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bored with the complacent, static attitudes of the noble class in general. Paran wanted something more challenging than coordinating shipments of wine, or overseeing the breeding of horses.
    Nor was he among the first to enlist, thus easing the way for entrance into officer training and selective postings. It had just been ill-luck that saw him sent to Kan, where a veteran garrison had been licking its wounds for nigh on eight years. There’d been little respect for an untested lieutenant, and even less for a noble-born.
    Paran suspected that that had changed since the slaughter on the road. He’d handled it better than many of those veterans, helped in no small part by the superb breeding of his horse. More, to prove to them all his cool, detached professionalism, he’d volunteered to lead the inspection detail.
    He’d done well, although the detail had proved . . . difficult. He’d heard screaming while crawling around among the bodies, coming from somewhere inside his own head. His eyes had fixed on details, oddities—the peculiar twist of this body, the inexplicable smile on that dead soldier’s face—but what had proved hardest was what had been done to the horses. Crusted foam-filled nostrils and mouths—the signs of terror—and the wounds were terrible, huge and devastating. Bile and feces stained the once-proud mounts, and over everything was a glittering carpet of blood and slivers of red flesh. He had nearly wept for those horses.
    He shifted uneasily on the saddle, feeling a clamminess come to his hands where they rested on the ornate horn. He’d held on to his confidence through the whole episode; yet now, as his thoughts returned to that horrid scene, it was as if something that had always been solid in his mind now stuttered, shied, threatening his balance; the faint contempt he’d shown for those veterans in his troop, kneeling helpless on the roadside racked by dry-heaves, returned to him now with a ghoulish cast. And the echo that came from the Constabulary at Gerrom, arriving like a late blow to his already bruised and battered soul, rose once again to pluck at the defensive numbness still holding him in check.
    Paran straightened with an effort. He’d told the Adjunct his youth was gone. He’d told her other things as well, fearless, uncaring, lacking all the caution his father had instilled in him when it came to the many faces of the Empire.
    From a great distance in his mind came old, old words:
live quietly
. He’d rejected that notion then; he rejected it still. The Adjunct, however, had noticed him. He wondered now, for the first time, if he was right to feel pride. That hard-bitten commander of so many years ago, on the walls of Mock’s Hold, would have spat at Paran’s feet, with contempt, had he now stood before him. The boy was a boy no longer, but a man.
Should’ve heeded my words, son. Now look at you
.
    His mare pulled up suddenly, hooves thumping confusedly on the rutted road. Paran reached for his weapon as he looked uneasily around in the gloom. The track ran through rice paddies, the nearest shacks of the peasants on a parallel ridge a hundred paces from the road. Yet a figure now blocked the road.
    A cold breath swirled lazily past, pinning back the mare’s ears and widening her nostrils as she flinched.
    The figure—a man by his height—was swathed in shades of green: cloaked, hooded, wearing a faded tunic and linen leggings above green-dyed leather boots. A single long-knife, the weapon of choice among Seven Cities warriors, was slung through a thin belt. The man’s hands, faintly gray in the afternoon light, glittered with rings, rings on every finger, above and below the knuckles. He raised one now, holding up a clay jug.
    “Thirsty, Lieutenant?” The man’s voice was soft, the tone strangely melodic.
    “Have I business with you?” Paran asked, his hand remaining on the grip of his longsword.
    The man smiled, pulling back his hood. His face was long, the skin