The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  A terrible suspicion crawls up on Baru. Yawa does not want her to go back to her own houseboat. This only makes sense if—oh. Oh no.

  Baru glares at her. “You treacherous fuck. You bitch. I thought I was safe—”

  Yawa shrugs. “It wasn’t in your file, I’m afraid. But I knew other places to look.”

  She hires a lighter and rows back to her houseboat. The sun is just rising when she bumps up against the floating dock and leaps across. There are people inside. Lamps burn brightly and furtive shadows move in the windows.

  “Shhh,” Baru hisses at Yawa. “Don’t you dare warn them.”

  She creeps up to the stern door, and finds it unlocked. Turns the handle until it clicks.

  Someone inside says, “Did you hear that?”

  Baru flings the door open. It slams into the back of Aminata’s wheelchair just as she is leaning forward to hide a gift, sending her face-over-ass onto the carpet. A man in another room barks, “To arms, sailors!” and comes rolling in on a wheelchair of his own: Abdumasi Abd, followed by Tau-indi and Kindalana, both of them struggling with armfuls of old books.

  Iscend, peering in from the kitchen, smiles like the moon.

  “Surprise!” Baru says, brightly.

  “Baru!” Aminata scrambles to her feet in protest. Baru can see the pain in the way she moves, that constant drillbit in her chest: but she does not seem to hang off it like a scarecrow anymore. “You weren’t supposed to be back yet!”

  “I am known for my brutal dawn ambushes,” Baru says, to Yawa’s incensed gasp. “Happy birthday to me. And thank you all very much for trying to surprise me. I don’t know how you did it. I’ve never celebrated it on record, not even once—it’s not a holiday on Taranoke.”

  “You daft bitch,” Aminata sighs, “Tau asked your mother, back on Cauteria. Your parents send their love.”

  Something is happening on her blind side: Baru looks over and sees Tau trying to tug a tablecloth over a spectacular jade cormorant. “Tau,” she gasps, “you shouldn’t have—”

  “It’s not for you,” Tau cautions her. “I found it in the Habitat Hill collection behind the embassy. I want you to kiss it, and then I’m sending it home to Lonjaro with Abdu, as a good-luck charm.”

  “You’re leaving?” Baru asks Abdu.

  “Of course I am,” he says. Kindalana rubs his scalp. “Kinda and I have to go home and try to sort things out between the Mbo and the Cancrioth. If I can go among them and come back to the Mbo, maybe . . . maybe others will see it’s not reason to start killing each other.”

  “That’s the hope,” Kindalana says. “I don’t think there’s any more good to be done here. My charities are solvent, I have skilled people in place to run my affairs, and I’m tired of Falcresti sending me assignation letters. For a people who don’t like Oriati”—she glances toward Iscend, the only actually Falcresti person in the room—“they’re certainly taken with Oriati women.”

  “If she’s the right sort of woman,” Aminata mutters. This makes Kindalana’s smile brittle, which in turn makes Baru think of all that is wrong: needles in her brain, unknown damage done to the integrity of her thoughts. Kyprananoke utterly erased, its culture reduced to a few scattered survivors. The Cancrioth on the move in Oriati Mbo, gathering followers for war.

  And, for all his influence, Cairdine Farrier was only one man: neither the cause nor the sole conductor of Falcrest’s malignant growth.

  Defeating him has stopped nothing. In fact, Baru’s new trade concern might guarantee Falcrest’s triumph. Oriati civil war still looms. The Brain’s martyrdom seems to guarantee religious schism. Baru doesn’t actually have the rutterbook she claims to possess, so in a sense all her promises of new trade are a monumental lie. But as long as that lie goes undiscovered, the sheer power of the Black Tea Ocean Concern will make her an empress in fact if not in name . . . only, if she cannot control that power, she will usher in an age of Falcrest’s domination that will scar every last people of the world.

  The same dilemma as ever, then. Can you defeat Falcrest with Falcrest’s power? Can fire burn fire?

  The question is not yet answered.

