—fromA Manual on Employing a Sesharian for Jantari Gentlefolk
Samson woke with the rancid taste of metal on his tongue. Leather straps cut across his cheeks, shoving the bar into his mouth with an increasing pressure. He groaned. A sour, putrid stench wafted up, and he realized he had pissed himself. Wincing, he attempted to twist out of his bonds, but his knees brushed against the stone wall, his back scraping against the wall opposite.
He was in a box, trapped.
Samson grunted, flexing his bound hands, willing his Agni to spark. He felt heat course through his veins, but then the metal bands around his hands and feet cut deeper. He cried out, choking. He wanted to throw up, found that he already had. Dried gobbets caked the floor. When Samson looked down at his chest, he saw the faint outline of stitches, smelled the cutting bitterness of antibiotics.
It was dark in the box, and still. He strained to hear any noise, but only a thundering silence answered him. Vaguely, he remembered the taste of blood. Elena’s scream. The glint of a silver blade.
Then pain.
Then darkness.
Samson whimpered, curling into a ball as the metal bands tightened around his limbs. He felt as if they would saw through his bones.
Sudden, blinding light. He gasped, pressing into the wall, trying to make himself as small as possible as a figure approached.
He smelled oil, heard the whir of gears.
A memory flitted through the fog in his brain. He recalled a ballroom lit with chandeliers. A curtain of roses. And the half-metal man who had greeted him with a bent smile.
“Hello, Butcher,” Farin said. His green eye glinted in the dark. “Look at what a mess you’ve made.”
Samson stared, blood draining from his body. The metal bands notched up a degree, and he gasped.
“Cunning things, aren’t they?” Farin said. His nose wrinkled as he took in the vomit. “But I confess they can get rather messy.”
He raised his hand, and someone placed a chair at the doorway. It was then that Samson realized he was not in a box, but in a cell, the ceiling sloping down so it felt like he was pinned to the ground. He tried to crawl forward, but the bands ratcheted tighter, and he hissed in pain.
For a while, Farin said nothing. He sat perfectly still, the quiet hiss of valves and motors filling the cell.
“You were like a son,” the king said finally.
The words struck Samson with a weight he had not expected. They were cruel and false.I was never a son. Not truly.He was Jantar’s outcast, the black sheep.
“I suppose every son must rise against his father someday, but I had higher hopes for you, Sam. So many hopes.” Disappointment skittered sideways across Farin’s face like a spider. He leaned forward, and Samson shrank back, but then Farin gripped his chin. Turned his head up as he loosened the leather straps. The metal rod fell to the stone floor with a sharp ring that echoed in the small cell.
Samson closed his mouth, wincing. Pain cricked down his face andneck. Behind his back, he tried to rub his fingertips together to create friction, heat, but the bands only clenched tighter around his wrists. He winced.
“They’re sensitive,” Farin said. “Every time they detect a slight increase in temperature, they constrict. Quite useful against fire fanatics.”
“Wh-where is Elena?” Samson croaked. His voice sounded thin, several shades less than his usual booming timbre.
Farin’s metallic eye pierced through him. His stomach twisted.
“You have cost me quite a lot, Samson,” he said quietly. “Six mines, hundreds of men, never mind my stolen metal. I would have let that go. But then you and your rebels forced me to give up my most prized possession.” Farin reached inside his coat, withdrew a dagger. With a start, Samson recognized the jagged blade. It was the same dagger his attacker had used. The hilt was shaped like a metal dragon, the blade lancing out of its jaws. Farin turned the blade over, traced its point. He pressed his metal finger against its edge, swiped, and showed Samson his hand. There was no scratch.
“Seshar was created by my forefathers. It took years to build, decades to perfect. But you snatched it away in one night. You, with your red queen and black devils.” Farin lowered the dagger. The blade hovered inches above Samson’s toes. “I gave you sanctuary from the Arohassin. I let you raise an army. I even gifted you an entire mountain to build your mines.”
“That gift was a blood gift, and you know that,” Samson said, even as his toes curled. His hands shook behind his back. “You gave me protection in exchange for a bond. An army, in exchange for all the metal I mined. Everything you gave, Farin, came with a cost.”
“Such is compromise.” Farin tapped the metal band around Samson’s legs with the tip of the dagger. “There are always costs.”
“Where’s Elena? Where are my men?”
“Dead, or imprisoned,” Farin said flatly.
He had feared the worst, but to hear it out loud, after floundering in the dark, filled him with a sense of hopelessness he had never felt before in his life—not even when he watched Seshar burn. His hands slackened. There was no heat, no sparks, no fire.
