Now I wished I still had the mantle Agia’s brother had sold me, for my fuligin cloak drew some odd looks. I was about to step inside once more when I heard the quickstep of marching feet, a sound familiar to me from the drilling of the garrison in the Citadel, but which I had not heard since I had left it. The cattle I had watched earlier that morning had been going down to the river, there to be herded into barges for the remainder of their trip to the abattoirs of Nessus. These soldiers were coming the other way, up from the water. Whether that was because their officers felt the march would toughen them, or because the boats that had brought them were needed elsewhere, or because they were destined for some area remote from Gyoll, I had no way of knowing. I heard the shouted order to sing as they came into the thickening crowd, and almost together with it the thwacks of the vingtners’ rods and the howls of the unfortunates who had been hit.

The men were kelau, each armed with a sling with a two-cubit handle and each carrying a painted leather pouch of incendiary bullets. Few looked older than I and most seemed younger, but their gilded brigandines and the rich belts and scabbards of their long daggers proclaimed them members of an elite corps of the erentarii. Their song was not of battle or women as most soldiers’ songs are, but a true slingers’ song. Insofar as I heard it that day, it ran thus:

“When I was a lad, my mother said, ‘You dry your tears and go to bed; I know my son will travel far, Born beneath a shooting star.’ ” “In after years, my father said, As he pulled my hair and knocked my head, ‘They mustn’t whimper at a scar, Who’re born beneath a shooting star.’ ” “A mage I met, and the mage he said, ‘I see for you a future red, Fire and riot, raid and war, O born beneath a shooting star.’ ”