If the slavers have found them they’re already dead, I thought. Slavers don’t keep young children, especially boys. Mouths to feed, and too small to do any useful work.

I got up from my knees while choking smoke filled the room and eager flames licked across the timbers of the roof. I stepped out onto the street. The air was thick with smoke. More houses were burning, I could see, as swaggering gangs of looters put the torch to what ever they could not carry away with them, roaring with drunken laughter. Men can turn into beasts so easily, I realized. Take away the authority of the emperor and even trained soldiers become looting, raping animals.

I wanted to kill them. Kill them all. Slash their guts out and watch their eyes go wide with pain and shock. But that was nonsense, of course. I could kill five of them, ten, a dozen. But in the end I would be swarmed under and cut to pieces. What would that accomplish? So I stayed my hand and waited in the doorway of the house in which I had been born.

The sky seemed to be darkening; drops of rain began to spatter the cobblestones. Not hard enough to stop the flames that were crackling on the roof, though.

My squad was nowhere to be seen. They’ll be back, I told myself. At sundown, they’ll return, just as I ordered them to.

But I wondered.

The world had split apart. The empire was in ashes and ruins. And my father had commanded me to find his grandsons, my little boys, and their mother, my wife: Aniti.

I had first met her on the day we were married in the temple of Asertu, nearly six years earlier. The two families had arranged the marriage while I was away on campaign with the army. A soldier’s life is not his own. I had been a soldier since I was fourteen, like my father before me. I had no choice; he was accustomed to giving commands and having them obeyed. Before my beard was anything more than a wisp he led me to the barracks and entered me in his squad. Thus I spent most of my days in long campaigns far from home, carrying out the emperor’s orders.