The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “That’s nonsense.” Yawa spat contempt and Barhu knew exactly why. They’d both sacrificed so much to gain this station. Too much for it to be just another layer of control. “My master and yours are competing for control over Falcrest’s destiny. Not control of a single cell, Falcrest entire.”

  “But they’re competing to prove their methods of control over new provinces. That’s naturally the domain of a foreign-affairs cell. Maybe Renascent has control of both the cells. Maybe she’s grooming Farrier or Cosgrad to take her place at the top of the chart.”

  Yawa groaned and touched the small of her back. “I can’t think about this now. It’s too much. I need to rest. Baru, we cannot keep delaying on the matter of the dowry. If it won’t be you, Heingyl Ri cannot make a suit to the Necessary King. Without a suit, he invades. We’ll be seeing Ri soon, and I need to give her instructions about executing the marriage.”

  Barhu blinked in surprise. “We will?” Helbride was sailing almost directly away from Aurdwynn. Why would Governor Aurdwynn be in their path?

  “I’m afraid so. Heia—Heingyl Ri, that is—scheduled a spring expedition to Isla Cauteria to negotiate the import of guano fertilizer.”

  “Seems convenient,” Barhu said, cautiously.

  “It’s not a coincidence. She wanted to tidy away all her foreign affairs before the Stakhieczi invade. Now go. I’m going to have Faham pulverize my spine.”

  “Yawa—”

  “Yes, what is it!”

  “Isn’t Heingyl Ri already married? To Bel Latheman?” The old head of the Fiat Bank in Aurdwynn, a young man who had been, for a few years, Barhu’s necklace, her cover against accusations of tribadism.

  Yawa smiled tartly. “That will be corrected.”

  She had loved working alone, as a student: she had even, in a taboo (at least in the Iriad school) simile, thought it was like swimming naked, free of any drag or constraint. That was apparently ordinary for boys in Falcrest, and in fact mandatory for reasons of hygiene. But neither women nor Souswardi were permitted nakedness, both being intrinsically sexual. (In Falcrest, the anti-mannist movement argued that it was unfair to women, whose advantages were in concealment and control, if they were forced to be immodest, fully revealed.)

  Now she was on Helbride, where everyone washed together, and she could not afford to work alone. She had to expand her plan beyond merely the acquisition of world-spanning mercantile power.

  She had to find a way to bring Yawa into the fold.

  The talk among the crew was all of ghosts and apparitions. A mast-top girl reported faces blooming among the jellyfish at night. In the bilge a carpenter saw the bleeding eyes of an Oriati man in the stains on the wood. He asked to be locked into blood quarantine. Svir called him a shirker and put him on half rations. Svir had not been in a pleasant mood.

  “At least there’s no palefire in the masts,” he said, when Baru rapped on the frame of his cabin door. “Palefire always gets the rigging girls excited. I swear that job addles their brains. Does the Manual of the Somatic Mind say anything about that, Agonist? If you stick an adolescent girl up in the air for hours at a time, does she start to turn into a bird?”

  “I need the will, Svir.”

  Svir’s throat blanked. It was a quirk of Svir’s that his throat betrayed his emotions; all the passion in him seemed to dwell below his upper lip. Although Barhu was now certain that this was a lure, like an orca’s false eyespot, and that he faked every swallow and stiff tendon. When his throat went still, then you had him somewhere he didn’t like.

  “What will?” He began to sort the files on his little shelf-desk, hands flickering, left and right, assigning each to its place according to his private scheme.

  “Tain Hu’s will.”

  “There’s no such document.”

  “There is, Svir! You used it to hold off Tain Shir back at the Elided Keep. You refused to wager it when we played Purge—”

  “Not that you could’ve won it anyway.”

  “Svir, please, I have to see it. There’s something Tain Hu wanted me to remember.” She had said, on the morning of her death, remember the man in the iron circlet. . . .

  “What did she want you to remember?”

  “If I remembered, I wouldn’t be here asking!”

  “And here I was thinking that Yawa warmed to you because you’d meticulously engraved every detail of Tain Hu’s life on the bad half of your head.”

