“Get me… on my… damn feet!”

The sand fields of Giordana could be quite akin to the sea; they carried echoes easily. Laying there on but a blanket under the doctor’s care, Lucius could hear the clang of metal and the shouts of fighting. The horn blasts to signal the voluntaries may as well have been beside him. Tyrion had taken the men north without him.

When Sammy knelt beside him, Lucius mustered all his strength and grabbed the boy by the pants. “Easy,” the doctor said, and cast a glance at the other injured man. Of course, they hadn’t been left alone. The auxiliaries and the injured had been left as a so-called rear guard while the voluntaries captured the mine. “This isn’t exactly a private check-up.”

“Don’t care… need fight.”

Sammy sighed and folded his arms. “You’ll be in no shape to move for at least a day. Just leave the fighting to Tyrion. It’s a commander’s duty to let his subordinates get their share of the glory isn’t it?” A true statement, but that form of generosity can only be indulged when the commander isn’t in fear of usurpation.

“Counter… poison.”

Only an apothecary would have understood. Sammy stared down at him, and looked again at the sigil of his stigmata. “Commander, I must advise you that forcing your body to overwhelm the venom will be extremely painful. You’ll be vomiting blood for weeks!”

Lucius tugged himself closer. He struggled to lift his head, fighting the locked muscles in his neck to get closer to the doctor. “Do it.”

Sammy sighed. “I guess I can’t just ignore the orders of my superior, now can I?” He fetched his bag and from it, produced a filtering contraption, along with a black, granular substance. He called for boiled water, and poured it through the substance three times, till the water ran black(1). “Prepare yourself,” he said, using a metal instrument to pry Lucius’ teeth apart.

My pupil later described the taste as, “Not pleasant.” In a letter he wrote to an internment camp some years later, he expounded,

The logistics of war are taxing on all. The men go hungry as often as the prisoners. Do not let yourself be swayed by their pleas for food. Those barbarians chew Amphos Root. Their sense of taste must be as crippled as their morality. I doubt they’d be able to taste it even if you smeared your own feces on their food.

Lucius von Solhart, 742 CC

The dueling poisons in his body got Lucius to his feet, even if every movement felt like he was shredding his body. Pain did not stop him. The auxiliaries looked at him as though a corpse had jumped to its feet and picked up his sword. “Come on! We can’t let them have all the glory, can we?”

More than his words, the Vassish could see the glow on the southern horizon, the one that didn’t align with Red Spire. Only a day later, the memory of Medorosa Canta hadn’t faded. There was even a one-armed man, missing an eye, that threw his pack upon his back and followed his commander to get more distance between him and the Cynizia.

Tyrion had departed from the temporary camp nearly half an hour prior, and no retreat had been sounded. While resistance was expected by the guards of the mine, leaving their supplies trailed out behind them with the so-called rear guard was akin to sticking one’s arm into a lion’s cage just because it's asleep. Plenty of the Vassish soldiers were happy to make themselves useful moving carts and wrangling donkeys, with excuse to stay far away from the clash of steel.

The mine itself had been cut through the side of a cliff, the kind of quarry that would have been a lake if not in a desert. The exposed veins had long ago been ripped free of the rock, giving the looming underside a scarred and tortured look. The tunnels burrowed in from the shadows at the very bottom of the cliff, surrounded by tents and stone mills. Nearly the entire perimeter of the encampment had waste rock piled up about as an embankment, with sand packed against the windward side.

Tyrion had divided his force in three, sending the bulk to the main gates, and dispatching shield formations to the left and right. While they still lacked in archers, the Vassish were perfectly well equipped to fling spear and javelin over the slopes. The left hand side had the easiest scramble over sand and rock, and they poured in among the tents to slaughter the panicking defenders.

Without a battering ram, it was unclear whether they’d actually be able to break down the wooden gate– a reinforced palisade like one might find in a woodland fort– with but a few wood cutting axes. That never had to be put to the test, as the climbers came from within and pulled the gate open.

Lucius arrived as the voluntaries were penning in the guards against the cliff wall. The two sides shouted at one another, victors in Vassish and prisoners in Giordanan. The command to drop weapons barely crossed the divide. From behind the ranks of men, Lucius barked out, “On your knees and hands on your head. Cooperate and we won’t kill you.”

Lieutenant Tyrion came marching over to him, his armor sporting fresh scratches but no blood. “On your feet already?”

