The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Or even if she should. After all, didn’t Baru want this ship for her plans? And wasn’t she a grand traitor?

  Maybe Aminata’s duty here was to keep this ship out of Baru’s hands.

  “Masako,” the Brain said, sorrowfully. “Load your pistols with small shot. Drive them off the rockets.”

  The woman in the Invijay fighting costume, the one with the face dimpled by lines of scar, lifted her fist over a glass vivarium. “Shoot at us and I’ll break this open!”

  “Do we now fear death?” the Brain roared. “What use is immortality if we cannot decide where and when our deaths will matter? This is the moment we live so long to reach!”

  And then, at last, the Womb spoke.

  Aminata had not seen her because she stood to the side, on one of the enormous wooden channels that anchored the shroud lines supporting the nearest mast. Her voice was not as powerful as the Brain’s, or the Eye’s, or even Tau’s.

  But when she spoke, they all heard their mother calling.

  “I brought a woman aboard this ship on Kyprananoke. Before she left us, Baru arranged safe passage through a minefield, through two waiting Masquerade warships. When one of those warships attacked us, she brought the other to our defense. I made the right choice when I brought her aboard.

  “But there was another person I brought to us. I brought Tau-indi Bosoka, because I could not bear to leave them to burn. Listen to them now. Let them keep us from burning. If we wanted to die in a hurry, would we be Cancrioth?”

  There was some laughter. Aminata watched the Brain’s eyes narrow. She had to reassert herself, now, before—

  Iraji saw something up in the rigging, and stepped forward, frowning, raising one hand to point. He’d spotted the plague knot. He meant only to warn the others.

  But the Brain saw him open his mouth and raise up his hands: and she knew he’d been taught sorcery.

  She struck.

  Her bright hand reached out to seize his attention. “IRA-RYE UNDIONASH,” she said, silently: but loud as a scream to a spy trained to lip-read. The name of Iraji’s mother found him, and he had no baneflesh to protect him from magic now.

  Iraji fainted to the deck. Aminata almost caught him but she was too slow and his head cracked against a cleat hard enough to open his scalp. He bled on her.

  “You fuck!” she shouted, and raised her bloodied hand. “Look what you’ve done!”

  The Eye jeered in En Elu Aumor, words Aminata couldn’t translate but understood nonetheless: shame on you! Shame on you, Incrisiath! A roar of fury spread through the Eye’s crowd. The Brain’s Termites stiffened and raised their weapons.

  It was all about to go to shit, one way or another. And here Aminata was, kneeling with Iraji’s blood on her hands, surrounded by magic, helpless to make a difference—

  Not helpless. Never helpless.

  “Excuse me!” Aminata bellowed. “I have a suggestion!”

  Barhu was still figuring out how the sunflash lantern worked when Eternal launched its first rocket. A tongue of white light shot from Eternal’s prow, up across the falling sun, and straight toward Barhu.

  “Here it comes!” the watchgirl cried. “One rocket, up high!”

  “Get under the shingle.” Maroyad pulled Barhu and Svir together into the shadow of the tower roof. “Hawkene must attack. Give us permission to attack.”

  “Just one rocket.” Barhu tugged free of Maroyad’s fingers. “If they wanted to kill us with plague, they’d send more.”

  “It’s a ranging shot! They’re testing the wind before the full salvo! Let my ship destroy them before they launch more, damn you!”

  “No.” Barhu stood her ground. “You will signal Hawkene to stand off and give Eternal sea room.”

  “You’re insane! You’re gambling tens of thousands of lives because you want to make money off a plague ship!”

  “I seem insane to you,” Barhu countered, “because I know things you do not. This is why I am given power over you, Maroyad. Will you disobey the Emperor?”

  Maroyad groaned in frustration. The lone rocket soared across the sky, closer every moment. There was something wrong with it, Barhu noticed. It was too heavy and too slow to possibly cover this distance—

  A ring of sparks jetted from the rocket’s ass end. A piece of it fell off and tumbled into the ocean. Wooden wings snapped into place, and then a second rocket ignited to push the glider forward. A two-stage rocket. Ingenious. Barhu had thought those were purely Falcrest’s invention.

