Ram barely left his bed for the next tetrad. Peri and the other officers were kind about it, and Busu didn’t say a word to him each morning as he left to go on patrol by himself. Probably they all thought he was malingering, pretending to be sick so he wouldn’t have to face their disappointment. But the truth was, he could barely move. Whatever he’d done to himself to stay kneeling for so long on that rooftop, his muscles wouldn’t forgive him for it anytime soon. He felt feverish, and his chest burned.

When he finally got up, on the fifth day after the bloom, he felt marginally better, but still terrible. It was white day, but he felt so rotten that he barely noticed as he shuffled his way down to the trough for his first proper meal since his failure. He couldn’t taste the food—not that that was any great tragedy.

Busu caught sight of him there; when he pushed himself back from the table and drifted out of the hall, his patrol-mate cut his argument with Dangurnintu short and hurried to follow him out as he started their daily round.

“Man,” he said, as he fell into step beside Ram, “I almost want crowhammer drill to start up again, you know? White day rounds just suck.”

Ram only grunted. They were close to the Temple anyway. White day mainly meant that the streets were less crowded. Less trouble to watch out for.

Busu persevered. “You heard anything from your girl lately?”

“No, she’s been kind of busy, you know, since her old man died. We lost touch.” Somebody had worked out, tetrads back, that the “Ushna” Kamenrag had spoken of was the ugly, dirty man Ram had described as his lover’s father. Fortunately, this inconvenient fact had been easy enough to integrate into the existing Ram mythos, but it was annoying to have to keep track of it all now.

“Damn. You’d think she could use some cheering up, right about now, eh? Patch it up quick, boy; you don’t let a girl like that go without a fight. Maybe you could buy her a present? I know a guy who sells good jewelry on the cheap. All real, no fakes.”

“Yeah, maybe.” It should have been touching; Busu was doing the best he could to pull Ram out of a funk by giving him advice on how to manage a fictional relationship with a beautiful woman who had no interest in Ram and had possibly already forgotten his name. How was Busu to know that it wouldn’t work?

“Hey, she’s unsupervised now, right? No more sneaking around. She comes back to this pyre, you just give me the word, the boys and I will clear the barracks, five minutes notice. We’ve done it before.”

“Mm-hmm.” He felt irrationally guilty for not having the energy to maintain the charade more vigorously, and added halfheartedly, “That’s not really the problem, though. She’s a complicated woman, and now her dad’s gone. She needs a little space.”

“No, she don’t,” Busu argued. “That’s trouble. Unsupervised is unsupervised, man, and you ain’t the only one interested. You want her going around pyre to pyre, all the local boys sniffing her ass, and not a word from you? Look, I know you’re in a bad place right now, but that ain’t going to end well. You got to defend your claim, man. If you want, we can get you some leave.”

“What?”

“You heard me! There’s time before the campaign, and the boss trusts you. You got time to go out, get your shit together, and find your woman.”

“I—“ Busu was dead serious. It was very important to him, Ram realized, that a man like Ram could win the love of a woman like Darun. It gave him hope that a militiaman’s life could have a happy ending after all. What could Ram say to that, that wouldn’t break his heart?

He didn’t have to say anything; Busu grabbed his arm and nodded down the street ahead. “Hey. Incoming.” Ram looked, and stopped in his tracks. There were no less than five flamekeepers turning the corner, headed their way in full battle armor. Ram made to dart down the nearest alley, but Busu held his arm fast.

“Let me—“

“What? I got your back, man. You don’t run. Besides, where you going to run to?”

It wasn’t reassuring, but it made sense. This part of the pyre wasn’t normal flamekeeper turf; they had to be looking for him. Which meant they’d gone to the bother of looking up his assigned patrol route, and weren’t inclined to let him shake them off. But this was still a public place, with witnesses, and he’d broken no law. He was untouchable. He only wished they weren’t swaggering like that.

The flamekeepers were approaching fast, and looking right at him; Ram trembled. “Relax,” Busu muttered. “I got this covered.” He took a deep breath, then bellowed out, at top volume, double-time, and the completely wrong key: “Ohh, Ektush was the biggest ass a pyre ever saw! He kept the peace, and broke it too, and fuck the fucking law! Oh here’s to a brave mil—“

Busu’s song was cut short by a punch to the face, and he reeled against the nearest wall clutching his mouth. The flamekeeper in the lead turned to Ram; he was close enough now that Ram could see his eyes twinkling brightly through the partially open front of his helmet, and catch the middle part of a smile with an incisor knocked out. Of course, it would be Kamenrag.

“Hearth trash!” he said, in as bright and eager a voice as Ram had ever heard him use. “I’ve got some really exciting news for you! Have you heard?” Ram’s hand flew to his club, for all the good that would do. “Maybe not. Get this, little man: your countenance just got revoked. Every bit of it. By the Lugal’s own order! Is that awesome, or what?” He looked Ram right in the eye as he drew his sword.

“The Lugal? What did I do?“

“Yeah, we’ve got a signed order and everything. Show him, Gusam!” The flamekeeper beside him whipped out an impressive-looking sheet of vellum with a familiar wax seal at the bottom. “Isn’t that wild? Oh, but I left out the best part: he also ordered your summary execution for the public good. Same for anybody who helps you.” He bounced on his heels. “Which means you get to find out what it feels like to have your intestines cut out! How sweet is that?”

Gusam stuffed the vellum into his belt, and drew his own blade; the other three weren’t slow in following. Busu was still leaning against the wall with his hand over his mouth, looking uncertainly from Ram to the flamekeepers and back. All other traffic on the street had stopped in place to gawk; white day or not, the area had become crowded again in a hurry.

Ram had only one tile left to play. “I’ve got countenance from the Ensi himself,” he said in a loud voice. “That makes your order invalid, and you a traitor against the God if you carry it out.”

