and led away. A mounted Erebus officer with a handful of Iphyri at his side came close to loom over Indris, florid with barely suppressed loathing.
“The code and measure won’t save you, traitor!” The officer spat at Indris’s feet.
Indris stared up at him. “The Arbiter of the Change may have a few things to say about that.”
One of the Iphyri’s calloused fists smashed into Indris’s head before he had the chance to say anything else.
Indris had once promised himself he would not get involved in the internecine politics of Shrīan again, yet here he was. If he was not executed for his part in Far-ad-din’s alleged crimes, he would make sure he kept his word to himself in future. Most of those who fought for Far-ad-din had been Seethe sworn to the monarch’s service, troupers who had decided to stay by their rahn rather than desert him. As a mercenary, Indris could have left Far-ad-din’s service at any time. As the man’s son-in-law, ridden with guilt over offenses both real and imagined, the choice to stay had been made for him.
Indris gazed out the windows of the room in which he had been imprisoned, squinting against the glare of the setting sun as it rolled over the bronze-shod domes of seaside shrines and sheened the crystalline towers of vacant Seethe schools. After his surrender at Amber Lake, a barely conscious Indris had been hustled to the top floor of an abandoned villa near the sea. For the past two days he had watched many of his comrades dragged into the courtyard below. There had been no sign of Shar. Yet. Those of the middle castes, common soldiers for the most part, had been beheaded with ruthless efficiency. The lower-caste menials—and those of the middle castes deemed worthy of keeping alive—were divvied up and handed over to overseers, where they were bound into service. The upper castes—wealthy landowners, the members of warriors’ families, or other luminaries—were strangled with lengths of yellow silk, their corpses thrown onto wagons like kindling. From dawn till dusk prisoners were brought into the courtyard garden. Quickly sentenced regardless of caste, or whether they were Avān, Seethe, or Human. The one constant was the crest worn by the officers, guards, and executioners: a black stallion rampant on a bloody field. The sign of the Great House of Erebus.
Indris’s surrender to Ariskander as Arbiter of the Change should have been enough to ensure his safety and that of his comrades. He had not anticipated that the Erebus forces would disregard the policies of surrender and ransom so violently.
There had been no chance of escape. The warrior-poet’s wrists and throat were encircled by locked bands of salt-forged steel, the metal blistering his skin. Toxic to mystics, the salt-forged steel dammed the flow of disentropy in his body. Sent fever chills along his skin. The painful sensation of needling down his spine. Even the glow of candlelight was too harsh; his eyes were now overly sensitive. His head pounded to the point that he felt nauseated. Days after the Battle of Amber Lake, his limbs still twitched in reaction to the flood of disentropy he had channeled. At least the mindstorms had passed, though his mouth still tasted of bile. His skin reeked of stale sweat and old vomit.
Screams came from the courtyard below. The repeated thuds of bladed weapons cleaving necks. The desperate gasps of strangulation. Wails as shackles were placed around wrists and ankles, freedom swapped for servitude. Indris leaned against the wall, looking to the purple-and-yellow-tinted clouds, wondering whether they were the last he would ever see. Soon his captors would come to him again and ask him the predictable questions he would refuse to answer. They would tire of his silence. Seek to motivate him to talk in evermore inventive ways. Sheltered in the bastion of his mind, he had known about the pain. Acknowledged it at an intellectual level. Packaged it. Locked it away to be expressed in the moments when he could release his self-control, if only for a short while. In the presence of the torturers who wanted him to betray Far-ad-din, Indris had shown nothing but a face of stone.
Tired beyond anything in his recollection, Indris focused his mind once more. As the Zienni Scholars said, “There is no failure in falling, only in not trying to regain one’s feet and take another step.” Disentropy, the energy of creation generated by all living things, eddied and swirled about him. He could feel