“I doubt very much it was fully reinforced. The Sicclunans had to have known that their line was folding. They probably left a skeleton battalion in the keep to buy time for them to fall back and establish a new one. The force the Savages put me with faced south of here seemed like a half-hearted effort as well.”

Brio braces himself as Evie digs particularly deep into his wound with the wetted cloth, closing his eyes.

“I imagine the Sicclunans have become expert at falling back,” he says, shaken.

“We give them little choice in the matter.”

Evie finishes cleaning out the gash and tosses the stained-black rag aside.

“Who took you?” she asks. “And how?”

“I was in the Bottoms. I turned down an alley, a shortcut to the sky carriage. I’d used it a hundred times before—”

Evie grunts. “That’s why they were waiting for you there. They were, weren’t they?”

“Yes. A bag was thrown over my head, and the next thing I remember is standing in a field shoulder to shoulder with the people I used to plead for. My clothes had been stripped from me. I was wearing rags. When I tried to explain what had happened I took the butt of a mace in my gut.”

“Do you remember anything before the training field?”

“I caught a… a flash… of a black cape. Black boots.”

Evie’s brow hangs heavily. “The Protectorate Ministry.”

“Most likely. The only good thing is they took me leaving and not going. If they’d caught me while I was headed the other way they would’ve had what they were no doubt looking for.”

“What’s that?”

“Proof, of what’s really going on here, what the other purpose of the Savage Legion is.”

“What proof?”

“Dispatches, between the Protectorate Ministry and the Capitol’s Aegin commanders, instructing them to increase arrests in aid of filling the Savage ranks, focusing on vagrants. They stated explicitly they were expanding their recruiting beyond the condemned, against Crachian law. There were also decrees sent out to all the councils that any petitioners speaking against the state be reported to the Ministry. I found dozens of them, copies made of the originals, stored away in the Spectrum archives. Can you imagine? This wonderful, oppressive bureaucracy of ours, every document required to be penned three times for the sake of posterity or records or whatever.”

“They didn’t think anyone would ever bother to look.”

“Of course not. No one else cares.”

“Why did you?”

“I began to hear disturbing things. People were disappearing, from the Bottoms. They were being arrested and never returned. Husbands, wives, parents, brothers, and sisters, they came to me in secret, terrified of even talking about it, afraid they’d be next. I begin to hear muddled whispers about this… the Legion. People used as flesh weapons, hurled at the front line of our enemies like artillery.”