The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  Tain Shir went back to the crab meat on the fire. “Farrier is more than what you see of him. He is always presenting one face for you. Other aspects for others in the Throne. Countless faces.”

  “Not countless,” Barhu corrected her. “Six faces. Three here. Yawa, Svir, and I. Plus Hesychast, Stargazer, and Renascent in Falcrest. Seven if you count him.”

  “You know the Cryptarch’s Qualm.” Shir chose a claw and tested it with her knife. “What does it tell you?”

  The Cryptarch’s Qualm. Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. To use your power you must touch the world. To touch you must be touched, to be touched is to be seen, to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish. . . .

  Barhu straightened in thought. The tightening wound across her back complained at the shift. “I suppose it tells me that . . . that the most powerful cryptarchs would be the most secret. Like Renascent.”

  “If you know her name,” Ake said, crossly, “do you really think she’s the most secret?”

  “I know them all, there aren’t any others—”

  Shir laughed like a jackal. “You think you know every cryptarch? There are more of them in Falcrest. There are many cells.”

  “No,” Barhu insisted, “there were many cells once, before the Throne was purged and rebuilt, and now there is only one—”

  “Wrong. They needed you to do provincial work, out here on the Empire’s frontier. So they gave you a provincial’s knowledge of the truth.”

  Barhu hated this thought. But the worst part was that it made sense. If the Throne was a miniature model of the Imperial Republic . . . wouldn’t the provincials, Barhu and Yawa and even Svir, be excluded from the true core of power?

  Didn’t it have a certain logic?

  Damn it, she had to talk to the eryre. If it was in there, if it was somehow guiding her, it must have a plan. It must! And if it didn’t—

  If it didn’t, then she should’ve taken the baneflesh, and the Kettling.

  Shir ripped off the coconut crab’s bulbous abdomen and bit into it. Thick yellow oil stained her chin like yolk. “Good. Tastes sweet. Like coconut.” She offered the bulb to Ake. “Try it. It’ll make you want to fuck.”

  Ake barked a laugh. “After today? I don’t think so.”

  Shir shrugged and took another drink. “I’ve seen worse.”

  “In the jungle?” Barhu asked.

  Shir shook her head. “In Falcrest. On raids.” She swallowed another gulp of buttery fluid. “You’re wasting your time going to the Kyprists tomorrow. To get to Governor Love you’ll need to pass through waters held by Unuxekome Ra’s faction.”

  “She’ll let me pass,” Ake said. Somehow she could hold Shir’s eyes without difficulty. “She hates Xate Yawa. My husband died in Yawa’s cellars. So we have some common ground.”

  “You think you can talk your way past?”

  “Yes,” Ake said, without hesitation. Barhu glanced at her in surprise and respect.

  Shir offered her the crab’s dripping abdomen. “How do you know that?”

  “Because,” Ake said, accepting the goblet, “I was Tain Hu’s friend and regent. I never betrayed her. And Unuxekome Ra knows that Tain Hu was her son’s true and faithful friend.”

  Screams and pistol fire came dimly out of the night. The Kyprists on the reservoir islands fighting off another assault, maybe. Canaat swarming up beaches barbed in broken glass.

  Barhu knelt in the shallows, in a mass of interested wrasse fish, to hang up her clothes on the low branches of a dead pandanus shrub. She was thinking, in sleek runs of harnessed idea that came apart and crashed like cavalry on a wet descending slope, about her plan to end Falcrest.

  She was confident that she had a plan, and that the details of it were hidden not only in her blind side, but in the things that she had done since the Elided Keep. Money games on the Llosydanes. Ake’s letter of governorship to rule Vultjag. Sniffing the deck on Eternal. It all meant something . . .

  But what? What?

  “Your wounds,” her blind side said.

  The Thing named Shir stood, silhouetted in the distant firelight, in the shape of a broad dark woman holding a severed crab limb as long as her arm. A bark-cloth satchel dangled from her breechcloth; otherwise she wore saltwater and fire soot. One of her breasts was cut almost in half.

  “Why didn’t the Cancrioth whale attack you?” Barhu blurted. “Because you were throwing it fish?”

