NightForge After Dark — Dark Fantasy HaremLit Audio FictionThe Salt Oath: Seven Words That Bound Ten Thousand Mercenaries | Grimdark Historical Fantasy Lore from The Jackal of Carthage
Open your mouth. Grey salt on your tongue, and seven words. Tonight you swear the only oath the mercenary world keeps, with no priest and no god, and you learn what happens on the night it wakes up. The gate of the camp at Sicca, where an oath-keeper in a leather apron puts pan-scraped salt on your tongue and makes you say the words before he tells you what they mean, while a clerk writes down the men who flinch. The black stone in the niche by the gate, worn copper-dark by ten thousand palms, with no face on it because the mercenary world does not trust faces. What each of the seven words binds: eat, owed, for. The fire where a paymaster splits an acacia stick down its length with one stroke, notches the two halves together, and will not say "paid in full" over four months of notches that meet nothing but air. Six men from six nations swearing six different oaths, by skulls, by a river, by a city's name withheld, by a horse still saddled, by an empty purse, by a ball of lead, and becoming one creditor without becoming one people. The standard-pole at dawn, a bronze disc with no face, a strap across a man's cheeks, a count spoken to the bronze, and a whole camp learning to look at a treeline. A disputed count settled by a man putting his finger in a breakfast fire to the first knuckle while the camp does not look up. And the night the silver does not come, when the seven words start at one fire and run through every tent, every horse-line and every ditch, not shouted and not chanted, and one Libyan pushes down the only spear that wants the gate. What I eat I am owed for. In the city they will tell you an oath without a god is only a grievance. They are about to find out how wrong they are. Read the entire Cycle in order at: read.NightForgeAfterDark.com Also on Amazon: THE JACKAL OF CARTHAGE https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HGBZF3VS THE KNIFE OF CARTHAGE https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKTGSZFN
