The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “It’s here. In that ship. The Brain brought it to use as a weapon against Falcrest. She already let it out once, on Kyprananoke.” She found it astonishingly comforting to admit this next part: “She wants me to take it and bring it into Falcrest’s heart.”

  He swore in Seti-Caho, something about nagana. “And she thinks you can be trusted?”

  “She knows the truth about me, Abdumasi Abd. She knows I’d have taken that bargain, not so long ago.”

  He almost asked what had changed; did not. “Any truth you offer is bait. I learned that well enough, O Fairer Hand.” He had a knack for bitterness. Barhu wondered exactly how badly his divorce had gone. “I’ll never help you buy my people.”

  “Really? You look around”—she waved to the bazaar, the tufa homes, the river—“and you see bait? I see the world the way I want it to be. The way I imagine it could be, without Falcrest.”

  “I was fighting for that world when you lured me to my death.”

  She thought about telling him that she’d never even known he existed. Decided it would be too cruel. “There are people I’ve lured to their death, Abdumasi Abd. You’re not one of them. Not yet.”

  “To Tau I am,” he countered. “I’m Cancrioth. Not human. Dead to trim.”

  That hit Barhu low. She had no idea who she would meet when Tau was released. A broken Prince? A vengeful exile?

  A corpse?

  “Abdu,” she said, “what happened between you and Kindalana? Why did it make you turn your entire fortune to war?”

  Deadly anger pierced his eyes. “You’ve already asked me these questions. I told you: it’s between me and Kindalana.”

  “And Tau.”

  “And Tau,” he admitted.

  “And Cairdine Farrier?” she probed.

  Thunder rumbled from the bay.

  Barhu, blindsided by the noise, looked wildly up into the sky. Abd shot to his feet. The marine sentries didn’t react: they were staring, too, out into the bay.

  “King’s dead glans,” one of them said.

  Eternal was salvoing her cannon. Smoke and blue-tipped flame pierced her near flank. The whistle of shot reached Barhu but she couldn’t see the target—surely it wasn’t Sterilizer, surely they weren’t idiotic enough to think they could break through the torchship’s sides before Sterilizer turned its siphons on them—

  But Eternal was not firing at Sterilizer.

  Eternal was firing toward the village.

  Round shot struck the beach around the Eye’s barges. Sand geysered. A horseshoe crab’s broken shell tumbled into the waves. Water fountained and fell as the ongoing fire tracked back into the sea, clustered, and then, at last, found its target.

  Children stared out from behind rows of pink hibiscus shrubs. The thunder made babies cry.

  It took the Cancrioth gunners nearly twenty minutes to blast the wooden barges to driftwood and twine. By the end they had become shockingly accurate. The Eye’s refugees stumbled down from the bazaar to watch, helplessly, as their boats were pulverized. Barhu ordered Sterilizer to hold at alert: her captain had already brought a brace of torpedoes up on the broadside rack.

  The firing stopped.

  Then, very deliberately, one gun discharged a shot. The ball landed right in the Rubiyya river beside the municipal offices. The signal was clear. They had taken the range, worked out their gunnery. Now they were prepared to raze the entire village.

  Eternal’s sunflash began to blink.

  SEND BRU

  SEND BRU

  SEND BRU

  SEND BRU

  SEND BRU

  SEND BRU

  You can’t go out there!” Yawa snapped. She was still in her black quarantine gown, fully masked, faceted and lensed: she chased Barhu down the harborside quay like a bipedal krakenfly. “It’s not just idiotic, it’s bad strategy! You don’t fold to their demands the moment they shoot off a few cannon. They’re dying out there, they’re at the end of their strength. Let thirst force them to come ashore!”

  “I can’t.” What Yawa said made perfect sense, if you had not been on Eternal and learned about its inner politics. “If I don’t go, it’ll seem as if the Brain’s spell failed. If the Brain’s powerless, she can’t control her faction of the crew.”

  “Good!”

  “No, Yawa. If she starts to lose control she’ll kill as many of us as she can and then destroy Eternal. She’d rather die than fall into our hands.”

