Free 4: Witches' Blood by Ginn Hale Page A

Ravishan some consolation.
    “You would have been proud to see him move, Dayyid,” Hann’yu continued. “It was like lightning. Something to put the fear of god back into the masses.”
    “Ushvun Jahn’s prowess does nothing to excuse you,” Dayyid responded coldly. “I shouldn’t have to come and fetch you for the Purification Ceremony every year. If you had minded the hour and kept your eyes on Jahn, none of this would have happened.”
    “But as it was, Jahn saved a very pretty girl,” Hann’yu countered.
    “For all we know she was one of the whores who follow the fair,” Dayyid said.
    “She was Jahn’s sister.” The playful tone dropped from Hann’yu’s voice.
    Dayyid glanced back, this time to John. John met his gaze. Dayyid’s scowl seemed to soften, and he said nothing to John. He turned his attention back to their path.
    “Was she...is she all right?” Dayyid asked after several minutes of silence.
    “I think so,” John said.
    Dayyid nodded and said nothing more.
    They continued threading their way south through the fairgrounds until they reached the last wall that enclosed the terraced steps of Amura’taye. City guards, armed with archaic-looking bows and spears, stood on duty at the heavy gates. They bowed as Dayyid approached and remained bent down until John, Ravishan, and Hann’yu had all passed through the open gates.
    Outside, John expected to only see the flat expanse of the Holy Road, the small shrine to Parfir, and the surrounding forest. Instead, he found that they had stepped out into a second fairground. But a single whiff of the air told John why this one was kept so far from the city.
    The air was choked with the smells of blood, meat, excrement, urine, and fires. Makeshift pens held fattened goats, young sheep, and old gaunt tahldi. Dogs crouched together in cages. Coops of weasels hung from the eaves of wagons. Smoked and salted carcasses dangled from walls and over entryways.
    Tahldi bellowed and dogs whimpered as they were dragged from their pens. Teams of sweating, muscular men wrestled the animals down. Butchers slashed open the animals’ throats with fast, practiced strokes of their gleaming knives. Blood splashed and sprayed. Almost immediately, women and girls took over the work of skinning, gutting, and butchering the slaughtered creatures.
    In the flickering red torchlight, the bodies of butchered animals seemed to melt into the blood-stained sweating forms of the men and women moving between them. Crowds of buyers shoved their way to the pens. They pointed and shouted out which animals they wanted, many demanding the same dog, goat, or sheep. Arguments seemed to break out constantly.
    “You haven’t been here before, have you?” asked Hann’yu.
    John shook his head. He had tried to hide his revulsion at the vast, open-air abattoir, but Hann’yu must have noticed it.
    “I was astounded the first time I came as well. I couldn’t believe how many people were up and about this late. They don’t even have proper lights.” Hann’yu shook his head. “But the blood market is always busiest at night, when the air is cooler and there aren’t so many flies.”
    John simply nodded. The fact that it was so busy at night hadn’t really made an impression on him. His deep familiarity with the twenty-four-hour conveniences of Nayeshi made the idea of nighttime shopping unremarkable.
    It was the way the blood and butchery seemed so routine, the straightforward brutal slaughter that shocked him.
    “The night brings out its own kind of vermin.” Dayyid threw a pointed look to the shadowy alcove between two wagons where a group of men seemed to be lounging. John wasn’t sure what Dayyid was referring to. The men looked bored, but hardly like vermin. In fact, some of them seemed very well dressed. Then John saw a woman farther back in the shadows. The thick body of the man thrusting between her sprawled legs hid most of her nudity. Her thin arms absently clung to his