Page 57 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Hadd’s shoulders slumped a fraction. “Gallows meat.” He glanced at Arpix with a frown. “And we’re in danger of missing the drop. So, if you’ll excuse us…”

“Don’t let’s rush off on my account,” Arpix ventured. “I mean it’s bad manners—”

Janks’s hand closed around Arpix’s throat and sealed away his words.

“Let him go,” Hadd said without heat.

“You’re taking him to be hanged. No harm in a little foretaste, is there?” Janks shook Arpix in a playful manner whilst lifting him, with just onearm, to a point at which his toes barely made contact with the flagstones. “Hanging’s so quick after all. A hardened criminal like this one deserves to linger. Give him a chance to rue the day he crossed paths with Private Hadd of the Potentate’s Outer Guard!”

“You break him, you keep him.” Hadd stepped around Janks and made to continue on his way.

Janks dropped Arpix on his heels where he somehow stayed standing, gasping air in through a still-constricted throat. “Don’t be like that. We’ll come along and help you, Hadd. Don’t want to risk this dangerous criminal overpowering you and escaping.” His patrol, four canith and two men, lined up behind him.

Hadd shook his head and motioned Arpix forward.

They crossed another square, a large one where Arpix could see the buildings rising to left and right, albeit hazily. Stallholders had already set up shop around the margins but were only now starting to see much business, some rising from their chairs to deal with customers come to buy pans, pots, strings of garlic, beadwork, rugs, small cakes. Arpix’s eyes lingered on the cakes, remembering the recent glory of the butter cookies Celcha had created from her flask. He wished the ganar would come along now, spreading her peace out across this strange but familiar city he’d fallen into.

“Oh.” He saw the gallows now, their shapes resolving through the evaporating mist, the nooses hanging empty, waiting. He wanted to protest further, no matter how faint his chance of salvation. And he would have if Hadd had been his only audience. It felt ridiculous to hold on to pride or shame so close to being murdered in such a cold and functional manner, but Arpix couldn’t bring himself to plead with a bully like Janks looking on. Hadd contained a better nature, that much was obvious.

The patrol and guard escorted Arpix to the gallows. There were three nooses, each depending from its own timber frame. The whole structure of raw timbers crudely bolted together seemed to be temporary, designed to be assembled at speed and taken away just as fast. Eight prisoners stood roped together in a sorry line behind the gallows, two canith, six humans. Four of them had a broad red stripe across their faces, as if someone had carelessly trailed a paint brush from one ear to the other. These four stoodat the far end of the line, an old man in an expensive frock coat, a young man and woman in simple garb who held hands like a married couple, and the shorter of the two canith. Fresh paint by the look of it…or blood…drips running down across their cheeks like crimson tears.

The crowd that had gathered before the platform showed a similar demographic to that of the prisoners. Young, old, humans, canith, rich and poor. Perhaps a hundred citizens distracted from their bargain hunting. Enough to acknowledge the hangings as a spectacle, but not so many that it might be considered a rarity. Arpix had seen more people assemble to hear one of the more popular singers on Trandor Corner. His death was to be a minor entertainment, with a crowd-pulling level that ranked somewhere between a skilled juggler and the sort of magician who snatched coins out of people’s ears while an accomplice tried to filch additional ones out of their pockets.

As Hadd brought Arpix towards the end of the line, two more canith guards, these in a dark and shabby uniform, came forward to take charge of him. A wiry man with wiry greying hair and narrow eyes came forward with a small bucket of what might be pig’s blood, and a dripping brush. “Amacar?” He raised the brush.

“Says he isn’t.” Hadd waved the brush away.

“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” The man made to go around Hadd’s half-hearted defence.

“Of course he is,” Janks called with jovial malice from somewhere further back.

“Does it matter?” Arpix found himself saying. “Are they going to hang me twice if I am?” It was something Livira would say. Arpix wondered if staring death in the face had finally uncovered some courage in him.

The man with the brush slapped at Arpix, and, partly deflected by Hadd, ended up scoring a wet red line across Arpix’s chest. The blood—it smelled like blood—looked black on Arpix’s faded robes rather than red.

“Enough,” growled the nearest of the executioner canith, and jerked Arpix forward by one arm. With practised ease, he secured Arpix’s wrists behind him using a short length of rope which he proceeded to tie to the much longer rope joining the prisoners.

Arpix resisted pointing out that they would just have to untie them allsoon unless it were some kind of joint hanging. It all seemed suddenly absurd to him, funny in the bitterest of ways. To die here, impossibly far from all he’d known, killed for no reason by people who didn’t particularly care. When Hadd turned away Arpix called after him, “You’re not staying to watch?”

The canith looked back with a frown. “You’ve got a bigger audience than most of us get.”

“But I don’t know any of them.” Arpix realised he was babbling. Already his prediction was coming true. The three prisoners at the front of the rope were being untied and the crowd’s chatter had stilled to an expectant hush.

“You don’t knowme.” Hadd turned and shouldered his way past Janks, who apparently had no better place to be.

Arpix stood, shivering despite the midday sun now tearing through the remnants of the mist. One of the executioners read the crimes of the first three condemned. The words washed over Arpix. He scanned the crowd, hoping to see Clovis or Evar there. Starval would do. Even Mayland. But there were no familiar faces, no friendly eyes. It seemed no time ago that he had been watching a different sea of faces without compassion. There had been no kindness among Oanold’s soldiers. United in their togetherness, they had become something other than human, substituting a mob’s instincts for those of a person. And here again, the simple mathematics of us and them had given a crowd licence to chew pasties and joke among themselves while they watched the living become the dead.

The creak of a lever shook Arpix from his reverie. Three bodies dropped through trapdoors and came to a juddering, devastating halt beneath them. Arpix nearly vomited. His breath came in short, horrified gasps.

Voices in the crowd expressed their disappointment. All three necks had broken. None of the criminals had danced for their audience. Someone pointed at Arpix. “Skinny’s gonna kick. Ain’t got the weight to snap ’is spine.”

The next three went up. Boos from the crowd, abuse hurled, stones too, aimed at the couple with the bloody stripes. The executioner announced that the criminal to the left, a heavy-browed man sneering at any who met his eye, was a street robber, and that the couple had been caught poisoninga well. The young man’s protests of innocence were drowned out by the audience’s rising anger. “Amacar filth!” “Conspirators!” “Child stealers!”

Under a barrage of insults, the last adjustments were made and the trio dropped. The couple, Arpix noted with horrified detachment, had shorter ropes, but whatever the executioner’s intention, both died almost instantly. The citizens of the still-nameless city shouted their disappointment, cursing the executioners, a stone bouncing off one of the canith’s broad shoulders.

Arpix looked around for an escape route, only to find Janks grinning at him good-humouredly, almost inviting him to try to run. And before he knew it, rough hands were guiding him, the well-dressed old man, and the last canith up the steps.

“It can’t end like this.” Arpix had been thinking the words, but it was the old man who said them out loud. He looked younger close up, perhaps not even sixty. Both his hands were shaking to a degree he’d empty any cup before it reached his lips.

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