A cool breeze crept over the room and ran a hand along Blake's neck, lifting the thin sweep of hair at his nape. Below, the city he had taken lay in a ragged, smoking scrawl blackened roofs, torn banners that smelled faintly of ash and old blood even from here. The harbor glittered with captures: hulks of ships, fat barges packed with plunder, and a forest of masts that bobbed like teeth along the water.
It had been lucky that they had enough hands to burn as many corpses as they did. If the stench of the dead had settled for long, the whole enterprise would have become an epidemic more than a victory.
They had worked the slaves like a human tide, hauling bodies into pyres, feeding the flames until the night sky swallowed the smoke.
Men do not like to be in a city that smells like a graveyard, after all.
He now could see how childish he had been with his plan.
