I laid all the Zombies out.

Once I started cutting them open, I didn’t want to have to do a lot of walking.

I’d also piled up the heads and as soon as I’d cut out the heart of each Zombie, I rolled it closer to the pile. Zombie blood was highly flammable and burning them up was the most reliable way of making sure that some entrepreneurial person didn’t try to salvage some Zombie parts and accidentally turn themselves into a Zombie.

Once I’d finished with the extraction, I put the six hearts in a bigger leather sack to hold them until tonight when I’d go about the tedious task of actually cutting the heartstones out of the hearts.

I began to wonder if I was going to need to be as careful as I had been trained to be. Part of the process was to keep yourself from nicking your fingers white you cut and minimizing how much of the purple blood you got everywhere. Since I was now immune to turning, neither was a concern. I’d experiment a little on speeding up the process, but I still wanted to make as small of a mess as possible.

The pile went up in flames from a single spark. And as soon as I was sure that it was going to keep burning, I turned to the town.

There was a gray-haired woman covered from head to heel in full metal armor standing in the middle of the partially open gate watching me. There was a black hammer emblem on her chest and she had a longsword in her hand.

It was strange to see someone in armor like that. It was true that the zombies would have trouble breaking into it or biting them, and it was very easy to clean the zombie blood off. But it made a person so slow, that there wasn’t much practicality when fighting more than a couple Zombies.

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I walked up to her, making sure that my eyes were covered.

“Here.” She grabbed a pail of water from inside the gate and held it out for me to take. “We don’t need any of that in here.” She motioned at the blood I’d gotten on my armor. Her hand stopped on the bag with the hearts in it, “What are ya going to do with those?”

I’d been warned against saying too much, lest a human try to harvest a stone on their own. I gave her the response I’d been conditioned to say to questions I didn’t want to give the answer to.

“Bokor Business.”

She sighed and shook her head, “Fine, but if I catch you doing anything weird with um, it’ll be business for ya.” She bounced her blade in her free hand.

I felt the urge to remind her how much trouble she could get into by threatening a Bokor, but the look in her eyes told me that she was willing to fight if I tried to strong arm her. Instead I just nodded and began washing the blood off of me.

Not that I was particularly worried if she did attack me. Master Bran had trained me often in sword techniques and with my enhanced body due to becoming a Touched, I doubted there were a handful of humans that could take me on in a fair fight.

I finished washing myself off and the woman gestured for me to come inside.

“I’m Byler…”

“The Bokor told us about you.” The old woman cut me off, “Told us you hurt your eyes and might need help getting around.” She leaned in to look at the bandages, ‘You don’t look like you need much help.”

“They’re almost healed, but the light.” I jerked my thumb to the morning sun. “Hurts them.”

She nodded, apparently satisfied with the answer.

“The name is Gili.” She called over her shoulder, “I’m captain of the guard around here and I’ll take ya to yer Bokor.”