The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Why would I be ashamed? You took my clothes.” Her period would have inconvenienced her (she was due), but it had skipped, as it had in the fearful days before Sieroch. “I won’t bargain for anything. I demand to be treated as a visiting dignitary.”

  The Womb tapped her fingers impatiently. “Terms of parole. You will be given a room and comforts. You will not leave it without one of my escorts. You will not speak to anyone without my presence. Not even someone you pass on the deck.”

  “Such concern! You brought me here. Why not make the most of it?”

  The Womb had traded the dashiki she’d worn at the embassy for a thick ankle-length wool cassock. Kimbune wore the same. Baru imagined their modesty might come from some kind of dualist tradition, one that venerated the true flesh of the immortata over the frail and shameful ephemera of the body. But she was only guessing.

  “I do have something to ask of you,” the Womb said, carefully. “Something that might make a great difference.”

  Baru smiled toothsomely at her. “Need to assure your people bringing me here wasn’t a mistake?”

  “No.” The Womb had an absolute certainty about her, when she wanted. “I need the opposite. I need you to tell them you’ve led the enemy to us, and that we’re in terrible danger. Tell them it’s time to give up and go home.”

  “Give up on what?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Wait!” Kimbune leapt forward, wide-eyed. “Wait, Abbatai, we can’t! We’ve come so far, he’s so close, he must be . . .”

  “Look. Already she has us turning on each other.” The Womb did something, must have done something, to make the candle she held gutter down. “Maybe it’d be better if we put her back in that pit.”

  “And waste a chance to talk your way safely past my warships? Throw away an opportunity to find out exactly how much Falcrest knows about you and your, ah”—Baru paused, rather artfully, she thought—“your anatomical society?”

  “Tau-indi warned me you’d lie. That you’d pretend you wanted to help us. Like you did in Aurdwynn.”

  Damn Tau! At least when they’d been limp with grief they couldn’t fuck things up—oh, she couldn’t bear to think about Tau right now. Just shove it off into the right, into her blind side.

  “Where is this ship? No, don’t tell me, I’ll deduce it.” She stretched to get her feet on the deck, and winced at the pressure on her splinters. “This is the ship that sank Tau’s Cheetah. Therefore it’s large enough to carry an arsenal of cannon. We’d have spotted a ship that size on our approach to Kyprananoke if it were moored anywhere nearby. But you can’t be moored far off. A ship this size must have a crew to match, and crews are thirsty. Say a gallon per day for each head, and most of your wine and beer used up in the voyage here. You’d need to stay close to the freshwater. And the only way to get freshwater on Kyprananoke without going through the Kyprist government would be the aquifers on el-Tsunuqba. We’re inside el-Tsunuqba, aren’t we? We’re in the caldera of the old volcano.”

  Kimbune looked gratifyingly impressed. Baru stared the Womb down smugly. “Shitty hiding place. No wonder you’re cornered.”

  “Who’s the boy in the sketch? The one you showed at the embassy, when you recited our prayer?”

  No! Not Iraji. Baru jagged away as hard as she could. “I want water. I want to wash. I want to speak to my aide. Then we can discuss whether or not you’ll be taking this ship home safely . . . wherever you come from.”

  “Put her down, Innibarish,” the Womb said.

  The man behind her unhooked her from the hoist and set her down. She turned, curious to see what made him so absurdly strong, and felt an uneasy Incrastic fascination, a Falcresti gaze that saw bodies as artifacts and resources. Innibarish was muscular beyond any man she’d ever met, beyond even Hesychast, swollen like a bully whippet, the purebreed Metademe dogs that were born double-muscled. Possibly, checking against her accounts, he was the tallest person she had ever met. But he was gentle. And it was not his fault that his breechcloth failed his modesty: she only thought it interesting that he would respond at all.

  “Your man has a hard-on,” she said.

  “Please don’t be crude,” the Womb sighed. “Innibarish is a good man.”

  “I just think it’s tactically interesting. If he’s aroused by a stinking, salt-soaked woman, it’s clearly been a long time for him. Which means you’re not letting even your most trusted lackey go ashore.”

  “I don’t like whores,” the man said, in gentle Aphalone.

