The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Heaps of it.” Tau kissed her softly on the bottom of the chin. She moaned, pressed closer to their small warm body, and then, catching herself, growled in irritation. Tau looked up at her from several feet away, where they had gone without moving. “What do you think I just did?”

  “I’m hallucinating.”

  “Datura doesn’t cause hallucinations. It causes delirium, which is much worse. You won’t remember that you’re drugged. Listen—if Execarne is trapped aboard, if he cannot use the hostages to get out, he will set fire to the magazines.”

  “Virtues, why?”

  “He came to find the Kettling. He fears it, and he may in the end destroy himself to destroy it. We have to stop him.”

  A pistol discharged nearby: the sound became a spike like a whaler’s harpoon, fifty or sixty feet long, pale eel of no color. It fell on the deck and squirmed. Aminata looked away. “Did you bring Osa? Can she fight?”

  “No. Too much danger to her trim. Listen, Aminata, there’s something you have to know—a special danger to you—you are bound by trim to Baru, and to Kindalana, who—”

  “Oh, king’s balls,” Aminata groaned. “Not Baru again.”

  “Listen!” Tau was above her, suddenly, looking down at her from a mighty altitude. Aminata could not understand how they fit inside the ship. “Those bonds would protect you powerfully. But not here. Not among the Cancrioth. This is a place raw to the world, unordered by human design, inhabited by older power.”

  “So?”

  “The things that happen here are meaningless. Your destiny has no power at all to save you. The most beloved woman in the world, a woman protected by the gratitude and obligation of whole nations, might step on a nail and die of tetanus. A son might break his father’s brow with an opening door. This is a place for senseless hurt, Aminata. Iraji and Abdu are in the most danger they have ever been. And so are you. If Abdu dies, all is lost. And if you die, Baru is lost.”

  “Who gives a shit about Baru?” Aminata snarled.

  “You do, child. You do.” Tau smiled down at her. “But it’s Iraji and Abdu who need us at the moment.”

  “Your Highness,” Aminata said, feeling, maybe for the last time, that old spark of duty-pride, “what can I do to help?”

  “Find Execarne. Tell him I’m aboard. Tell him to surrender. Tell him if he doesn’t, I’ll be killed with everyone else.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I think so. Faham’s my friend. He wouldn’t blow me up.”

  “All right. Take this—where’s the lantern?”

  “I have it.” Tau showed it to her. “You were swinging it about.”

  “Take it abovedecks. Signal to Sterilizer. Just do three fast blinks, over and over. It’s the signal for enemy aboard, send urgent reinforcement.” Aminata covered her eyes against the lantern light, to save her night vision. “With any luck at all, they’ll send marines.”

  “How will the marines help?”

  “They’ll convince Masako and the Brain to let Execarne go. They’ll convince Execarne he has a way out.”

  The moaning alarm trembled through the deck below her. She could hear words in it, now. She was very afraid that it would say her name. She understood, suddenly, that she was meant to die here.

  “Aminata?” Tau whispered. “Are you all right?”

  “Go. Go above. Be safe. Send the signal.” She pushed the Prince behind her, and faced the squirming dark. “I’m going to save Iraji.”

  She knew exactly where Execarne would barricade himself. He would look for a holdout near the magazines where he could triage his wounded and regroup: somewhere with chokepoint entrances and plenty of room inside.

  He would find the Brain’s ampitheater.

  Space shattered and knotted around her. Compartments and passageways tangled like intestines. The datura smoke was a thick ground fog now, and things like centipedes rose from it to taste her ankles. Silhouetted fighters screamed at each other in fury. She was not afraid. This was battle: seven parts trying to find out where to go and what to do, two parts shouting, and one part horrific, irrevocable violence.

  A Termite’s pistol fired like a disembodied thing, backflash silhouetting half a man, light shining through the thin webs between his fingers. She felt the skin of that hand between her molars, and the light like grains of dirt in her eyes. The husk of a smoke grenade crushed under her foot and she looked down. It was the body of the burnt boy she’d found on the Llosydanes. A charcoal star of limbs around a powdered center. Tiny rats with Baru’s face swarmed past, chattering their plots.

