The Tyrant Read online

  “I remember . . .”

  Kimbune. Kimbune asking her questions, while the water rose around her down in Tubercule.

  “I remember a voice,” she says.

  Act One

  baru’s choice

  Splinters

  Who are you?”

  Baru jerked awake. Slammed her head against wet wood. It was real! It had all been real! The madness in the embassy, the traitor-admiral waiting for her in the dueling circle, the Kyprananoki rebels hemorrhaging black Kettling blood from their swollen eyes. Governor Love screaming as the plague carriers disemboweled themselves and smeared their gore on his face. Aminata’s marines firing the embassy, shooting the guests. Spilled palm wine on burning lilacs.

  And then the shadow ambassador had led Baru down to the secret way beneath the reef. The swim to the ocean. Saltwater pouring off black whaleskin. An orca with a human skull embedded in its breaching back. A woman with swollen cancer in her womb.

  Real. It was all real.

  She had gone to the embassy on Hara-Vijay islet in Kyprananoke. She had gone to find the Cancrioth, and the Cancrioth had found her first.

  “Who are you?” asked the voice from above.

  “Barbitu Plane,” Baru croaked. Her cover. “I’m from the Ministry of Purposes. I’m on a diplomatic mission with . . .”

  She’d had someone with her. She couldn’t remember. Her tongue was slimy, her throat dry. She’d been mouth-breathing for hours. She must have been drugged. As a girl she’d been so embarrassed by the idea of gaping like a fool while asleep that she’d trained herself to frown while she dreamed.

  “Where am I?”

  “You are in Tubercule.”

  She tried to look up and slammed her scalp into a metal clamp. No way to see except by desperately rolling her eyes. She reached up to pull the clamp off and found her hands jammed against the walls of a narrow wooden chute. Claustrophobia loped up growling in the dark. Gods of fire it was so deep dark.

  “Tubercule.” Speech now the only way she could act, and therefore desperately necessary. “What’s that?”

  “Where the dead go to grow.”

  “I’m not dead.”

  “How do you know? Can you move? Can you see?”

  Dog-legged claustrophobia licked at the back of her knees. How deep underground was she? Below the water table? The walls angled in to a joint beneath her. She had to kick and scrabble to keep her feet from sliding together in the pinch. A splinter of soft wood found a toenail, dug beneath. Baru gasped and twisted away. Nowhere to go! Nowhere to go! Water dripped on her scalp and slithered down her body—

  Baru made herself be still, and took comfort by measuring the water level. Counting always soothed her: she never did her figures wrong. She was not imagining it. The water was rising around her legs.

  So it was going to be like that.

  “What do I need to tell you to get out of here?”

  The voice above her was silent.

  “Ask me, damn you!”

  The sound of water kept the time.

  “Let me answer!”

  “Who are you?”

  “I told you! I’m Barbitu Plane!”

  A pedal thumped. A valve opened. Piss-warm water slapped against her back and coiled down her legs. “You’re lying. Your name is Baru Cormorant.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Unuxekome Ra told us.”

  She remembered that name as hands around her throat. Unuxekome Ra, exiled duchess, mother of the Duke Unuxekome who Baru had betrayed. She’d hauled Baru out of the water off Hara-Vijay. And then she’d tried to murder Baru. Someone had stopped her. . . .

  The shadow ambassador. The woman from the embassy, with the tumor that looked like pregnancy. She’d stopped Ra. They’d been on a boat, Baru and the shadow ambassador and Unuxekome Ra and Shao Lune and a man with no lips, and . . . and . . .

  “Tau!” she gasped. “Where’s Tau-indi?”

  “The one who renounced you?” The voice echoed down the shaft above, doubling, doubling again. “Tau-indi Bosoka, who was once a Prince?”

  No,” Tau gasped, “no, no no no, please don’t—”

  “I cut you,” said the shadow ambassador with the tumor in her womb. “I cut you out of trim. Na u vo ai e has ah ath Undionash. I call this power to cut you. Alone you will serve us, Tau-indi Bosoka, alone we will be your masters, to save the nations we both love. Ayamma. A ut li-en.”

  “STOP!” roared Enact-Colonel Osa. The little fishing felucca rocked as the Prince’s bodyguard scrambled between her charge and the shadow ambassador, powerless against sorcery, desperate enough, anyway, to try.

