Horse clumping onto solid ground once more, he drew up beside his captain and they sat watching the others cross one by one.

Captain Skint’s expression was flat as her face, her eyes like scratched basalt.

“A year ago,” said the man, “and it’d take half the day for alla us t’come over this bridge. A thousand Rams, hard as stone.”

The third rider coming up alongside them, a tall, gangly woman with crimson glints in her black hair, snorted at the man’s words. “Dreaming of the whorehouse again, Sarge?”

“What? No. Why’d ya think—”

“We ain’t Rams anymore. We’re goats. Fucking goats.” And she spat.

Dullbreath and Huggs joined them and the five mercenaries, eager for the respite the hamlet ahead offered them—but admitting to nothing—fell into a slow canter as the track widened into something like a road.

They passed a farm: a lone log house and three stone-walled pens. The place stank of pig shit and the flies buzzed thick as black smoke. The forest came to a stumpy end beyond that. A few small fields of crops to the left, and ahead and to the right stood some kind of temple shrine, a stone edifice not much bigger than the altar stone it sheltered on three sides. Surrounding it was a burial ground.

The riders saw a man and a boy in the yard, digging pits, each one marked out with sun-bleached rags tied to trimmed saplings. A mule and cart waited motionless beneath an enormous yew tree.

“That’s a few too many graves on the way,” Sergeant Flapp muttered. “Plague, maybe?”

No one commented. But as they rode past, each one—barring the captain—fixed their attention on the two diggers, counting slow to reach…five.