him alive over the city wall so that everyone could see. That broke our resistance. Most of the soldiers wanted to flee after that.
“After Irjah was dead, the Ninth and Eleventh surrendered en masse. I don’t blame them. They were outnumbered, and they thought they’d get off easier if they didn’t resist. Thought maybe it’d be better to become prisoners than to die.” Kitay shuddered violently. “They were so wrong. The Federation general took their surrender with all the usual etiquette. Confiscated their arms, corralled the soldiers into prison camps. The next morning they were marched up the mountain and beheaded. There were a lot of deserters from the Second after that. A couple of us stayed to fight. It was pointless, but . . . it was better than surrendering. We couldn’t dishonor Irjah. Not like that.”
“Wait,” Chaghan interrupted. “Did they take the Empress?”
“The Empress fled,” Kitay said. “She took twenty of her guards and stole out of the city the night after Irjah died.”
Qara and Chaghan made synchronous noises of disbelief, but Kitay shook his head warily. “Who can blame her? It was that or let those monsters get their hands on her, and who knows what they would have done to her . . .”
Chaghan did not look convinced.
“Pathetic,” he spat, and Rin agreed with him. The idea that the Empress had fled from a city while her people were burned, killed, murdered, raped went against everything Rin had been taught about warfare. A general did not abandon his soldiers. An Empress did not abandon her people.
Again, the Talwu’s words rang true.
A leader abandons their people. A ruler begins a campaign. . . . Joy in decapitating enemies. This signifies evil.
Was there any other way to interpret the Hexagram, in the face of the evidence of destruction before them? Rin had been torturing herself with the Talwu’s words, trying to construe them in any way that didn’t point to the massacre at Golyn Niis, but she had been deluding herself. The Talwu had told them exactly what to expect.
She should have known that when the Empress had abandoned the Nikara, then all truly was lost.
But the Empress was not the only one who had abandoned Golyn Niis. The entire army had surrendered the city. Within a week Golyn Niis had more or less been delivered to the Federation on the platter, and the entirety of its half million people subjected to the whims of the invading forces.
Those whims turned out to have little to do with the city itself. Instead, the Federation simply wanted to squeeze Golyn Niis for whatever resources they could find in preparation for a deeper march inland. They sacked the marketplace, rounded up the livestock, and demanded that families bring out their stores of rice and grain. Whatever couldn’t be loaded up on their supply wagons, they burned or left out to spoil.
Then they disposed of the people.
“They decided that beheadings took too long, so they started doing things more efficiently,” said Kitay. “They started with gas. You should probably know this, actually; they’ve got this thing, this weapon that emits yellow-green fog—”
“I know,” Altan said. “We saw the same thing in Khurdalain.”
“They took out practically the entire Second Division in one night,” said Kitay. “Some of us put up a last stand near the south gate. When the gas cleared, nothing was alive. I went there afterward to find survivors. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. All over the ground, you could see animals. Mice, rats, rodents of every kind. So many of them. They’d crawled out of their holes to die. When the Militia was gone, nothing stood between the soldiers and our people. The Federation had fun. They made it a sport. They threw babies in the air to see if they could cleave them in half before they hit the ground. They had contests to see how many civilians they could round up and decapitate in an hour. They raced to see who could stack bodies the fastest.” Kitay’s voice cracked. “Could I have some water?”
Qara wordlessly handed him her canteen.
“How did Mugen become like this?” Chaghan asked wonderingly. “What did you ever do to make them hate you so much?”
“It’s not anything we did,” said Altan. His left hand, Rin noticed, was shaking again. “It’s how the Federation soldiers were trained. When you believe your life means nothing except for your usefulness to your Emperor, the lives of your enemies mean even less.”
“The Federation