The Poppy War (The Poppy War #1) - R. F. Kuang Page 0,159

hadn’t even bothered to leave behind a skeleton patrol. Which meant that the Federation didn’t care who came into Golyn Niis.

Which meant that whatever lay behind those city walls, it wasn’t worth guarding.

When the Cike finally succeeded in dragging open the heavy gates, an appalling stink assaulted them like a slap to the face. Rin knew the smell. She had experienced it at Sinegard and Khurdalain. She knew what to expect now. It had been a fool’s hope to expect anything different, but still she could not fully register the sight that awaited them when they passed through the barrier.

All of them stood still at the gates, unwilling to take one step farther inside.

For a long time none of them could speak.

Then Ramsa fell to his knees and began to cackle with laughter.

“Khurdalain,” he gasped. “We were all so obsessed with holding Khurdalain.”

He doubled over, sides shaking with mirth, and beat his fists against the dirt.

Rin envied him.

Golyn Niis was a city of corpses.

The bodies had been arranged deliberately, as if the Federation had wanted to leave a greeting message for the next people to walk into the city. The destruction possessed a strange artfulness, a sadistic symmetry. Corpses were piled in neat, even rows, forming pyramids of ten, then nine, then eight. Corpses were stacked against the wall. Corpses were placed across the street in tidy lines. Corpses were arranged as far as the eye could see.

Nothing human moved. The only sounds in the city were wind rustling through debris, the buzzing of flies, and the squawking of carrion birds.

Rin’s eyes watered. The stench was overwhelming. She looked to Altan, but his face was a mask. He marched them stoically down the main street into the city center, as if he was determined to witness the full extent of the destruction.

They marched in silence.

The Federation handiwork became more elaborate the deeper they traveled into the city. Close to the city square, the Federation had arrayed the corpses in states of incredible desecration, grotesque positions that defied human imagination. Corpses nailed to boards. Corpses hung by their tongues from hooks. Corpses dismembered in every possible way; headless, limbless, displaying mutilations that must have been performed while the victim was still alive. Fingers removed, then stacked in a small pile beside stubby hands. An entire line of castrated men, severed penises placed delicately on their slack-jawed mouths.

One sees great joy in decapitating enemies.

There were so many beheadings. Heads stacked up in neat little piles, not yet so rotted that they had become skulls, but no longer resembling human faces. Whatever heads retained enough flesh to form expressions wore identical looks of terrible dullness, as if they had never been alive.

As though burning; as though dying.

Perhaps due to some initial desire for sanitation, or mere curiosity, the Federation had tried to ignite several corpse pyramids. But they had given up before the job was finished. Perhaps they did not want to waste the oil. Perhaps the stink became unbearable. The bodies were grotesque, half-charred spectacles; hair had turned to ash, and the top layers of skin had turned a crinkling black, but the worst part was that there was something beneath the ashes that looked identifiably human.

The subject is with tears flowing in torrents, groaning in sorrow.

In the square they found bizarrely short skeletons—not corpses, but skeletons gleaming pristine white. They looked at first like children’s bones, but upon closer examination, Enki identified them as adult torsos. He bent down and touched the dirt where one skeleton was fixed to the ground. The top half of the body had been stripped clean so the bones glistened in the sunlight, while the lower half remained intact in the dirt.

“They were buried,” he said, disgusted. “They were buried up to the waist and set upon by dogs.”

Rin could not understand how the Federation had found so many different ways to inflict suffering. But each corner they turned revealed another instance in the string of horrors, barbarian savagery matched only by inventiveness. A family, arms still around each other, impaled upon the same spear. Babies lying at the bottoms of vats, their skin a horrible shade of crimson, floating in the water in which they’d boiled to death.

In the hours that had passed, the only living creatures they encountered were dogs unnaturally fattened by feeding on corpses. Dogs, and vultures.

“Orders?” Unegen finally asked Altan.

They looked to their commander.

Altan hadn’t spoken since they had walked through the city gates. His skin had turned a ghostly shade