In the Shadow of the Gods by Rachel Dunne

transports Iveran had butchered. Scal had seen more of it than he had wished, and this was just like it. Only more. All red. All death.
    Bodies lay like a carpet along the main street through Aardanel, wardens and prisoners alike. Men and women and children. Most of the faces familiar. Some faces too bloody or beaten or cut up to recognize. Arms and feet and heads lay scattered around with none to claim them. Those white arrows, fletched with feathers from the snow eagle, stuck out of many bodies. But most were cut open or smashed up. The smell of fire was not enough to cover up the stench of blood and death, of guts and bowels and urine. Scal’s stomach roiled, but nothing came up. It was too vast, too horrible, to be real.
    They were near the barracks where the wardens slept, and Monarro pointed to it with a shaking finger. A body had been nailed to the door. Cut up like Radis, only this one was missing a head. None of them needed a face to know who it was. Only Chief Warden Eddin wore black-dyed uniforms. A raven perched on his shoulder, plucking at the gaping wound of his neck.
    Others were heaving now, adding more mess to the scene. Scal could not find it in him to join. What was the point? This was no more than a nightmare. He would wake up soon, and tell Kerrus. The parro would tell him how even bad dreams were a gift from the Mother. Glimpses of what-might-be, he would say, or what-might-have-been. We should all be thankful we only see a small portion of what Divine Metherra could show us—that, my boy, is mercy.
    His feet were moving. He did not know when he had started to move. That was the way of dreams. Running. Jumping. Slipping over the bodies and gore. His boot punched through bone, a skull, blood and brains spraying up his breeches. It did not matter who it was, had been. Not in a dream. He only kept running.
    The chapel was gone, too close to the palisade to escape burning. Even with the snow red-spattered all around, it was not hard to pick out Kerrus’s red cassock. He was on the ground in front of what was left of the chapel, lying there in his thin old robe like he had had no time to put a coat on. Not that a coat would have done him any good, then or now. Fur could not stop a sword. There was no point in trying to stay warm after the sword had gone through and the blood had gone out. He had always told Scal he would be smiling when he went tomeet the Parents. But there was no smile on his wrinkled face. No joy in his fixed eyes.
    Next to him, Brennon was not smiling either. He had found a knife somewhere. It was clutched still in his fist, unbloodied. It had not done much good against the arrow sticking out the side of his neck.
    Scal’s knees were cold in the few inches of pink snow. He did not remember kneeling down. His hand shook as he reached out and wrapped his fingers around the snow-eagle feathers. Yanked the arrow out of his friend’s neck, arrowhead scraping against bone. The arrow came free, bloody almost half the length of the shaft. Little chunks of meat sticking to the arrowhead. Mercy, Kerrus had told him as they had watched the wardens burning a dead child, has nothing to do with fairness.
    The shouting came dim to his ears, and the sounds of metal against metal. Unimportant. He could not pull his eyes from the arrow. His thumb smoothing down one of the white feathers, the vane rough against his skin. A single sluggish drop of blood collected slowly at the tip of the arrowhead, stretching out until it held on by a thread-thin line, and fell gently onto his thigh.
    It was silent inside the shell of Aardanel. Silent as the dead.
    â€œRuuli?” a gruff voice called out, searing through Scal like an arrow. His fingers tightened around the fletching, crushing the delicate feathers. “Ruuli, where are you?” The rough Northern tongue. The language of Scal’s forgotten childhood. The memories were gone, but the words stuck, somehow. “Ruuli!” Closer