Scorpion Rising

'No, ma'am, that I don't.'

But for all his cockiness — or maybe because of it — she imagined there would be many among the Hundred-Handed who went to sleep at night dreaming of that wide, disarming grin.

'Do all novices go through the tomboy phase like Clytie and the other three?' she wheezed, leaning forward to catch her breath.

'Clytie wasn't a tomboy,' he said, resting his foot on a rock and letting his shirt billow in the breeze. 'In fact, she wasn't a bit like Vanessia and the others.'

Claudia had got her wind back, but pretended she hadn't. 'How so?'

'Put it this way,' he said. 'Our Clytie was never caned or put into detention. Our Clytie would mend the tears in Aridella's smock and clear up the honey Lin spilled, and she'd re-make their beds and re-wash their underclothes, and every morning our Clytie went out spotless and tidy, and at night came home exactly the same.'

'Was she clever?'

'No idea, I can't follow the signing, but that child was certainly conscientious, if that's what you mean.'

'The class swot?'

'Like I said.' His mouth twisted up. 'Conscientious.'

And that was clearly the end of that conversation.

Halfway up the second hill, Swarbric offered to carry the Lady Claudia the rest of the way. Three-quarters of the way, the Lady Claudia wished that she had let him. Overhead, magpies chattered in the oak trees. She had a feeling that they were laughing. But at the top, the woods opened out to a wide, grassy clearing in which limestone outcrops were dotted with poppies, where lizards basked in the warmth of the sun and where birds deafened the eardrums with their warbling. Chaffinches, goldfinches and blackcaps.

'This is beautiful,' she puffed, sinking down onto one of the rocks and sending a family of lizards diving for cover. 'Absolutely-' She jumped up and covered her nose with her hand. 'Oh dear god, what is that?'

'The putrefying remains of wild animals,' Swarbric laughed, steering her downwind of the smell. 'Young ones, usually, who hadn't learned prudence by the time they fell in and discovered it was too late to learn it afterwards.'

Still shielding her face, Claudia peered into the diamondshaped fissure from which the stench was emanating. 'Curiosity killed the cat, eh?'

'And the lynx and the wolf and once, even, a bear.'

It looked innocuous enough, that hole in the rock. Why

'reflection', she wondered. And why 'pit'? To her surprise, the hand that clamped round her arm and jerked her back was neither gentle nor seductive.

'I don't advise standing too close.'

Searching round for a loose stone, the German tossed it into the aperture. Claudia counted four before she heard the dull thud.

'That is deep.'

'That is very deep,' he corrected. 'The opening's narrow, but don't be fooled. Like a pear, the chamber inside gets bigger the further it goes down and the rockface, like the rest of the region, is sheer. Once a penitent is thrown in, it's impossible to climb out.'

The Pit of Reflection, shaped not like a pear, but a teardrop, she decided. With plenty of time to reflect on one's sins, stuck inside a dank, dark hole with just a crack of daylight above to mark the passage of time and with only old bones for companionship.

'What's the average sentence?' she asked, tossing in a rock of her own and waiting for it to land.

'You don't know, do you?' The grin dropped from his face. Every trace of the cavalier had vanished. 'When I said it's impossible to climb out, I mean impossible.' Swarbric drew a deep breath. 'They don't use it often and never, thank the Fire God, willingly, but this is how the College deals with execution.'

Something primordial slithered inside.

'By distancing themselves from the act and thus ensuring none of those dainty little hundred hands gets dirty?'

It was arguably the nastiest form of punishment she had ever encountered, certainly the slowest and the most painful. Forgetting the possibility of breaking a bone or three in the fall, the prisoner was doomed to die of thirst and starvation in a pit filled with rotted remains. Reflection, my arse, she thought bitterly. This is murder by any other name. Murder, moreover, through the slowest torture known to man.

The penalty for slaying a raven is severe. Ailm's voice floated back, but Claudia remembered how the Death Priestess had turned her head to the wall when she spoke.

The perpetrator is cast into the Pit of Reflection, as are runaway slaves and, of course, any man found inside the walls of our precinct.

Small wonder Elusa was terrified.

So are any women who try to escape, she had said. They 're thrown into the Pit of Reflection, too.

'I've seen enough,' she said, turning away.

This land was beautiful, the women ditto, they were graceful, elegant, rotten to the core.

'Maybe I can show you some other less unpleasant but equally clandestine sites?' As he offered his arm, his shirt contrived to fall open even further. 'There's a little waterfall not far from here that is mossy and shady, as pretty as you are, or I could take you to a glade in the forest where-'

'You enjoy your job, don't you?'

The young German had 'choose me, choose me' written all over him. Like willow, he, too, was one of nature's survivors.

'Let's say I've become skilled at it,' he said, throwing in a winning, lopsided grin for good measure.

'What about the other side of the work?' she asked, as they retraced their steps back to the College. 'Doesn't it bother you, playing policemen to your fellow slaves?'

'My task is to stop people from getting into the grounds, not getting out.'

This time they followed the track below the arrowhead of rock, lined by sweet chestnuts and where peacock butterflies flitted and a dove cooed out its sleepy call.

'That's a job for the local Gauls,' Swarbric said. 'They volunteer to take turns to guard the men in the village.'

That explained why was it so hard for them to escape. Dedicated followers of College philosophy would prove more effective than the fiercest mastiff.

'How come you can take time off to show me the sights?' Claudia asked.

'Because there's only one road down to the gorge and therefore only one way in. Guards posted at points on the hills warn us of impending visitors by blowing a horn.'

She'd heard the blasts. Simply taken no notice.

'Do all the men get the same amount of free time as you?'

Swarbric leaned close and grinned. 'Teacher's pet,' he confided in a whisper. 'I get special dispensation.'

Special duties. Independent living. Teacher's pet indeed. But which teacher? she wondered. Surely only the pentagram priestesses had the authority to give that kind of permission.

'The job carries an awful lot of trust,' she pointed out. 'What did you do to earn it? Throw people screaming into pits?'

'Not me.' He leapt up to pluck an early apple from an overhead bough and tossed it to her. 'Sharp, but surprisingly tasty.'

After seeing the pit, Claudia had no appetite. She tossed it back. 'So if you don't throw them in, then who does?'

'Down here, I have very little contact with the men in the village,' he said, crunching, 'so I can't say who has the dubious honour these days.'

'Not the locals, though?'

'The Pit of Reflection is the Hundred-Handed's last resort, but it is also their ultimate deterrent.' He tossed the core into the undergrowth. 'As I've been singled out as Guardian of the Sacred Gate, so others are selected as Guardians of the Sacred Trust.'

'A noble title for an ignoble task, but if you expect me to believe that you don't know the name of the man who's been elected as the College executioner, you must think I'm stupid.'

Swarbric spun round on his heel and stepped in front of her. 'I find persistence a heady quality in a woman,' he said huskily, 'and as much as I'd like to be pressed further' — his grin was pure wolf — 'I honestly don't know who's taken over from the Spaniard, and maybe that's because I'm much happier not knowing whose killer eyes I look into.'