Both, he reasoned, came out only after the moon was high, or, like tonight, when it wasn't in the sky at all. Both skittered away from the flicker of the lamplight dangling at the end of the hook on the long pole he carried. Both were covered in filth and likely were the vectors of disease. Both, he thought solemnly, were forgotten by the gods.

 

Dalian walked past a small alley, his worn boots splashing lightly over the shallow puddle of water – or perhaps something else – gathered between the cobbles. His light fell across the spectacle of a fat reprobate and a harlot in the furious, heedless act of fornication, she bent forward over a hogshead. Around them, the streetlights had long ago fallen into disuse, and only Dalian saw their fleeting moment of passion. The shadow of them that his light cast against the cracked brick wall at the back of the alley was not of two, but a single beast, writhing in the dark – at once more real and more telling than the two creatures before him.

 

Dalian drew his hood aside so he could not see, and he left them, the light seeping away. The two did not even notice the darkness as it swallowed them, just as they had not noticed the light.

 

The lamp-bearer soon became aware of a man walking beside him, also hooded, head down, following him quietly.

 

“Good even', Sir,” Dalian said out of pure obligation. “Is there a place I can take you?”

 

The hooded man brought a hand out of his long-sleeved robe and dropped a silver piece into Dalian's hand. The lamp-bearer stopped short. Beneath the hood were a pair of deep brown eyes, almost amber in the lurid burning of Dalian's burden. The voice was gritty, cold, with no interest in politeness.

 

“They say there's a legionnaire here, an Ascondean. He hides in a bottle somewhere. Take me to him.”

 

Dalian's fingers started to close around the silver piece, then hesitated. The flame in his lamp snapped. Down the way he'd come, the harlot's customer cried out. Two streets over, the sound of a lute ringing out some bawdy tune floated through the back alleys. Dalian looked again into the eyes of the man, and spoke haltingly.

 

“I couldn't take coin for something I'm not sure I know,” Dalian said. “This legionnaire, this Ascondean, he wouldn't be in trouble, would he?”

 

The hooded man avoided the lamp-bearer's gaze in a slow, casual turn of his head, the hand disappearing back into the sleeve of the robe. The voice seemed disinterested.

 

“If the legionnaire is in trouble or if he isn't, the one who takes me to him will get that coin. It could be a whore whose madame beats her and binds her feet and will take it from her, or the drunken sot who'll use it to drown himself, or a lamp-bearer who makes his living as honestly as he knows how who will use it to buy his children bread and his wife a new dress. Does it still interest you whether the legionnaire is in trouble?”

 

Dalian sighed quietly, closing his fingers around the coin and pocketing it.

 

“It doesn't so much at that,” he said. “Just now I recall this man. Follow me.”

 

Through the pitch blackness they walked, the sound of their footfalls over the cobbles interrupted by the bleating shouts of revelry, anger, passion, envy that leaked into the street along with the occasional sliver of the light from behind a closed door, or the cloud of smoke from the pipes of men clustered around the front porches of taverns and saloons.

 

Finally they came to a place with two braziers alight out front, women in silk and feathered tiaras, men hanging off them with bottles or mugs in their hands. The entire place reeked of sin, and within came the off-key music of drunken minstrels. Like moths to a flame, the seedy elements of the city had gathered, and the man in the hood felt as if he too would be drawn into the center of that swirling galaxy.

 

Dalian watched him enter without a word of goodbye or thanks, and then the lamp-bearer turned his back on all of it and headed on along his route, the only glimmer in that place.

 

---

 

The hooded man found the interior of the tavern as shadowy and unsavory as the outside. The barkeep was engaged in a dispute with three men over what they owed, and a girl – one of the island folk, maybe – who looked far too young to be in that sort of place danced atop a table in a sequined dress while a minstrel played a jangling, thudding song behind her, overtaken by the hoots of a semicircle of philanderers who, judging by the pile of coppers at the girl's bare feet, were rich men indeed.

 

Off in the corner, hand grasping a mug shakily, was a sallow creature in the beaten canvas tunic that an Ascondean might recognize as the undershirt worn beneath the phalanx's lorica. An elven prostitute with dark black hair had been approaching the hooded man, but in the moment his eyes caught sight of the man in the corner, they blazed up and she quickly sidestepped him as he pushed past her.

