Heritage of Cyador

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From the low rise where he has reined up, the Mirror Lancer undercaptain glances eastward to the Swarth River, slightly more than five hundred yards away, its waters far lower than usual in the hot afternoon, an afternoon more like late summer or early harvest. Then his eyes turn westward, taking in the open lands, whose grass is dry and brown and barely calf high. More to the north are the few scattered plots that have brought forth little enough from the drought-plagued past harvest. Less than a kay behind him, beside the small stream that flows down the middle of the swale between the rolling rises, is a scattering of cots and hastily built shelters-structures thrown together by the people of Ensenla after they had fled the town of the same name, a town less than two kays north of where he waits, a town burned to the ground early that morning and now marked only by trails of smoke rising into the silver-hazed green-blue sky. Roughly fifty yards in front of him is a single post, stained a faded green. There is another such post a quarter kay to the east, overlooking the river, and another a quarter kay to the west, and that line of posts extends a good ten kays west of the river, perhaps farther, since the undercaptain has not measured the precise distance they extend in the three eightdays since he arrived to patrol the area.

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