Black smoke still drifted across the shattered catapult line when four spectral bone-steeds halted at the edge of the northern bluff.
The beasts did not breathe. Their hooves burned with pale green corpse-fire, leaving scorched glass prints in the white salt crust.
A tall man sat atop the lead mount. He wore high-collared executioner robes of midnight silk, fastened with thirty silver needles. Across his chest hung the silver-scythe crest of the Imperial Censorate.
Inquisitor Thorne-Crow pulled his reins, looking down at the smoking wreckage with utter contempt.
Twenty scorched siege engines lay snapped like dry twigs. Three hundred imperial engineers were still dragging their burned dead from the smoldering oil trenches.
General Dravus knelt in the alkaline dirt thirty paces away. His gilded cuirass was blackened with soot. Blisters covered his jaw where reflected pitch had splashed his collar.
“Three weeks,” Thorne-Crow said. His voice was soft, carrying like frost scraping against an iron tomb. “The Grand Chancellor assigned twenty thousand frontier troops to this penal sector. You were ordered to secure the salt roads and bury three dozen broken exiles.”
Dravus pressed his forehead against the sharp salt gravel. His fingers dug into the crust.
