Thank you to my assistant, the Dread Pirate CAPSLOCK. Though your predecessor should have most likely killed you in the morning, I’m flabbergasted by your unending brilliance and towering intellect. You’re a paragon of strength, resilience, humility, and hilarity. Thank you for being the person who makes those last-second edits and additions to the manuscript that sometimes even I don’t see before they show up in print.
Going a bit further afield now—no, no, go ahead, you can quit reading anytime! Thank you to Dante Alighieri, for literally writing a character named ‘Dante’ meeting the greatest poets of all human history in the afterlife and having them welcome him to join them at their fire as an equal. Whenever I worry my pride may be getting the better of me, I think of your—
Dante: Hey! It’s not arrogance if it’s accurate!
Brent: I’m not so sure about that, bucko. And putting your enemies in literal hell?
Dante: Bucko? Psh. Call me Dan. Now, come on, why don’t you join us at the fire? I’ll introduce you to everyone you don’t know. Oh, don’t worry. They all know you! We were just having a great discussion about how amazing Lightbringer is.
Brent: Yessir, whatever you say, Master Alighieri, sir . . . uh, Dan.
But seriously, I’ve always had a keen understanding of which fire I don’t belong at, and—more’s the pity—that’s one of ’em. But my sincere thanks to you and Homie and Bill and Eddie for showing me how high the bar can be. Even if you are laughing at me as I Fosbury Flop right under it.
Tim Mackie, thank you for the glimpses into the Ur. My thanks to the Monday Night Irregulars, and my thanks to those who have stood in the gap for me when it seemed my help was caught up over Babylon.
My deepest gratitude to the one who ended that storm at the exact right moment and brought me diamonds in moonlight. I’ve been a lot of trouble.
My thanks to Dr. Jacob Klein for decades of dumbing down ancient Greek and Latin and philosophy for me. Some of it is going to stick any day now. Call it purgatory for that impressive jumping spinning sidekick on the racquetball court that was supposed to miss my face.
Thanks to my brother, Kevin. Kristi says whenever I speak Andross Guile’s lines, I imitate your voice. (Weird!) Without the dirt-clod incident, the pitch-black locked closet with the spiders crawling under the door with their glowing red eyes, and the plastic zippered under-the-bed laundry bags, I’d probably have a lot more brain cells, but I wouldn’t be able to write claustrophobic terror nearly so well. Huh, this makes you sound mean. Sorry. Please don’t hurt me.
Sorry to that one guy who wrote me the angriest e-mail I’ve ever gotten—for writing a world in which color differentiation is so important that color-blind drafters are discriminated against. I appreciate your yearning for a kinder world. A world where all people knew what was true and beautiful and acted on it would have only one drawback: writing fiction there would be impossible—and probably unnecessary. In my worlds, characters believe many ugly things that I don’t. Indeed, some even believe beautiful things I don’t. Some authors confront the truth that people suck by imagining a world in which people don’t suck in some particular way; I choose to say, “People suck. What do we do about that?”
Thanks to my akhuya Ishak Micheil for the Arabic translations. Any errors are either Teia’s, because she was doing her best to translate phonetically what she heard, or your practical joke on me. But you wouldn’t do that, right?
Thank you to Thomas McCarthy, for the Irish pronunciations, translations, and the patience with our Internet-translated (i.e., wrong) declensions.
Thank you to the late Mitch Hedberg. Sorry for stealing the ‘I used to . . . I still do’ joke form that one time. I put you in the acknowledgments to make up for it . . . ?
To my dearest Kristi, without whom no one would be reading these words. When we were thirteen years old, I thought, ‘That girl is going to make an amazing wife someday.’ I love being right.
When we were planning our wedding (twelve years later, readers!) and you said you thought you should work the day job so that I could write full-time, I wanted to say YES! so badly that I was almost afraid to. An artist on a mission can be a terribly inhumane creature, as willing to make others suffer for his art as he is willing to suffer for it himself. I’ve tried not to be that careless creature—and too often failed. Thank you for suffering with me, for learning with me, and for laughing with me. Thank you for helping me understand my story-children as much as our real ones. Your singing makes the stars shine brighter.
Oh, and for you stubborn, quirky readers who read to the very last line of the book: Thanks for supporting me in doing what I love. You deserve to be rewarded. Flip the page for a special, secret little thank-you gift for you.
BUT JUST THIS ONCE! Don’t you expect me to do it again!
Postlude
In the burned-out ruins of Master Atevia’s house, Teia stepped into the cool, dark room and hung the master cloak on a mechanical peg, much like another one she remembered. She had only time to make out two figures in the room, one seated wearing spectacles and the other standing at his right hand.
As she closed the door behind her as if her heart weren’t in her throat, an altered voice said out of the darkness, “You’ll pardon my caution, I hope.”
It had been three months since the Battle of Sun Day, and this morning, she’d found the note in her pocket, inscribed with the Broken Eye, telling her how to get to the Old Man of the Desert’s secret new offices on Big Jasper. That she’d received a note instead of a knife in the back meant the Old Man didn’t know (at least for sure) that she was the one who’d poisoned the entire Order. That the note had been planted in her very pocket suggested that he had at least one last Shadow.
Andross had given Grinwoody the chance to run, but he just couldn’t do it.
That was why she was here, foolish as it was. She had too many friends upon whom the Old Man still wanted vengeance.
“What the hell happened to all of us on Sun Day?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to find out, but everyone’s just claiming it was an act of Orholam. No one’s telling me anything.”
“Not even your friend the White?”
“You know how that infiltration went, don’t you?” Teia said. “I’ve been demoted for being absent without leave. I’ve been lucky to keep my place in the Blackguard.”
“You were at the Feast of the Dying Light,” the Old Man said. “I wasn’t aware you were invited. You were supposed to be watching Gavin Guile.”
“I’d just got back. Master Sharp took me to the Feast, just for a bit, he said. Said I shouldn’t miss out on the holiest day of the year and my first chance to drink the bloodwine and see the community I was giving so much to serve. Then, afterward, he saved me. He guessed what the poison was and told me our only hope to live through it. But he drank too much of it. I watched him die.”
“As I watched many more,” the Old Man said.
“What happened?” she asked.
“One of the high priests betrayed us, a man named Atevia Zelorn. He poisoned the wine. He gave his life to betray us. This was his home. He was acting, I think, on Karris Guile’s orders. We will have our vengeance soon.”