Radaani glanced over his shoulder at the red and swollen sun that was just now touching the horizon. The others were silhouetted against it, standing in a clot at the mouth of the hall. Radaani turned back and took a pose that suggested an alternative.
"Perhaps we might wait until morning-"
"What if there's a man still alive in there," Otah said. "Will he he alive when the sun's back? If darkness is what we have to work in, we'll work in darkness. Anyone who survived this, I want him. And hooks. Anything. If it's written, bring it to me. Bring it here."
Radaani hesitated, then fell into a pose of acceptance. Otah put his hand on the man's shoulder.
We've failed, he thought. Of course we failed. We never had a chance.
They didn't make camp, didn't cook food. The horses, nervous from the scent of death all around them, were taken hack from the village. Nayiit and his blacksmith friend Saya gleaned lanterns and torches from the wreckage. The long, terrible night began. In the flickering light, the hack halls and grand, destroyed chambers danced like things from children's stories of the deepest hells. Otah and the three men with him-Nayiit, Radaani, and a thin-faced boy whose name escaped him-called out into the darkness that they were friends. That help had arrived. Their voices grew hoarse, and only echoes answered them.
They found the dead. In the beds, in the stripped libraries, in the kitchens and alleyways, and floating facedown in the wide wooden tubs of the bathhouse. No man had been spared. "There had been no survivors. Twice Otah thought he saw a flicker of recognition in Nayiit's eyes when they found a man lying pale and bloodless, eyes closed as if in sleep. In a meeting chamber near what Otah guessed had been the Dai-kvo's private apartments, Otah found the corpse of Athai-kvo, the messenger who had come in the long-forgotten spring to warn him against training men to fight. His eyes had been gouged away. Otah found himself too numb to react. Another detail to come into his mind and leave it again. As the night's chill stole into him, Otah's fingers began to ache, his shoulders and neck growing tight as if the pain could take the place of warmth.
They fell into their rhythm of walking and shouting and not being answered until time lost its meaning. They might have been working for half a hand, they might have been working for a sunless week, and so the dawn surprised him.
One of the other searching parties had quit earlier. Someone had found a firekeeper's kiln and stoked it, and the rich smell of cracked wheat and flaxseed and fresh honey cut through the smoke and death like a sung melody above a street fight. Otah sat on an abandoned cart and cradled a bowl of the sweet gruel in his hands, the heat from the bowl soothing his palms and fingers. He didn't remember the last time he'd eaten, and though he was bone-weary, he could not bring himself to think of sleep. He feared his dreams.
Nayiit walked to him carrying a similar bowl and sat at his side. He looked older. The horrors of the past days had etched lines at the corners of his mouth. Exhaustion had blackened his eyes. Exhaustion and guilt.
"There's no one, is there?" Nayiit said.
"No. They're gone."
Nayiit nodded and looked down to the neat, carefully fitted bricks that made the road. No blade of grass pressed its way through those stony joints. It struck Otah as strangely obscene that a place of such carnage and destruction should have such well-maintained paving stones. It would be better when tree roots had lifted a few of them. Something so ruined should be a ruin. A few years, perhaps. A few years, and this would all be a wild garden dedicated to the dead. The place would be haunted, but at least it would be green.
"There weren't any children. Or women," Nayiit said. "That's something."
"There were in Yalakeht," Otah said.
"I suppose there were. And Saraykeht too."
It took a moment to realize what Nayiit meant. It was so simple to forget that the boy had a wife. Had a child. Or once had, depending on how badly things had gone in the summer cities. Otah felt himself blush.
"I'm sorry. That wasn't ... Forgive my saying that."
"It's true, though. It won't change if we're more polite talking about it."
"No. No, it won't."
They were silent for a long moment. Off to their left, three of the others were laying out blankets, unwilling, it seemed, to seek shelter in the halls of the dead. Farther on, Sava the blacksmith was looking over the Galtic steam wagon with what appeared to be a professional interest. High in the robin's-egg sky, a double vee of cranes flew southward, calling to one another in high, nasal voices. Otah took two cupped fingers and lifted a mouthful of the wheat gruel to his lips. It tasted wonderful-sweet and rich and warm-and yet he didn't enjoy it so much as recognize that he should. His limbs felt heavy and awkward as wood. When Nayiit spoke, his voice was low and shaky.