He didn’t touch him. “What happened?”

Seren was vomiting, his face gray with pain. The hand he had clutched to his stomach was slick with blood.

Beyond a gold awning where fry-ups were sizzling ran an exceeding narrow walk between three-story buildings, accounting houses topped by apartments. A young militia man appeared in the gap. Seeing Kesh, he beckoned him over.

“Weren’t you one of the Master Feden’s slaves? Aren’t you hired now by the outlanders? Best you come see.”

Back here the buildings were a maze, walkways barely wide enough to let a barrow pass. They turned a right corner, then a left, and in the center of a stone drainage ditch awash in spilling sewage and flowing blood lay the other Qin soldier, Tam.

He was dead.

32

From a ridge, Marit looked over a substantial valley, green with the season. Far below, a lake and river sparkled in the afternoon sunlight. The Orator and her Three Daughters formed a bulwark to the southeast, snow dusting their heights and clouds threatening behind. To the east rose a sheer line of cliffs running almost due north and south, ends lost in haze. The uneven patch of lifeless brown scarring the lake’s shore near the confluence with the river marked the town of Walshow.

Here on the northern frontier of the Hundred, where many weather systems met and mingled, the wind blew in changeable eddies. Vultures drifted along currents of air right where the foot of the long ridge met the valley floor. Far above, a speck circled, almost certainly an eagle, although it glided too high up for her to be sure.

She led Warning along the ridge trail to the road, a graded avenue that, having cut through the hills that separated the valley from upper Haldia, now switch-backed down the grueling slope into the depression. This late in the day, she had the road to herself, no traders, no casual traffic moving up or down. She might have flown it, but now that she had traveled all this way through the wild lands of Heaven’s Ridge, keeping out of sight, she found herself reluctant to hasten into the belly of the beast.

And no wonder.

Where the road bottomed out on the valley floor, poles had been erected at intervals as trees are planted to shade a thoroughfare. Corpses in every stage of decay dangled from the posts, hoisted up by their arms and left to rot. Where the soft tissue had pulled free, remains had fallen into heaps on the dirt. Some of these bones had been weathering here for years, when they ought to have been offered release at a Sorrowing Tower. The impiety—the sheer scale of executions—was meant to intimidate anyone approaching Walshow. Where had all these dead people come from? She remembered Sediya’s chant: “The weak die, the strong kill.”

She rode on through the drowsy afternoon.

Most of the trees in the valley had been cut down. Sheep and goats grazed among stumps. After about two mey, the scrub and pastureland spilled into fields being worked by men and women who kept their heads down, glancing at her swiftly and getting straight back to work. Threads of smoke rose from the town. It was too quiet. Chains rattled when the wind caught them just right. Skulls leered at her from the ground, tilted back to make their unhinged jaws open in a wide grin.