  The judge hadn’t wound up the voice-changer in the collar of her gown. Her words were raw Yawa, the Treatymont accent of a common girl begging her friend not to go out in the winter night. “They’ll take you hostage. They’ll try to use you as a shield while they make demands. Sterilizer will burn you all.”

  “You’ve got what you need from me, don’t you?” Barhu leapt down into the rowboat and dropped her gutsack in the bow. “Svir will handle the Necessary King. If Eternal blows up with me aboard, at least you have Cancrioth ashore to take to Hesychast. You can’t lose now.”

  “I can lose you,” Yawa said, in a tone of such utter contempt for Barhu’s intelligence that it must cover real emotion. The only woman in the world who knew how much she’d sacrificed. “I need you—I need you for your marriage trick. You haven’t passed your claim to Heingyl Ri.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” Barhu picked up the left oar, and then, with a shake of her head, the right. “I’ll be back for my lobotomy.”

  “Damn you. You don’t get to joke about that until you’ve given me an alternative!”

  “There is no alternative as long as we’re both alive. Only one of us can win. Tain Hu volunteered, you know?” Barhu threw the mooring lines up at Yawa. “She went in with her eyes open. Both eyes open to the end. It was her choice. She knew it was the right way.”

  “She’d have torn my eyes out if I ever hurt you, Baru!”

  “Take care of my parents if I don’t come back. Tell them I’m sorry—no, tell them I did my best.” Barhu shoved off from the quay. “Make sure Xe gets back to Aurdwynn. She has a child there. Make sure Aminata gets a pardon.”

  “For Devena’s sake, Baru, what’s out there worth risking your life?”

  “Yomi,” Barhu said.

  “What?”

  It was an Aphalone word. Hesychast had taught it to Barhu. The art of knowing your opponent’s choices before they do. Either because you understand their inner processes perfectly, or because you have constrained their available choices so narrowly that they have only one option.

  “Yomi,” she shouted down the floating wharf to Yawa, who stood with her gown plucked up from the lapping waves. “Think about it, Yawa. We can’t beat our masters, can we? They control the entire board. They have control of the money, the government, the ideology of sex and race. They have control of the context in which we make choices. They’ve written us a script and we have to perform it or be punished: destroy each other, or be destroyed. If we deviate, they will know at once. They have us in yomi.”

  “So you’re giving up?”

  “No! There are two ways to break yomi, Yawa. One of them is an external factor. Something they haven’t accounted for.” She waved wildly towards Eternal. “And the other one is you! You, Yawa!”

  “I don’t understand!”

  “Think about the secrets you’ve kept from Hesychast. He knows what you’ve done for him but he’s never understood your motives! It’s possible to do exactly what they require of us, Yawa, but for reasons they don’t understand! That’s how to beat yomi! Conceal our maneuvers inside their maneuvers! They think their yomi is maintained until the moment it is broken!”

  “Baru,” Yawa screamed, “this is not the time for your philosophical fucking ramblings! Don’t go out to that ship! Come here and explain yourself!”

  “Trim calls me back to Tau!” she shouted back. “There’s a weapon out there. Something I can use. I have to find it. Trust me, please.”

  “What weapon? How can Farrier’s secret possibly be—?”<
br />
  “If I tell you, Hesychast might learn. Just let me go. I trust you. Think about it. I trust you to do what they expect.”

  Yawa began to swear at her in Iolynic, calling her a fool, a hot cow turd with a hoofprint in it, a girl poured out from her mother’s gutter, a paint eater, a hairless bloodless dried-out cunt, a carrion bird, a cracked cornerstone, an assface. Barhu rowed out toward Eternal.

  When she had some headway she raised a hand to wave.

  The golden ship’s broadside grew each time she looked up from the oars. Became a cracked, filth-streaked wall. A rope ladder tumbled down to her boat. She stood on it and clung with her good hand and they hauled her up the great reach of hull. She noted that the ship was down by the bow and tilting to starboard; the pump crews were losing the fight.

  Scheme-Colonel Masako pulled her over the rail. Barhu tried her very damnedest to punch him in the face. “Hardly appropriate,” he said, with seemingly genuine surprise.

  “That was for Kyprananoke!”

  He blinked at her, as if shocked anyone still cared. “You did that. You did that.”

