Heavy links of spirit-iron chains clinked against the crusted salt as Sera Thorne tightened the padlock.
Centurion Brand sat on his knees in the white dirt, his bruised chest heaving beneath his dented crimson breastplate. His hands were bound behind his back, wrapped in five coils of cold-forged chain from Deacon Vane’s supply cart. The thirty cavalrymen behind him were piled together in a shallow ditch, stripped of their weapons and bound hand and foot with heavy hemp rope.
Sera stood over the officer, tapping her brass reed pen against the open pages of her Overtime Grudge Ledger.
“Forty-eight baseline hours,” Sera recited, her tone icy and businesslike. “That’s forty-eight hours of accumulated martial momentum our master lost because your vanguard couldn’t mind its own business. At standard ducal mercenary rates, one wasted Nascent Soul combat hour costs two hundred Mid-Grade Spirit Stones.”
Brand flinched, looking up at her soot-streaked face. “Two hundred? That’s highway robbery.”
“It’s forty-eight lost hours,” Sera corrected coldly. “I haven’t even added the fee for my wasted caltrops or the sulfur smoke pots. Talk, centurion, or I’ll start billing you in body parts.”
Deacon Vane stepped forward, holding his silk parasol delicately over his shoulder. He flicked a few specks of salt dust from his embroidered satin sleeve and smiled down at the kneeling officer.
