Puerto Faro had become a grisly festival, and Commander Solhart marched his men right through it, the one born with the name that is. The auxiliaries were armed with spear and torch, filing through the sandy roads. All other lights in the night were their foes. The good people of the city had barred their doors, blocked their windows, and shut themselves away. Anything illumined belonged to the Cynizia as they colored the streets with corpses in feverish hues.

Outside this marching creep of light, my mercenaries trailed from rooftop to rooftop. The Tolzi brothers were large men, trolls by comparison to the short Giordanans. Having grown up in the half-frozen woods and swamps of the north, afraid any rustle of leaves or snap of a branch would scatter their prey or summon a troll, a real one, the sand floors of Puerto Faro let them move like wisps.

Commander Solhart would not have been able to spot them even if he hadn’t been consumed by fear. All about him were shouts of battle and the cries of women. Horses charged down the streets, bloody and frothing. Men laid dead on the ground, skulls split by mace and by rock. He saw men gasping and bleeding and did nothing to help. He ran past the bodies, the anguish, the evil of men’s hearts laid bare, and did nothing against it.

Perhaps he thought a fire had broken out, or rival merchant families were having a feud. The possibility of his own destruction gripped his mind so tightly it blinded him from the true danger before his very eyes. Had he stopped to consult with his subordinates, perhaps history would have gone differently, but he was young and far from home. Most of all, he was terrified his own poor choices would be laid bare for all to see.

The coffers of the garrison, given to him by Lord Felix von Raymi, were empty. He had stolen from them to pay his gambling debts and even that could not cover his debts. When his creditors convened and came to realize the scope of his foolishness, they put knives to him and gave him an ultimatum; produce the money by blood, or they would take it from his body. They had the liveliest of debates over whose slave pit he would end up in, before he fled to stoke the flames.

The Medini family, Solhart’s victim of choice, sat on the west side of the town, away from the Tavina River. Their complex surrounded the Medini estado with a lattice of pillars and spanning arches. A maze of shuttered peddler stalls laid out through their bazaar, with more shadows, blind alleys, and unexpected walls than a Drachenreise labyrinth of trials. Marching into a viper nest would have been safer, but near two hundred soldiers pushed him onwards. He had rallied a mob and he knew well enough that something had to be destroyed. If not the Medini’s, it would be him.

Now, even before the eighth century, the Vassermark army was nothing to take lightly, even the auxiliaries. While the average Giordanan soldier had barely more than a few rods or disks of brass and iron strapped to a linen shirt, the Vassish had segmented plate over gambesons. With shields and stout spears, they had little to fear from a merchant guard. Or so Lucius thought.

“Stella Medini!” he bellowed, calling out to the woman who had taken in Medorosa.(1)

“He said you would come here, you greed-blinded bastard,” she said from her balcony. Her features could hardly be made out, silhouetted by her room’s lamp as she was. The voice left little doubt as to her identity; the shadow of her guard hound left none.

“Medorosa, I presume? Stella, I demand you turn yourself over for rebellion. You will pay for this!” Let no one ever say that he was not good at bluffing. It was statistics he had failed at.

The man of the night, the spark that struck the fire, walked out beside her. Medorosa Canta lifted his chin and shouted, “I am right here, you honorless bastard.” He wore no shirt, let alone armor, at that moment; as though goading a courageous arrow or spear. All could see the stigmata written across his flesh, and the trickling red line sliced through his breast. He held the knife that did it in his hand; his honor blade.

Lucius had been told who the man was, and his noble honor did not let him be cowed. “Honor? You’re an oathbreaker by turning your blade at us!”

“You Vassish broke your oaths first!” he screamed, and slammed the pommel of his blade down on the balcony railing. Every last soul in the deathly marketplace looked to him. They clutched their weapons tighter and they listened. “What did your Vassish oaths mean when you people saw us under attack? When cannibals were butchering my friends in the river? When you left me, all of us, to die!... Was it the money? Was it that you wanted to squirm out of paying us our measly wage? That’s all you Vassish care about, isn’t it?”

“Money,” Lucius grumbled, and he drew his sword. He pointed his broad bladed infantry sword at the rebel and with all the gravitas his upbringing could give him, he said, “We are here at the order of our King! For the prosperity of not just our people, but your backwards, slave-infested filth of a region as well. You should be grateful we chose to impose our rule upon you, rather than burn your cities to the ground to make way for good people. It is Vassermark that will lead the world. You and your honor will be forgotten.”

“Godless bastards,” Medorosa said, and he held up his honor blade. The moonlight shown upon the edge, silver. At the signal, a hundred men rose up around them with short bows. They had been hiding in shadows, atop roofs and awnings, within crates and carts, and everywhere else. Arrows flew into the Vassish before shields could be swung about. Shouts of surprise became screams of pain. The Vassish around Lucius never recovered after the first volley; their formation crumbled. Like timber in a burning building, the whole thing came down around him.

