"Come, now," the Commander said. "You know better than that."
Behind the locked door, Lee Bennet had thrown herself on the bed, dry-eyed. She wished she could cry, but tears never came. Not since those three roistering drunkards had demonstrated their virility as males and their immunity as Syndics on her ... she couldn't cry any more.
Charles Orsino—another one of them. She hoped they caught him and killed him, slowly. She knew all this was true. Then why did she feel like a murderess? Why did she think incessantly of suicide? Why, why, why?
Dawn came imperceptibly. First Charles could discern the outline of treetops against the sky and then a little of the terrain before him and at last two twisted shadows that slowly became sprawling half-naked bodies. One of them was a woman's, mangled by fifty-caliber slugs. The other was the body of a bearded giant—the one with whom they had struggled in the dark.
Charles crawled out stiffly. The woman was—had been—a stringy, white haired crone. Some animal's skull was tied to her pate with sinews as a head-dress, and she was tattooed with blue crescents. The jaygee joined him standing over her and said: "One of their witches. Part of the religion, if you can call it that."
"A brand-new religion?" Charles asked dubiously. "Made up out of whole cloth?"
"No," the jaygee said. "I understand it's an old religion—pre-Christian. It kept going underground until the Troubles. Then it flared up again all over Europe. A filthy business. Animal sacrifices every new moon. Human sacrifices twice a year. What can you expect from people like that?"
Charles reminded himself that the jaygee's fellow-citizens boiled recalcitrant slaves. "I'll see what I can do about the jeep," he said.