I tried to flex my fingers. They responded slowly and unwillingly. The leather of the glove was heavy and constrictive, like each digit was trying to lift a ten kilogram weight. The cold wasn’t helping. The red sands heated up quickly under the sun, but released that heat just as quickly into the darkness of the night, leaving the mornings freezing. But it wasn’t the desert's fault, really. I should still be in a sling. Hellish Realms, I should still be in bed. There was definitely a fracture, however small, in my clavicle, and possibly both bones of my arm, too, and my ribs stung and crackled whenever I breathed too expansively.

  But there was no rest for the Guabdi, of which I was now a fully fledged member. I think.

  I had been involved in more than my fair share of escort jobs, sometimes leading the caravan, then later, amongst the train. They were, without exception, terrible to be a part of, in any form.

  It could be because civilians are unable, or, more likely, unwilling, to follow the rigidity with which the Corps operates. Trenchers had been harshly trained until moving methodically and efficiently was instinctual. Regulars who hadn’t ever suffered a beating for tardiness tended to kind of just wander around like a loose leaf in the wind, and weren’t particularly receptive to recommendations on camp routine, even if they’d hired you at great expense for those very expertise.

  But it wasn’t just civilians. Such expeditions, by their nature, rarely stay true to plan, and soldiers can get crabby real quick when the system they’ve learned to let think for them by is disrupted in the slightest.

  The worst by far were any times a fat Burgher Prince or Administrator of the Realms wanted to come and inspect the front, and those times were plentiful. Not because the Council mistrusted our commanders, but because politicians like to brag to their fellows about braving the theatre of war. Optics so often got in the way of actual progress. They, also, did not like to be told what to do, and, unlike civilians, we weren’t able to argue with them.

  This caravan held the promise of being different because the people believed in our ability to get them to this Thamatune, this miracle worker, not just in one piece, but on time enough to have a chance at receiving her blessing. They caused no trouble amongst themselves, never wandered off, hardly complained when we told them to make the best of the terrain where we called a halt, and were then early to rise and eager to march at whatever pace we set. In fact, we had to reel them in at times, so keen was the entirety to go stampeding ahead and exhaust themselves. The draw of the Maiden was strong.

  Briggs and Church settled in besides me, their initial disdain for me swept aside by our heart to heart at the inn. I happily chattered along with them, surprised to find that I had missed the comradery of a band of brothers and sisters. Wedged between the broad shoulders of the heavies was reminiscent of sitting between my father and uncle as a child, trying desperately to strain to their height and be seen as an equal.

  Both carried the customary Dalkton-pattern shield slung over their backs; slabs of metal almost the height of doors, with a half-moon drip in the outline of the rim on either side. When held tight in a shield wall, these crescents created a full hole with their neighbour, through which backrowers could thrust spears even while the shield wall was maintained. However, as was the non-standard standard of Special Squad, our heavies did not wield spears.

  “The heads kept snapping off with every thrust,” Briggs explained when I asked why.

  “You were thrusting too hard,” said Tal.

  “How can one thrust too hard? A thrust is a thrust!”

  “And thrusts are what spears are made for.”

  “Perhaps not to be thrust by Briggs, then!”

  “In truth, the Burgher Princes outfitting us must have changed suppliers at some point,” Church added. “Cheaper on the initial ledger, no doubt, but far more expensive in the long run to keep replacing them.”

  “In truer truth, they were no good even before the change,” said Briggs. “I used to have a proper Zweih?nder. Gut, it was called. Beautifully balanced: long yet wide, thin on its cutting edge, yet strong so as not to chip. You might not believe it from the look of me, but I was once so graceful in the art of killing. I could flick my wrists, and men would fall around me as if blown down by the breeze.”

  “If I’d know, I would’ve brought you a replacement in the resupply,” I said.

  “You could not of, for this sword was irreplaceable,” he said. “It was made from a single chunk of star metal, unable to be forged, but hammered into shape over decades. The life’s work of three different smiths. It was a damned fine thing. Even after I was drafted, and the officers tried to impose uniformity on me, I carried it into every battle, strapped to my back. Everyone’s convinced it slipped out and was trod into the muck on some field or other, but I swear to you I felt an old captain of mine slip it out of its sheath and toss it far away when I was otherwise engaged with the enemy.

