“Good one!” Abdumasi jeered, leaping over bodies, kicking aside splintered wood, nimble and free with his rapier. He’d dance around these brutes, he’d poke them to death, quick-footed, hadn’t Kindalana loved the grace of his dancing? “Can’t start your fire? Don’t be embarrassed! Happens to the best of us! Come on over here, I’ll show you a weapon that always works! I am Abdumasi of the House of Abd, of Jaro the Flamingo Kingdom, of the Einkorn Crop of Lonjaro Mbo the Thirteen-in-Three-in-One, and I came to kill cuge like you!”

The marine officer shrugged. He said something in Aphalone so muffled by his mask that Abdumasi heard it only as a low sinister diagnosis: the patient is dead.

The rest of the marines walked straight at Abd, shoulder to shoulder, crouched a little against the roll of the ship.

“Sophisticated Masquerade tactics!” Abdumasi bellowed, as a huge sheet of fire roared up across the sea behind him, a slick of leaked cooking oil catching alight. “Come on, form an orderly queue, who wants it first, my blade is lined with moral fiber and if I prick you you’ll realize what a thug you are! Form a—”

The first marine proceeded straight onto his sword.

Abdumasi stabbed him in the eye and the point of his faithful rapier skittered sideways off the marine’s steel-masked cheek to stick in his shoulder rig, where the man grabbed the blade in his glove, hooked it on knuckle claws, and twisted till the rapier bent.

“Fuck,” Abd said, in bemusement.

He went for his belt knife. The marines were too quick. The first studded punch hit like a shot of tequila and Abd went down on the pitching deck under stamping feet and steel truncheons. For a few moments he felt like the lead drum at his own funeral. Flesh pulped. Bone cracked. Abdumasi crawled inside himself like a turtle and tried to dream of sunny days on Lake Jaro. But the lake boiled, and the imaginary cranes impaled him on their beaks, and then the marines beat the memory right out of him.

When they let up he threw his last defiance at them.

“Ayamma,” he whispered, and then, shouting into the face of the man cuffing him, into the indifferent red masks and the sea of burning corpses and the whole tyrannical fucking design of Falcrest and its faceless Emperor, shouting with the terrible bargain he’d made because it was all he had left, “I am a thousand lives, you poor fools, it grows in me, a ut li-en, I have the immortata, the cancer grows!”

In Aphalone the marine asked his officer, “What the fuck is he saying?”

“Tunk superstition, I suppose.” The officer opened a cloth sack. “He’s their leader. He goes straight to Province Admiral Ormsment for debriefing.”