 

The man in the canvas tunic looked up as the hooded man sat down across from him. The legionnaire – or former legionnaire – had pale hair the color of day-old dishwater, grown too long to fit beneath a helm. The muscles, the hooded man saw, had atrophied, and the hands were bony and weak, barely able to lift the mug without trembling. Still, the round blue eyes were the same – seeming too large for the face, bright despite the dullness of the rest of the man's countenance, as if his creator had added them in as a last desperate detail to give him some distinction. Even now they were biting, intelligent.

 

“Hello, Quintus,” the hooded man's voice shook the drunk out of his stupor for a moment.

 

Quintus looked into the eyes beneath the hood. Amber. Where had he seen eyes like that?

 

“The hell do you want?” he managed. Beneath the table, his hand dropped to the hilt of his gladius, still belted to his hip. It didn't occur to him that he couldn't remember how to use it.

 

“Mostly to talk,” the hooded man said.

 

“There's girls in here'll talk with you all you want. I'll take coin for a lotta things, but not that,” he belched silently, tasting bile, turning away. “Not yet,” he muttered to himself, then noticed the stranger hadn't left. “Shove off.”

 

“You won't even talk to an old friend, Quintus?”

 

“You're no friend of mine. Who are you?”

 

The hooded man leaned in, his hand slipping out of the sleeve, producing a gold locket in the shape of a seashell that was charred, like so many other things that had weathered the Night of Fire. He dropped it on the table in front of Quintus, whose eyes seemed to swell even larger.

 

“I fought with you at Vindalanda, Quintus,” the hooded man's voice became a grating snarl. “You don't remember?”

 

---

 

“You think they'll really attack under cover of the dark?”

 

Quintus looked to his right, saw the amber eyes beneath the helm. Their line had been marched to the hill to the west of the wide pond. Placing their right flank toward the water kept their line safer, but they were on the front, the forlorn hope of the operation, and gods damn all of it, here he was between this inexperienced boy on his right and the idiot Marus on his left.

 

Marus was praying, of all damned things to be doing, as if it would save him from the onslaught of the barbarians. He had the locket in his hand, kissing it through the opening in his helmet. The gold made the shape of a small seashell. Marus had told them – about a half million times – that he and his wife believed they could speak betwixt their matching seashells as if their voices were the sound of the surf. Marus, Quintus had realized after listening to the man for about eight seconds, was a blithering idiot.

 

“It's more to our advantage than theirs, really,” the boy went on. “How does it make sense?”

 

“They're orcs,” Quintus said. “They'll have their due one way or another. And it's only easier for them if we're announcing ourselves by talking.”

 

The boy stiffened and turned away, understanding Quintus's pointed tone. The field beneath their feet was no longer still, but pulsing. The boy suddenly knew Quintus was right. Against all reason, against all logic, they were attacking under cover of night, determined to beat against the shields and spears of the legion until sheer fatigue wore out the inferior numbers of their well-trained and well-fed enemy, and then they would swarm the city and take everything.

 

The call to advance came. The night spread about them into eternity, the gaping maw of blackness surrounding them on all sides. Only the reassuring slosh of the water at their right hand gave the boy some hope.

 

They only saw the barbarians a split second before they were upon them. Quintus tensed, felt Marus and the boy ready on either side, and the howls and ululations of their foes struck his ears one unreal moment before the great clash of hide upon metal, steel upon flesh. Their spears set against the charge, they felt the weight of their insane enemies upon them.

 

They impaled the first wave of foes, shoved their bodies off the ends of the spears and trampled over their corpses as the second wave beat against their shields and tried, in vain, to evade the wall of spears. Quintus could only trust in his companions as they moved forward.

 

A shout from somewhere behind him.

 

“Night arrows! Shell! Shell!”

 

Quintus felt the tower shield of Borius, the legionnaire behind him, lift over his head and cover him, and he could not have cared if those behind Marus and the boy to his right had gotten theirs in place. There was always a man behind them who would move forward, who would hold the line.

