The mud of the inner courtyard was covered in a skin of green grease two inches thick.
Through the mist, the advance banner of the Orthodox Heresy Inquisition drifted forward like a vulture gliding over a cemetery.
Grand Inquisitor Qi Yun walked at the head of five hundred elite shadow students, his ivory robes cinched with chains of blackened silver, a nine-tiered skull rosary rattling against his breastplate.
“Bind the heretics,” Qi Yun commanded, his voice dripping with poisonous triumph. “Flay the scribes. Melt the printing presses into pig iron. Any artisan who can read or write will have their eyes burned out with boiling lime.”
*
Behind him, eight thousand Great Yan shock troops poured through the shattered gates, their heavy bronze axe-spears glinting through the toxic emerald gloom.
They didn’t see an army waiting for them.
They saw only an empty courtyard littered with dead porters, smoking melted rock waste heaps. The rusted iron framework of the Seventh Ward’s blast furnaces.
