The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “My patience is not infinite,” Xe said. “Not in all matters.”

  “What have I done?” Barhu asked, nervously. “What do I need to fix?”

  The diver stared at her. Finally Barhu understood.

  Afterward, with her open lips against Xe’s throat, Barhu said. “I’ll miss you. I hope you’re home in time to have the baby.” She felt the little smile move Xe’s throat, and suddenly her eyes were hot with tears. “You know I don’t deserve this . . . I don’t deserve you. Not after what I did to your people.”

  Xe squirmed slightly, and didn’t answer. She was ticklish in the throat! What a petty victory it would be to make her laugh. But Barhu did not need any more petty victories. There was a terrible enough triumph waiting for her tonight. The sun was warm and falling, the krakenflies buzzing in the marsh, she had a lovely older woman to rest her head on.

  For now it was all right.

  “Xe,” she said, “I’ve never said good-bye before.”

  “Of course you have.”

  “I mean a proper good-bye to a woman, before we parted. A good-bye that was . . . decent, pleasant, kind. I’ve had three lovers now. One was Tain Hu, one was an asshole, and one was you. I’m glad I get to say good-bye to you.”

  33

  Two Exiles

  She came back to her parents’ house at sunset to face the carpets. Pinion waited under the veranda, stone-faced, dressed in a sleeveless jerkin and her lucky bark-strip hunting skirt with its woven charms and camouflage brush. Barhu had always thought, as a child, that boar hunting was an ancient and eternal practice. Only in school had she learned that boars were a recent arrival to Taranoke, brought by Oriati traders.

  Someone was always changing someone, Aminata had said.

  Solit was in his modern smith’s apron, dark with soot. He did not smile, either. Wordlessly he gave her the dive knife in its leather scabbard and Barhu tied it around her left ankle where she would not forget it.

  “Is it ready?” Barhu asked.

  “Yes,” her mother said. “It’s ready.”

  “Come, Baru,” her father said. Taking his last chance to speak her name in public.

  The matai waited for her on the town green. There were eleven of them, thirteen with her parents: an indivisible number, Kimbune would point out. The elder potter, the carpenter of trees and of driftwood, the textile maker, the elder navigator, the chief fisher, the canoe-maker, the first shield, the lead drummer, the planner of farms, the birdwatcher, the healer. Solit was the metalworker and Pinion was the huntress. They went to stand with the others, leaving Barhu by a spray of damask roses and hibiscus.

  “Baru Cormorant,” the healer aunt said. “We have called you here for the last time. You brought death to our shores for your own profit. You turned your back on your people to lie down with those who made war on us.

  “Though you were born among us, you did not live with us. You have filled your own stomach while we were hungry. If you come to us starving, we will give you stone. You have dressed your own skin while we were naked. If you come to us naked, we will shut our doors. You have sailed away while we foundered. If we see you drowning, we will leave you to the sharks.

  “As our ancestors cast the water thief from the canoe and the hoarder from the village, now we cast you out. We name you Namestruck. Lie on your belly.”

  Barhu knelt on the petal-strewn earth. The uncle who was the textile maker unrolled a bolt of mulberry cloth across her shoulders. Pinion pushed Barhu down onto her stomach and drew the cloth flat over her. Her fingers paused at the hem, half a knuckle’s width from the top of Barhu’s head. She stood and walked away.

  One by one they stepped onto her, put the weight of one foot onto her back, and walked across.

  Barhu grunted softly with each foot. Her mother stepped on her. Barhu could tell it was Pinion by the way she hesitated, and then landed too hard. Solit was last of all. He chose carefully where to put his weight, and she barely felt his passage.

  A year ago this would have killed her. The loneliness and the shame would have crushed her like a hundred thousand feet of water. What you can learn to survive, if you go into it with purpose.

  She would never go back to Taranoke, live in a little house by the lagoon, deal foreign currency at the market, and fight with her wives. She had wanted that for so long. It could never happen now.

  She closed that door forever.

  Someone ripped the cloth from her. Rough hands lifted her and pushed her toward the road out of the village. She caught her right foot on a vine and stumbled. No one helped her: no one could. The word would go out everywhere that Taranoki people lived, even among the plainsiders, that Baru Namestruck had been trampled under her own parents’ feet.