 

The arrows – coated with black tar to hide them in the night – thudded across their shields, a cacophony of strikes.

 

“Madmen,” Quintus snarled at the sight of some of the barbarians writhing under their own volley – those stupid enough to charge forward into the dark, heedless of whatever orders their commander gave, if indeed they had one.

 

The clash of flesh and steel once more. Over and over. Treading across bodies, wading into the enemy. Boots splashing across ground soggy with the blood of enemies. Elsewhere on the line, they were losing men.

 

And then the fire.

 

Quintus felt the earth rumble, and from above them came a bloom of harsh red light.

 

“Magic?!” the boy gasped.

 

“No,” Quintus said. “No... it's...”

 

They were sent high by the explosive impact of the fireball, the shrieks of their own men ringing in their ears. Whatever had hit them, Quintus realized in the ringing moment after he'd gained his feet, it was destroying the barbarians as well. Impact after impact, flames reaching to the clouds.

 

There would be stories of empires fallen and heroes consumed in the Night of Fire – but few would remember the destruction of one century of Ascondean legionnaires.

 

When Quintus awoke from the daze the smoke and concussion had left him in, there was nothing but the charred smell of death. He looked behind them – what he thought was behind them, what had been behind them when they were still moving forward – and saw the ashen remains of their garrison in the distance.

 

All of it, gone. His unit in ashes.

 

Quintus looked down and saw Marus's corpse, eyes staring at the grey sky choked with ash. The spent cinders covered everything like snow – had made Marus's hair look like an old man's. Beneath the lorica segmentata emblazoned with the sygil of the Ascondean Legion, there was a single glint of brightness.

 

The necklace – the seashell locket.

 

Quintus's hand darted out and took it, wrenching the chain up over Marus's head. He bit out a curse as he forced the death-stiffened neck up to allow the chain to pass over it. The dead man's head thumped against the ground as he got the necklace off of it.

 

Quintus spit across Marus's face as he rose to his feet.

 

“So, the dungeons or the Legion for Quintus, eh? Eh?!” he roared to the sky. “Rain bile next, then!”

 

Quintus tried to take a step, but a hand had grasped his sandaled ankle below the greaves. He looked down to the desperate pair of amber eyes below him.

 

“Q-Quintus, what happened? What happened?”

 

“The end of the world is what happened,” Quintus said. “Let go of me.”

 

He kicked the boy's hand aside and started back toward the remains of the garrison, the seashell locket dangling in the grip of his left hand where before there had been a shield.

 

“Stop! Where are you going! We can't be the only ones who’ve survived! Help me tend to...”

 

Quintus turned around and slugged the boy in the jaw, below the protection of the helmet. He fell to the ground hard, dazed. Quintus looked down at him, dangling the locket before him.

 

“I never had a choice, boy! I never wanted any of this, or any of you. There's no brotherhood in this world, you stupid little brat. No honor, no fairness or justice. The gods rain fire down on us as it pleases them, and now my only means of paying back the debt that got me here destroyed! I will have my freedom from the cutthroats on the street and the tyrant in the courthouse, young fool. I will have it and no fire is going to stop me, nor any army of pig-buggering barbarians nor any bullshit of the gods.”

 

The boy struggled to a sitting position.

 

“That's Marus's,” he said. “Give it...”

 

“MARUS IS DEAD!”

 

His boot struck the crown of the boy's helmet, knocking him to the ground cold.

 

“All these fools are dead, but with the luck of Quintus, old Boss Slazzo is still sitting high on his throne in the Old Quarter. But I'll pay him back. I'll pay him back...”

 

Quintus did not think the boy heard him, but he did. It was the last thing the boy remembered before he slipped into blackness.

 

---

 

Now sat the twin of that locket on the table before Quintus, a lifetime later it seemed, and the amber eyes were back beneath their hood.

 

“Urso,” Quintus muttered, too quiet for any but himself to hear. “Razelus Urso. Impossible. How did you find me?”

 

“I followed the stink,” the hooded man said.

 

“How did you get that locket?”

