The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “I have to report to the Rear Admiral Maroyad. She sent me on this mission. I have to go back to her.”

  “You could ask Baru for a pardon.”

  “No! I am not going to fucking ask Baru for a pardon!”

  It wasn’t fair! She’d gone so far to do her duty. Thrown her life away to destroy Ormsment’s mutiny, helped lead the battle against the warmongers aboard Eternal, saved everyone aboard from a death ride into the teeth of Annalila Fortress. Saved the whole Republic from the outbreak of open war right here at Cauteria.

  And what would it get her? What would any of her work get her?

  Nothing. She’d yielded a navy secret under duress, and refused the orders of a superior officer. If they felt she’d done it out of cowardice, or out of a racialized solidarity with the enemy, they might drown her for it.

  But what else could she have done? Let Masako shoot Iraji? Let Ormsment burn Eternal with a Prince-Ambassador aboard? Collaborate with a woman in clear mutiny against her sworn duty?

  “Aminata,” Iraji said, softly. “You’re going to tear the sheets.”

  “Sorry. I bet they’re expensive.”

  “I wasn’t worried about the sheets.”

  “I have to report to Maroyad. It’s my duty. That’s all there is to it.”

  He shifted a little closer to her. After their first and only time together, all curiosity satisfied, he’d vanished from Aminata’s awareness as a sexual thing. Become a kind of warm directional illumination, like a slat of sun.

  “If I don’t make it,” he said, “will you tell Baru that this isn’t her fault? She’ll blame herself. I don’t want that.”

  “You want me to talk to Baru?” Aminata drew back in horror. “After what she told me?”

  The memory of the things she’d heard in that dark place wrapped around her like a burn. The Brain had brought her there, bound by sorcery and silk cord, to answer the same question she’d always asked. Was Baru genuine? Was she telling the truth?

  Oh yes. Baru had told the truth to the Brain. She’d lied to Aminata her whole life. She was a traitor and a would-be tyrant. Had she ever cared about Aminata as more than a tool? First a tool to deal with that pedophile fuck Diline. Then a tool to get the navy’s support when she was short on allies in Aurdwynn. Then a tool to kill Ormsment.

  A living idiot tool.

  “I think you should talk to her,” Iraji said, carefully. “I think that she would like to make herself understood to you. She cares about you.”

  “She made herself perfectly understood to me. I listened to her explain her entire plan to sabotage the Imperial Republic. I believed every word.”

  And the fuck of it was that it was a good plan. A great plan. Aminata didn’t pretend to an admiral’s understanding of the world, but she knew the Imperial Republic existed because of the trade wheel. If you could place that wheel under your own control, and then stop it turning, Falcrest might fall.

  “Maybe it was craft,” Iraji suggested. “A way to entice the Brain into further contact. It’s the kind of thing the Throne would do, Aminata. . . .”

  “No! No, fuck that, she’ll claim it’s that but I won’t believe it. I know Baru. I know she was telling the truth. She’s calm when she lies. It’s the truth that makes her start shouting, because it scares her. She was furious. She was telling the truth.”

  “I suppose she was,” Iraji said, quietly.

  “I’m tired of chasing her around. Tired of trying to figure her out.”

  “She’s going to get you out of here, you know. When they arrange a hostage exchange.”

  “But what about you?” She turned to face him square, his perfect body, his warm eyes. She worried for him with more feeling than she could allow for herself. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Iraji. Once you do this . . . I don’t think you can come back.”

  “You’re changing the subject!”

  “I’m defending you from my mood, sir.”

  “Calling me sir?” He pouted. “Now I know you don’t like me.”

  “But I do,” Aminata said. “Iraji, I actually do. It’s everyone else I’m not sure about, now.”

  32

  Magic and Meaning

  In the end the Cauteria Agreement was reached as much by exhaustion as by any clever stratagem of diplomacy.

  Eternal was down twenty degrees by the bow and heeling hard into her wound. Pump crews collapsed of exhaustion in the rising water. The Brain had firm control of the ship and its weapons, and Masako’s hardened Termite cadre might have been enough to use them, but what would they attack? A little village full of Taranoki, on an island far from Falcrest?

