It was eerily quiet: no shouting, not from his hawk-masks, or the adversaries;
the fire crackled and the horses snorted and groaned like the men where they
fell.
Jubal recollected the sinking feeling he had had in his stomach when Zaibar had
confided to him that the bellows of anguish emanating from the vivisectionist’s
workshop were the Hell Hound Tempus’s agonies, the forebodings he had endured
when a group of his beleaguered sell-swords went after the man who killed those
who wore the mask of Jubal’s service for sport, and failed to down him.
That night, it was too late for thinking. There was time enough only for wading
into the thick of battle (if he could just find it: the attack was from every
side, out of darkness); hollering orders; mustering point leaders (two); and
appointing replacements for the dead (three). Then he heard whoops and abysmal
screams and realized that someone had let the slaves out of their pens; those
who had nothing to lose bore haphazard arms, but sought only death with
vengeance. Jubal, seeing wide, white rimmed eyes and murderous mouths and
the new eunuch from Kadakithis’s palace dancing ahead of the pack of them,
started to run. The key to its collar had been in his robe; he remembered
discarding it, within the eunuch’s reach.
He ran in a private wash of terror, in a bubble through which other sounds
hardly penetrated, but where his breathing reverberated stentorian, rasping, and
his heart gonged loud in his ears. He ran looking back over his shoulder, and he
saw some leopard-pelted apparition with a horn bow in hand come sliding down the