Oh. It must be the Falcresti confusion. “No,” Tau-indi said patiently, “they didn’t make me into a laman. I chose my gender. Didn’t you choose to be a man? Or do they say, you have a penis, so you’re a man? What about people with both? What about the people who don’t want sex and all the other sorts? How do you sort them, if you don’t let them choose for themselves?”

“Degeneracy,” Cosgrad muttered. “The Oriati have decayed. Too much drift. Not enough competition among you, to keep the breeding healthy … but oh so rich … so much raw material to work with, so much pedigree to study, if only, if only I had the Metademe.…”

Tau brought Cosgrad cold water, chilled in the night and stored belowground. He wept it back out and screamed about a world unbound by law, spectral shapes in the mangrove shadows, bloody leeches clinging to his calves. “Farrier!” he would scream, red-eyed and roaring in his meningitis dream, “Farrier! They are not yours to take!”

On the next month, the gossip and the comic refused to come to Prince Hill to tell the story of the war. There was nothing funny to say. There was no gossip to tell.

The epic came up the hill, trudging and broken, covered in grief ash, with the satirist trailing behind.

At the beginning of the war the epic had named Kolosan and Eyotana Six-Souls, Cho-oh Long Oar and the Man with the Rudder Thumb, the sons and daughters of House Mbunu, and even salt-jeweled Nyoba Dbellu. The epic had bound himself to those stories. He was fated to tell of their thousand-dromon fleet, advancing bravely up the wind, into the skittering Falcrest frigates with their forest of sails and their unquenchable fire.

The ruin of these heroes and hunters, whose lays and sagas now darkened and dripped with unnumbered tears.

The thousand-ship main assault on Falcrest had failed. The fish would not lose their taste for the flesh of people, for no flesh had come into the sea, only wrack and ash. The swarming armadas of the mbo had been tricked and drawn in and then Falcrest’s fireships had fenced them in. Everything had burnt.

Already they were calling this defeat the Unspeakable Day.

The satirist got up to mock the dead, the foolish overconfident leaders who had brought more than a hundred thousand sailors and fighters to ruin. Everyone wept silently and clung to each other, trying to be polite and strong: trying to let the satirist do their necessary work.

The satirist fell on their knees. “My brother,” they wept, their voice rent, the principles screaming through them, “my brother, my brother. My brother is burning!”

They had no brother. But no one doubted they told the truth.