“What, you think this is all a joke?” asked the priest, unwisely deepening the pit that he had already dug for himself. “I’m warning you; if you don’t—”
“Your wife was less talkative,” interrupted Drayton, relishing every nuance of his enemy’s impotent rage. “It took half-a-dozen Healers to take her down, and three of them won’t be out of hospital within the week, I fear. She would kill to survive; I’ve no doubt about it. But you won’t, Padre. You’re pathetic,” he added, as a gratifying spasm of pure humiliation crossed the carrier’s face. “You’ve been working yourself up to this all evening, haven’t you? Hoping that it might not get this far, that I might actually swallow your abysmal attempt to bluff me. But strange as it may seem to you, I was in fact trained to kill and to die for my
