The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  But the corpse turned over from its back-float rest and began to swim toward Annalila Fortress, using the long, slow, hip-driven strokes the navy taught for distance. So they plucked Shao Lune out of the ocean, glistening with monoi and mad as a bull. Before she even asked for water, she demanded a clerk to take down her statement.

  “Escaped from captivity aboard Oriati vessel,” Barhu read. “Collected secret knowledge on vessel’s origin, construction, armament, provisions, command, and crew readiness. Important diplomatic information aboard. Must report in person to authorities soonest.”

  Look how carefully she’d preserved Eternal’s cover as a trade ship, how she’d danced around naming any particular authority—whether Admiralty, Parliament, or Throne—as the recipient of her information. An offer of secrets for sale: all loyalties liquid and flexible.

  Barhu had to buy her back.

  “I’ve got to have her,” she complained to Iscend, who was packing Barhu’s things for the move across the island to Aratene. Eternal was already limping ahead to the Rubiyya bay, desperately pumping water from her cracking hull. “She’ll know what it’s like aboard Eternal. Their political situation, water and supply, everything we need for the negotiations. Damn her. Why didn’t she come straight to me?”

  “You know why,” Iscend said.

  Barhu, hunting through her paper stocks for a page that felt right in the spring humidity, admitted it: “Because I left her on Eternal.”

  “No. Because she betrayed you to Xate Yawa. She fears your retaliation.”

  “She won’t fear that,” Barhu said, absently giving away far too much.

  Iscend looked up with a dart in her eyes. The light through Helbride’s deck above cast spots like salt crystals on her face. “Why does she believe you won’t punish her for that? Oh. Because you’ve been lovers? You shouldn’t have done that, my lady.”

  “Oh, come off it,” Barhu snapped, “you were happy enough to ride my arm in front of a whole ballroom.”

  Iscend smirked a little, like a schoolgirl, at the innuendo. “The seduction of Governor Ri seems to serve your political objectives. But you must beware that the pleasure of your preferred vice does not lead you astray. I know that the meeting of similar anatomies in the isoamorous union can be addictive, frightfully ecstatic, due to the closed feedback loop of two identical—”

  The Hu in Barhu snuck the jibe past her. “Frightfully ecstatic, Iscend? Does the thought of me frighten you?”

  She expected a retort about Incrastic science, about the hereditary threat of the tribadist, whose behavior could only be explained by an anomalous and surpassing pleasure. Not the congruent and appropriate reward between man and woman, but instead an excruciating reflective similarity, driving each other to heights not meant for the mind to bear. Separating the reward of sex from the reproductive purpose. The Falcresti fetish of the tribadist, at once debased and exalted, revolting and enticing, predatory and doomed.

  Instead Iscend said, levelly, “Your Excellence, if you must indulge a vice which could compromise you, then you should indulge it with a woman who can be trusted. A woman whose entire purpose is your betterment and success.”

  Oh, Wydd save her. Not this! Not her! She must have some bizarre Clarified reason, but Barhu could not survive the thought. She lunged for another topic. “Are you satisfied with the plan to hold negotiations at Aratene?”

  “Largely. May I make a suggestion?”

  “Yes, go ahead,” Barhu said, irritated: Iscend was playing for time, drawing out the conversation, to observe Barhu’s discomfort.

  “We should go out to Aratene, together, before the negotiations begin. Speak to the village leadership. Canvas the terrain. Ensure all’s well.”

  It was a good idea, and it would get Barhu away from Xate Yawa, who made the precipice in her mind wider and wider. Barhu had a solution to Yawa’s dilemma in mind: the need for one of them to destroy the other. She was not sure she could face it.

  “I’ll invite Heingyl Ri,” she said, “and she can bring along her merchant factors. I need to persuade her to accept my suit.”

  And Governor Heingyl would be a good chaperone. Barhu had spent too much time longing for women in forests to trust herself around Iscend. She had made a very firm resolution to never touch the Clarified woman.

  But she had betrayed oaths before.

  “Go ask the Stag Governor if she’ll send a party to Aratene with me,” she ordered Iscend. “I’m going back to Annalila Fortress to see to Shao Lune and take control of the prize.”

