Tyrion had killed a shepherd.

Lucius didn’t blame him.

Three days of marching had brought them up from the desert and into a horrid wave of hills and rocks. The plants were plentiful, but even the flowering ones cracked at the lightest touch. Everything was withered and gnarled and offensive to look at. The towns most of all.

The north road they had followed splintered and fragmented, like they were marching upstream on a river. Dozens of tributaries darted out to stony enclaves that looked down upon them. Walls weren’t needed, the jagged landscape made the thought of assault a nightmare for the Vassish. After three days though, that nightmare had been contesting with the thinning supplies. Puerto Vida had not been as lucrative as they might have hoped.

Which brought them to the slaughter of an innocent shepherd.

“We should bury him,” Lucius said, looking down at the frowning corpse.

Soldiers had ignored their moral restraints and hurried on to the herd of goats to pull the ornery animals away. Men rejoiced at the idea of fresh roasted meat, and as dry as the foothills were, there was no lack of firewood.

“Do they bury their dead here? I thought they did that sky burial thing; let the birds eat them,” Tyrion said as he wiped the blood from his sword.

Lucius shook his head. “That’s on the western slopes. The eastern side abandoned that because of Yellow King Hassa. Some sects do cremation, but burial will do him fine. His goddess will find him either way.”

“Or the wolves.”

“Have him buried deep. You should put the headstone yourself.”

Lieutenant Tyrion sheathed his sword and nodded. “Fair enough.” He summoned a few other voluntaries and they got to the work of digging a hole. They chose a spot between the boulders that dotted the hills, and found the soil soft and rich. The ash from the volcanoes had piled up over the centuries, and yielded easily. They placed the grave marker just as cuts of meat were brought to them for dinner.

Lucius watched it all from a hilltop nearby. A tree topped the crest, a half-thick canopy granting a scrap of shade. While he kept his eyes on the effort, his mind wandered and turned over ideas. He couldn’t say for certain without seeing the stars, which had yet to emerge, but the certainty was arising that the north road was not taking him to Rackvidd.

“M’lord,” one of his subordinate’s said. The man had on full gear, which implied he was from the scouting group. The memory of the internal attacks in the silver mine made Lucius slide his hand closer to his blade, but the soldier said, “We’ve seen signs of the Cynizia approaching. We couldn’t count their numbers, but I trust my eyes to understand those dust clouds.”

“How far off?”

“A day still, I would think. Skal stayed behind to watch for their fires. They would have to march through the night to catch us.”

Lucius nodded and turned his gaze west, to the higher mountains. The road led them that way, to where cliffs rose, jagged and broken. The fiery teeth of the world awaited them, and Rackvidd beyond. “We have no time to waste in the morning then,” he said, and dismissed the man.

Soon, the sun set, and they could only see by the moon and by the embers of their cook fires. The cold winds of the foothills had replaced the scorching winds of the desert, and the soldiers took to huddling against one another. Lucius was able to turn his gaze to the stars, and scratched out some arithmetic in the sand. With only his memory to reference, he had to resort to estimates and guesses, eventually arriving at calculations impossible to place them. Had he been allowed some resources, placing their longitude would have been trivial, but he had only the things Lucius von Solhart would have had.

The young doctor approached him. The trip had been rough on him, turning his clothes haggard and dirty, rendering his long hair a jagged mess. Scratches had appeared on his glasses, that wouldn’t wipe away no matter how often he cleaned them. “You do have a plan, right?”

“Continue into the mountains until we find a choke point. Kill enough of the Cynizia to force them to retreat, then we escape.”

“Sounds simple enough.”

“If we don’t get bombarded by the hill tribes.” He sighed and squatted down next to his numbers once more. He knew they were wrong, so he dashed the work away and scratched his head. His gaze went back to the world around him, to the shadows and darkness of nature. No sign from the gods presented itself; he knew that no such thing would happen too, but childhood habits die hard.

Sammy sighed. “If I may, why hasn’t Amurabi joined us? Wouldn’t he be useful here? Or at least that Skaldish man.”

“You’ll see them again, soon enough. There’s no choice to be made tonight. May as well sleep,” Lucius declared, and ended the conversation by retiring to his tent.

The next day, after their march, he did get a sign from the gods. Golden stared back at him from a clifftop aerie as they stared at the landslide Medorosa had gloated so much about. To their north, the mountain looked like a great scoop had been removed from it, and grass had only just reclaimed the dirt. The huge mass of the slope had collapsed into the valley and the rains had cut the ash into chasms of granite laced with obsidian.

No road led through it. No bridges spanned the gaps. The landscape belonged to the goats alone.

Lieutenant Tyrion rode up to him, back atop his horse Laturi. The animal had healed well enough to let him ride it, but not to charge. The leader of the voluntaries had been using it to add to his height. He reigned up between Lucius and the sun, frowning at the young leader. “What do you propose we do now? We can’t march over that.”

“No, we can’t,” Lucius said, and his gaze searched across the cliffs.

“The Cynizia are on the road behind us. Every town is hostile. Those goats won’t last us forever.”

Lucius rose and turned to face east, to the distant sand cloud. “We’ll have to dig in.”

“What?” Tyrion demanded, and Laturi stamped its hooves. “Those goats won’t last us forever. This terrain is treacherous at best. You’d have to be mad to dig in here.”

“Yeah, and they know that too,” Lucius said. He nodded and planted his hands on his hips.

