The Broken Isles (Legends of the Red Sun 4) by Mark Charan Newton

of them still had an arrowhead embedded in the wood. One road was relatively clear, with a small pile of rubble in one corner.
    At the far end, where the Dragoons were now heading, a dust cloud floated above an end-terrace, which had recently collapsed. A few neighbours had clustered around to examine the damage without
offering much help, but the Dragoons dismounted and began to clear them out of the way, before they set to work.
    Brynd and Eir came closer to see that half the end house had just buckled over. It was an area of about fifteen feet wide now reduced to a mound of stone, with broken furniture jutting out of
the gaps. It wasn’t the first time this had happened since the war, and wouldn’t be the last.
    As the skies clouded over and the dust settled, the Dragoons set about climbing further into the debris. Four soldiers formed a chain along which they passed chunks of masonry. Brynd and Eir
dismounted from their horses, approached the scene and offered their help.
    ‘Nah, you’re all right. We’ll have this sorted soon, commander,’ said a tall, bearded officer with a wry smile. ‘It’s our job, like.’
    With a remarkable nonchalance they continued the chain of operation, the heavy men grunting as they moved some of the heavier stone back first. Two of the other soldiers had run further along
the street to flag for civilian assistance and, after returning unsuccessfully, one of them was sent on his horse to fetch more troops.
    Brynd turned to Eir. ‘This has been the main operation since the war – clearances of property, of streets, seeing that structures are safe. We tried to keep a log of all the
progress, though it probably isn’t as efficient as I’d like.’
    ‘These are people’s homes, though. How do you log the emotional distress this causes?’
    He knew what she meant. He led a life of numbers and logic, and in the clean-up he couldn’t afford to take such things into account.
    A middle-aged woman with straggly brown hair and dressed in heavy, drab robes, burst forward onto the scene. She dropped her bags, and began to wail into her hands. Brynd watched as she sank to
her knees on one side of the collapsed building, crying, ‘My boys, my boys.’
    Eir rushed over to the woman and knelt by her side. Brynd watched the former Stewardess of the Empire hold her as the woman emitted great, heaving sobs into her shoulder.
    Seeing Eir react to such raw human emotion, and so quickly, made Brynd contemplate whether the sheer scale of these losses, or even the war itself, had began to numb his senses, and chisel away
at his compassion. The Night Guard were enhanced in any number of physical ways, but the ability to offer a shoulder to cry on did not seem to be one of them.
    The soldiers eventually uncovered the dead bodies of two teenage lads and loaded them gently onto the cart. Their mother, with Eir still gripping her hands tightly, leant on the cart, pressing
her tearful face into one of the boy’s dirtied, bloodied shirts.
    While this continued, Brynd walked along the street to knock on the doors of several of the houses.
    Two people answered, only one of whom knew the woman well enough to take her in. It was an elderly woman who seemed fit and healthy and sane, and Brynd told her what had happened, pressed a few
coins into her hand, 10 Sota in all, and instructed her to buy food and look after the woman.
    As he returned to guide the woman towards this temporary sanctuary, he thought to himself, If I keep opening my purse like that, for every dead body, I’ll have nothing left . .
.
    *
    Brynd and Eir rode back in contemplative silence. Eir’s mood was different now, though he couldn’t tell how exactly.
    ‘Are you glad you came out here, to see all this?’ Brynd asked eventually.
    ‘ Glad is not perhaps the right word, but I am certainly grateful for what you’ve shown me. I’m happy you’re going about things the way you are – seeing that
these people have jobs, houses