Slaughter High Quotes

Since this was a formal undead gathering, there would be food—all kinds—drinks, dancing, and festivities, while those in power pondered whether or not to slaughter half the people around them. In other words, like a high-school prom.

I love my country, by which I mean I am indebted joyfully to all the people throughout its history, who have fought the government to make right. Where so many cunning sons and daughters, our foremothers and forefathers came singing through slaughter, came through hell and high water so that we could stand here, and behold breathlessly the sight; how a raging river of tears cut a grand canyon of light. Why can't all decent men and women call themselves feminists, out of respect for those that fought for this?

If you really care about animals, then stop trying to figure out how to exploit them 'compassionately'. Just stop exploiting them.

The Japanese fought to win - it was a savage, brutal, inhumane, exhausting and dirty business. Our commanders knew that if we were to win and survive, we must be trained realistically for it whether we liked it or not. In the post-war years, the U.S. Marine Corps came in for a great deal of undeserved criticism in my opinion, from well-meaning persons who did not comprehend the magnitude of stress and horror that combat can be. The technology that developed the rifle barrel, the machine gun and high explosive shells has turned war into prolonged, subhuman slaughter. Men must be trained realistically if they are to survive it without breaking, mentally and physically.

If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter.

Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done, to corral and bloody and where necessary slaughter the migrants, and had determined that some other way would have to be found. Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done.

We need to flood the Internet with fake news, ladies and gentlemen. They’re out to take our guns, don’t you know? People who look to Facebook for the news of the day will believe anything. They are sheep to slaughter . . .

To slaughter grand and beautiful creatures like these tuskers, whether terrestrial or marine, solely to obtain a few teeth indicates that we have not evolved very much since the days our forebears lived in caves and saught to prove their superiority by adorning themselves with teeth and claws

In the preface of "The Rifles" "Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing." Barnabas Piryuaq "Well, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created." Jan Welzi 1933.

They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft. At the same instant the ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek; the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back. The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing--for once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy--and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous to the ear-drums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold--that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would come a momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors--the men would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears starting in their eyes. Meantime, heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and life-blood ebbing away together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water. It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests--and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering-machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.

Tarinthali Ringali, I am, without regrets, your devoted servant. Your wit and intelligence stun me. Your beauty eclipses the sun itself. Your warm personality is enticing, and I highly prize your ability to disembowel anyone stupid enough to wrong you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and I selfishly want every part of you. It would be an honor, and my greatest desire, if you would allow me to protect, love, and serve you for the rest of our lives. And if you ever flirt with Eric or drink with another man again, I am going to slaughter them without hesitation.” “I accept. I love you, Captain Arion Herycian.” “And I love you, Tarinthali Ringali.

Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter's rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze. At last, after September, another weather arrives, an Indian summer that occasionally endures until Christmas.

. . what you call my struggle to submit . . . is not struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy—fully armed too as it’s a highly dangerous quest.” —FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Winston Churchill wrote afterwards: 'No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening. The measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces, the uncertainty of their movements and positions, the number of unknown and unknowable facts made the first collision a drama never surpassed. Nor was there any other period in the War when the general battle was waged on so great a scale, when the slaughter was so swift or the stakes so high. Moreover, in the beginning, our faculties of wonder, horror, or excitement had not been cauterized and deadened by the furnace fires of years.

I was raised in the Marine Corps and I was taught as a boy that you feed your own men before you feed yourself. It was my belief then, and it remains so today, that my platoon who loves and respect me will slaughter your platoon that hates you. But here is the great lesson I took from the plebe system—it let me know exactly the kind of man I wanted to become. It made me ache to be a contributing citizen in whatever society I found myself in, to live out a life I could be proud of, and always to measure up to what I took to be the highest ideal of a Citadel man—or, now, a Citadel woman. The standards were clear to me and they were high, and I took my marching orders from my college to take my hard-won education and go out to try to make the whole world a better place.

...one grows to the belief that, while woman's glory is in her hair, man's glory is to defeat some one. And if he can 'defeat with great slaughter' his monument is twice as high as if he had only visited on his brother man a plain undoing.

When I was old enough to ask what it was like on the day that my father arrived, she said that the presence of El hovered over him, which is why he was worthy of notice. Zilpah told me that El was the god of thunder, high places, and awful sacrifice. El could demand that a father cut off his son—cast him out into the desert, or slaughter him outright. This was a hard, strange god, alien and cold, but, she conceded, a consort powerful enough for the Queen of Heaven, whom she loved in every shape and name.

Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.

That’s when you fall in love with somebody. The lust and fucking like rabbits and letting your life fall to shit so you can be around him—that’s passion. It’s borderline obsession. And it always burns itself out. You know that, Liddie. That high never, ever lasts. But being in that hospital, taking care of him, I started to realize that what I had with Paul, what I thought I had, that was more than love. That was being in love. It was so tangible I could almost touch it with my hands. I could bite it with my teeth.

It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter's rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze

Biju stepped out of the airport into the Calcutta night, warm, mammalian. His feet sank into dust winnowed to softness at his feet, ad he felt an unbearable feeling, sad and tender, old and sweet like the memory of falling asleep, a baby on his mother's lap. Thousands of people were out though it was almost eleven. He saw a pair of elegant bearded goats in a rickshaw, riding to slaughter. A conference of old men with elegant goat faces, smoking bidis. A mosque and minarets lit magic green in the night with a group of women rushing by in burkas, bangles clinking under the black and a big psychedelic mess of colour from a sweet shop. Rotis flew through the air as in a juggling act, polka-dotting the sky high over a restaurant that bore the slogan "Good food makes good mood". Biju stood there in that dusty tepid soft sari night. Sweet drabness of home - he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing - that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant. Nobody paid attention to him here, and if they said anything at all, their words were easy, unconcerned. He looked about and for the first time in God knows how long, his vision unblurred and he found that he could see clearly.

The consequences of this amassing of fortunes were first felt in the catastrophe experienced by small farmers in Europe and England. The peasants became impoverished, dependent workers crowded into city slums. For the first time in human history, the majority of Europeans depended for their livelihood on a small wealthy minority, a phenomenon that capitalist-based colonialism would spread worldwide. The symbol of this new development, indeed its currency, was gold. Gold fever drove colonizing ventures, organized at first in pursuit of the metal in its raw form. Later the pursuit of gold became more sophisticated, with planters and merchants establishing whatever conditions were necessary to hoard as much gold as possible. Thus was born an ideology: the belief in the inherent value of gold despite its relative uselessness in reality. Investors, monarchies, and parliamentarians devised methods to control the processes of wealth accumulation and the power that came with it, but the ideology behind gold fever mobilized settlers to cross the Atlantic to an unknown fate. Subjugating entire societies and civilizations, enslaving whole countries, and slaughtering people village by village did not seem too high a price to pay, nor did it appear inhumane. The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.

No one saw it at the time, but her addiction had never been about the high, it has been about the escape. She had been actively seeking ways to destroy herself.

And there shall be upon every high mountain, and upon every high hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall. (Isaiah 30:25, emphasis added)

Good, because if you have got a problem with it I can’t see you. Can’t smoke, can’t see. You can’t smoke anywhere these days. That’s why I gave up and organized my practice from home. You can drive a bloody car pell-mell with a high risk of slaughtering a thousand little children a year but you can’t smoke in case they get a whiff of your tobacco. What sort of a country is that?” He

Lift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the list’ning skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chast’ning rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered. We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way; Thou who hast by Thy might, Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee; Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand, True to our God, True to our native land.

