PRELUDE
AS the firestorm took his ships, as a monsoon rain of greasy incendiaries burnt his people like screaming human skewers, Abdumasi Abd tried his very damnedest to die.
“Fire parties to the port rail!” cried his battle captain, poor Zee Dbellu, who had come to war with Abdumasi to avenge his grandmother. He was a big dreadlocked man with a green flag bound to his war-spear and a false hope in his voice. He was already dead. Abdumasi had to join him.
“Turn the ship to sea!” Zee bellowed. “Run out the sweeps, soak the rowers, beat the drums! We’ll get out of this yet, I promise you, I promise!”
The fire parties were all dead. The masts had toppled and the rowers lay suffocated at their broken oars. Masquerade rocket arrows had pinned all the corpses to the deck like rare butterflies.
Abdumasi looked up at Zee from under the fallen sail, where he’d crawled to hide. Beyond Zee he could see a sliver of the battle—burning masts and broken ships, arcs of hwacha-fire scratching terrible perfect curves out of the sky, war rockets that crashed down into wood and waves to bloom into blue-white fire. Dead gulls. Vortices of killed fish. The stink of Falcrest chemistry. The scream of fire and the groan of broken hullplanks and beneath it all the ebb and rush of the sea, tumbling the burning dead, stirring the pot of fire and wreckage.
A disaster. A catastrophe. And he had ordered it.
He’d brought his fleet to Aurdwynn to help their rebellion against the Masquerade. He’d joined the rebel armada at Welthony and together they’d struck Treatymont, the colonial capital: a gray cage of ironwork and stone to the north, and two burnt-out towers guarding the harbor like rotten dog teeth.
But the Masquerade had been waiting for them.
“Zee,” Abdumasi whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
And he put his sailing knife under his chin and tried to cut his own throat.
He couldn’t do it. He was too afraid.
“Abdumasi!” Zee howled. “Abdu, where are you? We need you!”
Zee had gone mad when he realized they’d sailed into a trap. Abd saw it happen in his eyes, a meaty pop like a knuckle of lamb in the fire, and from that moment on Zee was mad with among, the rescue-fever that came over Oriati people, sometimes, when their friends and family needed them. A noble madness, the poets said, the best madness, who would not be glad to die in the throes of among?
At burnt Kutulbha, where Abdumasi’s mother had died (now he sent his apologies to his mother Abdi-obdi with all his hopeless heart) whole mobs of good Oriati people had organized themselves with wet blankets and protective taboos and marched into the firestorm devouring the city, sworn to rescue parents, children, pets, books. There was no hope, of course. Falcrest’s Burn munitions had created a wildfire so fierce that it sucked in the air from miles around, like a demon mouth in the city’s heart, inhaling souls. No one rescued anyone. All perished. At the end of that day twenty-three years ago the rain fell on burnt Kutulbha and turned the mud and corpse-ash into concrete, and to this day Kutulbha was a gray disc on the coast of the Oriati Mbo, a dark mortar full of bone.
Into that mortar the Falcresti had inscribed two words in their dull blocky script: THE ARC OF HISTORY.
That horror was what Abdumasi had come to avenge—
—he had begged his fellow Oriati, the Federal Princes and the jackal soldiers, to come to the aid of the rebel accountant Baru Cormorant and her Coyotes. Together they might tear Aurdwynn entirely out of Falcrest’s grasp, pincering the tyrants from north and south—
—but the Princes would not act, the jackal soldiers would not send a fleet, they were terrified of open war, so fuck it, Abdumasi Abd decided to spend his fortune and raise a war fleet himself—
—which was why he had to die, now, right away, no procrastination, no excuses, no second chances. For if the Falcresti captured Abd alive, if they tricked him into admitting who he was (a merchant of great fame) and who’d sponsored his fleet (don’t even think of them, Abd!—but he could not resist the terrible prayer, ayamma, ayamma, a ut li-en) then Falcrest would extract the truth from him.
His ships were not just pirates come to pillage a disordered city but an invasion force backed by secret and terrible powers.
Then Falcrest’s unctuous ambassadors would slither up to the Princes of Oriati Mbo and say, O kind neighbors, here we have found an influential and great man, a man who somehow misplaced himself into our sovereign waters—but it seems he conspired against our Imperial Republic. Listen, listen: he has confessed everything.
We must have reparations, or there will be war.…
And no matter whether the Oriati chose reparations or war, no matter whether Falcrest attacked them with fire or (far more dangerous) sly schools and clever market games, the Oriati would be destroyed. Abdumasi would bring down doom on the two hundred million people of the Oriati Mbo, the heart of the world, his beloved home.
“Abd!” Zee roared, waving his green flag with both hands. “Abd, come to me! We have to rally the ships! We have to go!”
“I need last words,” Abdumasi whispered to himself—that was why he couldn’t cut his throat! He needed brave last words to inspire those who remembered him. “What shall I say? You’ll never take me alive?” He curled up beneath the toppled sail and tried to get his last words just right. “You’ll never take me alive. You’ll never take me alive. You’ll never take me alive! All right. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.” He got his hands under him, crouched, tried to fill his head with happy memories—Tau and Kindalana in the lake of drugged cranes, Tau helping him steal honey from Kindalana’s house, all three of them watching Cosgrad Torrinde stagger around high as balls after he licked a frog—“Fuck! Do it. Do it! Death and glory!”
Snarling in defiance, he leapt out from under the sailcloth, his rapier loose in his right hand. “Abdumasi!” Zee cried in mad delight, and behind him the dromon Bred For Laughs exploded in a huge crack of powder as Falcrest fire found her store of mines. The thunder drowned out Zee’s words—Abdumasi saluted him with the rapier, and leapt up onto the ship’s fighting rail to plunge to his death.
“You’ll never take me alive!” he roared, and then he made the awful mistake of looking down before he leapt.
The sea burnt beneath him.
Blue-hot chemical fire simmered on the waves, vicious, viscous, burning everything, cooking up a sauté smell of seawater and charred lumber and boiled fat bursting out through blistered dead skin and incinerated hair, popped eyeballs, chips of toenail off bloated feet; the mortal remains of forty-one shipfuls of Abdumasi’s crews tossed into a fucking wok and stir-fried—
Abdumasi couldn’t jump into that.
Not even if he imagined Kindalana shoving him, not even if he pictured Tau-indi down in the flame urging him on, not even then could he jump. Call him a coward and a traitor to two hundred million people, but there are limits to courage, there are footnotes to the code of bravery, and fire is the first of them.
“Death and glory!” Zee shouted, waving his battle flag, and caught up in among madness he jumped up alongside Abdumasi and leapt over the rail.
“No!” Abdumasi screamed, “Zee, wait!”
But too late, gravity had him, a graceful dive and Zee went down through the gel and came up again coated in flame, the Burn sticking to him everywhere as if it smelled Oriati flesh and hated it, and it burnt even underwater, it fed on the air in his clothes. He screamed soundlessly because the fire was eating all the air that came out of him. He screamed with his face tipped back to the sky, and the Burn went down his throat.