Light from the rising sun reflected off the shed’s roof of cobbled together sheets of rusted corrugated iron. Its intended purpose was for shearing, but it had been constructed preemptively: the Burgher Princes of the Core Realms would not risk sending vast quantities of stock to the Continent, no matter how expansive the grazing land was, when that land could still so easily be raided by roving bands of Sunsuga. So now the sheets rusted and hung loose, and the whole structure appeared to be held up by the stubborn remnants of stockyard pens at its side.

  In the shade at the front of the building, a table with two bench seats on each long side, attached to the table by crossed trusses. I deposited the two gunny sacks I was carrying on the end of one bench, turned, placed the bottom of my pack on the end of the table, and wriggled out of the straps, which had steadily dug ruts in my chest and shoulders over the course of the morning.

  There were two others sitting at the far end of the table. Like me, they wore long leather dusters despite the heat, though it was impressive they'd been able to make coats to fit them, such was their hulking size. Battered, broad brimmed kuubras sat on the benches beside them. I took off my own hat and mopped at the sweat that had accumulated beneath the band.

  The woman’s brown hair was tied in the same way as the man’s beard: with braids both thick and fine, and interwoven with beads and gems and what might have been small bones. Those fetishes marked them as veterans of this long campaign. Fresh recruits always were clean cut, and not only because their officers were far more stringent about uniform. If you were tying bones into your hair, you were too good at the parts of being a soldier that really mattered to be pulled up on it.

  “Lovely day for it,” I remarked.

  The woman raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Are you taking the piss?” said her companion. His voice rumbled up from deep within the canyon of his chest, a canyon that was painted with tattoos of beasts and swirling oceans judging by what spilled out onto his neck and hands and the shaved sides of his head. He pronounced each word slowly, deliberately. “It is a terrible day for anything other than sitting in the shade, and even then the heat is -”

  The woman kicked him under the table. He gave her a fierce look, but she scowled right back at him. Realisation dawned on his face.

  “Oh,” he said. “I meant, lovely day for what?”

  The woman sighed.

  “No you didn’t, dear,” she said.

  “Piss down both sides of my breeches,” came a new voice.

  A face popped up over the roof of the shed, cheeks crisp with sunburn. Hair a dirty blonde, or maybe just dirty, bound low on her neck with a strip of leather, so that her kuubra could sit comfortably on her head. I rubbed at the nape of my own neck, and then up over the crown, jealously feeling the sun’s bite after only a few seconds unshaded. My chin, cheeks and throat were more covered, though I doubt this girl was envious of that, even without considering all the greys.

  She stood, poised just to the right of the setting sun, so that she could hide in its glare without casting a shadow. Clever, because she had a massive crossbow cocked and locked on me, presumably since a kilometre out from the rendezvous. But it must have been roasting up there, on the tin. Strong, too, then. But so young.

  “I swear, the only thing Heavies are good for is clogging up latrines, and even then I’ve seen them get confused and piss on their Captain’s tent. Why am I up here, roasting, while you two have been left in charge of the passcodes?”

  “That roof wouldn’t support us,” said the man. “We’re Heavies.”

  “Typical from you, Briggs,” said the woman on the roof. “Bloody typical. But you, Church, I expected more from.”

  “So you should,” said the woman sitting on the bench - Church. “And so I did: he never said the phrase, so we were playing coy. Until you blew our cover.”

  “Coy, yes!” said the man, Briggs. He turned back to me. “We are but simple shearers, reflecting on our day’s labours.”

  It was said in a mocking tone, and so I returned fire.

  “Shearers,” I said. “Then where is your flock? And she shears on the roof, does she?”

  “It’s not like you remembered your part either!” said Briggs, threatening to stand.

  Our pending fight was interrupted by the door to the shed banging on its hinges. Briggs sat down quickly, like a child caught misbehaving by their mother.

  And it was an older woman who stepped out onto the landing, easily adjusting her weight to the creak and give of the decomposing wood. She had a shock of red hair, kept standing at wild angles by weeks of sweat. She was tall, and as thin as the blade of the rapier perched on her hip, but one would be a fool to dismiss the wiry muscle that coated that form, as dangerous as the behemoths on the table before me.

  The basket handle of the weapon was perhaps once plated bronze. Now, like everything, it was weathered red-sands rust.

  “That him?” she called.

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.

  Who else would I be, walking so directly into the middle of nowhere. And who else would they be, sitting out here in no man’s land, waiting for the locals to come and lick them up. So far this squad wasn’t much living up to the promises their Captain had made me in their letter.