Did I undermine your rescue plan with my own audacious, highly impressive escape?” His eyebrows furrowed. I smirked at him. “As much as I would have enjoyed waiting for you to stroll into that prison and slaughter everyone in sight, I had things to do.

In less than a month it would be the magical feast of Samhain. Some years this took place at the great ceremonial centre of Tara; other years it was held at other places. At Samhain the excess livestock would be slaughtered, the rest put out on the wasteland and later brought into pens, while the High King and his followers set off on their winter rounds. Until then, however, it was a slow and peaceful time. The harvest was in, the weather still warm. It should, for the High King, have been a time of contentment.

Then the creatures of the high air answered to the battle, foretelling the destruction that would be done that day; and the sea chattered of the losses, and the waves gave heavy shouts keening them, and the water-beasts roared to one another, and the rough hills creaked with the danger of the battle, and the woods trembled mourning the heroes, and the grey stones cried out at their deeds, and the wind sobbed telling them, and the earth shook, foretelling the slaughter; and the cries of the grey armies put a cloak over the sun, and the clouds were dark; and the hounds and the whelps and the crows, and the witches of the valley, and the powers of the air, and the wolves of the forests, howled from every quarter and on every side of the armies, urging them against one another.

Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

Tarinthali Ringali, I am, without regrets, your devoted servant. Your wit and intelligence stun me. Your beauty eclipses the sun itself. Your warm personality is enticing, and I highly prize your ability to disembowel anyone stupid enough to wrong you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, and I selfishly want every part of you. It would be an honor, and my greatest desire, if you would allow me to protect, love, and serve you for the rest of our lives. And if you ever flirt with Eric or drink with another man again, I am going to slaughter them without hesitation.

The same Bible that condemned me held in it the promises that could save me. I just had to believe it. “It” being what it said about Him: God. Jesus had the guilty in mind when He was hung high and stretched out wide. On it, He died in my place, for my sin. He, bare-bodied and face set on joy, became as a slaughtered lamb underneath the wrath of God. You would think His Father would have a better memory than that. Didn’t He know that that wrath was mine? It even had my name on it. But He knew. His justice wouldn’t allow Him to forget. His love is what He wanted me to know and remember, and I did.

Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter's rough Colorado winds and hp-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheat stalks bristle, blaze.

The Israelis have not been the worst conquerors of Jerusalem: they have not slaughtered their predecessors, as the Crusaders did, nor have they permanently excluded them, as the Byzantines banned the Jews from the city. On the other hand, they have not reached the same high standards as Caliph Umar. As we reflect on the current unhappy situation, it becomes a sad irony that on two occasions in the past, it was an islamic conquest of Jerusalem that made it possible for Jews to return to their holy city. Umar and Saladin both invited Jews to settle in Jerusalem when they replaced Christian rulers there.

Jesus had the guilty in mind when He hung high and stretched out wide.... He, bare-bodied and face set on joy, became as a slaughtered lamb underneath the wrath of God... Didn't He know that wrath was mine? It even had my name on it. But He knew... Without asking my permission, a good God had come to my rescue.

Not in San Salvador, he thinks, where the shanty slums press against gleaming high-rises like the thatched huts of medieval peasants pressed against castle walls. Except these castle walls are patrolled by private security guards wielding automatic rifles and machine pistols. And at night, the guards venture out from the castle walls and ride through the villages ...and slaughter the peasants, leaving their bodies at crossroads and in the middle of village squares, and rape and kill women and execute children in front of their parents.  So the survivors will know their place.  It’s a killing ground, Art thinks.  El Salvador.  The Savior, my ass.

Are you aware that they inject all kinds of antibiotics into that meat you eat? Yes, that same food supply and those same corporations that are actually causing and perpetuating WORLD HUNGER, because we humans could be eating the grain that they are feeding to the cows, that could live quite well on GRASS, if we didn't destroy the topsoil in this country's heartland; there are livestock an chickens that are being injected with hormones to make them grow bigger and faster and forced to live in filthy cramped conditions just so they can be slaughtered and end up on you high priced plate next to that tiny gray vegetable that you cooked to death instead of steaming.

The fact that the technology of slaughter at vast distances has become extremely sophisticated does not culturally advance its highly trained operators over club-swinging primitives; it makes complete the blindness that was but rudimentary in the primitive. It is the supreme triumph of resentment over vision. We are the unseeing killing the unseen.

Slaughter on a scale far greater than any attempted by the Paris mob was the portion of those village patriots who dared to resist them. Women and children were not spared, men were thrown, while still alive, into ditches piled high with corpses. Clergy who had sworn the oath to the Constitution were tied to horses and dragged on the dusty roads to a terrible death.

I stood on the dead horse and spread my arms. I held the shield high to my left and the sword to my right, and my mail coat was spattered with blood and the snow fell about my wolf-crested helmet and all I knew was the young man's joy of slaughter. "I killed Ubba Lothbrokson!" I shouted at them. "I killed him! So come and join him! Taste his death! My sword wants you!

Perhaps they had decided they did not have it in them to do what would have needed to be done, to corral and bloody and where necessary slaughter the migrants, and had determined that some other way would have to be found. Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done. Or perhaps the sheer number of places where there were now doors had made it useless to fight in any one.

give order that these bodies High on a stage by placed to the view. And let me speak to the unknowing world How these things came about. So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fallen on th'inventors' heads. All this can I Truly deliver.

My last Christmas toy drive in Compton handed out eulogies Not because the rags in the park had red gradient But because the high blood pressure flooded the caterin' So what's the difference 'tween your life when hidin' motives? More fatalities and reality brung you closure The noble person that goes to work and pray like they 'posed to? Slaughter people too, your murder's just a bit slower

High-quality and affordable childcare and eldercare • Paid family and medical leave for women and men • A right to request part-time or flexible work • Investment in early education comparable to our investment in elementary and secondary education • Comprehensive job protection for pregnant workers • Higher wages and training for paid caregivers • Community support structures to allow elders to live at home longer • Legal protections against discrimination for part-time workers and flexible workers • Better enforcement of existing laws against age discrimination • Financial and social support for single parents • Reform of elementary and secondary school schedules to meet the needs of a digital rather than an agricultural economy and to take advantage of what we now know about how children learn

In this wealthy, technologically advanced, highly educated nation, more and more of our darkest children are dying on the streets--literally. Still, this uncontested reality polarizes adults along racial lines, not as we attempt to discover meaningful solutions to these brutal slaughters but in our racially balkanized expression of beliefs and determinations regarding the cause of these senseless deaths.

And still, strangely, they were not past the carnecería. The vision of red horror was on their left as they paced steadily forward on the hot tile sidewalk. The things that hung from hooks looked like brutalities and sins, like bad consciences, evil dreams, like gored flags and slaughtered promises. The redness, oh, the hanging, evil-smelling wetness and redness, the hooked and hung-high carcasses, unfamiliar, unfamiliar.

