Savage Tales of Xoth, The Headsman's Debt

 The first chapter of Dor Stryker is now written. 2,600 words of pulpy goodness as a try and complete Lester Dent's pulp formula for writing seriels. 

THE HEADSMAN'S DEBT

from the Chronicals of Xoth

 “The sword remembers every neck it has kissed.”

— Proverb of the Sword Sisters of Khazrahj

I.

The drum beat came before dawn. Dor heard it from the rooftop where she slept — a flat expanse of cracked limestone wrapped in her cloak, above the Street of Copper Lamps, where the smell of tallow and wine drifted from warm cobblestones below. She lay on her side, one hand on the hilt of the long blade next to her, unsheathed, naked of adornment, and unlike any other. Three strokes, pause, three strokes. It rolled across the awakening city like a stone cast into still water. Dogs could be heard yelping, and their master’s then scolding.

Zhul-Bazzir squatted at the junction of two caravan roads and the banks of the Sorrowing River — a city of yellow stone and ambition and rot, its minarets rising from a base of accumulated squalor . Flowers sprouting from a dung-heap. The Grand Inquisitor, Massad Ul-Khet, had held the city for eleven years. In that time, the headsman's yard had never gone cold. Stone-paved, drain-channeled, sluiced each evening with grey river water, running red before it ran clear — the yard behind the Palace of Corrections was the true heart of Zhul-Bazzir, the place where the Inquisitor's theology was written in a language everyone understood. Dor Stryker has been the yard's master author for the last three.

She rose, rubbed her face, stroked the fracture along her nose which marred her otherwise comely appearance, and tied back her oiled black hair. She relaced her high leather boots and buckled her corselet over bare skin, strapped on her belt sheath. She flicked her sword deftly into it and climbed down before the echo of the drum had fully died.

II.

The condemned was already kneeling at the block when Dor arrived. A crowd had gathered in the grey predawn — merchants, harlots, off-duty soldiers, the idle poor — drawn by the drum as they always were. They pressed against the low iron rails and watched with the frank curiosity of a people long accustomed to public death.

Dor noticed the prisoner's hands first. The knuckles were scarred in a pattern she knew: the callus ridge where a sword's grip meets the first two fingers, built by a thousand mornings of drilling. A fighter's hands, bound at the wrist with cord rather than chain. The Inquisitor's bailiffs had underestimated their captive or been paid to.

Then Dor came around the block and saw the face.

The prisoner was forty years old, with burnt-bronze skin and hooded eyes. Her hair had been shorn indicating a freshly taken slave, but the cant of her shoulders, the way she held the back of her neck against the pressure of the guard's hand — these weren’t slave-postures. These were postures Dor had learned in the training yards of the Sisterhood decades ago, from a woman who had beaten those lessons into her with a length of oiled cord and a practiced contempt for weakness.

The prisoner turned her head and Dor met her eyes.

The recognition struck like a cold blade through the heart.

Maret. Senior-Blade Maret of the Seventh Company. The woman who had once stood between a fifteen-year-old Dor and the anger of a training-master who believed broken bones were pedagogy.

Maret did not smile. She inclined her head —and Dor was uprooted, not understanding. The absence of begging; the unbowed calm not resignation, something more deliberate. A Sword Sister going to the blade the way a Sword Sister should, no this is not what unmoored her from her present place, present duties.

“Why here, why this?”

Dor breathed once through her nose and took her position.

“Why are you here sister?” This time she said it aloud, like steel pulled against the whetstone.

III.

The Inquisitor's deputy, a liver-spotted functionary named Ozeh, read the charges from a wax tablet in a reedy voice. He found satisfaction in his words and uttered crisp and polished sentences. Conspiracy against the throne. Harboring enemies of the Inquisitor's peace. Sedition through the distribution of the Sisterhood's "martial catechism” - a document Dor had herself been required to memorize before she knew what language was, though it contained nothing more seditious than advice on sword-grip and the obligation of a warrior to die on her feet.

The crowd listened, thirsty for misfortunes which were not their own.

Ozeh finished his recitation and looked at her with the expectant expression of a man who had arranged everything properly and expected others to perform their function just as properly. Lost in the poetry of his own blather, it was obvious he was unaware Dor was addressing the condemned slave before her.

The crowd was still. The drum had gone silent. Over the rooftops of Zhul-Bazzir, the first suffusions of prayer bled into the yellowing sky.

“Why are you here?” Dor hissed vehemently.

Maret's neck, exposed by the shorn scalp, was steady above the block's worn crescent.

“What makes you think I won’t break one oath over another sister?” she spoke again, angrily.

Ozeh looked back to his tablet and then up from his tablet. The absence of the singing blade followed by a wet, shearing thump had awakened him from his indulgence of the law, and its placement on others like a soap bubble snapped in the breeze.

“Finish the sentence,” Ozeh said. He struggled to comprehend his nicely ordered execution had come off the rails.

Dor rolled her right shoulder, testing the familiar weight of the execution blade — not her own sword belted at her side, but the instrument kept in the Palace's armory: a thick-spined, single-edged weapon of practical design, as devoid of beauty as a carpenter's adze. She had used it often enough that her body held the motion without thinking. The angle. The weight-shift. The exhale timed to the drop.