  So he knew about the eryre. Maybe it had come up while Barhu seemed sure to die. “It’s not actually Hu. There are things I can’t remember.”

  “Things you can’t remember because they slipped your mind? Or, perhaps”—he ran his thumb down the edge of a sheet of notepaper, and she had the awful image of pale pink flesh separating into layers, like onionskin—“things you can’t remember because they remind you what you did to her?”

  She took the hit. She took the hit, damn him, and it did not even make her want to die of grief. “It’s something I need to know to make her death worth something.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes. It’s so.”

  “I made it up,” Svir said.

  “What?”

  He closed his eyes. His throat kinked as he swallowed. “I made up the will to manipulate you.”

  She tried to glare at him but the venom wouldn’t come. “You forged it?”

  He spun a file into an immaculate pile of its coded fellows. The whole stack toppled. He swore, quietly, in Stakhieczi. “Yes. I thought you’d believe that she’d kept secrets from you. But she didn’t. You’re her testament, Baru. She loved you. You’re all she left. You and that seagull she trained.”

  “She trained that seagull?”

  “While she was on Helbride, on her way to her execution.”

  She thought about this, and how she felt about it: glad, and proud, and sorry. “Thank you for telling me. But you’re wrong.”

  “About what? She did love you.”

  “Not about that,” Barhu said, smiling. “She left something else behind. Yawa has it. She stole it from me.”

  “That letter you got,” Svir deduced. “The one in the strange cipher.”

  It had been pinched while Barhu was sleeping in Helbride’s armory. The ship’s cook had tried to murder her there; that made Barhu remember the cook’s death, leaping onto an attacking dromon with an armful of grenades.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to Munette,” she said. “I understand she was quite heroic.”

  It was incredible to feel grief without being undone by it. The difference between an amphora, a vessel that contained and carried something, and a septic leach field, which wallowed in the plume.

  “I believe you,” Svir said. And seemed to surprise himself by meaning it.

  “Well, I’ll go,” Barhu said. But didn’t.

  He looked up from his sorting after a moment. “What is it? What else do you want?”

  “Have you seen anything?” Barhu asked, nervously.

  “Anything?”

  “Specters. Visions of the dead. Like the crew’s reporting.”

  He grinned at her. “Afraid of ghosts?”

  “After what I saw on Eternal I won’t rule anything out.” She showed Svir her spidered fingers, all six and both thumbs. “The Cancrioth leaders had this glow on their hands, Svir. Like they were on fire. But there was no heat. . . .”

  “Jellyfish tea,” he snapped. “Glow-worm paint. Just theater. Don’t be a rube, Agonist.”

  She was going to ask him why he responded so fiercely to this suggestion of magic, when he himself had seen such strange things across the Mother of Storms.

  And then she realized, too late as ever, that he was afraid for Iraji, who was on Eternal, alone.

  “I haven’t given up on Aminata,” she blurted, meaning: Iraji might be all right. But she was so afraid of his reaction, afraid that he might call her fool, that she fled.

  Go back into your stateroom.” Scheme-Colonel Masako gestured with
his pistol. “Let your bodyguard see you’re safe and well treated.”

  Aminata did not think Tau looked well treated. They had bilge filth up to their bare knees and a scab across their brow where they might have tripped. But Tau-indi obeyed.

  “Your Highness!” Enact-Colonel Osa bellowed, and lunged forward to protect her prince. The hobnails in her boots left tiny white scrapes on the wood.

  “This is outrageous!” Shao Lune shouted, from the cover of the washroom door. “We are foreign dignitaries and we demand to be—”

  “You coward,” Osa shouted at Masako. “When they cut your ililefe off to make you a Termite they must’ve taken your balls—”

  Masako shot Osa in the face.

  The pistol went off like a snapped line. Shao Lune cried out in surprise. Osa staggered backward, clutching her face and swearing in Old Takhaji.

  “Oh,” Tau-indi said, if as shocked by their own feeling.

  “That was a powder shot.” Masako wrung out his wrist, a practiced gesture. “Now I am loading a lead ball. The next shot will be for Iraji. He is a citizen of Falcrest. We are at war.”

