Trumpets blared out a fanfare. Yorl lifted the curtain again. Sunlight fell on a four-fingered, ebony hand. The Beysa had arrived at the platform, her breasts so heavily painted they scarcely seemed naked. Her long golden hair swirled plumelike in the light breeze. The moment had arrived and the crowd grew quiet. Terrai Burek, the prime minister, ascended the platform and behind him, in chains, came his son, Turghurt.
The young man stumbled and the guards rushed forward to get him back on his feet. Even at this distance, it was plain that something had happened to the young man and that he had no clear idea why his aunt, the Beysa Shupansea, was standing in the sun, telling everyone that he was going to die for the deaths of his own people and for the death of a Sanctuary courtesan. Yorl let the curtain drop again.
'Then why did you use just enough venom on your dart to destroy his mind but not enough to kill him?'
The Beysib woman laughed melodically. 'He overstepped himself. He thought to arouse Shupansea's rage by slaying Sharilar, her cousin, while they walked along the wharf. But he killed not only Sharilar, but Prism - and that we could not forgive.'
'But you could have killed him outright. Wouldn't that have been the true vengeance of Bey?'
'Bey is a goddess of many moods; she is life as well as death. This is a lesson for everyone: for town and Beysib. They will respect each other a little more now. Shupansea, herself, needed to pronounce this judgement. She must rise to rule here or Turghurt will be only the first.'
There was a collective gasp from the crowd and Yorl drew back the curtain for the third time. The Beysa was holding a small, bloody knife, while her serpent wound around her arm. Turghurt was already dead. The crowd broke into cheering, just as Yorl felt the sharp prick of fangs on his own neck.
Poison burned and gripped him in hands of red-hot iron. The sunlit courtyard grew dim, then black. The homed gateway to the seventh level of paradise shone before him. The ancient magician's spirit stumbled forward and fell, with the gate just beyond his reach.
Failure - and with the land of death almost within his grasp. He wept and brushed the tears away with a shaggy paw. The room was dark and filled with the odour from the pyre on which they'd immolated the criminal, depriving his spirit of eternal life within the goddess Bey. And Yorl was left with only the memory of death to sustain him.
VOTARY by David Drake
'Hai!' called the Beysib executioner as his left blade struck. The tip of his victim's index finger spun thirty feet across the Bazaar and pattered against Samlor's boot. 'Hai!' and the right sword lopped the ends off the fourth and middle fingers together, so that the victim's right hand ended in a straight line, the four fingers all the length of the least, the only one to which a fingernail remained for the moment. 'Hai!'
The auction block in the centre of the Bazaar had been used for punishment before, but this particular technique was new to Samlor hil Samt. It was new as well to many of the longer-term residents of Sanctuary, judging from the 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 protector was a blacksmith? Oh yes, Illyra was still in Sanctuary... and Dubro the smith, too, if the foreign master's business was with him.
Samlor's intended business was in no way with the blacksmith, but the information was none the less good to know. Before entering the booth, the Cirdonian set his thumbs on his waist belt and tugged the broad leather a fraction, to the side. That was less obtrusive than adjusting the belt-sheathed fighting knife directly.
'Welcome, master,' said the woman who had been reading the cards to herself on a stool. Samlor looped the sash across the doorway hangings. There were the usual paraphernalia and a table that could be slid between the S'danzo and the lower, cushioned seat for clients. The young woman's eyes were very sharp, however. The Cirdonian knew that her quick appraisal of him as he slid aside the curtain of pierced shells gave often as much information as a reading would require, when retailed back to the sitter over cards or his palms or through 'images' quivering in a dish of water.
'You came about the luck of your return -' and Samlor would have said that his face was impassive, but it was not, not to her. 'No, not a journey but a woman. Come, sit. The cards, I think?' Her left hand fanned the deck, the brilliant, complex signs that some said reflected the universe in a subtlety equal to that of the icy stars overhead.
'Lady,' said Samlor. He turned up his left palm and the silver in it. It was uncoined bullion, stamped each time it was assayed in a Beysib market. 'You gave a man I met true readings. I need a truth that you won't find in my face.'
The S'danzo looked at the caravan-master again, her smile still professional, but something new behind her eyes. Samlor's boot heels were high enough to grip stirrups, low enough for walking, and worn more by flints than by pavements. He was stocky and no longer young; but his waist still made a straight line with his rib cage, with none of the bulge that time brings to easy living. Samlor's tunic was of dull red cloth, nearly the shade of his face. His skin never seemed to tan in the sun and wind that beat it daily. His only touch of ornament was a silver medallion, its face hidden until the man moved to show the bullion in his calloused palm. Then toad-faced Heqt flashed upward, goddess ofCirdon and the Spring rains - and the S'danzo gasped, 'Samlor hil Samt!'
'No!' the man said sharply in answer to the way Illyra's eyes flicked towards the doorway, towards the ringing of hot iron heard through it. 'Only information, lady. I wish'you no harm.' And he did not touch the hilt of his belt knife, because if she remembered Samlor, she remembered the tale of his first visit to Sanctuary. No need to threaten what his reputation had already promised, wish it or not. 'I want to find a little girl, my niece. Nothing more.'
'Sit, then,' the S'danzo said in a guarded voice. This time the visitor obeyed. He held the silver out to her between thumb and forefinger, but she opened his palm and held it for her gaze a moment before taking her payment. 'There's blood on them,' she said abruptly.