The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Iscend turned Szeti, kicked his knees out, and, catching the back of his head, slammed it face-first into the edge of the nearest table until his neck cracked.

  “Fuck!” giant Pilyx bellowed. He dropped the gutted loyalist and came for Heia, who was still on top of Barhu, who threw her hips and pitched the duchess away to the left, into the feet of a goggling guano merchant.

  Barhu scuttled backward as fast and frantically as she could—

  Right into Svir.

  He stood above her, his neckerchief blowing out from beneath his scout’s mask, hands on hips, staring up at the rafters. “Shoot! What are you waiting for, shoot!”

  A crossbow snapped in the high rafters of the Arsenal Ballroom.

  Barhu recognized the sound of the mechanism from ambushes past. In slow-time analytic trance she saw the navy marksman’s bolt split the mail rings of Pilyx’s armor and strike the twenty-layer jack below. The jack was made of scavenged metal plates sewn into layers of felt and canvas. Not enough. Pilyx hadn’t had the money for a full plate brigandine, and what he could afford was not enough. Accounting strikes again.

  He died in a triumph of Falcresti engineering.

  The bells of Annalila Fortress rang the marines to their war stations. Iscend pinned the man with the burning face to the ground and drove a dose needle into his throat: a captive, to name any unrevealed coconspirators. Heingyl Ri’s handmaidens hurried her out of the ballroom in a protective thistle of gowns.

  Applause roared up around them.

  “Exquisite!” someone called. “Just exquisite! Well done!”

  “Fucking Falcrest,” Apparitor muttered, reaching down for Barhu’s hand. “Where’s Yawa?”

  “I don’t know. What’s happening, Svir? Did you come here to save the Governor?”

  “Not at all. When I opened the window, those assholes must’ve assumed I was coming to warn Governor Heingyl, so they struck too early. They would’ve killed her in private, later.”

  He hauled her up. “What did you come for?” Barhu panted.

  “I was taking care of something in the fortress—”

  “What something?”

  “I was arranging vendettas. Will you be quiet? When I went up to use a sunflash, I saw Helbride. She’s sighted the Cancrioth. Eternal’s here.”

  “Now? That’s impossible!”

  “I assure you it’s not. She looks set to attack. And someone’s tied a plague knot in her shrouds.”

  “A what?”

  “The knot a ship inspector ties if they discover plague, and they need to warn shore parties without alarming the crew. It means burn this ship on sight.”

  “Shit! And we only saw this now?”

  “All Maroyad’s pickets are in dock, remember?”

  “I don’t understand,” Barhu complained, which was about the foulest epithet she knew. “How did they make up the distance? That hole in their prow—”

  “I don’t know. They must have half the ship down on the pumps.”

  “Himu fuck,” Barhu said, in exasperation.

  Marines rushed Apparitor and slammed into his upraised polestar mark, the mountain-and-thunderbolt sign of his Imperial Agency. Steel against paper but the paper said, if you hurt me the Emperor will care.

  The marines stopped.

  “Bring us to the command tower,” Barhu ordered them. “And get the Rear Admiral up there to meet us.”

  25

  Tooth Bomb

  People are always begging me to abandon ship,” Aminata complained, “and I always find, at the last minute, that I don’t really want to.”

  Iraji watched her quietly. They sat side by side on the unused bed, a little ways apart.

  “I’ve got to go with Captain Lune,” Aminata told herself. “She’s my commanding officer.”

  “Is she? Haven’t I seconded you to my service, as an agent of the Throne?”

  She tried to smile at him. “I’m not sure the court-martial board will believe I got lawful orders from a Cancrioth magician.”

  His eyes were gold and dark like sunken treasure. “We need you here. This is your duty. To make the most difference.”

  “Come on.” She tried to laugh him off. “I can’t help here. I don’t know anything about, you know, all this, this . . .”

  “Superstition? Ritual?”

  “This Oriati business. I just . . .” She tugged at the stiff collar of her uniform. She’d only just put it back on, and it itched. “I don’t see what you think is going to happen, Iraji. Captain Lune put up a plague knot. The navy’s going to burn this ship.”

