The wind howled outside the small Roman outpost, a relentless gale that flung sand and grit against the wooden palisades with the sound of a thousand tiny claws. It was a miserable, forgotten corner of the empire, a place where the sun was a hammer and the world seemed to be fraying at the edges. Inside the fort's cramped command post, the air was thick with the smell of sweat, stale wine, and the overbearing piety of Titus Pullo.
He had returned from the desert an hour ago, he and his small, elite team of Purifiers. They were caked in dust, their faces burned dark by the sun, but their eyes held the incandescent glow of men who believed they had just done God's own work. He now stood before the fort's commander, a weary, pragmatic Centurion named Flavius, who wanted nothing more than a quiet frontier posting and was now faced with the Emperor's personal holy warrior.
"My report for the Emperor," Pullo began, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that seemed to vibrate with righteous certainty. He had followed his orders to the letter, a fact which filled him with a deep, profound satisfaction. He had been sent to observe the desert witch, and he had observed.
He dictated his report as a nervous scribe scratched furiously on a piece of papyrus, the nib of his stylus seeming to tremble under the weight of Pullo's words.
"The mission, as commanded by our Divine Lord, is a success," he intoned. "We penetrated the unholy lands of the heretic, Kaia, and we have assessed the nature of her blasphemy. I can report that the desert witch is no mere prophet of some savage creed. She is an Arch-Heretic of a new and profound cunning, a creature of a uniquely insidious evil."
Flavius shifted his weight, his expression carefully neutral. He had met Pullo before and knew the man's mind was a straight, unbending road of iron dogma.
"She does not preach of the empty peace of the Silence," Pullo continued, his lip curling in contempt. "Hers is a far more insidious blasphemy, a heresy of the material world. She has raised a graven idol not of stone or wood, but of Gold. She makes offerings of grain and water to both the legions of the Emperor and the unclean armies of the Great Enemy. She is not a warrior fighting for a faith, nor a queen fighting for a people. She is a merchant," he spat the word as if it were the foulest of curses. "A soulless creature who seeks to profit from our sacred and holy war. She would sell water to a drowning man and sand to a man dying of thirst, so long as they had coin. This is a corruption of the spirit so profound, so complete, that it cannot be borne."
Pullo's report was a masterpiece of religious paranoia, a perfect and witty filtering of Kaia's brilliant geopolitical pragmatism through the dark, unyielding lens of his own fanatical worldview. He saw no strategy, only sin. He saw no innovation, only heresy.
The Centurion, Flavius, a man who had spent twenty years dealing with the very real and practical problems of supply and logistics, listened to this theological assessment with a growing sense of dread. "And did you… take any action, Commander?" he asked, his voice carefully neutral. "Your orders were to observe."
A grim, satisfied smile touched Pullo's lips. "Our Lord commanded us not to engage the witch herself. We are hunters, not assassins. Heresy must be confronted, not stabbed in the back. But we could not stand by and allow her unholy commerce to continue. We could not allow the Unclean to feast upon a bounty tainted by a heretic's greed."
He leaned forward, his eyes burning with the memory of his holy work. "We located the nexus of her sin. A hidden oasis where her agents were leaving stores of grain and supplies for the Silenti horde, like a farmer leaving scraps for a rabid dog. We could not attack the witch, as our Lord commanded. But we could deny her customers."
He straightened up, his chest swelling with pride. "We descended upon the oasis at night. We did not just burn the grain. That would have been a simple act of war. We performed a Rite of Holy Purification. We consecrated the ground in the Emperor's name. We tore down their storage huts, we salted the earth so that nothing may grow there again for a generation, and we poisoned the well, rendering it an undrinkable font of our Lord's righteous judgment." He pointed to the Purifier sigil branded on his gauntlet. "We left their mark upon the dead trees, so that all who find the place will know that the Emperor's gaze sees all, and that the land itself will not suffer the tread of the Unclean."
He stood back, clearly expecting praise for his initiative, for his brilliant interpretation of his orders. He had acted with perfect piety. He had not engaged Kaia directly. He had struck a massive blow against the Silenti's supply line. And he had cleansed a patch of land from a heretic's stain. In his mind, it was a great and holy victory for the Emperor.
Centurion Flavius stared at him, his face a mask of dawning horror. This was not a victory. This was a catastrophe. This fanatical madman, this blunt instrument of the Emperor's will, had just single-handedly ignited a new war on his quiet, already over-stretched frontier.
He doesn't see it, Flavius thought, his mind racing. He doesn't understand what he's done. Kaia, the pragmatic barbarian chieftain, would not see this as a holy act of consecration. She would not see it as a theological dispute. She would see it as a Roman army, led by an elite officer, deliberately and maliciously destroying her property, breaking her contract, and attacking her economic livelihood. She would see it as a declaration of war.
Before Flavius could even begin to formulate a response, the sound of a horn blast echoed from the watchtower, sharp and panicked. Shouts erupted from the courtyard below. A moment later, the door to the command post burst open and a breathless legionary stumbled in.
"Centurion! A rider from the western patrol! They are the only survivor!"
They rushed out into the courtyard. A lone rider was being helped from his horse, his body slumped in the saddle, a barbed nomad arrow protruding from his shoulder. His face was pale with blood loss and terror.
"What happened, soldier?" Flavius demanded, his heart sinking with a terrible certainty. "Was it the Silence?"
The wounded legionary shook his head, gasping for breath. "No, sir. Not the Silence. It was the nomads. Kaia's riders. They came out of the dunes like a sandstorm. Fast. So fast. They didn't even give us a chance to form a shield wall. They… they butchered us."
One of the other soldiers, who had been tending to the man's horse, let out a curse. "Centurion, look at this."
Tied to the shaft of the arrow still lodged in the survivor's shoulder was a small, tightly rolled piece of parchment. Flavius carefully untied it, his fingers feeling clumsy and slow. He unrolled it. The message was not written in the elegant Latin of a Roman diplomat, nor was it the crude scratching of a common bandit. It was written in a clear, precise Greek, the trade language of the East. It was not addressed to the Emperor. It was addressed to him, to the local Roman command. It was a merchant's ledger entry, written in blood.
"You have broken the contract. The price of water has just gone up. The new price is blood."
Titus Pullo read the message over the Centurion's shoulder. A frown of confusion crossed his face. He could not comprehend it. He had won a great spiritual victory, and this was the enemy's baffling response. But Flavius understood perfectly. Alex's attempt to use his fanatic as a subtle tool of reconnaissance had failed in the most catastrophic way imaginable. Pullo's holy folly had just plunged the entire Eastern front into a new, brutal, and utterly avoidable three-way war. And the first payment on that bloody new ledger had just been collected.