The village was barely burning anymore. At the commencement of the attack, Anhchoi had ordered his catapults to target the largest buildings. Their savage shrine. Their feasting hall. As with all barbaric villages, the majority of buildings clung to a vast and grotesque sculpture of coral. The bulk of the structures sat on the humped back, while others ran up the three sinuous necks, traversed with an intricate web of ladders, ropes, and bridges. Regardless of their location, all were thatched with leaves and fronds, which caught easily when the greasy tongues of sea fire touched them. Sea fire was a glutton, and ate all that it could reach; once it caught, it was best to wait until the meal was utterly consumed and only blackened bones were left.

  Right now, he could smell little else than the caustic bite of sea fire, and the smoky refuse of its fiery feast. Soon, that would blow away on the salt breeze, to be replaced by the sweet scent of fruit trees warring with the pervasive stench of death. Not many of these people had died, and he had lost only two men, but it would be enough to poison the air for a time. It was good to smell death. Taking it in made a man strong. Bringing death inside taught a man its taste, scent. Its feel. Let him become close with death, but not close enough to take.

  The shrine and feasting halls had been burned down to their skeletons, and were still guttering with the orangey globs of sea fire. Their rude harbor, set in the clear bay of the island, was in ruins. Anhchoi had only used force where the barbarians had chosen to make their last stands. Pathetic demonstrations that did little more than prolong their suffering.

  Perhaps that was what these people wanted. To suffer. When left to their own devices, they were good for little else. Lazy and indolent, they lived off the generosity of land. They made nothing, did nothing, expressed nothing.

  Anhchoi watched his men plundering the village. Some took what pathetic goods the people had—mostly fish, fruit, and the odd bit of livestock. The others were being separated, those young or strong or beautiful enough could be loaded into the belly of the warjunk and taken east.

  Where to? That was the question.

  Home wasn’t an option. Home didn’t exist anymore. Realizing it, again, led to the gnawing hole left at the center of him. The loyalists been poised at the gateway of victory, when his Warlord had been cut down. Anhchoi still couldn’t bear to think the name of his slain leader.

  Anhchoi started walking up the beach to the wooden staircases leading up to the statue’s back, loosely twirling his shortsword in one hand. The tribals had met his bronze with glass and teeth, as they always had. Small wonder these tribes were good for little else than plunder. They might be giants, but they were a weak sort of giant. Without civilization, they were as good as chattel.

  Anhchoi paused, meeting the eyes of a woman sobbing over a dead man. His torso bore innumerable sword wounds. He had died fighting. She would cry now, but when she made it east, she would know true life. Where? He had a warjunk, had a doughty crew. And now plunder to sell. Someone would want them. Someone had to.

  Anhchoi climbed a short ramp into the center of the village. He stood now on the boardwalk criscrossing the coral surface of the statue. This was one of the blasphemies the savages worshiped. Anhchoi didn’t like to look at the representation of their deities. The outlines, even in the rough edges of coral, were wrong somehow. They made his eyes twitch, planting a shard in the middle of his head. It was the instinctive revulsion of rotten meat crossed with the atavistic fear of predators.

  And these people worshiped them.

  This was where the tribe would be rounded up to be separated into those who could be sold and those who would be left behind.

  The tribe had a name. They all did. Anhchoi didn’t care what that name might be. Some gibberish in the local dialect. Such divisions were irrelevant anyway. They would either be given the gift of slavery, or to be left behind to stagnate.

  Anhchoi’s quartermaster led the distribution, directing her men to and fro. Makani was huge, tall even for her original people, the name of which Anhchoi never knew and Makani claimed to have forgotten. She had rejected the savage costume of simple breeches or kilts, with adornments on wrists, ankles, and neck. She had once dressed as a nation freebooter would, in breeches and shirt, with belts, bronze weapons and bronze jewelry. Perhaps those things were still on her, but Anhchoi hadn’t seen them in years. Not since she had started wearing the cloak and mask.

  The cloak she had fashioned from the flight ribbons of a thousand kalao. Every color of the rainbow woven together and dripping down her body with only her bare feet and hands visible. When she moved, it looked like the light itself was rippling on her skin. To stare at her was to look on the sun’s reflection in an angry pool. A wooden mask covered her face and the many scars she’d gained in the years before she and Anhchoi met. It was carved into the stylized shape of a human face, glowering down at anyone she spoke to. She had turned herself into figure out of a nightmare and this was why, despite her being of tribal birth, she was accepted as quartermaster of the Kwailoon.

  “Good stock here from the Mele,” Makani said. Though the mask looked like it should muffle her voice, in fact the structure served to amplify it, and even made it deeper, sounding like the words of distant thunder.

  “Good,” Anhchoi said, nodding to his slave. He had already forgotten the name of the tribe, though Makani had only just said it.

  Makani stepped around the line of tribals, joining Anhchoi where he stood.

  “What’s thundering your cloud?” she asked.

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  Anhchoi shook his head. “The defeat of tribals is easy. Fighting seasoned sailors...nation sailors...is hard.”

  “Paths got branches. Not all of ‘em are easy to see, but eventually, they all make it to the water.”

  Take a tribal away from her people her whole life, she’ll somehow still spout their silly “wisdom,” Anhchoi thought. He merely nodded, seeing no reason to antagonize his loyal friend and slave. He considered his words carefully, finally opening his mouth to speak, when he saw the line of slaves, all around the coral statue, gazing up at the sky in wonder and terror.

  Anhchoi saw what they were gawping at: a streak of gold plummeting toward the earth. It was so bright that it entirely cut through the remnants of smoke, and was difficult to look directly at. It fell past Anhchoi’s sight, followed by a boom like the sky cracking in half.

