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Nomad meets the rush of Charred on the Dawnchaser's deck and uses himself as bait — they howl loud enough that the ones still pressing against Zeal and Rebeke from inside the cab abandon that door and pile out to share in the fun. He tries to call a spear and meets resistance; the canker on his soul is only half-skimmed and the bladed form fights him. He settles instead on a length of plain silvery bar — a six-foot bo staff Aux forms readily, with the spearhead simply left off — and notes, dryly, that he has heard a story about exactly this once before. He bores a small hole in the haft and slips the offworlder's sunheart into it so he can keep his hand on it while he fights. Aux, oohing in monotone, finds he can draw on the Investiture Nomad is feeding into the stone where he could not touch the soul-canker directly. Filtered and purified, Nomad says, and lets it be.

Aux gives him a number: a few hundred BEUs of usable charge, no more. He will need every one of them. Twenty-odd Charred ring him on the deck — including the one with the fire-poker scars he punched a moment ago, back on his feet now with his cinderheart flaring. Twenty to one is bad odds even for him. The trick, as it has always been, is not to be caught and pulled down. He moves first and keeps moving. He hooks one Charred under the chin hard enough to send her teeth through her own mouth as she rises into the air. He spins through the next cluster — drops the staff, snatches the sunheart out of the air, forms Aux up as a shield, takes three baton blows on it, heaves the men back, drops the shield, forms another staff — and rejoins the fight before the rain has finished his last sentence. One sweep takes three at the knees. The next breaks an arm. He throws people off the side into the mud and remembers, with a small black pleasure, that on a planet where men do not train for battle there is nothing to compare him to.

He is the rain, the lightning, the thunder. He is the storm dropped into a country that has never seen one. The storm has always been the same, even when the ground beneath it is new.

Aux catches what he has missed — one of the Charred has slipped through the cockpit door behind Zeal and Rebeke, rising at their backs with its chest staining the cabin red. Nomad skids up outside the windshield, calls — *spear* — and the spearhead etched with patterns from his homeland forms on the end of the staff as he drives it through the glass and through the cinderheart in the Charred's chest. The stone cracks. The light goes out. Smoke trails from the dead eyes. Every Charred on the deck freezes; Zeal and Rebeke turn from the dead one behind them and stare back through the cracked windshield at Nomad with new horror.

Aux reminds him, in his head, that he is flirting with empty. He has not refilled his strength reserves, and the Charred who are now wary and getting back up will not underestimate him next time. He cannot finish them all. He pulls the spear back out of the windshield and gestures the universal *what the hell* at Zeal through the broken glass — *take off* — and Zeal cringes and goes for the controls.

Nomad turns back to the Charred now clumped at the bow. They are hesitating. They can still feel fear; the Cinder King's grip is not absolute. Aux says, quietly, that what they are doing to these people sits poorly with him — they are victims too. Truth, Nomad thinks. He has known truths like that a long time. You very rarely get to fight the right people; you fight the wrong ones until you can reach the one who gives the orders.

Today there may be another way. He falls into stance and begins to spin the spear — the Chasm Kata, the first such form he ever saw, the first he knows from the inside how intimidating it looks. Each foot a drumbeat on the wet deck, each step inevitable, the spear so fast that it catches the cinderheart light around it and throws it back. Step by step he advances on the Charred at the bow. They flinch away without meaning to. Beyond them on his own ship, two glowing eyes are watching from the dark. Nomad can read the fear on the Charred faces and through them on the Cinder King's — the man is realising, in real time, just how grateful he should be that Nomad did not take his duel.

Nomad finishes the kata: final spin, planted feet, the spearhead extended close enough to touch the chest of the nearest Charred. He sweeps back into stance, dismisses the spear, catches the offworlder sunheart out of the air and crosses his arms in front of him at the wrists, and mouths the two words his audience cannot possibly understand. Bridge Four. The ship lifts off; the Charred break for the side and drop into the mud as it climbs. He suspects they would not have run like that if the Cinder King himself had not been watching, and seeing it. Or perhaps he is just reading what he wants to read across a distance. Either way, no one gives chase. They flee into the night with the sunhearts.