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(Back to Mardek... A few hours later, that night...)
Mardek didn’t run so much as leak away from the battlefield, a grin scraped off his face and left sowhere in the sand. He ca back to the last rally point with a torn sleeve, a stiff shoulder, and a look that made his own n step aside without being told.
Of the thousand he had led into the desert, barely a thread returned with him. It was just over a hundred, counting the ones who stumbled in at dusk after hiding behind dunes. Seven hundred plus died in the sand. The rest had scattered when the roar broke their knees.
They made a camp because they had to, not because they believed in it. The "camp" was three slumped lines of tents around a cook fire that wouldn’t catch. The wind had more shape than their banners. The n who could stand tied lines, boiled water, and went about the motions of a night they didn’t want to see.
"Count," Mardek said.
His adjutant, face gray under dust, saluted and moved down the rows with a bone tally. "Present, one hundred and twelve. Wounded who can walk, forty-one. Wounded who can’t, nineteen. Shields... forty-seven sound. Spears... sixty-three that won’t snap in the first shove."
Mardek listened without blinking. He picked up a fallen spear, flexed it, and tossed it back down.
"Salvage everything that isn’t broken," he said. "Stack plates. Sharpen what can be sharpened. Burn nothing."
He walked to the edge of the circle and knelt at a black iron tripod. The thing that hung from the crossbar looked like a mirror, but it wasn’t glass. It was an oval of smoked mica set in a ring of hamred iron with a braided cord of reed and hair. Runic scratches smudged the edge, each scored with a pinch of star-salt that glittered when the fire flared.
Resonant glass. Close-range only. It didn’t sing to far-off cities or deep caves. It sang to what you could reach by walking a night and a day with no sleep.
He spat a little blood into his palm, sared it along the rim, and tapped the iron thrice with a knuckle.
"Skall," he said. "Oru. Yavri."
The mica clouded, then cleared. The desert reflected back for a breath, then a face slid into view — thickset, plates broad, eyes that forgot to blink. Skall. Iron and salt even through the shimr.
"What did the dunes do to you? Why do you sound like that?" Skall asked. His voice never hurried. It didn’t now. "You sll like a kettle left on the fire."
Mardek took the mock and swallowed it. "Oru," he said.
The mica sared like a thumb across wet paint, then steadied on a lean, long-limbed figure with antennae sharp as blades. Oru didn’t stand in front of his mirror. He leaned so far into it that his eyes looked too large.
"You call from closer than you should be," Oru said in a voice like quiet sand. "Lost your road, young vice general?"
"Yavri," Mardek said, ignoring both. "Answer."
The third face ca last: pale resin lacquer gleaming faintly even in the mica. Yavri wore her discipline like a cloak. Where the others’ images shook, hers did not. She said nothing at first, just watched him with that wall of a gaze.
Mardek set his jaw.
"I engaged with the white hair," he said. "We fought in his shadow. I lost eight hundred before a day had passed. Another hundred fled. I hold a hundred and change."
"Losing eight hundred is a choice," Oru murmured. "Why did you choose it?"
Skall’s mouth tugged in what passed for a smile. "We walked the marsh three days without losing a man to mud. You lost to sand in one."
Yavri’s eyes didn’t move. "Report," she said. "Not songs."
Mardek felt a shiver of gratitude he would never admit. He drew a breath.
"He commands over a thousand four-star fighters," he said. "They ca like a tide. Not born yesterday. They moved like they were born at dawn and drilled by dusk. They obeyed him like a drum. They didn’t break when we pressed. They didn’t chase when we pulled. He... The white hair," Mardek’s lips thinned. "He wore a crown."
Skall’s eyes actually blinked at that. Oru’s antennae lifted.
"A crown?" Oru said, amusent thin as wire. "Did he have ti to shop?"
"Not iron," Mardek snapped. "Not resin. Aura. Black. It hung over his head and made the air hard to breathe. When he roared, n fainted. Three-stars dropped like pots in the wind. Four-stars shook and moved anyway. My hundred best t him but he broke them like sticks. One cut and he took a head with its spine still attached. I saw it. He didn’t brag. He walked."
Skall’s humor dried up. He leaned closer to the mica. "Aura tricks," he said. "So he’s not a boy with shiny plates. He knows how to push."
"He fights like a duel that never ends," Mardek said, hating the way saying it made his skin prickle again. "And he has that army. You talk about walls and ropes and marsh. You—" he jerked his chin at Oru—"talk about rivers and shadow. Underestimate him and you’ll die. Not in a story. In the sand. Fast."
Oru’s mouth tilted. "I don’t die. I un-appear."
Yavri raised a hand. The single, small move shut both n up.
"What do you want?" she asked Mardek.
"A fight we can win," Mardek said. "Not four separate hunts. A grip. A plan. A place for it."
Oru rolled a carved bone ring along his fingers. "You can co nearer," he said, looking off to the side. "Resonant glass needs bodies like drums need floors. If we want to talk properly, we make a triangle, three points no farther than five leagues apart. Then the glass carries without stuttering."
Skall nodded once. "We’re on the east line, marsh at our back. Reed mats built. Causeways hold. We can reach the mountain in five hours, maybe midnight. We will be slowly coming off the mud, but we will co."
"I’m north of his wind," Oru said. "Streams and hollows. If I run the water road, I can be within range before dawn and unseen while I do it."
Yavri turned her head a fraction, as if listening to a drum no one else could hear. "Old caravan cut puts on his obvious road," she said. "We marched with light packs. We can angle south and be in mirror-range by morning watch."
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