  Unuxekome Ra caught her and kicked her down.

  The shoreline was burning. The beautiful embassy at Hara-Vijay, all its lilac trees and wine and all the people inside, was aflame. Masquerade marines had torched it to contain the Kettling plague. But right now all the pity and fear in Baru’s heart was for Tau-indi Bosoka, who was being cut.

  “Ayamma,” the shadow ambassador repeated. “A ut li-en. It is done.”

  Tau-indi Bosoka fell weeping to their knees. Had their hands been severed from their body, Baru could not have pitied them more. But she could not go to Tau. She was paralyzed by astonishment.

  The shadow ambassador was Cancrioth. The words of the sorcery she’d spoken were Cancrioth. They were real. And she’d done something to Tau. Was it real? It couldn’t be real. Was it real?

  The shadow ambassador lowered her hand. A trick of firelight and setting sun seemed to make her fingers burn cool green. “Well,” she said, shivering now, “that’s over with. Ra, take the boat west. We’ll lose our tails in the kypra and then go home to Eternal. I’ll signal our return on the uranium lamp.”

  “Incredible,” Shao Lune breathed. The navy woman huddled stiff at Baru’s side, her proud uniform and elegant face all wet, staring in astonishment. She was Baru’s hostage and uneasy companion, fled from the service of the Traitor-Admiral Juris Ormsment. “They think they’re doing magic. . . .”

  Unuxekome Ra laughed as she unstayed the boat’s tiller. “You stupid little girl. You think it’s just theater?”

  “I know it’s just theater.”

  “Is it?” Ra pointed past her. “Is that theater? Is that theater?”

  A school of ghostly white jellies had surfaced behind the boat. Thousands of them together, their feeding tentacles intermingled. And through that jelly raft sliced a blade like the moon.

  It was a fin. A whale’s tall black dorsal fin edged in sharpened steel. And behind that fin, a tumor ruptured the sleek back. At first Baru thought it was a huge barnacle, or an infection, but no barnacle was that unnatural sun-bleached sterile color. The tumor was bone. And though it knobbed with spines and bulbous growths, it wept no pus. The wound was clean, the skin knotted tight with scar tissue around the extrusion. Even its contours had been streamlined by the flow of water. . . .

  The creature rolled to bare its passing flank. A tremendous white false eye gazed on Baru: beneath it was a black true eye, keen, aware. Teeth glimmered at her from a carnivore yawn. The whale’s body passed alongside her, and she saw, embedded in the tail end of the tumor, a grinning human skull—its lower jaw subsumed into the flesh—its empty eyes filled with furry, cauliflower-textured bone.

  “Oh Himu,” Baru moaned.

  The whale blew mist and the blowhole whistled like thunder piped down a thigh-bone flute, like the mad shriek of an archon folded into the world from pre-created space. Baru scrabbled up onto the boatwale, battering the two stub fingers on her wounded right hand, crying out in pain but desperate to see.

  “What is it?” she begged. And forgot, for a moment, poor maimed Tau-indi, lost on her blind right side.

  The shadow ambassador whistled to the whale. “Good boy, Galganath!” She threw a fish. The whale’s huge jaws clapped shut on it. Unuxekome Ra grinned in delight, her own jaws full of silver and lead, and murmured to her first mate.

  Baru
sank back into the boat. She’d done it. She’d succeeded catastrophically. The lure of Iraji’s face had worked too well. The Cancrioth had her in their power. They would want to know how she’d discovered their existence. She had to secure her position immediately, find some leverage that would keep her safe. She’d lied once already: told Unuxekome Ra, in a moment of desperation, that she was carrying Ra’s grandchild.

  Shao Lune whispered into her ear: “Did you expect this?”

  “A little.” Baru giving herself too much credit. “Well, I expected to find clues to the Cancrioth, not . . . not the Canaat attack, or the blood plague, or that thing in the water. . . .”

  “A deformed asthmatic whale. Nothing magical.”

  “I can hear you two muttering,” Unuxekome Ra growled. She rose from the tiller like an old sea eagle whose dull feathers disguise its swooping hunger. She’d been a duchess once, a companion of pirates, a mother to a good son. Baru had lured her son and all her pirate friends to their death.