  Baru ignored him. That detail was inconvenient to the story she was telling. “Miss Womb, if your man here hasn’t been ashore . . . has anyone? Are you the only one who knows Kyprananoke’s fallen into civil war? Or that there are Falcresti warships waiting outside the caldera? Or that the Kettling has been released?”

  Kimbune gasped in horror. Even the big man looked shaken.

  “No,” the Womb said, reluctantly. “No one else knows.”

  “Liar,” Baru said, smugly. “Someone sent Kimbune to find me. Someone else knew I was brought aboard. Is she the one who let the Kettling out? Is she the one who gave the rebels Oriati weapons?”

  That, she thought, is who I want to talk to.

  But the Womb was staring at her hands. Suddenly she inhaled hard, pinched out the candle, and left them all in the dark: except for the unmistakable waxing gleam of her fingers, an auroral blue-green.

  “She’s coming,” Innibarish said, softly. “She carries powerful magic.”

  “Kimbune.” The Womb’s urgency made the mathematician jump. “The Brain sent you here?”

  Kimbune nodded, eyes downcast.

  The Womb said something very softly in Maulmake, a question that was not a question at all.

  Kimbune nodded again.

  “Damn it,” the Womb said, flatly. “Damn you, Kimbune, for leading her here. Damn Unuxekome Ra for telling her too much. And damn her for leading you astray. Innibarish, take Baru aft, to the void rooms where we stowed the others. Clothe her and go!”

  “Shall I blindfold her, Abbatai?”

  “No. Let her see the ship. Let her know that an attack would be insanity.” The Womb’s hands were burning now, bright as a campfire and rising. “Just get her inside my taboos before she’s taken!”

  “Tau told you,” Baru breathed. She understood now. “That’s what you’re afraid of. Tau told you I want to fight Falcrest. Tau warned you I was lying, but there’s someone on this ship who believes me. . . .”

  The Womb slapped Baru, right on the glass cut in her cheek. Baru’s whole mind folded into a thin white crack of pain. “If the Brain’s people find you they will do things to your flesh that will make you regret your fetus ever found a place in your mother’s womb. Listen to me now! Do not let them put anything into your body. Do you understand? Not even water. Better for you to die than to let the baneflesh have you! Your soul will be caught up and mutilated for a thousand years or more!”

  There were centuries of fury in her eyes and for a moment Baru believed with all her heart that the Womb truly was immortal. That the woman she was speaking to was only a vehicle for the mass inside her.

  “And if you lead poor Kimbune to harm,” the Womb hissed, “I’ll have you back in that hole to drown alone—”

  “You won’t kill me,” Baru snarled, advancing on her with the marks of power she had, the flesh wealth of her strength and the Incrastic mark of her well-kept teeth. “You’re immortal, aren’t you? Every one of your lives is infinitely precious. The navy is out there, waiting to burn you, and I am the only thing that can save you now. You need to cut a deal with me.”

  “Get her out of here,” the Womb snapped. “Get her aft. I’ll head the Brain off and meet you there.”

  Kimbune had lied to her. They were not on a ship. This could not be a ship.

  This was a fortress.

  How could that triple-terraced mansion, with its withered gardens and narrow windows, be a ship’s sterncastl
e? How could those eight receding pillars, marching away like columns in a temple gallery, be masts? No ship had ever sailed with eight masts. . . .

  Shattered el-Tsunuqba’s flooded caldera opened to the sea through a mess of fjords to the north. Tall cliffs ringed the south wall. The light of green worms clinging to the cliffs cast tenuous shadows from the rigging: an ecumene of spiderwebs in pale relief across the deck.

  It was the rigging that forced her mind to concede. The lines implied functions, hoist and haul, reef and shakeout; and those functions resolved the whole preposterous immensity into the deck of a ship. A ship twice as long as any ever recorded in the Navy List. Baru made a hasty computation—given her dimensions, she must ship at least a hundred tons of cargo. The profit on a single load would be immense. . . .

  “Behold Eternal,” Innibarish whispered. Even he was awed. Maybe he had watched this ship built, decade by decade, over the course of an immortal life. Maybe.

  “No wonder you’re trapped here,” Baru breathed. “A boar in wet concrete would handle better on the open sea. . . .”

