When We Were Executioners by J. M Mcdermott

muddy field. Drinks spilled in the rolling carriages. Cracks in the floorboards meant spilled drinks fell out on their own. Piss, too, if it came to that.
    Jona stood up, turned around, and put his knives away. He urinated into the back of the carriage. He turned back around to face the door, and he knelt down again, knives in his hand and ready to jump. He tried to keep his hands off the ground on account of the piss. The smell lingered. Jona listened to the liquid dripping down into the mud below the carriage.
    He tried to breathe quietly.
    Time passed. Somewhere else, the city breathed bodies in and out of taverns and brothels and homes and ships and theatres and apartments. Money changed hands. Lovers met for the first time, made love, fought, and fell away. A city reached vast tendrils into the world along the roads and rivers and sea currents. A thousand upon a thousand minds dreamed of better lives in dark bedrooms and smoke-filled backrooms. A thousand upon a thousand voices spoke of their dreams with others, and these dreams were more important as hope than as reality, because in the morning there was only work and nobody spoke their dreams out loud when they were earning their little corner of the city in coins.
    Jona stood alone in the dark, in his own stink. He thought about Rachel. He was about to make hope real for his own night bosses, and all he thought about was making his dreams real with Rachel—dreams that would never be real.
    Then, he heard men muffled by the wooden walls. Too much laughter from too many voices emerged from some distant crowd. Men came closer, talking too loud, like drunks. A woman laughed.
    The carriage door opened. Jona jumped.
    A flash of wind and cloth.
    A woman screamed.
    The butt of Jona’s knives together against the man’s temples knocked the coachman into a heap. Jona flipped the knives in his palms. He jumped around the coachman’s crumbling body. The Chief had his hands on a veiled woman. The Chief pushed her behind him. The Chief turned his back to shield her with his own body, as if she was the one who needed protection.
    Jona jumped. The left knife caught the Chief in the side of his neck. The knife tore through meat. The tip thumped spine.
    The Chief ’s hands flew up to his neck. Blood sprayed like sick fireworks.
    The second blade tore into the Chief ’s right kidney.
    The old man fell forward, arms flailing, into the veiled woman. Blood sprayed over her silks and satins from the neck wound. She held the man up by his arms.
    Jona hugged the body away from the woman. He jammed his knife in and out of the Chief ’s stomach three times from behind. He wrapped the other knife around the Chief ’s throat to slice the jugular clean. The head only hung on from spine and small ligaments. Blood poured from the neck. The body was all limp, now. Jona, holding up this bag of spraying blood in his arms, held still. He, the veiled assassin, looked into the veiled woman’s sad eyes.
    She nodded. She turned away.
    Jona heard the cranking sounds of a crossbow from the high seat of the engineer’s carriage. Jona hefted the Chief ’s limp body around to take the bolt in the chest. The tip of the bolt nipped at the leather jerkin, but didn’t pierce the red X.
    Men were running at Jona.
    Jona pushed the body aside. He ran between the coaches, and back up the hill. He jumped into the back door of the bath house.
    Behind him, men called out in alarm.
    Jona jumped through the kitchen, through the cauldrons boiling clothes clean and warming water on large, smoking racks of coal. He ran around the attendants with their huge buckets of soapy, hot water.
    He heard bustling behind him, and shouts. He hefted a giant soapy cauldron over onto the tile behind him. He ran through the curtains to the sailors scrubbing away in their neat rows of cast-iron tubs sitting on hot stones. The men watched from their tubs, impotent and naked.
    A man shouted something and waved his arms at Jona. He