Chapter 21 #2
Perhaps due to some initial desire for sanitation, or mere curiosity, the Federation had tried to ignite several corpse pyramids.
But they had given up before the job was finished.
Perhaps they did not want to waste the oil.
Perhaps the stink became unbearable. The bodies were grotesque, half-charred spectacles; hair had turned to ash, and the top layers of skin had turned a crinkling black, but the worst part was that there was something beneath the ashes that looked identifiably human.
The subject is with tears flowing in torrents, groaning in sorrow.
In the square they found bizarrely short skeletons—not corpses, but skeletons gleaming pristine white.
They looked at first like children’s bones, but upon closer examination, Enki identified them as adult torsos.
He bent down and touched the dirt where one skeleton was fixed to the ground.
The top half of the body had been stripped clean so the bones glistened in the sunlight, while the lower half remained intact in the dirt.
“They were buried,” he said, disgusted. “They were buried up to the waist and set upon by dogs.”
Rin could not understand how the Federation had found so many different ways to inflict suffering.
But each corner they turned revealed another instance in the string of horrors, barbarian savagery matched only by inventiveness.
A family, arms still around each other, impaled upon the same spear.
Babies lying at the bottoms of vats, their skin a horrible shade of crimson, floating in the water in which they’d boiled to death.
In the hours that had passed, the only living creatures they encountered were dogs unnaturally fattened by feeding on corpses. Dogs, and vultures.
“Orders?” Unegen finally asked Altan.
They looked to their commander.
Altan hadn’t spoken since they had walked through the city gates. His skin had turned a ghostly shade of gray. He might have been ill. He was sweating profusely, his left arm trembling. When they reached another pile of charred corpses, he convulsed, sank to his knees, and could not keep walking.
This was not Altan’s first genocide.
This is Speer again, Rin thought. Altan must have been imagining the massacre of Speer in his mind, imagining the way his people were slaughtered overnight like cattle.
After a long time Chaghan extended his hand to Altan.
Altan grasped it and rose to his feet. He swallowed, closed his eyes. A mask of detachment spread across his expression once more with a curious ripple, like a facade of indifference had formed a seal over the surface of his face, locking any vulnerabilities within.
“Spread out,” Altan ordered. His voice was impossibly level. “Find any survivors.”
Surrounded by death, spreading out was the last thing any of them wanted to do.
Suni opened his mouth to protest. “But the Federation—”
“The Federation isn’t here. They’ve been marching inland for a steady week. Our people are dead. Find me survivors.”
They found evidence of a last desperate battle near the southern gate.
The victors were clear. The Militia corpses had been given the same deliberate treatment as the carcasses of the civilians.
Corpses had been stacked in the middle of the square, neat little piles with bodies arranged carefully on top of one another.
Rin saw the broken flag of the Militia lying on the ground, burned and smeared with blood. The flag bearer’s hand was detached at the wrist; the rest of his body lay several feet away, eyes blank and unseeing.
The flag bore the dragon crest of the Red Emperor, the symbol of the Nikara Empire. In the lower left corner was stitched the number two in Old Nikara calligraphy. It was the insignia of the Second Division.
Rin’s heart skipped a beat.
Kitay’s division.
Rin dropped to her knees and touched the flag. A barking noise sounded from behind a pile of corpses. She looked up just as a dark, flea-matted mongrel came running at her. It was the size of a small wolf. Its gut was grotesquely round, like it had been gorging for days.
It dashed past Rin toward the flag bearer’s corpse, sniffing hopefully.
Rin watched it rooting around, salivating eagerly, and something inside her snapped.
“Get away!” she shrieked, kicking out at the dog.
Any Sinegardian animal would have slunk away in fear. But this dog had lost all fear of human beings. This dog had lived amid a juicy feast of carnage for too long. Perhaps it assumed that she, too, was close to death. Perhaps it thought fresh meat would taste better than rotting flesh.
It snarled and lunged at her.
Rin was caught off guard by the dog’s tremendous weight; it knocked her to the ground.
It slobbered from open jaws as it lunged for her artery, but she raised her arms in defense and it sank its teeth into her left forearm instead.