Dor raised the blade.

The single clear note of it — the whisper of displaced air as the weapon reached the apex — was the sound Dor associated with a precise, irreversible moment. Before a thing was done that could not be undone. She had heard it three hundred times and it had never meant anything except the final step of a process.

She held it there. One heartbeat. Two.

The crowd began to murmur.

IV.

Dor lowered the blade.

The sound that went through the yard was not loud — a collective intake of breath, the shift of sixty bodies registering the same confusion. The two guards flanking the bound Maret exchanged a glance.

“No.”

The word came out as flat and unremarkable as cobblestones, and it fell into the silence with the same solidity. Dor rested the execution blade across her left shoulder and turned to face the deputy. She was aware of how she appeared to the crowd: tall, deliberate, the dawn-light catching the brass fittings of her corselet. Her hardened body balanced on the lightness of a raptor's readiness. The end of another executioner's tenur in the service of Zhul-Bazzir.

“This is the Inquisitor's lawful sentence,” Ozeh said. His voice had climbed half an octave. “You are the Inquisitor's lawful instrument. You will—”

“The charge is distribution of the Sisterhood catechism,” Dor said with overblown disgust. “The catechism is a training document. Its oldest version predates Massad Ul-Khet's authority over this city by four hundred years. Executing a woman for possessing it is not law. It is the Inquisitor erasing his critics.”

She said this loudly. She said this loudly on purpose.

The crowd was very still now — the stillness of people who are watching something consequential and do not yet know whether to flee.

Ozeh's face had moved through surprise and landed on something pale and calculating. “Seize her,” he said quietly to the guards.

The guards were experienced men. They did not look at each other this time. They looked at Dor — at the execution blade still resting on her shoulder, her long blade at her hip. They had witnessed three years of her cold killing at the block. There was a pause that lasted one heartbeat longer than Ozeh intended.

Maret, still kneeling at the block, said, “Go, sword-sister. And consider your oath fulfilled.”

Dor looked at her.

Maret's face was a mocking smile. How could Dor anticipate her debt would be called so suddenly, unexpectently. But called it has and in an instant all she had careful constructed over three lonely years was ruined.

    Dor drove her elbow into the nearest guard’s jaw, then struck the second across the neck with the broad edge of the executioner’s blade. As blood sprayed from the severed stump, she pivoted and brought the heavy sword down in a two-handed arc, cutting through the other guard’s leather byrnie and deep into his shoulder. His spear slipped from numb fingers as he screamed and fell dead. Dor then sprinted for the Street of Copper Lamps.

                                                               V.

    She went over three rooftops and down an oil-seller’s outside stair before a serious pursuit organized itself. Zhul-Bazzir was a city she had walked for several years at the Inquisitor's pleasure, and she had done so with the professional attention to neighborhoods a person who killed for work would cultivate.

She did not return to her lodgings. She did not go to the stable where her Karrax riding-beast was kept. She went instead to the arena in the tanners' quarter — a deep-cellared ring with open seating. She descended stone steps to the animal stalls. It stank of waste, wet straw, and carrion. The game keeper, a foul slob of a brute with more hair on his back than words in his skull, sat gapped-kneed on a stool eating something that was cooked on a stick. He didn’t say anything until Dor reached the gate of a fierce hill-cat. A green and yellow striped predator from the far south. Vicious killers, the game house sedates them before every match so as not to kill too many expensive and popular gladiators before they earn enough gold. This one was sleeping off last night’s dose. Its bloodstained muzzle and claws testified to the great cat’s past performance.

“What do you think you are doing Stryker?” The game keeper had stopped eating. Deciding whether to stand up. He did not want to set down his plate.

“The Patar Marter wants to see the beast. Evaluate it before its next performance.” Dor answered as she gathered up a Banthen riding harness and saddle.

“Just take the lead and the whip. You don’t need a harness. No one told me Vigna was going out this morning.”

“Kalo, how long have you known me?”

This was a truly epic calculation for Kalo to make, and the way he tugged his beard meant he was getting mad because he was no longer eating. “Not long, I don’t think.”

“And you are always worried I’m not supposed to being doing what I’m doing when I’m down here right?”

“Yeah, like the time you tried to spike that Gargak before its match. I got beaten bad for that.”

“Well, they are going to beat you much worse for this.”

Before Kalo could react, let alone stop Dor from doing what she was doing, Dor had planted her booted foot swiftly into his groin. As he doubled over in agony Dor followed with a brutal uppercut which snapped the game keeper’s head back. Kalo fell in a haze of pain and delirium.

After she had Kalo adequately bound with rope, Dor started fitting the Banthen riding harness on the drugged cat. She had to kick it several times in the ribs to get it to stand up to finish the kit’s bindings. The creature growled, annoyed and hungry but still compliant from the heavy dose of lotus it had been given hours earlier. With a sack of dried meat and a large water bag tied behind the saddle she led the great green-maned cat up the ramp into the empty arena floor.

continued here?