“Finally, a private moment.”

Lucius didn’t recognize the canvas overhead. He couldn’t place the voice either. His mind was faded and groggy. The bloodloss was familiar to him though. He tried to right himself one elbow at a time, and was rewarded with a pint of beer to his lips.

The man proferring it was Doctor Samson. He smiled when Lucius opened his mouth and drank the sludge-like brew without complaint. “Half-fermented. It won’t intoxicate you, but it will make you feel more human.”

Lucius shook his head and spat the dregs from his mouth. They came out red with blood. “I need meat. Gunna get anemic at this rate.”

“One of the auxiliaries is fetching you some.”

“Are we under attack?” Lucius sat himself up on the table he had been laid across. The pain through his arm and chest lingered, but as he stretched and flexed, his nerves eased.

Sammy blinked. “You’re getting faster at coming back, for a man who only just got his stigmata last night.”

“Practice.”

The doctor grinned. “Relax, Commander. I’m on your side. The bird put his geas on me. I’m now more bound to my word than even Medorosa fancies himself.”

Lucius didn’t share the grin. “How did you meet the bird?”

Sammy huffed and put up his hands. “How else? I met Amurabi. You think I would have escaped Puerto Faro without some kind of help? I had to choose between some skaldish guy knifing me, or walking hand and hand with you people to the end of the world.” He tried to read Lucius’ face, but saw little. “At least with one offer, I had something to gain in the meantime. No? Besides, are you really going to look a gift horse in the mouth like this? Did you think you could do this all on your own?”

Lucius was prevented from answering by the arrival of two voluntaries. “Doctor!” one of them shouted. He was holding the other up completely. A black feathered arrow shaft stuck from the man’s collarbone, plunged in from above.

“So we are under attack. What are their numbers?” Lucius demanded as the wounded man was laid out on the ground.

The doctor went to work. The soldier stood up and faced Lucius at attention. “Sir, no mass of soldiers has been sighted. They are loosing arrows at us from the darkness. Not many, just one here and there. Svenson here wasn’t paying attention and they got him.”

Sammy groaned and wiped his hands off on the wounded man’s cloak. “It’s too late for this one. He was dead before you got him to me.”

The other soldier’s face tightened and his eyes watered. “Giordanan bastards. We should go out there and slaughter them!”

Lucius shook his head. “That’s what they want. Use the prisoners instead. Make them march the walls for us. I want the soldiers watching them to always have helm and shield at the ready. Make it clear to the prisoners that if they don’t warn us, we’ll gut them all.”

It took him a breath too long to unclench his jaw, but the soldier nodded. “Aye, Sir.”

Lucius took his gaze away from the soldier just in the nick of time. He shot his hand forward, grabbed Sammy by the collar of his shirt, and threw him backwards.

The corpse had a knife in its hand, and eyes set on him.

“Not very dead, are you?”

“How are you alive?” the corpse asked. It got into a low crouch. “That’s three times now you should have been dead, you cockroach.”

“Spear!” Lucius bellowed, thrusting his hand out to the other voluntary.

The soldier was too baffled to act. “Sir, what is going on? Svenson! What are you doing?”

Lucius’ face colored as he roared. “It’s a stigmata!”

Steel lashed forward. Unarmed, Lucius could only jump back. He backpedalled around the unfamiliar room, half his attention on avoiding the knife and the other half on scanning the room. Having only just awoken in it, he had yet to even identify it. The doctor had taken him into the foreman’s office, and the moment he recognized that was the moment he found a chair.

With his foot he kicked it up and flung it at the stigmata cursed corpse. As it was little more than sticks and cloth, the chair bounced off the assailant; but, it obstructed the knife for a moment. Lucius stepped back in, grabbing the leg of the chair. He shoved the man back with it, getting a slice across his forearm as he did so. The man was flung back to the wall nonetheless. Then there was space. He swung the chair like a club and smashed it into the man’s skull. Half his scalp ripped off with the crack of wood and skull.

“Commander!” Sammy shouted, and tossed him his sword.

Lucius caught it in the air and drew it just as the attacker stood back up like a tortured puppet. Medorosa’s stigmata was powerful, but not enough to overcome the destruction of the body. The corpse movements were those of a defenseless drunk.

Lucius decapitated it, and broke the spell.

He panted for breath. The fresh burn of cuts, the trickle of blood, piece by piece it filtered into his mind. He turned back to the other soldier. The voluntary had fallen to the ground without even drawing his sword. “What is the meaning of this?” the soldier asked, but he faced the ground, not his commander.

“Soldier!” Lucius barked. “I gave you orders. Get to it. I don’t want one more of our men struck by these arrows.”

That put some spine back into the man. With purpose, he rose back up and charged from the building.

