A soldier reached over to tug open the door for them — creaking, as Rahm had heard it creak a hundred fifty, five hundred fifty times, three years ago, coming in and out as a workman. Now the sound was alien. Rahm stepped out, and looked up among the few branches, where, near summer’s end, brown leaf-clutches were scattered through the darker green.
Here and there, set irregularly toward the common’s corners, stood some five of the spidery structures that were the Myetrans’ movable light-towers: a great illuminated lamp on one, as Rahm looked at it, went dark, like the rest.
Above it in the sky’s lavender-layered gray, something moved.
Rahm frowned.
Four, six, ten of the Winged Ones passed above in a pattern that dissolved and reformed further away; and dissolved again — a pattern that was no pattern.
“Bring the block and the ax!” the prince called. Then his voice returned to conversational leveclass="underline" “You are going to cut off a man’s head. That shouldn’t be too hard for you — and since he’s one of ours, who knows: you might enjoy it.”
Still squinting from his sweep of the sky, Rahm looked at the bearded prince beside him. Rahm’s nod was not intended to mean agreement, only to register he had heard. But, from the smart move the man gave — signalling to someone halfway across the grass — Rahm realized, without particularly marking it, agreement was how the prince had taken it.
Across the common, soldiers stood — at attention, in three rows.
“You can bring the prisoner out,” the prince said to one of the several soldiers accompanying them — who turned and hurried across the common. The grass, with the few trees here and there on it, seemed to Rahm as oddly unfamiliar as the creaking door to the council house.
They started down the ten stone steps and across the gravel toward where grass took up again. The common at evening was a familiar place. But the common at dawn — when was the last time he’d been here at this hour? Certainly it was more than three years ago. Maybe four or five. If only because all the shadows were pointing in the wrong direction, it might have been a public square in a wholly alien town.
In the back row, two or three soldiers glanced at the sky, then brought their eyes back to the field.
More than a dozen of the Winged Ones turned and turned, infinitely high, infinitely small, infinitely distant.
By two poles, four soldiers carried a large block onto the grass. It looked black and old, at least down to its base; there it was a little lighter. Another man was coming toward Rahm and the prince, carrying an ax by its handle — the double blade hanging before his knees — his small steps, high chin, and pursed lips attesting to its considerable weight.
Rahm took it in one hand.
The soldier who’d carried it did not take a heaving breath; but when Nactor dismissed him, he threw up his fist, turned, and walked heavily back across the field.
The ax was heavy. Rahm brought it slowly before him, lowered the blade to the ground, and put his second hand on the haft.
The four soldiers had lowered the block.
“Bring out the prisoner,” Nactor said.
Beside them one of the soldiers halloed across the common: “Bring out the prisoner!”
A beat later, some of the Winged Ones swooped, swooped, and swooped again — without, as a group, getting any lower. Then they went back to their lazy flight.
“You will have no trouble with this ax, Çironian. That I can see. At my command, you will cut off the prisoner’s head. Do it cleanly, with a single cut. We do not need unnecessary mess, cruelty, or pain. I am very fond of this man. But since he has to die, I want him to die swiftly. You understand me …?”
Rahm nodded. He did not see which of the houses on the common, commandeered by the Myetrans, the prisoner was led from — for at that moment, with the prince’s signal, another soldier stepped up beside him. The world blinked out — then reappeared through eye-slits in the black cloth hood dropped over his head.
Rahm looked about.
The cloth tickled his collar bone.
The prince touched Rahm’s shoulder, nodded ahead.
Six soldiers walked now with the tall man among them toward the block. Rahm blinked to realize the man — who wore black — was not bound. Only a black cloth was tied around his eyes, though this one was without eyeslits.
Rahm leaned to ask the prince, softly: “Why is he not tied?”
“When we execute common soldiers, we bind them,” Nactor said, as softly to Rahm as Rahm had spoken to him. “It’s Myetran custom to let our officers die like men. Come.”
Across the prisoner’s chest, two puma claws were fastened one atop the other, from the pelt he wore around his back.
Inside the hood, Rahm frowned — and hefted up the ax. With the prince and the several others, he started across the grass toward the block. Even without his officer’s hood, Rahm recognized him. Rahm’s stomach went cold and heavy with that recognition — as if all at once he’d eaten to bloatedness.
When the prisoner raised his hand — to adjust his blindfold or scratch his chin or whatever — a guard struck Kire’s hand down viciously; and three more guards seized both his arms, even as no one in the group broke step.
Rahm’s hand tightened on the haft. Inside the cloth, his breath whispered.
As they reached the block, a soldier near Kire suddenly kicked him behind his knees, so that he went down. Immediately two others grabbed him, kneeling beside him on one knee so that they could hold him. Two others held his legs. Still two others steadied his shoulders. Kire’s head, mouth, and jaw, cut off from bronze-colored hair by the black blindfold, lay left cheek down on the scarred block.
Beside Rahm, the prince sighed.
Rahm looked down at the puma’s pelt across Kire’s back. The beast’s skull had been pulled aside, as if in some scuffle, so that it hung askew.
Inside his hood, without sound, Rahm mouthed: “…friend Kire…” lips brushing cloth.
Beside Rahm, the prince said: “Lieutenant, you will now see just how gentle and peace-loving your Çironians are.” He bent down, reached down, thrust a finger beneath the blindfold, and pulled — not gently. With the tug, Kire’s head slid inches across stained wood. As the cloth slipped free, the lieutenant grunted. “Look here, now — a nice, gentle Çironian is going to cut your head off.” The prince stood up.
From the block, the lieutenant glanced up, green eyes gone near gray with dawn and fear.
There was no recognition in them. But why would there be, Rahm thought, inside his hood.
The prince turned to Rahm. “Kill him — now, Çironian.”
Rahm took a step to the side, spread his legs, slid one hand forward on the haft, and hefted the blade over his head. A breeze flattened the cloth to his face, so that any of the guards, looking up, might have seen, under the black, the form of his lips, strained apart with effort.
On the block, Kire pulled his shoulders in. His own lips parted while his eyes squeezed tight, as if by not seeing it he might delay the stroke. His bronze hair was stringy.
The breeze moved it.
Then Kire blinked rapidly three or four times, as if eager for a sight of the morning, the grass, the men around him, even the stained wood obscuring the vision in his lower eye.
The breeze ran in puma fur, parting the hairs to show their lighter roots.
And Rahm brought the ax — not down, but in a diagonal that became even more acute with a twist of his body.
Prince Nactor did not scream, but rather looked down — and staggered — at the ax blade sunk inches into his chest. Rahm yanked the handle, now one way, now the other, as his hands, his shoulders, and the cloth on his face wet with what spurted. As the prince fell, Rahm jerked the ax loose and swung it back around, the blade’s side crashing against two of the heads of the guards holding Kire. The swing took it all the way, so that it struck another man and sent him sprawling. Then up, then down — honed metal cut into, and severed, the arm of the officer standing with them, who alone had had the presence to reach down and unsnap his powergun sling — the first man to scream!