expressions on their faces as they watched. The victim had been spread-eagled,
belly against a vertical wooden barrier. That gave the audience a view of the
executioner’s artistry, which an ordinary horizontal chopping block would have
hidden. And the Beysib – Lord Tudhaliya, if Samlor had understood the crier was
an artist, no doubt about that.
Tudhaliya held his swords each at its balance and twirled them as he himself
pirouetted. The blades glittered like lightning in the rain. The Beysib bowed to
the onlookers before he spun in another flurry of cuts. The gesture was a
sardonic one, an acknowledgement of the audience’s privilege of watching him
work. Tudhaliya was not nodding to the locals as peers or even as humans. For
his performance, the executioner had stripped to a clout that kept his genitals
out of the way when he moved. His arrival had been in a palanquin, however, and
the richly brocaded Beysib who stood by as a respectful backdrop to the activity
were clearly subordinates. And at the moment, his lordship was slicing off the
fingers of a screaming victim like so many bits of carrot.
Well, the governance of Sanctuary had never been Samlor’s concern. Blood and
balls! How the Cirdonian caravan-master wished that he had no other concern with
this cursed city either.
The first link of the information he needed had come from an urchin for a copper
piece, sold as blithely as the boy would have sold a stale bread twist from the
tray balanced on his head. The name of a fortune-teller, a S’danzo whose