  Tain Shir walked alongside her. Blood dripped from her white mouth where shark teeth grinned into the chum-clouded sea. The first man who had ever told twelve-year-old Aminata that she looked like a full-grown woman gave her a flower and asked her to smile. He was a post captain now, somewhere. Shir’s vast shark shape drew back a lance and hurled it into Aminata’s heart.

  She pinched the lobe of her ear, stabbed two fingers into her left hand between thumb and forefinger, and kept walking.

  “Iraji?” she shouted. “Execarne? Anyone? I’m with Tau-indi! Don’t shoot me!” The diplomatic protections of an Oriati Federal Prince fell like an itchy blanket over her, and then unraveled, became caterpillars, crawled away useless into the chaos.

  A grenade blew up in the fork of the next intersection. Shrapnel chipped the teak. A big piece spun like an axehead past her. She crawled up to the intersection to look, and, in the cross-corridor to her left, saw something move in the lantern light: the thin white line of a rapier blade, red at the tip.

  The rapier turned toward her. A man called out a challenge in Takhaji battle language.

  “I’m with Tau-indi!” she shouted back.

  The rapier became a shining white point coming straight at her face. Fighting spirit, what her old instructors had called death liquor, blew up in her drug-quickened heart. The man holding the rapier was slim and tall, he wore the shoulder flag of a fighting Oriati soldier, he looked faintly bemused—Masako. It was Masako.

  She jagged right without thinking, old Naval System knife defenses waking up. He will kill you if you cannot control the weapon. She lunged in along the rapier’s length and grabbed for Masako’s wrist but he flicked the rapier sideways and cut a long shallow tunnel of pain up her left arm.

  She screamed in challenge and threw herself on him, inside the rapier’s range. He staggered back around the corner. She smashed her whole body left, into the rapier’s blade, and to her glee the long thin sword bent over the hardwood corner and cracked.

  The man tackled her and threw her down on her back. His fist cocked back.

  She lost a moment.

  Then she was on her back on the deck, and Scheme-Colonel Masako was battering her face into her head. Her nose was broken, her thoughts gray. He pulled his fist back for another hit. She drove her forehead right into his oncoming punch. Fuck you, Masako, who taught you how to punch? A fist to the face is little bones against one big bone, and the big bone wins.

  Masako’s fist hammered her head back against the deck. Her forehead broke his hand and folded it down limp beneath his wrist. He roared in pain.

  Aminata saw and felt only red, but she didn’t need to see, didn’t need to think, she was fighting from her spine. She wrapped her legs around Masako’s waist, put her forearms in front of her face to block his next blow, and threw all her weight to the left. Use your legs, her master-at-arms whispered, use all your body, or die.

  He fell off her, shrimping up around his broken hand. Rolled across his back. Came up crouching. Where was his broken rapier? She needed a knife, a piece of shrapnel, anything—she kicked frantically at his shins to keep him away—

  He looked baffled, as if he were not quite sure what was going on. A datura erection tented his slops. In the dark behind him, in the place they’d first met, children crawled through the fire of the embassy Aminata had burnt.

  “Tsaji,” he said, thickly. “Collaborator!”<
br />
  He kicked her in the head. She curled up against the blow and took his steel-tipped boot right to her kidney, screaming like a cat in the night. He kicked her again, maybe even killed her, if he’d hit the kidney bad enough. It would just take her a while to bleed and die.

  She spat and rolled onto her stomach. He got her again, right in the same place. She reached out blindly into the dark and found nothing to help her. No one coming. No one to save her. But he was alone, too, or she’d be dead already—

  He kicked for her head again. She rolled over in time to grab his calf and take the hit right in the chest, thump of steel against her diaphragm, everything in her lungs coming out in one hot gasp. No air, no breath, but who had time to breathe anyway: not Aminata, clawing his belt, pulling. He fell across her. The fucker was laughing. He had never believed anything could go wrong. All a fucking game to him. Kyprananoke and all of it. Even this fight.

