The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

Author:Seth Dickinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

AT dawn the next morning, Barhu rapped on the one door in Helbride that never opened.

It led to a converted dry stores compartment, one deck below Svir’s map room. Food and water and soap went into it, and nothing came out. The woman within poured her wastewater over the stern. Sometimes the room emitted thin scratching sounds, which made the sailors hammocked nearby complain of vermin and make the handwashing gesture to expiate evil.

“It’s Baru,” Barhu called, and waited for the door to open.

It didn’t. Barhu rapped again. “Please,” she called, “Kimbune, it’s me. We’re coming to Isla Cauteria soon. I’m certain we’ll find Abdumasi Abd there. I want to talk to you before we arrive. I want to make arrangements for your husband’s soul.”

The sound of toes on wood, wary as a cat. At last Kimbune’s voice came through. “Where are my people?”

“Eternal is following our wake. We’re both catching a trade wind out of the west. We’ve kept their mast tops in sight so they can chase us; I don’t imagine they have charts of the whole trade circle to follow.”

“It’s not really a circle, you know,” Kimbune said. “There’s easterlies to the south and westerlies to the north and the other legs are—” She cut herself off, though Barhu was completely sympathetic to her need to assert herself through knowledge. “Are they safe?”

“No.” Barhu would not want to be lied to in Kimbune’s place. “One storm would sink them. They need a port, and they need a cover story to reach it. If we’re going to bring them safely into Isla Cauteria, we need to signal them. Can you reach them by uranium lamp?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s supposed to go through surfaces, but not very far.…”

“We can send you closer by boat, if we must. Will you try?”

The door cracked open. Kimbune’s thickly lashed eyes peered out at her. Her portioned-circle Round Number tattoo gleamed on her brow. “You can’t trick me,” she said, warily. “I’ve made certain of it. I won’t help lure my people into a trap.”

“May I come in?”

“There’s power in here. I ask that you respect it.”

Barhu took a nervous step back. “What kind of power?”

“Truth,” Kimbune said. “Come in.”

The door opened. The wedge of lamplight from outside met and joined the candlelight within. Barhu gasped in wonder. All the walls and floorboards were brushed with Cancrioth script, ancient En Elu Aumor patterns joined together in gorgeous oriasque. In places, Kimbune had even whittled the characters into the wood. And if Barhu understood not one dot of it, she still felt a cosmic frisson, like seeing the book of the world’s truths, edge-on, with all the pages shut together.

“What is this?”

Kimbune closed the door behind Barhu. “The proof.”

The proof? Yes, she’d mentioned a proof when she left Eternal. She’d said it would protect her. The bastard went and died before I could convince him, she’d said, but it’s true, I’ve finished it and it’s beautiful and he was

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