Gavin watched him, pitiless. “If the only thing you’re going to respect is strength, Kip, first, you’re a fool, and second, you’ve come to the right man.”

The panic came. He should have known better. Kip thrashed, tried to scream, reached up to that thin ridge of luxin by his eyes—but he barely touched it before his hands drooped. He should have known he couldn’t trust…

Chapter 24

After traveling all day and into the night, Karris first became aware of Rekton in the distance as a great, unvariegated glow as she stalked through the forest. It was long after nightfall now, the air cool in the undergrowth. She was enough of a sub-red to use dark vision, but it wasn’t perfect, and on a moonlit night like tonight she kept switching back and forth from normal to dark vision. Light below the visible spectrum was rougher; it didn’t lend itself to fine differentiation of features. Even faces simply looked like warm blobs, brighter here and there, but it was much more difficult to make out expressions or fine movements—or even to identify a face from much of a distance.

The glow meant Rekton was still burning. Karris circled it slowly, climbing the last hill. She stayed off the road, admiring the waterfall just below the town in the silver moonlight. She hadn’t seen anyone on the road all day, which she found odd. If no one was fleeing downriver from Rekton, it probably meant no one had made it out. But it was also strange to follow the river through arable land and not come across any other settlements. She’d seen orange orchards that clearly hadn’t been tended since the war, but they were still growing fruit. The fruit was sparse and the trees leafy and chaotic and growing haphazardly in comparison to the paintings Karris had seen of orange harvests, but they were still here. With the price Tyrean oranges fetched, she found that hard to believe. Tyrean oranges were smaller but sweeter and juicier than Atashian oranges, and the Parian oranges didn’t even compare. No one had moved back after the war?

Had the Battle of Sundered Rock really killed so many that even now, sixteen years later, the land lay fallow, bearing fruit for deer and bears alone?

Karris didn’t see any bodies until she crept into the still-burning town, wrapped in her hooded black cloak. She was following the main road, its cobbles even and well maintained: a symbol in Karris’s mind of a place well governed. A burned body lay in the middle of the street, facedown, one arm extended, a finger pointing deeper into the town. Only the hand and pointing finger were unburned. The head was missing.

She hadn’t seen this kind of burn since the war. During the war, the armies had clashed a number of times in areas where the bodies couldn’t be buried and where there wasn’t enough natural fuel for funeral pyres. Corpses had to be disposed of to avoid losing even more soldiers to disease, so red drafters would spray a corpse with a quick stream of red jelly. A quick coating, even if drafted carelessly, could be lit quickly. Problem solved. It wasn’t cremation, though. If bodies were burned singly, rather than in piles, the bones remained. If the drafter weren’t thorough, certain body parts wouldn’t be reduced entirely to bone. Rib cages and skulls ended up full of smoking meat—good enough for exigencies of war when you had to dispose of your opponents’ corpses to avoid spreading disease, but never good enough for one’s own countrymen.

King Garadul hadn’t fought in that war, but he was aping the worst practices of it—on his own people.

As she suspected, that pointing hand led Karris to more bodies. At first they were spread widely, then one every thirty paces, one every twenty paces, one every ten. All were headless. Then bodies lined the sides of the main road now in a solid row, past smoking, crumbled homes and shops. The nicely maintained cobblestones here had cracked from the heat. There were tracks across the cobbles. At first she couldn’t tell what they were, but as she got closer it became obvious: they were drag marks, streaks of dried blood perhaps a day old from the decapitated bodies being dragged from the square.

She paused amid the smoke and gore before she rounded the corner that would take her to the town square. She drew the short sword, but didn’t put on her spectacles. If there was a trap, it would be here, but there was enough red and heat for her to fight magically if necessary. Even if she wasn’t planning on a straight infiltration, there was no need to announce that she was a drafter if she didn’t have to. When the moment came, she’d announce it with fire.

Karris rounded the corner.

Dear Orholam.

They hadn’t melted the heads. They’d preserved them with a blue-and-yellow luxin glaze and stacked them in the middle of the town square. Eyes staring, faces mangled, blood cascading from the top to the bottom like a champagne pyramid at the Luxlords’ Ball. Karris had half expected something like this from all the decapitated bodies, but expecting it wasn’t the same as seeing it. Her stomach heaved. She turned and clamped her jaw shut, blinking rapidly, as if her eyelids could scrape the horrors off her eyes. She studied the rest of the square to give her stomach time to settle.

If Gavin had seen this, he would have killed King Garadul. Pitiless as the sea, righteous as Orholam, he would have hunted down every one of these monsters. Whatever he had done during the war and before—whatever he had done to her—since the False Prism’s War, Gavin had traveled the Seven Satrapies meting out justice. He’d sunk Ilytian pirate fleets twice, killed the bandit king of the Blue-Eyed Demons, made peace when war had broken out again between Ruthgar and the Blood Forest, and brought the Butcher of Ru to justice. Other than the Tyreans, the people loved him. And he would have wreaked a mighty vengeance here, even for Tyreans. He wouldn’t have stood for this.

Most of the buildings were piles of rubble, smoking in the predawn gray. Here and there a single wall stood, scorched and blackened and separated from its fallen fellows. The alcaldesa’s residence, if such it was—it was the grandest building she’d seen here, with steps leading directly onto the square—was a total loss. The soldiers had flattened it; there wasn’t one rock left sitting on another.

But the square itself was immaculate. Any burnt wreckage had either been pushed into the streets leading here or shoveled directly into the river, whose channel bounded the square to the west. King Garadul had wanted nothing to distract a visitor from his grisly trophy. Steeling herself, Karris looked back to the pyramid of human heads. All the drag marks, all the bloody streaks led here. The bodies—Karris hoped they’d all already been bodies by the time they came here—had all been decapitated here so that the pyramid would be as bloody as possible. This was a spectacle. King Garadul wanted everything to lead to this horror.

The pyramid was taller than Karris. The heads at the top, crowning the pyramid, were children: round-cheeked little boys and little girls with their hair in ribbons and bows.

Karris didn’t throw up. There was something about this that simply left her cold. By their ages and her own, those children could have been hers. She found herself counting the heads. There were forty-five at the base, and the pyramid was as wide as it was tall, built with mathematical precision. The children’s heads were smaller, and there was no way to tell if the pyramid was solid or if these heads had been stacked around the outside of a smaller pyramid made of something else. Karris’s fingers moved as she mentally moved the beads of an abacus, shuttling them left and right.