  “Can’t be sure,” said Briggs. “He seems pretty lost.”

  He turned back to me.

  “You’re on the march now, don’t you know? This isn’t your fancy practice in the city. You should have only brought the kit you could march.”

  “I wish I hadn’t bothered,” I said, growing frustrated. “They’re no use to me. They’re for you, actually. Resupply.”

  Completely abandoning his immediate derision of the two heavy sacks I’d lugged across the desert, Briggs dove across the table towards them. But Church, on account of being on the right side, beat him to it and whipped the first bag out of reach, leaving him floundering on the benchtop like a stunned mullet. Finally he managed to writhe his way across to the second sack and drag it back into his lap, and the two heavies proceeded to rifle through them, remarking snidely on what I had and hadn’t brought.

  “Tal?” said Red.

  The girl on the roof, now poking over the edge to look down on Red, shook her head.

  “Just him,” said Tal. “So far.”

  Red returned her gaze to me. Her eyes were only the faintest blue, hidden behind so many walls of ice they appeared grey.

  “Come on, then,” she said. “He wants to talk to you.”

  I took a step, then stopped.

  “I should have said, ‘Do you have a nail trimmer?’”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Then I would have replied, ‘Careful you don’t lose a finger’,” said Briggs. “See, I was paying attention. Aren’t we all a clever bunch.”

  He opened a packet of nuts, poured them into his mouth, and chewed aggressively while staring at me. The offering, while enthusiastically consumed, had done little to ingratiate me to my new squad.

  I went up the rickety stairs and through the door held for me. Behind it there was a small room, a sort of antechamber to the shearing floor, likely a break room for the shearers.

  On a short wooden stool, resting his back against an exposed wooden column of the shed’s frame, sat a man.

  He had a bushy moustache, as peppered with white as mine was grey. Such was the style of officers, but his was longer, and in danger of being swallowed by the stubble that grew all around it.

  Two little balls of gristle for ears. And he wore a patch of black leather over his left eye, which almost seemed to be taking the piss out of the thick, deep scar that ran from the top of his bald head, down his cheek and his neck, to be halted finally by the hard edge of his collar bone. The pads of my fingers tingled. How he’d managed to heal without a grain of sand getting in and starting an infection was beyond me.

  Beneath the folds of his duster, a brace of pistols was strapped across his chest. Bloody expensive kit, especially considering they were prone to clogging with sand, making them nothing more than fancy blackjacks.

  Overall, the man wasn’t tall, and was stocky rather than strong, except in his presence.

  “Dassem,” he said, around the pipe that sat, unlit, between his teeth.

  I pretended to remember something I’d heard about the military, and gave a sloppy salute, heels of my boots clicking awkwardly and nearly tripping me up standing still. The man did not rise from his stool to greet me.

  “I, ah, received your letter, Tor,” I said, feeling pressed to break the silence.

  Dassem finished looking me over, and finally settled his eyes on mine.

  “Gear still fits?” he said.

  I pulled self consciously at the sleeves of my duster.

  “A little tighter around the waist these days, but well enough.”

  Dassem chewed on the stem of his pipe.

  “I understand you trained as a doctor before the Corps? Trained in some Outer Realm I’ve barely heard of, probably in some questionable, esoteric methods, but a doctor nonetheless.”

  He made it sound just enough like a question, but I knew he was challenging me to tell the truth. Or, at least, what he knew as the truth. And my challenge was to find out what that was, and to make them believe it.

  “I was,” I said.

  “So how’d you end up here?” he asked.

  “How’d any of us?” I said. “Mercantile Empire, eyeing off a whole new continent of untapped wealth, requires enough loyalist blood to make the earth feel the same as that of the Inner Realms.”

  Dassem raised an eyebrow.

  “You don’t agree?”

  “I think it’s a steep price to pay, only to make rich men richer. And I don’t see any of them in the trenches.”

  Dassem didn’t offer his own opinions either way.

  “So you earned yourself a conscript contract?”

  I nodded. Dassem chewed.

  “Takes a proper course of study to become a doctor. A long course, with all the lodgings, books, and other materials that all requires. Yet you’ve no debts against your name. So, I’ll guess you were born into money. Even if it was Outer Realms coin originally, it would’ve exchanged just fine by now. And a man of those means could have easily paid to have his slip taken out of the lottery.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “Mmmmm.”

  I moved my weight from heel to heel, pretending to look nervous. In truth, I was terribly aware of Red lurking behind me, and that did make me a little uncomfortable. Which was definitely the effect she was after.

