Huge and crimson and shimmering, the sun sank behind the jagged black line of the horizon.

The Dust Way was empty, 'cept for Olms and his gaan-lizard, plodding toward the disappearing light. Caravans out of Zar Pellos wouldn't be plying this stretch for a few months yet, waiting for the wet season to end, when the wolf scorpions went dormant and nyr'kiin raiders could travel less far from their burrows.

Olms wasn't worried about any of that, himself. The Dust Way was a straight thin line cutting through miles and miles of boulders and thorny brambles and not much else. He knew these parts and what lived in 'em. Knew the kinds of things that were big or numerous or stupid enough to try'n take down a full grown gaan and an armed rider. Knew that even without the lizard, he could take most anything south of the Smoking Forest. He and the Sword slung across his back.

He felt the weapon twitch very slightly in its scabbard as he thought of it. Or maybe at the thought of shedding blood.
 
He grimaced and took a long pull from a dented flask. 

In the distance, a horn sounded, and dark silhouettes crested a slight rise in the road, just beneath the red horizon.

Olms frowned, squinting into the sun. A column of soldiers, looked like, headed towards him. In the direction of the Empire.

[i]The Masters starting their bid for the Rainlands[/i], he thought.

He thought about what to think about this. Wondered what was the lesser of two evils, the Congress or the Shashul. 

Olms'd plied his trade in the ashen wastes of the Union for most of his life, working for merchant-lords, slaver-chieftains and often even for Drathan magisters themselves. He had few illusions about the glorified coven of bandits that presided over this place, an entire country little more than a vast slave-pen, so different from the Empire which, even now, even nearin' its own twilight, still provided its subjects with a good living, however modest, and with order, with settled laws rather than the whims of changeable warlocks. He thought of all those villages in the Rainlands without walls- without need of them, for centuries. Remembered ridin' through those places as a boy with his father, wondering at how they stayed safe from the muties and the bugs, and the old man sayin' they didn't need to, on account of the Sashul and his armies. How rare that was, to not live in fear! 

What would happen to them when the Drathan lords divvied those little towns up among themselves in the course of their endless and pointless feuds? He thought of market squares turned into slave-auctions, of rice-paddies turned into grub farms.

He thought then of Yta, whom he had once loved. He thought of her dark eyes and her knowing half-smile. Thought of what the Salished priests had done to her in their Foundry Temples.

The Sword twitched again. 

"Let the Drathans have it," Olms said quietly, to no one.

Not for the first time, he pondered how the coming war might be related to his current errand. Wondered whether this new contract would set him at odds with the ambitions of the Congress, or whether he would be serving the endless schemes of that canny old spider, Khalul. 

The outriders put an end to this speculating. They surrounded Olms silently and in short order, four of them descending like ghosts from the flowering thickets of strangle-vine that bordered the road. Hulking aelg-men with their pointed eyes and teeth riding lean young gaans and the slender, swift horses of the Ashlands. 

These men knew what they were about.

Olms reigned his lizard to a halt, unscrewed the top of his flask, took a long drink.

"Evenin'" he said, tilting his hat back on his head and meeting the gaze of the rider in front of him. The other man's face was a busy mass of scar tissue and he was holding a nasty-looking axe loosely in one hand. The buckler strapped to his other arm was painted with the sun-and-moon sigil of Zar Dratha.

"What's yer business on the Dust Way?" asked the rider.

"Headed to Zar Yiin," said Olms, "to meet up with an old, ah, associate of mine. One who pays well."

"Your line of work?"

"Sellsword," said Olms with a smile, "I believe that's tolerated in the Union?"

"You're ridin' west," said the rider, "With Salished steel strapped across your back. The real stuff, I think. The Soul Steel."

"Doesn't sound like something a spy would do, does it?" said Olms, "Not a good one, least ways. 'sides, I'm no braid-bearded Rainlander, am I? Not like the man I killed for this."

Slow and deliberate, Olms drew his sword. The mounts of the riders surrounding him shifted and growled uneasily.

It was a beautiful weapon. Curved, slender, single edged, it caught the dying light as Olms drew it, flashing scarlet.

Olms met the eye of the rider in front of him. There was a long moment of silence.

"If he's a spy, he's a dumb one," said the rider, the nervous edge to his voice was barely audible, "Let him pass."