  Someone might try to take Barhu’s parents hostage anyway. That was a risk Pinion and Solit knew and accepted. But her enemies would not do it because they thought Barhu loved Pinion and Solit. They would not punish Taranoke to punish her, not unless they were vicious beyond reason.

  And it would protect her, too. She would never be tempted by an offer of the governorship. She would never be tempted to go back to a home she had never really known: only loved from afar, loved it for its hidden aspect, the way you love a god.

  Her left foot came down hard on the loose gravel. She stumbled. “O Devena,” she whispered, “please stay me on my course. Please keep me from turning back—”

  “Last chance,” Yawa said, from out of her blindness.

  Barhu tried to twist to face her, and faltered on her bad ankle. She lost her balance and fell on her two-fingered hand. “You were watching?”

  “Yes.” Yawa didn’t move. She stood fully masked and robed, shadow raven-roosting upon the mulberry bushes. “The negotiations are done. Abdumasi Abd has gone to Eternal for his surgery. Everything Farrier wanted is possible now. Did you gain the rutterbook?”

  “No.”

  “Then your trade concern is doomed. You will have no ports in the Black Tea Ocean.”

  “No,” Barhu said, laughing a little, “not doomed, just speculative. No one has to know we didn’t get the rutterbook, Yawa. We’ll lie. We’ll say we have it. By the time anyone finds out differently, we’ll own half of Falcrest. Everything we wanted is possible now, Yawa.”

  Yawa rubbed something in her gloved palm. It was a scrap of onion skin, for luck. She threw it away. “Have you ever seen a case of penile myiasis?”

  “A case of what?”

  “Say a man sleeps nude in a house full of flies. One day he comes in to the clinic with bloody discharge and painful lesions on his cock. We look at him, we find a big red blister right on the tip”—Yawa described the shape and the blister with her hands—“so we prod that blister. It squirms. There are botfly larvae growing in his manhood—”

  “Yawa!”

  She could see Yawa’s eyes through the mask. So bright. As if bleached by the suffering she’d seen. “We made a bargain with the woman who destroyed Kyprananoke. That should feel more repellent than maggots growing from a cock. But people don’t think that way. The thought of maggots in a cock bothers us more than ten thousand dead innocents. So I thought I would evoke the necessary revulsion.”

  “Thanks, Auntie Yawa,” Barhu said, queasily.

  “Is it too late to alter the terms of our bargain?”

  “Yes,” Barhu said. “Much too late for that.” She held Yawa’s gaze firmly. “The terms stand. Exactly as we discussed.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “I’ve made my choices. I’m ready to confront Farrier. Just keep Hesychast out of the way.”

  “You don’t think you can convince the Cancrioth to yield a sample of the immortata?”

  “A living portion of their sacred flesh? You’re the religionist, Yawa. You know how hard it is to convince people to give up their faith.”

  “You forget, Baru. I did give up my faith. I crushed the ilykari. I mortified their flesh for Hesychast. I even gave him my brother, Baru. My own brothe
r. He’s here. On this island. Now. Hesychast demands my triumph.”

  “Then give it to him,” Barhu urged her. “Yomi. Like we discussed.”

  “You trust me?”

  “Yawa, I trust you.”

  Yawa’s mask nodded in the dark. “Very well. Faham, take her into custody.”

  Footsteps closed in from her blind side. Barhu went for her dive knife. A steel cosh smashed her right wrist and when she tried to rise another blow to her ribs took the breath from her. A black bag dropped over her head. The drawstring noosed around her neck.

  “Tip her head back,” Execarne ordered. “Hope you haven’t lost any weight, Baru.”

  A dose bottle cracked like mouse bone. She held her breath as long as she could. When she gasped, her cheeks went numb, her throat, her chest.

  She heard Iscend say, “I have the instruments prepared.”

  “She thought it could be faked,” Yawa said, with remote sadness. “She thought I’d find a way.”

  Aminata woke in a hot sweat to the sound of screams.

  “Boarded,” she said, and sat upright faster than her blood could reach her head. She grayed out for a moment. And she was back on Lapetiare, leaping onto a pirate galley, with the stink of Burn in her nostrils and the silent mass of her marines behind her and the first man she would ever kill waiting below.

