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!”