The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “They’ve almost got the killing shot,” Svir reported with a catch of fury in his voice. “Damn it. Damn Ormsment and all her traitor crew. It shouldn’t have come to this. I would’ve sworn we pulled her too far out of position, especially with the rudder gone . . .”

  “No,” Barhu said, though there was nothing to do now: “No, it won’t happen. I know it won’t. I have a plan for that ship.”

  A light kindled in Sulane’s rigging.

  Barhu took it for the first flash of a rocket launch and gasped in horror. But it was a flare, a green chemical flare. The flare began to bob and dance, and then Barhu realized someone was waving it, signaling in navy semaphore:

  S H O O T A T M E

  It was Aminata.

  N U L S H O O T N O W

  A M N S H O O T M E

  SHOOT

  SHOOT

  SHOOT

  Barhu had walked away from so many things. Taranoke. Treatymont. Sieroch. The Llosydanes. Eternal. Always escaping just in time, before the real cataclysm.

  She had no idea what kind of strength it must take to stay behind.

  S H O O T

  Ascentatic ignited her hwachas.

  Nullsin did not, in the end, hold back. It was a full barrage, sixty-four rocket arrows per hwacha by eight hwachas, five hundred and twelve burning arrows and not one a misfire. A plague of screaming narrow things. Their shadows moved on the sea. Dawn-glint reflections off steel shafts. Streaks of fire, dwindling as motors burnt.

  Nullsin fired on his own mutinous fleetmate.

  The hwacha barrage stitched Sulane’s rigging. Sailors fell from the lines and the tops to plunge impaled into the warm water. Not one of those who survived abandoned her post: lose the sails and you lose the battle, and they would not let their admiral lose.

  “Aminata,” Barhu croaked. She’d been up there.

  Fire caught in the shrouds, ignited by an arrow with an incendiary head. For a moment Sulane was crowned, left and right of the mainsail, by converging lines of flame, climbing the shroud lines. Then the sails caught.

  Sulane was on the southerly leg of her upwind tack. With the sails suddenly ruined, the dawn gusts fought her emergency rudder and, by degrees, won. The ship’s prow came south toward el-Tsunuqba. Her stern slewed north.

  She was caught broadside on to Eternal.

  On Sulane’s sleek prow, a rocketry crew winched their mount around to bear on the golden ship. The rocketry mate knelt with her hands on the fuse-cords. Barhu saw Juris Ormsment, up on the taffrail, pointing one-handed toward the target. She dropped her hand like an axe: fire!

  The Cancrioth shot every cannon they had.

  Thunderflash, white jet of cannon, recoil pushing the black weapons like marching ant legs. The percussion drummed inside Barhu’s chest, a feeling like giddiness, like nausea.

  The crew at Sulane’s prow Flying Fish launcher went to pieces in a blast of dateshot. The fused rocket fell off the launch mechanism and rolled across the deck. A pale little girl-sailor leapt onto the loose rocket, hugged it to her chest, and ran for the rail to leap overboard. It didn’t matter. The volley of point-blank cannon shot walked down Sulane’s starboard flank from prow to stern. Ricochets and low shots, waterspouts and snapped yardarms, cannonballs bouncing off the frigate’s copper and wood, snapped ropes whipping in panic: and then the fateful penetration, forward of the amidships frame and right about the waterline, into the rocket magazines. Which were too well-built for the cannonball to blow through the far wall and escape again.

  With her intuition for structures Barhu could see the ball smashing through the stacked rockets and fireworks, ricocheting off firebreaks, splashing casks of piss, until, eventually, inevitably, powder crushed beneath hard iron, or the ball smashed a canister of Burn.

  The Traitor-Admiral’s flagship ate itself.

  Eternal, packed full of fine powder, would have exploded. Sulane went up slow and fat, the greasy squirming Burn spilling out through hatches and climbing the lines, the whole ship inhaling wind, hammocks curling like dying spiders, rats chittering in brown running rivers over the sides. The midships stairway exhaled white sparks onto the burning rigging. Everything afire now, the frigate drifting south into el-Tsunuqba’s black crags. Sulane spouted a drunken round of fireworks, a last ecstatic spasm, the mutiny is over, hoorah, hoorah, and the hulk ran down the current toward ruined el-Tsunuqba, the slouching enormity of the mountain waiting like a huge shattered cup, tipped over to welcome Sulane into its dregs.

