His face was all gone to slack, sunken. His eyes were fever bright and his cheeks rosy from the sun and the grog, and the bloody state of it all. His head was pounding and he could smell them already, hear the buzzing.

High Inquisitor Seta's resentment boiled as he glared at the new list of bounty heads to come streaming over the hills from the south. Furians, those wretches, And in ever greater numbers. Trudging across his hall with blood-caked sand shedding off their fancy new boots, or stumbling in drunk as the night is black when he’d only just closed his eyes for one damned moment of peace. If the Holy Lord Phoenix love them so much, he could come down here and entertain them his-damn-fool-self. Heathens and deadmen for company every night, their hard bread and cactus rum stale breaths, the crimson smears of often odd-limbed, broken dead men all over his mirror shined tiles. Likely the savages couldn’t even read the damn option to turn their quarry in alive.

He couldn't fathom just how Okran could favor these malefactors, these reprobates and sinners. They were barbarous, callous and reeked of the corpses they so casually dealt in like a banker deals in cats and ledgers. Business-like murder for hire, and Conan was the worst of them. The man had all the charm of a Beak Thing and the looks to match, but when it came to a knife, he was a true artist. A shame the same couldn’t be said for his manners. Killers really are the cheapest of all consorts.

Seta kicked a cleaning woman’s pail aside in passing, sending the pinkish suds in a wave across the hall with a grimace etched across his face. These days, you’d have better luck spotting a smile in a graveyard than to find him in a good mood. Why hadn’t the divine ever chosen him? It should be clear to anyone that he deserved it, Clearer to none more than himself in fact. Hadn’t he toiled all his years in Okran's supposed-light, where was his reward? Hadn’t he been righteous?

An yet, this is all he had to show for it; Ruling a piece of blasted desert frontier with Shek axes looming nearer to his neck each passing night, putting dirty money in bloody hands, ringing a dinner bell for all the jackals and the foulest of the faithful. That’s what drew them; sure as the corpses draw flies, gold and the black work drew Furians. There was no shortage of either this far from Okran’s pride. Consequently, there was no shortage of Furians either.