  She couldn’t touch Baru in revenge—not when the shadow ambassador needed Baru alive. Now her eyes turned to Shao Lune. “You’d do well to respect the Womb’s people. You have no idea what they could do to you.”

  “The Womb?” Shao Lune, Falcresti to the marrow, ready with a sneer for the old Maia woman and her superstition. “Oh, she’ll curse me, will she? She’ll cut my soul? I don’t believe in those things you did to the Prince.”

  Baru looked guiltily to the stern, where Tau-indi lay like a dead parrot in Osa’s arms.

  “You don’t believe.” Unuxekome Ra smiled at her first mate. His lips had been slashed off in ritual punishment. The Kyprists who ruled these islands had once been Falcrest’s chosen pawns; when Falcrest left, they’d held on to power by sheer cruelty.

  “You hear that?” Ra said. “She doesn’t believe we’ll cut her.”

  The lipless man nodded and tapped his ear.

  “If you don’t get to keep your lips,” Ra said, “why should she?”

  And she came up the boat with her hooked knife glittering between her knuckles.

  Shao Lune stiffened against Baru: too proud to beg for help. Baru felt a profound empathy for her attacker. Falcrest has cut your people, cut off lips and balls and fingers and tongues, and you cannot get justice. You cannot wait for history to turn in your favor. But at least there is revenge, which is like justice the way saltwater is like fresh. So you take what you can from the Falcresti in your reach. You cut your debt out of her—

  Shao Lune had been Baru’s lover; once, and unwisely, but still her lover. And after Tain Hu, Baru had promised herself never again—

  “Stop!” Baru barked. “She’s under my protection.”

  “The way you protected my son?” Ra grinned at her, a smile like spilled plunder, and kept on coming. All across the horizon behind her the islands of Kyprananoke burnt in civil war, pistol fire and screams, mines detonating like pounding drums. The Canaat rebels had found their hour to rise against the Kyprists. The embassy had been the first strike in the revolution.

  Baru should be cheering for them. But here came their leader with her knife—

  “Don’t,” she snapped, “don’t, don’t.” No chance she could take the knife from Ra, no chance of persuading her to back off, so look for outside influence—“Ambassador! Help!”

  “Ra. Let them be.”

  The shadow ambassador sat at the tiller now, steering the boat, her brow in sunset silhouette. Her skin was black as Mzu, the mythic god of moon and life, black as Tau and Osa, who were Oriati, too. But she was not like them. Did not belong to the great Oriati Mbo or any of its thousand glorious squabbling confederations. Did not and never could.

  Her belly swelled with a mass which would never come to term. Her cancer. The Cancrioth worshiped the flesh that was their namesake.

  “Until later, then.” Unuxekome Ra winked brightly at Shao Lune. “Baru,” she said, not turning her eyes or her knife off the Staff Captain. “The Prince wants you, I think.”

  “I won’t leave you,” Baru whispered to Shao.

  But the other woman shoved her away: no more fooled by the lie than Baru herself. “Go be useful,” she hissed. “Find some leverage.”

  An hour ago Tau-indi Bosoka had been a Federal Prince, guardian and protector of the trim which bound Oriati Mbo’s people in one great web of compassion. They had come looking for their old friend Abdumasi Abd, hoping to reconcile with him and bind up the tear in trim that (Tau wholeheartedly believed) would soon become a war between Falcrest and the Oriati. That was how Tau thought: that you could end a war forecast to kill one out of six people in the world by rescuing one estranged friend.

  And then the shadow ambassador had cut them.

  “Baru.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m here!” She fell over one of the thwarts as the boat pitched on a wave, landed hard on her bad hand. The pain in her two stump fingers pulled like cold wire all the way up her arm to the side of her head.

  “I’m here, Tau,” she cried. “I’m here!”

  Enact-Colonel Osa cradled Tau’s head in her lap, but there was no affection for Osa in the laman’s stiff little body. Tau might as well have laid their head on a block of granite. They turned listlessly to meet Baru’s eyes.

  “You said you wanted to help me find Abdumasi.”

  “Yes—yes, and we’re closer now—”

  “You said we would find Unuxekome Ra, and she would know where Abdumasi had gone.”

