Sorn was buried at the center of the new settlement. Over the freshly turned earth stood a smooth black stone, dark as night itself. Dan stood in silence, his hand tight around the shaft of his spear, watching until the last clod of soil fell onto the grave.

  He did not speak. Not that day. Not the next.

  On the third day he ordered fifteen warriors to assemble. The best of them. Eneke at their head.

  “We are not going there to kill,” Dan said. “We are going to make something clear. No one should think the blood of our brothers is dust.”

  They did not execute the captive. They fed him, taught him words, made him understand that he mattered. Through him they learned where his people were hiding: a gorge to the north, caves cut into jagged rock like burrows.

  He did not resist. He was afraid, and he had begun to respect them.

  He had seen that Agha lived by a different law. Blood for blood, but with honor.

  When they set out at dawn, the forest was still. Eneke walked in front. Dan took the rear. He was not meant to go, yet he could not remain behind. This would be his first war in this world.

  On the fourth day they reached the edge of the gorge. Their guide, an old hunter from the tribe, pointed down toward a narrow strip of land between two steep walls of stone. Smoke rose from below. Not one thin thread but several.

  A settlement.

  They lay behind the ridge and watched. Life moved below them. Children ran between crude huts. Women carried brushwood and cut into carcasses. It looked like any other day.

  Ordinary people.

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  Dan watched and could not shake the thought that they were no different from the ones he had sworn to protect. The same worries. The same shouting. The same smoke hanging over their homes.

  A careful reconnaissance during the night confirmed it. This was not merely a band of raiders. Their families lived here. Women. Old men. Children.

  The men whose tracks they had followed for four days were hunters. They simply hunted people.

  The land offered little game. The animals had moved on. There were too many mouths and not enough meat. Someone, perhaps the most desperate or the most cruel, had offered a solution: take what others had already won. Easier than chasing prey through the mountains.

  Dan sat in the dark, watching the sleeping camp below. In his hand he held a knife forged from the first steel. He remembered the village after the attack. Ash. Blood. The bodies that had not yet been buried.

  Then he thought of the children below.

  They had not chosen where to be born. Their fathers had chosen violence. But the children would pay for it.

  The old guide shifted beside him. He too stared into the gorge, and there was no pity in his eyes.

  “They knew the risk,” the old man whispered. “When men leave to kill, the women pray the gods will be merciful. The gods rarely listen. Not when blood is involved.”

  Dan nodded.

  The choice had been made long before this night. It had been made in the burned village, while he buried the dead.

  The attack would begin before dawn, under the cover of the morning fog that would fill the gorge. No one would slip away without answer.

  It was swift.

  The first arrows struck the sentries. Three men fell without a cry. Then the charge.

  The people of Agha moved as Dan had taught them, without fury and without mercy.

  Dan himself dragged the leader from a cave. He was massive, filthy, a brute with a burned mark on his chest. The man snarled like an animal but he was wounded and helpless. They bound him.

  “For Sorn,” Eneke said, striking him in the chest with the butt of his spear. “For what you did.”

  Not all the captives were killed. Five men were hanged at the mouth of the cave. The women, the elderly, and the children were spared. They were taken back and later accepted into the villages. They were taught. They were given a chance.

  When the warriors returned, Eneke laid the chieftain’s tooth at the foot of Sorn’s grave stone.

  “There is law,” he said. “Now they all know it.”

  Rumors traveled faster than wind. A few days later another wandering band, seeing a patrol bearing the mark of Agha, dropped their weapons and knelt without a fight.

  Someone said the gods themselves had come down from the sky and given these people a law that could not be broken.