Ludwig stood in the dim chamber beneath the Sacrosanctum and stared at the bodies.
For several breaths, none of the three moved. Even Redd, who had seen battlefields, slaughterhouses thief dens, slums, and the kind of cruelty that people dressed up as necessity, had gone completely still.
The cells ahead of them were not prisons in the normal sense. They were storage rooms for suffering, stone pockets carved into the underbelly of the holy city, each one holding children in different stages of being used up.
Some were alive and pressed against the corners with hollow eyes, too exhausted to cry properly. Some were dead, though Ludwig quickly realized that death had not been allowed to finish its work here.
That was the thing that turned the disgust in his chest into something much colder.
The corpses were wrong.
