Primed and loaded.

Fixed.

The order finally came to advance as dawn spilled into the foggy morning. Behind them, far away, all the churches of Sevastopol began to toll out their bells in a fury of pealing to spur them on.

Forward.

But Pasternak had been right. The ravine was very narrow, and the British had set pickets ahead. They were firing by the time Pasternak reached the choke point. There were already bodies underfoot.

The fog was very thick. All he could see was blossoms of musket fire flaring out in the gloom.

Now his nerves were truly ablaze. Now he was ready to kill anything that moved.

In his final moment, Yankev Pasternak thought he saw one of the Brits rushing forward through the fog—a soldier in a black, black uniform, blacker than the darkness he would soon find hidden inside his eyes—but before the figure resolved, a musket ball rang through his helmet like a bell.

His eyes closed.

And this was the end of Private Yankev Pasternak.

But Pasternak didn’t know that. As far as Pasternak knew, he woke again in the aftermath of the battle, rising up from the morass of corpses into an empty ravine.

Everything was still.

His head ached terribly.

But the fog smelled sharply of spent powder, and somewhere nearby—he couldn’t quite say where—he could still hear the popping of gunfire, the grunt and the groan of striving men.

Pasternak had died with nerves ablaze, and so that was how he remained: embattled, terrified, bloodthirsty.

He was alone on the battlefield. He had to find the others.

And so he retreated through the fog, bayonet at the ready, prepared to kill anything that moved.

And in this manner, he made his way into the Far Country.

“You there!”

Pasternak wheeled about, his bayonet forward, as an officer on horseback cantered up through the fog.

“What are you doing skulking around out here?”

Pasternak stared. Speech was supposed to fire from the barrel of his mouth, but he could not quite recall how it was done.

“You’re not a deserter, are you?”

At this dangerous and insulting insinuation, Pasternak let out a percussive “No, sir!”

“Well, come on, then,” said the officer. “The muster point’s just beyond the ridge.”

The officer turned his mount sharply and made to spur it on. “What are you waiting for, soldier?”

The noise of battle—thudding artillery, screaming horses—seemed to be growing louder in Pasternak’s ears with every second.

But something was strange.

Pasternak had never seen an officer with slit-pupil eyes before. The cockade in the officer’s hat was made not of ordinary ribbon, but of badly bloodied bandaging knotted into a rosette, and what was more, the mount beneath him was in an extreme state of decay, its bleached white ribs exposed beneath the saddle on its back.