Chapter 93 — After the Victory
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
A crisis had passed in safety, but the greater part of the work was only just beginning.
The wounded needed rest, the aftermath needed hands to handle it, the frightened settlers needed soothing, and the camp's production had to be set back on course.
The first thing Gao Yang did was gather up the blood-red bones that lay piled outside the camp, scattered across the mountain pass, and heaped along the mountain paths. He dispatched nearly a third of the able-bodied laborers, rushing to haul the remains back into camp before the power of Order could fully decompose them, and then had them piled high along the south bank of the Whitewater River, building a daunting mountain of bone near the sawmill beside the camp.
Those monsters had been so vast and hideous that even after death, even after the bones had been "decomposing" for a day and a night, these remnants still possessed a terrifying bulk and appearance. Piled together in wild disorder, they gave off ceaseless plumes of black and red smoke and mist, as though an invisible flame were burning within them; and of all the bones, less than a tenth of the skeletons remained relatively intact.
Most of the intact skeletons were those left from the battle with the guard units; the monsters buried under rockfalls or blown apart by the "landmines" had scarcely a whole body among them.
Gao Yang picked the relatively intact skeletons out of the bone heap, propped them up on wooden frames, and arrayed them neatly along the south bank of the Whitewater River. Seen from a distance, it was as though a grim new wall had risen north of the camp; and before the bone pile at the center of that wall, Gao Yang erected a tall wooden platform.
Everyone in the camp could watch the bone heap and the platform taking shape. Most of the common folk and serfs had been startled at the sight of those horrifying blood-red remains, and the old fear of their homes being destroyed welled up in them anew; yet the defensive battle fought the day before amid the thunder of explosions had done something to offset that fear. Even an illiterate serf could grasp one thing: since they themselves were still alive and standing here, while the monsters were piled up on the riverbank, that was proof enough that the lord's army had won a great victory, and so the monsters were not so fearsome after all.
Soldiers ran through the camp, loudly proclaiming the lord's summons: Duke Gao Yang Cecil called all the people of this land to assemble before the high platform by the river to hear his new commands.
A camp of fewer than a thousand souls was easy to muster, and soon the whole population of the domain had gathered in the square by the sawmill. Gao Yang stood on the hastily built wooden platform, the assembled settlers before him, and behind him the blood-red bone heap still ceaselessly decomposing and sending up its elemental dust and mist.
Heddy cast a voice-amplifying spell, and the words from the platform rang out across the whole square.
"People of Cecil, today I have three things to announce," Gao Yang said, planting the Pioneer's Sword point-down in the earth and sweeping his gaze over the crowd below. Then he suddenly raised the blade and pointed at the skeletons ranked along the riverbank. "First, I announce a celebration—a celebration that these monsters, who once laid waste to the Cecil domain, who once slaughtered your brothers and sisters, your kin and friends, who not long ago threatened the lives of every one of us again, have been defeated! Struck head-on and crushed! Nearly a thousand monsters, almost ten times the number of the camp guard, and not one of them set foot inside our camp. You know how strong and terrible these creatures are—but now you should know, too, that these aberrations are not invincible!"