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custodian. The original owner had been Haas’s great-grandfather, Hendrik Velte, whose family, tracing to Alsace, formed a minor aristocratic line of Etichonid blood. Though settled in the Netherlands for generations, Haas’s surname, his father’s—High German rather than Low Frankish—left them feeling mildly, proudly, transplanted.
    Hendrik’s service as an army officer had been mostly symbolic. In any case he had little need for a weapon of a foot soldier. The training he had was proper to his class: in longbows and rapiers, and in horsemanship, not guns. But he was far from alone among officers in having fine versions of infantry armaments made up, not for use, nor even for show, but simply for possession. The felt need for them seemed to grow just as that weaponry eclipsed the rarefied martial skills of the nobility on seventeenth-century battlefields.
    The Velte collection was extensive. It held, among much else, ancient hand-cannon, elegantly wrought pikes, and an array of arquebuses of various bores. Some had been lost, dispersed, or sold over the years, but the arquebus in Haas’s hands was the best of Hendrik’s: uncommonly accurate owing to the rifling, and potent, with a bore twice the size of the newer infantry muskets.
    The gun had never been fired on a man before it came to Haas, who was the first in several generations to serve actually rather than symbolically. His mother had been reluctant to see him do so on the other side of the Earth, if he had to do it at all, and then only in defense of crass commercial interests. But that was the modern world. The son had wanted a part in winning it; that is, in winning whatever there was left to be won, even if his kind were no longer in the ascendancy. So he’d left Europe to extend the reach of something between a business and a colony, the Dutch East India Company.
    Almost from the start there was local resistance. It turned armed and absolute as soon as it became clear they were occupiers not liberators. (The Portuguese had already given the game away; simple trade could never be the end of it.) Haas found himself helping raze Colombo, when the Portuguese still had a hold on it, then rebuilding the same city after the Dutch won it.
    Since then he’d been making ever-deeper incursions into the bush, toward Kandy, winning and losing the same ground several times. At one point he took a nine-month trip back to Europe, as a sort of extended constitutional. It included a marriage, to a second cousin of equal birth, or slightly better, as the last century or so had been kinder to her family’s fortunes than his own. But the woman, the girl, was far from his mind, now that he’d returned to Lanka. Love would matter one day, he thought. It would be everything. But first there was blood, and there was plenty of it to be spilled.
    After several recent losses of position and personnel, they’d managed, almost magically, to hold the ground they took. He thought he must have solved something, even if he couldn’t say what. It must be showing up in his tactics, moment to moment, a finer calibration to the environment, one he couldn’t describe or know of except through the raw fact of their success. Lately he’d heard rumors that the Portuguese were making trouble to the north, perhaps drawing the Sinhalese away from the southern front of the kingdom. They might be his magic. He put it out of his mind. It didn’t help. And they were only rumors.
    Haas and his squad found themselves on Kandy’s doorstep now. Fifty miles, maybe less. But their victories, coming consecutively, were beginning to cripple them. The men, and he especially, as commander, had been left starved of sleep and, far from Colombo, short of munitions.
    By rights Haas could have led from a distance. He was fourth in command of Dutch forces on the island. His rise hadn’t been hurt by his family name, the distant echo of clout it carried. But mostly it was down to his relentlessness in the