A Passing Breeze - Part 5

If not for the dress that the victim wore, it might have been far more difficult to tell that she was indeed a woman. Her attack had paid particular attention to her face, mutilating it beyond all recognition. Her scalp had been disconnected entirely from her body, and tossed to the opposite side of the room, with the hair still attached. What was left seemed more a skeleton than a corpse.

"A servant," Verdant offered calmly, judging what was left of the woman from her clothes. "They intended to make it as cruel as possible. A fact that does not seem to have escaped the other corpses."

"There's likely something in that," Oliver said. "The unnecessary cruelty of it all. If they wanted to cause a sheer panic, then numbers would be the best way to go about it, would it not? If you kill a hundred men, you demonstrate emphatically that the tournament isn't a safe place to be. You bring it all crashing down in an instant."