The morning after the Eastern Plain was quiet in the way that mornings after large battles were always quiet, the specific silence of a landscape that had been saturated with violence and was resting, the way a field rested after a storm, the damage visible but the energy that had produced the damage discharged.
Khao'khen walked the battlefield at dawn.
He walked alone, because the walk was not a tactical inspection but a personal one, the walk that a commander made when the battle was done and the cost needed to be felt rather than counted. The counting was Sakh'arran's work. The feeling was the chief's.