  Her people were dying of thirst. She was dying of white blood. And there was nothing mighty for them to achieve by dying here.

  She came ashore that morning to sign the final agreement, with Yawa and Barhu and the Eye, in a round one-room tufa household at the east end of town. The Rubiyya murmured past outside. The two onkos didn’t sign with pens; instead they pressed their hands to the page, and left dim, stained handprints which shone in the dark.

  Tau and Osa would be released in exchange for Kimbune. Cancrioth surgeons would open Abdumasi Abd’s back, cut out a living piece of Undionash, and transfer it (by secret technique: they would not allow any Falcresti near it) into Iraji. He would remain with the Cancrioth, to be cared for and educated, awakened to the memories in his implant. He would not die of the tumor’s spread, the Eye promised. His lineage was in agreement with the Spine.

  Kimbune would leave a copy of her proof with Barhu for verification in the Metademe.

  The issue of cholera in Cautery Plat was not raised.

  Eternal would be repaired, provisioned, and given charts for the return to Segu waters. There was barely enough of summer left to make the voyage before autumn storms.

  It did not surprise Barhu to discover that the Brain was awful at negotiation. There was no byplay with her, no give or take, no posturing and retreat. She was an ancient and willful creature, and she had no time left to waste. The power and directness of her thought made her detest the excruciating and necessary tedium of the table. She did not like to linger while others caught up to her will: she was alive in all her memory, and if the present could not match the urgency and fascination of the past, she feared she would wander from it.

  The Eye was not so easily satisfied. He had no problem sitting (or standing, when he was impatient) at the table all day long, waiting for things to grow and turn his way. He wanted guarantees of safe passage out of Falcrest’s waters, letters and flags, diplomatic seals. He wanted assurances that Barhu would not reveal what she’d learned of the Cancrioth to the whole world. She would not, she said, because that would endanger the prospects of her new trading concern, which would only flourish in peacetime. He wanted assurances that Abd would be treated well; Barhu assured him that Abd would be placed in the custody of the Oriati Embassy on Habitat Hill in Falcrest.

  One of the Brain’s eyelids drooped unevenly. Her words were beginning to slur. “Let them have Abd. Let all Falcrest know he defied them. Let them come for us. Better that we fight. Better that all the Oriati rise up and fight.”

  The Eye whirled on her. “And that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” There was clarity and power in his words, a strength he had concealed for the right moment. “I thought you joined this voyage because you cared about Undionash and wanted him safely home. But it was really about the harvest, wasn’t it? All those millions of bodies in Oriati Mbo. Soldiers for your cause. Hosts for your growth. You need war so you can reap your crop, Incrisiath. A million new believers for the Cancrioth.”

  Then he said two words in En Elu Aumor: “Su malimun.”

  Malignant. You’re malignant.

  The Brain looked at him in profound sorrow. She asked a question in their tongue, and her voice was lonelier than a body on a spar in the sea.

  There was a long silence. Barhu decided to play the blithe and self-absorbed young tycoon. “Pardon
me. This agreement we’ve signed covers your safe return home and the return of our hostages. But there is, obviously, still a great deal to settle, particularly after the . . . ah, damages inflicted upon the Imperial Republic’s interests. A rutterbook describing routes and ports through the Segu archipelago and into the western Oriati coast would be a welcome sign of good faith, I think.”

  “Do you honestly believe,” the Eye snapped, “that any one of us is idiotic enough to let Falcrest ‘trade’ into our homeland? We know what happens when the Empire of Masks turns up with paper money and a porcelain smile—”

  “I do not give you the rutterbook,” the Brain said.

  Barhu exhaled. It was not defeat: it was not destruction. But it was a setback. She had known that the Brain would probably refuse. This was how Falcrest won its victories, after all. Find a crevice of self-interest or rivalry. Pump it full of water, acid, molten iron. Dig at it until it split. Until the abscess tore open and you got into their soft innards like a lamprey and they would never get you out.