  But right now Baru has a little house, and friends of a sort to fill it, even if few of them, in all likelihood, will survive what is to come with that friendship intact. Aminata is thinking strongly about leaving the navy forever (if she does, Baru intends to offer her a commission as captain on a Black Tea Ocean Concern ship). Baru has no lover; Iscend Comprine is taboo, Shao Lune is a self-serving racialist snake, and Ulyu Xe has gone back to Aurdwynn. But there is a city full of prospects out there, and Baru has Tain Hu’s reputation for conquest to uphold.

  And she has Kimbune’s proof ready to dazzle Falcrest’s mathematicians. And Iscend’s coin theory of inheritance to challenge Incrastic heredity. And she has Ulyu Xe’s theory of culture to pursue, and her parents to reunite, and a friendship with Aminata to repair, and a princess of the Mbo to discover, and Tau-indi’s faith to uphold, and more yet, so much that fills her with that giddy claws-out sense of challenge.

  She sets it all aside, and closes, for a moment, the accounts of her work.

  “I’m twenty-three today,” she tells them. “I’ve outlived Shiqu Si, haven’t I?”

  “By two years,” Iscend shouts from the kitchen.

  “You’re far behind her, though,” Kindalana says. “Shiqu Si was Empress of everything from western Aurdwynn to northern Segu, and you’ve only got a boat and a trading concern—”

  Of course Aminata has to burst in, dissatisfied to hear Kindalana, a Prince, talking down to Baru: “She’s been the Empress of Falcrest for a day, hasn’t she? Doing a little better than Shiqu Si.”

  “What do we call you now?” Tau asks, innocently. “The Half-Brain Empress?”

  Baru can see the patterns of the world, the ties of money and hunger that bind civilization together in need. And now, looking at Tau-indi, she feels that perhaps she can also see the world as Tau imagined it. The chains of grasping arms that connect all of them to each other. The hope and the fear of caring.

  “The Cormorant Empress,” she says. “And you are my Cormorant House.”

  THE LIGHTNING IN THE EAST

  The storm seized Auroreal and dragged her across the world.

  She was an old ship, a cursed ship, and Captain Bales had expected this expedition to end in doom. She was sailing the Mother of Storms with a crew of the condemned on a ship that still stank of cannibal fires. The Tuning-Spear Concern wanted to find a western route around the southern tip of Zawam Asu, a route to bypass the Oriati and seize the riches of the Black Tea Ocean beyond. So they put out the call for desperate adventurers, ill-acquitted criminals, and women who wanted to sail as far as possible from the past.

  Bales had survived four pregnancies and smallpox, which left its kisses all along her cheeks. Her husband was gone, and her children were raised, and one day Bales realized she would never see anything or meet anyone she didn’t already know.

  So she got her old navy scores out of the bank file and she walked down to the skills market and sold herself to the low bidder on a better captain.

  A better captain would not have taken this ship, or this crew, or this course. And when the storm caught them, a better captain would have tried to find a hole to wait it out at anchor. A better captain would not be where Limina Bales was right now: huddled under sealskin, lashed to Auroreal’s wheel, laughing.

  She ran her ship on the wild storm. Aft sails furled, half the crew on the bilge pumps (she’d ordered the bilge left half-flooded, to lower Auroreal’s center of mass and keep the ship from tipping). The reinforced stern, armored against northern icepack, shuddered and groaned under the storm surge.

  Limina Bales clung to the wheel as hot tropical water pounded her into the deck. She kept the ship’s bow pointed straight along with the wind. Straight east. Ever eastward.

  She had planned to swing wide east, then south, to catch a current around kangaroo-curse
d Zawam Asu and its deadly cape. But instead of bringing her west into the Black Tea Ocean, the Mother of Storms had caught Auroreal at the end of its eastward run, hurling them onward, storm-tossed through longitudes where a blistering headwind usually fought ships back.

  Limina Bales had, entirely by accident, discovered a southern passage across the Mother of Storms.

  And on the twenty-fifth day, as the crew began to run out of water, she sighted land.

  They were running almost straight north now. An albatross with a ten-foot wingspan and beautiful black tips dashed itself against the mainmast and fell dead. Then, at midnight by the ship’s clock, Limina spotted lightning on the northern horizon. The strikes illuminated a tower of stormclouds . . . and at the base of that storm, the dirty orange glow of wildfire.

