“Ugly design,” Dean said, frowning. “Who the frag wants to eat off a bug?”
Doc started to speak, and Mildred rested a hand on his arm, shaking her head. He grimaced, then shrugged. The scholar had tried to explain many times that scorpions weren’t insects, but an arachnid, an entirely different species like spiders. But nobody seemed to care. If it had more than four legs it was a bug. Ipso facto. Case closed.
“Could be the baron’s crest,” his father answered, shifting gears.
“See those slits in the ville roof?” Krysty said, pointing above the potter. “This deep in the desert, there would be no easy supply of charcoal for a kiln. So everything has to be sundried.”
“Lemons and lemonade,” Doc commented wryly. “They turned a problem into an asset.”
“Nuking hot enough be kiln,” Jak said, shaking to the motion of the wag over the uneven cobblestones. “Even with roof.”
“Black dust, I don’t like this,” J.B. muttered, adjusting his glasses. “Not one damn bit.”
“What?” Krysty asked. “Something wrong? The ville looks peaceful enough.”
“That’s the bastard problem,” he said, gesturing broadly. “No gallows.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Ryan muttered, glancing down cross streets and into alleys. In almost every ville, there was an execution area near the front gate to warn outlanders to behave or else. But not here. No gallows, chopping blocks, cages, or pits. However, there were always people to chill—thieves, traitors, murderers, whatever. So where did they ace people?
Mildred brushed back her beaded hair. “If the job isn’t being done in public, then it’s being done somewhere hidden. We better make sure none of us get detained by the sec men.”
“Just here to buy water,” Ryan reminded bluntly, but keeping his voice low so the sec men couldn’t hear. “Not interested in local troubles. If the people ain’t happy with the present baron, that’s their business, not ours.”
“‘Aren’t’ happy,” Krysty corrected him.
Just then, there came the sound of a whip cracking, closely followed by dull grunts of pain.
“Spoke too soon,” Krysty said, a hand instinctively resting on her gun belt.
The noise grew as the sec men and companions entered a small courtyard, where the cloth roof was gone and the sun blazed down in all its fury.
Set apart from every other tan adobe building in the ville, this structure was made of red brick and looked as strong as a bunker. It was two stories tall, yet oddly without windows, and a set of wide granite steps led to a bronze door green with age. Armed guards stood on either side of the door, routinely checking through the clothing of the people waiting in line to enter, and then again as they came out clutching small clay pots that loudly sloshed.
“I see that water is tightly rationed here,” Ryan said casually out the window. “That the ville well?”
“Our temple,” Hawk replied with a dark scowl. “You won’t be seeing inside there.”
The whip sounded again as the horses and wag went around the temple bringing into view a skinny man wearing rags, his hands tied to iron rings set into the brick wall, legs covered with rivulets of blood. A shirt hung in filthy strips from his back, and a large sec man was whipping him with a length of smooth leather.
“Nineteen!” the sec man cried and let the whip fly. The leather cracked as it touched the prisoner’s skin, making another section of clothing drop fluttering to the ground.
The prisoner hardily flinched as a red welt rose on his bony shoulders, an old scar splitting open and fresh blood trickling down his trembling torso. While the sec man reclaimed the whip, the prisoner wheezed for breath through his nose, a wad of dark leather held in his mouth.
“Padding to keep from breaking his teeth,” Doc scowled, twisting his hand on the silver lion’s head of the swordstick. “Barbaric!”
A sec man jerked his head toward the wag at that, and Krysty jabbed the scholar with a hard elbow to the ribs. Scowling darkly, Doc clamped his mouth shut with a clear effort of willpower.
“So what was his crime?” Ryan asked, as the group passed by the sight, the whip rising and falling in the background.