To his credit, Lucius, a man with the tenacity of a cockroach to survive, managed to cut his way free. The ambush was effective, but archers are easily routed in the face of drawn steel. Outside the market they were free of the harrying arrows and able to face down the rebels in the streets. He nearly cut his bloody way back to the garrison, back to the voluntaries he had left behind, and perhaps he might have lived.

Trampling over the bodies of his fallen men, the soldiers he had been charged to lead and fight alongside, he turned tail and escaped the Medini bloodbath. He lacked even the conviction to scream, “To me!” His plunge into the darkness was with head down and breath pumping. Without his proper helm, he appeared no different from any other Vassish soldier in the night, save to the watchful eyes of the Tolzi brothers.

My mercenaries dropped down in front and behind him the moment he took an alley, and they trapped him there. With dark buildings to his left and his right, foreign mercenaries ahead and behind, the sweat began to pour from Lucius.

The elder brother spoke. “Well if it isn’t the pauper prince! Now bereft of even an army,” Leomund declared with a bear-like grin. He spread his arms, swallowing the alley with his own presence.

“Who are you?” Lucius demanded, and belatedly put up his sword. “You’re no Giordanan.”

“I’m a recent hire.”

“Hire? So my creditors had me tailed? Some honor then.”

Leomund couldn’t help but throw his head back and laugh. “It’s not their honor that’s in question, but yours. What have you done to put value in your word, Lucius?”

He straightened up. “I pay my debts!”

“To the women you sleep with, maybe,” Leomund said. He leaned down to be of a height with the man, and put his hands on his hips. “But you lost money that wasn’t even yours. Dereliction of duty is dereliction of honor.”

“When my father hears of this, this city will burn!”

“The city’s already burning, and it’s the Vassish who are dying. What’s your daddy going to do about it?” Leomund asked. Lucius couldn’t meet the northerner’s glare; he didn’t have it in him. Leomund continued, “What’s he going to do but bail you out of your own mess?”

Lucius had no answer, and his mind could see nothing but the secret slave pits of Giordana. That was not to be his fate however. Nikolai, the younger Tolzi, cut his fate short and separated his head from his shoulders. The thwack of steel to flesh sounded like chopping green firewood. The commander of the Vassish garrison crumpled to the ground, squirting blood across the walls before that too came to a pitiful end.

Leomund bent over and picked up the severed head, holding it by the hair. “Don’t worry,” he said, speaking to the last vestige of will left within Lucius. “We’ll take care of your name. We might even make your father proud, like you never would have.”

The Tolzi brothers left the body behind. Nothing about it was identifiable save that it was Vassish. Many dozens of other corpses filled the gutters of Puerto Faro that night, and the victors had no interest in identifying the dead. Leomund put the head into a sack, and the two of them scampered back up to the rooftops. Nikolai departed south to inform me of the success. Leomund went north, to the temple of Last Respite.

The priest had been innocuously cleaning the sand from the steps, and just so happened to leave the doors of the temple open when he saw Leomund. Entering separately, the two of them met in the meager light of a single candle. “You’ve done it, then?” the priest of Shepherd, goddess of death, asked.

Leomund grunted and put the bloody sack on the altar between them. The marble idol of Shepherd looked down on them with shadows, staring into the spiteful soul of the man. The priest smiled as he held the light to the face. He said, “It would never do for me to take a side in this, you know?”

Leomund grunted. His ears were keen for the sound of fighting outside the stone walls of the temple. “And yet, here we are in the dark.”

“Not everything should be done in the light. Could you imagine a society where every single action is held to public scrutiny? No, no, that would be a foolish way to live. No one wants to know the great mass of actions that keep society together. We’d never be able to do what needs be done.” The priest poured oil over the severed head as he spoke.

The northerner jabbed a calloused finger into the priest’s shoulder. “Just keep your end of the deal.”

“I will, I will. My word is my honor, as I do serve the goddess,” the priest said, scowling back at the mercenary. “This is simply what the Vassish deserve.(2) They are the crudest sort of barbarians, by my reckoning. Their carelessness destroys everything around them. The Canta family will never again-”

“Stop blabbing like I care,” Leomund ordered. “Your town is nothing but a rat warren getting trampled by the march of time. Now light it or I will.”

The priest stiffed his back and swallowed his words. Without breaking eye contact with Leomund, he dipped the candle and set the wick to the oil. The altar erupted in flames. Orange tongues like spear tips that danced and coiled, belching black smoke. The color shifted, a bright blue streaking through it in sputtering bursts. The heat grew so great both men had to step back.

The soul of Lucius Von Solhart was sacrificed and obliterated; cleared out from the world of the living so that another might take its place.

(1) I found her to be a lovely woman, though most men drew their comparisons to vinegar rather than fine wine. Most men are imbeciles.

(2) There is much historical contention about the persecution of the Shepherd’s faith in Giordana, more than I can speak to here. I will only note that the Vassish had a habit of breaking power structures that got in their way, and putting up new ones. The temples had been nearly the only line of credit a merchant in Giordana could get, before the Vassish arrived and stripped them of that power.