  “You should take shelter, Your Excellence,” Iscend whispered.

  All around her, flare pistols and signal lanterns awaited her word. “Agonist,” Maroyad pleaded. “Let us attack.”

  “No. Hold your fire.”

  “It’s coming right at us.” Svir glanced between the fortress wind vanes and the rocket. “They launched a little westerly to account for the wind.”

  “It can’t be steered, can it?” Barhu muttered to him.

  “There might be an apparatus to keep it on a desired course—like the stabilizers on torpedoes—but to make it so small, I don’t know—”

  “Your Excellences, get down!”

  Iscend grabbed at Barhu’s belt but she fought back, leaning out to watch, the bomb was right there, skimming in above them with its second engine dead now but sparks still jetting from its tail. A fuse, they’d calculated the flight time and fused it, so it would blow up when it was still in the air—

  It’s for bombarding cities, Barhu thought. You can’t use this against a moving ship and expect to land a hit. You can’t fit an explosive aboard that would do any real harm. It’s meant to hit cities. And it’s meant to carry plague.

  “Let me fire!” Maroyad screamed.

  “I am the Emperor’s will, damn you! Wait!”

  A hundred feet above the command tower the glide bomb popped like a firework. The blast echoed in Barhu’s chest.

  She and Maroyad looked at each other.

  A strange hail began to fall.

  Barhu held out her hand, and caught a forked brown chip. All around her tiny brown-white objects pelted off stone and lumber.

  “Teeth,” she said. “They’ve sent us teeth.”

  The sound of bitten stone chattered all around her.

  “It was a dummy payload,” Svir said. “A demonstration. So we know they can hit us.”

  “Hold,” Maroyad ordered. “Hold and wait.”

  The minutes crawled past.

  “There!” the watchgirl called. “Signal mirror on the ghost ship’s bowsprit! It’s in navy code, mam. They want to parley with us for repairs and safe return to their home waters.”

  “Don’t call it a ghost ship,” Maroyad growled. “It’s right there. We can all see it.”

  Barhu bit down on her tongue to hold in her growl of triumph. She had gambled with all these lives, gambled and won. It would not do to enjoy it. Not for more than a moment.

  Not one of them comes ashore.” Maroyad pounded her desk. “Not in my fortress, not in my town. A living person’s a damn sight better carrier than a rocket. If you’re going to negotiate with them, you do it somewhere that can be quarantined.”

  “Poses some difficulties,” Barhu muttered. The details of rigging and sail aboard Maroyad’s warships were too sensitive to hold a meeting there. A meadow or a patch of wilderness would not have toilets, and would be far too hard to quarantine. And there was secrecy to consider: Barhu wanted to preserve the illusion that Eternal was a huge merchant ship, and that meant keeping it away from curious eyes with nautical experience.

  She had only one option left. Remote, yet developed. Nestled in a bay, where Eternal could be hidden. Full of people who could attend a merchant bazaar, as cover for the real negotiations, yet who would not gossip as easily as Falcresti townfolk.

  “What’s the Taranoki colony named?” she asked the others gathered in Maroyad’s office.

  “Aratene, if I remember right,” Heingyl Ri said. “I wanted to visit.”r />
  “That sounds right.” The Aphalone name Aratene would come from the Urunoki name Iritain, which came in turn from the name of the old harbor town Iriad, Barhu’s home, joined with tain, the Urun word for foreign. The very same root yielded the name Tain Hu: which could be read as great foreigner or foreign bane.

  Yawa produced a viciously sweet smile. Something cruel had come into her since the Governor’s Ball. “You want to hold your vital negotiations and prisoner exchange in the Souswardi experimental colony?”

  “Taranoki,” Barhu insisted.

  “Have you considered how you’ll tell your islanders that you’re about to moor a plague ship armed with hundreds of cannon off their little bayside paradise?”

  “I haven’t,” Barhu admitted. “I should speak to the mayor, or the . . .” She was bitterly embarrassed not to remember what the Taranoki called a council of elders. Muirae? No, she was thinking of Muire Lo. What was the name? “The governing committee.”

  Heingyl Ri turned to her handmaidens. “Who are the governors? The ones always shipping coffee samples everywhere?”