  The shriek of the whale’s metal blowhole sounded from the dark water below. The back of Baru’s throat prickled like the first hint of a cold. She swallowed in fear. She did not understand the whale. She was in the strangest place she had ever been.

  “That is Galganath, our sentry,” Innibarish explained. “Giving the all-clear at the end of a patrol.”

  “You talk to the whale?”

  “Of course we do.”

  “It can speak?”

  “It can hold its breath, can’t it? What’s talking except the choice of when to breathe?”

  They walked aft, circling a steep-roofed, palatial deckhouse built around the masts. Huge rolls of canvas rustled overhead. Capstans with spokes fit for oxen coiled up miles of rope.

  Baru would love to be captain of this ship—no, not the captain, the ship’s master and owner. She would love to have the blueprints, and a way to build more. . . .

  She scoured the design for clues. The weather deck was built of the same expensive-looking dark teak as the Tubercule chamber, and it had been carved, not in florid oriasques or humid jungle patterns, but into fingernail-tiny geometric links. Diamonds and hexagons, constructed of short straight strokes, chained together like maille . . . and there were initials in the shapes, too, left by builders or sailors, each letter joined to the greater pattern with reverent care.

  On a Falcresti ship, there would be crews out here on sunny days, dragging qualmstones up and down, singing their work songs as they scoured. How could there be engravings on the deck? Where was the weathering on the wood? Where were the stains left by years of feet?

  The wood must be of incredible quality to last so well.

  Not a human soul moved anywhere. Not up in the masts. Not in the acres of rigging and blocks. Not one exhalation disturbed the smell of pitch, tar, turpentine, and lime. The stillness tugged on a childhood terror of ghost ships, and when a bead of condensation dripped from a ratline above her, Baru was sure it would splash on the deck as black Kettling blood.

  This ship had supplied the Canaat rebels. This ship had weapons on it, and people willing to use them against Falcrest and its pawns.

  She had to find them.

  She looked out the other way, into the darkness of the caldera, where luminous green water licked at the bluffs. She had to conclude her business here and escape before Xate Yawa arrived and her lies collapsed.

  “You wanted to speak to your aide,” Innibarish said. “This way.”

  Who turned you?”

  Baru seized Shao Lune by the high cheekbones of her sweet heart-shaped face. The web of her thumb cut between Shao’s parted lips and she noticed, again, that she was missing two fingers on her right hand: she forgot that sometimes, because the hand was on her blind side.

  Staff Captain Shao Lune bit her.

  Baru clamped her hand down and didn’t let go. Chew me, then: you haven’t the fire for it, Lune, you’re too dignified.

  “You put a jellyfish trail on Ra’s boat. Who gave you the chemicals? Who’s following us?”

  “Let me go.” Baru’s blood smeared across Shao’s full lips. “Let me go and I’ll tell you.”

  The Womb had installed Shao Lune in a cabin that suited her entirely: leather furniture in pools of candlelight, a rich and finished place. There was no inscription on the deck here. As if this space were an embassy, a pocket in the Cancrioth pattern where outsiders could be stowed.

  Baru remembered another room, another confrontation, where Tain Hu had thrown her down on her back and hissed you gave us too much. She shoved Shao Lune to the floor. The staff captain’s salt-soaked uniform crackled beneath her as she fell. Her elbows clapped on hardwood; her beautiful face twisted viciously.

  Baru put a foot on her throat before she could spit something too foul to forgive. “Tell me who turned you.”

  “Yawa.” Shao relaxed, suddenly playful beneath the steel tip of the boot. “I told Yawa I’d help her take you, in exchange for a pardon. Just a move in the game, Agonist.”

  Baru dug her heel in. “Now she knows how to find this ship. You’ve put all my gains in danger. I should’ve left you in the bilge.”

  “But I’m not hers, Baru,” Shao said, just as smooth as wet ice. “I warned you she was conspiring against you. I gave you a chance to outbid her. You still have that chance. You know me, Baru. You know I’ll work for whoever benefits me, and that’s why I’m the only one you can trust. We’re trapped here. Yawa can’t save me. I need you. You need me.”

  “You’re really reprehensible,” Baru said, in wonder and in relief. Shao’s mercenary allegiance made much more tactical sense than Tau-indi’s unconditional trust. Look where that had brought Tau.