The highly civilized apes swung gracefully from bough to bough; the Neanderthaler was uncouth and bound to the earth. The apes, saturated and playful, lived in sophisticated playfulness, or caught fleas in philosophic contemplation; the Neanderthaler trampled gloomily through the world, banging around with clubs. The apes looked down on him amusedly from their tree tops and threw nuts at him. Sometimes horror seized them: they ate fruits and tender plants with delicate refinement; the Neanderthaler devoured raw meat, he slaughtered animals and his fellows. He cut down trees that had always stood, moved rocks from their time-hallowed place, transgressed every law and tradition of the jungle. He was uncouth, cruel, without animal dignity – from the point of view of the highly civilized apes, a barbaric relapse of history. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

So there are no dirges in Terrasen that are sung in a different language?” “No,” he said, drawing out the word as he pondered. “But I once heard that in the high court of Terrasen, when the nobility died, they sang their laments in the language of the Fae.” Chaol’s blood froze and he almost tripped, but he managed to keep walking and say, “Would these songs have been known by everyone—not just the nobility?” “Oh, no,” Sensel said, only half-listening as he recited whatever history was in his head. “Those songs were sacred to the court. Only those of noble blood ever learned or sang them. They were taught and sung in secret, their dead buried by the light of the moon, when no other ears could hear them. At least, that’s what rumor claimed. I’ll admit to my own morbid curiosity in that I’d hoped to hear them ten years ago, but by the time the slaughter had ended, there was no one left in those noble houses to sing them.” No one, except … You will always be my enemy.

Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to me. Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!--that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now. Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!

Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high. Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the “Mexican drug problem” and Mexican corruption. It’s not the “Mexican drug problem,” Pablo thinks now, it’s the North American drug problem. As for corruption, who’s more corrupt—the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors? Corrupt to the soul. That’s the big story, he thinks. That’s the story someone should write. Well, maybe I will. And no one will read it.

He was always saying: “Don’t get ideas above your station. Don’t think you’re anything special.” When the boys in their high spirits declared that they wanted to become professional footballers when they grew up, or lawyers or millionaires, he would always snap back: “One should know one’s place!” He was stingy when it came to praise and encouragement, and certainly when it came to money. He distilled his own spirits, ate the meat of animals which he himself had shot or slaughtered, and the farm was as good as self-sufficient. Nothing was ever bought unless heavily discounted or in a

Not that Baum had taken offense. Still, he had to wonder how many of his people had perished that day, or for that matter since he and Cyrankiewicz had sat down to talk. A dull, orange glow pulsed above the tree line to the north; the last of the Scharfuhrer's fire pits were dying out for the evening. Granted, a little unintended bigotry or even the occasional racial slur was something to be expected, and certainly no cause for high dudgeon. But to what extent, one had to ask, had such seemingly innocuous behavior led to the slaughter of children and the emergence of creatures such as Otto Moll?

ACT9.1 And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest,  ACT9.2 And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem. ACT9.3 And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven:  ACT9.4 And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?  ACT9.5 And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

Liberty, Equality and Fraternity….“ began the badger. "Liberty, Brutality and Obscenity,” rejoined the magician promptly. “You should tray living in some of the revolutions which use that slogan. First they proclaim it: then they announce that the aristos must be liquidated, on high moral grounds, in order to purge the party or to prune the commune or to make the world safe for democracy; and then they rape and murder everybody they can lay their hands on, more in sorrow than in anger, or crucify them, or torture them in ways which i do not care to mention. You should have tried the Spanish Civil War. Yes, that is equality of man. Slaughter anybody who is better than you are, and then we shall be equal soon enough. All equally dead.

To win the good-will of the people thou governest there are two things, among others, that thou must do; one is to be civil to all (this, however, I told thee before), and the other to take care that food be abundant, for there is nothing that vexes the heart of the poor more than hunger and high prices. Make not many proclamations; but those thou makest take care that they be good ones, and above all that they be observed and carried out; for proclamations that are not observed are the same as if they did not exist; nay, they encourage the idea that the prince who had the wisdom and authority to make them had not the power to enforce them; and laws that threaten and are not enforced come to be like the log, the king of the frogs, that frightened them at first, but that in time they despised and mounted upon. Be a father to virtue and a stepfather to vice. Be not always strict, nor yet always lenient, but observe a mean between these two extremes, for in that is the aim of wisdom. Visit the gaols, the slaughter-houses, and the market-places; for the presence of the governor is of great importance in such places; it comforts the prisoners who are in hopes of a speedy release, it is the bugbear of the butchers who have then to give just weight, and it is the terror of the market-women for the same reason. Let it not be seen that thou art (even if perchance thou art, which I do not believe) covetous, a follower of women, or a glutton; for when the people and those that have dealings with thee become aware of thy special weakness they will bring their batteries to bear upon thee in that quarter, till they have brought thee down to the depths of perdition.

The office of midwife was hereditary in the family of the basket-maker. It belonged to his wife. She might not be competent, but the office was hers, anyway. Her pay was not high—25 cents for a boy, and half as much for a girl. The girl was not desired, because she would be a disastrous expense by and by. As soon as she should be old enough to begin to wear clothes for propriety's sake, it would be a disgrace to the family if she were not married; and to marry her meant financial ruin; for by custom the father must spend upon feasting and wedding-display everything he had and all he could borrow—in fact, reduce himself to a condition of poverty which he might never more recover from. It was the dread of this prospective ruin which made the killing of girl-babies so prevalent in India in the old days before England laid the iron hand of her prohibitions upon the piteous slaughter.

In the bourgeois democratic countries the need for using intrinsically good means to achieve desirable ends is more clearly realized than in Russia. But even in these countries enormous mistakes have been made in the past and still greater, still more dangerous mistakes are in process of being committed today. Most of these mistakes are due to the fact that, though professing belief in our ideal postulates, the rulers and people of these countries are, to some extent and quite incompatibly, also militarists and nationalists. The English and the French, it is true, are sated militarists whose chief desire is to live a quiet life, holding fast to what they seized in their unregenerate days of imperial highway-robbery. Confronted by rivals who want to do now what they were doing from the beginning of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, they profess and doubtless genuinely feel a profound moral indignation. Meanwhile, they have begun to address themselves, reluctantly but with determination, to the task of beating the Fascist powers at their own game. Like the Fascist states, they are preparing for war. but modern war cannot be waged or even prepared except by a highly centralized executive wielding absolute power over a docile people. Most of the planning which is going on in the democratic countries is planning designed to transform these countries into the likeness of totalitarian communities organized for slaughter and rapine. Hitherto this transformation has proceeded fairly slowly. Belief in our idea postulates has acted as a brake on fascization, which has had to advance gradually and behind a smoke screen. But if war is declared, or even if the threat of war becomes more serious than at present, the process will become open and rapid. "The defence of democracy against Fascism" entails inevitably the transformation of democracy into Fascism.

life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way. Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to me. Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings, float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now. Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!

For long they had fought against each other in fierce combat, and the struggle gave them pain at heart, the Titan gods and those that were born of Kronos: the proud Titans from high Othrys,* and from Olympus the gods, givers of blessings, whom lovely-haired Rhea bore bedded with Kronos. They had been fighting each other continually now for ten full years, and the fight gave them pain at heart; and to neither side came solution or end of the bitter strife, and the outcome of the war was equally balanced. But when Zeus provided those allies with full sustenance, nectar and ambrosia, such as the gods themselves eat, and the proud spirit waxed in all their breasts, then the father of gods and men spoke to them: ‘Hearken to me, proud children of Earth and Heaven, and let me say what the spirit in my breast bids me. For long now we have been fighting each other for victory and power, day after day, the Titan gods and we who were born of Kronos. But now you must display your great strength and your terrible hands against the Titans in the fearful slaughter, remembering our faithful friendship, and how much you suffered before our decision brought you back into the light from your dismal bondage down in the misty darkness.