 

“The same way you did, just off Annika, instead of her husband. I came for what you took. Now's your chance to give it back.”

 

Quintus's sword didn't clear the scabbard before the hooded man grabbed the old soldier's head in both his hands and brought it down on the table with the force of a mallet. Quintus, dazed, still managed to pull the blade the extra inch out of its sheath before the hooded man socked him full on in the throat.

 

Quintus dropped the sword, his chair sliding back into the wall with the impact of the strike, choking for breath. The hooded man rose and took a single fluid step toward him, reaching down to scoop up the gladius into his own grip. Before the drunk could get his bearings, the hooded man struck him across the ribs with the flat of the blade, causing him to double over in pain.

 

“The locket,” the hooded man said evenly.

 

Quintus told the hooded man what to do to his horse. He felt fingers in his hair, grabbing it up in a vise grip, and then the world scrambled as he felt his head beaten against the wall once, twice, three times.

 

“The locket.”

 

“I'll kill you.”

 

The hooded man's boot slammed into Quintus's shin.

 

“The locket.”

 

“I'll ... I'll ... rape your whore mother...”

 

The hand in his hair again, this time forcing Quintus's head down, exposing the back of his neck. The cold point of the gladius bit into the skin right where the neck met the back.

 

“The lock--”

 

“STOP! STOP! Please, please STOP!”

 

“You want me to stop?”

 

“Yes, yes, anything, please, just...”

 

“Then give. Me. The locket.”

 

“I DON'T HAVE IT! I DON'T HAVE IT, I SOLD IT! I SOLD IT MONTHS AGO DON'T KILL ME DON'T PLEASE PLEASE DON'T MERCY MERCY--”

 

Razelus man raised Quintus's face to meet his own, pulling back the hood to reveal his face. Quintus looked blearily into the eyes set in a dusky face, black hair cut short for the legion still despite all that must have transpired between then and now. He was no boy any longer. He'd always had a square jaw and a hard, muscular frame, but he'd seemed like a simpleton, without confidence, without the grit of war. Quintus saw that in the intervening time, he had become as merciless as any killer in the gutters of the city.

 

And the voice. What happened to it?

 

“No, Quintus. No mercy.”

 

Razelus punched Quintus in the nose with the fist that clutched the gladius. The added weight of the sword's hilt gave his strike the force of a maul, and he felt the man's nose break under it. Quintus blacked out immediately, blood everywhere, his labored breathing and the bubbles of red coming from his decimated nostrils the only sign that Razelus had not robbed him of his life. Quintus sank forward in his chair, his head hanging down between his knees, the pattering of blood on the floorboards the only sound escaping from him.

 

“Taking you away from this pit – that would be a mercy,” Razelus said to himself in an undertone.

 

“Hey!”

 

Razelus turned, dropping the sword to the ground as he did. The barkeep had taken notice of their skirmish, if it could be called that.

 

“What am I supposed to do with him? He pays me a princess's dowry every night the way he drinks! Go kill somebody else's customer!”

 

“He's alive,” Razelus said.

 

“Well, he ain't drinkin'!”

 

Razelus reached over to the locket he'd shown to Quintus and tossed it lightly to the barkeep.

 

“Here, it'll make up for your lost business. Its owner won't mind.”

 

Razelus walked out the front door, the eyes of every man and woman in the place following him. The barkeep waited a moment to make sure the intense man had left before he turned to his girl Shurmyria and jabbed a thumb at Quintus, pooling blood at his own feet.

 

“Go make sure he en't dead,” the barkeep said.

 

Shurmyria looked at Quintus with distaste. Just as she was about to go over to the wretched soldier, his body heaved and, without waking up, he vomited a great putrid stream of the burning liquor he'd been drinking the entire night all over the floor beneath his chair. She nodded to the barkeep.

 

“He en't dead.”

 

---

 

Razelus put his hood back up, and in the expansive dark of the city's seediest quarter, he retraced his steps. The memories of his brothers in arms still screamed, but he had learned, as Quintus had, to silence them. He was solitary. He was strong. And now, having given his life's greatest teacher his due, he had finally left the old days behind like so much ash from the wasted land that had once been Vindalanda.