horses, had surged forward, leather groaning. They had smashed into the front lines of Far-ad-din and his Seethe, laying waste to those about them.
There had been no restoring order. No turning back, once the smell of blood was in the air. Mayhem now claimed the day.
Bright sunlight flashed from weapons. It seared the eye where it blazed from polished shields and breastplates, helms with their long plumes of dyed horsehair and feathers, and metal crests polished bright. Warriors flowed in complex formations like colored inks swirled in turbulent water. Arrows buzzed like gnats. The melee had one mighty voice: a rumble like the basso of thunder, which echoed, rolled, boomed without ever dying, in counterpoint to the shrieks of metal, the screams of pain, the war songs. Indris inhaled the acrid perfume of heated metal. Of sweat. The sweetness of crushed grass. The ammonia smell of urine. The copper-tang of blood.
Outnumbered as they were, the Seethe Indris commanded defied the might of their enemy. He knew it would not last. No doubt the Seethe knew it also, yet pride was ever the enemy of common sense. Their jewel-toned eyes and porcelain skin shone with the radiance of their fury. Beautiful, ageless, and all but deathless, they wore drake-glass armor that shone with bright gem colors; their weapons and shields chimed. Seethe war-troupers—artists, dancers, musicians, acrobats, and actors as much as they were killers—wove their way in formations only they seemed to understand. They vanished from sight only to appear improbably far away, to kill, to vanish again. A Seethe trouper leaped, almost as if she could fly, to land amid enemy soldiers, whom she cut down with a dark laugh. The Seethe’s drake-glass helms shifted form from leering skulls to maniacal laughing faces to the sorrowful visages of beautiful maids, cheeks bright with diamond tears. Wyvern-riders swooped to strafe combatants with arrow fire. The rainbow-hued reptiles snatched warriors from the ground and carried them into the sky, only to hurl them to the ground below. When a wyvern was shot from the air, it plowed great furrows through the ranks of soldiers as it died, poison stinger flailing.
Seeing their chance for glory, the warrior-poets from both armies sought each other out. Challenges to single combat rang clear, for such was the old way of the militant elite. Small circles or squares opened in the greater battle as the flamboyant warrior-poets met. Fought. Died. Songs would recount the glory of their lives by moonrise even as the flesh was boiled from their skulls, the bone to be plated in gold as a trophy.
The enemy had not gathered from across the breadth of Shrīan to lose. The Avān fought with ferocious tenacity, a machine of bronze and steel, resolute in their purpose. The Iphyri strode Amber Lake like blood-drenched juggernauts, eyes rolling, teeth bared in their horse heads.
Three knights of the Sēq Order of Scholars strode the sky, crow-black in their centuries-old finery. His former colleagues. Indris heard the crooning of their canto as they wove disentropy, the very force of creation, in complex formulae. It was the power of disentropy that made lanterns of their flesh. They unleashed geometries of power: spheres, arcs, and lines that scoured the Seethe ranks. Gone were the days of glory for the Sēq, yet those who remained were grievous enough. As Indris watched, one of the Sēq Knights convulsed. Her body shook, no doubt with the strain of channeling too much energy. Indris could have sworn the black-armored scholar vomited as she plummeted from the sky to disappear in the frenetic mass below.
Indris turned from the battle, Shar at his side. They sprinted to where Far-ad-din and his son, Ran-jar-din, stood with their royal guard. The guards turned their beaked helms in Indris’s direction as he approached, their feathered cloaks drooping in the hot, sodden breeze.
“You’re done,” Indris said to Far-ad-din without preamble. Shar’s eyes widened at his perfunctory tone. “You and Ran need to get away from here.”
“Is this how the legendary Indris makes war?” Ran-jar-din swept a bowl of dried emerald lotus petals from the small camp table. His sapphire eyes and clouded skin flickered with his wrath. “Why did we trust you? I’d already lost a sister because of—”
“That’s not fair and you know it!” Indris snapped. He felt the blow of the accusation in his chest. “Vashne may be the Asrahn, but even the Asrahn is answerable to the Teshri. It was they who brought this to you. You could’ve run,