The mud was the first thing he tasted bitter, gritty, and freezing. It coated his tongue and filled his nostrils, a thick slurry of earth and decaying leaf litter that smelled of a damp, indifferent world.
He tried to push himself up, but his arms felt like brittle twigs. His fingers, calloused and cracked at the knuckles, sank deeper into the muck. This wasn't his bed. This wasn't the hum of his refrigerator or the distant, comforting drone of city traffic. The air here was too sharp, tasting of woodsmoke and wet horsehair.
"Up, you miserable whelp! The sun's burning daylight, and my armor isn't going to polish itself while you dream of a warm hearth."
The voice was like a saw blade cutting through bone. A heavy, mud-caked boot caught him square in the ribs, rolling him onto his back. He gasped, the air leaving his lungs in a wheezing rattle.
Above him stood a man who looked like a nightmare of the middle ages. He wore a gambeson that had been patched so many times it was more thread than fabric. Over it sat a breastplate of dull, pitted iron, cinched with a belt of cracked leather. His face was a map of broken veins and sun-damaged skin, framed by a thinning, greasy beard. This was Sir Ulrich a "knight" in name only, a man whose only loyalty was to the thin clink of copper in his moth-eaten purse.
"Did the fall scramble your wits?" Ulrich spat, leaning over him. The man's breath was a foul mixture of stale ale and rot. "Check the cart. If a single spear-tip is rusted through by the time we reach the gates, I'll take the price out of your hide."
The memories hit him then not his own, but the echoes of the boy whose skin he now inhabited. His name was Kaelin a young orphaned squire to the miserly mercenary knight Ulrich.
He looked toward the horizon. In the distance, rising like a jagged gray tooth against the pale sky, stood the Capital. It was a sprawling, suffocating mass of stone and timber, currently swarming with thousands of men just like Ulrich.
The Emperor had called. A dream—a divine vision of a land across the Silent Sea, a place of untapped riches where, it was said, the gods would speak again once the land was conquered.
The God's Silence had left this world hollow. Once, this land had been blessed with miracles, and men had no cause for worry so long as their mouths could beg the gods for aid. Then a vicious curse befell them. The gods answered no more. Of course, to call it a silence was an overstatement. There were still the occasional prophets and seers—people able to receive commands from the divine. But for the common man, prayer became a fool's labor. So a promise of the end of the Silence was as sweet as honey to commoners and noble folk alike.
A cold, hollow dread settled in Kaelin's gut. I won't survive the expedition, he realized. The first skirmish in those foretold lands will be the end of me. If the hunger didn't kill him, Ulrich's miserly refusal to buy decent equipment would.
He pulled himself to his feet, swaying slightly as his vision blurred from low blood sugar. He had to play the part for now. He had to be the obedient, dim-witted boy Ulrich expected. But as he gripped the rough wooden side of the cart, his mind began to race with a different kind of strategy.
The Capital, he thought, his eyes fixed on the distant gray walls. It'll be chaos. Thousands of mercenaries, merchants, nobles, and knights. A sea of people to disappear into.
If he could just make it to the city gates, he could find a way to slip Ulrich's leash. He didn't need a sword or a knightly title. He needed to survive. Find a merchant, sell anything decent he had on his body, then run. Far, far away, where no one who knew him would find him. It couldn't be deserting if he hadn't even agreed to join. Besides, Ulrich would be happy not to have another mouth to feed.
He looked at Ulrich, who was already busy grumbling over a fraying horse-lead, unwilling to spend the coin for a new one.
"I'm up, Ser," Kaelin croaked, his voice cracking. He reached for a rag to begin the soul-crushing task of rubbing the orange rust off a dented buckler. "I'll have the gear ready before we hit the main road."
He lowered his head and spat out a glob of mud, his fingers finding the familiar, reassuring grit of the rag. He wasn't going to that land in the Emperor's dreams. He was going to survive the Capital, and he was going to do it by being more cunning than the world that had tried to bury him in the mud.