Annur wasn’t perfect—Kaden understood that clearly enough—but surely it was better than a hundred rival warlords rending the land and the people who lived there. Surely the sufferings of the countless Annurian slaves weighed less, when you put them in the scales, than the broken infants torn from their mothers’ breasts and killed; than the defeated armies castrated, mutilated, mocked, and massacred; than the annihilation of whole nations because they spoke the wrong language, wore the wrong clothes, worshipped at the wrong altar. Surely, set in the scales, Annur was an improvement over what
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