There were perhaps twenty of them visible from this angle, and the count grew as he moved and the angle changed. Abomination corpses, drained and desiccated, their hides sunken over their frames like old leather over collapsed frames. Each one had been opened — not torn, not savaged, but opened with precision, the ribcages pried back in matching patterns, the internal cavities swept clean of anything that had been inside them. It was systematic in a way that exceeded the behavior of any Abomination he knew of, and it had clearly not been recent; the corpses had been here long enough to have dried to the texture of old wood, their colors leached to uniform grey-brown.
"Church's work?" Jacob asked, looking at Arthur.
"No," Arthur said, and there was something careful in the word, something that was not quite reluctance but was adjacent to it.
"You sound certain."
