ROTTEN ORDER

The wagon's wheels creaked slowly along the muddy dirt road, softened by rain that had fallen days before.

Krazoc sat in the wagon with his back against the wooden frame, feeling the cold of the heavy iron chains biting into his skin where they wrapped his arms. With every jolt of the wagon, the heavy shackles struck the wooden floor with a dull clatter.

Across from him, the boy sat with his knees drawn up to his chest, never once taking his eyes off Krazoc.

"For Qysdes's sake, can't you hold those damned irons still for one moment?"

The voice came from Vance, hunched in the corner of the wagon. The Herbalist was trying to scratch something into a small, leather-bound notebook with a stick of charcoal, but with every jolt of the wagon and every clink of the chains, his hand slipped.

Vance slapped the notebook against his knee in irritation. "I am attempting to set down observations here that will rewrite academy history. The moment I turn my notes on the Essence of Being resistance in the legendary Quatl's scales into a proper paper, they'll pull me out of this misery and back into my warm laboratory in the Capital. But I cannot concentrate with your deafening rattling!"

From the driver's seat, Elara's voice carried back, dry with amusement, as she held the reins. "I wouldn't know about your muses, doc, but the sound of those chains is rather soothing to me."

"If the chains are rattling, the prisoner's still where he belongs," grunted a deep voice from the back of the wagon.

Broc sat with his massive mace resting against his knee. His fingers traced the deep grooves carved into the weapon, but his eyes held a tired softness that didn't suit his bulk. With thick fingers he tore off a chunk of dried meat from a pouch at his belt and began chewing. He paused, broke off a small piece from the cleaner-looking part, and held it out to the boy in silence.

"Name's Broc. What's yours?" he asked. His voice was gentler than his enormous frame had any right to be.

The boy didn't take the meat. He only looked warily at Broc's hand, then at his face, at those deep brown eyes.

"Don't be scared, little one," said Broc with a small smile. "Qysdes as my witness, I'm sharing my own ration with you. It isn't poisoned."

"Not poisoned, maybe, but it'll guarantee a week of gut rot," Vance cut in, wrinkling his nose in disgust as he turned back to his notebook. "I can see the mold spores growing on that meat from here with the naked eye. You're going to poison the boy on his very first day."

"Leave them be," called Captain Garrick from outside the wagon. He rode his horse alongside, keeping pace. Garrick's face was tense, his eyes sweeping the shadows of the treeline without rest. "We're not nursemaids."

"Alister," said Krazoc suddenly.

The creak of the wagon seemed to stop for an instant. Vance's hand froze in midair as he stared at Krazoc in shock. Krazoc himself was startled by the sound that had left his own mouth. The word hadn't come from his mind — it had torn itself loose from somewhere deeper, somewhere in his blood, and spilled onto his lips.

No one had told him the boy's name. And yet... he knew. In the dead center of that blank, white expanse inside his skull, the echo of that name stood firm as a monument. How could a man who couldn't even remember his own name know this small child's name with such certainty?

Garrick turned his head from the saddle to fix Krazoc with a suspicious look, while Alister's eyes lifted to meet Krazoc's. A small, warm flicker of recognition passed through those bright eyes.

"The boy's name is Alister," Krazoc repeated, fighting to keep his voice flat.

The journey continued for several more hours in this same tense, silent rhythm. As the green of the forest slowly gave way to a barren, gray, rocky landscape, the smell in the air shifted with it. A familiar, rusted odor that Garrick had smelled before began to reach his nose.

Rot. The further you get from the Empire, the worse this sickness in nature grows, Garrick thought. The soil seemed to be dying by inches, its greenery curdling into a sickly yellow pus.

"Stay sharp," Garrick said abruptly, resting his hand near the hilt of his sword. "We're coming up on the Brothers' Pass. Merchants favor this route."

The pass cut through the gap between two enormous mountain ranges that tore at the sky like broken teeth. Their peaks were swallowed in cloud. Despite it being the shortest road to the Tree of Wisdom, Garrick had no intention of taking them through the depths of that pass.

As they rounded a bend in the road, in the middle of that pitiful landscape of nature still clinging to life against the rot, an enormous shadow appeared.

Coming toward them — heading, Krazoc guessed, toward the Capital — was a heavy, slow-moving caravan. But it was far too long and far too grim to be hauling spices, silk, or ore.

