The gunshot smoke hung in the freezing drizzle over the market square like a funeral shroud.
Marshal Ors stood with his smoking wheel-lock pistol lowered, his face dark with mottled rage, watching Lieutenant Brandt’s four-pound iron sallet roll across the wet cobblestones to stop against the edge of the horse trough. The iron helmet rang against the stone with a hollow, dying chime that seemed to suspend the breath of every soldier standing in the square.
For three slow heartbeats, the old commander did not move. He looked at Brandt’s bare, defiant head. He looked at the fifty-nine cuirassiers of the Third Battalion whose shields remained resting in the mud, their spears held limp at their sides, their eyes burning with the cold hatred of men who had discovered that their brothers had been slaughtered for fuel.
Then, Ors’s left hand blurred.
He did not draw his broadsword. He pulled a nine-inch triangular stiletto from the concealed sheath beneath his wolf-skin mantle and drove the blade upward with savage, blinding speed. The steel punched through the soft hollow beneath Brandt’s chin, driving up through the tongue and palate into the brain.
Brandt’s eyes rolled back into his skull. He let out a wet, bubbling gasp, his massive knees buckling, his body crashing forward onto the stones at the marshal’s feet like a felled ox.
