Morning came to Lenkerk without urgency.
It came pale and damp through the trees beyond the town and through the sagging roofs, along the mud roads where the water still stood in shallow brown seams from the rain before. Birdsong echoed between the shacks, storehouses, and low concrete walls, bright and indifferent. The air already held some of the day’s heat inside it. There was the faint smell of rotting wood, the damp forest, old smoke, animals, and something sour left in the drains. It was not a smell anyone noticed unless they had just arrived. After a while it became the shape of the place itself.
A man who always rose early drove a small herd of gulluks down the street with a stick and a patience that looked ancestral. The beasts went clopping through the wet road with their heads lowered, their backs glistening, their breath showing briefly in the cooler morning air before the heat took that too. He spoke to them in Tilmuhlan, soft and practiced, and they answered with clicks or bleats.
Water dripped from the edge of a corrugated roof one drop at a time. Beneath it a dog nosed through a rut in the road, found nothing, and moved on. Other animals came after it, narrow things with ribbed sides and pale eyes, picking at the dirt for scraps. A woman opened a window, looked out, and then closed it again. Somewhere a motorized carriage coughed once and failed to start. The birds kept singing.
Near the side of a closed repair shop, under a patched awning turned black from mildew, a homeless human man sat beside a blind yinglet and fed sticks into a small cookfire made in a broken oil pan. The yinglet’s fur had gone thin around the snout, and his eyes were clouded over white and useless. A dog laid against his leg, tied to his wrist by a length of string. The string was not strong. It did not need to be. The dog knew where it belonged. The yinglet reached down now and again to touch its head, fingers searching through the coarse fur. To him, that dog meant the world.
The human passed the yinglet a biteleaf cigarette. The yinglet found it by smell and took it between two fingers. They smoked without speaking. In the pan, something cooked that might have been a fresh meal, or might have been yesterday’s leftovers made hot enough to eat. The blind yinglet turned his face slightly toward the birdsong and listened. The dog lifted its head, then put it down again.
This was Lenkerk. A town no one knew except those who were bound to it by work, misfortune, or orders written somewhere else. It had no grace to it. No secret importance. It remained because there was a Val Salian Expeditionary Army base inside its limits, a bycite mine beyond the trees, and because men, women and others still needed a place to sleep when the day was done with them.
At the far edge of town the fence of the VSEA base ran through the wet grass in a straight line that belonged to another country. Inside it the buildings were low, square, and practical. Two flags, attached to a pole in the middle of the base, faintly fluttered in the wind: the red-and-gold banner of House Ivenmoth, and the green-and-white flag of the Republiek Olissingen. The morning light seeped over the roofs, motor sheds, stacked crates, and the tarpaulins slick with rain. A generator turned over somewhere and began its thin, stubborn hum.
The base was still mostly asleep. A few figures moved between buildings with cups in their hands or towels over their shoulders. A vehicle sat half-covered in mud beside the repair shed. Rifles stood in racks. Boots and footwraps dried poorly beneath bunks. The sun rose higher and touched the metal roofs, the wet ground, and the sleeping town outside the wire.
Nothing had happened yet. The day was only beginning. A day of rot, wet, and routine.