The high council’s tin mirrors remained dark, but the iron-shod boots of the vanguard were already caked in the gray slush of treason.
Cassian stood at the center of the subterranean under-croft, a vaulted limestone chamber beneath the armory foundations that the high lords hadn't used since the Great Famine.
The air down here was free of the sulfur-grain smoke that choked the upper estate; it was thin, bitterly cold, and smelled heavily of old grease, damp iron, and the sharp, volatile static of nine alpha-lineage commanders who had been dragged from their pallets by a silent, verbal cipher.
On the center of a scarred salt-barrel lay the ruined, flattened calfskin vellum that Elena had smoothed out hours before. The left-leaning hatchings of Selene’s *Gilded Matrix* gleamed under the
