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.…