  “My place is here,” he said, with a wistful sadness that made her want to shout at him, no, you idiot, your place is where you want it to be, you’re not bound here by your flesh, your blood, your race. “I gave myself to them in exchange for Baru’s freedom. I can’t undo that. I used to faint when I thought about who I really was. I don’t do that anymore. That’s how I know this is the place where I have to be.”

  “You don’t need to die here.”

  “We’re not going to die,” he said, fiercely. “We’re going to stop the rockets. We’re going to convince the rest of this ship that they will see their home again. We’re going to bring Eternal into safe harbor and find a way everyone can go home alive. It won’t be like Kyprananoke.”

  “And then the navy will storm your ship,” Aminata whispered, “and take all of you.”

  “Not if Baru stops them.”

  “Can she? Will she?”

  “She will. Because she cares about the people on this ship.”

  “She doesn’t even know I’m alive, Iraji.” And last time she had, she’d used Aminata as a weapon, manipulated her into doing what Baru needed.

  “You’re not the only person she cares about, Aminata.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Getting up, with a frustration that split her like an axhead: “I have my orders. If I don’t obey Shao Lune, if I choose a ship full of my racemates over my superior’s commands, I’m finished in the navy forever. I’ll give every Oriati sailor a bad name.”

  She fled the room. She fled the thing which frightened her most, which was wanting something more than her duty.

  “If you stay,” he called after her, “maybe you can get your sword back from the Brain!”

  She ran almost bodily into the Eye.

  “Aminata,” he said; his ordinary body and ordinary face and ordinary voice, and the immense protrusion from his eye socket which Aminata still found truly disgusting. “Tell me honestly. Is there any chance we’ll leave this island alive and free?”

  She was impatient and afraid and therefore she was honest. “Mister Eye, the purpose of Falcrest’s navy is to destroy Oriati. That’s all I’ve ever been taught. Excuse me, please.”

  Shao Lune had already packed her notes into a gutsack; she was stripped down to linens, oiling herself with monoi, Taranoke’s blessing to divers. “I stole it,” she said, to Aminata’s unvoiced question about the oil. “These tunks have awful security.” No apology for the epithet. “Strip your uniform off. The water’s warm, and if a current takes us out to sea, you’ll regret every extra ounce.”

  The groan of the ship’s alarm sounded through the hull. “They’re ready to attack,” Shao Lune said. “We’ll leave over the stern. Down the same way you escaped, and then we jump. Get your oil on and let’s go.”

  Aminata stared at her. The absolute compliance of her, her sharp eyes and small full mouth, the generous body so ready to be constrained and controlled by the uniform, made appropriate, modest, unobtrusive. She made Aminata feel frictional, ill-designed, a thing that rubbed on itself as it moved.

  And she ached to be back with Iraji again, the two of them alike in flesh. No, her duty told her, do not be seduced by the homogeneity of race, do not value sameness of flesh.

  She thought about where duty had led her lately.

  “Lieutenant Commander.” Shao Lune smooth as snakebelly. “I gave you an order.”

 
; “You’re out of uniform, mam.”

  “I am your superior officer.”

  “You aren’t in my chain of command. I report directly to Rear Admiral Maroyad, mam, who ordered me to find the Cancrioth. And my mission is not complete until this ship takes up harbor and I report directly to her. Mam.”

  “Take off your uniform and prepare to leave the ship. You will report to Maroyad only once I am finished with my own report. That is an order. If you disobey me I will see to it that you stand a court-martial.”

  “Iraji is an agent of the Emperor. He requires me to stay.”

  “If you choose his agency over duty to the navy you betray women everywhere. Have you seen any proper orders from him? Proper codes, proper seals? Have you seen anything from him but superstition and filth and his whore cock—”

  Staring at her, listening to her, Aminata crossed some inner threshold, invisible to her until she had already passed it. Like the point where a ship tips too far, and not all the keel and righting moment in the world can keep it from overturning.

  “Excuse me, mam,” she said. “I have to go find my sword.”