  Then Sulane struck one of her own mines.

  The blast boiled whitewater all around the dying frigate, and as if to meet and match the fire, the ocean came up, inch by inch, into her hull, to drag her down.

  Barhu watched it all burn.

  Hey, thirteen-year-old Baru said, in the throatiest, most confident voice she could manage, not, in the end, really managing at all. Hey, she said, to the girl she envied so much, the lanky Oriati midshipman who got to carry a sword.

  Hey yourself, Aminata said.

  NOW

  Cairdine Farrier is washing her hair.

  “Let me be sure I’ve followed.” He teases the knots from her short growth. “You tracked Abdumasi Abd’s water purchases to Kyprananoke, where you found a Cancrioth ship. You were captured and taken aboard. But after meeting with their leaders, you negotiated your way out by offering them Shao Lune as a hostage against your good conduct and promising to repatriate Abd to their care once you found him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They believed you?”

  “Of course they believed me, Mister Farrier. They’re a people of careful pedigrees. Heredity is everything to them. When I told them I hated Falcrest, my skin was the only proof they needed.”

  “And you’re certain they’re descended from the old slavers?”

  “The Brain has a cancer in her mind, Mister Farrier. It’s very hard for her to lie. The hard part, rather, is separating the truth from her delusions.”

  He allows himself to exult, so she will know how well she’s done. “When the world learns what they did to Kyprananoke, Baru, and to Tau-indi Bosoka, no one will be able to deny the need to act. I’ll put it in the broadsheets. I’ll have it sung in every market in the Mbo. I’ll tell Parliament and they’ll approve whatever consequences I suggest.”

  She nods. Her scalp moves beneath Farrier’s careful fingers and he flinches back, as he always does when he feels he has touched her accidentally.

  “Mister Farrier. Did you ever miss the Mbo, after you left?”

  “Oh, I suppose so.” He sighs nostalgically. He knows exactly what to do to play this question off. “It was quite . . . seductively idyllic. A place where you might think everything would turn out fine, if you just let it be. Childish, in that way. Naïve.” What everyone thought of Tau-indi Bosoka, at first. What she thought. “Of course, turn over that warm stone and you’ll find the squirming things underneath. Parasitic nobility, everywhere you look. Constant raiding and warfare under the guise of ‘ritual combat.’ Families who won’t speak to each other over trade conflicts five centuries old. A system of inherited class they won’t call slavery. . . .”

  “And the women,” she says, with a chuckle in her voice. “Too much trouble by half.”

  Farrier’s hands seize for a moment on her hair. “Baru! Don’t say things like that.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it? Everyone knows that. Even my friend Aminata would tell me jokes about Oriati women. How everyone wants them and hates to admit it.” She lets the calm, cool air lull her voice toward sleep. “She thought the jokes were funny. . . .”

  “Please, Baru.” He unclenches his hands, smooths out the tangle he’s made. “It’s true that the women are . . . not always given a chance to behave correctly. But some of that is exaggeration and prejudice. Some of it is fetishization of the foreign. When we talk about Oriati women as intrinsically erotic, somehow, we place demands on them. We contribute to their degradation.”

/>   “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be uncouth.” She lowers her chin contritely. “I was just trying to see things from your perspective. To imagine how it was, when you were there.”

  A STORY ABOUT ASH 9

  Federation Year 912:

  23 Years Earlier

  Upon Prince Hill, by Lake Jaro

  in Lonjaro Mbo

  They left at dawn to arrange the surrender.

  The decision took only a few words. “The other Princes will gather at Kutulbha,” Kindalana said, “to bring help, or to grieve the dead. We’ll deliver the terms of surrender. We’ll call a vote.”

  Mother Tahr would come with them. Cosgrad Torrinde and Cairdine Farrier would come. Padrigan eshSegu would stay on Prince Hill to heal while his daughter went on mission. Abdumasi Abd would also stay behind to manage the houses, bound by trim to a merchant’s duty.

  Prince Hill’s little Mbo would be divided.

