‘Yes sir,’ Narad replied.

Moving quickly, eyes on the log lying in front of his tent, Narad reached up to brush the lines of his broken face, and for the first time, he felt fear at what his fingers found.

Drought had dried the field and the hoofs of horses had driven like mattocks into the soil, tearing up the grasses until nothing was left alive. Master-at-arms Ivis walked from it covered in gritty dust. His leathers were stained, his jerkin sodden under his arms and against his back. Behind him the brown clouds of dust were slow to settle over the clearing and the troop he’d been training had all retired to the trees, desperate for shade and a rest. There wasn’t much talk left in them: Ivis had driven that out. Some were crouched down, heads hanging. Others were sprawled on the grassy verge, forearms covering their eyes. Armour and half-emptied waterskins were scattered about like the aftermath of a battle, or a drunken night of revelry.

‘Take what’s left of that water and cool down your horses. Those animals need it more than any of you.’

At his words, the men and women stirred into motion. Ivis studied them a moment longer and then turned to where the warhorses stood beneath the trees. The only movement that came from them was the swishing of their tails against the swarming flies, and the occasional ripple of their sleek hides. The beasts looked strong, stripped down of all fat. As the Houseblades moved in among them, Ivis felt a spasm of sadness and looked away.

He didn’t know if animals dreamed. He didn’t know if they knew hope in their hearts, if they longed for things — like freedom. He didn’t know what looked out through their large, soft eyes. Most of all, he didn’t know what teaching them to kill did to them, to their spirits. Habits and deeds could stain a soul — he’d seen enough of that among his own kind. He’d seen broken children become broken men and broken women.

No doubt scholars and philosophers, puttering in their cosy rooms in Kharkanas, had devised elaborate definitions of all those intangible things that hovered like clouds of stirred-up dust above hard and battered ground — things nobody could really grasp or hold on to. Ideas about the soul, the hidden essence that knew itself, but knew itself incompletely, and so was doomed to ever question, to ever yearn. No doubt they had arguments and defences, built up into impressive structures that were more monuments to their own brilliance than stolid fortifications.

He remembered something his grandfather used to say. ‘ The man patrolling his prejudices never sleeps.’ As a boy, Ivis had not quite understood what Ivelis had meant by that. But he thought he understood now. No matter. The philosophers dug deep moats around their definitions of things like the soul; moats that no animal could breach, since animals spoke the wrong language and so could never argue their way across. Still, when Ivis looked into a horse’s eyes, or a dog’s, or a felled deer’s in the last moments when the beast shudders and blinks with eyes filled with pain and terror, he saw the refutation of every philosopher’s argument.

Life did more than flicker. It burned with fire. He knew it to be a fire for the simple reason that eventually it burned itself out. It ate up all the fuel it possessed, and dimmed and waned, and then was gone.

But were life and soul one and the same? Why the division at all?

Anyone could draw circles in the dust, but in the greater scheme of things, it made for a pathetic moat.

His Houseblades had pushed away their weariness and were attending to their mounts. Saddles were pulled off, brushes drawn. Hands stroked down the length of muscles, felt along tendons and brushed bones under stretched hide. The animals stood motionless: Ivis never knew if they but tolerated the attention, or were comforted by it. He’d seen mischief in animals, but none of them could smile. And always, their eyes were but wells of mystery.

Corporal Yalad moved up alongside him. ‘Sir, they wheeled with precision, didn’t they? Never seen anything so perfect.’

Ivis grunted. ‘You want compliments, corporal? Maybe even a kiss? Go find that maid you keep rocking up the wall back of the stables. I’m the wrong man to make you feel good, and if I wanted a conversation I’d find someone with more than half a brain.’

Yalad backed a step. ‘Apologies, sir.’

The captain knew that his foul mood was the subject of plenty of barracks talk. If no one knew the cause of it, all the better as far as Ivis was concerned. It just made them work harder trying to please him, or at least avoid a dressing down. If they knew, they’d think him mad.

There was something in the air, in this summer heat, that felt… wrong. As if malice had a smell, a stink, and even the hot winds blew through it and left it untouched, and the sun could not beat it down and all the ripening crops could not burn it away.