Page 60 of What Fury Brings
After fifteen minutes of walking, Sanos’s bare feet were beginning to feel sore. He’d stepped on a dozen rocks and at least two bugs. Sweat ran down his chest and back from the sun, but his skin didn’t burn. His arms ached from holding them so tightly behind his back. The bindings were uncomfortable. And every new horror the street revealed caused him to tense.
Finally she led him into a building. An arena, of sorts, with a sunken pit in the middle of the room.
People recognized her. Friends waved her over, and the two of them were led to seats near the front.
Sanos smelled the blood before he saw it.
More fighting?he wondered.
He couldn’t make sense of what was before him. Blood congealed on the floor, covering rocks and dirt and every other surface. Sharp devices he didn’t have names for littered the space. A woman hauled a man in chains behind her.
“Did you know that other kingdoms sometimes send their criminals here?” Olerra asked him, leaning forward to speak directly into his ear. Even then, he only just caught the words. The crowd started to get louder as the chained man was brought forward.
“No,” he responded.
“We believe that the punishment should fit the crime. Unjust murderers are murdered. Thieves have time stolen from them in the prisons. And here”—she gestured to the arena—“here is where we deal with rapists.”
Rapists.
The word was foreign to him, but it didn’t sound good, the phonetics rough against his ears. He deliberated whether to ask what it meant. He didn’t want to seem foolish, not with his ignorance of all other things Amarran, but by the look of horror on the man awaiting his punishment, he dared not remain in ignorance.
“I don’t know what that means,” he admitted to her.
Her face looked disappointed at the admission. “I forget,” she said. “It is not even a crime in Brutus. How could you have a word for it?” She shook herself. “It is when a person forces sex upon someone who does not want it.”
Sanos’s eyes went wide, and suddenly it seemed strange that his country didn’t have a word for such a thing. It was what his father did to his mother in the marriage bed. He’d heard soldiers brag about conquests when they’d find lone women in the streets… It never sat comfortablywith him, but he took comfort in knowing that he was not like that. His brothers weren’t like that. Despite everything, the Ladicus brothers were nothing like their cruel father.
But then Sanos wondered, had he ever paid an unwilling woman? Someone who was so desperate for money to buy herself food and clothes and a roof overhead that she couldn’t say no despite wanting to?
Sanos felt sick. Worse than sick.
He hated that he’d never given it a second thought until this woman entered his life.
“What did he do?” Olerra asked the woman next to her, gesturing to the man awaiting punishment.
“He was the family friend of some nobility in Ephenna. He was caught in the bedroom of the nobleman’s ten-year-old daughter. The nurse thought to check on her and caught him. He was sent here for punishment.”
A child.
Sanos couldn’t help it. The smell of blood was so rich in the air, he leaned over the stands and vomited into the pit below.
Olerra rubbed his back soothingly. She used a handkerchief to wipe his face before he returned to his seat. She offered him her waterskin to wash down the taste of bile.
And then it was starting.
The sentenced man was dragged toward a large structure in the middle of the room. It was shaped like an X, two large wood beams making the shape. He was chained to each end, hands on the top, feet on the bottom. Then a contraption was rolled over to him.
The device was also made out of wood. It consisted of a single small hole like one would see in a stocks for hands and a head, but smaller. The device also had a metal blade.
A guard produced a knife, cutting off the man’s pants so they fellaround his ankles. He spat in her face as she worked, but she ignored it, clearly long used to the treatment.
Then a voice echoed through the room, and Sanos spotted another woman on the other side of the pit, speaking through a voice-magnifying trumpet.
“Revlin Darigan, for the crime of misusing your member, you have been sentenced to lose it.” The announcer nodded to the guard in the pit, who still had the man’s spit shining on her face.
The guard rolled the device until it trapped the man between the cross and it. She yanked on the pulley, which raised the wooden block with the sharp blade attached.
It looked like—
