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  To the CA. You know who you are.

  A BRIEF GLOSSARY OF COMMON GODGLASS

  ACTIVE GODGLASS

  Auraglass: augments charisma

  Cureglass: augments healing

  Dazeglass: augments euphoria

  Fearglass: augments fear

  Forgeglass: augments physical strength and speed

  Milkglass: augments pain tolerance

  Museglass: augments artistic creativity

  Shackleglass: augments obedience

  Sightglass: augments sensory perception

  Skyglass: augments tranquility

  Witglass: augments mental acuity

  PASSIVE GODGLASS

  Omniglass: increases the resonance of nearby godglass

  INERT GODGLASS

  Hammerglass: extremely durable, most often used for armor

  Razorglass: can be given an edge that can cut through almost anything

  PROLOGUE

  Demir Grappo picked his way through the aftermath of a battle as the sun began to set over the mountains. The sky was a brilliant hue of red, wispy clouds looking like the flames of an eternal forge, a scene worthy of a painting if not for the carnage spread out across the plain in every direction. Demir let his eyes linger on that sunset, trying to block out the screams and moans of the dying. He wondered if his army had an official artist. Most armies did, didn’t they? If not, he should get one.

  He held up his fingers to make a rectangle like that of a landscape painting. It was an incredible view. Slowly, he lowered his fingers so that they took in the rapidly darkening battlefield. This … less so.

  Demir had grown up on stories of wartime glory—of heroism and last stands and outnumbered cavalry charges; of unstoppable breachers in their brightly colored sorcerous armor cutting a swath through infantry while glassdancers rained shards of glittering silica across the battlefield.

  Those painted words had always been so much cleaner than reality. They hadn’t talked about the clouds of powder smoke, or the putrid slurry of mud and blood underfoot. None of his tutors had ever mentioned the screams of grown men and women—weeping for fear, for wounds, or for their dead friends. They certainly hadn’t mentioned the smell.

  And the blood. Oh, so much blood. There always was when glassdancers were involved.

  Demir had managed three victories in seven days, and he could not deny that watching a battle unfold to his specifications had made his heart pound in a way he’d never before experienced. Seeing the enemy routed; listening to his soldiers cheer—those things certainly felt glorious. But this? There was no glory for the medics, surgeons, and priests wandering the aftermath.

  Demir contemplated the swampy morass of blood left in the wake of a company of soldiers who’d fallen beneath a glassdancer’s attack. The bodies were eviscerated, sliced apart by millions of shards of glass. Those that survived looked like horror-house dummies, screaming in agony until a medic could reach them with various types of godglass to distract the mind, lessen the pain, and speed recovery.

  Was that his handiwork, he wondered? They were rebel soldiers, after all, and it was easy to lose track of these sorts of things during the chaos of a battle. His eyes fell on one of the wounded, a young woman sitting up with precious pain-deadening milkglass clenched between her teeth. She was staring at Demir with a mixture of horror and fear so intense that Demir found himself covering the overlapping triangle tattoo on his left hand that marked his sorcery.

  His glassdancer tutor had once told him that it was good and right for their kind to stand above others. It was a gift, she had claimed, and beyond the sorcerous power to manipulate common glass it would also give him a psychological edge over others. They would always fear him, because they knew he could kill with a thought.

  The evidence was before him. Hundreds of men and women, cut to ribbons. They were right to fear him. He had never witnessed his own destructive power with such acuity as he had on the battlefield these last seven days, and deep down, it terrified him. Would he get used to this over time? He was only twenty years old, after all, and this was his first campaign. Would he harden? Or would it always leave him sickened?

  Demir looked around for something—anything—with which to ground himself. His staff of officers hadn’t yet noticed his disappearance, and he was alone but for the dead, the wounded, and the healers and priests who tended to both. The living gave him a wide berth the moment they connected his decorated black uniform with the silic sigil marking him as a glassdancer. They might not actually recognize him, but they could do the math. General Grappo, the glassdancer commander.

  He hated that so much. Why couldn’t they see the victories he’d given them, instead of the deadly sorcery he never wanted?

  His eyes finally fell on a familiar figure and he turned his aimless wandering in that direction. He passed a medic handing a piece of white godglass the size and shape of a horseshoe nail to a wounded soldier. “Clutch it between your teeth until the pain passes,” the medic instructed, glancing at Demir as if it were his doing. Half the soldier’s guts were hanging out. She would be dead in a few hours, but the sorcery of the milkglass would ease her passing. On a whim, Demir tried to feel the little piece of milkglass with his sorcery, but the spot it occupied was cold and dead to his senses. Godglass was the only glass a glassdancer could not manipulate.

  Putting the medic and his dying patient from his mind, Demir approached the man he’d seen kneeling in a small clearing in the field of dead. Demir knew him just well enough to guess that he was not praying. Clearing his head, he called it, before and after every battle. Demir wished more soldiers attended to their own minds as carefully.