  There was nothing to be gained by arguing. Two of his Termites searched her for gas capsules or needles. “I want to see Aminata.”

  “Aminata does not want to see you. She believes the same lies you sold to Prince Bosoka.” He watched her curiously. “I know what it’s like to be a spy. You’re Falcrest’s, through and through.”

  “Your master certainly believes my ‘lies.’ Or I wouldn’t be here.”

  He flinched. “Don’t use that word.”

  “Master?”

  “Yes. The Brain does not have to believe or disbelieve you. She’ll know. She’ll pull the truth through the top of your head.”

  His soldiers made it gently but firmly clear that she should walk forward. In the spirit of contrarianism, she looked back.

  Up on the second tier of the sterncastle she saw the Womb, hands folded in the sleeves of her cassock, watching Barhu silently. And there beside the Womb was Tau-indi Bosoka. They wore the same cut of cassock, and their small, bright, life-black face was harsh with thirst. All their beautiful coiled hair lay heavy with sweat and oil. There was a line of bruises across their forehead. In that moment Barhu genuinely expected to see light burning on their hands.

  Tau was alive. She could know nothing else for certain. But at least they were still alive.

  Masako pulled her forward. The rigging blocked her view.

  This body is dying. Too young. Too soon. I love it. I don’t want to let it go.”

  Barhu couldn’t find the voice. The hutch at the ship’s bow was covered in pitch-blackened canvas. No light at all inside. There was only a sound like the wings of birds: but not that sound, exactly.

  “Hello?” she called.

  Two soft green lights appeared, like fingers pushed into her eyes. Hands. Then the Brain’s curious dovelike face folded out of the dark. She was alight from brow to upper lip with the uranium fire.

  “I call too much of it.” Sorrowful voice, weak as a wheeze. “I bruise, I bleed, I don’t heal. I sleep but I cannot find rest. My liver aches. I fight with the power I have, and I burn all the strength out of my blood, Baru.”

  She lifted her hands from her sleeves. The green light revealed the body beneath the ancient armor. Her cheeks were hollow. The hatch in her skull was taut and visible. Her body had been scraped by thirst and hunger: oh, the loose skin hanging from her wrists . . .

  Only the armor seemed to hold her together: dry sticks bundled in a bronze case. But her eyes were alert and intelligent, and the lines that signed her face were clear and wise. She beckoned.

  “Brain? I brought you water. . . .”

  “No. Not for me. Not until my people can have it, too.”

  Wings fluttered at the edge of her ghost light. Shadows moved through cage bars, across dark dangling shapes, like rats hung by their feet from gallows.

  “They’re asleep,” the Brain said, softly. “Come closer. I don’t want to wake them. They hear so well.”

  “Bats,” Barhu realized. “Why are you tending bats? They must use water. . . .”

  “I feed them rotten fruit, when we still have it. Now we take turns offering them blood. Though they don’t like mine anymore.” She stroked her bare scalp. Her hand trembled. Anger passed across her gentle face, chased by a deep sadness. “Maybe if I don’t fight the boy so hard . . . if I don’t fight the Eye and the Womb . . . maybe if I don’t do those things, I live. But I fight the boy. I fight the Eye and the Womb. Sorcery has its price. So I die. It is very soon, and I’m afraid.”

  “But you won’t die, will you? They’ll take a cutting of Incrisiath, and pass it on. . . .”

  “Of course I die. I’m not the kind of immortal who never dies, Baru. Just the kind who lives forever.”

  Barhu summoned all her will to push forward. “And you won’t even do that much if you die here, with no one to take your line. Which you will, Brain, if you won’t negotiate. If you keep provoking us with demonstrations like that barrage.”

  The Brain knelt in the dark. When she rose again a gray shape clung to her forearm, nuzzling at her skin. Her ghost light shone through the bat’s fine fur.

  “Life,” she murmured. “That’s all we are, Baru. The dread Cancrioth. Just life that goes on living. The Womb will do anything to keep her children alive. The Eye will do anything to keep us safely out of sight. They are each good and necessary organs.