“Yeah, I heard that,” Kamenrag said, then jabbed playfully at Ram with his sword, making him hop back out of the way. His four friends spread out to form a semicircle, with the two of them in the middle and Busu pressed flat against the wall behind them, all his bravado gone. Ram was on his own.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

He turned and ran, racing through the gap between the wall and the last flamekeeper; the crowd closed against him, and the flamekeeper grabbed him by the back of his shirt and threw him down on hands and knees in front of Kamenrag. He ducked his head just in time to get a boot to his crown instead of his face. It still stung.

“Up we get, hearth trash. Nobody likes a lazy soldier.”

More from perversity than from any hope of winning, Ram pushed off the ground in a low charge, trying for a tackle. Since Kamenrag was mailed, it was like running into a giant heap of pot-shards; the flamekeeper took two steps back before he found his footing, then started thumping Ram on the back. It didn’t hurt much, and Ram refused to let go. As long as he had Kamenrag clinched, he couldn’t use the sword. But Ram couldn’t do anything himself, either; Kamenrag’s helmet made headbutts a bad idea. He was only delaying the inevitable, and if he dragged it on long enough one of the other men would stab him in the back—

“Bastard!” There was a loud thunk, a hiss from Kamenrag, then another thunk as he dropped his sword. Ram let go at once, and scrabbled for the weapon with his left hand. Meanwhile, Kamenrag’s attention was on Busu, who had backed up against the wall again with his club raised, looking as though he hadn’t quite thought matters through before whacking a fully armored flamekeeper upside the head with it.

His eyes flicked to Ram, and widened still further. Kamenrag spared Ram a glance, then did a double take. Ram could see the nasty smile come back to his eyes. Busu made to swing at him again while he was distracted; Kamenrag didn’t even turn to look as he disabled him with a single armor-gloved punch to the chest. All his attention was on Ram, and the sword in his hand.

Which was, come to think of it, uncomfortably warm, and getting warmer. It wasn’t quite too hot to hold, but it didn’t feel good. But he’d die for sure if he dropped it. He put his right hand on the hilt, removed the left, and shook it to cool it, never taking his eyes off the enemy. He’d need to move quickly, but something about that obnoxious smirk gave him pause—

The sword. He was facing off against a flamekeeper, holding his own indwelt sword. Shouldn’t it have burnt his hand off by now? It was annoyingly warm, for sure, but from all he’d heard it was supposed to give instant blisters at best. He gripped down a little tighter; the heat seemed to fade slightly, along with the smile in Kamenrag’s eyes. Ram could see the others shuffling nervously at the edge of his vision. Behind them, the crowd were starting to mutter.

What did it matter? Here was a sword. There was the enemy. Everything else could wait.

The sword had, quite literally, a mind of its own. Ram had only to think of swinging it, to twitch his hand upwards in the suggestion of a strike, before it took over. Kamenrag’s eyes were still just barely smiling when the tip of his own sword came rushing up with terrible speed, scattering molten fragments of bronze scales like dead leaves in a breeze, leaving a glowing streak of fire running from hip to shoulder through his heart.

Kamenrag fell over on his back with a resounding crash. There was an all-too-familiar stink of burnt flesh and charred bone, a tinkle of loosened bronze scales falling to the pavement. All else was silence. Ram looked at the blade; its edge was smoking slightly, burning off what little taint of blood it had caught before it cauterized the wound.

Slowly he lowered the sword, looking around at the four surviving flamekeepers. He met the eyes of one—Gusam, was it?—and the spell was broken. As one they charged, swords raised.

They had him surrounded, and flamekeepers practiced with their swords daily. Yet all four, impossibly, missed, swinging comically wide. Gusam’s sword came down a foot to Ram’s left; two of the others somehow got in each others’ way, crossing swords instead of hitting him. The soldier behind Ram struck him in the left hand, but only because he flinched to avoid Gusam. The honed-steel edge clunked off his knuckles like a dry stick. It didn’t even hurt.

But Kamenrag’s sword knew its work. Ram’s first panicky thrust caught Gusam through the chest; a startled backswing took his nearest friend across the throat. Another blow cut the third man’s helmet and head in halves down the middle. The last flamekeeper tried a second, hopeless lunge; Ram parried it easily, and the other man’s sword bounced back with unnatural force to stick deep in its master’s neck. He took two wobbly steps back, reaching for his sword, but fell over before he could grab it, and lay still.

Again, dead silence reigned over the street. Ram looked to Busu; his patrol-mate was still staring at the burnt gash across Kamenrag’s chest. He felt like he ought to thank the man, but was afraid that anything he said would only terrify him—or that he would go into hysterics himself if he tried to speak. Instead he cut the scabbard off Kamenrag’s belt, picked it up, and sheathed the weapon. It didn’t seem necessary, but it was something he knew how to do. As he stood back up, he gave Busu a nod; he nodded back timidly, before returning his gaze to the corpses.

It would have to do. Ram didn’t have anywhere to go, but he knew with an urgent certainty that he couldn’t stay there, with the still-warm bodies of five of the Lugal’s prize retainers and an army of terrified witnesses. On a sudden thought, he drew the sword—the whole crowd gasped and drew back—and drove it into the fatal edict sticking out of Gusam’s belt. The lovely vellum burst into golden flame, was ashes before he could sheathe the blade again. Not that it mattered now; he’d just written and signed himself a new death warrant.

The crowd parted for him at a simple look. A few tremulous steps down the street sufficed to send half of them scurrying for the shelter of the nearest open door or alleyway. There they watched him, like mice eyeing a passing cat from under a bush. Ram knew exactly how they felt, but he could hardly run and hide from himself.

He ran anyway.