Chapter 21 #3
“The city’s defense was doomed from the start,” Kitay said. “We thought we still had weeks. But you could have given us months, and the same thing would have happened.”
Golyn Niis had been defended by an amalgamation of the Second, Ninth, and Eleventh Divisions.
In this case, greater numbers did not mean greater strength.
Perhaps even worse than in Khurdalain, the soldiers of the different provinces felt little sense of cohesion or purpose.
The commanding officers were rivals, paranoid with distrust, unwilling to share intelligence.
“Irjah begged the Warlords over and over again to put aside their differences. He couldn’t make them see reason.
” Kitay swallowed. “The first two skirmishes went badly. They took us by surprise. They surrounded the city from the southeast. We hadn’t been expecting them so early.
We didn’t think they had found the mountain pass.
But they came at night, and they . . . they captured Irjah.
They flayed him alive over the city wall so that everyone could see.
That broke our resistance. Most of the soldiers wanted to flee after that.
“After Irjah was dead, the Ninth and Eleventh surrendered en masse. I don’t blame them.
They were outnumbered, and they thought they’d get off easier if they didn’t resist. Thought maybe it’d be better to become prisoners than to die.
” Kitay shuddered violently. “They were so wrong. The Federation general took their surrender with all the usual etiquette. Confiscated their arms, corralled the soldiers into prison camps. The next morning they were marched up the mountain and beheaded. There were a lot of deserters from the Second after that. A couple of us stayed to fight. It was pointless, but . . . it was better than surrendering. We couldn’t dishonor Irjah. Not like that.”
“Wait,” Chaghan interrupted. “Did they take the Empress?”
“The Empress fled,” Kitay said. “She took twenty of her guards and stole out of the city the night after Irjah died.”
Qara and Chaghan made synchronous noises of disbelief, but Kitay shook his head warily. “Who can blame her? It was that or let those monsters get their hands on her, and who knows what they would have done to her . . .”
Chaghan did not look convinced.
“Pathetic,” he spat, and Rin agreed with him. The idea that the Empress had fled from a city while her people were burned, killed, murdered, raped went against everything Rin had been taught about warfare. A general did not abandon his soldiers. An Empress did not abandon her people.
Again, the Talwu’s words rang true.
A leader abandons their people. A ruler begins a campaign. . . . Joy in decapitating enemies. This signifies evil.
Was there any other way to interpret the Hexagram, in the face of the evidence of destruction before them?
Rin had been torturing herself with the Talwu’s words, trying to construe them in any way that didn’t point to the massacre at Golyn Niis, but she had been deluding herself.
The Talwu had told them exactly what to expect.
She should have known that when the Empress had abandoned the Nikara, then all truly was lost.
But the Empress was not the only one who had abandoned Golyn Niis. The entire army had surrendered the city. Within a week Golyn Niis had more or less been delivered to the Federation on the platter, and the entirety of its half million people subjected to the whims of the invading forces.
Those whims turned out to have little to do with the city itself.
Instead, the Federation simply wanted to squeeze Golyn Niis for whatever resources they could find in preparation for a deeper march inland.
They sacked the marketplace, rounded up the livestock, and demanded that families bring out their stores of rice and grain.
Whatever couldn’t be loaded up on their supply wagons, they burned or left out to spoil.
Then they disposed of the people.
“They decided that beheadings took too long, so they started doing things more efficiently,” said Kitay. “They started with gas. You should probably know this, actually; they’ve got this thing, this weapon that emits yellow-green fog—”
“I know,” Altan said. “We saw the same thing in Khurdalain.”
“They took out practically the entire Second Division in one night,” said Kitay.
“Some of us put up a last stand near the south gate. When the gas cleared, nothing was alive. I went there afterward to find survivors. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at.
All over the ground, you could see animals.
Mice, rats, rodents of every kind. So many of them.
They’d crawled out of their holes to die.
When the Militia was gone, nothing stood between the soldiers and our people.
The Federation had fun. They made it a sport.