  Idrian Sepulki was big, over six feet tall, with skin as dark as coal, broad shoulders, and legs strong as tree trunks. He wore the armor of a breacher: halfplate of interlocking steel worked with a myriad of high-resonance godglass; accents of milkglass to suppress pain; bands of yellow forgeglass to increase his strength and speed; pinpricks of purple witglass to invigorate the mind. Most predominant of all was the dark blue hammerglass that was harder than steel, making the armor itself almost indestructible. Idrian’s kite shield and immense bastard sword, both also inlaid with godglass, lay on the ground beside him, crusted in blood from the battle. His helmet had two hammerglass ram’s horns curled tightly against the steel. Among the soldiers, Idrian was known simply as the Ram.

  The sorcery of so much godglass in one place would sicken a normal person in a few minutes and kill them in mere hours, but Idrian was a glazalier—one of those rare individuals resistant to glassrot. All breachers were, by necessity. Demir glanced down
at the back of his own hand where a purple, scaly shimmer had appeared on his skin. It was the first sign of glassrot, caused by using witglass to plan and command the battle. Without care, the patch would harden into something akin to fish scales and become permanently fixed to his skin. He would need to be judicious with his exposure to sorcery for a few days.

  “Breacher Sepulki,” Demir greeted Idrian. The soldier cracked open one eye, saw that it was Demir, and made to get to his feet. Demir stopped him with a wave. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

  “There is nothing to interrupt, sir,” Idrian replied, his voice a deep, vibrant bass. “I am simply emptying my mind of violence.” He opened both his eyes, revealing that the right had been replaced long ago with a false eye made of purple witglass. Demir had asked around a couple of weeks ago, but no one seemed to know when he’d gotten that glass eye, or why it hadn’t killed him yet. Taking godglass into one’s own body wasn’t unheard of, but it was very dangerous, even to a glazalier.

  “Sounds healthy,” Demir responded. “I was enjoying the sunset, myself.”

  Idrian fixed Demir with that unsettling, one-purple-eyed gaze. There was no fear in that gaze, and for that Demir was grateful. At least someone in this army viewed him as more than a monster. But then again, breachers were little more than state-sponsored killing machines. Power understood power. “It is quite striking, sir. Congratulations on the victory.”

  Demir gave Idrian a cool nod and wondered if it irked the breacher to call someone less than half his age “sir.” “It does seem to be a victory, doesn’t it?”

  “The enemy has been crushed. Whatever strength they have left has fled to the mountains. Holikan lies defenseless before us.” Idrian nodded to himself. “At least, that is the intelligence I have received. You may have more current information.”

  “No, that’s about the sum of it.”

  Idrian snorted. “Thank you, sir. Do you happen to know where my battalion is?”

  Demir considered this for a moment, going through a catalog of the thousands of commands he’d sent out over the last twenty-four hours. He wouldn’t usually keep tabs on a single battalion, but Idrian belonged to the Ironhorn Rams—they were commanded by Demir’s uncle Tadeas and they were the best combat engineers in the Ossan Empire. Idrian would normally be with them, but Demir’s plans for this battle had required an extra breacher.

  “Haven’t caught up to us yet,” he answered. “I imagine they’re still blowing up bridges along the Tien.” He frowned. “That reminds me, let’s send a fast horse to let them know the war has been won. No need to destroy infrastructure that doesn’t need to be destroyed.”

  “Of course, sir. Should I carry the message myself?”

  “Eager to join back up with them?”

  “They’re my friends, sir. I don’t like them being without their breacher.”

  “Ah. No, stay with me a while yet, at least until I’m completely certain of the enemy’s surrender. We’ll send a horse, and I’ll make sure you rejoin them soon.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Idrian paused. “If I may?”

  “Yes?”

  “The soldiers are calling you the Lightning Prince. I thought you might want to know.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.” Demir took the name on his tongue and rolled it around. “Is it meant to be a diminutive for my age, or a celebration for the speed of my campaign?”

  Idrian hesitated just a moment too long.

  “Come now, be honest.”

  “Both, I think.”

  Demir chuckled. “I like it.” The Lightning Prince. Most great men were middle-aged before they’d earned an honorific like that. He hummed to himself, enjoying the way the nickname sounded in his head. It almost made him forget the blood soaking his boots. Maybe he would get used to this. Maybe he would harden to killing, and to ordering others to kill.

  He shuddered. No. More importantly than being a glassdancer or a general, he was a politician. He was in charge of this campaign by circumstance only, and within a few days he planned on heading right back to his province, where he could put the bloodshed behind him and focus on helping his people.

  Idrian climbed to his feet, towering over Demir by eight inches. “Sir, I believe that your staff is looking for you.”

