#wanderverse

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A man in a uniform came to the farm and took count of everyone present. Mother seemed afraid, but the man in the uniform barely said anything to her. He did, however, ask for the oldest child’s birthday and age. He made sure the child’s bones were strong, that the child’s vision was good, that the child could hear and run and climb. Then the soldier left. Azar was twelve years old.

Just before his fourteenth birthday, a magistrate’s messenger came from town and passed him a stamped, sealed paper. It was the year three-hundred forty-seven, in a season that Turkans would later call The Spring of Empty Houses.

He was a familiar face, the messenger; Azar recognized him as the gangly man who delivered forms from the town granary, as well as his mother’s tiny inheritance. The child tucked the paper under his arm and invited the messenger in to say hello to Mother and his baby sister, who took great joy in playing with the messenger’s long ringlets.

But the messenger shook his head. He insisted that Azar open the letter immediately. He had to return with a response.

Inside the letter was King Osman’s seal and an order. Report to the quartermaster at the Throne in the South as soon as possible.

Azar wasn’t stupid. The letter didn’t need to announce itself as a conscription order for him to know. Word in town was that you would know your assignment based on the reporting site: the magisters if you were selected for siege service, the guard academy for cavalry and archery recruits, the quartermaster for infantry. If you were to be excused for health or merit, you weren’t sent all the way to the Throne in Tiguerout.

Mother knew something was wrong when she returned from the peach grove. One of the twins was in the kitchen, sitting beneath the table and crying. She comforted the abandoned toddler and later found Azar in the wheat fields, tears streaking his dusty face.

Mother stopped his crying, stiffened his lip. She helped him pack up clothes and dried fruit and bread for the trip and sent him away with enough money for the ferry rides to the mainland.

--

Innsmen gave him free lodging in Passenso and Diban. Nobody seemed to ask why such a young child, so dirty in the face and with a farmhand’s clothes, was travelling somber and alone towards Tiguerout. The Dibani Arms owner gave him a free dinner and set him up in a tiny room on the second floor; at the Minstrel Inn in Passenso, a barmaid took him silently to a chamber out of the way of the other customers. He didn’t ask questions.

It was much the same in Ouaïnnkanou, the southernmost mainland city. There were choices of inns here, but most buildings had hand-painted signs advertising free rooms to young men heading for Tiguerout. He wandered into one near the edge of town and was sent to a room crowded with others. That night, he slept on the floor between a crying boy not much older than himself and a father who spent half the evening folding and unfolding a letter.

From Ouaïnnkanou to Tiguerout he rode in a wagon carrying hay and men. The farmers didn’t seem bothered by bindle-carrying travelers who hopped on the backs of their wagons without warning, so he stepped up onto one and held on tight. It was a rocky ride, but it was much faster than walking, and easier.

The child trained up quick, like all the other soldiers. There was, in that year, no time for long drills and specialization. The border dispute with Ketharous turned bloody in the earliest days of spring, and Turkos dealt with the blood in the only way they could at the time: young bodies, maybe not primed but armed and zealous. Azar’s training class was together for just under two months before they shipped north to Béla Crava for their final orders. The day after the company set out, Azar turned fourteen.

--

Caravans of soldiers, rations and weapons left Tiguerout on the ill-maintained northeast road that skirted the Oxspine mountains and wound along the coast of Turkos. This far east there weren’t many cities, just small fishing villages and scattered groups of sheep-farming nomads—the coast was ill-guarded and very few people settled in the region for fear of invasion by sea. Sometimes at night, though, when they passed along the shorter mountains, the company could see smoke from fires and radiant light from the cities along the Turkan steppe to the west.

Azar marched with the ration cart, rear left corner, a cloth over his face to keep out the dust and the cold. At first he tried to trot to keep up with it, but he soon learned to hang onto the side instead, sword drawn and ready for bandits and wolves. On the second day he fell off and couldn’t catch up for almost an hour. He did not fall again.

By night he stayed close to the ration cart and hid behind a wheel, rubbing his dust-dried eyes and trying to warm his hands. A rotation of men, young and old, joined him with blankets, thicker coats, stories, tears, but never the same person twice, never the same sad story told a second time. He collected their words and, with a scrap of paper in his tunic pocket, wrote them down in a letter to Mother.

It took nearly two months to reach Béla Crava from Tiguerout, two months of nighttime raids from wild boars and teary stories from strangers and choking dust that coated Azar’s tongue until all food tasted the same. They marched triumphant through the city as if they’d won some battle, banners flapping and brass calling around them, attended by townspeople who’d long since learned to see through the pageantry. An old lady, grumbling a language he didn’t know, handed him a delicious-smelling roll. He nibbled at it, but it tasted still like dust.