As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop. My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair. Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.

Gallipoli was one of a series of military ‘Easterner’ adventures launched without proper analysis of the global strategic situation, without consideration of the local tactical situation, ignoring logistical realities, underestimating the strength of the opposition and predicated on a hugely optimistic assessment of the military capabilities of their own troops. Not for nothing is hubris regarded as the ‘English disease’. But the Gallipoli Campaign was a serious matter: vital resources had been drawn away from where it really mattered. The Turks were all but helpless if left on their own. They had tried to launch an ambitious attack across the Sinai Desert on the Suez Canal but had been easily thwarted. Gallipoli achieved nothing but to provide the Turks with the opportunity to slaughter British and French troops in copious numbers in a situation in which everything was in the defenders’ favour. Meanwhile, back on the Western Front, was the real enemy: the German Empire. Men, guns and munitions were in the process of being deployed to Gallipoli during the first British offensive at Neuve Chapelle; they were still there when the Germans launched their deadly gas attack at Ypres in April, during the debacles of Aubers Ridge and Festubert, and during the first ‘great push’ at the Battle of Loos in September 1915. At sea Jellicoe was facing the High Seas Fleet which could pick its moment to contest the ultimate control of the seas. This was the real war – Gallipoli was nothing but a foolish sideshow.

They found Tharion on the couch with Ithan, the tv blasting the latest sports stats. Tharion munched on a piece of pizza, long legs sprawled out in front of him, bare feet on the coffee table. Ruhn might have stepped inside to grab a piece of that pizza had Bryce not gone still. A Fae sort of stillness, sizing up a threat. His instinct went to high alert, bellowing at him to defend, to attack, to slaughter any threat to his family. Ruhn suppressed it, held back by the shadows begging to be unleashed, to hide Bryce from sight. Ithan called over to them, “Pizza’s on the counter if you want some.” Bryce remained silent as fear washed over her scent. Ruhn’s fingers grazed the cool metal of the gun strapped to his thigh. “Your cat’s a sweetheart, by the way,” Ithan went on, not taking his focus from the TV as he stroked the white cat curled on his lap. Bryce slowly shut the door behind her. “He scared the shit out of me when he leapt onto the counter a few minutes ago, the bastard.” The wolf ran his fingers through the luxurious coat, earning a deep purr in response. The cat had stunning blue eyes. They seemed keenly aware as they fixed on Bryce. Ruhn’s shadows gathered at his shoulders, snakes waiting to strike. He subtly drew his gun. Behind her, a familiar ripple of ether-laced power kissed over her skin. A small reassurance as Bryce croaked, “That’s not a cat.” Hunt arrived at the apartment just in time to hear Bryce’s words through the shut front door. He was inside in a moment, lightning gathered at his fingers. “Oh, calm yourself,” the Prince of the Chasm said, leaping into the coffee table.

Stockholm, May 1943 I am on a stake, thought eighteen-year-old Tatiana, waking up one cold summer morning. I cannot live like this anymore. She got up from the bed, washed, brushed her hair, collected her books and her few clothes, and then left the hotel room as clean as if she had not been in it for over two months. The white curtains blowing a breeze into the room were unrelenting. Inside herself was unrelenting. Over the desk there was an oval mirror. Before Tatiana tied up her hair she stared at her face. What stared back at her was a face she no longer recognized. Gone was the round baby shape; a gaunt oval remained over her drawn cheekbones and her high forehead and her squared jaw and her clenched lips. If she had dimples still, they did not show; it had been a long time since her mouth bared teeth or dimples. The scar on her cheek from the piece of the broken windshield had healed and was fading into a thin pink line. The freckles were fading too, but it was the eyes Tatiana recognized least of all. Her once twinkling green eyes set deep into the pale features looked as if they were the only ghastly crystal barriers between strangers and her soul. She couldn’t lift them to anyone. She could not lift them to herself. One look into the green sea, and it was clear what raged on behind the frail façade. Tatiana brushed her shoulder blade-length platinum hair. She didn’t hate her hair anymore. How could she, for Alexander had loved it so much. She would not think of it. She wanted to cut it all off, shear herself like a lamb before the slaughter, she wanted to cut her hair and take the whites out of her eyes and the teeth out of her mouth and tear the arteries out of her throat.

On the other side of the mountain, Drizzt Do'Urden opened his eyes from his daytime slumber. Emerging from the cave into the growing gloom, he found Wulfgar in the customary spot, poised meditatively on a high stone, staring out over the plain. "You long for your home?" the drow asked rhetorically. Wulfgar shrugged his huge shoulders and answered absently, "Perhaps." The barbarian had come to ask many disturbing questions of himself about his people and their way of life since he had learned respect for Drizzt. The Drow was an enigma to him, a confusing combination of fighting brilliance and absolute control. Drizzt seemed able to weigh every move he ever made in the scales of high adventure and indisputable morals. Wulfgar turned a questioning gaze on the drow. "Why are you here?" he asked suddenly. Now it was Drizzt who stared reflectively into the openness before them. The first stars of the evening had appeared, their reflections sparkling distinctively in the dark pools of the elf's eyes. But Drizzt was not seeing them; his mind was viewing long past images of the lightless cities of the drow in their immense cavern complexes far beneath the ground. "I remember," Drizzt recalled vividly, as terrible memories are often vivid, "'the first time I ever viewed this surface world. I was a much younger elf then, a member of a large raiding party. We slipped out from a secret cave and descended upon a small elven village." The drow flinched at the images as they flashed again in his mind. "My companions slaughtered every member of the wood elf clan. Every female. Every child." Wulfgar listened with growing horror. The raid that Drizzt was describing might well have been one perpetrated by the ferocious Tribe of the Elk. "My people kill," Drizzt went on grimly. "They kill without mercy." He locked his stare onto Wulfgar to make sure that the barbarian heard him well. "They kill without passion." He paused for a moment to let the barbarian absorb the full weight of his words. The simple yet definitive description of the cold killers had confused Wulfgar. He had been raised and nurtured among passionate warriors, fighters whose entire purpose in life was the pursuit of battle-glory - fighting in praise of Tempos. The young barbarian simply could not understand such emotionless cruelty. A subtle difference, though, Wulfgar had to admit. Drow or barbarian, the results of the raids were much the same. "The demon goddess they serve leaves no room for the other races," Drizzt explained. "Particularly the other races of elves." "But you will never come to be accepted in this world," said Wulfgar. "Surely you must know that the humans will ever shun you." Drizzt nodded. "Most," he agreed. "I have few that I can call friends, yet I am content. You see, barbarian, I have my own respect, without guilt, without shame." He rose from his crouch and started away into the darkness. "Come," he instructed. "Let us fight well this night, for I am satisfied with the improvement of your skills, and this part of your lessons nears its end." Wulfgar sat a moment longer in contemplation. The drow lived a hard and materially empty existence, yet he was richer than any man Wulfgar had ever known. Drizzt had clung to his principles against overwhelming circumstances, leaving the familiar world of his own people by choice to remain in a world where he would never be accepted or appreciated. He looked at the departing elf, now a mere shadow in the gloom. "Perhaps we two are not so different," he mumbled under his breath.

