Egar grunted. Then they re getting better pay than I did at their age.

Perhaps so. They wore the livery of the Citadel Guard, as near as I recall.

Fucking Citadel?

A flickered glance at the barber to see if this would cause offense the imperials were funny about religious matters, had this clerk-arsed unforgiving book of rules to their observances, and very little sense of humor where it was infringed upon. Ordinarily, Egar could give a shit if he offended them or not, but it doesn t pay to upset a man who has a razor at your throat.

Yes, well Immersed in his task, the barber was apparently unmoved by any stirrings of religious fervor. He took the blade up under Egar s eye, back to the ear, strokes as smooth and practiced as the voice and the bland platitudes it uttered. The ranks of the Sacred Guard were much depleted in the war, my lord. Martyrdom called multitudes of the righteous away.

Yeah, didn t it just.

Egar had seen some martyrdom operations during the southern campaign, and they sickened even his well-worn mercenary soul. Waves of men and boys, some of them barely twelve or thirteen years old, hurling their bodies forward against the lizard lines with the name of the Revelation on their lips. Most struck at best a single blow before the reptile peons clawed or chewed them down. They died in their screaming thousands out on the field while the commanding invigilators looked on and offered prayers for victory.

At Egar s side on an overlooking promontory, one of the other Majak mercenary commanders spat in the dirt and shook his head.

And they call us berserkers?

But Yhelteth was like that. It lulled you along with its shaves and its baths, its book learning and its law; and then, abruptly, when you least expected it, you saw the vaunted trappings of imperial civilization cast aside, like the cloth and baked clay of some wealthy leper s mask, and you were abruptly face-to-face with the leering horror beneath a violent, tribal people, smug in their own assumed superiority and a faith that licensed their dominance wherever they could make it stick.