  “Hyani Coinflower and husband?” Maroyad snapped her stubby fingers. “No, there’s a new couple. Arrived very suddenly a month or two ago.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” one of the handmaidens said, “I remember their names from the coffee pamphlet. Solit and Pinion?”

  “That’s right,” another handmaiden said, reading from just such a pamphlet, “it says here, Solit Able and Pinion Starmap.”

  Barhu was, at first, indignant, embarrassed by her own astonishment: and she came within one breath of blurting out, like a petulant child, the fatal word Mom?

  A STORY ABOUT ASH 11

  Federation Year 912: 23 Years Earlier

  In Kutulbha Harbor, beside ruined Kutulbha in Segu Mbo

  Some of the Lonjaro Princes declared a surrender party on the palace ship Kangaroo Principle. The Princes had to make some joy, right here at the center of the hurt, or the whole generation’s temper would go sore. A celebration was as vital to them as prayer would be to a deist.

  But it was so very, very hard.

  “It’s not a very good party, is it?” Tau-indi said to their mother, peering around at the fine wines and the casks of beer, the huge swirls of crushed silk and piled velvet. Everyone was drinking and smoking with furious concentration. The dance moved in narrow nervous lines. “You always threw better parties.”

  “It’s easy to be joyful when you have joyful principles in the air. This, though, this is work. Sometimes smiling is work.” Mother Tahr took their hands. “Tau! You’ve got painting fat under your nails. Go wash up.”

  Tau-indi jerked their hands away, resentful. They’d been a Prince for so many days. Impossible to be a child again. “Mother,” they said, rather stiffly, “you’ve been talking to Cosgrad too much.”

  Tahr looked at them with a sad little smile of pride and hope and deep, deep loss, a smile Tau-indi wished they didn’t understand. Tau-indi was ready to leave home and be a Prince, and their mother knew it.

  “I have to go find Kindalana,” Tau-indi said.

  “Go, then,” Tahr said, meaning not just go find Kindalana, but all the rest. “Go do it well.”

  They swept off royally, cleaning their fingernails when Tahr couldn’t see. They got a mahogany bowl full of shrimp and a ceramic cup full of pickle sauce and went up onto the deck, down the length of the ship, out of the mass of Princes, flowing through the clerks and housekeepers and ship crew. And of course they found Kindalana sitting at the stern, wearing a gray halter that left her shoulder blades open to say, with their narrow motions, leave me alone, I am worried, I am thinking.

  “I brought you some shrimp,” Tau-indi said.

  She had her forehead against the railing. Her legs dangled over the water. She slid over and made room and Tau-indi sat down with her. They looked at her, then out at the lanterns and torches of the other ships, and at the black smoke glow of the city.

  After a little while she reached over and took a shrimp.

  They each ate the meat and spat the shells into the harbor. “It’s in us,” Tau-indi said, looking toward Kutulbha. “The ash is in us. Forever. I hope I don’t forget that.”

  “He was going to set up a new shipping company. Before the family fleet burnt up in the fire.”

  “Abdu?”

  “Yeah. He was going to send ships to Falcrest.” She took another shrimp and ate it and looked at Tau-indi while she chewed and swallowed. “With mixed crews, so they’d learn each other’s languages. He was going to send eidetic griots to Falcrest to have their stories turned into books, and to memorize the Falcrest books for retelling.”

  Her eyes made the claim that Abdumasi was as much a Prince as either of them.

  “Poor Abdu.” Tau-indi bit down on the toothache. “I wish he were here.”

  “You do?” Kindalana explored them with her eyes. “Really?”

  “Sure. Yeah.” They kicked at the side of the ship with their heels. “When I needed someone to remind me life wasn’t all, you know, duty and trim, I’d go to him. . . .”

  She said an edged thing. “And then you’d both come bicker over me. I was always the third one.”

  “You came later, Kinda.”

  “And I was a woman.”

  “Yes,” Tau admitted. “That’s true.” And she understood that a laman was not something halfway between man and woman.

  “We were children. We can’t be anymore.” She took a shrimp and peeled the shell with the edge of her thumbnail. “It’s funny, the things that you miss.”

