The long, bronze-throated war horns of the legions blared from both flanks of the grand avenue its resonant bellow shook the marrow of the bone like an hearthquake that brought down building on its passing.
Merelao rode at the head of his column, his cloth-of-gold mantle draped with practiced elegance over the cantle of his saddle. Sunlight flared along the polished silver rims of the legionaries' cuirasses. The iron-clad infantrymen stood in immaculate, motionless ranks, lining the paved causeway like columns of marble from an elder age, long before martial pride had degraded into southern vanity.
Merelao knew vanity well enough.
The sweetest sin of them all.
He knew it well enough.
Yet the newly minted King of Yarzat was vainer still it seemed to him, the vainest creature under the five gods, for Alpheo took boundless vanity in pretending to possess none at all.