  “Now I’m stuck using this!”

  He showed me a huge length of metal, almost longer than I was tall. It was more of a steel beam, meant for the construction of a fortress, crudely tapered at one end and shaped at the other to almost get a little way to resembling a lance. It certainly looked like something that could better withstand a Briggs’ thrust.

  “He’s compensating,” Church mouthed to me

  “How do you even wield that thing?” I said.

  “With great strength!” the huge man declared, and laughed boisterously.

  That was half the equation, anyway. He showed me how the hilt was much longer than usual, as a counterweight, and how this allowed him to strap the blade to his forearm by way of three leather belts and aided with the weapon’s use. Apparently this was his own design.

  “But there isn’t really any wielding of it,” he admitted. “I poke out from behind my great shield, and that is about it. There is no need of skill or grace in the crush of the shield wall.”

  “And you?” I asked Church.

  She hefted the silver hammer resting on the opposite shoulder to her shield, somewhere between a one-hander and a polearm, and, interestingly, held two flat heads either side of the shaft.

  “Not much thrusting and stabbing to be done with that.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Correct,” said Church. “I gave my husband a vow that I would never spill the blood of a fellow human.”

  I watched her face, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She made her life’s coin in the Corps, and as a Heavy no less, so it wasn’t as if she could sit in the backfield and miss ranged shots on purpose. But Church keep looking straight ahead, unaware of my silent interrogation. Slowly I became aware of the rest of the squad watching me, waiting on my reaction.

  “Such a thing must take a great deal of skill,” I said. “To smash in a man’s skull without compromising the sack of his skin.”

  Church grinned.

  “This guy gets it!” she crowed.

  Briggs groaned, disappointed in me.

  “Tell her, Doc, that men can bleed inside when you hit them hard enough. I’ve seen them cough it up later, and men don’t normally do that, so it must be because of her hitting them.”

  “But that’s not me spilling their blood, is it,” countered Church.

  “A technicality!” said Briggs. But he laughed. He laughed easily, and, therefore, often.

  “How do you do it, then?” said Church, trying to recapture the mood.

  “Do what?” I said.

  “Don’t doctors swear a similar sort of oath against killing?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  My hands threatened to itch, and I ran my nails along the inside of my palm.

  “Well, I’m not really a doctor. The title is an ill suited one.”

  “Worse trenchnames have stuck for much less,” Dassem piped up from behind us.

  “Well said, Sarge,” said Church. “Your own being a prime example.”

  Dassem scratched at his chin.

  “Don’t believe I’ve ever had the honour,” he said.

  “Piss off!”

  The squad jeered and moaned, which gave Dassem’s mouth the slightest twitch. But he steadfastly refused to open it to put to bed what was obviously a frustratingly long inquisition.

  There was no mistaking the Sargeant for merely the Captain’s whip, beating trenchers into line on her behalf. He wore the wounds of war more prominently than I, although somehow seemed impeded a little less, and men like us eventually had to find a different use for ourselves when we could no longer stand in the line. Why he’d willingly stepped back down the ranks, I could only guess, because he was clearly capable of earning a contract consulting on a Board of War. For some men, the soft carpet of an office is more painful to walk than the craggiest of marching roads.

  Dassem did not enjoy the small talk or the ribald jokes the others made around the campfire of a night. He’d heard it all three times before. But on the subject of war, having seen all of the gifts and curses of that too, he was loquacious. The squad, quite unwillingly, became his Board of War, and many of the other members of the caravan gathered just outside the light of our fire, hanging on every word as if he were a Teller of epics.

  “War is about far more than metal and movements on a map,” he said one night. “Most of all it is about the minds of men. You can have the most finely equipped armouries, the most beautifully drawn up flank charges, and then it rains the night before the engagement. An ancient, dried up creek bed floods once again. No one thinks to check it on the eve of battle. Why would they? They are confident it does not exist. They have outthought themselves.”