  Demir glanced the way Idrian nodded to see a small group approaching on horseback. They were an odd mix of Ossan political liaisons—here to oversee negotiations with the enemy—and grizzled officers sent along to make sure this young upstart governor didn’t make a complete disaster of his first campaign. The lot of them grinned at him like asylum fools. He could see in their eyes that they expected to gain prestige, land, and merits on the coattails of his victory. Demir didn’t mind. Sharing credit meant they would be beholden to him in the future; a card to keep in reserve for if he ever needed it.

  He let his eyes wander across the group for several moments, making mental notes of who he could use in the future, who might be trouble, and who he could forget. Tavrish Magna was a great potbellied jokester with few ambitions. Helenna Dorlani whispered behind Demir’s back constantly, undermining him with the subtlety of a company of cuirassiers. Her cousin Jevri gladly took Demir’s bribes to report on her. Three members of the small Forlio guild-family had managed to finagle their way onto his staff, and they stood to gain the most from this campaign, while Jakeb Stavri had made deals in the Assembly that bet strongly against Demir’s success. He would lose hundreds of thousands, and based on the look on his face, he knew it.

  It was a complex group, both personally and politically—untrustworthy adders slithering about his feet, any one of which might bite at any time. Even in victory he needed to be cautious, lest one of them turn on him for their own gain.

  The man out front was named Capric Vorcien, and he was a personal friend that Demir had brought on campaign to cover his back against all the rest. Capric was a tall, thin man in his early twenties with the black hair and olive skin of an Ossan native. Tattooed on his right hand was an inverted triangle crossed with the wavy lines of a sun setting over the desert—the silic symbol of the Vorcien guild-family. He saluted Demir grandly and swung down from his horse.

  “Hail, Victorious Grappo!” Capric called. The others echoed the words with various levels of enthusiasm. Demir gazed back at the group, still evaluating each person, noting the secrets hidden in the eyes of each. Behind their pleasure at a battle won, there was fear there, just like the soldiers’. How many glassdancers were there in the officer corps, after all? Not many. Capric was the only one who didn’t seem to walk on eggshells. “That was an incredible battle,” he complimented Demir.

  “Satisfactory,” Demir demurred. “That countercharge from their dragoons surprised me.”

  “But you shattered it anyway. Glassdamn you, man, take some credit!” Capric clasped his hand, pulling him into a congratulatory hug during which he whispered, “Look over my left shoulder. If you want to go ahead with your next plan, now is the time.”

  Demir’s eyes found an unfamiliar trio among his staff: a middle-aged woman with the blond hair of an eastern provincial, accompanied by two bodyguards, all three of them looking haggard and defeated. He pulled back from Capric and gestured at the group. “What is this?” he asked loudly, though he knew exactly who they were.

  “The mayor of Holikan has come to surrender.” At Capric’s gesture, the woman approached Demir, hands held out in supplication. She fell on her knees, pressing her face to the ground.

  “I surrender the city of Holikan,” she intoned. “I do not ask for terms—but I offer my life in exchange for the lives of my subjects. They do not deserve the wrath of the Empire.”

  Demir blinked down at her. He had discussed this moment with Capric at length. It was the crux of the next step in his political career, and yet it still managed to surprise him. Beside the prostrating mayor, Helenna Dorlani produced a short silver lance and now held it, pommel-first, toward Demir. Tradition dictated that he accept the surrender and t
hen pierce the mayor’s neck with the ceremonial weapon, executing her on the spot. She was a rebel, after all; an insurrectionist and traitor to the Ossan Empire. Demir glanced toward Idrian, his confidence wavering at the idea of such immediate, formalized bloodshed, but the breacher had taken two long steps back as if to say that a soldier had no business in this kind of thing.

  Demir took the lance from the liaison and turned toward Capric. Capric himself just shrugged. He knew Demir’s mind. He knew Demir had no intention of following outdated traditions just to please the Assembly. Demir gave the lance a little twirl, then slapped the haft thoughtfully against his left palm. “Stand up,” he said.

  The mayor glanced up at Demir, then at the gathered officers. She seemed confused by the fact that she wasn’t being speared at this moment. Demir thrust the lance into the ground, point-first, then leaned on it while he took the mayor under one arm and pulled her to her feet. He offered her his hand.

  “Good evening. I’m Demir Grappo.”

  The mayor stared at his other hand for several moments—or rather at the glassdancer sigil on it. Finally she answered the handshake. “I am Myria Forl, mayor of Holikan.” She hesitated for another few moments, then added, “I’ve heard of you, Demir Grappo.”

  “Good things, I hope.”

  She nodded. “What are you doing here? You’re a governor two provinces over; a politician, not a warrior.”

  “Warrior?” Demir laughed and jerked his thumb at Idrian. “He’s a warrior. I’m just a bit clever. Tell me, Myria, what do you want?”

  “I … Excuse me?”

  “Seven months ago, you declared your independence from the Ossan Empire. You’ve defeated two armies, gathered support from your province, and from what I can tell were doing a damned good job of this whole rebellion before I showed up. And yet … you’re still calling yourself a mayor.”