  Tain Shir gave a roar of delight. “That’s good. I like that. The whale is my friend.” She held up the satchel. “Your wounds need tending. The sutures on your back are dirty. And your hand should have a fresh dressing.”

  “What, you use medicine now? You don’t just slap mud on your wounds? You and your—” An inchoate wave at the whole concept of Shir. “Your barbarism?”

  The great brown head, dark as Hu was dark, cheekbones as strong, brow heavy, nose unbroken and curiously smaller, flatter, wider than Hu’s, and the eyes like pits: all of it inclined in curiosity. “Is that what you see? A barbarian?”

  “I’d struggle for a better word,” Barhu admitted.

  The Object descended on her, claiming nothing, possessing only itself, as transiently and enormously present as a mountain cat padding through the forest: beast-hot, sinuously alive.

  “You want something of me,” it said.

  “Not that,” Barhu said, laughing sharply.

  “Not what?”

  “Not—never mind. I want to know if you know a way to . . .” She waved at her own head. “To reach across yourself. To ask a question of . . . the other half of yourself.”

  Tain Shir stared down at her impassively, waiting for her to make sense.

  “I’m split!” Barhu snapped, in frustration. “There’s two of me in my brain, and the one you’re talking to—she needs to know something the other one’s thinking.”

  “I see,” Shir said, and came closer.

  Barhu was suddenly aware that she was kneeling. She began to get up. Tain Shir pushed her down on her folded legs and, with all the focus of a cat, began to clean the wound across Barhu’s back. The Kyprist alcohol wash stung, but cleanly. Like a ghost’s caress, receding. Barhu sighed.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said. “You were trying to kill me.”

  “You accepted death. There was no denial or deception left in you. So you can live.”

  “I don’t understand you at all.”

  She took Barhu’s injured hand now, unwrapping it gently, the very same hand she had cut on the Llosydanes. Barhu felt absolutely corporeal, her whole awareness rising and falling with the surf against her thighs and the uncoiling might of Shir’s body breathing at her back.

  “But you need to find things you can’t understand,” Shir said. “Who would you be if you understood everything? Finished.”

  The linen came off her injured stumps. Shir prodded the wounded remnants, which made Barhu hiss and curl up stiff against her.

  “Too much bone in there,” Shir said. “It should be reduced. Not now. In a surgery.”

  “Why did you cut my fingers off?”

  “You define yourself by what you sacrifice. So the sacrifices had to begin coming out of you. Not from others. You yourself.”

  “Is there a way to speak to the rest of me, Shir? Is it possible?”

  She neither moved nor spoke but there was a sudden concurrence of shapes between Shir’s overarching body and the bend of Barhu’s naked back. A sense of nestedness, like one bowl beneath another.

  “The spine lies beneath the brain,” Shir said. “Perhaps the answer is in your spine.”

  “Don’t break my spine!”

  “Let me teach you something. A way of being in yourself, in your own flesh. This will oppose Farrier. He despises the flesh as he despises all of unconditioned existence.”

  “What do I—”

  “Be still. Let your thoughts out into the water. Let them drift.”

  A weight lay on Barhu, not unple
asant but massive: her mind’s awareness of Shir behind her. She knelt in the warm rushing water, conscious of the hard power in her core and the ache of tired thighs, her beating heart and swelling lungs, all of these not separate from but part of her thoughts. The engine of her body-mind turning, the experience of the world like a river passing through her, powering her but not overwhelming her. And the more fiercely that world raged through her, the stronger she would build the mechanism, to convert the passage of events into thought and force and desire.

  Oh Himu, I am alive. I want to be alive, I want to want things, I want so much. I choose to live.

  Her spine was half an inch from Shir’s chest. Tau-indi was right. There were wounds in the human world, and Shir was one of them. But Barhu would not turn away. She would not fear. The less she understood, the more she wanted to know. And there was no other living woman in the world who had done anything as intimate to Barhu as chopping off two of her fingers.

  “Now,” Shir murmured, “listen to yourself. Let yourself speak.”