  “The prize, Your Excellence?”

  Barhu smiled, but didn’t answer. It seemed perverse that she had never met the man at the eye of the maelstrom: poor much-sought-after Abdumasi Abd.

  I know something you’d pay anything to know,” Shao Lune said.

  They walked the parapets of the fortress. Sea wind hissed between the crenellations to snap the banners like laundry.

  “Anything is an exorbitant price, Shao.”

  Weeks aboard Eternal hadn’t softened that cruel smile. Kyprananoke’s destruction hadn’t washed away the haughty security of her poise. Barhu felt a sudden idiot longing for her, for the security of her self-serving self-possession. You could trust Shao Lune to see to herself. What a terrible marvel of a person. Ulyu Xe was right. It would be very easy for Barhu to think she deserved a lover like Shao.

  Shao Lune turned up her collar against the wind. Her insignia glinted smugly. “My duty obliges me to report the elementary facts. Eternal cannot leave this island without your help. They’re on half rations for water, deep into their reserves. Their ship is in a rolling mutiny, one faction taking control, then the other. They may posture strength, Your Excellence, but they are vulnerable.”

  Barhu frowned at Shao’s collar, noticing the loose fit. “Lost your old uniform, have you? Was it a difficult escape?”

  “Simple enough.” She scowled and it was like there was venom on her lips. “If not entirely satisfactory.”

  Barhu crowded her toward the parapet, and the drop. “You tied a signal knot into Eternal’s rigging. You wanted that ship destroyed.”

  “I offered a recommendation, based on the threat that ship posed to Isla Cauteria. And you ignored it.” She smiled at Barhu with exquisitely falsified respect. “Which is your purpose as an Imperial agent: to exercise your influence in pursuit of the Emperor’s agenda.”

  “Did you really think,” Barhu murmured, taking Shao gently by the back of her collar, “that you’d ever get that pardon you want so badly if you had that ship destroyed? From me or from Yawa?”

  In a rapid, confident hiss: “I want what you promised. Do you remember? Do you remember what you offered me, before you led me onto that ship and abandoned me there? When you make your designs for the navy and Parliament, I want a seat at the table. I want to be a staff officer in the new Admiralty. I want my prize agent cut in on the first tranche of war spoils. I want a piece of your reward for finding the Cancrioth. And if you don’t give me what I want, or if you try to make me disappear, I’ve left sealed testimony which will make your friend pay with her career and her life.”

  “My friend?”

  “Aminata’s alive. She’s alive on Eternal.”

  Barhu gaped at her. She’d thought, way deep down in the bottom of her soul, that she hoped Aminata was still alive only because she was a coward, because she wasn’t ready to mourn again. But her hope was true.

  “She’s regressed to her nativity. She wouldn’t leave Eternal even when I gave her the order.” Shao brushed her collar clean where Barhu had touched it. “She’ll have to stand to a court-martial, of course. But I might be convinced to testify in her favor. . . .”

  “A court-martial?”

  “She disobeyed my direct orders. That’s mutiny. The penalty is death.”

  “You’re a staff captain, not a line officer. You don’t give orders to sailors.”

  Shao Lune’s eyes flashed with contempt. “Please don’t prete
nd you know the legal circumstances of Aminata’s crime better than I do.”

  “I’ve got to get her out of there,” Barhu breathed. “She’s alive! Oh, that’s wonderful—”

  Impulsively, idiotically, because it was a thing people did in stories, she tried to kiss the staff captain on the cheek. Shao Lune pushed her firmly away. “Not here.”

  “Sorry,” Barhu said, daftly, as if she’d done something wrong. She was so confused by what she felt—anger at herself, irritation at herself for not directing that anger at Shao Lune, hurt that she’d been rebuffed—that she tried to trample on over the moment. “Listen, I’m holding negotiations with the Cancrioth at Aratene. There’s a very good chance that all the Republic’s foreign policy in the next fifty years could be determined by the mercantile opportunities we open there. We might have a real chance for lasting, profitable peace. Come with me.”

  “I’d travel as your companion? And we’d be seen together in this . . . Souswardi colony? In an official capacity? I’d be attached to your retinue?”

