As Baru drowsed in the cellar, drugged by the wine I’d left for her, I ordered Iscend to draw Dziransi outside. She simply challenged him to wrestle. He said he would not fight an unarmed woman, for it was against the gentle honor. She said he was afraid to lose. That note of pride gave the Stakhi man an excuse to beat her, so he went out, amiably, into the dark saltgrass.

In their first grapple Iscend drove a poisoned needle into his bare thigh. He felt the hurt but thought, I am sure, that it was a thorn. He won the fight, but that got his heart going, which only pumped the poison all the faster. (A metaphor, there, for this Republic we serve.)

Then he fell.

The boat from Helbride had already delivered the sarcophagus. Iscend and I worked swiftly to pin Dziransi within the braces and steel clamps of the casket, as motionless as a krakenfly in amber.

Then I opened the sarcophagus’s neck hatch and needled Dziransi with a big man’s dose of the dream-hammer.

I gained the Jurispotence of Aurdwynn at age thirty-six, and for the next twenty-four years I scourged the bodies of my people. Did I torture them? Fucking right I did. I sent them down into my Cold Cellar for reconditioning and the occasional radical surgery. I had their bodies altered to the demands of the Incrastic state.

But I was better than what came before.

Remember the old Duke Lachta with his breaking-wheels and his hot pears? His fascination with expanding all the holes in the human form? He could make anyone say anything, as long as he wanted it said in a scream.

I never tortured anyone like that. I don’t waste people.

The brave man Dziransi possessed great strength, and like many strong things he was therefore brittle. I admit that I bent him perhaps too hard. I hate the Mansion Stakhi for their cold ways and their avarice toward my home. I hate what their ideas of women did to the daughters of Aurdwynn.

I suppose I hated Dziransi a little, and hurt him for it.

Dziransi had been on drugs since he came to Moem, of course. Execarne kept all his guests on a low dose of cannabis and opiate to secure their calm and trust. But the dream-hammer, now, that was a drug to change the shape of a man’s soul. In old Belthyc myth the first caterpillars ate the dream-hammer before they went into their cocoons, and from their feverish metamorphosis emerged the nightmare race of man.

I’d used it on myself once. On the night of my brother’s marriage. When I resolved to change the shape of my soul, to peel it away from the shape of his.

Tonight I used it on Dziransi. And the dream-hammer made me Dziransi’s god.

I felt blasphemous. I felt like I’d committed that mythic sin of hubris.