The bodies reminded Roh of Dasai and Aramey, Nioni and Kihin. He thought of his brother dying alone in a pool of his own blood on icy tundra such as this. I was a coward, Roh thought. A selfish coward. His throat closed and tears came. It was so cold, the moisture froze at the corners of his eyes before it could fall.

“This is different,” Kadaan said. “They don’t usually leave the bodies. They spirit them off somewhere.”

Roh wiped his face and looked up at the ruined gate of the tower. The ironbound door had burst inward, shattered like glass. The edges of the gate that remained fixed on the hinges looked like the remnants of the windows.

There was no movement along the battlements. Just inside the gate were heaps of Saiduan bodies. The walls blocked most of the wind-carried snow, so the bodies remained almost entirely exposed. Crystallized blood, frosty entrails, headless corpses, men shattered in two. Great scorch marks stained the walls inside. The buildings surrounding the keep had been reduced to charred stone, their roofs and interiors carried away by fire.

The sanisi followed the trail of bodies and burned-out homes up into the interior of the tower.

The gate there had been broken open as well, with the same violent force that had torn apart the gate outside.

The party did not speak as they moved through the keep. Dead sanisi littered the floor. Roh wondered at first where they all had come from – wasn’t this a prison? Then he realized that people from the surrounding areas must have fled here, hoping it was a place of refuge. Among the dead Saiduan were the shorter, paler bodies of the invaders. The invaders who looked like Dhai. Roh looked from the dead to Kadaan and wondered why no one ever called the invaders by name.

For the first time, Roh understood what kind of battle they were fighting. This wasn’t a war at all. It was genocide. It was the complete decimation of an entire people. The invaders were doing to the Saiduan what the Saiduan tried to do to the Dhai, and what the Dhai had done to the Talamynii before them. There would be no middle ground. No peace. No end. Dasai and the others were dead for nothing. Why had he lived? To what purpose?

Luna came up beside him in the cold hallway. “What is it?” he said.

“We have to win,” Roh said.

“I’ll settle for dying old,” Luna said.

“I won’t,” Roh said.