Massive, thick-barred iron cages were being hauled by enormous draft beasts, augmented with Essence of Being, their horns twisted at unnatural angles, their muscles swollen in some sickly, wrong way. The caged wagons were packed shoulder to shoulder. They were driving the beasts to death to make the Capital in time.

Krazoc narrowed his eyes. The things behind the bars... looked human. Two arms, two legs, faces. But something about them was horribly, fundamentally wrong.

Their skin was the color of dead ash, and their yellow eyes held no spark of intelligence, no hope, no despair — nothing at all. They only stared at the ground or into empty space with a blank, animal obedience. Heavy iron collars circled their necks, linked to one another by thick chains, and with every step those chains dragged across open wounds.

At that moment, a familiar, burning ripple stirred in Krazoc's chest.

This time the threat wasn't from outside. The feeling was internal. Krazoc's eyes snapped to Alister across from him.

The boy had both hands locked onto the wooden edge of the wagon, his knuckles white from gripping the wood so hard. His bright eyes were fixed on the slave caravan passing them, on those silent creatures behind the iron bars.

Krazoc felt the boy's emotion as if it had been injected straight into his own heart. It wasn't fear. It wasn't sorrow or pity, either. It was a pure, boiling, undiluted hatred. Krazoc's brow furrowed. He couldn't tell where that hatred was aimed — at the ash-gray creatures in the cages, at the hands holding the whips, or at something deeper, something burrowed into the boy's own flesh.

"What are those?" Krazoc asked abruptly. His voice was thick enough to cut through the groan of the wagons and the crack of the whips.

Garrick nudged his horse closer and looked at Krazoc with the tired eyes of a man who half-suspected he was losing his mind. "You really don't remember anything, do you," Garrick said. There was more bitter disbelief in his voice than mockery. He jerked his chin toward the caravan. "Attivs."

Krazoc turned the word over in his mind. It opened no doors in his memory. He only said what he saw: "They're not human."

"They're not," Elara cut in from the front. The cheerful lilt had vanished entirely from her voice, replaced by a trained revulsion. "They look human, but there's not a spark of soul in them — not the smallest ember. In the Dark Age, before Holy Qysdes granted us the sacred magic of Being, these mud-born things tried to wipe us out."

"Holy Qysdes. These days he doesn't do anything but sit on his throne and grow fat," Vance muttered — former Guild man that he was, his voice carrying that particular academic insolence, a direct affront to Elara's religious fervor.

Elara's jaw tightened; the old, endless friction between faith and science turned the air inside the wagon sharp and poisonous in an instant.

"They're fuel," Garrick cut in, slicing through the Guild-versus-faith argument before it could catch fire. His voice was colder than either of theirs, devoid of feeling. His eyes fixed on one of the Attivs in the cage — an old one, its skin cracked, blood seeping from its neck, still walking nonetheless. "They work the Empire's quarries. They sweat to death in the nobles' gilded temples, in the great mines."

"We could also call them biological batteries," Vance went on, closing his notebook. There was an irritation in his voice at having his lecture interrupted. "Their bodies hold Essence of Being, unlike ours. When magic needs power, healers and Beastbinders drain that essence to the last drop. They're milked until their marrow runs dry. A very... efficient system."

Krazoc looked again at the ash-gray creatures in the cages. Obedient, silent, nothing but meat waiting to be consumed. Something inside that White Void within him stirred — uncomfortably, like an itch he couldn't reach.

If these creatures were ambitious and dangerous enough to wipe out humanity, Krazoc thought, why are they in such a pitiful state now? Why is there no trace of envy in their eyes — only nothing?

Then his gaze shifted back to Alister. The burning hatred in the boy's eyes hadn't faded by a single degree.

"Stop looking at them," Broc whispered to Alister. There was a buried grief in the big man's voice. He'd already set the meat down on the floor of the wagon. "That's just how the world turns, little one. There's nothing we can do."

The slave caravan passed them by, trailing the heavy clink of chains and the sharp crack of whips.

Krazoc, his back against the wooden frame of the wagon, held fast to the one certainty echoing in the bottomless void of his mind. He didn't need his past, his memories, to understand how rotten, how merciless the world was. All he needed was to keep his eyes open.

And no matter what it took, he would keep Alister far from this rotten order, far from its bloodied gears.