The road was a ghost. It shimmered in the heat, a pale, dusty spectre of the imperial highway it had once been. Bhaskar's throat felt lined with the same dust. It was in his teeth, his eyes, the back of his throat. He walked beside the cart, the creak of the axle a monotonous complaint that had become the rhythm of his days. The sun was a physical weight.
In his mind, he saw the valley. The impossible green of it. The cool, clean taste of the water from the stream. The solid feel of the palisade wall at his back. Safety. Order. A world that made sense.
Out here, nothing made sense.
This was the fourth day of their journey toward the sprawling refugee city near Hubli. Four days of seeing nothing but fallow fields, burned-out villages, and the occasional corpse bloating in the heat, its face a feast for crows. The men were quiet, their faces grim. They were soldiers trained for the clean violence of a battlefield. This slow, rotting decay of a whole country… it was a different kind of war. It settled in the gut like a sickness.
At night, around a small, smokeless fire, Bhaskar would unwrap the two pieces of his broken sword. The metal was cold to the touch. He would feel the jagged edge of the break, the shame of it still a fresh, hot coal in his memory. He would try to make sense of the prince's words. Find the man who complains about the pot. It was a madman's riddle. A fool's errand. Yet, he had seen the look in Aditya's eyes. The terrifying, absolute certainty. And so he walked on.
The smell hit them a mile out. A thick, sweet, and sour stench of unwashed humanity, of sickness left to fester, of despair itself. The camp was not a camp; it was a plague. A sprawling city of rags and filth that spread from the dry riverbed and up the barren hillsides, home to tens of thousands of the dispossessed.
"Gods above," Kavi, the young scout, whispered, his hand going to his mouth.
"The gods have no jurisdiction here," Bhaskar grunted, pulling his cloak tighter, trying to look as destitute as everyone else. "Stay with the cart. Keep your hands on your hilts, but do not draw them unless I give the word."
He and Kavi entered the morass. The noise was a low, constant hum of misery—a thousand coughs, a hundred whimpering children, the endless, soft murmur of people with nothing left to say. Bhaskar felt his soldier's instincts screaming. This place was a trap. There was danger everywhere, but it was not the kind you could meet with a shield wall. It was the danger of desperation. A man with nothing to lose is the most dangerous animal on earth.
For two days, they listened. They heard only the litany of loss. A man weeping for his lost farm. A woman murmuring the names of her dead children. A priest chanting prayers to a sky that did not answer. There was no pride here. There was no anger. There was only the great, hollow emptiness of grief. Bhaskar's frustration grew, a sour taste in his mouth. The prince was brilliant, yes, but he was still a boy. He did not know the world. He had sent them on a quest for a phantom.
On the third afternoon, as they were about to give up and move on, he heard it.
It was an argument, sharp and furious, coming from a cluster of hovels near a stinking rubbish heap. An old man, his frame skeletal but his back ramrod straight, was shouting at a younger man who was trying to fix a broken cartwheel.
"Idiot!" the old man's voice rasped, filled with a shocking amount of venom. "You use a wedge like that, you'll split the hub! The grain is wrong! Can you not see the grain of the wood? You are bruising it! You are not mending it, you are murdering it!"
The younger man shrank back, muttering an apology. But the old man was not finished. He snatched a piece of the wood, his gnarled fingers caressing its surface. "This timber… it is pathetic. No strength. No soul. In my workshop, I would have used it for kindling."
Bhaskar froze. Kavi looked at him, confused, but Bhaskar held up a hand for silence. He listened, his heart pounding. The old man's clothes were rags. His hair was a matted, filthy nest. But his voice… his voice held the absolute, uncompromising fury of a master craftsman forced to witness shoddy work. It was the sound of pride refusing to die.
He waited until the younger man had scurried away. Then, he walked forward, his steps slow and deliberate. He stopped a few feet from the old man, who glared at him with suspicious, hostile eyes.
"Go away, soldier," the old man spat. "There is nothing to take here."
Bhaskar didn't respond. He reached into his tunic, his movements slow and obvious. He pulled out the cloth-wrapped bundle. He knelt in the dirt, the filth of the camp staining his trousers, and carefully unwrapped the two pieces of his broken sword. He laid them on the ground between them.
The old smith's eyes, which had been filled with a bitter, unfocused anger, narrowed into points of sharp, diagnostic light. He leaned forward, his whole body tensing. His gaze devoured the flawed steel. He saw not a broken weapon, but a failed process. An insult to the very idea of a sword.
He reached out a trembling, filthy hand. He did not touch the metal. His finger hovered over the jagged line of the break, tracing its path in the air.
A low growl rumbled in his chest.
"Slag," he whispered, the single word a curse upon the world. "The fire was not clean."