Up until now, Rababull had been deliberately ignoring the whole fiasco.
But when Habrunt finally stepped up to him and bowed low, he turned to
listen, still grandly smiling, and after a few barely whispered words
from the bowed face of Habrunt, Master Rababull quickly turned, and his
smile froze into an expressionless, unreadable, and somehow
all-the-more terrifying mask.
Master Rababull was, after all, many hundreds of years old, the better
part of a thousand, in fact, and no man's fool. He knew men, and he
knew how to deal in kind for kind, and had survived the most evil
schemes that men could throw at him by managing to anticipate them
sufficiently in advance whilst devising even more evil ones in return.
Together, Master and Slavemaster returned to the silent crowd that had
gathered around the two boys, and all of the women, except one old
grandmother, fell away like chaff before the wind. The one woman, whose
name was Breeka, stood her ground, though old and stooped, and her face
was as a gargoyle's, very terrible and unmoving, as if naturally grown
from some dark and twisted tree bole.
If Master Rababull's years exceeded six hundred, and his wit be steeped
in the tap root of the ungood, this old crone was the very epitome of
evil and practically a great-grandmother to him by comparison, with the
crime of the hour engendering within her shrunken breast a fearless,
savage desire for revenge.
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