“Hail … sir.” Puzzled. It was as if Kip was playing a game, and no one had told him the stakes, let alone the rules. It had happened enough in the last year that Kip should have been getting used to it. But this wasn’t the kind of thing you get used to. The man filled Kip with a quiet, nameless dread.

Already dead, can’t do anything to me. Oh, look at that. There may not be peeing in the afterlife, but it turns out that the strong desire to pee is indeed possible.

Which, in itself, was kind of terrifying.

Not moving from the spot where he’d landed, the man extended an open hand, tilted up. It wasn’t quite the attitude for a handshake or a wrist clasp, and Kip looked at it warily. Falling from the silent sky, something slapped into the man’s open hand. A polished black wood cane.

“You’ll excuse me the use of a cane, I hope,” the man said with a sound like great gears grinding. He stepped forward, and Kip could see that the man’s ankles were broken, poorly mended. Perhaps that was the reason for the stiff leather boots. “Under what name have you come here?”

Kip looked to the left and right. “Uh, is this a trick question?”

The man settled into place perhaps ten feet away from Kip, an odd distance for interlocutors. He put his cane centered before him and leaned on it with both hands like a three-legged stool. He waited.

“I am whatever I am. I mean, I am what I ever am. Kip. Kip,” Kip said. “Is there a privy here?”

“Kip? Kip. Not your birth name, is it? Kip, so puny, so insignificant. Barely worth three little letters. ‘Don’t look at me,’ it screams. ‘I’m just a bastard.’ Kip Delauria. Kip Guile. Lard Guile. Breaker. Godslayer. Perhaps Diakoptês? If you’re going to start collecting names in other languages and religions, this is really going to get tedious. But what are you under the names? Under your cloak of names, who are you?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I was known as a bit of a wearer of masks myself, you know. They called me … well, why ruin it? It became one of the first Black Cards, forbidden, for those who viewed it lost their minds. That, little Guile, from the tiny fraction of my power that can fit inside a card. You’re dying, right now. Oh, no worries, time is different here. We have all the time out of the world to talk, but your body is dying. I can save you.”

“Well, that solves that,” Kip said. “Here I didn’t know if you were a hero or a villain. Villain.”

“Really? It’s so easy for you?” the immortal asked.

“Not complicated,” Kip said. A million million books, and not one place to pee. “There’s a time for ratiocination, and a time for gut feelings. Gut wins, this time.” Ratiocination? Where did I even hear that word? Too much time in the restricted library.

“And if head and heart are equal, with which facility do you decide whether to follow the one or the other?” The creature smiled. He leaned on the cane with his left hand and propped his right hand on his hip. The move pushed back his long leather coat and revealed a pistol hanging in a special holster made for it at his right hip. It was actually kind of brilliant. Most people carried a pistol either in a bag or in a pocket. This design would make it far easier to draw quickly. It even had a tie at the bottom to keep the holster tight against the leg, so it wouldn’t flop around. Its wearer could always be certain of the position of his pistol. Kip would have to remember that.

Kip said, “You come across a dying man, and it’s in your power to help him—and you don’t. That’s villain behavior.”

Amused. Only a too-small ring of black pupil interrupted the eerie mirrored perfection of his eyes and showed where he was looking. “Ah, but you’re not dead yet. So perhaps you’re too hasty to judge me.”

Kip scowled. He had the distinct impression that the longer he listened to this man—Man? God? Something in between?—the more convinced he’d be. In that way, Kip’s tutelage under Gavin Guile was invaluable. Gavin tended to do the same thing.

“So I haven’t saved you. Yet. But neither has my enemy, now, has he?”

Enemy? “Who are you?” Kip asked. There was something odd about the leather of that long coat. Dual-layered, supple, yet so thin.

“Of course, he can’t save you. He doesn’t see. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t save. He is dead, and this world is ours.”

“Who are you?” Kip whispered. That was what it was about that coat. It was the pale white of the Angari on the inside, and that black was Parian black. Orholam have mercy, it was made of human skin.

“I am the Bearer of Fire; I am the Opener of Eyes; I have been called a god and a beast; I have been called angel and demon, and Slave of the Holy, and Breaker of Chains. I have been called jinn and monster and man. Those who hate me have called me Defiler, Seducer, Corrupter—and Master, and King. Wanderer, Outcast, Kinless, Unclean. I am the Right Hand of Darkness, the Voice of the Grave. I have slain kings and gods. I have come to bring true worship to the Seven Satrapies, to destroy what has been erringly wrought by human hands. The luxiats have shrouded my coming in darkness, but some things cannot be hidden forever. You know who I am.”

Kip’s metaphysical heart came into perfect synchronicity with his physical heart, and stopped. No.

“Say it.”

“You … you’re the Lightbringer.”

“I am.” The Lightbringer rolled his neck, and then his shoulders, and giant, glorious white wings unfurled from his back with a crack, emerging from long slits cut in the coat. His shirt tore, revealing a torso so white and flawless it could have been carved of living marble. He was larger than life, and more beautiful than any woman. It was more than simple beauty. It was raw presence, as if you magnified the melancholic yearning and pain of a perfect sunset a thousand times and stirred it with an animal lust to take and be taken and added glory like the true light of a summer day passing through a lens and burning Kip, the ant.

This is why the owl hunts at night; her eyes would burn in the sun. This is why man sees only his slim slice of the spectrum. To see more would be to be blinded. To see that for which his mind is not made was to be struck dumb.

Kip dropped to his knees, fell prostrate. He couldn’t help it. Had no strength. No will.

His hands slapped in the dust, in a position of worship, barely keeping his face from smacking the golden floor. The dust—dust? here? in this immaculate library?—swirled up in clouds into his open eyes before he could blink. In seconds, he was streaming tears, his tears turning humble dust to mud. The mud burned his eyes, but it wasn’t the burning of getting a speck in your eye, it was the burning of a muscle fatigued, a muscle growing stronger. The burning faded to tingling.

He looked up—and through, his eyes made new, silently made strong. Beneath a façade of glory—a cloak of light—the wings were rotten; a stench of decaying flesh swept out in a putrid cloud; the skin was blackened and curling, split from flames, and something else, something utterly inhuman was beneath—all quickly covered. The immortal bared his fangs at the sky, and snarled in a language that Kip’s ears couldn’t parse into syllables, nor his tongue ever hope to form. Here was an angel of light indeed, for light can also be used to dazzle, to blind, to misdirect and deceive. Here was light bent to illusions and lies.