floor. The magician stirred, perhaps said something, but Khirro didn’t notice. Farther from the wall, able to see more of its surface, other faces became visible—dozens of them.
“Hey,” Khirro called struggling to his feet.
“What is it?”
Athryn woke instantly, hand on the hilt of his dagger. Someone stood in the doorway: Shyn or Ghaul, maybe both. Khirro didn’t look.
“The walls,” Khirro whispered as though not wanting to wake the children sleeping within. He pointed with a quivering finger. “The walls are made of children.”
He felt the others beside him but didn’t look at them. Instead, he stared at the wall composed of face after face. Some of the younger ones looked placid, calm, but expressions of pain and fear twisted the others, silent screams mortared in their open mouths. Khirro’s jaw dropped, but his eyes stared, seeing the faces while the children stared back, blind. The smallest was no more than a babe, the eldest perhaps seven or eight summers old. Their faces horrified Khirro. Corpses didn’t wear such expressions—these children had been alive when sealed in the mud.
The hand on Khirro’s shoulder made him jump. He’d forgotten his friends were there.
“We must go,” Shyn said, his voice low, controlled. “This place is evil.”
Khirro looked at him and saw sadness in his eyes, and in Athryn’s, too. Ghaul’s face remained stony.
“Where’s Elyea?” Khirro’s voice sounded small to his own ears, like all the energy had been sucked from it.
“Bathing at the lagoon,” Ghaul replied.
“Gather everything. I’ll get Elyea,” Khirro said.
He spun toward the door and took one step before more faces staring at him, more bodies supporting the walls, stopped him. A hundred anguished children pleaded to be set free from the walls by the door.
Khirro turned his gaze to the floor and hurried out into the ruined village, a sickly feeling clawing its way out of his gut and into the back of his throat. He glanced at the other huts as he passed and saw more of the same: innocent faces—invisible in the dark and the rain when they arrived—glared at him from every surface. Where the baked mud was broken, bones showed: smooth tops of yellowed skulls, pointed ribs, shattered thigh bones.
The sound of water tumbling over the fall and into the lagoon kept him moving. He had to get Elyea, spare her from these sights. He plunged through a thicket of trees and emerged on the shore of the lagoon to see the waterfall cascading over a rocky outcropping thirty feet above into water murky with silt and mud kicked up by Elyea’s bathing. She stood in the middle of the shallow pool facing away from him, water up past her waist, wet hair clinging to her freckled back.
“Elyea,” he called urgently. She turned to him, arms crossed in front of her bare breasts, and he remembered her face in his dream—agonized, sweaty. “We have to go.”
“But I’m having such fun,” she said with mock pout. “I love the water, it makes me feel free.”
She dropped her hands into the water, then threw them up over her head, splashing droplets into the air to sparkle in the rising sunlight. Khirro glanced at her breasts, but the memory of his dream, and of the children in the walls, kept his eyes from lingering.
“Now, Elyea. We have to go now.”
She covered her chest again. “Has something happened?”
“I’ll tell you when we’ve left.”
She’d waded only two steps toward shore when the first corpse floated to the surface: a girl of about eight summers, naked, her swollen body white and puckered with seaweed tangled in her hair. Others followed: a boy a little older, an infant. Elyea gasped. More corpses appeared bobbing on the waves created by the waterfall, and body parts—arms and legs and heads.
“Elyea! Hurry!”
She didn’t move. For half-an-hour she’d bathed with these things hidden in the mud beneath her feet and now she could only stare. The corpse of an infant girl, bald and sweet as a cherub even in water-bloated death, brushed Elyea’s leg. She screamed.
Khirro plunged into the water, heedless of the body parts bumping his legs. Corpses and severed limbs covered the surface of the lagoon, a few of them adults with lips and nipples purple against their bulging white skin; most were children.
So many children.
Elyea had stopped screaming by the time he reached her. She stood, eyes wide, hands clamped over her mouth as convulsive sobs shook her. Khirro forced a hand under her arm and dragged her toward shore, fighting his own panic