The graduation was the smallest ceremony in the academy's history. One cadet. No family in attendance. No noble sponsors occupying the reserved gallery. No feast, no parade, no ceremonial presentation of the officer's seal to a proud lineage.
Just Agbonifo, standing in the commandant's office with a bronze seal in his hand and a look on his face that combined professional pride with professional exasperation in roughly equal measure.
"Esigie of Udo," he said. "Graduating with marks in the top five percent of your cohort officially. Unofficially, and off the record, the top one percent if we count the first tactical exam you weren't supposed to ace." He held out the seal. "Junior Officer, Third Rank. Western Command. You deploy in two weeks."
Esigie took the seal. It was heavier than it looked bronze inlaid with the academy's crest, enchanted with a minor identification charm that linked it to the bearer's aura signature. His aura signature. A slave's aura, bound to a military rank that technically shouldn't be accessible to anyone without freeman status.
Ehize had arranged the exception. An obscure provision in the kingdom's military code written centuries ago, during a war that had required every able body regardless of status allowed slaves to hold provisional rank in wartime. The provision had never been formally revoked. Ehize had found it in an archive that nobody else knew existed, because Ehize found everything in archives that nobody else knew existed.
"Western Command," Esigie said. The words had weight. Western Command covered the frontier counties the territory between the capital and the border with the neutral zone. The territory that included Udo.
"The Iyase personally approved your assignment," Agbonifo said. "He's read your file. All of it including the parts that Ehize tried to keep classified." A pause. "He wants to meet you."
* * *
The kingdom was mobilizing.
Not openly the Oba hadn't declared war, and the Uzama Council hadn't authorized general mobilization. But the machinery of a military state preparing for conflict was turning, and the sound of it the movement of supplies, the recall of reserve units, the quiet expansion of patrol schedules from routine to wartime was audible to anyone who knew how to listen.
Osawe knew how to listen. His intelligence briefings, delivered nightly in the cramped dormitory room that we still shared, painted a picture that was coherent and terrifying.
The Sarahan forces had completed their pre-invasion preparations. Osawe's network which now extended, through Iyamu's scout connections, into the kingdom's wider military intelligence apparatus had confirmed: the Saracen Host was assembling. Two hundred thousand soldiers. The Janissary Guard five hundred elite aura users, Level 5 to 7 was mobilized. Sultan Rashid had recalled his border emirs. The Caliphate of Al-Nuriya was sending fire-mage battle priests. The Khanate of Turan's horse lords were massing on Qadir's eastern flank.
The invasion would come from the west. Through the neutral zone. Into Benin's frontier counties.
Into Udo.
I looked at the bronze seal in my hand. Junior Officer, Third Rank. Western Command. A slave with a provisional rank and a deployment order that was sending him home not to rest, but to fight.
The rain was coming.
Time to find out who had a roof.