  “Land,” she croaked. “Land!”

  The man Hammide, whom she’d retained as a wilderness guide, stuck his head abovedecks at her shout. “Land?” he cried. “Truly?” He was nearly decapitated by a falling boom.

  At sunrise Auroreal ran aground in shallow water. She’d lost her main and foremast, but the hull was intact, and she could float again. They could get home—if they could only find masts.

  The eastern sun showed them an alien beach, volcanic stone cracked into hexagonal cells. To the north, where Limina had seen wildfire, thunder grumbled endlessly. The storm coiled and flashed over tremendous mountain peaks and the lightning never seemed to stop. Even here, south of the storm, the air tasted of nerves and soot. People became hypnotized by the flashes, and had to be shouted out of trance. What water they found seemed sulfurous or mineral. But in the stony tablelands beyond the beach there was a hot spring, which Limina used as a reward and rest.

  “Where’s there’s wildfire,” she told her first mate, “there might be wood.”

  She gathered a party of carpenters and able hands, assigned Hammide to break trail, and set out. Clouds obscured the true size of the mountains to the north and east. They were huge, easy rivals to the Wintercrests or Mount Merit, though older and more jagged. The surveyor shouted excited figures: twenty, thirty, forty thousand feet.

  The lightning strikes seemed to focus on a valley on the near side of the peaks. The surveyor begged for a chance to visit. “There’s no point,” Limina warned her, “until we’re sure we can bring whatever we discover back to Falcrest.”

  North and northeast they marched. Into the lightning.

  Soon the thunder crashed so loud it was impossible to sleep. Limina’s sailors began to hallucinate of fatigue. Reports of strange lights overhead, soft voices in the dark. “We do not turn around,” Limina warned them, “until we find a good tree.”

  On the second night beneath the storm, Limina was coming back from latrine when she saw a whirling ring of thin violet fire, perhaps three feet across, standing upright in the air before her. It ascended slowly and vanished among the low clouds. Limina sat down with a mental hygiene booklet and did a few washes.

  The forest ahead promised good trees. Frequent wildfires would leave only hardy and fast-growing specimens as survivors.

  One of the carpenters was struck first: the bolt traveled down his saw and through his body. He survived, but he was constantly confused and irritable. The tactical clerk was hit three times, leaving her a babbling mess. The first carpenter was now on crutches, having lost his sense of balance after the strike. The carpenter’s mate was struck while gathering water from a huge, shallow freshwater lake, a sheet of water running out to the horizon. He drowned facedown in six inches.

  They pushed on. Tiny brushes of fire flickered along belt buckles and fanned from knife tips. In camp that night Limina called Hammide to her tent to discuss what to do if they lost the strength to bring the masts back to Auroreal. They fell on each other, afterward, trying to find something to think about except that distant thunder: the world’s irregular heartbeat, daring them to madness.

  She drew lines of light on his naked chest, marveling at the flickering discharge. The sound of the thunder was inescapable; he moved to the anti-rhythm of the strikes. When it began to seem as if he matched or even anticipated the loudest cracks of thunder she closed her eyes and saw ghost letters in the afterimage darkness. She had to tell him she’d finished: his eyes were haunted, far-away, his hips shimmering galvanic against the blanket. He fell asleep holding her.

  They woke to a spider rune carved in the center of their camp, black glass and shattered flowers.

  But that late afternoon they found a copse of live trees.

  As the party cut and dressed trees to use as masts, and prepared rollers for the long haul back to Auroreal, Hammide asked Limina if he could climb the ridge to the north and look for the center of the lightning strikes

  “No,” she told him. “Absolutely not.”

  “Come on.” He gave her that stupid, endearing grin. “You want to sit here in camp waiting for the carpenters? We’re explorers! Let’s explore!”

  “We’re the dregs of the Republic,” she corrected him, wryly. “But I suppose, while we’re here, we might as well contribute to the natural sciences . . . if only in the hope they’ll contribute to us in turn.”