  She adjusted the arch of her body and Barhu found herself flowing into an echoing posture, hard to hold. Her arms columned outside Barhu’s, breath hot on her scalp. The bestial tension of Shir’s core almost brushing Barhu’s naked back. Do not think. Do not consider. Only listen.

  Shir rose up minutely away from Barhu and Barhu had to lift herself a little on her knees, tighten her thighs and her stomach and her aching back, to keep the same distance. And Shir breathed. And Shir breathed. Barhu trembled with the strain of holding the posture. Her breath quickened in time with Shir’s.

  Are you there? she thought. Are you there, Hu?

  I’m here.

  Are you there?

  I’m with you, Baru.

  Are you there, please?

  Can’t you hear me?

  Give me a sign, please, somehow.

  If I can find a way.

  I need you. I need you. I need you.

  I’m here! Listen!

  She was breathing quickly now, faster than Shir. Aware of almost nothing but Shir’s body behind her and her own desperation for a sign. Her thighs and core were trembling with tension, her calves cramped, her arms shaking. Her spine was sore, a dull rod drawn like a longbow. And Barhu had the strangest feeling that it was burning like a fuse: that something inside her was reaching down to grip her vertebrae, this road they shared.

  Is that you? Is that you, imuira?

  I love you, Baru.

  Suddenly one thing happened, and then another, without any movement on Barhu’s part. “Huh,” she grunted, in surprise. It was quick and violent, like breaking a fist, finger by finger. She grunted again, and exhaled, in wonder. She had not known that was possible.

  “Is your question answered?” Shir asked her, without any sign of mockery.

  “No,” Barhu said, a little breathlessly. “But I feel . . . I feel better.”

  “Then I think it was answered.” Shir got up. Saltwater poured down her calves. “A curious reaction. You have knots inside you, woman. You pull them as taut as you can, and think that gives you relief. Learn to untie yourself.”

  “Wait! Wait, was that not—not meant to happen?”

  “I taught you how to ask a question. Your body answered. If you are asking me what should’ve happened to you, then you have learned nothing at all.”

  And Shir wandered off into the groves, leaving Barhu in the water beside her airing clothes. The crab leg, folded on the satchel in the sand, smelled deliciously of fire. She took it up and ate.

  That, she thought, had been strange. But this was a place for strange things. And if Shir frightened her, if that had aroused her, well, at least she knew her own perversions better.

  All the tense crouching left her neck sore.

  16

  Things Fall Apart

  Juris Ormsment staggered up the black beach toward the men with the pistols.

  Her crew saved her. Against all her orders and all her fury they bound her to a spar and threw her clear of burning Sulane. She had wanted more than anything to die with them, and they had mutinied against her last command.

  They’d done their duty. Someone had to tell the truth about what had happened here.

  “Hey!” she called, wading out of the shallow breakers. “Hey, you!” She didn’t speak a word of el-Psubim, but what did it matter now? “What island is this?”

  The pistoleers turned toward her. One of them was bleeding from his eyes. “Are you a foreigner?” another shouted. “Do you know medicine?”

  Oh, they were infected. Red eyes and runny noses, one man trembling with chills. Flu symptoms. First stage Kettling, except the bleeding man, who was in the terminal stage. Well. Her ship was lost. She would not go to any great pains to protect what little remained of her life.

  “Give me cloth.” Taking the mulberry work shirt offered to her, she fastened it around the bleeding man’s head. “The blood is what spreads it, see? You can’t let your blood touch anyone.”

  “The Exile Duchess told us it was holy,” one man said, in very clear but very un-Falcresti Aphalone. “She told us that the elected ones would bear the sickness but never grow sick.”

  “Do you have a triage station? A hospital?” She looked around for a cone snail or something, anything, to put the dying man quickly out of his misery. They would have to dispose of the body, and then she would rally these men as a work gang, and try to organize a new quarantine. If only Captain Nullsin could be convinced to spare some Burn—but trusting Nullsin had been her downfall.

  She thought of Aminata and wanted to cry out. Poor Aminata. Dead on Sulane, with all the rest. Dead because she’d wanted justice, and Juris, thinking she could offer it, had taken Aminata in as her own.

