Brica shrugged, hot, dirty, not much caring. “Who are all these people? Were they to do with the town?”

“Of course they were. These were the citizens—there are the dead of centuries here, perhaps.”

“Why weren’t they buried inside the town?”

“Because it wasn’t allowed. Unless you were a very young baby, in which case you didn’t count as a person anyhow . . . That was the law.”

“The Emperor’s law. Now we make up our own laws,” Brica said.

“Or some thug like Artorius makes them up for us.”

“He isn’t so bad,” Brica said.

Regina read another gravestone. “ ‘A sweetest child, torn away no less suddenly than the partner of Dis.’ “

“What does that mean?”

Regina frowned, trying to remember her lessons with Aetius. “I think it’s a quotation from Virgil.” But the poet’s name meant nothing to Brica, and Regina let it pass.

Some of the graves had evidently once held wooden coffins, now long rotted away, and these graves were filled only with a scatter of bones. But in some of the grander tombs coffins of lead-lined stone had been used. These were prized out of the ground, roughly opened, and the grisly contents dumped back into the yawning ground so that the lead could be salvaged. Occasionally there were grave goods: bits of jewelry, perfume bottles, even tools—and, in one small and pathetic grave, a wooden doll. The workers would snatch these up, inspect them briefly, and pocket them if they looked like they were worth anything. There was no great stench, save for the scent of moist open earth. These bodies were decades old at least, and—except for those corpses tipped out of the more robust lead coffins—the worms had done their work.

Toward the end of the day the broken gravestones were loaded into carts, or set on people’s backs, for the haul back to Artorius’s capital.

On their return to the dunon, Artorius again came to seek out Regina. He insisted that she not spend another day at the gruesome cemetery-quarry, but come with him to inspect his developing capital.

“I value your opinion,” he said, his grin confident and disarming. “Intellect and spirit are all too rare these sorry days. You are wasted digging up bones.”

“I am no soldier.”

“I have plenty of soldiers, who are all trained to tell me what I want to hear. But you, as I know very well, have no fear of me. I know, above all, that you are a survivor. And survival is what I am intent on: the first priority.”

So she agreed. After all, she had no real choice.

They walked around the dunon. The hill was flat-topped, a plug of landscape. To the east was a ridge of high ground, but from the hill’s upper slopes there was a long view to be had of the plains to the west.