I didn’t resist the order. The battle had exhausted me physically and magically. Now, the aftermath had battered me emotionally. I was shaking for a dozen different reasons. Rest was most definitely needed.
I walked away from the hasty surgery and found a different shady spot to sit in. I looked out across the broken pagoda and Targin’s body. I thought back to when I’d first seen him, arguing with Mahrai on a rooftop not an hour before. Ours had been a brief but brutal acquaintance.
Now that I had time to consider it, that rooftop argument took on a new significance. Mahrai had said that she fought only for herself, not for the cause of Targin or the Unswerving Shadows. If that was the case, then maybe she could be drawn away from their side. Perhaps we could save ourselves the effort of fighting her and her golem again, and, in the process, save her from the darkness she had been drawn into. She wasn’t fully corrupt, like so many in Hyng’ohr, and that meant there was hope for her. Her actions showed it as loudly as her words. If she had wanted to walk the Straight Path, she would have stuck around and tried to kill me, as her comrades had done. But she had gotten out of the fray before it even started.
She wasn’t one of them.
Movement caught my eye. Ganyir emerged from between the houses and walked slowly over to Targin’s body. He stopped a few feet away and stared down at the bloody, mud-covered corpse.
Ganyir’s face didn’t even twitch. Years of training to be a lord had their hold on him, suppressing any sight of his feelings. Still, the emotion of the moment was too much for him. His own blood lay dead before him, at the hands of his allies. Men who he had been born to lead lay scattered and broken, many of them killed by him. He sank to his knees and stared unmoving at the face of his brother, caught up in a hidden world of grief.
I closed my eyes, and sleep took me. I didn’t know if it lasted two seconds or two hours, but the next thing I was aware of was Vesma sitting down beside me. She laid a hand on my arm.
“You did good,” she said.
“I wish I could have done more. Chosi and Fig fell in the battle.”
“They did good too. It was other people’s evil that killed them.”
Chapter Fourteen
We dug the graves in a patch of ground behind the sand-sunken village. First, we cleared the heaped sand, using earth Augmenting as well as physical labor. Such sand was no good for a burial ground. It was shifting and fickle, too easily blown away by the winds and by time. A final resting place should be exactly that, and so it was only when we hit the rich, solid soil underneath that we started digging the graves.
Ganyir used his magic to clear spaces for the men and women we had killed, warriors who had once served under his command. He knelt at the place where each grave would be, planted his fist on the ground, and closed his eyes. The earth trembled and then parted, rising up to each side, creating a hole for a body to rest inside. The symmetry of the holes revealed this power as something familiar to Ganyir, an act he had carried out before. This was not his first war and certainly not his first losses.
The initiates insisted on digging Fig and Choshi’s graves themselves. They found shovels in the back of one of the houses, a little rusty but still serviceable, and set to work. Drek dug with the skill and certainty inherent to his dwarven people, Onvar with fastidious earnestness. Elorinelle, the one least acclimatized to this sort of labor, worked until the sweat poured from her brow. Only Zedal, one leg missing below the knee, sat off to one side and watched, her scaled face twitching in frustration. She wouldn’t let her changed body hold her back for long; I was sure of that. One way or another, impatience would soon drive her to find a way back onto her feet and into action, and I feared for anyone— friend or enemy—who stood in the way of that mission.
While they worked, I helped bring up the corpses of the enemy soldiers. These faces meant nothing to me, which made it easier to deal with than my own losses. But I couldn’t help remembering that some of them were dead at my hands. The path I had chosen had consequences, and for some people, they were terrible.
Still, I knew I’d done the right thing. Their deaths would serve as lessons to anyone who allied themselves with a cult.
One by one, we lowered the bodies into the graves and covered them over. Their armor and weapons went in with them.
“We don’t need those,” Talis explained. “But they might need them in the next life.”
Everyone gathered around to help with Choshi and Fig. We hadn’t been careless in burying our enemies, but with these two, there was an extra degree of care. Their friends laid them out in the dirt, arms folded across their chests, weapons by their sides. Elorinelle placed a pouch full of dates in Fig’s hands, “for the journey.” Onvar reached into Choshi’s pocket, pulled out a leather string carrying a simple amber bead wound around with blond hair, and placed it between her fingers.
“It was her brother’s,” he explained. “He died fighting the cult when they first came to Gonki.”
While the rest of us filled the graves, Zedal sat scratching symbols into round stones that Elorinelle had gathered. Each symbol was the same—a large ring with three smaller semicircles protruding around the circumference, and in the center, a pictogram for the name of the deceased.
