In the next moment the boy’s slight, bare chest is awash in his own blood. The Professor lets his victim’s body slump to the floor at his feet.

“There!” he yells at the boy’s motionless form, waving the carving knife with abandon. “Is that what you want? Did you get what you wanted?”

Laython nearly bowls Evie over as he crashes through the crowd. The towering taskmaster of the Savages barrels down on the Professor without hesitation, easily avoiding the wild swipes of the man’s knife hand. Laython ducks behind the Professor and clamps him in a vise-like grip, restraining the Professor’s arms and controlling him by the back of his head and neck.

Laython flings the man to the ground with his full weight atop the Professor, immobilizing him, though he continues to struggle in vain.

Behind them, half naked and totally naked Savages and sex workers have abandoned their coupling and private stalls to investigate the commotion.

“Why must they come to me?” the Professor demands in a voice Evie doesn’t recognize, the hysterical shrieking voice of a madman. “Why must they always come to me for it? I did not ask for this! I never asked for any of it! I only give them what they want! I only ever gave them what they begged me for, I tell you!”

He ceases struggling then and begins sobbing, like a child. He does his best under Laython’s mass to pull his knees into his abdomen, attempting to curl up as he continues to wail.

Laython doesn’t even loosen his grip.

Two of the Skrain soldiers push their way through the gathered crowd a moment later. Only then does Laython relinquish his hold on the now broken man contorted into a damp ball on the floor. The Skrain lift him easily with one hand apiece and carry him back through the curtains.

Hands resting against his torso high above his waist, Laython looks down with stormy, disturbed eyes on the bled boy.

It’s the first wholly human emotion Evie has seen express itself on the man’s face.

Evie turns, finding Spud-Bar standing a shoulder’s length away.

“What…” Evie’s mind is still reeling. She has to shut her eyes tight to focus through it. “What just happened?”

“Why do you think he’s here?” Spud-Bar asks her. “The Professor?”

“He said… he told me the state accused him of subverting his students.”

Spud-Bar snorts. “More like eviscerating his students. Five of ’em, that’s how many he killed, mostly young fawns with schoolgirl crushes on ’im. Seems any time a pretty young thing turned that kind of eye on ’im something inside that man broke apart and couldn’t come back together as long as the beholder in question was alive.”

“But that’s… how is that possible? I mean, I never heard anything about any murders at a Crachian university—”