  Poor Abdu wept into Kindalana’s shoulder. He made silent, yawning, damp screams into Tau-indi’s breast. They’d all known his mother Abdi-obdi as a cheerful absence, the woman who was always bustling around the edges of Abdumasi’s life, out on business for months or years at a time. She was gone but she had always been gone. The difference was that there was no possibility, not anymore, for Tau-indi to turn to her and say, oh, you are a person, alive, and I want to know you.

  Abdumasi stood with his house to see them off. When Tau-indi passed, he stared at them with bright eyes, red-rimmed, sleepless.

  “This is your fault,” he said. “I won’t forget.”

  At first Tau thought Abdu was talking to them. But Abdumasi stared past painted Prince Bosoka, past the chained and silkened Prince Kindalana, at plain-shirted Cosgrad Torrinde and nattily dressed Cairdine Farrier.

  Cosgrad hunched his strong shoulders and looked at his toes. Cairdine Farrier held Abdumasi’s eyes for a few moments and then said, quietly but firmly, “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  Abdu spat at him. Farrier nodded.

  Kindalana tried to give Abdu a formal good-bye. “Surely,” she said, “you will find more practical uses for your time, without me to distract you.”

  “Yeah,” he said, roughly, trying to tell the same old joke, “yeah, I bet I will, you’re just so . . .”

  But he had nothing to say. So he stepped forward and kissed her, right in front of all three houses.

  Halfway down the hill, Abdumasi shouted and ran after Tau-indi to hug them and kiss them on the brow.

  They went north, downriver from Lake Jaro to the coast. Swarming catfish parted before the boat. Rain fell in short furious bursts. To the north and east, in the direction of the Tide Column, farmers burnt their blighted fields and huge pillows of ash rose up to color the sun.

  “Why are there vultures?” Tau-indi asked the barge crew. “What do vultures want with ash and burnt fields?”

  There was a bush scout aboard, part of a shua band, her face white with clay sunblock. She pounded doorbag milk by the bucket but never seemed to get too drunk. “They smell death,” she told Tau. “Animals flee the fire. Animals on the run die. Vultures feast.”

  Tau-indi imagined a fan of carrion, spreading out across the Mbo, and shuddered.

  The bushman looked Tau up and down speculatively, lingering on their hips. “You’re one of the Princes?”

  “Yes,” Tau said, nodding graciously, “as it pleases the people.”

  “Seventeen?”

  “Not quite,” Tau said, though they felt like preening. “Do I look like I’m seventeen?”

  “Parts,” the woman said, without quite leering.

  Tau, whose household staff were always respectful and therefore very dull, who had sat with rising frustration through many audiences with renegade and beautiful shua, sat up a bit straighter and raised their chin. “And if I were seventeen—”

  “No, no no no,” the woman said, chuckling, but looking away. “Don’t trust anyone who says a thing like that to you, understand? Not while you’re a child.”

  “I shouldn’t trust you?”

  She grinned half-toothlessly and wobbled her hand. “Not that way,” she said. “I live too much with dogs.”

  In the burning fields whirlwinds descended to stir the ash.

  Tau-indi and Kindalana walked through the port at Yama, speaking to the crews, plucking at ties of money and duty until they found a dromon they could commandeer without ruining the crew’s fortune. People gathered around them as they moved. Hand in hand, Tau and Kinda preached hope to the crowd, telling them how the Mbo, like a basket weave, would tighten as it strained.

  Then they sailed west, toward wounded Segu and burnt Kutulbha. The rowers pulled in time with the drums, their broad backs bent, moving the ship out of harbor with a grunting work song.

  “This is the Mbo,” Tau-indi said, showing Cosgrad the crew all together. “This strength of harmony.”

  Cosgrad turned his notebook over in his hands, writing nothing. “You know what I’ll say, don’t you?”

  “You’ll tell me something about Falcrest strength. About your special oars. Your sentences and mathematics describing the correct oarmen.”

  “Our ships have no oars.”

  “What do you do when the wind goes against you?”

  “We can always make the wind useful.” Cosgrad hesitated. “I don’t think I can tell you about that. It’s a military matter.”