They threw babies in the air to see if they could cleave them in half before they hit the ground.
They had contests to see how many civilians they could round up and decapitate in an hour.
They raced to see who could stack bodies the fastest.” Kitay’s voice cracked. “Could I have some water?”
Qara wordlessly handed him her canteen.
“How did Mugen become like this?” Chaghan asked wonderingly. “What did you ever do to make them hate you so much?”
“It’s not anything we did,” said Altan. His left hand, Rin noticed, was shaking again. “It’s how the Federation soldiers were trained. When you believe your life means nothing except for your usefulness to your Emperor, the lives of your enemies mean even less.”
“The Federation soldiers don’t feel anything.
” Kitay nodded in agreement. “They don’t think of themselves as people.
They are parts of a machine. They do as they are commanded, and the only time they feel joy is when reveling in another person’s suffering.
There is no reasoning with them. There is no attempting to understand them.
They are accustomed to propagating such grotesque evil that they cannot properly be called human. ” Kitay’s voice trembled.
“When they were cutting my squadron down, I looked into the eyes of one of them. I thought I could make him recognize me as a fellow man. As a person, not just an opponent. And he stared back at me, and I realized I couldn’t connect with him at all. There was nothing human in those eyes.”
Once the survivors began to realize that the Militia had arrived, they emerged from their hiding holes in miserable, straggling groups.
The few survivors of Golyn Niis had been driven deep into the city, hiding in disguised shelters like Kitay or locked up in makeshift prisons and then forgotten when the Federation soldiers decided to continue their march inland.
After discovering two or three such holding rooms, Altan ordered them—Cike and civilians alike—to carefully search the city.
No one disagreed with the order. They all knew, Rin suspected, that it would be horrible to die alone, chained to walls when their captors had long since departed.
“I guess we’re saving people for once,” Baji said. “Feels nice.”
Altan himself led a squad to take on the nearly impossible task of clearing away the bodies. He claimed it was to ward against rot and disease, but Rin suspected it was because he wanted to give them a proper funeral—and because there was so little else that he could do for the city.
They had no time to dig mass graves on the scale necessary before the stench of rotting bodies became unbearable. So they stacked the corpses into large pyres, great bonfires of bodies that burned constantly. Golyn Niis turned from a city of corpses to a city of ash.
But the sheer number of the dead was staggering. The corpses Altan burned barely made a dent in the piles of rotting bodies inside the city walls. Rin didn’t think it was possible to truly cleanse Golyn Niis unless they burned the entire city to the ground.
Eventually they might have to. But not while there could still be survivors.
Rin was outside the city walls trying to find a fresh source of water that wasn’t spoiled with blood when Kitay pulled her aside and reported that they had found Venka.
She had been kept in a “relaxation house,” which was likely the only reason why the Federation had let a division soldier live.
Kitay did not elaborate on what a “relaxation house” was, but he didn’t need to.
Rin could hardly recognize Venka when she went to see her that night.
Her lovely hair was shorn short, as if someone had hacked at it with a knife.
Her lively eyes were now dull and glassy.
Both her arms had been broken at the wrist. She wore them in slings.
Rin saw the angle at which Venka’s arms had been twisted, and knew there was only one way they could have gotten like that.
Venka hardly stirred when Rin entered her room. Only when Rin closed the door did she flinch.
“Hi,” Rin said in a small voice.
Venka looked up dully and said nothing.
“I thought you’d want someone to talk to,” said Rin, though the words sounded hollow and insufficient even as they left her mouth.
Venka glared at her.
Rin struggled for words. She could think of no questions that were not inane. Are you all right? Of course Venka was not all right. How did you survive? By having the body of a woman. What happened to you? But she already knew.
“Did you know they called us public toilets?” Venka asked suddenly.
Rin stopped two paces from the door. Comprehension dawned on her, and her blood turned to ice. “What?”
“They thought I couldn’t understand Mugini,” Venka said with a horrifying attempt at a chuckle. “That’s what they called me, when they were in me.”
“Venka . . .”