  She wormed out from under him, clawed her way up the wall, one of her fingernails snagging on a protruding treenail and bending halfway back. They didn’t even have proper metal nails for her to fight with.

  “Fucker,” she gasped, spilling bile and blood from a split tongue. “You’re dead now. You’re fucking dead.” As she backed away from him time stuttered in reverse, looping her words, fucking dead dead dead dead dead dead.

  “Constant aggression,” he said, through broken lips. He got back to his feet with only a little weariness. “The instinct of the body facing violence is to withdraw and contract. You must expand and fill up space. You must claim everything around you so that the enemy cannot. Even your voice must assert victory. I read your fighting manual.”

  She kicked a burnt-out grenade at him. He stepped out of the way. Burning lilac branches showered down across him from out of Hara-vijay, weeks past. The ship moaned.

  “I’m trying to save your life,” she snarled. “Get out of my way.”

  “Tsaji.” He panted for breath. “It means plunder. They plundered you, Aminata. They took you from us and I’m going to take you back—”

  She rushed him, head down, shoulders tight. It was the worst thing she could have done against a bigger faster man because it meant committing to the grapple. He caught her, stumbled back to absorb the impact, beat at the back of her neck—and she got his broken wrist and twisted. His laugh gurgled into agony. She grabbed for his balls and found a thick undercloth in the way: settled for punching him in the dick as hard as she could. He kept hitting her in the back of the head and with each hit she would go blind for a moment. She kept punching him in the dick.

  “I did the right thing!” he bellowed. “I did the right thing! I did it for my children! My child, my child, why do you fight—”

  Idiot, she thought: if you want to kill me you have to want to kill me.

  She tried to bite him in the throat. He grabbed her chin, forced her back, and they fell together, grappled, hissing, spitting, dripping blood and bile on each other. He was winning. Once he got on top of her he would hold her down and choke her.

  She stopped striking back.

  Save your strength, Aminata. Take the knee he slams between your legs. Take the punches to your kidneys that make you gag. Keep your hands up, lock your thighs around his waist, keep him in your guard and don’t let him go.

  She could not outmuscle him. She could not outrun him. But she would bet her life that she’d had the shit beaten out of her more often than some prissy spy.

  And finally he fell back on his haunches, panting, wringing out his one good hand. She could see his elbow shaking with fatigue.

  “Are you done?” he said. “Are you finished? These people, these masks, they don’t care about you. They use you to torture your own kind. They use your body for war and sex because their own bodies aren’t good enough. They want you to be a citizen, but you’re a queen, Aminata, you come from the line of kings and queens. We’re the humans, Aminata. We’re the race. They’re just vitiated pale leftovers—”

  He had no guard. His one good hand was down. She crunched with her waist and lunged and she had him in a front guillotine choke before he could do more than grunt. She counted while he thrashed and punched her stomach. The blood choke worked within ten seconds, usually. He went limp at twelve, and fell across her. She held him like that for a minute.

  “Baby killer,” she grunted, and left him among the burning lilacs, in the blood-soaked embassy courtyard where the children crawled.

  She staggered in the direction where the grenade had exploded, shouting, “I’m navy! Lieutenant Commander Aminata, Imperial Navy! Don’t shoot!”

  A gray wraith came out of the smoke and pulled her into the light ahead.

  Aminata,” Faham Execarne bellowed. “Welcome! I don’t suppose you’ve brought the navy to reinforce me?”

  He wore a fighting harness. The left arm of his shirt was cut off at the shoulder, exposing a pink machete wound straight down to the bone. Small tufts of grass grew from it; Aminata couldn’t remember if that was normal. She wiped blood from her lips. Her kidneys might be ruptured. She might be bleeding to death from the inside. But that was all right. She knew her purpose.

  “No, Your Excellence,” she said. “I’m here alone. I’ve sent Tau above to signal Sterilizer. I think you’d better surrender.”