  “Yes, that’s true, and she’s here, Ra’s here, we can ask her—”

  “You knew the Cancrioth were watching us. You were dragging your coat for them. You never warned me.”

  That was true.

  “You lied to me.” Tau’s eyes slid off her like a dead hand letting go. “You swore on your parents and you lied. And now”—there should have been a crack here, a catch of grief, but there was nothing at all—“now I am cut. I am a Prince without a Mbo. I am finished.”

  Baru huddled on her knees beside them, certain she could find some way to fix this. “Tau, I need your help. Please. Other people need you. Isn’t that what you told me? That trim is other people?”

  The shadow ambassador cleared her throat. “There is no more trim for Tau-indi. I have cut them away.”

  “Ignore her,” Baru whispered, “please, it’s just superstition, you don’t have to listen to her—”

  “I have seen their power do terrible work.” Tau shrugged, an exhausted so what? “I saw a woman who was severed so deeply from her own body that she could burn alive without feeling pain. It is real. And now that power has cut me.”

  “Just tricks, Tau, just theater. . . .”

  “I never should have trusted you,” Tau-indi said. “You’re a hole.”

  And they turned away.

  No one likes you very much, do they?” the shadow ambassador had asked her.

  Baru fussed with her incryptor, checking it for seawater. The clockwork device generated codes to prove she was an agent of Falcrest’s Emperor. It was almost too powerful to use: to apply the codes was to betray that you were a cryptarch. To be seen was to be known, to be known was to perish. Baru’s cover as a cryptarch had been blown since the moment she left the Elided Keep. With Juris Ormsment and Tain Shir chasing her, Baru had never really had the chance to work like a proper spymaster.

  But the incryptor was still proof that Baru mattered. That she’d gained something, anything at all, by putting Hu to death.

  Wydd help her if this thing, too, began to corrode.

  “People like me until I don’t do what they want,” she said, shortly. “Did you really have to do that to Tau?”

  “Yes.” The ambassador had a black eyepatch; her other eye was clear and sympathetic. She looked like someone who always understood exactly what she was doing. “There was no alternative. To bring someone so powerfully connected to the Mbo so close to us would be . . . dangerous for both sides. We are antithetical to each other.”

  “But yo
u’re both Oriati,” Baru said, pretending ignorance. “You’re on the same side.”

  “You know it’s not that simple, Baru. Oh, yes, I know who you are; Unuxekome Ra told me about Baru Cormorant and her treachery in Aurdwynn. You are an agent of the Emperor in Falcrest, dispatched to move among foreigners while masked by your own foreign blood.”

  “Shit,” Baru muttered.

  “Not at all. Your authority means you can help me.” The woman adjusted herself on the thwart, groaning amiably. “Forgive me if I rest. I swear this fellow”—she patted her bulge—“gets heavier at sunset.”

  “What is it like?” Baru blurted. “Were you ever pregnant? Does it feel the same?”

  “I had a child, yes, before I took the immortata into me.” She squeezed seawater from her damp eyepatch with two fingers. “The Line of Abbatai is borne only—almost only—by women. The immortata is colder than a child, somehow. And it never moves.”

  Baru, who thought of her menses as an inconvenient sign of good nutrition more than a mark of fertility, was suddenly afraid of the tumor. To have something growing inside you that would never leave . . .

  No wonder Cosgrad Torrinde the Hesychast wanted this secret cancer. He could use it to put his theoretical flesh-memory into people. He could transplant Incrasticism into their bodies and it would be as hard to get out as cancer.

  She tried to take a hold of the situation. “You said I could help you, somehow?”

  “Yes. Can you command those ships?”

  The shadow ambassador pointed north, to the far-off red sails of Ascentatic and Sulane, the two Imperial Navy frigates anchored off Kyprananoke. Sulane was the Traitor-Admiral Juris Ormsment’s flagship. Ormsment had come here to kill Baru.

  “Can you arrange safe passage for my people to go?”

  “Of course I can,” Baru lied. “But first I want to meet your leaders.”

  “You think I am not the Cancrioth’s leader? When the womb is the mother from which all life springs?”

  “Not fish,” Baru countered. “Or birds. Or lizards.”