“No time to be laying around. Gather their weapons, we’ll need them,” Lucius ordered.

Tyrion relayed it to his men, and Lucius barked out other orders. The supplies had to be brought in, the walls secured and manned, and scouts were needed for the Cynizia. He was pulled between speaking to the assembled rabble of slaves, and seeing to the sleep rotation of the soldiers, when Tyrion returned to him. “Sir. If I understood your local tongue, you said we won’t be killing the prisoners?”

That stopped Lucius in all his work. The prisoners were grumbling, their wrists bound together with rope taken from the mine supplies. They kept whispering rumors between one another, mumbled in harsh dialects that he could hardly make out. Their confusion was evident. By the laws of Giordana, they weren’t even criminals. From the moment they surrendered, they conducted themselves with the confused compliance of civilized men. Of course, their crime was against humanity, not the local laws.

“I said we won’t,” Lucius answered, and returned to the guards. He raised his voice and told them, “We can’t release you all at once. Dire circumstance has forced us here. I will have you taken out in groups.” After the bloodshed, thirty of the guards remained alive and at his mercy. “Every fifth man, step forward,” he ordered, splaying his fingers out.

Waving one of the voluntaries over as six of the guards shuffled forward, he told the man, “Bring them to the far side of the cliff here and see that they head west; away from us. Do not go after them.”

The Vassish soldier nodded, his face pale and grave in the moonlight. He glanced to his lieutenant, and got a confirming nod. Soon, he had a companion for his task, and the two soldiers headed out with six eager Giordanans. Lucius watched them go, and watched as a black shadow leapt up from the peak of the cliff and took to the skies; how the thing circled round and followed as the defenseless men ran into the desert darkness alone. He had not broken his word; the Vassish did not kill those men. All the same, they never saw civilization again.

“Commander! Commander Tyrion! I must report!”

The panic in the soldier’s voice drew Lucius from his solemn vigil, though he knew not what sat wrong with him about it. The soldier came in bloody and panting. Sweat poured off the man’s brow and he seemed about to topple over where he stood. Lucius didn’t recognize him, but he assumed it was one of the scouts. “What is it?”

The soldier looked at him queerly. He squinted his eyes as though unsure what he was seeing. “I need to report to the commander…”

“I am the commander,” Lucius shouted back at him. “What is it? Are we under attack? Were you struck in the head? Are the Cynizia here?”

“Aye.” The soldier licked his lips. “The Cynizia are here, in this very camp.”

Lucius turned his head, peering at the shadows between tents. He looked to where the slaves were assembled and to where the guards knelt. His assumption was that the workers of the mine were already compromised, were already sympathetic to Medorosa’s cause. He didn’t look at the man before him, at the soldier who stepped towards him with a flash of steel.

He felt a pinch in his chest; a shove to his side. Muscles spasmed and tore in growing pain. He knew the sensation all too well; the heat that squirted down his side and soiled his armor. A shiv of pointed brass had been slammed through his armor at the armpit and into his heart. He felt his heart thump and rip across the stake.

He only had a moment to act. The betrayer sneered back at him, expecting panic and terror. Lucius did not give the satisfaction. Instead, he grabbed hold of the weapon and ripped it free. His blood sprayed out. He could only take one step, so he made it count. The traitor couldn't even think to flee before Lucius grabbed hold of him by the shoulder and he slammed the shiv through the man’s eye. The orbital socket cracked and the tip skewered the traitor’s brain.

Lieutenant Tyrion had seen it occur, and he bellowed out, “Betrayer!” The words lit a fire in the voluntaries. A hundred armed men swarmed to the center of the mine; every last one that could be spared from the defense of the walls. They saw Lucius, bloody and dying, over the corpse of one of the auxiliaries.

The commander coughed, and spat blood from his lungs out. He turned to Lieutenant Tyrion. Had his blood not still been burning with Amphos Root, he would have been on the ground beside the traitor. He coughed again, drooling blood down his lips, and as carefully as he could, said, “Medorosa will be coming. That must have been his stigmata. Deploy… the men before… I drop.”

Tyrion nodded. “I want fires on the wall! Move in squads. Go! Go! Teams should be breaking these huts down for walls. We won’t go down as easily as these Giordanans, will we?”

Lucius’ eyes rolled up in his head as vertigo claimed him. He collapsed to the sand as his stigmata tried to put him back together once more.