  Barhu had not considered, in her damn self-centered arrogance, that every minute of her time with Shao Lune before this encounter had occurred under duress.

  “Yes?” she said, weakly.

  “Of course I won’t come. What would it do for my reputation to be seen with you?”

  Later Barhu would try to recapture the feeling of that rebuke. Like a chain you’d forgotten, suddenly pulled taut. You feel not just foolish but sheepish, the victim of a very obvious prank. Why did you let yourself hope? Your race will always matter.

  “Well,” Barhu said, coldly, “it might give you a reputation as someone associated with Agonist, a newly minted Imperial agent about to turn a fortune in trade.”

  “I don’t want a reputation as your whore.”

  “You aren’t my whore—”

  “I’ve slept with you as an exchange of personal and political favor. I’ve slept with you in order to convince you to protect me. Our tribade doesn’t belong in the public eye.”

  “There wasn’t any tribade,” Barhu said, out of a petty desire to correct her.

  “Don’t be facetious. The sodomites don’t all sodomize each other, either, but it’s the word in current use.”

  This was the first time in Barhu’s life that she had actually been turned down. It was unexpectedly upsetting. “I know,” she said, stiffly, “that you obtained a certain thrill from treating me like a lustful, savage native.”

  “Really?” Shao said, with elegant disdain. “I didn’t think you remembered anything about that night.”

  Barhu ignored her, for fear she’d scream. “I was confident this thrill did not extend beyond the bed and into your overall opinion of me. I thought we had an accommodation of physical and political use, which might be extended until no longer convenient.”

  “Oh, don’t be petulant. It’s nothing personal. You’re very lovely, and given a boat and a month to ourselves I’d run you through your paces—”

  “Like a horse?”

  “Like a prize horse,” Shao said, as if this were any sort of compliment. “But there’s a reason gava women aren’t invited to the anti-mannist leagues. Or to the Case for Isosocial Safety.”

  “What reason is that?”

  “Because it undermines our united female cause to complicate it with racial divisions.”

  “So even in the city of merit, in this republic of merit, I don’t belong in the women’s organizations because I’m from Taranoke?”

  “A woman’s merit must be evaluated against the background of her race,” Shao said, airily. “You are an extraordinary Souswardi. Isn’t that enough?”

  “No, it’s not fucking enough! And don’t you dare threaten my friend ever again!”

  Shao Lune sniffed. “This will play very poorly in Lieutenant Commander Aminata’s court-martial. If she survives to see it. Don’t forget that I’ve seen the Scheme-Colonel Masako aboard Eternal, Baru. I can prove that your ‘traders’ are working with agents of the Oriati federal government to infiltrate and destroy us. You wouldn’t want that out in the open, would you? It would complicate your plans for a new trade concern, I imagine. And if you try to be rid of me . . . well, I think you know what a sealed vendetta can do, hm?”

  Barhu called her a snake in Urunoki, and left her there, smiling coldly into the high sea wind.

  Aminata’s alive,” Barhu told the two young Oriati sailors off Ascentatic, and had to smile when they gasped and seized each other in joy. “She’s aboard Eternal, waiting for rescue.”

  Lieutenant Faroni and Midshipman Gerewho, who had been Aminata’s assistant torturers, broke out in open cries of delight. Barhu’s smile became a grin. “Tell Nullsin for me. But no one else, all right? Now I want a favor from you. I’m going to show you my Imperial mark, all right? Not to force you to do what I want, but so you can’t be blamed for it afterward. And I’m bringing a guest. Please keep her presence confidential.”

  “Your Excellence,” Faroni said, all business again, “we see nothing we are not required to see.”

  Faroni led them down into the bowels of the fortress, through the gated guard posts and the paper checkpoints crewed by midshipman clerks, to the mirrored panopticon above Abdumasi Abd’s cell.

  From the inside you might believe it was an apartment, one unit in a middlingly new Falcresti house-of-eight, with proper closed-surface plumbing, taps, and the luxury of a cistern-flush toilet. It even had a window looking out over the fishmarket bustle of Cautery Plat, where steam billowed up from the clambake huts along the slum waterline and children took swimming lessons in netted-off shallows. Ordinarily prisoners were carefully deprived of any sense of time or place.