Tyrion scoffed and pulled his helm from his head. “Listen, Solhart. I don’t know what you were taught by your father about war, but this is different from leading a march away. I’ll concede that you had a good trick back at the mine, but being clever about getting away from a fight is different from knowing when and how to pick one. If we turn around here, we’ll be slaughtered. They’ll starve us, and they’ll crush us.”

“Is that your official advice, on your honor, Lieutenant Tyrion?” Lucius asked, staring up at the man.

Tyrion puffed up his chest. “Yes, it is. Is it not my duty to inform you when you are committing a blunder? An error that will get us all killed?”

Lucius nodded. “Your objection is noted. Now go build me a wall to hide behind. This may take a while.”

“This? What this?”

“Negotiations,” Lucius answered, and began walking back down the road. He called over his shoulder, “It takes a lot longer to talk someone to death than it does to stab them to death. So make sure the wall is nice and tall. I don’t want them staring at the men while we’re talking.”

Tyrion’s face went red. “Lucius! Have you gone mad? Has getting killed so many times driven you insane? This is not a plan, this is suicide!” His roar echoed between the cliff walls, loud enough that even Golden took flight with the birds, and soared off to more pleasant hunting grounds. The soldiers heard too. Dozens of men turned to watch the leadership fight that had been brewing ever since the flight from Puerto Faro.

Lucius stopped his casual walk and turned back to the man. “Tyrion Reed, you need to watch your tongue. You’re right, you don’t know what I was taught about waging war; but at least I was taught. You’re a violent son of a merchant. Your success is because of your stigmata alone. Your advice has been noted. Now, I have given you an order.”

“Because of my stigmata alone?” Tyrion roared. He leapt down from his horse, his armor crashing hard as he hit the ground. “I know more about leading armies than a child like you could imagine. You were only given the command because of noble nepotism, and look what you did with it? Got half the men slaughtered in an ambush and only survived because of your own stigmata.”

Lucius gritted his teeth. He knew there was little he could say to that, it was all part of the role he had stolen. His only recourse was to say, “I suggest you retract your words Tyrion, or honor will force my hand.”

The older man snarled. “What do you know about honor?”

“I know I can’t lead these men, can’t save any of them, if I’m being undermined by my second-in-command.”

“Then maybe you should be second-in-command instead. Or better yet, handed over to the Giordanans as an apology.”

Lucius drew his blade. “Last chance. If you think you’re too valuable for me to lose, you need to think again.”

That got the attention of all the soldiers in the area. It of course was perfectly legal for a commander to take capital punishment for insubordination, and it was obvious that commanding someone else to imprison him wasn’t an option. None of them knew what to do about the conflict, let alone tried to stop it. They merely gathered and watched.

“Same goes to you, Solhart,” Tyrion declared, and drew his own sword. “You don't get to order men to their deaths like this. We need to march, we need to cut our way through one of these towns at the least.”

“My orders were clear. We will fortify this pass, and it is here that we will crush the Cynizia. I for one am tired of fleeing, and as you can see, we’re at the end of the road anyways.”

“This is a death trap just like the Medini’s!” Tyrion shouted back.

“Enough!” Lucius bellowed.

With that, there had been enough verbal foreplay, and an unfair bout began. Neither of them had their shields ready, and both held matching short blades. Tyrion had a hand’s span of height over the boy, and about twenty pounds too. Lucius was forced to use a high overhead guard as the larger soldier savagely rained blows down upon him. Every swing drew out more of his berserker stigmata, inflaming and engorging his muscles.

It would be false to think that my pupil had nothing to fear from being cut down, thanks to his stigmata. Had Tyrion struck true and severed his soul from his body, it would still take the boy moments to recover; more than enough time to lop off his head and then he would surely awake to the mercy of the Cynizia. For him, being put on a spike atop city walls would be an unending torture.

Worse yet, if he had to kill Tyrion, not only would he be losing a war asset, but he would have to do it such that no grudge would remain within the hearts of the men he had to lead.

One of the lieutenant’s blows slipped through his guard, crashing down onto his right collarbone like a sledge hammer. Lucius stepped in the moment he realized the guard and failed, taking the blow short on Tyrion’s blade, close to the man’s hand. At the same time, he whipped his own blade in an arc, wheeling it for the man’s head. He aimed right for the ear, but the berserker’s reflexes pulled him back with only a nick to the brow.

The throb of pain passed through his arm, like a slow poison that sapped his strength. Lucius had to take a dive, rolling to the side as Tyrion redoubled. He put a cut through the man’s trousers right below the hem of his tunic.

A regular man would have shrieked in pain, but Tryion retaliated. His sword cut, quick and up through his foe’s face.

Lucius roared, feeling the ringing pain of broken teeth and the eruption of blood through his ripped nose. He knew that Tyrion had felt it too though; a blow that would end any normal man. For a moment, all his berserker might was but dross in the mind, for Tyrion thought he had won. A slave to memory. Lucius slashed him deep through the thigh, enough to rip the tendons to his knee.

Tyrion bellowed as his leg buckled.

Lucius, nearly blind through the blood, brought his blade up overhead and cleaved down, cutting through Tyrion’s elbow and lopping off his shield arm.

The soldier raged, binding down his anger into strength. Even maimed as he was, he refused to go down. He drove the tip of his blade up through the segments of Lucius’ armor, forcing it in and through and skewering his foe.

Of course, that meant both of them would bleed out.

Which meant all Lucius had to do was step away and die on his feet. “Get the doctor,” he ordered, and ripped Tyrion’s swords from his gut. Blood poured down his legs and the wound across his face turned his words to spittle; but, it was Lieutenant Tyrion who fell to the ground and could not rise.

Lucius had taken control of the whole army, at the price of his best warrior.