  “Oh, Tau’s not here.” Execarne waved dismissively. “I’d never wish this place on them.” A trickle of blood spiraled down his arm to his glove and vanished into the lining. “You know, I always wondered if this was possible. Reality completely distorted by the power of the will. They’re remarkable, these sorcerers. I knew their whale was away spreading cholera, yet somehow, still, they sensed me coming. Sensed it in time to deny me my prize.”

  “What did you come for, sir?”

  “The Kettling, of course. So we could find a cure. But the roosts are empty. The bats are gone. I had to take us below . . . to the magazines.” He sighed heavily. “Did I ever tell you I have a perfect memory? So I am cursed to remember everything I saw. There’s a room down here, Aminata, where they cast living people in molten bronze. The flesh remains, beneath the cooling metal. There’s some art to it, to keep the body from burning away. . . .”

  He shuddered, and took a deep breath. His pupils were huge and black. The datura smoke seemed to climb his body.

  “Your Excellence, Tau is here. You mustn’t detonate the—”

  “The world here has been broken open and rendered subject to our wills!” Execarne barked. “I do not perceive Tau aboard, and thus Tau is not aboard! Do not disrupt my subjectivity! My calm remove is the only thing holding existence together!”

  “Your Excellence, there’s a drug in the air, it’s called datura—”

  “Of course there’s a drug. Drugs amplify the mind’s power over reality. Which makes it all the more important that I keep Tau away from this ship.”

  “Tau is right above us, on the weather deck, waiting for you to come out—”

  But Execarne was no longer listening to her. He had snipped her neatly out of his consciousness. Now he was murmuring with some of his Morrow-men, pointing at compartments on a map of Eternal’s underbelly.

  If they went for the magazines, Aminata did not think there was anyone on this dehydrated ship who could stop them.

  Aminata found Iraji and sprang up the pews to his side. He was swaddled in a litter made from two spears and a roll of bloody canvas, She checked his pulse (fast and thready) and his breathing (shallow and far too quick). She dared not pull the bandages off his sutured back to check the wound.

  “Iraji,” she whispered, “can you hear me?”

  He shivered under her hands and moaned.

  “He can’t,” a man said, grimly. “He’s quite drugged.”

  Abdumasi Abd lay on the pew above. His pain-squint eyes were level with hers. Aminata had been his torturer so long that she wanted to flinch away—do not let him see the face behind the mask! But he didn’t recognize her, of course. He had no idea what she
’d done to him.

  “Are you in pain?” she asked him: a triage reflex.

  “No,” he said, “but I can’t feel my legs. Something’s wrong. I could be bleeding out my asshole for all I know. What about you? You look like you’ve been trampled by a bull.”

  “I got in a fight.”

  “Anyone worth fighting?”

  “I hope so. Do you know what’s happening?”

  “Not sure. I’m high as stars. Something in the air.” A strained laugh. “You’ve got two centipedes coiled up in your eye sockets right now, guarding those little yellow babies they hatch. Lucky those mask fucks gave me so many drugs I’m used to it. Who are you, anyway?”

  “I’m the one who gave you all those drugs.” She just told him: there didn’t seem to be any point to lying.

  “What?” he said.

  “I was your torturer. I planned—everything. Everything they did to you.”

  “You.” He tried to recoil and something in his body did not respond the way he wanted. Claustrophobic flicker in his eyes—a man trapped in a coffin with a stinging jelly. “You’re Oriati? They gave me to an Oriati woman?”

  “Yeah. I know. I look just like Kindalana.”

  “You don’t look a fucking thing like her!”

  “That’s not what Cosgrad Torrinde told me,” Aminata said, and prayed, yes, actually prayed, that the human connection Tau believed in would do something to make Abd listen.

  Abd stared in horror. “How the fuck do you know Cosgrad?”

  Why not go all in on Tau’s nonsense? “Trim brought us together. Kindalana couldn’t be here, so trim brought me in her place. To save you.”

  “This is a trick.” Abd tried to get away from her and his legs wouldn’t work. He pushed at the litter with his arms, weakly. “This is another trick, I’m still in the fungus room, I’m hallucinating—”