--

Company Twenty-Seven, the poster read, reporting to Colonel Youssein in Halflight Valley, at the outpost by the foot of Mount Egri. He knew the word Halflight. He knew the stories about men ripped apart by the Kethars. Azar tried to rub his eyes and reread the poster, but the words were the same: Company Twenty-Seven, Halflight Valley, Mount Egri outpost. The other soldiers broke down their caravan and headed for their supply trains and scouting companies and field hospitals, and he followed his company to the front.

--

It was October, with a chill settling into the wood of the pikes that surrounded their camp, when Azar ran from his first battle. A Kethari scouting team set explosive powder in the crook of a hastily-built guard tower and set it alight. The guards leapt down before the tower collapsed in on itself, and the horsemen rushed to cut off the scouts before they could escape.

Somewhere distant, Colonel Youssein called for the infantry to attack. From the ditches and the tents and the wagons, men bolted for the tower and the Kethars at the base.

Hours later, First Lieutenant Hokka found Azar cowering under the ribs of a dismantled wagon. She reprimanded him for cowardice and assigned him to night watch for two weeks.

In another life, First Lieutenant Hokka thought, I’d comfort him. A child, terrified under a wagon, watching soldiers twice his age torn to shreds. But the King’s offices don’t believe in children from the Eastern Isles, only men.

--

The next day, his bunkmate left for Béla Crava in a wagon attended by medics. They covered his pockmarked body in a wool cloth and waved thick, choking incenses around the camp. Kethar Rot, the whispers said, and anyone nearby could be struck the same. It lived in the water and the air and only Kethars themselves were immune. One of the artillerymen, a native of Meshullam, offered Azar a sticky salve and a prayer, but he shook his head, indicating the Sign of the Empty that his mother had sent along. No absent gods would spare them of the rot.

--

Two more skirmishes came and went, and the time between fights got shorter. They saw prowling Kethari scouts behind trees and rocks and in the distant hills to the east, even on days when nobody came running from cover with weapons raised. Wounded horses and camels littered the field around the camp (one with Azar’s knife in its ribs, earning nothing more than a stern nod from First Lieutenant Hokka), some draped over their crying riders. One of the Casthan soldiers, a pale man with very little skill in Turkan, wandered the fields at sundown silencing the horses and their trapped riders, but Azar was still sure he heard them crying at night.

The third skirmish bled into the night. Colonel Youssein called for reinforcements the first moment he could spare a horse; the messenger bolted silent into the night mere minutes before another wave of Kethars spilled down the steep hills, leaping over the bodies of their kin.

Azar was quick. All the youngest soldiers were. The Turkan armor was far too big on his body, so he had left it in his tent hours before; that night, weaving through abandoned cannons and falling bodies, he was glad for the light tunic. When their reinforcements arrived from the Bohula contingent, he found that the remainders of the Twenty-Seventh were all unarmored as well.

A Bohula contingent officer, ushering the sodden and exhausted survivors to a field hospital behind the camp, told him the battle was near over, that he’d done his service and his mother would be proud when she saw him. He said the dregs of the Twenty-Seventh would return to Tiguerout as heroes, adorned in garlands of rare flowers and sent back to their homes with as much silver as they could carry. This was the payment for their terror. A day later, the same officer took them from the hospital and sent them back to the smoke-choked field.

He rotated in and out of battle for two more days before the Kethari finally ran back into the hills, dragging dying officers behind them. Colonel Youssein’s final orders, taken from his jacket before his body was burned, directed the last thirty soldiers of his regiment to the Twenty-Ninth in the Siperm marsh. He watched Hokka’s dead eyes as she read their orders aloud, watched the light fade around her as they marched north.

--

The night watch shrieked, and Azar was the first to move. Ever since they left Mount Egri, he hadn’t slept at all; every tiny noise made his hands clench tight on his wool blanket, so he’d given up on sleep entirely.

He leapt up to see only one Kethar, midnight-black paint cutting his face into ribbons, the campfire glinting gold on the bronze tip of his spear. Azar found the night watcher’s knife stuck blade-down into a log, found it in his hand and flying easy, whistling, through the air,

found it in the Kethar’s throat,

found the Kethar on the ground

dead, eyes wide.

First Lieutenant Hokka didn’t say a word when she awoke. The Twenty-Seventh were silent. Nobody made a move to stop him when he snatched up his blanket and a flaming branch from their fire. Surely someone would report this, the whole incident, the scout and the single enemy casualty and the clear hints at a diverted raid, but not for quite a while.