  “So your cavalry charge, that was meant to smash aside two hundred and fifty prole infantry, gets bogged on the charge, and sixty five of the Realm’s finest knights get butchered in the mud by a bunch of farmers with barely a plough head of steel between ten of them, who had themselves mindlessly wandered away from the carefully drawn up lines of their own commanders, and still stank of the piss they’d excreted moments before, hearing the drums of death in those hooves.

  “Now tell me, how does that make sense? How is there any bit of fairness in that?”

  “You don’t have to indulge him, Doc,” said Church from behind us. “I once heard him make a war story out of picking his teeth with a splinter.”

  The squad laughed. But I didn’t mind.

  “War is hardly about fairness,” I said.

  “Spot on,” said Dassem. “Because some sides have Fingers, or a thousand Ouborok cavalrymen, and some sides barely have sharpened sticks by comparison. And that’s why we have a chance, you see? Because none of that really matters in the end.

  “Suddenly your unguarded flank, which was left unguarded because it was never meant to have men opposed to it on that side of the creek you didn’t know existed, is suddenly threatened. That’s when the real shit starts. That’s the moment you truly see the mettle of your army, and by then it’s too late to account for any deficiencies.

  “And if the most poorly equipped, sacrificially placed men can suddenly become slayers of renown, and living legends who have grown small Realms of their own from taking the heads of a hundred men can die scrabbling in the muck, then we’re all equal on one thing.”

  He tapped a finger to his skull.

  “Men, and their minds,” he said. “That’s what war is really about. Who can adapt. Who will stand fast against impossible odds.

  “That’s why, at camp, we spent just as much time training their minds as their arms. Captain,” he called. “What were our margins for pre-battle losses, back in the day? Desertions, and rank breakers, and the like.”

  “Officially? Twenty percent. That’s what was deemed acceptable by the Boards of War pretending to direct things from an ocean and half a continent away. We thought we could realistically tolerate about thirty percent, if pushed. The reality was more like thirty five.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “You expected to lose more than a third of your force before any given battle had even commenced?” I said.

  “Yup,” said Dassem. “Grown men curling into balls in the mud right there in front of their fellows. Or running. We preferred the runners, believe it or not. The worst were the ones who stood rooted but screaming incessantly until they had to be put down like sick dogs by their trenchmates. That’s a sure way for morale to take a nosedive.”

  His face was grim. He didn’t accept it. Men like him could never understand what would make a man turn and run from his duty. But he couldn’t deny the reality he had witnessed time and again.

  “That is why the Empire was… less than effective here,” he said.

  He did not want to say failed. But what had we achieved, really? Apart from half of two roads, and a far flung outpost city in Arradheim that is like a body constantly fighting off an infection.

  “The Empire wanted to conquer front on, like they always have,” Dassm continued. “City by city, wiping armies off the map in pitched battles. But after we took Arradheim, the continentals didn’t want to fight us that was any more. Their forces buried themselves under the sands, only to strike at our ankles time and time again as we marched straight past, like vipers.

  “They would open the gates to their cities so that we could walk right in. But they knew that if something is given, it cannot be taken. The people there knew to ignore us, knew they had not been abandoned. So the cities slipped from us like trying to cup water in your hands. And by encamping there, we made ourselves siegeable, in cities which had been stripped of food and crippled of defences, and with thousands of willing traitors on the inside with us.

  “We returned to the deserts, but that made our armies even more vulnerable. We weren’t just walking past then, but right in the vipers’ pit.

  “Doc, can you imagine a single Harashuut walking into your camp of a night like a ghost, the blade sweeping through the officer ranks, not missing a single man of import, fouling all the water and food, and leaving again without waking a single person?”

  “I don’t need to imagine,” I said.

  “Mmm,” said Dassem. “Well, then you would know that means effectively two thousand dead men walking, and not a second of a pitched battle fought. After a few days, they could have come at us naked, knocked us down with their fists, and we would’ve begged them for it. You can only operate under that amount of stress for so long. Our minds had been blasted clean.”

  “Yet still they did not. Why bother, when the dunes would eat us anyway.”