The President is the King's father. He is an erect, strongly built, massive featured, white-haired, tawny old gentleman of eighty years of age or thereabouts. He was simply but well dressed, in a blue cloth coat and white vest, and white pantaloons, without spot, dust or blemish upon them. He bears himself with a calm, stately dignity, and is a man of noble presence. He was a young man and a distinguished warrior under that terrific fighter, Kamehameha I., more than half a century ago. A knowledge of his career suggested some such thought as this: "This man, naked as the day he was born, and war-club and spear in hand, has charged at the head of a horde of savages against other hordes of savages more than a generation and a half ago, and reveled in slaughter and carnage; has worshipped wooden images on his devout knees; has seen hundreds of his race offered up in heathen temples as sacrifices to wooden idols, at a time when no missionary's foot had ever pressed this soil, and he had never heard of the white man's God; has believed his enemy could secretly pray him to death; has seen the day, in his childhood, when it was a crime punishable by death for a man to eat with his wife, or for a plebeian to let his shadow fall upon the King—and now look at him; an educated Christian; neatly and handsomely dressed; a high-minded, elegant gentleman; a traveler, in some degree, and one who has been the honored guest of royalty in Europe; a man practiced in holding the reins of an enlightened government, and well versed in the politics of his country and in general, practical information. Look at him, sitting there presiding over the deliberations of a legislative body, among whom are white men—a grave, dignified, statesmanlike personage, and as seemingly natural and fitted to the place as if he had been born in it and had never been out of it in his life time. How the experiences of this old man's eventful life shame the cheap inventions of romance!

Rhysand was silent beside me. Yet after a moment, he said, 'Out with it.' I lifted a brow. 'You say what's on your mind- one thing. And I'll say one, too.' I shook my head and turned back to the city. But Rhys said, 'I'm thinking that I spent fifty years locked Under the Mountain, and I'd sometimes let myself dream of this place, but I never expected to see it again. I'm thinking that I wish I had been the one who slaughtered her. I'm thinking that if war comes, it might be a long while yet before I get to have a night like this.' He slid his eyes to me, expectant. ... 'This was a no-questions-asked invitation. I told you... three things. Tell me one.' I stared towards the open world, the city, and the restless sea and the dry winter night. Maybe it was some shred of courage, or recklessness, or I was so high above everything that no one save Rhys and the wind could hear, but I said, 'I'm thinking that I must have been a fool in love to allow myself to be shown so little of the Spring Court. I'm thinking there's a great deal of territory I was never allowed to see or hear about and maybe I would have lived in ignorance forever like some pet. I'm thinking...' The words became choked. I shook my head as if I could clear the remaining ones away. But I still spoke them. 'I'm thinking that I was a lonely, hopeless person, and I might have fallen in love with the first thing that showed me a hint of kindness and safety. And I'm thinking maybe he knew that- maybe not actively, but maybe he wanted to be that person for someone. And maybe that worked for who I was before. Maybe it doesn't work for who- what I am now.' There. The words, hateful and selfish and ungrateful. For all Tamlin had done- The thought of his name clanged through me. Only yesterday afternoon, I had been there. No- no I wouldn't think about it. Not yet. Rhys said, 'That was five. Looks like I owe you two thoughts' He glanced behind us. 'Later.' Because the two winged males from earlier were standing in the doorway. Grinning.

When you lived in the human world, you had legends of the dread beasts and faeries who would slaughter you if they ever breached the wall, didn’t you? Things that slithered through open windows to drink the blood of children? Things that were so wicked, so cruel there was no hope against their evil?” The hair on her neck rose. “Yes.” Those stories had always unnerved and petrified her. “They were based on truth. Based on ancient, near-primordial beings who existed here before the High Fae split into courts, before the High Lords. Some call them the First Gods. They were beings with almost no physical form, but a keen, vicious intelligence. Humans and Fae alike were their prey. Most were hunted and driven into hiding or imprisonment ages ago. But some remained, lurking in forgotten corners of the land.” He swallowed another mouthful. “When I was nearing three hundred years old, one of them appeared again, crawling out of the roots of a mountain. Before he went into the Prison and confinement weakened him, Lanthys could turn into wind and rip the air from your lungs, or turn into rain and drown you on dry land; he could peel your skin from your body with a few movements. He never revealed his true form, but when I faced him, he chose to appear as swirling mist. He fathered a race of faeries that still plague us, who thrived under Amarantha’s reign—the Bogge. But the Bogge are lesser, mere shadows compared to Lanthys. If there is such a thing as evil incarnate, it is him. He has no mercy, no sense of right or wrong. There is him, and there is everyone else, and we are all his prey. His methods of killing are creative and slow. He feasts on fear and pain as much as the flesh itself.” Her blood chilled. “How did you trap such a thing?” Cassian tapped a spot on his neck where a scar slashed beneath his ear. “I quickly learned I could never beat him in combat or magic. Still have the scar here to prove it.” Cassian smiled faintly. “So I used his arrogance against him. Flattered and taunted him into trapping himself in a mirror bound with ash wood. I bet him the mirror would contain him—and Lanthys bet wrong. He got out of the mirror, of course, but by that time, I’d dumped his miserable self into the Prison.

...it's too bad bad you're not like the Suriel, spouting any information I want if I'm clever enough to snare you.' For a moment, he blinked at me. Then his mouth twisted to the side and that metal eye whizzed and narrowed on me. 'I suppose you won't tell me what you want to know.' 'You have your secrets, and I have mine,' I said carefully. I couldn't tell whether he would try to convince me otherwise if I told him the truth. 'But if you were a Suriel,' I added with deliberate slowness, in case he hadn't caught my meaning, 'how, exactly, would I trap you?' Lucien set down the knife and picked at his nails. For a moment, I wondered if he would tell me anything at all. Wondered if he would go right to Tamlin and tattle. But then he said. 'I'd probably have a weakness for groves of young birch trees in the western woods, and freshly slaughtered chickens, and would probably be so greedy that I wouldn't notice the double-loop snare rigged around the grove to pin my legs in place.' 'Hmm,' I didn't dare ask why he had decided to be so accommodating. There was still a good chance he wouldn't mind seeing me dead, but I would risk it. 'I somehow prefer you as a High Fae.' He smirked, but the amusement was short-lived. 'If I were insane and stupid enough to go after a Suriel, I'd also take a bow and quiver, and maybe a knife just like this one.' He sheathed the knife he'd cleaned and set it down on the edge of the table- an offering. 'And I'd be prepared to run like hell when I freed it- to the nearest running water, which they hate crossing.' 'But you're not insane, so you'll be here, safe and sound?' 'I'll be conveniently hunting on the grounds, and with my superior hearing, I might be feeling generous enough to listen if someone screams from the western woods. But it's a good thing I had no role in telling you to go out today, since Tam would eviscerate anyone who told you how to trap a Suriel; and it's a good thing I had planned to hunt anyway, because if anyone caught me helping you, there would be trouble of a whole other hell awaiting us. I hope your secrets are worth it.' He said it with his usual grin, but there was an edge to it- a warning I didn't miss. Another riddle- and another bit of information. I said, 'It's a good thing that while you have superior hearing, I possess superior abilities to keep my mouth shut.' He snorted as I took the knife from the table and turned to procure the bow from my room. 'I think I'm starting to like you- for a murdering human.