  And she walked out.

  Iraji smiled like a signal in the night when he saw her coming back. “Don’t,” she muttered, “don’t. Let’s just do this and have it done.”

  Maroyad lowered her telescope. “Damn good thing you paid to keep one frigate on ready alert, isn’t it? Signal Hawkene into rocket range. Approach from directly astern. Destroy that thing’s rudder with torpedoes. Then burn the hull.”

  “Don’t do this,” Barhu warned her. “If you send a ship at them, you’ll force their hand.”

  “I’m to wait until they fire cannon on my island? Until they start flinging plague corpses into my fortress, or rockets full of pus into my reservoirs? No.” Maroyad was a flag officer in the full grip of her duty. “There’s a plague knot in those sails! A navy officer aboard that ship risked her life to tell us that we have to destroy it on sight!”

  “She has,” Svir murmured, “something of a point.” He stood in grim profile at Barhu’s elbow, and would not meet her eyes.

  “Iraji’s aboard that thing,” Barhu whispered to him.

  “I remember,” he growled back. “Do you honestly believe that he and I haven’t discussed what we’d do in this situation?”

  “We need to strengthen their bargaining position. Give them confidence. Pull back the frigate, Admiral, let them see we’ll give them a chance if they don’t attack!”

  “That’s idiotic,” Maroyad insisted.

  Barhu turned to Iscend Comprine, who had followed her up to the towertop, still in her ballroom finest. “You’re an actuary, aren’t you? Tell the admiral I’m right.”

  “I do not have enough knowledge to decide.” Iscend was wide-eyed with the need to help. “I’m sorry.”

  The staff officers behind Maroyad stared at their feet, caught between the Emperor’s will and their own rear admiral’s orders. Barhu decided to force the choice upon them.

  “I am invoking the Emperor’s agency. Rear Admiral Maroyad, I will accept responsibility for whatever may occur here. I order you to stand your ship two miles off Eternal and to belay any attack.”

  Maroyad seized her by the wrist. “Listen to me! If they get plague onto this island, thousands of Falcresti citizens will die! Parliament will send the navy to punish the Oriati! I don’t care who takes the blame, but if you force me to obey, think of those lives!”

  Think of Tau-indi lost in the cancer dark. Think of Aminata, who’d died to save that ship. And of Shao Lune, who Barhu had stranded aboard.

  This was the price of attachment. This was the truth Svir had warned her against. We leave people behind.

  But that same lesson had two edges, and the other edge said: there are other people in this world, with their own wants and means. And sometimes all you can do is make space for them to work.

  The Brain had cast a spell on Barhu. How could she break her own spell? How could she fail to see their bargain through? One way or another, Barhu and the Brain had to meet again.

  So the Brain would not attack.

  “Hold your ships,” Barhu said. “In the Emperor’s name, you will hold. Someone find a signal lantern. I need to talk to them.”

  The Eye’s mob was smaller, full of sailors and cooks and gardeners and other rough laborers, and a few idealists who had come over simply because Tau-indi was here and they revered the laman as an exemplar of the Mbo’s morality. They wielded rakes, wooden planks, hammers, oars, and laundry paddles. Against them the Brain’s navigators and griots were backed by Termites with powder-flash in their pistols. The onkos herself stood above them all, in the rigging of the foremast, with an impi’s round hide shield in her left hand and her armor bright in the dusk. She looked like a statue of ancient White Akhena, or one of her mau fighters. She had no weapon in her right hand but her light.

  The Eye’s people came upon them suddenly, screaming and singing, and drew the Termites away from the rocket stations at the prow. Then Aminata (who had handpicked the toughest-looking of the Eye’s followers) burst up from belowdecks and led her group onto the rocket racks. Some of her people tied themselves to the racks themselves, to prevent their use: others seized plague vivariums and ran for the rail, where they held the glass bottles hostage. No one could ever say these people lacked valor.

  Now: impasse.