  Tau wanted to seize him and beg him to make it right. Cosgrad, they would cry, Cosgrad, stop this! Let us be together, all of us. Let us trade and sing. You and I, your people and mine—

  But Cosgrad would say, sadly, Tau, there are powers at work here you don’t understand.

  And perhaps Tau was the fool. Perhaps the world had never been about trading and singing together.

  “You’re sad,” Cosgrad said, softly. “Is it about . . . ?”

  “Everything.”

  “I know.” Cosgrad stared down into the rippling water. “Me too.”

  Kindalana walked among the rowers, touching their shoulders, letting them see the Prince whose birth they had elected. She looked back at Tau-indi and Cosgrad, her jewels and chains gleaming in the dark. She was beautiful, wasn’t she? Not as an ornament, but as an intent, a mind that was a face and a body and all the things that body wore, an active and inseparable wholeness.

  She would be famous for it, Tau realized. Famous for charisma and compulsion, for the way you felt when you looked at her, as if you desperately wanted to be worthy of her thoughts. And she knew it, had known it for years. What a terrible wonder to know your own beauty, without shame, and to set it to use, for yourself and for your duty.

  Cosgrad would have equations to describe those arches of chain Kindalana wore, those filigreed catena from ear to nose. But he would have no equations to describe Kindalana, or the way she made people feel. Not yet.

  Cosgrad and Farrier caught lice and had to shave their heads.

  In Kutulbha, rain fell on the ash and made it into a paste of wood and flesh that settled like concrete. The city became a plate of mortar and the mortar was full of skulls.

  But they had not reached Kutulbha yet.

  “Farrier will come for all of you,” Cosgrad said. He stood on their dromon’s stern, looking out over evening harbor at a quiet fishery town where no one, not even the children, threw good-luck bread to the shearwaters. There was no grain to make bread anymore. “Farrier has his appetites set on Oriati Mbo.”

  Down below them, in the harbor shallows, a jellyfish pulsed blue-green. Tau-indi gathered their khanga up a little closer. “What appetites do you mean?”

  Cosgrad scowled, like a spike driven up through his face, and then sighed. The sigh was strange because it was full of shame. “Farrier is an explorer, a very public man, a man in favor. Everyone loves Mister Farrier. He writes books and gives speeches, he is seen with women of advantage, he is summoned to Parliament to give testimony . . . even on matters of heredity and social hygiene, which are my speci
alty.”

  Tau-indi set a hip against the rail and smiled up at Cosgrad. “Mister Farrier makes you jealous.”

  He put up a hand to shadow Tau-indi’s face from the sun. “Even here,” he said, sounding like he was trying very hard to joke, “he finds ways to steal from me.” He swallowed and went on very hastily: “What does Kindalana think of me?”

  Tau remembered Kindalana and Abdu, talking about Cosgrad in that cave. “That you’re very beautiful. That you’re a foreign agent. She doesn’t have . . . easily settled feelings about people, I think. She’ll like you in one way and think you’re a fool in another.”

  Cosgrad looked as if he might spit. “Then I hope she’s realized that Mister Farrier is a groomer. He has the nasty habit of befriending young people, treating them like they are his equals, and bending them, gradually, into his instruments.”

  Tau-indi gulped down a laugh before it could get out. Cosgrad saw it and huffed. “No! It’s hardly the same as our friendship.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “We speak. We learn from each other. I’m fair with you, I hope.” He paused there, endearingly, and Tau-indi nodded, yes, he was fair.

  “Cairdine Farrier treats no one as an equal. The world is a bazaar to him. He sails down the Mother of Storms to Devi-naga and says, oh, they have birds with feathers as long as a man is tall, we must study these birds in their habitat. He sails to Taranoke and says, oh, their women are licentious and their men are sodomites, they let their children know what they do, we must save the poor children.

  “But with his letter from Devi-naga he sends a feather, and the invitation to use it as an ornament. With that plea from Taranoke comes a sketch of the Taranoki on their beaches, savage and tempting. He shows people things and tells them not to want them and then sells them anyway. Farrier is a trickster, a liar, a huckster. He dreams of a world in which all men are permanently deceived, their minds bent from birth to serve his idea of a perfect republic. And this war has given him the opportunity to practice his deceit on an imperial scale.”