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from the marshy edges of the Empire, was the noblest life he could have chosen.
The
only
life, by damn. The only choice you could have lived with, once you knew you had it in you
. He was a soldier of Arqual, and even if he sat out the rest of his days in the court of this foppish King Oshiram he would never truly be anything else.
    Half a century in the service. Half a century of struggle and bloodshed, maimed friends, fatherless children: he saw now that they had all built to this moment. Treaty Day. The Great Peace. Millions were waiting for it to begin.
    And it was all a monstrous sham. Peace was the furthest thing from the mind of his Emperor, as Thasha and her friends had grasped before anyone. For chained in the bowels of the
Chathrand
was a deposed king of the Mzithrin, the Shaggat Ness, a madman who thought himself a god. His twisted version of the Old Faith had seduced a quarter of the Mzithrini people and inspired a doomed but hideously bloody uprising. When the Mzithrin Kings at last crushed the rebellion, the Shaggat had fled in a ship called the
Lythra
—right into the jaws of Arqual’s own navy.
    The
Lythra
had been blown to matchsticks. But the Shaggat, and his two boys, and his sorcerer: they had been plucked from the waves alive and whisked off to a secret prison in the heart of Arqual.
    He was the most dangerous lunatic in history, east or west. For forty years now the world had thought him safely drowned. And for forty years Arqual’s guild of assassins, the Secret Fist, had been infiltrating the Shaggat’s worshippers. On Gurishal, the fanatics’ war-blighted island of exile, the Secret Fist had stoked their faith, encouraged their martyrdom, assassinated the moderates among them. And above all, it had spread a false prophecy of the Shaggat’s return.
Those gods-forsaken wretches! They might have abandoned their cult and rejoined the Mzithrin by now, if only we’d let them be!
    Instead, the spymaster Sandor Ott had prepared them for a second uprising, even as Arqual and the Mzithrin prepared, with the greatest sincerity, for peace.
    If you want a lie to fool your enemy, test it on a friend
. The proverb was surely Ott’s cardinal rule. Even the highest circles of the Arquali military (of which Isiq was indisputably a part) had been kept ignorant. And the blood-drinking Mzithrinis: they had taken the bait in both hands, as King Oshiram’s prattle made clear.
    “They’ve loaded three ships full of presents, Isiq. Sculpture, tapestries, fiddles and flutes, a whole spire from a ruined shrine. A petrified egg. A miraculous talking crow. All for Arqual—the ships as well, mind you. And they’re sending artists to paint your Emperor Magad. I gather they’re dying to know what he looks like.”
    “The world changes swiftly, Your Highness,” mumbled Isiq.
    “It does not seem very swift to me—one day I will show you the City of Widows—yet I understand you, Isiq, I declare I do.Peace is our destiny, and we who have lived to see these days must rejoice. The future! How welcome it is!”
    A few decades without a bloodbath, and he thinks it’s forever
. But how could anyone have guessed the sheer, foul audacity of the plan? For the prophecy Ott had spread among the Shaggat’s faithful came down to this: that their God-King would return
when a Mzithrin prince took the hand of an enemy soldier’s daughter
. Isiq was that soldier, and Thasha the incendiary bride.
    Horror and betrayal: and that was before the sorcerer entered the game.
    Isiq waved to the mob, despair gnawing his heart like some ghastly parasite. Who among them would believe, even if he screamed it, that as soon as his daughter took Prince Falmurqat’s hand the Great Ship would set sail—not for Etherhorde, as they’d pretend, but for the depths of the Nelluroq, the Ruling Sea, where no other ship left afloat could follow her? That by crossing that chartless monstrosity of ocean, resupplying in the all-but-forgotten lands of the