  “I need you now.” Shao’s voice husked against Baru’s heel. “I need you to be the savant they say you are. You’ve been weak, Baru, you’ve been pathetic—”

  “I have not!”

  “Oh, come now. I was locked up in Helbride’s bilge and even I know how bewildered you’ve been. How purposeless. You got hopelessly drunk and slept with me!” Shao blinked at her, mockingly astonished. “Healthy people don’t do things like that.”

  “I imagine healthy people want nothing to do with you,” Baru snapped.

  “Healthy people don’t need so many nightcaps,” Shao retorted. “Really, Baru, what have you done lately except run from your problems and fall into traps? You’re ruined.

  “But I remember what happened the last time you were ruined. Everyone in Aurdwynn dismissed you after you destroyed the fiat note and alienated the Governor. Everyone thought you were finished. And that was when you triumphed.”

  Shao arched up against Baru’s foot, reminding Baru, suddenly, of the mountaineering net she wore beneath her uniform, the clinging survival gear that trapped air against her skin for warmth. “You can do it again, can’t you? You and I? We have such an opportunity! A ship out of the far west, full of exotic people, new languages, new flora and fauna, all their books and maps. We have a chance to find out what they can offer us! This is what Falcrest does!”

  Baru flinched like Shao had stung her heel. “When will Yawa come for me?”

  “I don’t know. Who knows what she’ll do when she finds this ship? This is our chance, Baru, not hers.”

  Baru dug her foot back in. She didn’t trust Shao, and she doubly distrusted her need for Shao to say a little more, to assure her that she was a savant, and not a whiskey-soaked ruin.

  “Please,” Shao wheezed. “Let me be useful.”

  Something shuddered against Baru’s balance. Like an interior riptide, pouring across her thoughts, running out into a right-side ocean. She felt for an instant as if clouds had parted, and she had seen, in the distance, a place where sea and sky whirled together, a maelstrom as tall as a cyclone’s eye and as deep as the green ash sea. All the gathered wreckage of her course, all the broken things she had left behind her, seemed to drift tow
ard that place of convergence, and she began to recognize in the debris the image of a face. . . .

  And then it passed.

  She had a purpose here, a purpose she couldn’t forget. Find the Kettling. Find a way to transport it. Release it in Falcrest. That was what Tain Hu would want. Shao Lune could be useful in that work; Baru could allow her to believe they were working together, as she’d let Tain Hu believe. Do it again, Baru, like you did it before.

  “Where’s Tau?” Baru forced herself to ask. “Are they all right?”

  “The Prince? Still having a snit, I suppose. Probably in one of the other cabins back here. We’re not guarded, as far as I can tell. Everyone’s busy belowdecks. Listen.”

  She beckoned Baru to lay her ear against the deck.

  Very distantly, passed through wood and air, Baru heard running feet and shouting. The slam of wood on wood. It sounded like a very subdued riot.

  “No pistol shots,” she noted. “No screams.”

  “None I’ve heard.”

  “Maybe they hate killing each other. Because they’re immortal.”

  Shao Lune snorted. “Of course they are.”

  “Who do you think’s fighting?”

  “I don’t know. Who can say what divides these people?”

  “Me,” Baru said, uneasily. “They’ve learned I’m here. Some of them want to find me, and others won’t allow it. . . .”

  Shao Lune rolled onto her back and began to undo her uniform. “You stink. We should both wash, or the salt will give us sores.”

  “You have water?” Baru gasped.

  “In there—there’s no tap, but the cask is full, and it’s only a little stagnant—”

  Baru lunged for the washroom.

  Baru drank greedily. It was cool and clean and good. When her thirst was finished, she cleaned her hands and took off the cassock Innibarish had given her to wash. Shao Lune washed, too, and Baru found herself noticing the net, that damn mountaineering net Shao Lune had worn for warmth, the way it portioned Shao’s smooth skin and indulgent build into sectors which stressed and distorted. Like a map, like a chart of resources and luxuries. Baru had admired the diver Ulyu Xe for her oneness, her indivisibility, the way one line became another curve, calf became hip became flank, so you could not possibly separate her into pieces.