Lucius turned on the doctor, still pressed to the far corner of the room. “You; we need to assume these arrows are poisoned. Everyone who is struck must be quarantined.”

Sammy gulped and fixed his hair. “Wha-what kind of stigmata could do something like that?”

“I don’t know,” my pupil said, and collected his things once more. He left the building and sought his second in command.

Neither man at this time had been told the nature of Medorosa’s stigmata, but neither had their foe learned of Lucius’. It was a fair gambit between the two of them. I might have forced the information from Aisha before letting her go, but the flavor of his heroism would have been tainted. The soldiers beneath him would have been able to sense that something was off; that he knew too much about Medorosa. The last thing we wanted was the notion that we were conspiring with the enemy. Perhaps some lives of the Vassish could have been saved with the knowledge; but, as they say, that was a sacrifice I was willing to make.

Back into the night, beneath the stars and with sand and blood in the wind, Lucius marched. “Tyrion! Lieutenant Tyrion!” he shouted, and through a series of salutes and points from the soldiers, found his way to the man. For lack of accommodations, the mine itself had been turned into shelter for some of the voluntaries, as well as the mine’s previous workforce. The initial room of the mine was not such a poor place for this function, for the tunnels extended outwards like so many roots into the rock, branching off from a central tap.

The temperature beneath the cliff was shockingly cool; an envious retreat. I myself have some speculation that they may have touched upon a crack straight through the world, to beyond the veil. It would explain how deep they reached without dire concern of air, and would explain why it has since been abandoned. Of course, going down wasn’t really the point of the mineIt was the tunnel that headed due west that was marked as collapsed.

“Solhart!” the older man said upon sighting him. The light of half a dozen oil lamps colored the man as he strode through the lattice of support pillars. He cast out a hand at the slaves. They were a motley crew of foreigners, still retaining vestiges of their homeland where dirt and burn had not marred their flesh. At once, hope of reinforcements from them withered. Perhaps once they had been hale and hearty, but their time in the mine had stripped the flesh from their bones. All that remained was skin and sinew. “Look what these rotten Giordanans do. They just abduct any foreigner they find and pressgang him.”

Lucius shook his head and held up a hand. “I’ll deal with it, Lieutenant. I need you to do something else.”

Tyrion frowned and peered at him by the wane light of burning oil. “Where are those cuts from?”

“The arrows. There’s some kind of stigmata curse. A man struck down by them got up and attacked me.”

“Nonsense!” Tyrion bellowed.

Lucius glared back at him. “The alternative is turncloaks within your ranks.” That shut the man up good. “That archer is still out there, in the night. If the whole of the Cynizia were here, our scouts would have found them. It must be just a few. I need you to ride out and run them down. You can do that, can’t you?”

“On horse?”

Lucius nodded.

Tyrion pulled himself up, puffed his chest and grabbed hold of his belt. “Aye, I can do that. We’ve three horses now. I’ll bring my best men with me and I’ll gut them.” They had been able to liberate only two steeds from the Medini’s in Red Spire, and walking past a full stables of horses belonging to the monastery had nearly been enough to make some men cry. A full cavalry would have left the Cynizia far behind them; but, that had not been the deal struck with the Divine Beast.

The older man went to march off, but Lucius grabbed him by the elbow. “Bring shields. They may well try to curse you on your charge. Do not let them.”

Tyrion solemnly nodded, and left.

Lucius found himself alone before the assembly of slaves. Fifty in all, though he doubted if even two dozen could still fight. He tried to not let it get to him; an army had more jobs than fighting. “Hear me! We are no friends of the Giordanans. We are from Vassermark; a land where no man is a slave(1). As you can see, we are pursued by enemies. Should you join us, we will bring you to freedom. If you do not wish to fight, then you may stay here and hand yourselves over to your owners.”

The reaction he gained for that was mixed. Some were shocked still. Others threw up their hands and roared. Those in the front knelt the way they had seen knights before their lords. One man stepped forward. He had the olive skin and dark hair of an Aillesterran, though he had clearly been worked to the brink. In broken Vassish, he said, “Me Lord. Stigmata have I. Very good. You need. Yes?” The man tugged down the ragged neck of his shirt, exposing his gaunt chest and the sigil written upon it.

Lucius, despite my years of tutelage, was no wizard. I had, however, forced through his skull the most rudimentary knowledge of identifying stigmata. He knew the difference between true complexity and faux complexity, whether it affected the person or the environment, and the most common templates. The Aillesterran slave had branded into his chest a mark of [Animal Friendship]; one that could turn even a donkey servile.

Lucius had found a diamond in a silver mine.

A lack of slavery was something of a legal fiction in Vassermark. An ostensible compliance to their goddess while still achieving much the same onerous control on those they called serfs.