“A detachment of troops, sent by the council to look into the reports of trouble brewing to the south, happened to have just arrived in Whitney. I talked with the commander and reported what had happened. I told him that I couldn’t bury well over a thousand bodies by myself and I needed help. I didn’t want my people to lie there and rot in the open or be scavenged by animals. All I could think of was that it was my duty to at least see them buried.

“Fortunately, the commander was an understanding man. He and his troops took me with them. We rode hard all the way back to Grandengart to attend to the dead as swiftly as possible.

“When we got there, the dead were missing.”

Magda blinked, not sure she had heard correctly. “Missing? What do you mean, they were missing?”

Isidore lifted a hand in frustration and then let it drop back into her lap.

“They were gone. Not a single corpse was there by the road where I’d left them. The town had been burned down. The rain had since doused the smoldering rubble. There were no bodies in the town, nor were there any beside the road where the poles had been erected, where I had delivered them from their suffering.”

“Did the troops believe you? Believe your story?”

Isidore grunted bitter confirmation. “The ground was soaked with clotted blood. They believed me. The poles, each with the ropes still attached, were covered with blood as well. There were some remains still scattered about—the viscera of those that animals had ripped open. After inspecting the remains the commander confirmed that they were human.”

Isidore again weakly lifted a hand. “But there were no bodies. None.”

Magda hooked a lock of her short hair behind her ear, at first having expected it to be long. She still wasn’t used to it being short.

“I don’t understand. How could there be no bodies? What could have become of them?”

“Well, I saw tracks that hadn’t been there before, so my first thought was that maybe General Kuno’s army had decided to turn back to the safety of the Old World and they had come back through Grandengart. I thought that maybe on the way back through they had decided to bury the dead rather than let them decay out in the open.”

“No,” Magda said. “That doesn’t sound at all like what I know about Kuno. Baraccus told me that Sulachan personally selected Kuno to lead their forces because he was so ruthless. Kuno wouldn’t care about any such decency as burying his enemy’s dead. Like Sulachan himself, he’s the kind who would have deliberately left the bodies there in the open as a ghastly warning to anyone who had thoughts of resisting. He uses tactics of terror to sap the will of those who will eventually have to face him.”