  “But it does not save us,” the Brain said, sadly. She could barely lift the weight of her body and the armor, but nonetheless she stood. “I am the Long Thought. I see the patterns of history. As White Akhena seizes the rivers and the roads to sustain the Mzicane, so Falcrest forces its way into the Black Tea Ocean to reach our spices. If it does not happen this year it happens in ten years or in thirty. And the longer it takes the more they punish us for it.

  “When your ships come, Baru, my people are ready for them. Send your merchants. Send your clocks and swords and telescopes. There is war soon enough; and you show my people the enemy.”

  It changed everything for Baru’s plan. It changed nothing. It meant only that she would need to tell a monumental lie. She would still have her monopoly, but now it would depend not on a real rutterbook but on the pretense of one: and on very, very deft manipulation.

  “I have one additional condition,” she said.

  The Brain staggered and caught herself on the table. “What is it?”

  “You release Aminata’s boarding saber with her.”

  “Fine.” She offered her half-curled hand to Barhu.

  Barhu took it. Their eyes met. The Brain smiled. “This is a moment I remember,” she said. “Whoever I am becoming.”

  “I won’t fail you,” Barhu said. “I didn’t lie.”

  The Brain leaned close. Her breath was weak. Her eyes blazed with some dying fire. All at once Barhu understood why she wore the old broken armor. That blow must’ve killed whoever wore it: but she had survived, anyway, to wear it again. She had died, but she had won.

  “Tell your people,” the Brain murmured, “never to eat the bats.”

  Barhu jerked away in shock.

  The Brain’s eyes flickered. “Su malumin,” she murmured, to the Eye. “En ek am incri an? Malumin? En incri ana ti se si ihen, Virios . . .”

  “I need to bring her back to the ship.” He tried to lift her but her armor was too heavy. He looked like he was about to cry again. “Please help me.”

  When she came home she found her parents sitting on their bed behind the mulberry curtain, holding hands, speaking softly. Solit reached out to Barhu. She joined them in the circle, taking her parents’ hands in hers.

  “It’s done,” she said. “We’ve signed an agreement. Hostages will be exchanged. Eternal will make repairs and go.”

  Pinion squinted when she smiled. “We’re not going to die?”

  “No. You’d better boil all your drinking water, though. There’s cholera in Cautery Plat, and if it’s there, it might get in the river and the water here.” She would leave an explanation of the bats for later. She hadn’t the stomach to think about that now.

  “Oh? Serves them right.” Pinion’s fingers explored Barhu’s hardened hand, her wounded stumps. “Some days I wish we’d met those first Falcresti ships like the savages they thought we were. Howling and throwing spears.”

  “They would’ve gone to the plainsiders, mother,” Barhu said, vaguely irritated by this casual use of the word savage, “and it all would’ve turned out the same. Except we would’ve been the ones dying at Jupora, when the ritual circle broke. Falcrest had so much that we wanted. . . .”

  She trailed off, overcome by nostalgia: here they were again, arguing over the strange ships in harbor. But now the strange ships had come here on Barhu’s invitation; now everyone’s fate depended on her. She had everything she’d wanted as a child. She had the power to determine the outcome.

  It was quite terrible.

  She saw her mother smiling. “What?”

  “I missed arguing with you.”

  Solit rolled his eyes. “I didn’t.”

  “I missed you both,” Barhu said, briskly, so that she wouldn’t have time to think her way out of it. This made it sound quite disingenuous, but Solit smiled anyway.

  Pinion broke suddenly away from Barhu and Solit’s grip and went over to the pine wardrobe, where she began to sort mulberry work shirts and rough canvas trousers into piles of apparently arbitrary character. She was frowning.

  Solit sighed. “Pinion, what is it?”

  “She’s about to ruin it,” Pinion grunted. “I can tell. She’s going to tell us something awful.”

  “You don’t know that,” Solit protested. “Just because she’s trying to be sweet doesn’t mean she’s going to do something which will torture us in the small hours of the night for years to come, as we wonder whether we did something wrong, something that drove her away from us.” He blinked at Barhu. His belly bunched up pleasantly over the hem of his slops. “Does it, daughter?”