  “But life needs to do more than just live, doesn’t it? Sometimes we have to risk ourselves . . . risk death. For our families. For our people. For an ideal. That’s what a brain is, isn’t it? An organ that guides the body against its own instincts. Why do we need a brain, Baru, if the skin and the stomach are enough? A worm has no brain. A worm can still touch what it loves, eat what it tastes, flee from its fears. We need a brain to deny ourselves what we want. Sometimes we must choose hate over love. Sometimes we must choose death over life.”

  She looked up from the bat in her arms. “Last time, you ran. Are you ready to overcome that fear? Are you ready to choose death?”

  Gray bat-winged absence beat at the edge of Barhu’s sight. She swallowed bile. This must be how Iraji felt, in the moments before he fainted.

  “The baneflesh,” she said. “You still want me to take the baneflesh.”

  The Brain cupped the bat’s small head. Tiny teeth glinted as it yawned. “In exchange for the flesh that carries the Kettling. Yours to bring to Falcrest.”

  Barhu gasped. “It lives in bats?”

  “Certain vampiric bats, from certain green holes in the floor of the Mzilimake jungle. The only place in the world it can be found. The Mbo know it’s there. They call it the bushmeat defense. Volunteers eat the meat of these bats, and go to the enemy’s heartland, to bleed out into their water and their crops.”

  “And you let these things drink your blood?”

  The Brain grinned, a naturalist’s delight: “Ironically, the worst the bite can do is give you rabies. They drink of us, and when the time is right, we eat of them. It’s a sacrament. Do you realize what I give you, Baru?”

  She nodded, afraid to speak: she was horrified by how much the Brain had entrusted to her. The Brain had given her the reservoir, the place the disease lived when it was not exploding into pandemic. If you wanted to find a treatment or an inoculation, it was where you’d begin.

  “I thought about trying to gather it from Kyprananoke,” Barhu admitted. “Finding someone infected, a sample of the blood . . . but how could I keep it alive to study, or to use?”

  “And now there is no Kyprananoke.”

  “I tried to help them. I had nothing to do with their extermination.”

  “I do. I cause it, ultimately.” The Brain shuddered. “I make my choice, child. I am born messiah to one people, and only one. They are mine to protect, not any other. If I stop to doubt my choices, I have a thousand years of regrets waiting for me like a labyrinth. There are entire hi
stories that happen if I whisper the right words in the right ears. And some of them, I’m sure, are better than ours. I have no time for those regrets.

  “I am making the choice, now, weeks and weeks ago. It is right to give the Kyprananoki a weapon. But I also want to show Falcrest what we can do if they press us. I know it will bring retaliation, but the sheer scale of it astounds me. A whole people wiped away in a day. Not even the Paramountcies were so swift. . . .

  “You see the evil they do.” She raised her burning face to Barhu. “Are you ready to consecrate yourself to their destruction?”

  “Must I?” Barhu whispered. “Can’t you trust me without . . . cancer?”

  “Oh, child,” the Brain sighed. “I wish I could. Nothing can be trusted in Falcrest. You could be seduced. You could be bound to them in ways you do not even know. When we first meet, we speak of the brain, and of the thoughts that veil the true world around us. The baneflesh is part of that true world. It has no thoughts. With it in your body, with its soul in your soul . . . you are beyond corruption. You are as full of devastation as I am full of the souls of the line of Incrisiath.”

  And the strange thing was that she was right. The baneflesh had revealed the secret chains upon her. Barhu had fled the choice, fled Eternal entirely, into Tain Shir’s waiting maw. And only then had she realized how Cairdine Farrier dominated her life.

  If she had taken the baneflesh and the Kettling on that night, she might have made it to Falcrest. She might have unleashed the pandemic. It might even have been enough to shatter the Imperial Republic. But it would not be the future Tain Hu had wanted for her.

  Light gathered in the lines of the Brain’s face. Like it was flowing over her, slow as wax. It made green wells out of her pupils, and a shining ring out of the torc around her shrunken neck. “I bind you to this purpose, Baru. On the deck of Eternal, as you fall into the caldera. I call you back here to complete our pact. You and I are akin. Born to one purpose, messiah and mask-bearer: salvation for our people. So doom yourself, as I am doomed. Take Alu Skin-eater into your body, and the Black Emmenia into your custody, and in our death, we will lead Falcrest to its end.”