It took all of Corinn’s concentration to keep her gaze elevated above the gore that littered the palace. She tried to keep her eyes vacant, uninterested, letting the bodies on the floor; the blood-splattered walls; and the strewn, shattered debris remain vague, only defined enough so that she could navigate through them. She focused on mundane objects in the distance, murals at the ends of hallways, doorframes, particular bricks singled out on the walls. Soon she planned to lock herself in her room until the cleanup was complete, until every sign and sight of the carnage she had orchestrated was scrubbed from the floors and walls and washed out of fabrics. She would send Rialus to the lower town to conscript the Acacian peasants huddled there for the task. She would pay them with freedom, with privilege, with her love and thanks. She would infuse them with pride in the Acacian Empire again. There would be a great deal to do, but these things would all come later. First, she had to walk these halls and complete one more task.

She found Rialus waiting for her. Earlier, when a Numrek soldier returned to inform her that the palace was controlled, Rialus had gone before her to assess the situation. Now he looked queasy. His tongue was quick enough, though, and he began talking before she had even reached him, expressing his amazement at how easily the palace had fallen. Her plan had worked perfectly. The palace was under her power already. The lower town was shut tight and trembling. There might be a few Meins hiding in the servants’ areas and in the town, but the Numrek were hunting them down door to door. The priests protecting the Tunishnevre had proven quite stubborn. They had clung to the sarcophagi until they were ripped from them and killed on the spot. Several noble families were caught trying to sail from the ports, their yachts piled high with all they could carry. A few boats had managed to get away. The Numrek, not being a seafaring people, did not-

Corinn cut him off. “Where is he?”

Rialus did not need to ask whom she meant. “In the ceremonial chamber, as you ordered.”

As the two walked, Rialus rattled on, detailing what he had learned about the battle. Much of it had gone just as the Numreks imagined. Their surprise appearance had created instant chaos. The first killed had been two Meinish women whose heads had twirled in the air before they had so much as voiced their alarm. Most of what had followed was pure butchery. Meinish guards fought bravely enough, he supposed, but they were cut down in ones and twos. Few of them had managed to organize a cohesive response. There had been a large skirmish in the main upper courtyard, where the palace battalion had focused their efforts. The Numrek had welcomed the sport of it.

Hanish had been in the ceremonial chamber when the attack began, but he had rushed out to respond. He and a band of Punisari held the lower courtyard right to the last, trying to block the entrance to the chamber. The Numrek had surrounded them, pushed in on them with their greater numbers, working at them like so many butchers slaughtering ornery beasts. The Punisari had not made it easy. They were Hanish’s best men, lean and muscled, capable of lopping free even a Numrek’s meaty arm. Each of them had blocked and struck at peak speed, blurs of motion that betrayed no fatigue, many wielding two swords. They had fought in a circle formation, drawing closer together as they fell. None of them had made even the slightest overture of surrender. Hanish himself spoke to his men the entire time. Few Numrek, however, know any but their own language. None could tell Rialus what the chieftain had said to his men as they, and everything they had ever fought for, died.

“Pity,” Rialus said. “I’d have liked to have heard what he made of the situation. Bit of a surprise, I imagine. Not what he had planned when he woke up…”

The last two remaining with Hanish had been the hardest to get rid of. They had reached a pitch of fighting that made it almost impossible to land a strike. One was eventually taken down after his leg was sliced off at the knee. He fell and, trying to right himself with the use of his blood-spurting stump, he became easy prey. The other got stabbed through the back of the head with a Numrek lance, an injury that, by the look of it, cut his spine and rendered his body instantly immobile.

Hanish, after this, had done his best to fight to the death. At some point he had realized that the Numrek were not trying to kill him. He had stopped fighting, let his blade droop and rotated it in slow circles, waiting. When none attacked, he pulled his Ilhach dagger and would have slit his belly, had the Numrek not grappled with him first. This also must have been a strange sight, a horde of the burly-armed soldiers dropping their weapons and struggling to pummel into submission a man who was intent on ending his own life-this when they were covered in gore from a few hours of blood work themselves. Rialus admitted that the Numrek had ill treated Hanish, but he left them little choice. He still lived. He was bound as she ordered and awaited her in the chamber.

When Rialus seemed to have exhausted his knowledge of the day, he turned and studied Corinn’s profile. “Princess, this is a work of genius, of simplicity. Once it is cleaned up, the world will bow to you and your beauty. They’ll forget the bloodshed here.” He hesitated a moment, his tongue flicking out to moisten his lips. “Of all the surprises you’ve devised, none is more of a revelation than you yourself are. I pray you never find reason to disfavor me.”

Something about this praise touched her. She felt a flush around her eyes, an itch that suggested tears were not far behind. She spoke quickly. “Thank you, Rialus. You have been a great help to me. I will not forget.”

Corinn left the ambassador standing in the open air outside the passageway into the chamber that now housed the Tunishnevre. She steadied herself a moment and drew out the one weapon she now carried. She walked past the Numrek, milling about the entrance, and into the dark corridor with a crisp step unconsciously modeled on Maeander’s stone-chipping gait. As the chamber opened up around her, she felt the seething incorporeal life in the air. She tried to ignore it, moving through the huge space of the place with no outward sign of discomfort. It took great effort. If air could scratch like claws, the air in this room would have shredded her. If silent screams could consume flesh, she would have been eaten alive. All her instincts told her to turn and run. She did not. She cut her progress with the point of her chin. Pride, even in the face of the undead, now seemed of greatest importance to her.

Hanish hung suspended over the Scatevith stone. His arms were bound above him, secured at the wrists, and his head slumped forward as limp as a corpse’s. He was naked from the waist up, his chest ribboned with bruises and abrasions. A gash under his armpit dripped a stain of blood, like rust, stretching all the way down into his trousers. He was bound at the ankles also, in such a way that if he tried to move he would be able only to writhe in the air but not kick out. One of his feet jutted out at a strange angle, broken. Perhaps most horrible, though, was his hair. It had been hacked away by Numrek swords, leaving his pate uneven, mangy, his scalp exposed in some places.

Part of Corinn wanted to fly to him, to grasp him around the torso and lift his weight and find some way to get him down and to beg forgiveness. She wanted to search about on the ground for clumps of his straw-colored locks and stick them back in place. It seemed unfathomable that Hanish, the chieftain of the Known World, could be reduced to this state within the space of a few hours. Is this the way the world worked? The way she had the power to affect it?