"The Marduk creatures swarmed my men, tearing into them, butchering them. a truly horrifying sight. But does terror excuse betrayal? Does survival make me a coward?"
---------------
Before Korim could respond, the dining hall's heavy doors burst open. A young boy stumbled in, his face flushed from running and his clothes muddy from the streets. Jarel, one of the family's many street informants, gasped for breath as he approached the table.
"Lord Arzash," he panted, "urgent news from the town square."
"Speak," Arzash commanded, grateful for the interruption. Perhaps whatever crisis had emerged would give his family something more immediate to focus on than their internal divisions.
"A stranger....a warrior....he's killed four of Tarkun's men outside Nabu's Corner. Cut them down like wheat before the scythe, the witnesses say. Barely drew breath doing it."
The table fell silent. Violence was common enough in Baelur, but four armed men dead by a single hand? That was noteworthy.
"And this concerns us how?" Volak asked, though his tone suggested he already suspected the answer. Jarel swallowed hard, his young face pale in the candlelight.
"My lord, the witnesses....they say the stranger carries a blade no ordinary man could lift. A great longsword, tall as a man and heavy as a forge hammer."
Arzash felt something cold settle in his stomach. He'd seen such weapons before, in the king's armory, carried by the elite guard who'd sworn their lives to the crown.
"You're certain of this?"
"Yes, my lord. They say he moved it like it weighed nothing, cut through armor and bone like silk. Only one type of warrior can do that."
"King's blessed," Arzash whispered, and the words seemed to echo in the suddenly quiet hall. The implications crashed over him like a cold wave. A king's blessed warrior in Baelur could mean many things, none of them good for a frontier family walking the razor's edge of open rebellion. Was he a royal agent, sent to investigate the town's instability? An advance scout for a larger force? Or something else entirely. a deserter, perhaps, or a mercenary whose loyalty could be bought?
"Did anyone see where he went?" Arzash asked, his mind already racing through possibilities.
"Into the inn, my lord. Nisheena welcomed him like an old friend, though I'm told they'd never met before."
Of course. If there was anyone in Baelur who would know how to handle a dangerous stranger, it would be Nisheena. She had fingers in every pie, ears in every corner, and the kind of pragmatic intelligence that kept her alive in a place where most people died young.
Korim leaned forward eagerly.
"Uncle, this could be exactly what we need. If we can recruit him to our
cause—"
"Or he could be here to destroy us all," Anumi interrupted sharply.
"The king's blessed don't simply wander into frontier towns by accident. His presence means something, and until we know what, we should assume it's dangerous."
Arzash nodded slowly, appreciating once again his niece's cautious wisdom. In the capital, he'd learned to read the subtle currents of politics, to recognize when apparently random events were actually carefully orchestrated moves in a larger game. A king's blessed warrior arriving in Baelur just as the town teetered on the edge of civil war was too convenient to be coincidence.
"Jarel," he said, turning to the boy, "what else did you learn? Did anyone speak with this stranger?"
"Only briefly, my lord. They say he was looking for work...mercenary work. And." the boy hesitated.
"And?"
"The bodies, my lord. They were Urartu men, but not just any soldiers. They wore Tarkun's personal men."
The silence that followed was pregnant with possibility. Arzash could see the wheels turning in his family's minds, could almost hear their thoughts as they processed this information. A king's blessed warrior had killed Tarkun's personal guards. was it coincidence, or something more deliberate?
"This changes things," Volak said slowly.
"Does it?" Anumi asked, her voice skeptical. "We don't know why he killed them, or what his presence here means. For all we know, Tarkun hired him and this was some sort of test or demonstration."
But Arzash was already thinking several moves ahead, his scholar's mind mapping out possibilities. A king's blessed warrior was a powerful piece potentially decisive if played correctly, potentially catastrophic if mishandled. The question was: how did one approach a man who could cut down four armed soldiers without breaking a sweat? How did one negotiate with someone whose loyalty had once belonged to the crown itself? And most importantly what had brought him to Baelur at this precise moment, when the town balanced on the knife's edge between order and chaos? Outside, the perpetual twilight of Baelur pressed against the windows like a living thing, and somewhere in the cursed darkness, Arzash knew that the game he'd been playing for years was about to become far
more complicated. The king's blessed had come to town, and nothing would ever be the same