  He will be stronger than you, her weapons master had told her. He will have a longer reach and more force behind his blows because he is a man. But you will be unhesitating and precise in your violence. You will have the fatal will that is most of killing.

  And failing that, you will have your marines.

  “We’re being boarded,” she said. “Iraji? Are you—”

  But Iraji was in surgery; they had told her she would not be released until he woke. Fine. She knew what to do. Assess the situation, discover the intent and strength of the enemy force, act with vigor and aggression to destroy the enemy’s cohesion and capability to fight.

  She didn’t know which side was her enemy. But she would go find out.

  She slid into her slops, double-tied her breasts, donned a canvas tunic, lit the candle in the desk lantern, and went out into the passageway. The crackle of Termite pistol fire sounded below: they were engaged with the boarders. She trotted down the narrow stairs to the deck with the baneflesh pigpen. Dry filth stained the causeway floor: men had come in through the pigpen, moving forward swiftly and in column. She made it for maybe twenty, maybe thirty. Not enough to seize the ship by force.

  So it was a raid. They were here for one of two reasons. To take prisoners and intelligence.

  Or to detonate the ship’s magazines. To deny Eternal to all those who wanted to use it.

  She crept through architecture like a palimpsest. Eternal’s original structure had been rebuilt again and again, each transfiguration leaving phylogenetic vestiges: inexplicable nooks, mazes of rooms, secret doors, strange chimneys where pulleys dangled between decks. She tried one door but the fumes from a shattered apparatus of yellow glass drove her back. At another door a dog barked pitifully. She tried to let the poor mutt out, but the warped frame wouldn’t give.

  Two frames forward she found the first corpse.

  He was Falcresti, rigged in a gray filtered mask and a combat harness too slim and carefully fitted to be navy issue. A pistol had shot a mandala of blood across his chest. No exit wound. The ball must’ve struck the back of his ribs and stayed inside.

  “You’re Morrow Ministry,” she told the dead man. “Faham Execarne, what are you doing?”

  Burnt-out smoke grenades littered the companionway like discarded tins of fish. She smelled old piss. The Cancrioth had been here, pouring jarred urine on the catchfires. They were moving behind the boarders.

  The tracks became chaos—the boarding party driven forward, moving in haste. They dropped smoke behind them to slow the Cancrioth pursuers. The size and organization of the Cancrioth pursuit told Aminata they’d been ready for an attack. How? Execarne knew about the cancer whale. He certainly knew it could report his approach. So why had he walked his boarding party into an ambush?

  She found the first Cancrioth body.

  Giant Innibarish lay naked and burnt in a mad scrawl of blood. His fists were charcoal-scabbed around a short axe. “Oh,” Aminata groaned, covering her mouth. She’d smelled cooked man before, but always through a mask. He must have stripped his clothes when they caught fire. “Oh, virtues.”

  “Aminata . . .” the corpse breathed.

  He was alive. “Oh, kings and queens, Innibarish. What happened?”

  He crackled when he moved. “The Brain . . . she told the Womb they would come. Told her to be ready. The Womb cast spells on us, for bravery, and against pain. I hardly feel it. . . .”

  Hundreds of stab wounds had turned his chest to ground meat. “You’re going to die,” she told him. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know. But I’ll live, too, if my people find me in time. Tell them . . . tell them to cut it out of me, quickly. . . .”

  He’d killed at least one of the enemy. His axe was bloody to the handle. He must’ve chased the Morrow-men through the smoke and flames, probably screaming his lungs out, coughing and hacking, trying to drive them away from the Womb and his friends.

  They would’ve seen a monster coming after them. Aminata saw the gentle man who had always treated her well.

  “I can kill you,” she whispered, “if you want. . . .”

  He tried to answer but it sounded as if his lungs were collapsing. His chin twitched. No. Not yet.

  He was trying to keep his tumor alive as long as he could.