She screamed out loud, but the dog did not let go; with her right arm she reached for her sword, unsheathed it, and shoved it upward.
Her sword found its way through the dog’s ribs. The dog’s jaws went slack.
She stabbed again. The dog fell off her.
She jumped to her feet and jammed her sword down, piercing the dog’s side.
It was in its death throes now. She stabbed it again, this time in the neck.
A spray of blood exploded outward, coating her face with its warm wetness.
She was using her sword like a dagger now, bringing her arm down again and again just to feel bones and muscle give way to metal, just to hurt and break something . . .
“Rin!”
Someone grabbed her sword arm. She whirled on him, but Suni pulled her arms behind her back and held her tightly, so that she could not move until her sobbing had subsided.
“You’re lucky it didn’t get your sword arm,” said Enki. “Keep this on for a week. See me if it starts to smell.”
Rin flexed her arm. Enki had bound the dog bite tightly with a poultice that stung like she had stuck her arm in a hornet’s nest.
“It’s good for you,” he said when she grimaced. “It’ll prevent infection. We don’t need you to go frothing mad.”
“I think I’d like to go frothing mad,” said Rin. “I’d like to lose my head. I think I’d be happier.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Enki said sternly. “You have work to do.”
But was it really work, what they were doing? Or were they deluding themselves that by finding the survivors, they could atone for the simple truth that they were too late?
She continued her miserable work of combing through the empty streets, upending debris, searching homes whose doors had been smashed in.
After hours of looking she stopped hoping to find Kitay alive, and started to hope she wouldn’t find his corpse during her patrols, because the sight of him flayed, dismembered, jammed into a wheelbarrow with a pile of other corpses, half-burned, would be worse than never finding him at all.
She walked Golyn Niis alone in a daze, trying to both see and not see. In time she found herself inured to the smell, and eventually the sight of bodies was not a shock, just another array of faces to be scanned for someone she knew.
All the while she called Kitay’s name. She screamed it every time she saw a hint of motion, anything that could be alive: a cat disappearing into an alley, a pack of crows taking off suddenly, startled by the return of humans who weren’t dead or dying. She screamed it for days.
And then from the ruins, so faintly she thought it was an echo, she heard her name in response.
“Remember that time I said the Trials were as bad as Speer?” Kitay asked. “I was wrong. This is as bad as Speer. This is worse than Speer.”
It wasn’t remotely funny, and neither of them laughed.
Rin’s eyes and throat were sore from weeping.
She had been clutching Kitay’s hand for hours, fingers wound tightly around his, and she never wanted to let go.
They sat side by side in a hastily constructed shelter half a mile outside the city, the only place they could escape the stench of death that permeated Golyn Niis.
Kitay’s survival was nothing short of a miracle.
He and a small band of soldiers from the Second Division had hidden for days under the bodies of their slain comrades, too afraid to venture out in case the Federation patrols should return.
When it looked like they could sneak away from the killing fields, they hid in the demolished slums of the eastern side of the city.
They had pulled a cellar door away and filled the open space with bricks, so from the outside it just looked like a wall.
That was why the Cike hadn’t seen them on their first pass through the city.
Only a handful of Kitay’s squadron was still alive. He didn’t know if the city contained any more survivors.
“Have you seen Nezha?” Kitay finally asked. “I heard he was being shipped to Khurdalain.”
Rin opened her mouth to respond, but a horrible prickling feeling spread from the bridge of her nose to under her eyes, and then she was choking under wild, heaving sobs, and she couldn’t form any words at all.
Kitay said nothing, just held his arms out in wordless sympathy.
She collapsed into them. It was absurd that he should be comforting her, that she should be the one crying, after all that Kitay had survived.
But Kitay was numb; for Kitay the suffering had been normalized, and he couldn’t grieve any more than he already had.
He was still holding her when Qara ducked into the tent.
“You’re Chen Kitay?” She wasn’t really asking, she just needed to say something to break the silence.
“Yes.”
“You were with the Second Division when . . . ?” Qara trailed off.
Kitay nodded.
“We need you to brief us. Can you walk?”
Under the open sky, in front of a silent audience of Altan and the twins, Kitay recounted in a halting voice the massacre at Golyn Niis.