Billat screamed when he saw Rathadas’s head roll forward, toppling from the man’s still upright body. A moment later, the lead monk reached the soldier. Cursing that they’d not been permitted to carry their shields, Billat backed away, his sword thrust out, its point dancing to keep his distance from the advancing monk. A shield would have made all the difference. He’d not have needed to worry about that second weapon, and behind a shield he could have charged the man, blocking the axe even if it was thrown at him, and then his sword would have done its work quickly.

He nodded to himself, only then realizing that he was sitting down, almost opposite the staircase. Sweat stung his eyes, making it difficult to understand what his hands were doing, there in his lap, repeatedly moving in a way something like shovelling, as they sought to push his intestines back into his body. It wasn’t working.

A shield. And a sword. Things would have turned out differently if he’d had those. He wouldn’t be sitting here on the floor.

Blinking back on a world that now stung, he saw his hands give up, and the guts roll out. He recalled trying to dig a latrine once, in sandy clay, and how the side walls kept caving in, until that damned pit was fifteen fucking paces across, and his comrades – all laughing – had had to throw him a rope so he could climb up the sloping sides. They’d known about the sand, of course. It was a rite of passage, being made into a fool, but how it had burned, how it had stung.

Humiliation. What a last thing to remember.

* * *

The heat from the fire engulfing the barracks forced Sergeant Telra and her soldiers back towards the entrance to the main building, where she decided they would await the reappearance of the lieutenant, once the ugly work inside was done with.

The shrieks from inside the barracks were gone now. No one had made it outside, meaning that she and her comrades had yet to bless their swords this night. Often, war forgot about being all about fighting, and instead became a sordid exercise in destruction, in flames and burned bodies stepped over, as if the aftermath had a way of creeping unseen over the present. In some ways, of course, that was a relief, but one could be left with the sense of having missed out on everything.

The heat and the flames, the billowing black smoke rising only to tumble over beneath the ceiling of white clouds, all reminded her of the last time she’d set fire to a building. That one had been an estate, empty but for a horrid old woman. Something of a debacle, to be honest. She’d exceeded her orders. Well, truth was, she’d been drunk.