Aeshma says nothing more. I know she was one of the foremost of the Two Hundred, nearly one of the Nine. A new Atirat is not born solely of one man’s conquering all human contenders. His partner jinn?yah must conquer all of her rivals as well.

The armor wraps around my body. I hold open only points at each joint. It’s not as efficient or flexible or reactive as how I had once done it—with every pore, every sweat gland, every hair a point of contact. Back then, I’d let my jinn?yah control the armor, shifting it, reacting to dangers I couldn’t even see, her immortal will complementing my mortal will. The two of us had been one in a way I couldn’t share even with my wives.

I draw on blue, looking above the frames of my green spectacles at the lightening sky. Blue is safe, for me. I never bound my will to blue’s. To me, it is only a tool, albeit one that cools my passions. My jinn?yah would never let me draft much blue. She was too jealous. I’d thought it was simply her nature, but now I see that she needed me all to herself if she was to win her fights with the other djinn. An Atirat who was not a pure green? Impossible.

As Pride is the first sin, so Power is the first temptation.

Funny how Lucidonius put that in the present tense, though telling a creation story. Not, Pride was the first sin. It made the thing applicable to us, as much as to the First Light. Good trick.

“My heart is yours, Darjan, but I cannot save you if you don’t let me help,” Aeshma says. Her voice is so like my dead ’Annaiah’s that I know she’s stolen even that. Clever, clever wench.

“You can’t listen to what she says, Darjan,” Auria says in the mundane world, voice weakening. “You know she lies.”

I know.

“Show me I can trust you,” I say aloud. I hope Auria thinks I’m speaking to her; I hope my jinn?yah thinks I’m speaking to her.

The light is good now. I start running toward the village. Another color might sneak in, hoping to find the raiders asleep, exhausted from a long night of murder and worse. That isn’t the way of green. My jinn?yah sings battle rage and bloodlust, and I know that she knows me too well.

Rage is not only red’s. I draft enough blue to make sharp edges for the thorn swords that sprout from my hands. My legs are sheathed in luxin, protecting my knees, adding springiness to each step, adding the power of my will to my movement, allowing me to jump farther than any mortal, to land safely, to run faster than a charging grizzly. I am become a beast.

I see the dead: a young woman, Luzia Martaenus, lying on her side with her head cracked like an egg, her baby-swollen belly run through half a dozen times. Her younger sister is dead, cut down closer to town. They’d tried to escape together. Ruy Garos lies facing town, his pitchfork lying in the sticky pool of his blood. Perhaps he’d tried to cover Luzia’s escape. He’d always loved that girl, though she’d married the town drunk instead.

Usually, the Angari raiders treated the people of Atan’s Town like a crop. Weed out the men who can fight, cut off the thumb of the right hand of the young men so they can still work, still breed, and take the prettiest women for slaves and concubines. Then the Angari would come back years later, long enough that the people could have built up a little wealth, but not long enough that they could build up enough strength to give the raiders much trouble. Of course, the raiders killed those who irritated them, too. Sometimes they killed for sport. Sometimes they maimed for fun. But this … this was something else. This was pure punishment, a massacre.

Everyone is dead. I see little Gonzalo, the farrier’s simpleton son. He’s been impaled on a pike, sodomized, the point of the pike sticking out of his gaping mouth up at the sky.

I howl, waking the whole goddam camp, and my Aeshma comes back over me, putrid and beautiful, a diseased whore. She is as ugly as what I plan to do, and my soul is a small price to pay for vengeance. It makes me monstrous. I am become a beast. I am become a god. Vengeance is mine.

Chapter 14

The galleys collided with a tremendous shock that sent half the slaves tumbling backward over their benches. A slave screamed as the manacle on his wrist tore his arm out of its socket. The Bitter Cob sank in the waves, having hit below the other galley’s center, then it lifted both ships and began to slide along the opposing galley’s side.

The other galley’s oars, fouled and crossed and yanked from their rowers’ hands, snapped like kindling as the Bitter Cob scraped along her hull. Falconets discharged from the main decks of both ships, and muskets punctuated screams of rage and screams of fear and screams of pain.

Heaving himself to his feet on the overhead oar, Gavin thought his part in the battle was done, but the Angari did things differently.

“Up!” Strap shouted. She had a splinter of wood thicker than Gavin’s thumb all the way through one shoulder. She didn’t even seem to notice. Orholam’s beard, she was fierce. “Man the oars! Knock those—”

A roar and an explosion of timber cut her off. The woman disappeared in sudden sharp light as the enemy’s cannon blasted a hole in the deck, followed instantly by a thick billow of black smoke, choking everything with sulfur and sunlight diffused with smoke. The sound deafened Gavin. He was only aware of the oar moving in his hands.

Blinking, gasping, coughing on burning fumes, he helped his oarmates, only slowly figuring out what they were doing. They stabbed the oar out repeatedly, Fukkelot guiding it, Orholam giving the lift, Gavin mostly interfering.

Through the smoke, not five paces away from them across the waves, he saw the bobbing forms of sailors on the other galley, trying to right their cannons from the collision. Loaded cannons. Aimed straight for the slaves’ benches. Gavin’s fellow slaves—at least those who’d fought before and weren’t injured—were using their oars to keep the sailors from lighting the cannons, to keep them from spewing death through the Bitter Cob.

Gavin helped Orholam and Fukkelot, stabbing their oar straight into an Abornean face that appeared in the smoke. It was a cabin boy, not twelve years old. The boy went down, face smashed, a slow match spinning out of his hand.

Fukkelot was trying to shout orders, but in the pressure of the situation, he was seized up with cursing. Orholam had the best view, so Gavin stabbed and stabbed, trying to figure out what Orholam wanted from his actions, throwing his whole, waning strength into the effort. Every so often, he felt the crunch of oar smashing against something softer than wood.

The wind blew the smoke clear enough that Gavin saw boarding nets thrown over the gap between the ships, saw men scrambling across. He thought he heard Gunner laughing somewhere, battle-mad.

The other galley was taller than the Bitter Cob, and Gavin could see the rowers over there huddled beneath their benches, cowering, hoping the pirates boarding their vessel passed them by. Some did. Some slashed at the helpless slaves as they passed, laying open heads, splitting shoulders, hacking off skinny, starvation-frail arms. Because they could. Because man loves to kill.

“Fuck,” Fukkelot said.

“Fuck,” Gavin agreed.

As the smoke slowly cleared, Gavin saw a girl burst from one of the cabins of the opposing galley. She was dressed in men’s trousers and a vest, but her long dark hair bobbed and streamed as she fled. A moment later, a pursuer appeared. It was one of Gunner’s men. He was holding his trousers up with one hand. She must have just escaped him.