Valentine could just hear the quiet rattle of their tails as she moved, if he really sought the sound.
After the dance came a combat display, Grogs wrestling, fighting with sticks, and finally swordplay. Valentine wondered if on their home world they used swords or if they'd adopted the weapons from machetes and such captured after 2022. Their fighting style, at least in this theatrical display, involved cuts and parries in precise, ever increasing tempo time. The Gray Ones in the audience became increasingly excited as the more furious blows and parries drew accidental blood.
After that came a bloody sacrifice.
Animals were slaughtered, starting with chickens and moving up to an ox and a captured eagle. They made a great show of presenting the eagle's feathers to Danger Close.
"A few deaths prove that they're serious about getting on the good side of all the invisibles," Stock said. "Don't let it scare you."
He glanced closely at Valentine. Valentine looked down to see that some of the spray from the sacrificed ox had struck his shirt, peppering it in red.
By now the crowd was excited.
They brought a huddled line of shorn men and a few Gray Ones out onto the pulpit projection. Two of the proposed victims were brought in on stretchers.
"Bad head injuries," Stock said. "Sometimes they're considered prophets, but if they're only barely responsive, they're done away with."
Men with riot guns stood behind, and the Baron's three pet Reapers flanked the column and stood at its head.
Valentine recognized one of the sacrifices. It was Beach Boy, from Hole Three. He hadn't seen him since the fight with Fat Daddy, though he'd heard he'd been put in another hole to stave off further fighting.
The Baron stepped forward, carrying a bamboo cane. A string with some weighted feathers hung from the handle end. He grabbed it by the base, and held it up over the first man in line. The feather just touched the top of the convicted man's hands as the two Reapers held him, one at the ankles and one at the elbows, with the third behind.
"Raminov, knifed a man over cards," Stock said to his party.
There was some hooting from the Gray Ones. A voice cried out from the balcony: I'd knife a man who was cheating at cards too!
Some applause and whistling broke out from the men, with a faint boo or "open him" shouted.
The feather moved on to a shorn Gray One behind him. Fierce growls broke out among the Gray Ones.
"No idea what he did," Stock said.
The convict fell back. He gave one violent shrug. The fist of the Reaper behind him exploded out of his chest in a shower of blood. Valentine noted, rather coldly, that the Reaper had discreetly locked its teeth at the Grog's shoulder and appeared to have its tongue wedged beneath one of the thick rhino-hide plates of cartilaginous armor.
The auditorium roared approval.
It was a revolting ceremony. Valentine decided it wasn't so much a sacrifice, or an execution, as a final appeal. Valentine noticed the crowd went silent for some of the victims. Someone from the audience would shriek out a plea for mercy, and if that met with approval there was a great stamping of feet. The Baron never failed to heed the collective verdict, either way.
Valentine, tired and nervous and sick to his stomach, tried to keep his meagre dinner down. Hot-blooded killing was one thing, but execution as grand theater ...
He'd seen his share of executions. There were several combat-zone offenses that could get one shot, or a civilian hanged, in Southern Command military jurisprudence. He himself had been under a death sentence, thanks to escaping trial and the rendering of an in absentia conviction. Arguably, he'd performed them himself, as some half-awake sentry at one end of an unlit bridge was just as helpless against his knife as a chained convict. You didn't execute men like this, in front of the next one in line with a holiday crowd roaring.
The feather moved over Beach Boy.
"He was in your hole, I think," Stock said, looking at Valentine. "He's in for shirking. They found him sleeping under a truck on his shift. When you're forced labor, that's it."
Beach Boy was a silly little toady, certainly, but how many in the audience knew him by anything deeper than sight? Perhaps enough had seen him in the fields to know he played the fool, always with the softest jobs and gentlest duties, to better preserve his supple, scented skin for Fat Daddy.
"Give him another chance!" Valentine shouted.
The growls and angry murmurs grew louder.
"Chance! Chance! Chance!" some others began to shout. The chant picked up voices, and the feather moved on. Beach Boy looked skyward.
He could guess the thoughts of every man in the audience: if it was me up there, how would I take it? Tears? Pleas for mercy? Reasoned argument? A final mouthful of spit?
"Just like you, Valentine, trying to save a worthless little dicksicle like that," Sergeant Stock said out of the side of his mouth.