Rhys smiled a bit, but the amusement died as he said, 'Tamlin was younger than me- born when the War started. But after the War, when he'd matured, we got to know each other at various court functions. He...' Rhys clenched his jaw. 'He seemed decent for a High Lord's son. Better than Beron's brood at the Autumn Court. Tamlin's brothers were equally as bad, though. Worse. And they knew Tamlin would take the title one day. And to a half-breed Illyrian who'd had to prove himself, defend his power, I saw what Tamlin went through... I befriended him. Sought him out whenever I was able to get away from the war camps or court. Maybe it was pity, but... I taught him some Illyrian techniques.' 'Did anyone know?' ... 'Cassian and Azriel knew,' Rhys went on. 'My family knew. And disapproved.' His eyes were chips of ice. 'But Tamlin's father was threatened by it. By me. And because he was weaker than both me and Tamlin, he wanted to prove to the world that he wasn't. My mother and sister were to travel to the Illyrian war-camp to see me. I was supposed to meet them halfway, but I was busy training a new unit and decided to stay.' My stomach turned over and over and over, and I wished I had something to lean against as Rhys said, 'Tamlin's father, brothers, and Tamlin himself set out into the Illyrian wilderness, having heard from Tamlin- from me- where my mother and sister would be, that I had plans to see them. I was supposed to be there. I wasn't. And they slaughtered my mother and sister anyway.' I began shaking my head, eyes burning. I didn't know what I was trying to deny, or erase, or condemn. 'It should have been me,' he said, and I understood- understood what he'd said that day I'd wept before Cassian in the training pit. 'They put their heads in boxes and sent them down the river- to the nearest camp. Tamlin's father kept their wings as trophies. I'm surprised you didn't see them pinned in the study.' I was going to vomit; I was going to fall to my knees and weep. ... Rhys merely continued. 'When I heard, when my father heard... I wasn't wholly truthful to you when I told you Under the Mountain that my father killed Tamlin's father and brothers, I went with him. Helped him. We winnowed to the edge of the Spring Court that night, then went the rest of the way on foot- to the manor. I slew Tamlin's brothers on sight. I held their minds, and rendered them helpless while I cut them into pieces, then melted their brains inside their skulls. And when I got to the High Lord's bedroom- he was dead. And my father... my father had killed Tamlin's mother as well.' I couldn't stop shaking my head. 'My father had promised not to touch her. That we weren't the kind of males who would do that. But he lied to me, and he did it, anyway. And then he went for Tamlin's room.' I couldn't breathe- couldn't breathe as Rhys said, 'I tried to stop him. He didn't listen. He was going to kill him, too. And I couldn't... After all the death, I was done. I didn't care that Tamlin had been there, had allowed them to kill my mother and sister, that he'd come to kill me because he didn't want to risk standing against them. I was done with death. So I stopped my father before the door. He tried to go through me. Tamlin opened the door, saw us- smelled the blood already leaking into the hallway. And I didn't even get to say a word before Tamlin killed my father in one blow.' 'I felt the power shift to me, even as I saw it shift to him. And we just looked at each other, as we were both suddenly crowned High Lord- and then I ran.' He'd murdered Rhysand's family. The High Lord I'd loved- he'd murdered his friend's family, and when I'd asked how his family died, he'd merely told me a rival court had done it. Rhysand had done it, and- 'He didn't tell you any of that.

One way is to start from the recognition that nation states seem unlikely to give an international agency the power it needs to overrule nation states. So if countries have all the power, they have to find some way to use it in the common interest. If the WHO cannot tell a big country what to do, other countries will have to. Which might work, especially as they are all trading partners. A global government, as governments are usually understood, is not likely to work. Complexity scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam says that when social systems get too complex, old-fashioned hierarchies, with one guy (it’s usually a guy) in charge, don’t work anymore because one person can’t get their head around everything. Hierarchies are already devolving into global networks as the real power structures in many areas of global concern, writes author and governance expert Anne-Marie Slaughter, especially things that can be managed by networks of experts. So we need a network. We now have an annual meeting at which WHO member states tell the WHO what they want it to do. What if we also had a more constantly convened, high-level council of countries to deal with global threats, that could demand that individual governments act on big deals like suspicions of incipient pandemics and other problems that could have impacts far beyond one country? And what if it was advised by a network of scientists-on-call, like the one the WHO now convenes for emergencies?

Sperm is high in fat and protein, which takes time for the digestive system to process.

Allon’s means was fear. He spread rumors among the Arabs that if they did not leave, they would be slaughtered and their daughters would be raped. As Allon hoped, it was highly effective, and nearly all the Arab villagers in the eastern Galilee fled to Lebanon and Syria.

War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties.

I do not blame Lord French. I have no right to blame him, as I am not a soldier nor a military expert. He did his best, with the highest motives. The blunders he made were due to ignorance of modern battles. Many other generals made many other blunders, and our men paid with their lives. Our High Command had to learn by mistakes, by ghastly mistakes, repeated often, until they became visible to the military mind and were paid for again by the slaughter of British youth. One does not blame. A writing-man, who was an observer and recorder, like myself, does not sit in judgment. He has no right to judge. He merely cries out, “O God! … O God!” in remembrance of all that agony and that waste of splendid boys who loved life, and died.

She was the King of Hybern’s most lethal general—she fought on the front lines, slaughtering humans and any High Fae and faeries who dared defend them. But she had a younger sister, Clythia, who fought at her side, as vicious and wretched as she … until Clythia fell in love with a mortal warrior. Jurian.” Alis loosed a shaking sigh. “Jurian commanded mighty human armies, but Clythia still secretly sought him out, still loved him with an unrelenting madness. She was too blind to realize that Jurian was using her for information about Amarantha’s forces. Amarantha suspected, but could not persuade Clythia to leave him—and could not bring herself to kill him, not when it would cause her sister such pain.” Alis clicked her tongue and began opening the cabinets, scanning their ravaged insides. “Amarantha delighted in torture and killing, and yet she loved her sister enough to stay her hand.

that it took six mortal queens crafting the Treaty for the slaughter to cease on both sides and for the wall to be constructed: the North of our world conceded to the High Fae and faeries, who took their magic with them; the South to we cowering mortals, forever forced to scratch out a living from the earth.

I started learning English from Abuelo Jorge's old grammar textbooks. I found them in Abuelo Celia's closet. They date back to 1919, the first year he started working for the American Electric Broom Company. At school, only a few students were allowed to learn English, by special permission. The rest of us had to learn Russian. I liked the curves of the Cyrillic letters, their unexpected sounds. I liked the way my name looked: Иван. I took Russian for nearly two years at school. My teacher, Sergey Mikoyan, praised me highly. He said I had an ear for languages, that if I studied hard I could be a translator for world leaders. It was true I could repeat anything he said, even tongue twisters like kolokololiteyshchiki perekolotili vikarabkavshihsya vihuholey "the church bell casters slaughtered the desmans that had scrambled out." He told me I had a gift, like playing the violin, or mastering chess.

People did not change their basic, core personalities. Their values tended to stay the same. Their personal demeanors. Their world outlook and political beliefs. One need only go to a high school reunion to verify the theory.

He had never brought home a school report and watched his mother smile. The clay ashtray he’d made in kindergarten had been one of sixteen Mrs. Flannigan received on Mother’s Day. All the Christmas gifts under the tree were labeled “for a girl” or “for a boy.” The evening Will graduated high school, he’d looked out at the crowd of cheering families and seen only strangers.

