“Balendin’s there,” Talal said, pointing through the smoke toward what had been the town square. “He’s crossed the first channel.”

Valyn raised the long lens. Gwenna’s explosion had blasted out most of the log dam, but it was still possible to sneak across on foot, darting from one trunk to the next. The Urghul had been doing so all night, replenishing their numbers on the one island they held. It was a slow and painstaking process, one that forced them to leave their horses behind, but then, if they found a way to cross the central channel, it would be the numbers, not the horses that mattered.

Valyn focused on Balendin. There had been no sign of the leach all night. What he’d been doing during the last attack, Valyn had no idea, but there he was, arms stained past the elbows with blood, bison cloak wrapped around his shoulders, feathers in his hair twisting in the morning wind, eyes fixed firmly on the island to the west, where Valyn watched from atop his tower and the loggers prepared for the next assault.

Valyn shifted the long lens. “He brought his prisoners.”

Talal nodded silently.

The captives—dozens of them—knelt in ragged ranks across what had been the northern end of the town square. Their wrists were bound and rough rope noosed their necks, linking one to the next, preventing anyone from running. None of them looked likely to try. Most kept their eyes on the mud, as though by shirking the gaze of their captors they might somehow escape notice. The faces of those few who did look up were filled with terror rather than defiance. They watched Balendin as he paced back and forth in the square with all the mindless helplessness of livestock waiting their turn at the slaughter.

A wave of dark disgust rose inside Valyn.

“Almost a hundred of them,” he muttered, “and not one making any sort of play. Not one fighting back.”

Talal shifted his eyes from the square to Valyn.

“They’re not Kettral,” the leach said quietly. “They don’t know how to fight back.”

He was right, but that didn’t make the spectacle of several dozen men and women waiting meekly for their own horrific murders any easier to stomach. Valyn watched as two ksaabe cut an older man loose from the line, then dragged him forward to the center of the square. Balendin considered his captive for a moment, then smiled and drew his knife. The man began to pray, a frantic, repetitive plaint to Heqet that did nothing to stop the blade. Balendin took his right eye first, then his ear, then his shriveled cock.

“He’s gathering his power,” Valyn said, forcing himself to watch.

Talal nodded. “The question is: what’s he going to do with it?”