  She passed a compartment strewn with pots, each full of carefully sorted shards of human bone. The dark beyond smelled powerfully of glue. She raised her lantern. Light fell across something the size of a boulder, jigsawed together from curved pieces of bone. It was a tremendous human skull, half-made, unfinished from the jaw down except for two mounds of glue where a lower jaw might hinge. Hundreds of teeth grinned in a white arc, incisors and canines and molars grouped together, tribes of allied bite.

  “I hate this fucking place,” she said. But she was lying. What she really felt was a kind of outraged protectiveness. She had been on this ship first! She’d worked so hard to keep the crew alive! How dare Execarne just bull in here and ruin everything!

  She chased the sound of battle forward. And found slaughter. Eternal crew lay with their blood sticky across the engraved teak, with their gaping throats smiling up at snuffed candles, with two gouged wounds into their kidneys. Most of the dead were so dehydrated that they couldn’t have fought. They would have split like paper.

  What had happened to break discipline? Why were the Morrow-men suddenly berserk killers?

  She checked each corpse with her heart in her throat. Not Iraji. Not Iraji. Not Iraji—

  Something tickled at the hand she’d braced on the deck. She snatched it away. Nothing there. Just a little gap in the caulking between planks. She thought she’d felt a roach, or a rat.

  She lowered the lantern to the gap to check for movement. And saw the faintest trickle of smoke coming up from below.

  The ship was on fire. She sniffed the smoke. It didn’t smell like burning wood, or paint, or navy Burn. It smelled like . . . like what? A little like sex, some kind of heady sweetness, like whorehouse flowers: but over that a bitter, foul, oily stink, like grease dripping in reverse, climbing up her nose.

  The ship’s great alarm groaned into the hull. It made her fingertips tremble. She had a sudden sense of unreality. She was farther down the causeway, but didn’t remember moving. Had she gone into rower’s trance? “Shit,” she muttered.

  What had she smelled in that smoke?

  A fat green cockroach ran across the passageway, blinking its light at her. A pistol cracked somewhere forward and below her.

  She heard Iraji scream.

  I’m coming, Iraji!” she bellowed, against all tactical sense. Her heart stammered and le
apt as she plunged down the narrow stairs and ladders, chasing the sound of Iraji’s pain.

  She was so thirsty. Her tongue seemed cemented to the roof of her mouth. The lantern bounced wildly in her grip, cutting nonsense slices from the dark ahead. She put her left hand out to shield her and pushed forward.

  She was beginning to think she’d been drugged.

  Her hand met something warm. Someone warm. They gasped: “Aminata? I heard you.”

  Aminata raised the lantern. “Your Federal Highness?”

  “Tau will do, thank you.” Tau-indi clasped her around the waist, panting for breath. “Aminata. Something’s desperately wrong—”

  “I know. The ship’s been boarded by—”

  “Morrow-men, yes. Faham Execarne is with them. Strange to see him out in the field; like meeting the Minister of Agriculture out tossing hay. He must trust no one else.” Tau laid their head on Aminata’s breast, as if they were dearest friends. “His party was ambushed. They took Iraji and Abdumasi from the surgical theater as hostages. I told Faham they couldn’t be moved, but he wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t even look at me. Like I wasn’t there.”

  “Iraji’s still alive?”

  “Not for long. He and Abdu are held together by silk and glue. And the datura will pull them toward death—”

  “Datura?”

  “Yes. Can’t you smell it? The Womb’s people are burning it down below, filling up the ship, so their magic will be stronger. Datura. Archon trumpet. It’s terrible. It will take anyone who suffers it to the bottom of their soul.”

  She couldn’t focus on the words. They felt round, skittering away, marbles on glass. “I’m already dosed.”

  “I can feel it. Your heart rate’s up. You’ll get a dry mouth soon, and become aroused.”

  Her mouth was already very dry. “Doesn’t it affect you?”

  “I’ve had every drug you can imagine, Aminata. Datura is one of the worst, but I can ride it.” Tau inhaled across her skin: it felt like spiders stepping. “We have to stop Execarne. I think he might blow up the ship.”

  The thought of Eternal detonating in a clean blast of fire, swallowing Aminata and Iraji and Tau and everyone else aboard, simplifying them into ash, made Aminata profoundly horny. So there was the next symptom Tau had predicted. “Virtue fuck,” she snarled, “how much of this stuff are they burning?”