  “You let him be!” Aminata shouted, but it was no good: the Termite soldier behind her pricked her back with his rapier. Another soldier seized Iraji and backed him up, at knifepoint, into the cabin wall. Masako selected a fabric cartridge of powder and a ball of lead shot from his bandolier and rammed them into the pistol. Aminata remembered his expression from the Hara-Vijay embassy, that slight smirk of satisfaction at a plan well executed, and hated him utterly.

  Masako held the pistol carefully away from his body, finger clear of the firing lever. “Miss Aminata. Tau-indi tells me that you came from Isla Cauteria. That you were a torturer.”

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

  He was going to kill her. He’d let her see him, an Oriati Scheme-Colonel, walking completely undisguised in his death-white blouse and spinal flag, upon a Cancrioth ship. Open conspiracy between an agent of the Mbo and a secret society taboo to every principle the Mbo cherished. He would have to kill her to conceal it.

  “If you hurt us,” she said, “it’ll be war.”

  He looked at her in disgust. She wished that his high white collar would strangle him. “I told you that we are already at war, Aminata. You yourself are war plunder. You worry about me hurting you? The wound left in the Mbo when Falcrest took you, that hurts all of us.”

  “My mother ran off to seek her fortune, my father had to put me in an orphanage, I volunteered to join the navy—”

  “You think you volunteered, I’m sure. That’s how they operate. On children, in particular. Be quiet now.”

  He crossed the room to Iraji. The ship groaned beneath them, a stabbed-calf noise. Eternal was coming very slowly apart around the torpedo wound. Aminata shivered under her coat of filth, shivered again, harder, as Masako raised his pistol to Iraji’s stomach.

  Masako looked back at her. “I have only one question for you. You’ve heard it before.”

  Aminata, judging distances, tried to figure if she could get her hand into the pistol’s mechanism before he fired. If she failed—she could already see the wet blast of lead and bowel through Iraji’s back.

  Iraji shut his eyes and prayed in En Elu Aumor. He could not pronounce it very well.

  Masako put his finger on the trigger. “Where is Abdumasi Abd?”

  “Say nothing!” Shao Lune shouted, from her shelter in the washroom. “Lieutenant Commander, I order you to be silent!”

  “Shut up.” Masako watched Aminata with a snake’s curiosity. “If I kill this boy, I think the Eye will be furious with you. And who will protect you then?”

  “Aminata isiSegu,” she said, bitterly. “Brevet-Captain, RNS Ascentatic.”

  “You are not leaving me very much choice,” Masako sighed. “I assure you that it’s in everyone’s best interest to help me find Abdumasi. He is a danger to the Oriati Mbo. He is a danger to your navy. He can do nothing but provoke war and waste. Much better if he goes home, quietly, where he can do no harm.”

  Some deep current of human feeling broke through Tau-indi’s mask. “I don’t want to listen to the boy scream. Aminata, tell the truth.”

  Shao Lune broke from cover in the washroom. She still wore her uniform. Aminata had left her own filthy reds to dry and never put them back on. “If you break your vows here, if you tell them one word of the navy’s privileged information, you will attaint the loyalty of your whole race—”

  One of the Termites put a rapier tip up to her face.

  “Tell them,” Tau repeated. “Tell them that you’re the Burner of Souls and that you tortured Abdumasi Abd. Isn’t that the truth? Tell them the truth so Iraji can live.”

  Shao Lune glared like a cobra.

  Damn it. Damn it. There was a beautiful boy about to be gutshot. Whatever duty asked of Aminata, she had a gallantry she couldn’t master.

  “Abd is on Isla Cauteria. In Annalila Fortress. I interrogated him myself. The navy is keeping him there, hidden from the world. Now let Iraji go, will you? Let him go!”

  You stupid tunk, Shao Lune’s eyes said. You traitor. You’ve given up our best leverage over them. And you did it for a Cancrioth man.

  Aminata couldn’t breathe for fear of what she’d just done.

