Four more figures walked down the center aisle of the amphitheater. They did not possess Sergeant Berr’s weathered, solitary bearing; they moved with the instinctive, drilled spacing of an infantry file executing an advance in close order through broken ground. Corporal Baird led the squad, his exposed rib cage bound with fraying cords of dry sinew, his three copper corporal’s chevrons still wired to the rotting wool of his left sleeve. Behind him came Private Durn, Shield-man Vonn, and Watchman Hew, each carrying his bleached skull balanced between his clavicles, their empty eye sockets turned toward the high presiding dais with the impassive discipline of veteran border troops.
They did not carry sidearms or pole-axes. Their hands hung loosely at their sides, the finger bones yellowed and pitted by thirty years of sulfur water and stagnant cellar damp. When they reached the bottom riser of the semicircle, they halted in a single line behind Berr, their heels coming together with four sharp, synchronous clicks that echoed off the limestone vault like dry stones tossed into an empty cistern.
The young privates of the siege vanguard in the second tier stared down at them with wide, startled eyes. One corporal, a lad of no more than nineteen with freckles across his sunburnt nose and the red cord of the artillery battery pinned to his shoulder, reached up with trembling fingers and touched the iron rim of his helmet, as though trying to convince himself that his own skull was still covered…