  “Why the trenches?” Dassem said, drawing my attention back.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Doctors have big houses, good food, few working hours, not to mention the much greater prestige, and the much reduced risk of getting stabbed.”

  “Less reduced than you’d think,” I said, and he actually grinned at that.

  “I can’t think of many men who would give that life away voluntarily. But you got your boots dirty. A regular old Trencher.

  “Why not buy a few ranks? Become an officer, enjoy some modicum of luxury. Only risk getting stabbed in the back.”

  “You can do that?” I said. “Purchase your way up the ranks?”

  “It’s the Mercantile Empire, mate,” said Dassem. “Everything is for sale.”

  I pretended to consider for a moment, then shook my head.

  “An officer has to give orders rather than take them, and I don’t like making decisions that could determine whether people live or die.”

  “Doctors make decisions on who lives and who dies, every day, every hour.”

  “Not quite in the same way. And it didn’t agree with me in that particular theatre, either.”

  Dassem wasn’t looking at me, but at the wall beside him instead, occasionally reaching out to pick a splinter from an exposed wall stud. His body feigned disinterest while his mind weighed up my story.

  “So the Burgher Princes answer your prayers, draft you, give you a ticket to the simple life of eating sand and piercing your blisters every day in the trench. And then -”

  Dassem got a hold of something, and this time ripped a larger chunk from the support.

  “- you go back to practicing medicine.”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I left for a woman.”

  “Deserted,” he corrected me.

  “Deserted, yes.”

  True to his word, Dassem did not laugh, because he already knew.

  “And now you’re back in the Duster.”

  I shrugged.

  “The woman left.”

  “Aye, they’ll do that. You’re meant to just find another one.”

  “She left to join the enemy.”

  “Ah,” said Dassem. “So it’s revenge you’re after. But it’s not the reason that worries me. It’s your… indecisiveness.”

  He held up his hand and turned it back and forth in front of his face.

  “In, out, in out. Like a fish, flip flopping. Trying desperately to breathe.”

  “I suppose I’m just an unsettled soul.”

  Dassem grunted.

  “Eight years, in Arradheim, with this woman,” he said. “Treating locals and immigrants alike. Saved the life of more than a few good soldiers, so we heard. But not in any official capacity for the Corps. And not accepting any scrip.”

  “When you’re this far from the Core Realms, promises of coin don’t buy you much.”

  “They do if everyone is sticking to the same promise, which those Imperials in Arradheim certainly would be. So you could have survived, even if you didn’t want to charge poor Trenchers an arm and a leg to save their arm or their leg. Instead you deliberately trade for food and other necessities. A very continental approach.”

  “You’re going the slow way about making a point.”

  “As I please,” said Dassem. “You’ve travelled the continent extensively as well, before, but mostly after your days in Arradheim. Embedded amongst its people. Living like a true local.”

  “I suppose you could say that.”

  “Perhaps, without even realising it, you might have picked up certain… how can I say this… ways of being. Ways that you might not want to challenge.”

  “Twisted loyalties, you mean? To Azhur, and the Hand. They’ve ruled my way of life for so long, you think I might have come to accept that’s just the way things are?”

  Dassem drew on his pope

  “Your summons said you had a weapon capable of dealing with the Fingers’ Glimmer. Prove it, and I’ll stay with you until I've seen it done to all eight of them. I’ll sign any contract you want.”

  “A man of your talents could fade into the desert, out of reach of any contract. As you have done once already.”

  “Revenge, then,” I lied. “A stronger bond than any writ. The strongest pledge there is.”

  “Except for love.”

  I thought he knew something then, that his seemingly innocuous comment was a test. But he arched his back and cracked his knuckles, moving on, and I figured it must have been no more than a passing comment, perhaps something playing on his own mind, rather than anything to do with me.

  “I believe you, I think,” said Dassem. “But it’s not up to me. I’m just a sergeant.”

  He nodded behind me. I whirled around to face Red. She stared back at me with indifference, those blue eyes hidden behind so many walls of ice that they appeared grey.

  “Forgive me,” I said. “When I saw the name signed on the summons -”

  “You thought of my father.”

  “I suppose I did, yes.”

  “They usually do.”

  She jerked her chin at Dassem.

  “Show him.”

  Dassem finally stood and crossed to the opposite side of the small room from where we’d entered. There he grabbed a large sheet of tin that was leaning against the wall. Careful not to slice his fingers on the ragged edges, he lifted it and walked it aside.