“I come bearing good news men, although you were scheduled to be hung tomorrow morning in the public square, Lord Urdurel has, for some unfathomable reason, granted you leniency.”
DeFacto, the acting leader of the surviving but captured ‘Dirty Dozen’ calls up from the gloom below.
“That is surprisingly good news! So what’s to happen to us now? A royal pardon?”
Torsion shrugs unseen.
“Lord Urdurel’s not quite that lenient. It’ll be ten years hard labour in the quarry, I’m afraid. It’s back breaking work but you might survive it and, if you do, you’ll still have a chance of a real life.”
There are audible sighs of relief from behind the cell bars but also groans. Ten years of hard labour is often just a stretched out death sentence, with the weaker members of the work gangs, often not surviving beyond the first year.
Still, Torsion continues to smile. Despite his ‘Chief Executioner’ title, he’d never wanted to do this job in the first place. When he was young, he wanted to be a musician and make people happy but his dirt-poor parents couldn’t even afford to buy him a simple flute, so he was forced, because of his imposing size and lack of a formal education, into this, normally and literally, dead-end job.
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