Two men would die today.
One, the poor bastard screaming and thrashing on Arbiter Chuldok’s bloody table atop the gallows. This one would die slowly. Painfully. Chuldok would stretch out the torture, savor each moment of the pitiful man’s agony until even the crowd clustered around the hangman’s scaffolding would lose their appetite for the kill.
Public executions were trite in Kullen’s eyes. He preferred to bring death silently, swiftly, and without fanfare. The sycophants and sociopaths who chose to gath-er and watch while others’ lives were drained away by degrees… it made Kullen sick to his stomach—and very little turned the assassin’s insides.
Whatever the prisoner had done—stolen bread to feed his family? Gotten caught with his pecker in the wrong man’s daughter?—his death would be just one more spectacle masked as “the Emperor’s justice.” When the time came to take his last tormented breath, the dying man would likely welcome Shekoth’s cold embrace as surcease from his suffering.
But the second man—the pompous, self-important prick who wore the title of Magister Iltari like velvet robes of royalty—had not come prepared to die. Like the others, he’d come to watch the torture and public execution of the fool beneath Arbiter Chuldok’s knives.
Kullen grinned. If only that overfed shit-stain knew he’d come to his own execu-tion today.
The cobblestoned Court of Justice was packed to overflowing. There, amongst the rabble, Kullen was at home. He was a droplet of rain amidst a tumultuous typhoon. Just one thorn in the patch. A single blade on the battlefield. One of the thousands that comprised the jeering and shouting mass bearing witness to Chuldok’s latest cruelty. Filthy, every single one of them. And not just their hearts. Their faces, too, were stained with soot, dirt, and worse. Coated in the stench that so enveloped this city—the reek of sewers and rotting, fetid flesh, but also like the roses the noblemen wore upon their lapels to mask the odor. Like the perfumes carried upon the powdered skin of their ladies.
The din of voices blended into a roar not even the nearby ocean could match. They shouted—chiefly from sheer joy that they were not the one strapped to the Arbiter’s table, that they’d survived one more day in a city that treated life like a commodity, where blood was cheaper than gold.
So many wretched curs. All so desperate for an escape from the harshness of their cold reality.
To think, this was entertainment to these people. When this was over, and the prisoner’s head had finally been separated from his neck, they would return to their miserable lives. To their hungry families and empty larders. To their squalid homes in the Embers, cast deep in the shadows of the Upper Crest—fine manors and grand estates belonging to the nobility of Dimvein, the Karmian Empire’s capital city.
Kullen cast one last glance at the grisly exhibition atop the raised scaffolding. Dark carrion birds roosted on the gallows, cawing in eager anticipation of their next meal. They seemed to prefer the eyeballs as appetizers and intestines as dessert, seemingly unpicky in terms of anything else.
Arbiter Chuldok was a beast—and not just because of his Orken heritage. His arms must have been twice the size of Kullen’s own. Two giant hands rested upon the pommel of his axe, blade pressed into the platform between his feet. Beside him, a headsman’s block, bloodied and chipped, was on full display for the waiting crowd. The dry, splinter-laden wood of the platform, stained dark from years of use, was the center of attention.
And there, upon the Arbiter’s table, the thrashing man—a distraction ideal for Kullen’s purposes this night.
Sinking deeper into his hood, Kullen slithered through the crowd, heading away from the Court of Justice. No one took notice of his departure. Those he passed simply flowed forward to fill the space he’d vacated, jockeying for a position closer to the gallows as if they longed to be showered with the blood of the guilty. Finally, he broke free of the thinning throng and ducked down a narrow side street adjoining the broad avenue that led toward the main square—as all roads in Dimvein tended to do.
Night was nearing, twinkling stars already piercing the purpling skies. Cold shadows grew long, their emaciated fingers stretching from the city’s tall towers, grasping, clawing for anything to swallow up. For Kullen, that made for a simple task, disappearing into obscurity, hidden, shrouded—the perfect place for an assassin.
Around him, tall, wooden structures rose, half a dozen on each side of the square, each bearing the varied colors of their respective houses. More scented flowers encircled them.
Kullen had one such tower in his sights.
Two guards stood beside a wooden staircase, wearing the insignia of the Iltari house: a gold bar and an ivy leaf. Wealth and good fortune.
Not tonight.
