the platform. He groaned, holding on to the corner post, staring out to East Bay in the half-light.
Rea, please tell me I’m not really alone here. Please.
“The master cloak. Where is it?”
“You’ve made a big mistake,” Kip said, facedown, woozy. “Huge. Gigantic.”
Gunner was out there, so far away Kip could barely see him, standing as if he was holding a long-lens up to his eye. With the hand out of Abaddon’s sight, Kip tried to gesture to Gunner: ‘Shoot here, yes, here!’
“Me?” Abaddon said. “No, no, no. You have no idea, do you? This battle was never about Koios and this little empire. It was about the fate of this entire world. Even now your Wight King calls out for our aid—and will get none. The djinn have been freed from his control. The bane will grow again—in a single day, with my help. We’ll inspire such bloodlust that these barbarians will scour these Jasper Islands. Massacre everyone. Even now, look! Are your worthless mortal eyes keen enough to see the black sails of Pash Vecchio’s fleet on the horizon? The pirate king comes with our reinforcements, and what do you have? No one comes for you. You’ve been abandoned. What’s your last hope? Some sea demons? Do you know how weak those really are against the right magics? It’s been a defense worthy of song. But none will sing of what you did here. None will be left to do so.”
“It’s funny you mention my eyes,” Kip said. “Because you’re right. I am blind to other realms. I don’t know them, nor understand them when I see them, and when they affect my life, I’m left breathless and dazed. But I’m not the only one blind.”
“I know. All your ilk are the same, save some few Seers, who catch glimpses and believe they see all and know yet more.”
“I mean you,” Kip said. “How many humans have you known, over how many ages? How many worlds? And yet you don’t understand us at all. I’m blind to the other worlds, but you’re blind to the workings of love, of self-sacrifice. You look at the space they occupy, but it looks empty to you. You can’t even imagine how they work. You can’t imagine caring about anything other than yourself. It makes you stupid, Abaddon. It makes you predictable. It makes you weak. Do you know what humans can do? We can suffer. If you just give us one solid thing to brace our will against, we will move the world. We will hold on. Past reason. Past belief. Do you know what we know that you don’t?”
“I should take you to join my menagerie. Perhaps a thousand years of torment will teach you some respect. What are you hoping for, little Guile? Orholam’s hosts have abandoned this realm. I feel not the touch of a single one of them now. Soon we shall free our brothers and . . .” He trailed off, his head twisting to the side. “I see something about a gunner?”
“Thanks,” Kip said. “Sometimes it takes a while for a compelling argument to come together.”
“What?”
Kip reached out and touched Abaddon’s foot. Abaddon could move way too fast for Kip to mock him out loud, but he thought, You’re in my bubble of causality now, bitch.
The immortal looked at him, his head tilting. “We seem to have such trouble communicating, you and I.”
Kip couldn’t help it; he glanced toward the seawall protecting East Bay, where he could just barely see the lonely foredeck of a ship that had been run aground, and the black cloud of smoke that had been belched from its mighty throat. Kip shouldn’t have looked, but perhaps Abaddon was so crafty he would think Kip’s glance itself was a distraction, a misdirection.
Between the raised platform at Orholam’s Glare and Gunner’s mighty Compelling Argument soared the old Tyrean embassy. There was a space no wider than a man’s forearm is long through which a cannonball might clear the embassy and still hit the platform.
Indeed, though Kip was visible, the embassy probably blocked Gunner’s view of Abaddon.
Kip didn’t care. He hoped Gunner put the exploding shell straight in his own lap. His life for Abaddon’s? Yes. Absolutely yes. This is for my nunks, you bastard.
But even as the first diced heartbeat passed, Kip saw that the shot was simply too far, even for Gunner.
The cannonball—a smoking, flaming streak—was heading wide. Either Gunner had miscalculated to try to miss the embassy or the cannon itself