  Tau-indi Bosoka stepped into the space between the lines. Their jade-gold khanga was stained by tar, seawater, and sweat. The jewelry that had once glittered under Kyprananoke’s high sun now glistened with oil tarnish. Their hips moved not with grace but with sore, tottering fatigue.

  But Tau spoke.

  “Listen! We all came here for the same reason. We came for Abdumasi Abd, my friend, your family. Some of you are afraid that he’ll betray your existence to the whole world. Some of you would like that, I know. Some of you want to die here.”

  “Your Highness,” the Brain called down from her foretop. “Falcrest has telescopes trained upon us. When they see our rockets aren’t ready to fire, they will destroy us. Stand aside!”

  Tau ignored her. “I allowed myself to believe you weren’t human. My home, my beloved Mbo, made the same mistake. We wrote a footnote to our code of dignity. We said, everyone but these ones, they are human; everyone is real, but the Cancrioth are not. We embraced our other enemies. But not you. We hated you. I hated you.”

  Lovely green Isla Cauteria shimmered right off the bow. Eighty thousand people under Aminata’s sworn protection. And she was allowing a Federal Prince, foreign royalty, to fight in their defense.

  “You’ve sailed far from home to save Abdu,” Tau cried. “So have I. Maybe it seems like we’re all doomed to die here. But I can still save Abdu! We can still save Abdu! We can rescue him together! And then we can rescue ourselves.

  “Come home to Oriati Mbo. You will be welcome. See Aminata, there, who sails for Falcrest? She is welcome among us. See Iraji there, who spied for their Emperor? He is welcome. And my friend Abdumasi Abd, who swam with me in Lake Jaro, who took your money and your cancer into him so that he could go to war? I say he is welcome! Will you come home with me?”

  “If you have any principles at all, Tau-indi Bosoka,” the Brain called, “you say these things before you have no other choice.”

  She pointed up to Annalila Fortress, a panther crouched above its prey. Her hand shone against the dark fabric of her sleeve. “Abdumasi Abd is in there! And if we show that we can answer Falcrest’s weapons with our own, they’ll give him up! For the first time in history, Oriati people dictate terms to Falcrest. We are at their shores, in our ship, with our weapons! This is how it was meant to be! This is the first right thing that happens since the Armada War! The entire Oriati Mbo knows that we defied Falcrest, and they awaken to the need for war!”

  “They’ll kill us all,” the Eye shouted back. “You saw what one of those ships did to us at Kyprananoke! Here they have a fleet! Are we not
the people of the long thought? Aren’t you Incrisiath, the Brain? Think!”

  The Brain denied him with an outflung hand. “We are the people of the long thought, my friend. We’ve thought long enough about Falcrest. They only respect power.” She closed her fist around green ghost light. “They’ve wounded us. They smell weakness. Now we show them we still have strength.”

  “Your prissy knife-man Masako shot me in the face, and here I am still,” Osa shouted, to a general ooh of delight from the Eye’s supporters. “You’re surrounded, short on water, damaged, far off your charts! If you come at them with knives out you have no chance!”

  “When the shark smells blood, do you go limp and wait for teeth?” Scheme-Colonel Masako cried back. “You don’t understand Falcrest. They’re cowards! They exploit weakness! They bargain only when they fear our strength! Tau wants to make speeches about who’s human and who is not, but Falcrest doesn’t think any of us are human!”

  The crew wavered. Aminata saw it in the way the able sailors looked to their seniors, and the seniors looked to the officers. Come so far, through thirst and storm, for one man, one sacred precious man: should they risk war when they were so to close him?

  “What about Kimbune?” Tau called. “What about Baru? Will you give them a chance? You put your power into Baru, Incrisiath! Is that not enough?”

  “It is enough,” the Brain roared back, “before I am attacked! Before you set the baneflesh on me, carried by an innocent boy! If the bond I put on Baru is broken, then you broke it!”

  Her supporters growled and crossed their hands, warding off evil. “Cunning bitch,” Aminata muttered in Aphalone.

  The fuck of it was that the Brain and Masako were right. Once the navy saw the plague knot, they would attack. Eternal would burn. And Aminata couldn’t figure out how to avoid that.