Theodora had gone about her simple duties for the most part without interruption as the days had passed in the underground stronghold, and newcomers had started to arrive in heed of Tanhkmet’s order.

  Alongside the soldiers came all kinds of refugees. Children, the elderly, individuals and families. Some had even attempted to bring their livestock. Most such animals were turned loose as a precondition for their owners’ entry, given concerns for space. But a few shepherds elected to stay camped in the desiccated grassland outside with their small herds, instead, hoping to keep their livelihoods intact and willing to risk their safety to do so.

  Before reaching the underground compound’s entrance, though, soldier and civilian alike passed within sight of the remains of Atum-Ra. As much was clear on the features of every new arrival, who seemed each to share the same broken, wide-eyed fear as the next.

  It soon became crowded in the tunnels, and the problem only worsened with time. Between the bunker’s stockpiles and that which the migrants had brought with them, there was at least plenty of food to go around, for a time. But Theo checked the stockpile each day, and saw firsthand the pace of their consumption. And every peasant farmer habituated to rationing their seasonal floods’ bounties each year would intuit the same conclusions. And so the mere knowledge that their limited supplies were creeping toward exhaustion constricted another coil of tension around the claustrophobic space. Even the air began to taste spread thin, shared by the sheer density of people there.

  At first, Junius tried to take charge. And Theo had attempted to assist him the best she could, along with the surviving Imperial Guard of Tanhkmet’s company.

  But precious few of the new arrivals knew Junius enough to respect his authority beyond the affordances of his mere stated rank. His attempts to bring some semblance of order to the anxious huddled mass of refugees were not all wasted, but Theodora would’ve been hard pressed to agree that he was anywhere close to ‘in control.’

  Junius did what he could with what he had. But after the initial shock of the city’s ruin dulled for the civilians, fear, doubt, and that claustrophobic anxiety trickled back through to them in a bad way in its place, as if a damp rot dripping down in from the underground stronghold’s compromised air vents. They began to bicker, venture where they shouldn’t, and steal.

  Junius had been forced to choose between keeping the telegraphy consoles monitored to prevent misuse, or simply destroying them to save the manpower. He’d decided to keep them watched, though doing so had spread ever thinner the ranks of Tanhkmet’s company of Guards, further eroding the sense of order. Fights broke out among the civilians with increasing frequency, and it took ever longer to break them up.

  It was on the thirteenth day since the arrival of the first refugees, that at last Theo had witnessed Captain Tanhkmet emerge from the infirmary.

  Two young civilians had come to blows over something trivial in the middle of the stronghold’s central refugee habitat. But it just so happened that each hailed from a different olive-pressing clan of the Khem floodplains, in the southeast, and large swathes of both rival families had since arrived as refugees. So both brawlers had plenty of grudge-nursing reinforcements close at hand ready to help the issue spiral out of control.

  Before long, the central habitat was enveloped in the throes of a riot. Theo first tried to separate the feuding parties, but was quickly overwhelmed by the crowded chaos and spat out onto the melee’s outskirts, bruised and reeling. As she tried to collect herself on the sidelines, a group of almost a dozen other patrol officers passed her by. They fled the cavern without even attempting to intervene, as if already resigned to impotence as the situation devolved.

  Imperial Guards determined to restore order soon arrived through connecting passages, and with them Theo once more threw herself into the chaos. But the rioters were as if deaf to their commands for peace, all while backswinging elbows and wild haymakers continued to mistakenly batter their bodies placed in the line of fire. And so it was just as soon again clear they were not enough to pull the throng apart from itself.

  After deflecting a stray fist otherwise destined to knock out some of her teeth, Theo tumbled out of the mix once more, and at once made up her mind to change course for the infirmary. If she couldn’t lend any other form of aid, she might at least ensure Caesos remained safe. As if a viscous liquid filling all available space, the brawl spilled into the hallway hot on her tail after her even as she scrambled away.

  The distinct lack of the brawl’s presence on the other half of the stronghold helped distinguish the otherwise dim, self-same tunnels from one another and so aided her navigation. Before much more than the fighting’s distant, muted racket had oozed much farther from that first habitat, she’d made her way back to the infirmary.

  Just as she reached for the door, though, it opened from within.

  Captain Tanhkmet stood across the threshold.

  It was the first time she’d seen him standing on his feet in almost two weeks. He’d his great shield slung down onto one arm, while in his other he held Caesos, nestled against his shoulder.

  “Ah, Lieutenant Belisarion,” he said. “Good to see you. Follow me.”

  Then he strode past her, before she could so much as salute.

  In the few dozen seconds it took him to retrace her steps, she could tell the situation had further deteriorated. The original two factions insulted, wrestled, and flailed against each other in a ridiculous, chaotic tumult. Some dispersed clusters of those civilians without a bird in the race attempted to huddle away from the fighting, lacking much free space to do so. Others had become somehow drawn into the melee. Junius was still near the middle of the atrium, shouting into the vortex as he wedged himself between two entangled brawlers.

  Tanhkmet stopped at the border of the fighting, observing the sight before him. Lingering, at first as if simply waiting to see if any of the combatants would notice him.

  Then he turned back to Theo, where she stood waiting behind him, and offered her Caesos.

  “Stay here with him, outside of it,” he said. “And cover his ears for this next part. Yes, just like that.”

  Then he waded into the crowd.

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  He was already a tall man, but in his steel boots, he was the tallest of any present by multiple inches. And so as he pressed on the fighting managed to half-part for him, as it had for nobody else. Many even froze and hushed mid-punch as soon as they recognized the arrival of his iconic plate steel armor. Only those locked in the most vicious of duels remained blind to his presence. All others drew back at just the sight of his purposeful and unflinching stride into the heart of the roil.