  “There! You see! Your crimes don’t go unpunished!” The voice came from behind Anhchoi. He turned and saw one of their priest-witches—the ma’hanu, a term he only knew because of Makani. The priest was marked, most of his skin covered in intricate geometric tattoos. He was old, his beard white, his belly large even for a tribal, his limbs having lost some of the powerful thickness for which tribals were known. His eyes were wild as he leveled a finger at Anhchoi. Beside him, Makani tensed, but didn’t attack.

  “Going to use your magic on me, old man?” Anhchoi asked with a smirk.

  The ma’hanu’s eyes fell. “No. Too much cost. Mele, his sleep is troubled. Mele dreams of waking.”

  Mele—that was what this place was called. Named for their monstrous god.

  “Then drop your hand, or I cut it from the wrist.”

  The old man quailed, but he was not entirely beaten. “You see that light? The light in the sky? That means Mele wakes soon. Maybe the others. Maybe all the gods. Comin’ up from the deep, take you down to meet ‘em.”

  Anhchoi looked at the empty sky, as though the streak of light would still be there. It was, of course, gone. He turned back to the old man. “Was that what it was? It looked like nothing more than a starfall to me.”

  “Your kind don’t know. You walk on Waiola, you sail her waters, but you don’t know.”

  Anhchoi chuckled. The old man was beaten. He wanted to salvage something from defeat. Anhchoi was curious, though. The falling star was something. It had made a sound. It had fallen not far away. The old man had an idea of what it was, it might have as much claim on reality as anything Anhchoi thought. Or not. The man was a tribal. Anhchoi knelt, bringing him level with the old man’s gaze.

  “Tell me then, elder. What do I not know?”

  “Everything,” whispered the old man.

  “Ma’hanu,” Makani intoned.

  The old man’s eyes flickered from Anhchoi to Makani, who would be looming behind him. There was a rustle, and the wash of wind. Anhchoi didn’t have to look—indeed he never would—to know Makani had just opened her cloak. Anhchoi felt the bone-deep chill that emanated from her now and suppressed a shudder. He would show no weakness here.

  The ma’hanu’s eyes grew, rounded. Tears sprung up at their corners, wobbling, but too fearful even to fall. His lip quivered as his jaw slowly dropped. His neck tensed as tremors chased themselves over his form. He recoiled, but it was a scant movement, as though that tiny gesture was too much, that this would allow whatever it was the old man was seeing to give chase, catch him, and devour his screaming corpse.

  Anhchoi watched the sanity leave the old man, mapped out in the movements of his face. It was not the first time the warchief had seen a man broken thus, and it always gave him the slightest amount of pause.

  “Nuh-nuh-no,” the ma’hanu stuttered. “It can’t be. It can’t, it can’t it can’t it caaaaAAAAAAAA—” His voice disappeared in a keening wail.

  “Makani.”

  “As you like.”

  The rustle and the sudden cessation of the abyssal chill signaled the cloak had been closed. The damage had been done. The ma’hanu fell onto his back like a doomed insect, staring sightlessly at the sky, a line of drool marking its way down the side of his mouth. He was hopelessly gone now, his mind snapped under the crushing weight of whatever Makani had shown him.

  Anhchoi didn’t waste much time on regret. The old man’s status as a ma’hanu meant he was only good for the arena or a bodyguard, and his age meant he wouldn’t have gone for much. He was doomed as soon as Makani got her hands on him. She despised the ma’hanu above all others, and barely needed an excuse to break one as she did here.

  The warchief got to his feet. His knees popped—a relatively new development, and he was less than pleased at the recent signs of his aging. When a man had more horizons behind him than before, his attention turned to his legacy. He looked into the masked face of his quartermaster. Her eyes were shrouded in shadow, only barely visible to him. They shone with an inner light.

  “Orders, warchief?” she asked.

  “As you’ve been doing. Gather them up, separate meat from scale.”

  “And load them in the hold?”

  “No hold to load them into.”

  Anhchoi began to walk to the shore. Over the tops of the low wood-and-thatch buildings of the Mele tribe, and through the columns of greasy smoke, he glimpsed the Kwailoon, a twenty-catapult warjunk, lately of the nation of Zhao-Chi, floating in the calm bay. The ship was massive, one of the largest things to be seen plying the waves. Truly, a floating city, with a crew of nearly five hundred—fewer now, after the battle, though Anhchoi wouldn’t linger on that—and enough firepower to effortlessly raze a village. The walls were high and the belly-flat, the upper deck sitting much higher than any of the buildings the ship had since destroyed. Sailors moved around it now, pulling plundered goods up with a series of ropes and pulleys. The ship’s crane, at the fatter aft end, was not in use. The entire vessel was topped with a series of simple, triangular sails that looked like the webbed fins of a lalani breaking the surface of the water.

  “Master?” she asked, looking for clarification.

  “I aim to see what fell from the sky, Makani. If it’s the wrath of the gods, I want to know. If it’s something else...I want to know that too.”

  The word, skyborn, flitted through his mind, but he would not let hope give it voice yet. He would see first. He would know.

  “I will go,” she said.

  “Need my quartermaster here. Keep the plunder going. I want everything separated and ready for me when I return.”

  “And if the other tribals send a war party?”

  “Build some pickets.”

  The shore was a zoo of freebooters bringing plunder back to the skiffs, which would take it to the junk itself. As they saw their warchief and quartermaster, the pirates straightened up, paused in their actions, and waited for an order. Anhchoi liked the instinctive obedience. He stepped onto the nearest skiff.

  “To the ship,” he told the rowers. Though the deck of the skiff was half-filled with melons, they forgot loading the rest and immediately put their backs into rowing for the warjunk.

  Anhchoi already knew, whatever the falling star was, it would be valuable. And perhaps, even the first steps to a return to grace.