Exeunt

He’d always wanted to try that one. (There’s bound to be a sharp uptick in the number of instances of inconvenient kinsmen dispatched in a similar manner; the hot iron suppository is not for the faint of heart but kings have always been trendsetters too. Lightborn will be the progenitor of a truly novel thing.) In the Neapolitan school of assassination, there is always some thought given to creativity as well as to practicality; Lightborn is well aware that this death in particular may be his masterwork. What could outdo regicide? Truly the king of crimes. He might conceivably be dispatched to kill the Pope in Rome, but even that would feel pale and dull and – well, less than virile in comparison. There had been a real zest to the poor bugger’s manner of dying. Such contrasts – the jewel, the sewer, the king and the cutthroat. The feather bed – the old Romans settled for simple bedclothes to bundle up their inconveniences in and roll them merrily into the Tiber; for a little child (a princess, or a princeling) a silken cushion might have done the job just as well, but kings and princes must have the best in everything. The roasting spit had been a perfectly ordinary roasting spit, though. One thrust, easily placed. He’ll never forget the sound, and moreover the smell, the sharp crescendo of seared flesh cutting through the miasma of filth, and the screaming. No gradual build-up from pleas to blubbering to cries to screams – full-voice, straight up the register until the moment of termination, no waiting. What technique! What execution.