Once they discovered our solar-powered city, tucked high in the Sierra Oriental, I knew that the end was near. Stupidly, they attacked us, like a wild barbarian horde. We slaughtered them with laser beams and heat-seeking bullets. Instead of driving them away, that only whetted their appetite.

In the postwar years, the Marine Corps came in for a great deal of undeserved criticism, in my opinion, from well-meaning persons who did not comprehend the magnitude of stress and horror that combat can be. The technology that developed the rifled barrel, the machine gun, and high-explosive shells has turned war into prolonged, subhuman slaughter. Men must be trained realistically if they are to survive it without breaking mentally and physically.

It is an unpleasant surprise to discover that in the treatment of animals raised for slaughter, of fur animals and farmed fish the level of cruelty has reached an all time high, and yet such practices continue to be tolerated. I am not referring here to the most excessive among excessive practices: things like accelerating the growth of cattle with hormones, the use of artificial light night and day or the artificial swelling of livers in geese. These matters are too repulsive — "over the top" — and I do not wish to write about them. A simple order would suffice to deal with similar practices: death penalty for those responsible! (…) The cruelty involved in rearing caged [animals] differs from any other form of hunting, even the worst — in one fundamental respect: hunting affects animals that have lived a full life according to their own needs, perhaps for decades; when death arrives, it is sometimes painless, sometimes agonising — just as in nature. When hunting, man is a predator in the food chain, one cause of death among others… By contrast, caged animals spend their whole lives, from birth to death, in unnatural anguish, not like animals but like objects. In this case, the very character and pride of the animal has utterly been devastated. Nothing could be worse than this.

Muslims, whom he regarded as a people “alien to God.” The Christian soldiers, who would one day be known as Crusaders, breached the city’s defenses on the night of July 13, 1099, and slaughtered its inhabitants, including three thousand men, women, and children who had taken shelter inside the great al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. It was Saladin, the son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune from Tikrit, who would return the favor. After humiliating the thirst-crazed Crusader force at the Battle of Hattin near Tiberias—Saladin personally sliced off the arm of Raynald of Châtillon—the Muslims reclaimed Jerusalem after a negotiated surrender. Saladin tore down the large cross that had been erected atop the Dome of the Rock, scrubbed its courts with Damascene rosewater to remove the last foul traces of the infidel, and sold thousands of Christians into slavery or the harem. Jerusalem would remain under Islamic control until 1917, when the British seized it from the Ottoman Turks. And when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1924, so, too, did the last Muslim caliphate. But now ISIS had declared a new caliphate. At present, it included only portions of western Iraq and eastern Syria, with Raqqa as its capital. Saladin, the new Saladin, was ISIS’s chief of external operations—or so believed Fareed Barakat and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. Unfortunately, the GID knew almost nothing else about Saladin, including his real name. “Is he Iraqi?” “He might be. Or he might be a Tunisian or a Saudi or an Egyptian or an Englishman or one of the other lunatics who’ve rushed to Syria to live in this new Islamic paradise of theirs.” “Surely, the GID doesn’t believe that.” “We don’t,” Fareed conceded. “We think he’s probably a former Iraqi military officer. Who knows? Maybe he’s from Tikrit, just like Saladin.” “And Saddam.” “Ah, yes, let’s not forget Saddam.” Fareed exhaled a lungful of smoke toward the high ceiling of his office. “We had our problems with Saddam, but we warned the Americans they would rue the day they toppled him. They didn’t listen, of course. Nor did they listen when we asked them to do something about Syria. Not our problem, they said. We’re putting the Middle East in our rearview mirror. No more American wars in Muslim lands. And now look at the situation. A quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more streaming into Europe, Russia and Iran working together to dominate the Middle East.” He shook his head slowly. “Have I left anything out?” “You forgot Saladin,” said Gabriel. “What do you want to do about him?” “I suppose we could do nothing and hope he goes away.” “Hope is how we ended up with him in the first place,” said Fareed. “Hope and hubris.” “So let’s put him out of business, sooner rather than later.

I was there, in the Hewn City, the day her father declared she was to be sold in marriage to Eris, eldest son of the High Lord of the Autumn Court.” Lucien’s brother. “Eris had a reputation for cruelty, and Mor … begged me not to let it happen. For all her power, all her wildness, she had no voice, no rights with those people. And my father didn’t particularly care if his cousins used their offspring as breeding stock.” “What happened?” I breathed. “I brought Mor to the Illyrian camp for a few days. And she saw Cassian, and decided she’d do the one thing that would ruin her value to these people. I didn’t know until after, and … it was a mess. With Cassian, with her, with our families. And it’s another long story, but the short of it is that Eris refused to marry her. Said she’d been sullied by a bastard-born lesser faerie, and he’d now sooner fuck a sow. Her family … they … ” I’d never seen him at such a loss for words. Rhys cleared his throat. “When they were done, they dumped her on the Autumn Court border, with a note nailed to her body that said she was Eris’s problem.” Nailed—nailed to her. Rhys said with soft wrath, “Eris left her for dead in the middle of their woods. Azriel found her a day later. It was all I could do to keep him from going to either court and slaughtering them all.

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

he says, pushing his hood back, so I can see his Disney prince blond hair. Only, it’s strange because he’s not the prince; he’s the villain that slaughters the wide-eyed royal and buries his body in the woods.

It is beyond doubt that the chief motive of Vegetarianism is the humane one. Questions of hygiene and of economy both play their part, and an important part, in a full discussion of food reform; but the feeling which underlies and animates the whole movement is the instinctive horror of butchery, especially the butchery of the more highly organized animals, so human, so near akin to man.

Word came from the enemy right before they attacked in the dead of night: Surrender, and we would be spared. Fight, and we would be slaughtered. Our camp had been erected high in the mountains, where we thought the winter snows would protect us from advancing enemies. Instead, we were cold and hungry, with barely any time to ready our forces. Aidas had returned to Hel to recruit more soldiers, so we were spending a rare night with our mother alone. Hel did not have the chance to come to our aid. My mother did not even bother to try to open a portal to their world. Our forces on Midgard were already depleted—the new recruits wouldn’t be amassed for days. We begged her to open the portal anyway, to at least get the princes’ help, but my mother believed it would do little good. That what was coming that night was inevitable.

Psychopaths alone were incapable of implementing the Holocaust. And they were dependent on an army of complicit drones, as well as highly educated professionals to lubricate the mundane logistics of industrial slaughter.

We love your pets. But Man's Best Friend is a hungry wolf to a bird, no matter the harmless, playful little scamp Fluffy may seem to you. And Athena, with her retractable claws, silent stalking, and high-jump pounce, is a bird-killing machine...The American Bird Conservancy estimates that in the United States, where the domesticated feline is a non-native predator disrupting the natural balance, cats slaughter 2.4 BILLION birds EACH YEAR. Keep cats indoors and dogs on the leash in protected areas, if they are permitted there at all. The birds--and other birders--will thank you.