  But Abd wasn’t at the window. Barhu watched him through the panopticon as he sat before a small mirror and stripped down to the waist. He carried no fresh cuts or scabs on his narrow, exercise-hardened body. But he had old wounds.

  He twisted himself so that he could inspect his back.

  Barhu’s guest began to cry silently. Barhu touched her shoulder. “Wait until I call you.”

  Kimbune nodded, and touched the loop of parchment she’d wrapped around her wrist: a copy of her proof, for safety.

  The door in the false anteroom opened at Barhu’s second knock. Abd’s face appeared like a skull in the crack. His eyes were sunken and suspicious but still bright with awareness. He didn’t, of course, recognize her.

  “Who,” he grunted.

  “Abdumasi Abd,” she said, smiling as well as she could, “I’ve been looking for you a long, long time. Tau-indi Bosoka sends their love.”

  His hands plucked at the couch, traced the seams of the cover. “I don’t recognize the name you mentioned. Wait. Tau-indi Bosoka? Is that the Prince-Ambassador?”

  “Of course it is,” Barhu said, patiently. “As you know very well.”

  A white stain like bread mold spotted the dark skin on his forehead. When he saw Barhu peering in curiosity, he said, “You weren’t there for the wet room?”

  “The what?”

  “The fungus room. They hung me in this stone cell where fungus grew everywhere. Fungus coming up the toilet hole, red jelly spidered all over the floor, these fat fruiting bodies sticking out of the walls. I slept in a little clean spot that I had to defend with my own piss.” Abd poked his forehead. “Eventually it started to grow inside me. I think it’s supposed to make me tell the truth.”

  “The way the Undionash implant is supposed to grow in you, and carry your soul forever?”

  His eyes did not even narrow: he was that good. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I’ve been on Eternal. They want you to come home, Abdu. They want you safe.”

  “What are you here to trick me into saying?”

  “I’m here to trick you into trade,” she said. “Into commerce. The way one merchant lures another: with the possibility of profit.”

  The fact that Abd was a merchant could be attributed to destiny, if you were a
fool; Barhu thought it was instead a logical consequence of the facts. It made sense that the first man to strike against Falcrest would have the independence of a private citizen but the wealth of a trading concern.

  But there was a kind of symmetry to it, wasn’t there? Like Barhu, Abd had gone looking for a war. Like Barhu, he would find his victory in a different kind of contest.

  Abd spat on the tiles. “Trade? With Falcrest? I know how that goes. No one knows better than I do.”

  “Or I,” Barhu countered. “I was in the markets on Taranoke when they came. I’m not here to make Falcrest richer. Quite the contrary. You have interests in the Black Tea Ocean and the western Oriati coast, don’t you? I’d like you to approach those contacts on my behalf.”

  Abd glared at her. “You’re usually more subtle about trying to ferret out my accomplices.”

  He was very reasonably suspicious. “I don’t expect to persuade you without matching action. I’m here to return you to your people.”

  “Which people?”

  “Kimbune, you should come in now.”

  The mathematician peered shyly around the door. “Hello?”

  “Oh principles.” Abdumasi pushed himself back into the settee. “Why, she’s . . .” He pointed to the tattoo of the Round Number. “You’re one of the—”

  “Yes,” Kimbune said. “I really am.”

  “You can’t be here. I didn’t betray you.” He began to tremble. “I didn’t tell them a—this is a trick! You’re a fake!”

  “I’m not, Abdumasi. I came for you.”

  He began to speak with her in En Elu Aumor. Kimbune came out of the doorway, wide-eyed in wonder. She was shaking. Barhu imagined how she would feel when she saw Pinion and Solit again, if they really did live here. She began shaking, too, an empathy of hands.

  And she felt, also, a prickle of awe, a starlight feeling, as if she were standing in a shaft of radiance coming down through a crack in a huge black roof. What if this meeting was the proof of genuine immortality? What if the soul of Kimbune’s dead husband actually lived on in Abdumasi Abd’s body?