  She’d failed. All come to nothing. All the dead betrayed.

  “Who are you, anyway?” one of the men asked her, watching her run her fingers through the wet sand, looking for a deadly snail.

  “I’m . . .” Juris began, and didn’t know what to say next. “I know a little medicine. I can help.”

  Barhu woke up with a headache.

  “It’s fine,” she grumbled, as Ake Sentiamut ignored her. “I’m fine.”

  Ake, who was so bright red and burnt that she crackled when she moved, was loading up a canoe for the day’s attempt to reach the Kyprists. “When do we go?” Barhu groaned.

  “You don’t.” Ake levered a water barrel into the canoe with her knee. “If Ra’s rebels intercept us, they’ll kill you. So you stay here.”

  Ridiculous. Obviously she had to be there to persuade Barber-General Love. “You’ll need me,” Barhu insisted, and tried to get up. She couldn’t.

  Ake pushed the canoe into the gentle surf. “Wait!” Barhu spat. “Wait, you’ll—tell Governor Love about the apocalypse fuse!”

  Ake pulled away into the channel between islets, paddling badly but with vigor.

  “I’ve been abandoned,” Barhu complained. The Morrow-men would be nearby, of course, and they could get her back to the ship.

  She rolled over onto her back and stared at the hot blue sky. If the other mind in her head had a plan, and that plan was hidden in Barhu’s recent actions . . . what part of the plan required Ake Sentiamut to be armed with a letter of authority and sent back to Vultjag?

  She’d given Ake orders about trade. So that was a constraint, a way to focus her investigation. The answer involved trade.

  And Vultjag was in the north of Aurdwynn, pressed up against the Wintercrests. First to fall if the Stakhieczi invaded. Did she mean for Ake to establish trade with them?

  She thought, suddenly, of the black iroko wood on Eternal. It would be an incredibly valuable trade item. . . .

  “Turn your head,” Tain Shir said, from her blind side.

  “What?” Barhu grunted.

  “Turn your head side to side.”

  Barhu did not want to. “Listen, you’ve got to go up el-Tsunuqba. There’s a bomb up there which will cause an avalanche to de
stroy the entire kypra. I need you to prevent its use. I need time to work.”

  “I know. Turn your head.”

  “Why does it matter if I turn my head?” Barhu snapped.

  “Because you’re nodding while you talk, but you don’t turn your head. Turn your head.”

  “Of course I can turn my head, see—”

  The pain was so strong it made her double up cringing into her lap.

  “What happened to your eye?” Shir snapped. “Weren’t you punched?”

  “No—your aunt, she started to lobotomize me—”

  “Did she drill a hole?”

  Barhu nodded. That hurt less.

  “You have meningitis.”

  “I do not have meningitis!”

  But none of Barhu’s protests could stop Shir from lifting her and carrying her south. After a while she stopped understanding her own protests. She tried to shut up. Her mouth went on moaning.

  What if it’s Kettling?” someone was asking. “What if she gives it to all of us?”

  She cried out weakly because her head was an open red sore. Xate Yawa leaned over her, masked, waving a mirror before her eyes.

  “Hello,” Barhu said, daftly, as a world of masts and feet and blue jungle-crow eyes orbited her skull. Her aching brain had swelled up and begun to tunnel out her right eye socket. “Saw your niece.”

  “Meningitis.” Yawa snapped the mirror shut. “Get her below. If she has Kettling, too, we’ll just have to keep her in quarantine and mind her fluids. It won’t pass to us unless we’re very foolish, or she breaks with the pneumocystic type.”

  “I can’t go below,” Barhu protested, “I’ve got to arrange the water truce. . . .”

  “Whatever you want to tell us,” Svir said, appearing out of Barhu’s rightness in a flash of red, “you’d better say it now. You may not be with us much longer.”

  “Yes. Yes.” She fumbled through her thoughts. They would not come into any kind of order. “The teak. The iroko wood. I meant to . . . oh, I can’t remember. Use the water as leverage. They can’t sail without water. . . .”

  “Listen to her,” Ake said, “half dead and she’s still certain she knows what’s best.”