Why did Mor look so disturbed when she left?” His throat bobbed. I could tell it was rage, and pain, that kept him from telling me outright—not mistrust. After a moment, he said, “I was there, in the Hewn City, the day her father declared she was to be sold in marriage to Eris, eldest son of the High Lord of the Autumn Court.” Lucien’s brother. “Eris had a reputation for cruelty, and Mor … begged me not to let it happen. For all her power, all her wildness, she had no voice, no rights with those people. And my father didn’t particularly care if his cousins used their offspring as breeding stock.” “What happened?” I breathed. “I brought Mor to the Illyrian camp for a few days. And she saw Cassian, and decided she’d do the one thing that would ruin her value to these people. I didn’t know until after, and … it was a mess. With Cassian, with her, with our families. And it’s another long story, but the short of it is that Eris refused to marry her. Said she’d been sullied by a bastard-born lesser faerie, and he’d now sooner fuck a sow. Her family … they … ” I’d never seen him at such a loss for words. Rhys cleared his throat. “When they were done, they dumped her on the Autumn Court border, with a note nailed to her body that said she was Eris’s problem.” Nailed—nailed to her. Rhys said with soft wrath, “Eris left her for dead in the middle of their woods. Azriel found her a day later. It was all I could do to keep him from going to either court and slaughtering them all.

Behold I am about to bring a calamity upon this place, at which the ears of everyone that hears of it will tingle. Because they have forsaken Me … and because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter My mind; therefore, behold, days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when this place will … be called … the valley of Slaughter.’” (Jeremiah 19:3-5)

O’Neill could feel rising off them devotion and love for him, and he knew they would lay down their lives for their high chieftain and for the new cause, only now taking shape in their heads. The cause. Unthinkable just a year before—freedom from occupation. Freedom from oppression. Indeed, their heinous oppressors were approaching—English soldiers who had slaughtered their brothers, their wives, their mothers. Their children. Soldiers who had mindlessly laid waste to their home provinces. To Ireland. Never before had these men fought for the whole of this ancient land, but now they understood, and their hearts—God bless their staunch hearts—were strong and ready to fight. Raising his sword high above his head, O’Neill, with slow deliberation, lowered it, and the glorious blue morning exploded into sound.   C

Many network theorists note that human beings differ dramatically from the rational profit maximizer of social science theory. Neuroscientists exploring different regions if the brain, sociologists mapping an increasingly networked society, and entrepreneurial enthusiasts of the sharing economy challenge the highly individualist conception of the individual that many economists embrace. Instead of homo economicus, let s consider homo sociologicus, a person driven as much by the desire to belong and connect as by her individual goals.

Humans pursuing deep, complete connections respond to quite different incentives from those that influence self-interested utility maximizers. Rewards, monitoring, and punishments are less likely to be effective than engagement, communication, norms, socialization, identity, and common purpose. They share not out of a calculation of reciprocity but from a psychological pleasure in sharing. Those seeking connections make decisions from their hearts as well as their heads, influenced by emotion, fairness, empathy, and intuition. Their behavior, thoughts, feelings, and even personal attributes are highly socially contingent. The range of humanity includes individuals who display every possible combination of selfishness and sociability.

Driving toward Gillette on Route 59 north of Bill, Wyoming, Tom Carson felt alien in the rolling landscape. Pronghorn antelope appeared here and there in the hills, grazing in herds, strung out along a stream drinking. Buffalo grazed too in the gently undulant pastures. They weren’t wild herds, he knew. They were ranch buffalo, healthful, destined to be slaughtered and sold in specialty stores. He’d never been anywhere very much until he moved to Wyoming. Lived all his life in Paradise, and his parents too. His mother taught seventh grade at Paradise Junior High. His father ran the Gulf station. The only gas station in the downtown area. He had no military experience. He hadn’t gone to college. He’d joined the cops after working three years for his father. The

Both vocations call forth leadership and responsibility above, and demand docile compliance below. But that of the hunter elevated the will-to-power and eventually transferred his skill in slaughtering game to the more highly organized vocation of regimenting or slaughtering other men; while that of the shepherd moved toward the curbing of force and violence and the institution of some measure of justice, through which even the weakest member of the flock might be protected and nurtured. Certainly coercion and persuasion, aggression and protection, war and law, power and love, were alike solidified in the stones of the earliest urban communities, when they finally take form. When kingship appeared, the war lord and the law lord became land lord too.

King Edmund of East Anglia is now remembered as a saint, as one of those blessed souls who live forever in the shadow of God. Or so the priests tell me. In heaven, they say, the saints occupy a privileged place, living on the high platform of God’s great hall where they spend their time singing God’s praises. Forever. Just singing. Beocca always told me that it would be an ecstatic existence, but to me it seems very dull. The Danes reckon their dead warriors are carried to Valhalla, the corpse hall of Odin, where they spend their days fighting and their nights feasting and swiving, and I dare not tell the priests that this seems a far better way to endure the afterlife than singing to the sound of golden harps. I once asked a bishop whether there were any women in heaven. “Of course there are, my lord,” he answered, happy that I was taking an interest in doctrine. “Many of the most blessed saints are women.” “I mean women we can hump, bishop.” He said he would pray for me. Perhaps he did.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom 42 likes Like “The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King tags: friendship 40 likes Like “The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation... Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.” ― Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom tags: preachers, pride, reputation, shield-wall 39 likes Like “I am no Christian. These days it does no good to confess that, for the bishops and abbots have too much influence and it is easier to pretend to a faith than to fight angry ideas. I was raised a Christian, but at ten years old, when I was taken into Ragnar’s family, I discovered the old Saxon gods who were also the gods of the Danes and of the Norsemen, and their worship has always made more sense to me than bowing down to a god who belongs to a country so far away that I have met no one who has ever been there. Thor and Odin walked our hills, slept in our valleys, loved our women and drank from our streams, and that makes them seem like neighbours. The other thing I like about our gods is that they are not obsessed with us. They have their own squabbles and love affairs and seem to ignore us much of the time, but the Christian god has nothing better to do than to make rules for us. He makes rules, more rules, prohibitions and commandments, and he needs hundreds of black-robed priests and monks to make sure we obey those laws. He strikes me as a very grumpy god, that one, even though his priests are forever claiming that he loves us. I have never been so stupid as to think that Thor or Odin or Hoder loved me, though I hope at times they have thought me worthy of them.” ― Bernard Cornwell, Lords of the North

The wise ones called council. We cannot remain passive. The whites must be driven out. Now is the right time, while they are at war amongst themselves. Their soldiers are away. They’re defenseless. The People must strike.” Red Buffalo’s sobbing quieted. “But Hunter, that is exactly what you feared might happen. What about survival through peace?” “It’s too late for that.” A heavy ache centered itself in Hunter’s chest. “I am a dreamer, Red Buffalo. The land is like a single bone between a pair of starving dogs. There is enough for only one. Peace will never come, never. You were right all along, and I was too blind to see it.” “But your woman! She’s a tosi. You speak of driving them out. What of her?” Hunter started to speak, couldn’t. He took another deep breath and tried again, his voice strained. “I will protect her as best I can. The others have agreed not to attack her wooden walls. A messenger has already left to tell some other bands of today’s attack and our decision to make war. He will also pass the word about my tosi woman.” “You aren’t going to get her? She’s your wife. Her place is beside you.” “A man cannot own a woman, cousin. He can only…” Hunter’s words trailed off. A picture of Loretta’s face flashed in his mind. “He can only love her. The blood of the tosi tivo will flow bridle high. To force her to stay with us while we slaughter her people would be torture. Before this is over, my name will be a curse upon her lips.