Why then was Ironfist ashamed? Ashamed that Grinwoody hadn’t trusted him. Ashamed that for some few months, he’d thought he didn’t have to choose sides, thought that his two oaths could be fulfilled without betraying either one, that ancient enemies could be made allies as they fought a common enemy, that his Ulta might be to kill the Color Prince. He took off his ghotra. Too late for that now. Orholam had reached out to Ironfist, and Ironfist had just spat in his face. “What do we do now?” Ironfist asked, without inflection.

“How we direct all the resources of the Order hinges on your answer to one question, my nephew and my right hand: after all you’ve seen, who is Kip Guile?”

Ironfist looked at his uncle, the slave, the hidden Old Man of the Desert, the head of the Order of the Broken Eye, and he could almost see fates being written as he chose his words. “He is not Kip Delauria, bastard, that I know. Nor is he Kip Guile. He is the Breaker, he is the Lightbringer, and he is our Diakoptês come again.”

“Then go, nephew. You have fulfilled your Ulta, so the fulfillment of your next task will have to come not from your oaths but from your heart instead. Go and turn Breaker’s will that he may not destroy us as did the last Diakoptês. Go and serve him, go and save him, or go and slay him, and with him, all the world.”

Epilogue 1

The distant explosion’s roar raced through Big Jasper’s broad avenues and lightwells, between the arches of its Thousand Stars, past whitewashed homes and gleaming domes. The cheering throngs along the Sun Day parade route fell silent, and every eye looked to the horizon, Ironfist’s eyes first of all.

Ironfist’s bitter regrets and introspection blew away with the last echoes of the great blast, and a rippling cloud billowed upward somewhere near the docks, so intensely hot and huge that it folded in on itself like a mushroom cap. There was only one place on that side of the island that held enough black powder to make an explosion so huge. He ran.

With his height and constant training and knowledge of every back street on this island, the half league passed in no time. Crowds coming and going both slowed his pace as he reached the narrow peninsula. Promachos Andross Guile’s Lightguards were trying to set up a perimeter, and doing a predictably bad job of it.

As Ironfist approached the line—were those idiots keeping out chirurgeons?—he couldn’t help but stare at the dissipating black cloud and the rubble beneath it. The explosion had come from the cannon tower that guarded the harbor. The tower’s powder stores were sunk into its bedrock bowels so that even an invading navy’s fire couldn’t hit them. Carver Black, in charge of the island’s defenses, was meticulous in checking that appropriate discipline in storing and working around so much black powder was maintained.

Of course, with the Lightguards having taken over, those clumsy fools might have begun storing the powder above ground. A dropped lamp, an iron-nailed boot—if you let discipline slip for a heartbeat, this kind of accident could happen.

But Ironfist knew in his gut that this was no accident.

The Lightguards tried to bar him from the peninsula, but he said, “I’m Commander Ironfist, let me pass.”

He actually forgot that it wasn’t true anymore until the words were out of his mouth. He’d been commander so long, it was impossible to think of himself as anything else.

They moved immediately. So they hadn’t heard yet.

The cannon tower was still standing. Reinforced with iron and Orholam only knew what kinds of luxin, the outer walls were cracked in some places, but otherwise intact. The blast, thus contained, had shot up from the cellar through each of the five floors, hurling everything out the top, transforming the cannon tower into a cannon aimed at heaven. Everything within had been flung into the sky: broad paving stones that had made the floors, splintered wood, rags, and, nearer to the tower itself, even the massive cannons themselves.

The entry door had been blown out into the harbor, and heavy smoke roiled out of it still. Civilians and Lightguards alike surrounded the tower, looking for survivors, surveying the damage, counting the dead. Ironfist saw a corpse, legless, charred, his clothes blown entirely off him. Others bobbed in the waters. But of most of the dead, there was almost nothing left. A boot here, a piece of meat unidentifiable there. Blood smears.

Ironfist found a corpse, dead not from the explosion, but of a slash through the neck. It could have been from flying shrapnel, but the man had no burn marks or evidence of injury from the concussion wave. He’d been lying here when the explosion happened, already dead.

That meant sabotage. Ironfist looked to the horizon. Was there a fleet out there? No. And they’d have had warning if there was. Why this target, then? Surely the Color Prince wouldn’t spend lives and treasure blowing up a tower for no reason.

A yell sounded from a knot of Lightguards at the water’s edge. Ironfist made his way over there as they pulled the man from the waves. The man was Parian, tall, hugely muscular, and wearing only dark trousers, his tunic lost, his headscarf lost. It was his brother.

Tremblefist. Dear Orholam, no. Ironfist’s heart stopped. It couldn’t—it couldn’t … And yet there was no mistaking that imposing figure, the smaller twin of Ironfist’s own body.

“He’s alive!” someone shouted.

Ironfist crashed the lines of gawking Lightguards. “Away!” he roared. “That’s my brother! Move!”

And then, with no time intervening, he was holding his brother in his arms. He must have been convincing, because everyone had moved back a good ten paces.

It was immediately obvious that something was very wrong. Tremblefist’s body bore no wounds that Ironfist could see, but when his eyelids fluttered open, the whites of his eyes were bloodshot almost pure red. If he had that kind of damage to his head …

No. Ironfist didn’t want to believe what his experience knew.

“Harrdun,” his brother said, looking up at him.

“Hanishu.” They had barely spoken each other’s birth names in all the days since they’d taken their Blackguard names, there was so much pride in the latter names, and so much pain in the former.

“You should have seen me fight,” Hanishu said. “Twenty-seven men. In less than a minute. Not a scratch on me. They even used … mmmm. Used muskets. Orholam forgave me, Harrdun. For Aghbalu. His holy breath was on me in this fight. I made it through the whole tower.”

Ironfist was still trying to recover, the words clanged against each other like a cacophony of pots and pans. “You did this?” he whispered tensely. “I thought maybe an attack by the Color—”

“I saved the Lightbringer. They were going to sink his ship.” He found Ironfist’s hand and clasped it. “I made it to the cellars. Set the fuse, ran. But they’d locked the door out. So I climbed the entire tower, fighting, jumped off the top just as she blew. Landed it. One for the ages. Surfaced, was swimming back to shore, and a damn rock fell out of the sky. Had no idea they’d be in the air that long … I’m all busted inside.”

From his eyes, he hadn’t made the jump quite as clearly as he seemed to think. But blows to the head could skew everything. And it didn’t matter, did it?

“Not long now,” Hanishu said. “Got a question, big brother.”