  “That’s exactly what it means,” Pinion said. “She’s letting us talk, see. Because she doesn’t want to say it. She doesn’t like telling us about anything.” She smoothed the frayed cloth of a skirtwrap under her thumbs. “She doesn’t even return our letters.”

  “Cairdine Farrier was holding my mail,” Barhu protested.

  “That snake,” Pinion snarled. The fabric groaned taut in her hands. “I’d like to shrink his head down to an apple. Like those jungle people in his book.”

  “I can beat him,” Barhu said, quietly. “And bring Salm home. I have everything I need to do it. But I need you to do something hard for me first.”

  They both looked at her, Solit from the bed, Pinion from the wardrobe, and there was a fierceness in Pinion’s eyes and a terror in Solit’s.

  Barhu’s throat closed up. “I need you to let me go,” she choked.

  “Go where?” Pinion sounded as if she would leap up with her boar-killing spear and murder whoever wanted to take her anywhere.

  “Give me the carpets.”

  “Oh, I knew it.” Pinion threw the skirtwrap at the wall. “I knew you’d do this. You just can’t go on being our daughter, because, oh, it’d put us in too much danger! Never mind that we fought on Taranoke. Never mind that we saved ourselves when they were hunting for us door to door. Never mind that we, the matai, voted to risk ourselves for your plan. It’s only our brilliant daughter who can face the mask—”

  “It’s not about that, love,” Solit said.

  She whirled on him with fury and betrayal in her eyes. She could have screamed at Barhu. Never at him.

  “She’s not trying to protect us.” Solit touched Barhu’s wrist. “Tell her.”

  “I know you’re used to danger. I know you can protect yourselves. But I need Cairdine Farrier to believe I’ve broken this bond, too. I need him to believe I’ve fouled up all my ties to Taranoke and thrown you away in disgust. He has to know I’m still obeying his script. You’ve got to do it to me. You’ve got to do it publicly. Please, ma.”

  “So he wins,” she snarled. “He takes you away from us forever. Just the way we were afraid he would.”

  “I can bring Salm home—”

  “How can we tell him that we gave away his daughter to have him back?”

  “But I’ll still be out there, ma. I’ll be out there doing my work
. You can take pride in that.” She reached out to Pinion, though her arms were not long enough to cross the space. “That’s the difference between obeying him and pretending to obey him, even if they look the same from the outside. Even if no one else can see it. This is what I do, mother. I let them think they’ve won, so that we can win.”

  “How will we explain this to Salm?” Solit asked, quietly. “When we see him again?”

  When we see him again: that was a sentence full of hope. She squeezed Solit’s hand hard. “You’ll tell him that you helped me tell a lie.”

  Pinion sagged in place. “The carpets are for traitors, spies, spouse-beaters, and child molesters. They mean something sacred. You’d be tainted in the eyes of the gods. . . .”

  “I’ve hurt a lot of children. I’ve killed a lot of spouses. I’ve been a spy and a traitor. Maybe I deserve it.”

  “You’re my daughter!” Pinion shouted. “My daughter isn’t a child molester or a spouse-beater! You don’t deserve to be treated like one!”

  “We didn’t deserve to be conquered, either,” Solit said, looking at Barhu’s two-fingered hand. “But it happened.”

  “Oh,” Pinion snarled, “why do you always have to take her side? You let her go to that school!”

  Solit flinched a little, but he knew it was only her temper talking, picking up weapons and hurling them. “No, muira. She wanted to go to that school. She’s always chosen her own way.”

  “Mother! Father!” The old Urunoki came back to her tongue like wine. “Please don’t fight over me. I can face anything, anything at all. But if I knew you disapproved of what I was doing . . . if you thought I wasn’t your daughter anymore . . . I would . . .”

  She touched her collarbone, to show them what she meant. She would snap. She would break like a bone.

  “Gods of stone and fire,” Pinion snarled. She dashed the pile of laundry she’d made onto the floor, and went out into the sun.

  Solit and Barhu looked at each other.

  “Can’t you just blackmail this Farrier man?” Solit asked.

  “No. He has to trust me long enough to put me in a certain position. He needs to believe I’d choose him over you. So he knows his conditioning is flawless.”