  Tau-indi made a shrug with their hands: like what?

  “Like Abdu,” Kinda said. “He always wanted to be one of us. I didn’t realize it until that day on the beach.”

  “He will be,” Tau-indi said softly. They moved their weight so their hip would brush Kindalana. “If you do marry him. He’ll be husband of a Prince, and that’s like being a Prince.”

  “If, if, you say if but there’s no if. I have to marry him. All the families in his household are depending on me to keep them employed.”

  “Would you marry him anyway,” Tau asked, “if he still had his money?”

  “My answer to that doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to him.” A marriage built on obligation might work, but it hadn’t for Padrigan, and it hadn’t for Tahr, and now they were in each other’s beds instead.

  “I don’t know,” she said, which Tau thought must mean no.

  “I could do it. I could marry him and you could marry Farrier.”

  They tried to imagine being married to Abdumasi, rubbing their chin on his stubble when they kissed him, watching him laugh and play big and try to hide his (wonderful, endearing) efforts to be better. They tried imagining Abdumasi’s cock hard in their hand. It was very odd.

  Kinda considered them. “Do you mean that?”

  “You said . . . you and Farrier . . . you said you were trying to seduce him. And if you couldn’t marry him, you said I had to do it. Well, I could marry Abdu, and you could try for Farrier. Do you really want to marry Farrier?”

  “No, of course not,” Kinda said. “But I want him to want to marry me.”

  “Why?” It felt wrong to Tau. It meant using a basic human need as an instrument of politics.

  “So he’ll make mistakes,” Kindalana said, cryptically. “He’s taught me a lot about what mistakes mean in Falcrest. By what he does, and what he won’t do.”

  “I don’t like the idea,” Tau admitted. “I don’t like the principles of it. Flirting with him.”

  “I’m sorry.” She said it a little bit like a question. “It makes you jealous.”

  “No!”

  “Not of Farrier, Tau. Of my methods. You think it’s wrong, but for me it’s just . . . what a Prince does. One’s body is political. Falcrest has peculiar politics, so I do peculiar things. I was making progress on Farrier, very carefully.” She sighed in frustration. “But I can’t leave Abduma
si, I don’t think. He needs my money and he loves me.”

  Tau-indi loved Kindalana more for this than for anything before. “That’s good of you. To want to treat him well.”

  “Thank you.” She looked as if she wanted to touch their hand again. She didn’t. “But you know I won’t.”

  “Treat him well?”

  She shook her head. “I have my duty to the Mbo. That will always come before him. And he’ll hate that, eventually. He’ll probably hate me for it.”

  “Kinda, that’s unbearably sad.”

  “I know. I know.” She sighed. “I’m glad we got to talk.”

  “I’m glad, too.”

  “It’s over,” Kindalana said. She turned at the waist so that they were facing each other and lifted her chin. All the lines of paint on her throat and chest moved in one liquid bound-together way, like the surface of the sea, like the Mbo, and Tau-indi remembered painting the duties of a Prince on her flesh. “I didn’t think about it until now, but this is the end of . . . you know, of Prince Hill. It’s over.”

  They laughed and it came out as bittersweet and papery as the treaty. “I wish you wouldn’t say things so honestly.”

  “Sorry,” she said, and then, defying Tau’s wish, “Do you want to kiss me?”

  Tau-indi’s stomach leapt. They giggled and then, sitting up very straight, looked at Kindalana, wonderful awful Kindalana, who always solved things too directly. The palace-ship moved under them and they swayed against each other. Kindalana opened her mouth a little, faintly nervous, faintly cheeky, and made a sound like the very first breath of a laugh.

  “I don’t think so,” Tau-indi said, although it didn’t feel true until the last word. “Not right now. It wasn’t quite that kind of jealousy.”

  She looked at them a while. She nodded. “I didn’t really think so, either.”

  “I hope your dad gets better.”

  “Me too,” she said. “Can we stay here a while more?”

  They did.

  26

  Positioning

  The fortress watch officers thought Shao Lune was a corpse, an overboard from a trader or a victim of foul play. Leave her to the Cautery Plat constabulary, who were getting paid to make up stories about skull-backed whales.