the embers in a bright hearth. Indris gasped as disentropy flooded through his body. Fatigue was sluiced away.
“Thank you.”
He opened himself to the ahmsah. Eddies of disentropy swirled about his feet, as if he kicked up ancient and invisible sediment. He fancied it pulled at him, wanted him to remain immobile, forever part of the world in a single moment of communion. Indris held his hands out at his hips, fingers spread, palms downward as his Disentropic Stain flared. Colors became brighter. Images sharpened so much he could make out the individual splinters in the wood grain at his feet. He watched the currents of disentropy flow from plank to nail to plank of the deck at his feet. Down, down, down to the green-mantled darkness of the water, filled as it was with myriad lives, which in their turn fueled the world with disentropy of their own.
Numbers cascaded though Indris’s mind. The formulae of cause and effect slotted into the words used to express them. A vista of questions and answers spread in three dimensions across his mind. Where the numbers made no sense, or he could not find the words to express them, the cool calm of Changeling’s presence helped slot missing pieces into place. Together they strung together form from chaos. Reoriented strings of numbers and thoughts so their pieces fit together in the picture puzzle he created.
He chanted the Greater Kinesis.
The galley shuddered. He paid scant attention to the yowls of protest from the Tau-se. Part of him registered Hayden’s pallor as the boat gave out a deep groan of protest. Indris felt as if his head would implode as the massive ship settled back into the water. Changeling burned. The deck at his feet was hot through the soles of his boots.
Again, Changeling urged him without words.
The galley lurched as it rose from the embrace of the water.
Indris felt the weight of the galley and its passengers compress his Disentropic Stain. For a moment he felt as if he would be crushed. His mind, body, and soul, aided by Changeling’s barely audible corrections to disentropic ebb and flow, withstood those first moments of pain. More smoothly now, the galley rose from the water, higher, then higher again, until it crested the surrounding walls and white-tiled roofs.
“Hold on to something,” he urged his passengers.
Indris flexed disentropy as easily as he would the muscles of his own body. Slowly at first, then with gathering speed, the galley sped away from Fiandahariat, northeastward toward Amnon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Should one day all the people I love decide to hurl themselves into the Elder Darkness, I could never follow. I will have gone before them, through what trials as there may be, to save them where they fall. Love is the greatest loyalty. It should be bound neither by limitations of energy, sincerity, nor willingness.”—from The Values, quotes by Kemenchromis, Sēq Magnate and Arch-Scholar, 3rd Year of the Awakened Empire
Day 325 of the 495th Year of the Shrīanese Federation
Mari watched her father, brother, and the others board their wagons. Her thoughts went out to Indris and his friends. She chewed on one knuckle, anxious to see him again. She also wanted to see Ariskander. To have some sign their folly had proven fruitful, rather than the beginning of the end for them all.
She heard rough scratching from behind the wall of her chamber. Mari prowled to the hidden door panel from where the noise originated. She manipulated the opening mechanism, then stepped back. The panel gave a slight pop, then slid inward and sideward.
“Come out where I can see you!” she ordered.
“It’s Qamran!” The Feyassin poked his dust-grimed head through the portal.
“How did you find me?” Mari snapped. “More importantly, why are you still here? I asked you to leave—”
“Something’s happened to Pah-Vahineh.” His voice rasped from the bruising she had inflicted yesterday.
“Go back to her! I’ll follow.”
Mari took a few moments to change into a fresh tunic, trousers, and boots. In case Qamran planned a trap, she held her sheathed amenesqa in her hand as she entered the hidden passage and took the gloomy twists and turns that led her to the room she had left Vahineh and Qamran in.
Qamran had left the secret door open. Mari strode into a room furnished much like her own. It had been turned into a storeroom of sorts, for the spare belongings of the blood royal and their senior staff. Armal’s belongings had been moved here, as well as many of the other belongings