  An oval clearing formed in the middle of the habitat, centered on him, as all of those still possessed of their wits stopped fighting to scamper back, and out of his way or reach. There he halted, pivoting as he swept all around him with a furious glare, civilian and officer alike. All the while, a handful of brawlers as if bloodlusted still tumbled over each other on the ground at his feet, before one pair in particular wrestled right into his greaves.

  “Now, just what in the good Gods’ fuck is going on, here, then?”

  Theo could’ve sworn the eruption loosened even the solid stone-carved walls of the atrium.

  Caesos flinched in her arms even as she kept his ears covered tight, but he settled back down perhaps calmer than before in the intervening silence.

  All movement ceased. The last brawlers fell over one another as they tried to stop quicker than their momentum allowed. Even Junius and the other Guards, who’d by every right committed their best efforts to stopping the fight, froze in place.

  For a long moment, the only sound in the whole of the chamber was the shifting plates of Tanhkmet’s armor, as his chest heaved as it fumed his heavy, quickened breath just as might the bellows fanning a great vessel’s engine-furnace.

  “Well? Let's hear it!”

  His glare swung the other way back across the crowd.

  None dared speak.

  After long, painful seconds, Junius cleared his throat:

  “Sir, there was a–“

  “Lieutenant-commander Junius,” spat Tanhkmet, “I appreciate the attempt you were making to restore order before I arrived, but I will now very much appreciate your absolute silence at this moment.”

  Junius’ mouth snapped shut.

  Tanhkmet then looked down, at the two wrestlers still paralyzed mid-grapple at his feet. It wasn’t necessary for him to restate his wishes: explain yourselves.

  But another pair of fighters in the clearing spoke up first. One young rhiza pointed at another, then a moldy quashed stonefruit smeared across the floor.

  “He, and all his g-g-grubby cousins—” Some deep-seated, blood-feud resentment bubbled up past her fright. “We’ll all catch scurvy—“

  “Well we’re the most, anyways!” protested the other. “When there’s not enough to go around—“

  “Enough!” roared Tanhkmet, somehow louder than before.

  He stamped forward as he did, striving his shield into the ground as if slamming down his fist in frustration. The sharpened point of its bottom vertex split the fruit’s pit in half before continuing into the floor beneath, penetrating inches deep into solid stone. Even doused in the fruit’s mush, the impact cast long sparks across the floor. Tanhkmet then wrenched the shield free, tossing the fruit’s inedible remains separated as if into two portions demarcated by his shield’s incision.

  “Share,” he grit, before whirling back to the crowd at large. “Now, all of you, listen! No fighting — in fact, no bullshit is going to be tolerated while I’m on watch down here. Is that understood? None of any of this. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”

  Even Theo even felt ashamed, then, though she knew she had no reason to be.

  “Do you know why you’re all down here?” he thundered. “I don’t believe a single one of you hasn’t seen what Atum-Ra looks like, right now. We are down here, because we are hiding from whatever did that. No, the Guard doesn’t know what’s going on, or why. But we’re working on it. What we all do know — what all of us have seen — yes, you too, each of us, soldier and civilian — is that for some reason, fifteen miles east of here, where there used to be the greatest city in the world… now there’s a grave.”

  Caesos curled up tighter and tenser in Theo’s arms. Unsure what to do, she patted his hair down, and hoped it felt reassuring.

  “A million people, not to mention the imperial family,” he continued. “I can’t imagine there’s a single one of you who didn’t know that yet already, somehow, or understand its gravity.”

  None could answer him.

  “Now, as far as I’m concerned, the ruins are something of a holy site, for me, because of that fact. I don’t care which gods yet live. Atum-Ra, and the space surrounding it, is sacred to me, right now.”

  His baleful gaze came to rest at last on the two brawlers at his feet.

  “Now, listen to me very carefully,” he said to them. “I will not have any of you disrespect the grave of a million murdered souls, with the pettiness of your inbred peasant shitfarmer’s pissant feud!”

  He drew back, composing himself again, at least by degrees.

  “We will exist here respectfully. Civilians will exist here at my discretion, considering this is a military facility. If anyone wants to test my further tolerance for their disrespect of our dead compatriots — of my dead comrades — then they will be immediately and permanently expelled from the safety of this place, such that they might get another good, long look at the remains of the city, and have a realization or two. Is that clear?”

  Another cowed silence at first ensued, before Tanhkmet stomped sparks again from the stone floor with one plate-metal boot in indignant rage, and at once a chorus of murmured ‘yes-es’ and ‘yes-sirs’ filled the chamber.

  Surveying the crowd one last time, at last the Captain’s breath began to steady.

  “Now, to all military personnel present: report with me to the infirmary immediately,” he barked. “All else: disperse! If you can’t stand being in the same room together, find a crevice, and crawl into it.”

  Former brawlers and bystanders scurried into the connecting tunnels, as if they’d expected some harsher punishment and were keen to escape before anyone changed their mind.

  Tanhkmet returned to Theo, sighing with exhaustion. Slinging his shield onto his back, he gestured for Caesos.

  He hoisted him back into his arms with a gentleness strange and alien coming from a man seconds ago brimming with such fury. After allowing the blind child to curl against one steel-pauldroned shoulder, he began swaying from side to side, lulling him back to sleep.

  "It has been said that there are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.

  But perhaps more frightening yet still, than even the anger of a gentle man? That retreat to quiet reserve by a man with every reason to be furious."

  She-the-Saffron-Cloaked, Last Demiurge of Setet