Setting down the stone oil lamp, she reached up to one upper end of it and tugged steadily while sawing at the thin strong threads of sinew with a knife, until she popped the corner loose.
Ignoring the disapproving and contemptuous look of Borla as he watched, and oblivious of the stares of the guards, and the Captains of Fifty who had accompanied Borla to received their Orders of the Day, and the Emperor himself, Si'Wren reached up to the lone dangling corner of the tent flap for a fresh grip, and applied the knife to the binding threads of sinew as she pulled steadily at it, until it also came loose and dropped into her arms in a thin swirl of dried dust.
She folded the tent flap over and rolled up various items within it. Then she went out resolutely to her horse, and tied the bundle behind her saddle.
Then without so much as a backwards glance, she led the black stallion to a nearby rock, which she climbed, and mounted, and turned and galloped him across the compound toward the far perimeter of the camp, with many a warrior's lusting eyes looking on as she rode out of camp with the oil lamp in one hand.
Oil lamps were made for darkness. Plainly, seeing it was still but morning, the men watching her ride away were not a little curious as to her destination with a lamp at such an early hour.
* * *
When she found him, it was not yet as she had feared.
She quickly located the body by the sight of a large flock of vultures wheeling and circling overhead. Nearby, a cluster of hyenas was already sniffing around, still trying to find the body.
Hyenas, with their silly laugh and ugly, death's-head faces, could crush ox bones with their powerful jaws. They usually ran in packs, and she considered them -as did any decent folk- to be cowardly, dangerous, and disgusting animals.
But they had not quite succeeded in locating the body yet, and the man's motionless remains lay virtually unscathed, except for the mortal wounds from his execution at the orders of Borla. His lifeless body had been left lying face-down beside a series of downwards sloping, shaded stretches near a gently banked, zig-zag ravine that meandered through the broad field.