig,” she grunted, and then, hastily, she’d opened a hole in her armor, “Aminata isiSegu. Brevet-Captain. RNS Ascentatic.”

  The pig whimpered. Something was wrong with it, Aminata thought, someone should help that pig.

  A bristly stinking face pressed up against her neck. Hot breath went up her nostrils.

  “Look,” a woman said, “look—”

  Aminata opened her eyes. A piglet dangled before her, illuminated by the green glow of the hand that held it. The piglet’s skull had ruptured from within. Its trotters jerked. The open brain was infested with glistening cysts, bloody with capillaries, scabbed and broken and scabbed again—

  “This is what happens to you,” the voice said, “if you do not answer our questions. Where is Abdumasi Abd?”

  “Aminata isiSegu. Brevet-Captain. RNS Ascentatic.”

  A thin knife appeared and cut one of the tumors from the piglet’s head. Blood welled up to pool in the ruined skullscape. The knife and the tumor lifted toward Aminata’s mouth. She gagged. The questions did not stop.

  “Where is Abdumasi Abd?”

  “What has been done to the mathematician Kimbune?”

  “How many ships are stationed at Isla Cauteria?”

  “Are there supply depot
s on islands closer than Cauteria?”

  “Is there good lumber on any island closer than Cauteria?”

  “Where are the minefields defending Isla Cauteria?”

  The pig’s stink—hot blood stink, not septic death but swollen life, the cancer, a ut li-en, the cancer grows—she was aboard Eternal! The Cancrioth whale had taken her home!

  “Aminata isiSegu!” she shouted. “Brevet-Captain, RNS Ascentatic!”

  They forced her lips open. “Where is Abdumasi Abd?”

  Aminata had enough freedom to dart forward and bite the tumor right off the knife. Cold steel taste, hot iron blood, and the fatty slimy fullness of the cancer, like snot. She spat it at the glowing hand that held the pig. “Fuck you!”

  Rough hands slammed her up against the wall. “Let’s begin everting her,” the interrogator’s voice said. “One slit across the abdomen, please. Bring a laundry rack. We unpack her guts for her to consider. It’s a remarkable thing to watch your own digestion.”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

  A knife dimpled the skin of her belly.

  “You won’t touch me,” she panted, “I know what you need to know, you won’t hurt me,” shut up, Aminata, you’re giving them too much, “Aminata isiSegu, Brevet-Captain, RNS Ascentatic!”

  “We can hurt you,” the voice said, with some sorrow, “in ways which render you useless at your work, now and for the rest of your life. You are tsaji, a collaborator, a traitor to your people. We think it fitting that you should be denied all means of connection: sight, voice, hearing, even smell. Touch will take the longest. But when the baneflesh has its way, you live in a skin of rubber, and all that remains to you is that nameless sense which tells you when you are sick. And you are sick, Aminata isiSegu. You are never well again.”

  The voice left her panting in the dark for a moment. And then, again: “Where is Abdumasi Abd?”

  “Baru loves me.”

  There was a silence of a different kind. Not, Aminata thought, a choreographed one.

  “You know Baru?” the voice asked, quietly. Its whole character had become wary, thoughtful, interested.