  The crest of the ridge revealed a long valley, running east into the mountains. Rings of ancient stone monoliths interlocked like chainmail across the valley floor. Tumbled ruins broke the patterns, ruining any hint of elegance. Lightning forked and tripled in the west, probing the mountainside. The plants were stunted, as if the storm had been overhead so long it blocked the sun.

  Their weapons, the buckles on their clothes, crawled with cold fire.

  “Look, mam!” One of the sailors in the party pointed north. “Do you see that? Does anyone else see that?”

  They gaped together at the green sun descending from the clouds. It must have been forty or fifty feet across, a perfectly spherical ball of fire, trailing a constellation of sizzling blue points which flocked and swarmed like fish. Abruptly it accelerated south, toward them, and then spiraled in impossible curves down toward one of the monolith rings. In silence it touched the stone and vanished. Just gone.

  “What is this?” Limina breathed. “Where the fuck are we?”

  “Captain Bales,” Hammide said, slowly, “I think there are people down there. Things that might be people . . .”

  She followed his spyglass. Something moved . . . a file of shapes, coming up through the toppled monoliths, toward the mountain and the center of the lightning strikes. They did not look like people at all. The shapes were wrong . . . the ground behind them seemed to squirm. Like octopi, she thought. Giant land squid, dragging thick limbs behind them. Thin gray lines, rays of geometry, cast off their shoulders and up into the clouds.

  “Ten people,” Hamidde reported crisply. “They’re wearing plate armor. Full-body plate, like a Stakhi tunnel knight . . . but badly maintained. Rusted or burnt.”

  “Let me see.” Limina shamelessly applied captain’s privilege to steal the spyglass. “Oh, kings . . . look at that. . . .”

  Only in the flash of lightning could the armored figures be seen. In the darkness between strikes, they became ghosts of crawling palefire. Huge tentacles dragged across the ground behind them: like worms, pursuing. They were chains, Limina realized. A cape of chains behind each armored figure. And the rays she’d seen projecting from their upper bodies were lines for kites. They had kites tethered to their bodies, flying in the clouds. . . .

  “Ai!” she hissed. Lightning struck one of the armored figures. The flash shattered her vision into forks and jags.

  “What is it?” Hamidde whispered.

  “I don’t believe it.” She reacquired the group and counted them twice. No change. “He’s still walking. The armor protects them.”

  “That can’t be. Lightning will shatter Stakhieczi plate. Burn whoever’s inside.”

  “Well, he’s still walking!”

  “Maybe the lightning just landed nearby.”

  “Maybe. Hush. They’re doing something.�
��

  The group of armored figures was coming up to a slight rise, where a toppled monolith waited like a table. Limina began to notice differences between the figures. The one in the lead was stooped over, staggering as if under a burden. And in the middle of the column . . .

  “They have prisoners.” She couldn’t make out features, but the unarmored figures did not seem willing: two of the armored beings guarded them closely. Her mind leapt to the most lurid possibility. “I think it’s a human sacrifice.”

  But it did not go as she expected.

  The two guards made no move to force the prisoners up onto the makeshift altar. The weakest one, the one who’d been in the lead, climbed up onto the monolith with the help of the others.

  Then, with shocking speed, the leader shed its armor. At this distance there was no sound but the thunder, so Limina imagined the rattle of chains and the crash of steel. The body within seemed human. Limina tried to get a glimpse at its face but it was moving, reaching down, taking from the others a long spear or pole.

  The one standing on the monolith lifted the pole to the sky and waited.

  The bolt came down at once. The flash dazzled Limina again, but she blinked it away and screwed her eye tight to the scout glass. “The one who took its armor off is dead. Killed by the lightning. The others . . . they’re . . . oh kings, oh queens and kings.”

  “What is it?” Hammide begged. “What’s happening?”

  “The other armored ones. They’re cutting the dead one’s head open. They’re portioning it . . .”

  “What?”

  “They’re portioning its brain out. They’re going to make the—”

  She gagged and had to look away. The guards were shoving the unarmored prisoners forward, toward the slaughtered corpse, and the little gobbets of human brain waiting in metal bowls.

  “Limina, what’s happening down there?” Hammide whispered.