  “Thank you.” Masako smartly unloaded his pistol. The cartridge crinkled in his hand. “I’m sorry I did that, child.”

  Iraji smiled coldly at him. “My lord will know what you’ve done.”

  “The Eye? I’m afraid he’s in no position to complain. Nor will he be until our work is done.” Masako beckoned to his soldiers. “Come. I’m going to speak to the Brain.”

  “The Eye’s not my lord,” Iraji said, sweetly. “I serve the lightning man.”

  She had to go to the Vultjagata. Tain Hu had left her a message, somewhere, something she’d forgotten in the haze of her grief. She had to go to the Vultjagata and ask.

  Finally Barhu worked up the courage.

  Helbride had lost something when Cheetah’s crew left. Barhu missed the sound of Seti-Caho, the smell of fresh injera bread and gauze-cut fish and beef hammered with spices. The feeling that there was an old and comfortable togetherness between someone on this narrow, tense ship. She knew she was romanticizing the company of a Federal Prince’s close retinue, using their particular and mannered habits to paint whole nations . . . but they were the Mbo Oriati she knew best.

  “I wish,” she said, to the empty places where they’d been, “that there was someone here to tell me how to do this.”

  But there wasn’t. She went to see her Vultjagata all alone.

  Yythel saw her coming. The plump herbalist shot upright in her hammock. “Baru’s here,” she said, in the tone you would use to report a snake on the road to the well.

  Ude Sentiamut was teaching young Run how to gamble on dice. Barhu wanted to give him tips on probability but she thought he would murder her. Ake Sentiamut looked up from a copy of The Dictates to meet Barhu with narrow-eyed calm.

  “You’re awake,” she said. “Yythel thought you’d die.”

  “Sorry to disappoint,” Barhu said. The joke landed with the scrabbling awkwardness of a sick cat. “Where’s Xe?”

  “She’s moved her hammock to the aft orlop locker. Whatever that is.” Ake turned a page. Paper scraped across paper so loudly that Barhu winced.

  Yythel stared suspiciously at her. “How did they keep you alive?”

  “They popped my eyeball out and poured honey on my brain.”

  Yythel snorted. Run made a disgusted face over Ude’s shoulder. The big bearded man had his dice clutched in his hand, perhaps planning to use them as caltrops if Barhu tried to attack.

  “Baru,” he said. “Why did you tell Tain Shir to kill you? Instead of us?”

  “I felt I owed it to the duchess to protect you.” Which was the truth.

  “Is that what happened to Nitu?” Yythel asked. “That madwoman mad
e you choose between Nitu’s life and yours?”

  That was exactly what Shir had done: and when Barhu had chosen to let Nitu die, Shir had hacked off two of her fingers as punishment.

  “I don’t know what happened to Nitu,” Barhu said. She’d lost track of the cook when Shir’s machete came down. “The last I saw her, she was alive. I promise you that. For—uh, for whatever my promise is worth.” She did not deserve their trust, or their forgiveness.

  “We never found her,” Ude said, mournfully. “After we left Execarne’s farm, she never came back.” Hate bent his lips like a bow. “She ran to get away from you.”

  Ake sighed and put down her book on her chest. “Why are you here?”

  “I came to ask what had happened to Dziransi.”

  “He’s far from you,” Yythel snapped.

  Ake looped thin straw hair around her finger. Barhu knew that look: longing for someone she would never see again.

  “He left,” Barhu realized. “He left you on the Llosydanes and sailed home. How could he go home? I thought he was dishonored.” He’d led his king right into Barhu’s honeypot, after all.

  “He had a dream,” the boy Run blurted. “A woman with stars for eyes told him he had to go home and arrange a marriage.”

  “Run!” his father snapped. “What’s our first rule?”

  “Don’t tell Baru anything, I know, but you’ve all been so worried about him.” He was looking at Ake. “I thought maybe she could help—”

  “Whatever Dzir’s doing now,” Ude told his boy, defiantly, “it’s far beyond Baru’s power. He had a dream from the hammer. Do you know what that means? The stars are sparks from a forge. The hammer of that forge beats our souls into the shapes—”